Category: US politics

I realize I didn’t blog much last week. I was busy elsewhere. But it was a sad, sad week for the relationship of the US citizenry with the rest of the world. For two main reasons:

(1) We saw Karl Rove, finally let off the hook of fearing a possible indictment over Plamegate, coming back into the party-political arena with all his most divisive guns firing.
(2) We saw the Democrats, who’d previously held together on a sort of lowest-common-denominator course of standing by to watch the Republicans implode politically under the weight of their own contradictions, being completely sandbagged by Rove, and unable to come up with any unified, proactive, and effective political response to Rove’s truly vicious attacks.

One big risk Rove took– and I see him as perhaps the most risk-happy person in the whole Bush entourage– was to turn the subject of politics inside the Washington Beltway back to Iraq.
So risky for the Prez, you would have thought, wouldn’t you?
Previously, the Repubs (also known– I have no clue why– as the “Grand Old Party”, GOP) had been trying to steer clear of talking much about Iraq. They were trying to keep the conversation on topics like immigration or gay marriage, instead. Immigration turned out to blow up in their face: they looked deeply divided over it, while the Dems could stand aside, looking principled and thoughtful while not having to do much (or take responsibility for much) at all. Gay marriage also turned out not to be a great support-winner for those in the GOP who are passionately opposed to it.
So Rove comes along, and turns the topic to Iraq, with some vicious accusations that the Democrats just want to “cut and run”… And what this has done is send the Democratic Party politicians into a tailspin of internal division and indecisiveness… Revealing that on this, the most important issue facing our country right now, the Democratic Party leadership is still too divided to be able to take any kind of a principled public stand.
Taking most of the heat from Rove has been that great and principled patriot, Congressman John P. Murtha from Pennsylvania… a much-decorated former Marines officer (and generally, a “hawk” on defense issues), who has become one of the most outspoken voices in Congress urging a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
Murtha knows very well whereof he speaks. See this transcript of a TV talk show. (It’s from yesterday, June 18, though the heading says “June 11”.)
Rove has been going with special venom after Murtha and the other Dems who had voted for the war-enabling resolution back in October 2002 and then later came out against the war. As noted in a transcript of a videotaped portion shown on that same t.v. show, Rove said,

Like too many Democrats, it strikes me they are ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running…

Murtha, it has to be said, did not keep his cool when shown that video during his live broadcast there. He said of Rove:

He’s, he’s in New Hampshire. He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, “Stay the course.” That’s not a plan. I mean, this guy—I don’t know what his military experience is, but that’s a political statement. This is a policy difference between me and the White House. I disagree completely with what he’s saying…

A near-toxic rightwing attack-dog/commentator called “Ann Coulter” has also been majorly getting her rhetorical teeth into Murtha, saying recently that that he was, “The reason soldiers invented ‘fragging.'” (Fragging is US soldiers’ slang for trying to kill your officer.)
But what seems saddest to me is not the frenzy of the anti-Murtha rhetoric but the failure of the Democrats as a political leadership group to be able to come out forthrightly and unitedly to say, “This war in Iraq is going disastrously, and was anyway built on a lie perpetrated by the ruling party. We need to get out of Iraq and to re-order our relations with a world that will no longer be simply standing aside to allow the US to wreak such havoc on other nations. Let’s all work together to heal our relations with the rest of the world and with each other… based first and foremost on bringing our much-abused troops home from Iraq.”
Instead of which, at the end of a disgraceful, politically charged debate in the House of Representatives last week, 42 Dems bucked their leadership and joined a virtually united GOP in the House to pass a resolution stating,

that the United States must complete “the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure and united Iraq” without setting “an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment” of U.S. troops.

