Author: Helena

On war

I have been meaning for a while now to blog some of my thoughts on the nature of, and prospects for, our country’s continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq…. That intention was rekindled by reading the latest issue of Middle East Report, which has some good articles on the subject– as well as a good piece on Washington’s political interventions in Iraqi politics by none other than Reidar Visser.
Regarding U.S. military doctrine, and the whole issue of Gen. Petraeus having been rushed in to take over from McChrystal in Afghanistan, I’ve been thinking for a while that we really need to do a thorough re-examination of this whole “doctrine” of “counter-insurgency” (COIN), of which, of course, Petraeus was one of the principal authors. In this issue of MER, Rochelle Davis, Laleh Khalili, and B.D. Hopkins all have good articles on various aspects of ‘COIN’, and Steve Niva has a good piece on the ‘lessons’ from Israel’s failure to win the 33-day war against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. You can read the whole text of Davis’s and Khalili’s pieces there, free.
My own emerging thoughts are that the entire “doctrine” of COIN may well be most appropriately thought of as a huge, elaborate Potemkin village, designed mainly to bamboozle the U.S. public into thinking our brave men and women in uniform are actually able to do something of some value in those distant battlefields, and that they will “achieve” something of value there before– as will inevitably happen– financial constraints at home and the constraints of the hugely intractable facts on the ground in those distant places will force a U.S. withdrawal “redeployment” from them. (As I wrote in Boston Review, last December.)
Maybe we should start calling it (Potem-)COIN.
… And in a very important and related development, Gen. Ray Odierno, the guy who’s in charge of all the U.S. forces in Iraq, told the AP on Tuesday that,

    U.N. peacekeeping forces may need to replace departing U.S. troops in the nation’s oil-rich north if a simmering feud between Arabs and minority Kurds continues through 2011.

That is not a direct quotation from Odierno, but the version reported by AP’s Lara Jakes. She also commented,

    A U.N. force might offer both the Iraqi leadership and President Barack Obama a politically palatable alternative to an ongoing U.S. presence to prevent ethnic tensions from descending into war. Although occasional bombings by Sunni extremists on Shiite targets grab the headlines, many observers believe the Kurdish-Arab dispute is the most powerful fault line in Iraq today.

To which, all I can say is two things: (1) Yes! Make this a role and challenge for an invigorated UN– a body in which all the nations of the world, including Iraq’s neighbors, are represented; but (2) How tragic that it has taken Washington and the U.S. military so many long years to get this far towards the idea that it might indeed not be the U.S. alone and its chosen lackeys inside Iraq who determine the future of that severely war- and occupation-battered country.
Of course, it would have been far, far better if the U.S. had never invaded Iraq at all. But Bush and Cheney were determined to do so, and did. Then, relatively soon after the invasion/occupation I started arguing– e.g. here in Kansas in May 2004 (scroll down to the comment from my dear, subsequently deceased, friend Misty Gerner), and doubtless also earlier– that the best way to deal with the tough challenges the U.S. faced in running the occupation would be to hand the whole basket of big questions involved over to the U.N.
But of course they didn’t take my advice. 3,000-plus U.S. service-members have been killed in Iraq since then, and many scores of thousands wounded. And more than 100,000 Iraqis probably lost their lives in the waves of sectarian violence that erupted in 2006 and 2007– stoked in good part by Washington’s blatant policy of emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences in a sustained attempt to suppress adherence to any continuing form of (pan-)Iraqi nationalist feeling.
… And all for what? Because the powers that be in Washington did not want to admit that they needed to share decision-making power in Iraq with the U.N.
So now here’s Ray Odierno in July 2010 saying, Oh yes, and maybe now we need the U.N. in Iraq.
Staggeringly tragic. Much, much more to write about here.
But I have a huge bundle of things I need to do for my business in the days ahead. Stay tuned…

