Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 98 – Info, analysis, discussion

Haaretz editorial: Israel ‘expedited’ breakdown of ceasefire

The big meme in the western-dominated media has been that even if Israel’s “retaliatory attack” against Gaza has been slightly (!) disproportionate, still, it was justified because after all it was Hamas that broke the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) and has even, according to several accounts I’ve read today, “has been firing rockets non-stop into Israel over recent days.”
Not so. And intelligent Israelis understand that to be the case.
Israel violated the tahdi’eh numerous times throughout its six-month term, often lethally. Hamas violated it only a few times, and worked strenuously (and often, though not always, successfully) to persuade the other Palestinian groups in Gaza to abide by it, too.
In November, one month before the expiry of the mutually agreed tahdi’eh, Israel sent a sizeable ground force into southern Gaza to destroy suspected tunnels there.
That was the big violation Haaretz was referring to today, when its editorial writers noted that,

expedited the deterioration that gave birth to the war of yesterday.

So why do so many writers in the western-dominated media continue with their accusations that Hamas is fully to blame?
In the realm of economic policy, Willem Buiter and others have coined the term “cognitive capture” to describe how financiers managed to persuade regulators and legislators to look at the financial world almost wholly from their viewpoint.
It strikes me it’s also a good term to describe the way pro-Israeli organizations in the US have almost completely succeeded in having the country’s commentators and politicians look at the Middle East almost wholly through their eyes.
Another term for “cognitive capture” would be “brainwashing.”
Both terms, however, seem unable to capture the degree to which those “captured”, or brainwashed, may in both these cases have actually internalized the messages of those seeking to “capture” them. It also fails to capture the degree to which the powerful forces doing the “capturing” succeed in their capture/brainwashing task ab initio by sustaining powerful campaigns to ensure that no-one who even questions their mindset or is capable of bringing an independent, querying mind to their task is even allowed into the positions of influence that they seek to control.
Anyway, it’s very depressing to see– yet again!– the degree to which the US media and pols just fall in lockstep behind the “official” Israeli government explanation and framing of the current, extremely tragic events…. And they do this to a degree far higher than many of the media and pols in Israel do!

Olmert/Livni launch assault on Gaza: Where will it end?

Israel’s quite unchallenged (and US-supplied) Air Force has killed more than 200 people in waves of attacks against Gaza today. Most of the locations targeted were reportedly linked to the main security force in Gaza, that provided by the elected Hamas movement. Many of those killed were police officers, including 40 cadets just completing their training.
In his well-regarded ‘Talking Points memo’ blog, Josh Marshal shamefully titles his short post on this massacre “Cycle”. He also describes the attack as “retaliatory”, though he does not say for what.
There have been numerous, highly asymmetrical exchanges of fire between the security forces of Gaza and those of Israel in the past days– as in the past three years.
In addition, ever since Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006, Israel has maintained an extremely tight siege around Gaza that has blighted the lives of the Strip’s 1.5 million people quite unjustifiably, including causing numerous deaths.
Gaza maintains no siege around Israel.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph may be a rightwing newspaper. But it has a far more sober attitude to the truth of the Gaza-Israel dynamic than Josh Marshall does.
The DT’s Tim Butcher reports from Jerusalem today :

Nine Israeli civilians

at least 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in Gaza,

Josh Marshall’s type of “cycle of violence” and “Israeli retaliation” language is, however, the way the vast majority of people in the US political elite (mis-)portray and (mis-)understand the situation in Gaza.
The Israeli cabinet’s decision to unleash the present tsunami of violence has no discernible strategic relevance. There can be no serious strategic thinker in Israel who imagines that this kind of massacre will suddenly “persuade” Hamas to cry “uncle” and accede to Israel’s longstanding demands that it perform what is, in effect, an unconditional surrender to Israel.
Ha’aretz’s Amos Harel describes the assault as Israel’s version of “Shock and Awe,” explicitly comparing it to the US assault on Iraq and Halutz’s original July 2006 assault on Lebanon. (He fails to note that both of those attacks ended up with their overall strategic “achievements” for the assaulting government being deep in the negative column.
He writes:

Under that scenario, the Israeli leadership is expecting that after some period of time the US will step in and help it negotiate the kind of political outcome it wants with (or without?) Hamas.
This seems unlikely to unfold as planned. The US has no effective president right now. Who will the Americans deal with, in the Arab world, to try to get Hamas to accede to its and Israel’s demands?
Egypt acted as intermediary in the June tahdi’eh between Israel and Hamas. But this time round, Hamas has already signaled its strong discontent with Egypt’s position. Meantime, Hamas’s co-believers from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood seem more ready than ever to intervene in public inside Egypt in support of Hamas.
Actually, what seems to be shaping up is a major, possibly regionwide confrontation between, on the one side, the many pro-Hamas forces in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere in the region, and on the other, the US and Israel and the Arab regimes that have until now been dependent on the US.
Olmert, Livni, and Ehud Barak may well not have factored this into account. It may well be the case that the considerations uppermost in their minds were the very provincial considerations of two governing parties that had been badly tainted by the outcome of the 33-day war of 2006 that are now going into a big general election fight in early February.
The Olmert government would certainly not be the first Israeli government that decided it wanted to launch its election campaign with a “salutary” military attack against some Arab neighbors! (Shimon Peres in 1996 comes immediately to mind.)
Deep condolences to all the families, on both sides of the line, who have lost loved ones in the present round of fighting. One Israeli has been reported dead from Hamas’s retaliatory fire.
Pray for all those terrorized by the attacks.
Note, too, that one other casualty of this assault is very likely to be Abu Mazen’s role in the Palestinian movement.

More Warriors Needed

The US Army is currently on track to increase 65,000 people to a total of 547,000 active-duty soldiers next year, up from 482,000 before the current conflicts. There is a corresponding increase in the US Marine Corps, from 194,000 to 221,000, for a total increase of 92,000 to 768,000 ground troops.
A larger US military was first proposed by the presumptive Secretary of State, Senator Clinton along with Senator Graham in May, 2004 and has subsequently been endorsed by Senator Obama. In 2004 Clinton said, “I don’t think we have any alternatives.” In July 2005 Clinton co-introduced with Graham legislation to increase the size of the regular United States Army by 80,000 soldiers.
This 92,000 increase is apparently not enough.
According to an Army spokesman, the Pentagon actually needs not 547,000 but 580,000 soldiers, a 33,000 additional increase, “to meet current demand and get the dwell time.

The demand for soldiers extends beyond the war zones, as commanders in other regions request troops, Undersecretary of the Army Nelson Ford said. “It’s a real challenge. It’s not just Centcom that thinks they need more soldiers; Northcom wants more soldiers, Africom wants a dedicated headquarters, Pacom wants more for 8th Army in Korea,” Ford said, referring to the U.S. Central Command, Northern Command, African Command and Pacific Command.

The New York Times, a chief promoter of the Iraq and Afghanistan imperialism, also weighed in on this matter recently in its editorial “A Military for a Dangerous New World [sic]”.

Continue reading “More Warriors Needed”

Merry Christmas Open Thread

It always happens at this time of year. My blogging plans get mugged by the family’s arrival… But family is such a blessing!
Anyway, warm greetings for Christmas, Hannukkah, Yule, Solstice, etc to all JWN commenters and other readers.
I’ll be back when I can. Meantime, this thread’s for you!