The authors of that WaPo report linked to there note that the 42 Democratic “defectors” this time “were about half the 81 [Dems] who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force”…
So at this rate, it could take us just as long again to arrive at a Democratic Party that is clear and united in opposition to the Bushist vision of perpetual and unilateral US “preventive” war?
H’mmm, that would take us until, let’s see, January 2010?
Not fast enough, guys! Let’s get ourselves a real and principled Democratic Party in the country long before then!
(The good news: at the broad level of the US public, few people seem to have been bamboozled by Bush’s “Mission Accomplished Part Deux” last week, or by the bullying tactics used by Rove and Coulter, into reducing their opposition to this disastrous war effort. The Democratic Party just needs to catch up with the people…)

“Mission Accomplished”– Part Deux?
Well, he didn’t have his “Mission Accomplished” flight suit on in Baghdad today, but Bush’s media and political advisers have certainly seemed eager to create (and then exploit) another key “victory photo op” to rally the flagging Republican base in the lead-up to the November elections.
AP’s Terence Hunt writes that Bush’s ostensible “host” there in the Baghdad Green Zone, PM Nuri al-Maliki, was given all of five minutes warning about the “guest” who, unbeknownst to him, had already flown into his country and was now anxious to meet him in the Republican Palace.
So much for Iraq’s “sovereignty”.
Hunt also told us about this crucial exchange between the two men:

“God willing, all the suffering will be over. And all the soldiers will return to their country with our gratitude for what they have offered, the sacrifice,” al-Maliki said through a translator.
Bush made it clear, however, that a U.S. military presence — now at about 132,000 troops — would continue for awhile.

The NYT had a good article in today (before the news about Bush’s “Mission Mission Accomplished” was released.) In it, David Sanger and Jim Rutenberg wrote about Monday having seen the first day of a two-day gathering of top-level Bush advisers, convened in the Camp David presidential “retreat” center 40 minutes north of Washington DC to discuss options at the present “critical juncture” in Iraq.
Sanger and Rutenberg wrote:

The meeting was as much a media event as it was a high-level strategy session, devised to send a message that this is “an important break point for the Iraqi people and for our mission in Iraq from the standpoint of the American people,” in the words of the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett.
It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week’s events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.
“When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running,” Mr. Rove said at a state Republican Party gathering in Manchester.

It is now clear that convening the Camp David gathering was also a clever way to pull together Bush’s key advisers and prepare them for their trip to Baghdad in a place somewhat away from the public eye. (And also, as AP’s Hunt noted, to provide a pretext for Maliki be in the “Republican Palace” in Baghdad at just the right time… since he had originally been told to be there for a videoconference with Bush.)
So which “key advisers” do you imagine Bush took with him to Baghdad? According to the listing given in this noon-Tuesday story on the NYT website,

He was accompanied by senior aides like National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Mr. Bartlett, Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagan and the White House spokesman, Tony Snow.

So that is one foreign-policy specialist, two domestic-policy specialists, and two public affairs flaks…
God help the Iraqi people.

Today in the US Senate, senators voted down a proposal that President Bush had been pushing with surprising intensity over the past few days: an amendment to the US Constitution (no less!) that would have spelled out explicitly that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman.”
That the proposal was voted down was no surprise to anyone. So why had Bush made such a big deal of jumping in at a very late date to push this strongly anti-gay proposal, if he (and everyone else) knew it was headed to defeat anyway? Didn’t this risk making him look weak by having suddenly jumped in to push it?
Well the consensus among DC political analysts is that this was a pretty “desperate” attempt by the Prez to try to energize the rightwing evangelical Christian networks who have always been a strong basis of his political support around the country– and to do this at a crucial point in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.
But why did he suddenly need to energize these people right now— that is, over the past few days?
The WaPo’s Dana Milbank has an extremely amusing account of some of the more obviously “pander-y” aspects of what Bush was doing. It starts like this:

There’s violence in Iraq, corruption in the House and anxiety in the markets. Somebody needs to create a diversion.
“The gays are aggressive! Gays have called war! Gays are attacking traditional marriage!”
Bishop Harry Jackson was shouting these words outside the Capitol yesterday morning, at a rally for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
“Marriage is under attack!” cried out Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), also at the rally.
“We can have anarchy!” warned Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.).
No doubt Jackson, Allard and Harris are sincere in their views about marriage. But the urgency of their alarm is a bit suspect to anybody with an eye on the electoral calendar…