Summer thoughts: On publishing

I’ve been amazingly (and wonderfully) busy, reading the first two book manuscripts for the new publishing house. Okay, let’s be truthful. I’ve been reading one (Laila El-Haddad’s), and Bill the spouse has been doing the main reading on Chas Freeman’s first of two manuscripts.
Also went to Philly for a meeting (unrelated) with AFSC.
Also been doing more work on the Just World Books website, etc. I am really excited at the discourse-stretching aspect of the whole book-publishing project; and I was really buoyed up by some feedback I got from a longtime friend who’s been in mainstream publishing all her life and expressed real excitement at the JWB project, saying niche publishing like this really is the future of the business…
Bottom line here at JWN, though, is that I see I haven’t blogged since Monday. That’s how it goes in blogging.
Reading through Laila’s manuscript, which is a compilation of many of her blog posts and other writings, December 2004 through June 2010, has kind of confirmed the intense, personal, quirky, and incredibly rich quality of the whole blogging experience– and therefore also of its product.
By the way, Laila’s manuscript will be not one but two books! Yay! Just a bit more work of tweaking and editing before we can start laying out the pages, producing the books, and making them available to the waiting public! Let’s say as of now that we hope to get Gaza Mom, Book 1, out in late October, and Book 2 out in early December, in time for the second anniversary of Israel’s launching of the 2008 assault on Gaza.
… I have also been hoping to blog some of my own thoughts here on the nature of and prospects for our country’s horrendous continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq…. (Snip. I’ll make the rest of this a new post.)

The passing of Ayatollah Fadlallah

Juan Cole has an elegant and generally well-sourced short appreciation of the life and work of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who died in Beirut yesterday.
Without a doubt, Fadlallah was a commanding figure in the “Shiite Awakening” in Lebanon (and throughout the whole Middle East). As Juan notes, Fadlallah was closely associated with the founders of the Da3wa Party in Iraq, where he had been born of Lebanese parents and where he studied at the great seminaries in Najaf. The Da3wa Party was, of course, also the political incubator of post-invasion Iraqi prime ministers Ibrahim Ja3fari and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Juan notes the role that Fadlallah played in inspiring the anti-Israeli resistance that grew up among Lebanon’s Shiites in particular after Israel’s large-scale, sustained, and very brutal occupation of 1/3 of Lebanon in 1982. He also notes that the CIA was widely thought to have organized the 1985 bombing of Fadlallah’s residence in southern Beirut which killed 80 people, the vast majority of them civilians– but not either Fadlallah or a young bodyguard of his called Imad Mughniyeh, who went on to become one of the strategic masterminds of Hizbullah.
Fadlallah always, as Juan notes, pursued a steadfastly anti-imperialist line. However, he had at least one very serious theological differences with the current Hizbullah Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah believes in the concept of the Guardianship of the (Islamist) Jurisprudent– wilayat al-faqih— while Fadlallah strongly opposed it.
(This was in a way a paradox, since Fadlallah himself could have qualified to be the faqih in question, whereas Nasrallah, who has never attained any of the higher ranks of Shiite jurisprudence, could not. The marja’/faqih whom he follows is Iran’s current Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.)
The sense I have had from the times I have been in Beirut in recent years is that Fadlallah always had a very strong following among Lebanese Shiites– both those who supported Hizbullah and those who supported the other significant Lebanese Shiite movement, Amal. It is very doubtful, however, that his passing will lead to any recurrence of the Hizbullah-Amal tensions that sometimes arose in the past, since Hizbullah has clearly established itself as the more powerful and energetic of the two movements, with Amal’s people more or less resigned to living in its shadow.
Juan writes that,

    Most Lebanese Shiites either follow Sayyid Ali Sistani of Najaf in Iraq, or Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran (Hizbullah favors Khamenei). But some followed Fadlallah. His partisans will likely now turn to Sistani, strengthening the new, Shiite-dominated Iraq’s influence in Lebanon.

I am not sure that the first of those sentences is accurate– I’d love to see Juan’s sources for that judgment. I also think it’s unlikely that Fadlallah’s passing will cause any significant rise in the “influence” that either Sistani or the new Shiite-dominated Iraq is able to wield in Lebanon. Lebanon has its own very robust Shiite politics and its Shiite citizens have their own, always compelling reasons for the political choices they make. Fadlallah’s passing will almost certainly further increase the social and political heft of Hizbullah, since the gentle “brake” that Fadlallah often applied to Hizbullah power will now be removed; and it seems unlikely that anyone from his circle will speedily (or indeed ever) replace him in that role.
Also, re the idea of Iraqi “influence” in Lebanon, the Iraqi government can’t even wield sufficient “influence” inside its own broken country, let alone anywhere else… and come to that, what Iraqi “government” might we be talking about here??
Hizbullah’s Al-Manar website has an informative account of Fadlallah’s many contributions to social welfare and other civil-society projects in Lebanon over the past decades. It tells us that Nasrallah has announced a three-day mourning period for Fadlallah, and calls for a large turnout for Fadlallah’s funeral, to be held tomorrow.

