Author: admin

When all else fails in Iraq,…

blame Iran.
It’s a tried, tired, and (not) true neocon formula, dating to the very first signs of trouble in Iraq after Saddam, four years ago. It’s the same ole’Allan Jackson country music tune “they” trot out, figuring Americans mostly still “love Jesus and talk to God,” but they just don’t know “the difference ‘n Iraq and Iran.”
According to the Voice of America, top US spinmeister General William B. Caldwell (the IVth) told a Baghdad press conference yesterday of familiar “charges” about Iranian weapons and training for Iraqi insurgents :

“We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them… We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month, from detainees debriefs.”

Caldwell clarified that the mentioned “training” of Iraqi insurgents was done by intelligence “surrogates” for Iran.
I wonder what “methods” were used on the “detainees” to get such desired evidence.
The material “evidence” trotted out this time was apparently different from previous briefings. Most media reports focused on weapons claimed to have been captured on Monday, after a “citizen tip” in a Sunni section of Baghdad named “Jihad” (sic). According to the NYTimes,

“The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked “made in 2006….”
The weapons that the military officials said were of Iranian origin were labeled in English, which Major Weber said was typical of arms manufactured for international sale.”

How convenient!
Why didn’t the New York Times apply the laugh test to that one? Does this mean the Iranians “sold” them or “donated” them? By the way, I don’t recall those alleged Iranian arms in 2002 on the Karine-A headed for Palestine being labeled in English? eh? It is especially thoughtful of those “Iranians” to now mark weapons from Iran in English. It will save American “disinformation” specialists from having to stencil them in Persian or Arabic. (which of course they just wouldn’t do anyway, as my son the Lieutenant would insist…)
The real “headline” grabber though, the change off the broken record, came when US Major General Caldwell remarked,

“We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support.”

He apparently didn’t elaborate. But “the quote” gave CNN’s perma-embed @ the Pentagon, Barbara “yes-sir” Starr, a breathless top-billing on CNN for the next eight hours (last I checked). All she could say was, “this is new…, really new.”
Yes, new – and bizarre.

Continue reading “When all else fails in Iraq,…”

Making Persian Gulf Security Durable (Ramazani)

FYI, here’s a recently published short essay by R.K. Ramazani, as I mentioned in discussions here several days ago.
Seeking to go beyond the immediate details of the recent UK-Iran dispute, Ramazani has three main objectives:
1. Provide historical context for understanding why bilateral conflict resolution in the Persian Gulf rests on fleeting sand. Bilateralism, unilateralism, and power balancing as approaches to maintaining Persian Gulf security have all broken down – and will inherently falter again:

“As long as Britain and America approach Gulf disputes by such means as playing regional powers against each other, by bullying tactics, by calls for regime change and by the threats of military strikes against Iran, there is little hope that Persian Gulf conflicts will ever be prevented in the future or that durable solutions can be found for the present ones, including the British-Iranian dispute today. As a result, the secure export of Gulf oil supplies to world markets will be threatened and the price of oil will soar beyond the capacity of the world economy to tolerate.

2. “Collective Security” is the only sustainable alternative.

“The real question, therefore, is whether Britain and the United States will be able to shake off their addiction to using force and embrace a comprehensive collective security system that would include the Persian Gulf states and major outside powers with high stakes in the region, including Britain and the United States, under the auspices of the United Nations.”
Short of that, Iran, as the major Persian Gulf state, will continue to resist British and American pressures. Its resistance to foreign bullying and pressures is rooted in a millennial and proud sense of glory and power in ancient times, in a deep-rooted sense of national identity and in a resentment of discrimination against the Shia, who are, today and in history, a minority in the larger Muslim world, by the Sunni majority.”

3. Security for the Persian Gulf also requires a “holistic” recognition that “the problems of the Persian Gulf are intertwined with the major conflicts of the broader Middle East and beyond.” Put differently, resolving conflicts in the Persian Gulf are incomplete without attending to conflict causes in the Eastern Mediterranean. That holds true both ways.