Go read the whole thing… Milbank really does have a great eye for political detail. I said it was an amusing account. At one level it is. At another I just hate the amount of hurt these virulent anti-gay campaigns and the anti-gay legal environment inflict on my many gay and lesbian friends.
Though I agree with the broad thrust of Milbank’s analysis there I do have an additional explanation for Bush’s sudden enthusiasm of the “defense of marriage” issue in these recent days. Remember that these exact same days have also seen his administration make a 180-degree turn in its policy toward Iran… This, on an issue in which the evangelical right and the Jewish-American right have both been extremely busy pushing a hardline agenda. (See a report of some of AIPAC’s recent belligerent urgings regarding Iran here.)
But what is notable to me right now is that though Bush seems to have felt a need to appease the evangelicals at the time he (effectively) turned his back on their longheld position regarding Iran, he has not– so far– felt the need to pander in any parallel way to the AIPAC crowd.
The experienced former Indian diplomat M.K. Badhrakumar, writing in Asia Times Online yesterday, reminded us that

hardly a fortnight has passed since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while visiting Washington, described the Iranian government as an existential threat.
At a joint press conference on the White House lawn on May 23 with President George W Bush, Olmert made a hard-hitting statement: “… The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel; it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world. And it could mark the beginning of a dangerous and irresponsible arms race in the Middle East.”

And on May 24, Badhrakumar recalled, Olmert said this in his appearance at the US Congress:

” Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and a notorious violator of fundamental human rights, stands on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. With these weapons, the security of the entire world is put in jeopardy … This challenge, which I believe is the test of our time, is one the West cannot afford to fail.
“The radical Iranian regime has declared the United States its enemy. Their president believes it is his religious duty and his destiny to lead his country in a violent conflict against the infidels. With pride he denies the Jewish Holocaust and speaks brazenly, calling to wipe Israel off the map. For us this is an existential threat, a threat to which we cannot consent. But it is not Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to stability in the Middle East and the well-being of the world at large.
“Our moment is now. History will judge our generation by the actions we take now, by our willingness to stand up …”

However, despite all of Olmert’s urgings Bush evidently made up his own mind regarding what to do about Iran. And Condi Rice then simply informed her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, of the decision. Once Bush’s new initiative had been announced in Washington, Livni could do little more than issue a statement saying, “Israel appreciates the steps and measures by the United States in continuing to lead the international coalition and in taking all necessary steps to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability.”
As for AIPAC, it issued a statement noting tersely that, ” AIPAC is not taking a position on dialog with Iran.”
It seems that what is happening is that the Bushites have understood– finally!– that the situation they face in Iraq (and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and in many other places too) is really perilous… And this time they have no choice but to act in the US national interest, in an attempt to tamp down US-Muslim tensions and do whatever is necessary to try to set the stage for some form of non-chaotic and sizeable drawdown of the US troop presence in Iraq.
If they want to do that, of course they need some level of cooperation from the Iranians… who not only abut huge lengths of the Persian/Arabian Gulf… who not only also abut huge lengths of the heavily-populated eastern portion of Iraq… who not only sit right acorss the river from the key logistic chokepoints in and around Basra… but who also have pervasive networks of agents throughout the whole of Iraq itself at this point.
The possibility that at this point in history, when the US government has 135,000 hostages to Iranian fortune deployed as sitting ducks inside Iraq, it might choose to escalate tensions with Iran or even launch some form of military adventure against it, would be quite beyond belief– even for the extremely risk-happy gang of men at the top of this US administration. (I think we have to give them some credit for having learned at least a few lessons as a result of the failure of their “big roll of the dice” in Iraq?)
The people running the Bush administration understand this situation… And so, at a different level, do most of the members of the US Congress– especially since all the emembers of the House of representatives and one-third of the members of the Senate are up for re-election just five months from now.
With the US casualty toll in Iraq now standing at 2,482 body-bags and tens of thousands of other very badly wounded soldiers and Marines, few if any US politicians want to be the ones standing up right now and urging the launching of yet another unnecessary military adventure.
So this is a decision-point when the preferences of AIPAC and its extensive networks become basically irrelevant. And anyway, neither Israel nor the AIPAC crowd particularly want to stick their heads out right now regarding the US-Iran overture. With the US public majorly embittered by the results of the Iraqi invasion and occupation so far, now is obviously not a good time for the pro-Israelis to arouse too much US public interest in the whole question of… h’mmm, how exactly did Washington get drawn into the invasion of Iraq, anyway?
This, because as Mearsheimer and Walt (and many others) have noted, the evangelical right and the pro-Israeli right were the two major political forces that prior to March 2003 were pushing for the invasion…
Meanwhile, back in the discussion of the gay-marriage issue here in the US, we see that these two important strands of the US political right now have noticeably divergent interests. Opposing gay marriage is a big, perhaps defining, issue for the evangelical right these days. But for the pro-Israeli crowd in the country, it’s something else they don’t really want to talk much about. Mainly because, within the Jewish community, it’s such a deeply divisive issue. Certainly, for them it is nowhere near being such a hugely important issue as it is for the rightwing evangelicals.
… Anyway, I think it’s been really interesting to note that, when Bush was forced by the logic of international affairs to turn his back majorly on the “let’s attack Iran” forces, he apparently felt he had to throw some bones of appeasement to the evangelical rightwingers among them. But, as noted above, he didn’t feel the same way about the pro-Israelis. (Of course, you could argue that just carrying on with US governmental business as usual with regard to Israel– that is, dolloping out huge amounts of money to it with absolutely no questions asked about its land-grabbing policies in the West Bank, its inhumane siege on many Palestinian communities, etc.– is already appeasing it far too much already. But that discussion is for another day…)