Turkel compounds Netanyahu’s problems

When Israeli PM established the internal and powerless commission under retired High Court judge Jacob Turkel to investigate some aspects of the Mavi Marmara raid, he did so only as a way to get President Obama and other western leaders off his back. Those leaders have been under continuing pressure from NATO member Turkey to support the establishment of a robust international commission to investigate the raid, in which Israeli naval commandos killed one American citizen and eight citizens of Turkey.
Obama went along with Netanyahu’s plan that the three-member Turkel Commission should have no teeth, no basis in Israeli legislation regarding such matters, no sub-poena powers, etc. He also went along with the idea that the ‘international’ component of the commission be confined to two observers, one from Britain and one from Canada– both of them well-established partisans of Israel.
Well, Obama went along with it all. But Turkel himself has not; and his demands to be given much more sweeping powers have made the commission into much more of an embarrassment than an asset for Netanyahu as he prepares for his upcoming visit to Washington.
Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz today that,

    The demands of retired justice Jacob Turkel, who is heading the civilian committee investigating the raid, roused some concern from the prime minister and defense minister. Both men agreed to accept most of Turkel’s demands, yet they denied his committee the right to question soldiers and officers, with the exception of IDF chief Ashkenazi and, perhaps, Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit.

How, I wonder, will former law professor and steadfast defender of the concept of civilian control over the military Barack Obama, refer to the Turkel Commission when he meets with Netanyahu next week? Let’s see.
It would also, of course, be helpful if the representatives of the U.S. media who get a chance to question Netanyahu during his visit remember to ask him about the toothlessness of this commission and how he suggests that Israel can make things right with NATO member Turkey over the deadly flotilla raid…

Haaretz’s Burston on Hamas’s resilience, smarts

Here is a must-read from Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston.
He writes about Hamas:

    Never has Israel had an enemy so perfectly attuned to the Jewish state’s weaknesses, so impervious to its strengths. For more than 20 years – ever since Israel inadvertently midwifed the founding of Hamas at the outset of the first intifada – the organization has leveraged Israel’s every tactic into tangible, stepwise political gain.

Burston argues in the piece tht the Israeli government should do what it has to to secure the release of four-year POW Gilad Shalit. In other recent articles, Burston has argued that the government should negotiate with Hamas on a far broader range of issues.
His espousal of these positions is noteworthy because until about six months ago, his writing seemed on the hawkish side on nearly every issue.
Today, he writes,

    Why is it that time after time, Israel sets a trap for Hamas and is shocked to find itself falling straight into it? Beyond everything else, our inability to successfully confront Hamas has to do with that most tragic and deep-seated of our misconceptions regarding the Palestinians: the unshakable, eternal faith among Israelis that “we know the Arabs.” Yet the actual equation is simple: It is Hamas that knows Israelis like no one else. Indeed, Israelis, at this point in time, don’t even know themselves.
    The long war with Hamas has changed Israel, and for the worse. It has in many ways robbed the country of the ability to make decisions courageously and independently. From suicide bombings to rocket attacks to its demands for Gilad Shalit – Hamas has made many Israelis grow callous to the plight of Palestinians, as a whole, and to lose faith both in the efficacy of their own government and in the very possibility of peace.
    Hamas remembers and exploits what we have forgotten: the underlying dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas understands that the basic motivating force of post-Holocaust Jews is fear, and that the basic motivating force of post-Nakba Palestinians is humiliation. Hamas understands that Israel’s attempts to address its fears often cause Palestinians additional humiliation. And Hamas knows even better that Palestinians’ attempts to redress their humiliation often deepen Israelis’ fears.