Continue reading “Making Persian Gulf Security Durable (Ramazani)”

So this is Progress? (Najaf march)

I see we have new competition for Tony Snow’s job.
Today, “tens of thousands” of Iraqis marched in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, on the occasion of the 4th anniversary of Baghdad’s fall to American forces and in response to calls from firebrand cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.
Colonel Steven Boylan, a top U.S. military spokesman, praised the peaceful nature of the demonstration, saying Iraqis “could not have done this four years ago.”

“This is the right to assemble, the right to free speech – they didn’t have that under the former regime… This is progress, there’s no two ways about it.”

But of course. And by the way, just what was it that the marchers were chanting?
That America go home. “Get out, get out occupier!”
Progress indeed.
Yesterday, al-Sadr’s written marching orders included a call for Iraqi partisans to stop fighting each other and instead unite to concentrate on their common arch enemy – America:

“Oh my brothers in the Mahdi Army and my brothers in the security forces, stop fighting and killing because that is what our enemy and your enemy and even God’s enemy hope for….”
“God ordered you to be patient and to unite your efforts against the enemy and not against the sons of Iraq. They want to drag you into a war that ends Shiitism and Islam, but they cannot.”

Anybody else hear an echo to the William Wallace “Braveheart” line about “sons of Scotland?”
Yet Colonel Boylon wants to characterize Iraqi streets filled with protestors calling for America to go home as an unequivocal sign of “progress?” One wonders if he also was in charge of Senator John McCain’s April Fool’s Day tour of Baghdad?
Back to al-Sadr, Edward Wong’s report yesterday ominously noted that,

“Mr. Sadr’s statement on Sunday indicated he might be ready to resume steering his militia, the Mahdi Army, toward more open confrontation with the American military.”

Yet I am aware of analyses suggesting that Sadr’s latest rhetoric and this march are an effort to “let off steam” for frustrated followers, or a sign of “desperation” in the face of recent US military attacks against his Mahdi “Army” in Diwaniyeh. (These assaults, by the way, included the use of US bombers….) In the following extended McClatchy story, we have:
Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group observing that Sadr’s “lie-low” strategy has backfired among his more militant followers:

“Shiites who were targets [of sectarian violence] want to respond, and Muqtada is coming under more pressure to call for some kind of retaliation… [The mass demonstrations are] “one way of allowing people to let off steam.”

And this from Vali Nasr of the US Naval Postgraduate School, who contends that Sadr’s response to the U.S. troop assault against his once government-protected militia has put his position of power in jeopardy, and that his statements were meant to distract his followers, including militiamen who are eager to retaliate.

“This tough rhetoric essentially camouflages the decision not to fight.”

Perhaps they are correct. But my comment for the moment reduces to two words:

Wishful thinking.

UK sailors released…. “stunning” ?

(5:05 pm. update: Gary Sick’s G2k comments are now appended in the continuation)
Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has announced that “he” will be releasing the British sailors. The US airwaves are now filled with quotes characterizing this very welcome release announcement as a “stunning surprise.”
No doubt it was a shock to Ted Koppel, the former ABC News anchor. Just two days ago, Koppel’s NPR commentary had knowingly proclaimed that this current hostage drama was deja vu from 1979. Koppel speculated that the crisis wouldn’t be over until Tony Blair was out of office. Koppel must be missing his Night-Line gig.
Surely I’m not the only one not surprised that this crisis is being unwound. After all, the world’s stock markets rallied yesterday (Tuesday) and oil prices plunged in anticipation that something positive was in the works.
A good thing too – I was getting nauseous from all the plausible to bizarre theories purporting to explain which Iranian faction was behind the capture, what their agendas were, and how the crisis presumably was playing into the hands of Iran’s confrontational hardliners. (never mind the “regime change” ideologues in the US and Israel) Even Juan Cole in Salon published a version of such interpretations.
A few lonely voices had contemplated that the crisis might have been consciously provoked by the British, or that the situation was recklessly stoked when Blair proclaimed he was “utterly confident” over the facts of the original British operation. It became a mutual TV propaganda war. (and the US mainstream media largely bought the official British version, “hook, line, and sinker.”)
I don’t know yet which account to believe on the immediate catalysts. I was more concerned that the “neocons” on both sides were painting themselves into corners from which a resolution would be supremely difficult to reach.
Over the past few days, however, close observers could see a series of encouraging signs from both London and Tehran suggesting that creative language was forming that could indeed be acceptable to both sides. From the British side, there was less blather about “absolute certainty” that their sailors had been on the Iraqi side of a maritime border line – a line that in fact does NOT exist in treaty form.
Richard Schoffield and Craig Murray were quite “spot on,” even as their early voices of sanity were pointedly ignored by most of the mainstream media. The problem at hand is rather “simple,” as Schoffield told the BBC over a week ago,