I’m in Kansas for a couple of days, doing something urgent and personal…
Back home in Virginia, meanwhile, I see that Al Weed, the Democratic challenger for our local US Congressional seat, has been getting some some potentially supportive attention in various places. (Here and here.)
I’ve known Al for a few years now. He’s a former Special Ops officer who’s served in numerous overseas places, from Vietnam to Bosnia (the latter, while in the reserves). He’s been cultivating a vineyard not far from Charlottesville for many years now . Crucially, from my point of view, he has been quite clear on the question of the war against Iraq, and quite clearly opposed to it, from the very beginning.
On his website now, he writes:

If the new Iraqi government and the people of Iraq want our troops to stay and help rebuild their country, we should oblige. If they want us to leave, we should oblige that wish as well. We must encourage the Iraqi people to forge their own future.
As Americans, we must understand the potential costs of a long term presence in Iraq…
Our men and women in uniform deserve to return to their families. To stay indefinitely puts us at risk of being dragged into a guerilla war without a foreseeable end and cost us dearly in lives and resources. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I speak from experience when I say that this is a possibility that we must carefully avoid.

Al ran against the Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, once before, in 2004, and did not win. Since then, three things have happened that mean he has a much better chance this November:

(1) The solid good sense of his position on Iraq has become much more evident to all the American people– including, no doubt, to the voters in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.
(2) Virgil Goode has become badly ensnared in the Wade-Cunningham-MZM corruption scandal.
(3) Al, and the 5th district Democratic Committee have all worked hard and effectively to rebuild the Democratic apparatus in the district. You see, Goode had originally been elected from the district as a Democrat. Then he left the party and ran once as an independent. Then in the next election he ran as a Republican. Those switches left the Democratic Party apparatus in tatters, and it has been a long hard slog to rebuild it.

So anyway, I’ll be back in Virginia late Wednesday. Once I’m back home I can write some more about Al Weed, and more about my usual subjects…
It’s a little hard to blog from here as the folks I’m staying with have no broadband and just one landline phone. So as I’m posting this now over their phone line, I’m completely blocking them from using it!