Within the U.S. political system, of course, the whole idea of talking to Hamas remains a complete (AIPAC-enforced) anathema. Personally, I’ve thought for a long time that– just as with the PLO in the 1980s/90s– the authoritative players in the U.S. political system will not be prepared to deal in any way with Hamas until after the Israeli government does so.
In September 1993, it was quite hilarious to see the entire U.S. political establishment turn on a dime and give Yasser Arafat and the PLO a warm embrace, when just days earlier these politicians and officials had all still been unanimous in excorating and accusing the PLO of the worst possible things.
What changed, of course, was the revelation that the Israeli government had been secretly talking to the PLO in Oslo for many months and had indeed reached an agreement with it. (Which turned out, over the years that followed, to signal the political death of Fateh and to a great extent also the PLO. But that’s a slightly different story.)
However, even in those “dark” days of the mid-1980s in the U.S. when no-one with any authority was allowed to even hint at talking with the PLO, there were people deep in the bowels of the Pentagon who understood that, from a military planning point of view, they did need to understand the organization’s political dynamics and explore the possibilities of the U.S. dealing with it in the future.
Amd the descendants of those military intel/planning officers are still in the bowels of the Pentagon today, it seems, ‘war-gaming’ and doing contingency planning regarding the possibility of the U.S. dealing with Hamas. Mark Perry had this important piece on the Foreign Policy website on Wednesday, describing some of their efforts…
Perry, who has proven the quality of his Pentagon sources in his earlier writings, writes this time:

    “There is a lot of thinking going on in the military and particularly among intelligence officers in Tampa [the site of CENTCOM headquarters] about these groups,” acknowledged a senior CENTCOM officer familiar with the report. However, he denied that senior military leaders are actively lobbying Barack Obama’s administration to forge an opening to the two organizations. “That’s probably not in the cards just yet,” he said.
    In the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said that those on board the Mavi Marmara, the scene of the May 31 showdown between Israeli commandos and largely Turkish activists, had ties to “agents of international terror, international Islam, Hamas, al Qaeda and others.” The same senior officer wasn’t impressed. “Putting Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in the same sentence, as if they are all the same, is just stupid,” he said. “I don’t know any intelligence officer at CENTCOM who buys that.” Another mid-level SOCOM [Special Operations Command] officer echoed these views: “As the U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism evolves, military planners have come to realize that they are all motivated by different factors, and we need to address this if we are going to effectively prosecute a successful campaign in the Middle East.”
    The most interesting aspects of the report deal with Hizbollah. The Red Team downplays the argument that the Lebanese Shiite group acts as a proxy for Iran…

You need to go read the whole article if you don’t understand the role a ‘Red Team’ plays in Pentagon planning exercises.
But my bottom line remains that a ‘breakthrough’ in U.S. policy towards Hamas is much more likely to stem from an antecedent ‘breakthrough’ in Israeli policy (and hence in the arm-twistings of AIPAC). As of now, it looks as if there may indeed be some imminent change in the Israeli policy– at least regarding the prisoner exchange issue. And if there is a breakthrough on that issue, its effects may well cascade fast through the whole of the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic…

Yezid Sayigh’s paper on good governance in Gaza

I only just discovered that Yezid Sayigh’s paper on the unexpectedly (for many westerners) good quality of Hamas’s governance of Gaza is now up on the website of Brandeis University’s crown Center. PDF here.
Close readers of JWN will recall the post I wrote back in March, about the presentation Sayigh gave at the Palestine Center in Washington DC, in which he compared the quality of the governance in Gaza and by the (actually, unconstitutional) administration led by Salam Fayyad in Ramallah– to the favor of Gaza’s Hamas government, which ws elected in January 2006.
The summary posted on the Crown Center website concludes thus:

    Prof. Sayigh argues that Hamas has demonstrated its ability to innovate and survive. He concludes that the international sanctions policy has created a durable stand-off: Rather than spark mass discontent leading to the collapse of the Hanieh government, it enables Hamas to enhance its ruling party status.