“Iran and Iraq have never agreed to a boundary of their territorial waters. There is no legal definition of the boundary beyond the Shatt al-Arab.”

That didn’t stop the New York Times (for starters) from reprinting the British “fake” map in their pages — with no indication that the boundary line indicated was not at all settled.
Even the British naval commander of the operation, Commodore Nick Lambert, had carefully observed in the early hours after the detention of his sailors that,

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated.”

Ambassador Murray was widely vilified for pointing out that it was ill-advised for Blair to have been “utterly confident” that Britain’s ships were on the Iraqi side of a “fake” line. Yet a week later, Murray noted that the border’s unsettled nature had become widely admitted within British foreign policy decision-making circles and even in the British media.
I suspect that this key shift “back” in British rhetoric contributed to today’s news.
From the Iranian side, there was recognition that the crisis was only increasing Iran’s woes in the international community. The public parading of the sailors, however relatively “different” from the images of Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc, was also reviving ghastly images from the US hostage crisis of 1979. And few Iranian leaders wanted to re-live that isolation.
President Ahmadinejad is but one spoke in Iran’s complex decision-making wheel. The hub of that consensus forming wheel is Iran’s “Leader” – Ali Khamenehi. No doubt Khamenehi, in consultation with veteran key players in the top inner circles (e.g. Rafsanjani, Khatami, Velayati), decided that the boil had to be lanced.
Ali Larijani, the Iranian who gave the encouraging interview with Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday, chairs Iran’s Supreme National Security Council – a body that reports directly to Khamenehi – not Ahmadinejad. When asked if Iran would put the sailors on trial, Larijani replied,

“Definitely our priority would not be trial… Our priority is to solve the problem through diplomatic channels. We are not interested in having this issue get further complicated.”

Such conciliatory comments were welcomed by Britain.
While AN may have been granted the privilege to announce the pending release of the British sailors, the decision was hardly his alone to make.
Hats off then to the “grown ups” in both the British and Iranian foreign policy teams. Both sides surely realized that neither country had an interest in the sailors’ plight turning into a “hot” war in the Gulf.
The challenge now is to craft mechanisms to insure that such incidents don’t recur.
If a boundary is at long last to be agreed upon between Iran and Iraq, both in the Shatt al-Arab river, as well as in the territorial sea, it cannot be imposed from the outside. Instead, it will have to be achieved bilaterally between Iran and Iraq, and supported multilaterally by the interested international community.
All interested parties should also “fix minds” on dropping “gun boat diplomacy” in favor of “collective security” arrangements, beginning with all eight littoral states of the Persian Gulf. As is so often forgotten from the outside, local security is relatively more “vital” to the states that “live” there. It’s their front yards! As my mentor (Ramazani) long ago wrote, they all need to get their oil and gas securely to world markets, “they can’t drink it.”
Yet the Gulf’s littoral states also have the curse and luxury of the entire world also seeing their fragile waterway as critically important. Why not then dare to imagine more sustainable security arrangements as guaranteed through the UN Security Council rather than via the gunboats or aircraft carriers of any one outside imperial power?
————————
Update (as of 5:05 pm EST)
Gary Sick (now a respected Professor at Columbia U., a key Carter NSC member during the hostage crisis, and a former Navy Captain) made the following 8 points on the “Iran-UK contretemps” via his closed Gulf 2000 forum (and which he just indicated can be quoted publicly) I disagree with him on some points, agree in most others. (Guess which?) See continuation:

Continue reading “UK sailors released…. “stunning” ?”