President Bush came out swinging yesterday to offer what WaPo reporters called, “an unequivocal vote of confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.”
And to show just how seriously he considered this matter, he even took time out from his long weekend to issue a special statement denying claims that Rumsfeld completely ignored the professional advice he’d gotten from the generals in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at several stages since…
This brass-vs.-suits contest inside the Pentagon over the conduct of the Iraq war is not a new issue Check for example this JWN post from November 2003.
What is new is the willingness of small numbers of retired US flag officers to come out publicly not just to criticise Rumsfeld but also to issue a four-year-overdue call for his resignation. The IHT yesterday identified a fifth retired general who had done this.
But here’s the thing. There are literally hundreds of serving flag officers in the four branches of the US military. (If someone has time to verifiably research the exact number that would be grand: just post the number and a link in the Comments here.) David Ignatious wrote in yesterday’s WaPo that,

When I recently asked an Army officer with extensive Iraq combat experience how many of his colleagues wanted Rumsfeld out, he guessed 75 percent. Based on my own conversations with senior officers over the past three years, I suspect that figure may be low.

So my question– and okay, I know it’s not totally original– is why have so few retired officers and zero serving officers gone on the record publicly with deep-rooted criticisms of Rumsfled’s conduct of the war?
I think an answer needs to be built from a number of components… One of these is of course that we have a valuable and long-engrained system in the US of civilian control of the military.
That’s grand, and it’s a basic component of democracy. I am totally not calling for a military coup here!
But still, even within that system, there has to be a way for basic professional expertise to be made available to the (civilian) policymakers at all levels in a purely professional and unpoliticized way. Shinseki tried to do that, and was canned. He was then replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s top military officer) by two Rumsfeld yes-men in turn, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and then Marines Gen. Peter Pace.
Rumsfeld, of course, is the person who makes the recommendation to the White House regarding who to nominate for that job. So he has made it crystal clear that he only wants a yes-man in the job.
There are other powerful ways in which the country’s top officers are trained (or “incented”) to be loyal yes-men, too. One of course is the whole tenor of basic military training, which is such as to inculcate and value the blind following of orders and the setting aside of personal considerations and analyses… (But then, regarding operational matters, the military wants to encourage innovative, out-of-the box thinking in mid-level officers… So there’s quite a bit of a tension there.)
And then, there’s the pay structure. And not just the structure of the pay and benefits for serving officers, which already and understandably incent people toward behavior that will ensure promotion, but also– and this is crucial for top-rank people coming near the end of their careers– the structure of the military pension scheme in which an officer, once retired, will then find himself for the rest of his (or her) life.
Expectations about pension levels have been mentioned by many reporters when discussing the very cautious behavior of the highest-ranking officers… So I thought I’d go over to the DOD’s Final Pay Retirement Calculator to see what difference it would make for me, if I were a senior-level officer coming toward the end of my career in, say, 2010, having served for 30 years at that point… (I kept the default “expectations” regarding inflation rate etc that are given in the bottom half of that web-page.)
So I found out there that if I retired in 2010 as a Colonel (O-6), my monthly pension would be $7,609. Not shabby at all– especially given the many other perks and benefits that military retirees get in this country, to say nothing of opportunities for lucrative consultancies, etc…
Ah, but if I’d been a loyal officer and got to retire at O-7 level (Brig.-Gen.) level in 2010, instead, then I’d make $8,664 per month. ($12,660 more per year.) But if I’d been even more “loyal”– to my superiors, to the Secretary of Defense, etc– I might be an O-8 (Maj.-Gen.) and pull in $9,767/month instead (a further increase of $13,236/yr.)… Or an O-9 (Lieut.-Gen.), and retire at $10,780/mth…. or an O-10 (full Gen.) and get $10,901/mth.
I have to tell you a few things here. Firstly, the incentive is certainly there for a serving high-rank officer “just to keep quiet for a couple of further years” as s/he heads toward retirement… and certainly to avoid doing anything dramatic that might force him/her to resign from the force at the existing rank, if need be, in order to protest the policy. And also, to do nothing that might jeopardize that vital next promotion, that could– over the course of 35 more years of life after retirement– add up to huge amounts of actual $$$.
Second, I find all these retirement levels (and all the pay levels for still-serving officers at the top end of the scale) quite obscenely high. The serving generals in this country live very nicely indeed, with all kinds of country clubs, subsidized housing and transportation, tax breaks, etc… They form a special class of pampered and very powerful individuals who nowadays roam the world trying to run programs and projects in scores of different countries… And when they retire, many of them find well-paid additional jobs inside our country’s bloated military-industrial sector.
I, with my pathetic little income as a writer, have to subsidize all that? (FCNL tells us that 42 cents of every dollar I in taxes goes to the military now.) And the grunts out there in the field risking their lives in obedience to Bush’s scary and destabilizing war plans are supporting the generals’ lifestyle, too.
So the very least we should all expect from these guys, given how nicely we are all treating them, is that they should candidly give the country and its citizenry their best professional estimate of whether a proposed war-plan will work, or not.
Shinseki tried to do that, and got canned for it. But why have we not seen any other generals trying to “storm the ramparts of the SecDef’s office” since then?