The very well-documented, eight-page paper itself gives a wealth of detail obtained from the public record and from a week-long research trip Sayigh made to Gaza back in January.
It looks as though Brandeis did just a little bit of “political” editing of the piece– at least, by comparison with the way Sayigh spoke during his presentation at the Palestine Center.
Thus, he spoke openly at the Palestine Center about the bifurcation of power between Gaza and the West bank back in June 2007 having been primarily the responsibility of “”the president’s men [i.e. Abu Mazen’s men– though notably not Abu Mazen himself] and certain people here in the Bush administration.” And he referred to the Ismail Haniyeh government in Gaza as being “partly constitutional”, while saying the Fayyad government in Ramallah was wholly unconstitutional.
In the Brandeis/Crown paper, responsibility for the bifurcation of June 2007 is vaguely directed elsewhere, with the relevant events being referred to only as “The assertion [by Hamas] of exclusive control over Gaza in June 2007… ”
Yeah, well. It was not so much that Hamas asserted exclusive control, as that there had up till then been a Saudi-brokered National Unity Government under Haniyeh’s premiership… but Mohamed Dahlan and Elliott Abrams together mounted a Contras-style coup to topple it. The elected Hamas leaders were, however, able to rebuff the coup attempt.
Ah well, that seems to be the main point on which there seems to have been some political intervention by Brandeis/Crown. The rest of Sayigh’s analysis is well developed and well documented in the published version.
Interesting that it is the major Jewish university in the U.S. that sponsors such work, eh?

Update from Just World Books

I realize I haven’t posted anything here since mid-April about the progress of my new book-publishing company, Just World Books. But the authors and I– along with a range of other contributors to the project– have all been pretty busy. So I’ll tell you all to watch out for busy Fall 2010 publishing schedule ahead.
First off the press will most likely be Laila El-Haddad’s book, which now has the fixed title Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. The due date for that manuscript’s delivery is tomorrow, but because I’m such a huge softie I’ve given Laila two whole days of grace on delivering… So this Friday, it will be.
I can’t wait. I worked a little with a short excerpt that we’re using to try to persuade the right kind of person to write a Foreword– more on that, later. But I found even working with that short excerpt from the book to be incredibly moving… And that, even though I’d read all her blog posts and other essays at the time, when they first came out.
Somehow, having them strung together (and in forward-chrono order) made for an incredibly gripping narrative.
I think everyone who enjoys JWN will just love her book.
By the way, one of the many “background/administrative” things I’m doing right now re setting up the business and all its systems is, not surprisingly, to supervise the design and building of the Just World Books website. (Ably assisted by the continuing advice from my homegrown CTO.) The site is just a wee bit behind schedule right now. But no worry. It should be up within 3-4 weeks. Hey, by then I might even have a price and an ISBN for Laila’s book so that all the publishing info can be up on the site and y’all can start ordering.
But I don’t want to fix the price till I have a clearer idea of the page-length, so I do need to see the manuscript first. (It’ll have photos from her blog in it, too, which will complicate some of that length/price planning. Oh my. There is definitely more to this publishing business than meets the eye!)
Then in short order after Laila’s book we’ll have Book 1 from Chas Freeman, which will be on “Americans, Intelligence, and the Middle East”, Joshua Foust‘s very timely book that’s a critique of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Book 2 from Chas Freeman, which is on “America, China, and the World”, and then Reidar Visser‘s book on “Iraq under Nuri al-Maliki, 2006-2010.” (I actually emailed Reidar today to ask what we should do if the Iraqi pols can’t agree on a new PM any time soon. Heck, it looks as if the current stalemate might go on for many, many more months… ) Plus, I’m planning a 25th anniversary reprint of my 1985 book on Lebanon, which I’ll be re-packaging under a new title along with my two longish Boston Review articles on Lebanon from 2005 and 2006, a little connecting text, and a brand-new Foreword by my esteemed, longtime friend Dr. Michael C. Hudson of Georgetown.
So that’ll be most of our Fall line-up. Then, I have two more authors who have already agreed to deliver manuscripts in late fall and January 2011, respectively. They are Rami Zurayk, who’s curating a book called “Food, Farming. and Freedom”, and Ron Mock, who’s a prof at George Fox University in Oregon, who’s publishing a more general (and traditionally constructed) book called “Pacifism Under Pressure” with us.
In addition, I’m in an advanced stage of contract discussions with a couple of other really intriguing bloggers, to do curated books from their blog; and I’m in an earlier stage of discussions around a number of other fabulous-looking projects, including not one but two great-looking atlases, a cookbook (on Gaza’s distinctive and fabulous cuisine, from Laila El-Haddad and a friend), a memoir, and a couple of ground-breaking edited volumes.
The first of those blogger-curated books mentioned above might come out this year. The rest of those projects will all be in the Spring 2011 or Fall 2011 lists.
Anyway, as you all may guess, as soon as the JWB website is up, you JWN readers will be the first to know… And I’ll really rely a lot on all of you to help spread the word about the JWB books as they start coming out.
I have to tell you, starting this business, planning the whole editing and publishing system and getting it into place, and nurturing all these projects along has been a heck of a lot of work– but a lot of fun, too! I’ve found and started working with an incredible bunch of other professionals who’ll also be contributing to the project… and I really think the English-speaking world is ready for these new discourse-expanding books!
Plus, did I mention yet that I’ve been looking into e-book publishing in a very serious way, and one of the things JWB will be doing is to publish fabulous, iPad-optimized e-books that will really build on all the strengths of the original, often web-published texts.
(By the way, I am also hoping to sell other-language rights, too. If any readers here want to enquire about terms for those, let me know.)