Broadband updates (haves vs. have-nots)

JWN readers might remember my lament here last July about the “digitial divide” in Central Virginia (and beyond) between those who can get broadband and those who cannot.
Alas, I’m still stuck with Wildblue Satellite. It’s better than dial-up, when it works, and when it’s not raining. Embarq’s DSL is still about 900 yards to my east and 1200 yards to my west.
Comcast has bought up the bankrupt Adelphia cable/broadband assets. When I called them, a representative (sitting at a computer in Toronto) assured me I could now get Comcast – but that was six months ago.
Meanwhile, progressive states like Oregon and Vermont are moving ahead with creative initiatives to bring broadband to their entire populations. But here in vuhGinyah, well, gosh, why would governmnent of, by and for something other than the people want to interfere in the miraculous chaos of the free market?
That’s not quite fair. Our “radical” experiment here with Broadband Over Powerline via our electric “cooperative”continues its four year tradition of going nowhere fast. In January, CVEC blamed the company providing the technology (IBEC) which in turn blamed the latest delays on a lowly chip company (DS2). With an alleged “line noise” problem solved, we were instructed to watch for a March update. Of course, it’s now April. If past pattern holds, we’ll see a new message shamelessly appear in about July, with yet another drumroll announcement to watch that space for a “full roll-out” by Christmas. Not. Even if we get it, the announced speeds for BPL (256 mbs) are half what I now limp along with via Satellite.
A solution!?
At long last, however, those of us on the wong side of the digital divide may have a solution, one oh so fitting for the frustrating *$%#^* that we’ve endured. It’s an amazingly simple, ecologically friendly, and almost “free” solution: Google’s TiSP DSL service, just announced on Sunday. If you haven’t read about this already, check it out.

Craig Murray: About that “Fake British Map”

I have been extremely displeased by the media reporting regarding the ongoing Iran-Britain “detainee” crisis. The boundaries questons surrounding the Shatt/Arvand River are hardly of recent vintage. They are instead a crtical flash-point of contention that goes back centuries. Insuring access to world seaways via the disputed area is a vital interest, not just to Iraq, but to Iran also. And Iranians of all political persuasions have reasons to be deeply suspicious of “perfidious Albion” — on this issue.
It has been a crisis waiting to happen – or be manufactured. More on my views, a backgrounder, and cautions in another post.
For now, here’s a few stunning excerpts from the extraordinary blog of Craig Murray, the dissident former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and a onetime “Head of the Maritime Section of the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”
As he did before, he’s blowing the whistle on “sexed-up” Blair-spin — and on the incredibly lazy reporting in the mainstream media (here in the US and in the UK):
Today (March 28th):

“The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.
But there are two colossal problems.
A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.
B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.”

Well imagine that. Should we be surprised? Who was it that invented the art of artificial line drawing in the Middle East?
Murray’s blog entries since March 23 are all worth considering – and comparing with what we’re reading in the media. To be sure, Murray sees room for blame on all sides

“None of which changes the fact that the Iranians, having made their point, should have handed back the captives immediately. I pray they do so before this thing spirals out of control. But by producing a fake map of the Iran/Iraq boundary, notably unfavourable to Iran, we can only harden the Iranian position.”

I share Murray’s wish that this be resolved rapidly, before ideological hotheads on both sides (AN & TB) turn this into something bigger and more difficult to unwind.
And will somebody please get Helena’s hotline suggestion – e.g., Colonel Lang’s “deconflict mechanism” – working and stat!?
Comments?