M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis at the extremely centrist American pro-Israeli organization Israel Policy Forum (IPF). And he has a beef with the extremely hardline American pro-Israeli activist Daniel Pipes.
In a very moving column Rosenberg wrote last Friday, he started off by talking a little about his extended family of Holocaust survivors, including his kids, their American cousins, and their Israeli cousins:

these kids are here. That’s the miracle.
The ancestors they have in common would have a hard time recognizing their descendants. The Americans are very….American. Life is all about jobs, sports, hip-hop music, internships, iPods, etc.
The Israelis, from a 1939 Polish Jewish point of view, are just as improbable. They live in a country that last existed as a Jewish state 1900 years previous. They speak Hebrew. And they are also very religious (none of the Americans are) with their lives revolving around youth groups, studying in yeshivot, the army, etc.
When we are together, there are always discussions about politics. The Israeli cousins demonstrated against the Gaza withdrawal and are on the Right. That certainly is not the case with the Americans.
But the political discussions do not descend into arguments. Even though we are family and even though the Americans have strong feelings on Israeli politics, the Americans are not going to tell the Israelis what they should think. The Israelis live there and the boys go into the army. There is a real hesitancy about telling them what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.
Everyone is aware of what is and isn’t appropriate for American Jews to be telling their Israeli counterparts…

But not so, Danny Pipes, very comfortably ensconced in his self-made little empire up there in Philadelphia. Rosenberg writes of him:

He is best-known for running an outfit called “Campus Watch” which enlists college students to monitor their professors in an effort to curb free discussion of Middle East issues.
He believes, and has repeatedly written, that Israel should abandon the idea of compromise of any sort with the Palestinians and should instead defeat them the way the allies defeated the Nazis i.e. make them surrender and have the victor dictate the terms of the peace.
In general, Pipes’ view of the situation indicates a fairly unsophisticated grasp of Israel’s situation. He seems not to know that the Palestinians are not a regime, which can be eradicated, but rather a people with whom Israel is destined to share the land forever. (They also represent close to half the population of historic Palestine and, before the refugees fled, represented a majority of it).
In his New York Sun column, Pipes excoriated all of Israel’s leading political parties for seeking ways to achieve coexistence with the Palestinians rather than “offer[ing] the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs.”
He calls this omission a “striking and dangerous lacuna.” (I didn’t know what lacuna meant until I looked it up. It is “an empty space or a missing part.”) In other words, missing from Israeli politics is a determination to fight the Palestinians to the death.
Brave words from Philadelphia.
Pipes then itemizes all the bad ideas Israelis have come up with as alternatives to war. These include the security barrier, disengagement, promoting Palestinian economic development, territorial compromise, promoting democracy and bilateral negotiations.
He even rejects the noxious idea of “transfer,” the Kahanist plan to deport Palestinians across the border, as an attempt to “manage the conflict without resolving it.” How chilling is that? If Pipes considers the insane idea of “transfer” too moderate, what precisely would be acceptable to him?
For a start, he believes Israel needs another war. Anything else is a waste of time. Only another war will do the job although seven previous wars – 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and the first and second intifadas –somehow did not. But Pipes believes that the next one will – if it is pursued to unambiguous victory.