Obama ‘wilfully’ provoking Beijing?

China Hand (Peter Lee) has a post today on what looks like a really important story: the eruption of a startling new war of words between Washington and Beijing– a phenomenon that Lee indicates could be undergirded by some serious new tensions in this world-defining relationship.
The way he tells it, the latest spat began on Sunday, at the G-20 summit in Toronto, when Obama publicly accused China of “wilful blindness” by remaining silent over North Korea’s suspected sinking of a South Korean warship in March.
Today, People’s Daily Online hit back. An unsigned editorial there said of Obama,

    His words on such an important occasion, based on ignorance of China’s consistent and difficult efforts in pushing for peace on the peninsula, has come as a shock to China and the world at large.
    As a close neighbor of North Korea, China and its people have immediate and vital stakes in peace and stability on the peninsula. China’s worries over the North Korean nuclear issue are by no means less than those of the US.
    The US president should have taken these into consideration before making irresponsible and flippant remarks about China’s role in the region.
    The facts speak for themselves, and very clearly so: China has made tremendous efforts in preventing the situation on the Korean Peninsula from getting out of control, including in the aftermath of the Cheonan incident.
    Without China’s involvement, there would not have been the Six-Party Talks, and the outbreak of yet another Korean War might well have been a possibility.
    It is thus not China that is turning a blind eye to what North Korea has done and has not done.
    Instead, it is the leaders of countries such as the US that are turning a blind eye on purpose to China’s efforts.

Lee writes in his post:

    Characterizing the US president as “irresponsible and flippant” is a convenient indicator that US-China relations are headed for the meat locker.
    Another indication is the Chinese announcement that it will conduct live fire naval exercises as a riposte to the US-ROK joint exercises scheduled June 30 to July 5, which may or may not include a US aircraft carrier sailing around the Yellow Sea between the Korean peninsula and the Chinese mainland.

He has some more material, too, about the US continuing to pursue anti-China policies in another dimension of the US-China relationship, namely the intermittent jockeying over the status of Tibet.
He concludes:

    as far as I can see, the Obama administration policy toward China is all sticks no carrots. The consequences of crossing the United States are meant to be dire, but I haven’t seen any significant proffered benefits to China for toeing the U.S. line, other than the intangible ones–like not having President Obama insult your President at high profile international forums.
    It will be interesting to watch this play out, especially in the run-up to the 2010 US congressional elections.