The Mother of all Sermons

(Note: this is Scott Harrop writing.)
Four years ago this past week, 23 March 2003 to be exact, I heard what for me then was the “mother of all sermons.” Yet until now, I have resisted writing about it:

*First, I am not inclined to be too autobiographical in the blogosphere.
*Second, when I finally forced myself to re-listen to the digital recording of “the sermon,” it dawned on me that I’ve heard far worse since. (See John Hagee section below)
*Third, I have long resisted returning to the subject of “Christian Zionism.” Where I was raised in Pennsylvania, Hal Lindsey and his 1970’s bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth” was widely read at churches my family attended. A bit later at a “Christian University,” I once wrote a paper on “Peace and Prophecy” with the edgy subtitle, “Are they Compatible?” I had the “nerve” to think they were. Still do.
*Lastly, I am also not too inclined to ridicule ministers in public, even when well “earned.“

But then I saw a bumper sticker on the family van of one of my daughter’s friends that proclaimed, “No Jesus, No Peace.” It convinced me that I needed to go back and “unpack” four years of pent-up angst over what “the sermon” signifies for me, then and now.
Besides, I have analyzed the Friday political sermons of Shia clerics for over two decades, so I shouldn’t be so abstemious about assessing what presumed “Gospel” ministers have to say on Middle East matters. I also lamely take some courage from how George Fox challenged ministers of his day.
THE Sermon:
The context of “the sermon” was just days after the US “shock and awe” bombs began raining down on Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, as the first stages of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The setting was one of the larger “evangelical” churches here in Charlottesville, Virginia. We had been “visiting” this church, in part as the Pastor had assured us that his “new covenant” church didn’t preach “Christian Zionism.”
The sermon that day four years ago was delivered by a visiting older minister, long a mentor, an “Apostle” to the local pastor, and now involved primarily in outreach efforts to drug-infested communities. Jesse Owens was his name – not to be confused with the famous Olympian.
Much of “the Apostle’s” sermon tone was blistering high-volume, classic fire-and-brimstone, text-less, “holy spirit” fury. At early points, Owens was nearly apoplectic, as his face turned deep red and purple and his neck veins bulged.
But his subject that day wasn’t about heaven or hell, sin, eternal damnation, or any of that.

Continue reading “The Mother of all Sermons”

GAO’s Pogo Report on Unsecured Munitions In Iraq

GAO, meet POGO.
Yesterday, the US Government Accounting Organization released an unclassified 35 page version of a study submitted to the Pentagon in December, with a long-winded title: “Operation Iraqi Freedom: DOD Should Apply Lessons Learned Concerning the Need for Security over Conventional Munitions Storage Sites to Future Operations Planning.”
A better title, in Pogo’s immortal “Swamp Speak,” might be, “In Iraqi IED’s, We have Met the Enemy and He is Us.”
The gist of the report is that “hundreds of thousands of tons” of Iraqi munitions were left unsecured after Iraq was “liberated” in April of 2003. Such munitions and components are being used by insurgents in making the roadside mines (IED’s), the devises deemed responsible for half of American casualties.
As Secretary of Defense Gates admitted yesterday, unsecured weapons caches have been a “huge, huge problem.” Characterizing Iraq now as “one huge ammo dump,” the munitions on the loose literally provide the raw materials for much of the carnage in Iraq today.
So how did this happen dear Pogo?
Elementary. We did it to ourselves.
First, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) assumed that after Saddam’s regime was overthrown,

“the regular Iraqi army units would ‘capitulate and provide internal security.’ Knowledgeable senior-level DOD officials stated that these Iraqi army units would have been used to secure conventional munitions storage sites….” (over 400 of them… p.8)

“As stated in the OIF war plan, the U.S. Commander, CENTCOM, intended to preserve, as much as possible, the Iraqi military to maintain internal security and protect Iraq’s borders during and after major combat operations.”

The US military planners also assumed that,

“Iraqi resistance was unlikely…. the plan did not consider the possibility of protracted, organized Iraqi resistance to U.S. and coalition forces after the conclusion of major combat operations. As a result, DOD officials stated that the regime’s conventional munitions storage sites were not considered a significant risk.”

Why should they have feared such resistance? After all, then Assistant Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was channeling the koolaid being mixed by Chalabi, Lewis, Ajami and their neocon pals. Remember the welcome to Iraq predictions?
In short, and as incredible as this may now sound, OIF planners assumed that, “Postwar Iraq would not be a U.S. military responsibility.”
As a result, “U.S. forces did not have sufficient troop levels to provide adequate security for conventional munitions storage sites in Iraq because of OIF planning priorities and certain assumptions that proved to be invalid.”
“Heck of a Job there Tommy.”
Worst of all (and to be more candid than the GAO report), the OIF military’s planners did not anticipate the actions of their own government:

“On May 23, 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved the Iraqi Army, which the CENTCOM commander assumed would provide internal security.”