He continues:

Pipes’ call for war would be outrageous enough if an Israeli offered it. But an Israeli, of course, puts his money where his mouth is. An armchair warrior in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania simply sits on the couch and watches the action on cable.
Needless to say, Israelis, who heard about Pipes’ call to arms, were angered.
Bradley Burston, a Ha’aretz columnist, calls Pipes a “new kind of Israel basher.” And, he adds, Pipes is far from alone in his physical bravery by proxy.
“In fact,” Burston writes, “a number of our readers who live in North America, some of whom regularly use the word coward to describe Israeli moderates, have any number of suggestions for us as well, up to and including the use of weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians, apparently in an effort to change their minds about us.
“Daniel Pipes…is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight….Try as we might, we just can’t seem to win his war for him.”
“His war.”
Pipes, like so many others on the Right, does not support endless war for Israel out of a love for the Jewish homeland gone terribly wrong. They support war because they are simply tough guys from afar. They walk taller when some Israeli 19-year old dons his uniform. As Burston puts it, Israelis are their “mercenaries.” Or, at least, that is what these guys want them to be.
I have read many columns by Pipes and the other well-known columnist/hawks and I cannot recall any in which their ardor for Zion is expressed in a positive way. They don’t extol the beauty of Jerusalem or the live-and-let-live Mediterranean style of Tel Aviv. Israel, as depicted by them, is neither beautiful, nor spiritual nor cultural. It is just some would-be Sparta, clad in uniform, always ready for the next fight. In fact, their negative feelings toward Palestinians far outweigh any positive sentiments toward Israel.
“A new kind of Israel basher.” That is exactly right.

By the way, up at the top here, I was about to describe Rosenberg’s organization, the IPF, as “just slightly left of center.” But I saw that they featured Ehud Olmert at their “Tribute to Israel” dinner last June. And I looked at the web-page on which they list their (one gender only) “leaders”, who include Seymour Reich and Steve Spiegel, and I had a hard idea thinking of the organization as being “left of” anything… Unless you say “left of AIPAC”, which really isn’t saying anything significant at all.
So that’s even better in a way. If even people associated with a very middle-of-the road Jewish-American pro-Israel organization are expressing such strong public criticisms of Danny Pipes, that’s good news indeed.

Yesterday, in major cities throughout the US, there were massive demonstrations by recent immigrants to the country– documented and undocumented– and by their allies, to protest a new set of anti-immigrant laws passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The vast majority of those who participated in the demonstrations were what is known here as “Hispanics”– that is, people coming from places where Spanish is a common lingua franca, though actually for many of these people an indigenous (pre-Columbian) language may well have been their mother tongue. (Check, for example, this language map.)
Veteran WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, an African-American, wrote today:

White Americans, and black Americans too, are going to have to get used to sharing this country — sharing it fully — with brown Americans. Things are going to be different. Deal with it.
The most important legacy of the histrionic debate over immigration reform will not be any piece of legislation, whether enlightened or medieval. It will be the big demonstrations held in cities throughout the country over the past few weeks — mass protests staged by and for a minority whose political ambition is finally catching up with its burgeoning size. In the metaphorical sense, Latinos have arrived.