Indeed. Interesting, and quite possibly very depressing. Not least because the relationship with China is (like US-Turkish relations) yet another of the key aspects of US diplomacy in which the actions of dedicated pro-Israeli zealots within the US political system are currently making great and completely unnecessary problems for the true interests of the American people.
As Lee himself showed in some detail in this recent post at Asia Times Online, which detailed the degree to which Stuart Levey, the head of the US Treasury Department’s ‘Office for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence” (OTFI) now has China in his sanctions cross-hairs.
Lee unapologetically describes Levey as the “‘father’ of the North Korean atomic bomb”, explaining that it was Levey’s excessive zeal as head of OTFI in instituting sanctions in September 2005 against a small bank in Macau called the Banco Delta Asia (BDA) that had spurred Kim Jong-Il to withdraw from the six-party talks and detonate North Korea’s first nuclear bomb just weeks later, on October 9.
As Lee added laconically, a second immediate effect of Levey’s action that year was that, “America’s image as an honest broker impartially protecting the integrity of the dollar-based international financial system was seriously tarnished.”
Lee concludes the ATO article by writing,

    Given… OTFI’s rather dismal record of failure and insubordination on BDA, it is interesting that the Obama administration kept Levey in his post after it took office.

An explanation could almost certainly be found in some of the sources cited in this April 2010 post at Mondoweiss.
In it, Jeff Blankfort and Phil Weiss recall that in 2005, Levey told an AIPAC policy conference that,

    It is a real pleasure to be speaking with you today. I have been an admirer of the great work this organization does since my days on the one-year program at Hebrew University in 1983 and 1984. I want to commend you for the important work that you are doing to promote strong ties between Israel and the United States and to advocate for a lasting peace in the Middle East….

Blankfort and Weiss have more good stuff there, as well– on Levey’s also strongly pro-Israeli deputy David Cohen, as well as on Levey himself.
These guys are dug very deep into sensitive portions of the administration at this point; and they are backed up by great cohorts of AIPAC-orchestrated funders and propagandists who work at the congressional and public-discourse levels to try to keep us all living inside the AIPAC-defined blinkers.
But they are now prepared to put the core U.S. relationship with China that undergirds the entire current world economic system at risk, just because of their (Israel-motivated) zeal against Iran?
Yes, it seems so.
That was a dangerous and escalatory game to be playing back in 2005. But today, the globe-girdling balance between Washington and Beijing has shifted considerably. This time, Stuart Levey’s Israel-motivated zealotry against China could have consequences that are far, far more damaging for humanity.
—-
Update, Wed, 10:30 am.
A friend sent me this 2006 profile of Levey from the WaPo Style section. The writer, Dafna Linzer, quotes Clinton administration official as describing Levey as “a loyal Republican, but he would not let politics color or direct a judgment that he would otherwise make.”
Linzer also notes that Levey, “spent his junior year [from college] studying at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he worked on an undergraduate thesis on Meir Kahane…” It seems possible from what Linzer wrote that the thesis was critical of Kahane.
But regarding U.S. politics, Levey’s politics seemed clear:

    Levey was dispatched to Florida as part of the 2000 election recount. Like many of the Republican lawyers behind Bush v. Gore , Levey joined the government shortly afterward. He chose the Justice Department, serving under then-Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson.
    Levey started out handling immigration issues. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Thompson promoted him to chief of staff and added money laundering and anti-terrorism activities to his portfolio.
    Thompson is among a long list of conservative mentors to Levey. They include Judge Laurence H. Silberman, former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) and Martin Peretz, the New Republic’s editor in chief, who was Levey’s Harvard thesis adviser and who describes him as “dazzlingly smart.”

Linzer also had this:

    This February, Levey traveled to the Middle East with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shortly after Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, had won Palestinian elections. As part of a small team of administration officials grappling with the results, Levey tried to figure out how to get money to the Palestinian people without going through Hamas.
    … On the way back from Jerusalem, Levey approached Rice on a different matter: financial levers he thought could be used to pressure Iran. Rice was impressed, her aides said, and Levey was asked to lead a task force designed to implement financial sanctions against Tehran if negotiations over its nuclear program fell apart.

So there you have it. A man without much political loyalty to Pres. Obama’s party as such. But with a lot of loyalty to AIPAC’s highly escalatory and destabilizing anti-Iran agenda.
Someone remind me why Obama kept him on again?