As a direct consequence, Iraq’s weapons caches and manufacturing facilities went essentially unguarded for months. The US Military did not have a coordinated effort to manage and monitor Iraq’s munitions depots until after August of 2003. Even now, the GAO contends that monitoring and control of such “vulnerable” Iraqi munitions sites remains poor.
The consequences of leaving Iraqi munitions so vulnerable to theft have been… grave:

“As reported by DOD and key government agencies, the human, strategic, and financial costs of not securing conventional munitions storage sites have been high. Estimates indicate that the weapons and explosives looted from unsecured conventional munitions storage sites will likely continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region. Government agencies also assessed that looted munitions are being used in the construction of IEDs.”

In turn, ongoing high levels of violence impede reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
Remember this report next time you learn of a breathless claim that Iranian origin components are somehow the root of the road mines that are “killing Americans.” The neocons wanted to use such claims to buttress their “regime change” and bomb Iran campaigns. One wonders how the neocons will respond to the more plausible explanation that such American casualties are the fruit of American incompetence at the highest levels.
Pogo would frown at blame-somebody-else tactics.

Molewatch: Cheney & Ahmadinejad?

On a lighter note, Nicholas Kristof recently suggested that Americans will learn more about Israel’s real problems by reading Israeli papers than in the self-censored pablum in the US mainstream media. He might have added that one can get great ideas for new columns there too.
Back on March 1st, Isreali columnist Guy Bechor revealed that Iranian President Ahmadinejad was in fact Our {Israel’s} Secret Agent in Iran.

“Could it be that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is working for us? He is after all doing an excellent job for Israel. This week, while Teheran is divided between pragmatic elements calling to suspend Iran’s nuclear program (or at least enter dialog with the US,) and militant elements who are not prepared to make any concessions – militant Ahmadinejad should definitely be supported.”

Bechor then satirically bullets Ahmadinejad’s “top achievements” in isolating Iran and making his own reputation as “as the world’s problem child.”
How else can we explain that one man brought such pressure down upon Iran and support for Israel? Obviously, he must be a deep cover Israeli mole. Oh but of course.
And now we have Nicholas Kristof, by coincidence no doubt, asking if our own Vice President Dick Cheney is “an Iranian mole?”

“Consider that the Bush administration’s first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Iran’s bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran’s even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
You really think that’s just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq’s army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script
We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that’s just another coincidence?

Oh, but of course! Cheney is Iran’s man in Washington. Didn’t he once criticize Clinton policy on Iran for hurting American oil companies? One of his implants must get transmissions from Tehran.

Continue reading “Molewatch: Cheney & Ahmadinejad?”

New Challenges to AIPAC

An interesting crop of articles examining AIPAC – the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee – has emerged in the wake of the latest AIPAC convention in Washington.
In his taboo breaking Sunday column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof bravely observes what has long been obvious here:

“There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.”

George Soros laments the same problem in the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books:

“Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.”

An article in the current issue of Salon closes with a similar ironic challenge:

“We find ourselves in a very strange situation. America’s Mideast policies are in thrall to a powerful Washington lobby that is only able to hold power because it has not been challenged by the people it presumes to speak for. But if enough American Jews were to stand up and say “not in my name,” they could have a decisive impact on America’s disastrous Mideast policies.”

In his essay, Soros anticipated that, “Anybody who dares to dissent may be subjected to a campaign of personal vilification.” (Ask Mearsheimer & Walt, Carter & Hagel, etc.)
As noted by the new web site from Jewish Voices for Peace, “Muzzlewatch,” the New York Sun, as if on cue, shamelessly accused Soros, Kristof and others of being no different from the Nazis in pursuing a “new blood libel” against Israel.
And so it goes.

Continue reading “New Challenges to AIPAC”