He is quite right. The politics of this country will never be the same again. (Eat your heart out, Sam Huntington.)
It is not only the size and nationwide reach of yesterday’s mobilization that indicates to me that this mainly-Hispanic movement is one of seriousness and resilience. There was also the impressive discipline and focus that the participants showed in expressing themselves, this time, as determinedly pro-US.
Last week there were some precursor demonstrations that caused concern among quite a lot of “Anglos” here because many participants were carrying the flags of their nations of origin– a sea of Mexican, Salvadoran flags and flags from other central-American nations.
But yesterday, at all the demonstrations I saw, the overwhelmingly main motif was the US flag– hoisted high, rendered on bandana, painted on people’s faces: everywhere, the Stars and Strips. And the theme was quite focused: a desire to be included. (Sort of the same effect as when participants in the large Hizbullah demonstrations in Lebanon in March 2005 all carried the national flag rather than Hizbullah’s own yellow party banners. The same political smarts, focus, and mass discipline.)
This country of some 292 million people now has an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working here– the vast majority of them people from Mexico and the seven small countries of Central America. And they are not just in the borderlands: throughout the whole country they do the hard work on the construction sites, in the restaurants, in agriculture and a number of other fields in which US employers are just too downright stingy to offer anything like a decent wage that most US citizens would accept.
All US citizens benefit from the lower prices that the presence of the immigrants allows us– though their presence also keeps wages depressed in numerous occupations…
The US-Mexico border is too long, and the wage differential between north and south of it too great for anyone to imagine ever being able to stop the flow of undocumented workers across it altogether… Plus, we’re supposed to have a “Free Trade Agreement” with Mexico (and Canada), though that hasn’t succeeded in providing very much of the promised stimulation to Mexico’s economy.
So here’s my proposal. Why don’t we just forget about continually trying to upgrade the fortifications along the US-Mexico border, and start discussing a vision of a Union of North and Central America that would work more or less like the EU? Including, crucially, with complete freedom of movement of people, goods, and investment from the Arctic North of Canada right down to Panama’s south-eastern border?
(For starters, that border– with Colombia– would be a lot easier to police effectively than the US’s sprawling border with Mexico.)
The population balance would look like this (2003 figures):

Canada– 31.6 mn
USA– 292.3 mn
Mexico– 104.3 mn
Guatemala– 12.0 mn
Belize– 0.3 mn
Honduras– 6.9 mn
El Salvador– 6.6 mn
Nicaragua– 5.3 mn
Costa Rica– 4.2 mn
Panama– 3.1 mn

So there would be a total of around 467 million people involved, just under two-thirds of them (us) being the increasingly ethnically diverse bunch of folks who make up the US citizenry. Around 143 million of the people would be from the eight Hispanic countries. And then there are the 31.6 million people (Anglophones, Francophones, and First Nations peoples) of Canada.
It could be an exciting and very constructive mix! As in the EU, members of all the different groups would need to continue to figure out what their ethnic and cultural identity means to them, and how to preserve and celebrate it. The richer societies of the north should do a lot to invest in helping to build up the conditions of life for the people in the (still reeling-from-conflict) communities of Central America. Indeed, maybe the Central Americans should get together and start demanding reaparations from the US for all the terrible damages the US-inspired wars inflicted on them during the Cold War.
And we in North America would certainly find our society and politics enriched by the energies (including the political organizing energies) of our hermanas and hermanos from the south…
Equally importantly, pursuing this kind of a goal of building up the conditions of life in Central America (and Mexico) could provide a wonderful “purpose” for the US citizenry at the time that it becomes clear that seeking our national “purpose” through the pursuit of military adventures in various places is counter-productive and self-defeating…
One last point. I’m an immigrant in this country. I came here because I married a U.S. citizen, someone born to citizens of (mainly) ethnic-German and Swiss heritage. All of us here except for the “Native Americans” are in one sense deeply illegal immigrants… in that our entry into the country was always arranged and protected through the agency of a clearly colonial venture. Meanwhile, it is clear that the vast majority of the “Hispanic” immigrants here are people of mainly indigenous origins– “brown” Americans, in Eugene Robinson’s words…but definitely, people whose ancestors have been on this continent for a lot longer than any whitefolks have. So in one way, it looks like pure whitefolk arrogance if the English-speaking peoples here are now busy trying to keep them out.
… Well, this is just a suggestion. I’m sure there are plenty of people in Mexico and Central America who would be wary of too close an integration with Gringo-land. But it’s definitely a conversation we all ought to be starting to hold. (And it’s probably a whole lot easier of a conversation to hold than the similar conversation the European nations ought to be having right now with their North African neighbors…. )