IHH publishes report on flotilla raid; Tirkel Committee temporarily beached

The IHH has now published a very thorough-looking report on the whole flotilla project and Israel’s raid against it. Kudos to Adam Horowitz and Mondoweiss for publishing it.
I’m reading it now.
IHH was one of six civil-society organizations, all based in different countries, that jointly organized the flotilla. This is a truly international report.
Inside Israel, meanwhile, the “Turkel Committee”, which was appointed by PM Netanyahu in order to appease the Americans though it has no sub-poena powers and no basis in Israel’s legal structure, has already started to challenge its (extremely restricted) mandate. The good people at Gush Shalom tell us that “Judge Tirkel undertook to the Supreme Court that the Committee’s activities will be suspended until July 11, and that it will conduct no activity until the change in its authority is determined.”
They cited this PDF document (in Hebrew.)
Gush Shalom head and former MK Uri Avnery said in a statement,

    It seems that already before our appeal got to any hearing before the court, the State representatives in practice admit Gush Shalom’s main contention – that the Tirkel Committee, with the very narrow authority and mandate given it by the government, was not able to conduct a serious investigation into the circumstances which led to the killing of nine passengers on the Gaza Flotilla, and subsequently to a severe damage of Israel’s international position. I am glad to see that the Prime Minister apparently has also understood this, even if belatedly…
    Nevertheless, we don’t withdraw our demand to form a Judicial Commission of Inquiry, independent and fully empowered, which is the instrument created by Israeli law exactly for sensitive investigations of this kind. A thorough and independent investigation is needed, first of all, not for the Americans, not for the Turks, and not for the U.N. but for ourselves, for the sake of Israel’s future in order to help prevent such grave fiascos from happening again.

To which I’d add merely that yes, actually it would be nice if Avnery admitted that the raid needs to be very thoroughly and credibly investigated precisely for the sake of the many Turkish families left bereaved by Israel’s grisly May 31 assault, and not just for the sake of the claimed “moral purity” of Israel’s long-pampered Jewish citizens.

Richard Cohen’s ignorant, anti-Hamas rant

Shorter Richard Cohen, today: We have to starve Gaza’s 1.5 million people in order to save them (from Hamas).
Where does this guy get his ignorant opinions from, and why does the WaPo pay him huge gobs of money as a staff columnist to continue inflicting them on the reading public?
Cohen:

    It’s a pity that Israel, while substantially loosening its grip on Gaza, will continue to enforce a blockade when, with just a little imagination, it could insist on a deal with the activists once again steaming its way: You can proceed to Gaza if, once you get there, you demand that Hamas cease the persecution of women, institute freedom of religion, halt the continuing rocketing of Israel, release an Israeli hostage, ban torture and rescind an official charter that could have made soothing bedtime reading for Adolf Hitler. This may take some time.
    In fact, these demands would never be met…

His evidence for these claims? He adduces no direct evidence, at all! The whole “argument” he makes is one built on guilt by association– Hamas’s claimed close association with MB founder Hassan al-Banna, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Sayyid Qutb… as traced by that wellknown “scholar” of such thinkers (not!), Paul Berman.
Yes, the very same Paul Berman who was one of the key, New York-based liberal hawks who helped crowbar large chunks of the “liberal” portion of the U.S. elite into supporting the idea of saving Iraq’s people by invading their country.
(How did that go, Paul?)
Well, now Berman has a new book out, this time an explicitly anti-Islamist screed. And stop the presses! Richard Cohen has read it!
That is the entire data-set on which Cohen bases his allegations against Hamas. Oh no, don’t bother him with such mundane things as mere facts! E.g., as against his claims about Hamas’s “persecution of women”– the fact that Hamas has a number of articulate and savvy female elected MPs. Do you think Cohen even knows that? Or cares about actual facts?
He completely ignores all other salient facts, too. Including the relevance of the international laws governing belligerent military occupation, and Israel’s responsibility under those laws for the wellbeing (and not just the bare physical survival) of Gaza’s people… The fact that Israel’s military control of Gaza has continued unbroken and brutal for 43 years now… Israel’s continued detention of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners including tens of elected MPs, with many of those civilian detainees held without trial for many years now…
Oh, but he makes sure to mention Gilad Shalit, the one serving Israeli soldier taken captive by Gazans during a firefight in 2006 and now held by Hamas, which sadly enough is a risk that soldiers take once they put on the uniform.
This screed is beyond one-sided. It’s pathetic. But the WaPo carries on giving him his real-estate on the opinion page there…