China and its ‘netizens’

I’ve been seeing quite a lot of references in the official Chinese media to what the reactions of Chinese “netizens” has been to one or another development. Most recent example: a report on the possibility of China sending a small naval task force to join the anti-piracy effort in the seas off Somalia.
It is evident that the Chinese Communist Party government pays a lot of attention to the views that Chinese citizens express on various web-based forums.
In fact, the policies Beijing pursues toward web-based discussions is much more nuanced than you’d believe if you read only the complaints of those organizations that criticize the kinds of political (as well as anti-porn) filters/shackles the authorities places on such discussions. According to the interesting discussion on media in Susan Shirk’s China: Fragile Superpower, many high-ranking CCP leaders actively seek out the views of “netizens”, as a way of supplementing or perhaps even replacing the mechanisms of internal, intra-party reporting that they often find provides only heavily politicized reporting of the views of citizens.
But here’s another interesting aspect of this: The term “netizens” itself, which I have only ever seen used by China-based media or those (like Shirk) who follow such media closely.
For example, I did a quick Google site search on Marc Lynch’s Abu Aardvark blog, which provides in-depth coverage of new-media developments in the Arab world. No mention of the term ‘netizen’ came up there. And I’ve never seen it in any other, non-China-related context, either.
Wikipedia tells us the term was coined by Columbia University’s Michael Hauben. In 1995, he co-wrote a book called Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet.
But even though I’ve been an active “netizen” for nearly six years now, it’s not a term that seems to be widely used in the real or cyberspace circles in which I move– except those related to China…. which seems to have been the country that has done the most to invest the term with some real content and meaning.
Interesting.

This guy’s been outside the US for too long!

I was reading a recent interview with Andrew Tabler, an American who’s spent the past 14 years in the Arab world, most prominently in Syria, and who’s about to take up a nicely funded fellowship at the AIPAC-founded ‘Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (HT: Josh Landis.)
There are a few interesting nuggets in the interview– though not as much useful information as you’ll find in Syria Today, the monthly magazine Tabler has edited for a few years now in Damascus, with much support from Syria’s “First Lady” (a quaint term that he himself actually uses), Mrs. Asma al-Asad.
So now Tabler is coming back to the US, where he says his goal is, “to try and make it so that whatever discussions come about are based on Syria as it is as well as what it could realistically be.” All well and good– though we could maybe explore a bit more what the meaning of “is” is?
But here’s the hilarious part of the interview:

[Arabs] are a lot like Americans, especially from the countryside: very nice, personally very warm. On the surface, we’re very, very similar. But there are fundamental differences. The Arab world is badly ruled. Its rulers are not accountable to their people, and they often make very bad decisions…

Unlike Americans???
Here’s a guy who was not in the US during the lead-up to the Iraq war. Not in the country during Hurricane Katrina. Had still not– when he gave this interview– come to the US during the current– still accelerating– financial meltdown…
Welcome back to the United States, Andrew.

The Bush administration on the Right to Food: Uncaring, tone-deaf, or both?

So at the end of November, just as most Americans were preparing the gargantuan feasts they have every year on “Thanksgiving”, the US representative in the UN’s Third Committee was the only representative there to vote against a resolution on the “Right to Food” under which the UN General Assembly,

would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population.

The vote on that resolution was 180 to 1. Only the US voted against it. (HT: B of Moon of Alabama.)
As a US citizen, I consider that vote a disgrace.
The UN record of the vote and discussion, linked to above, tells us that,

After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively. In his view, the draft contained inaccurate textual descriptions of underlying rights…

So according to this representative of the Bush administration (and still, tragically, of all of us who are US citizens), it is quite alright that “more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday”… because his, completely over-lawyered “reading” of the international declarations on this subject somehow make it okay?
This is a travesty of humanity.
It is also yet another international political disaster for the US.
It’s not enough that the US has felt in recent years that it has the “right” to invade other countries unilaterally, and quite in contravention of the UN’s norms on resolution of international differences?
It’s not enough that the US has felt it has the “right” to export a major destruction of agricultural livelihoods worldwide through its maintenance of of hefty subsidies to US Big Ag, while using the IMF to ensure that poor countries don’t subsidize their farming systems at all?
It’s not enough that the US has felt it had the “right” to export its completely toxic financial flim-flam “products” to other countries, forcing them to open their financial systems to receive said products??
… But now, the Bush administration– alone of all the other governments around the world– tells us it’s quite okay that six million children die each year from hunger-related illnesses… And this at a time when, yes, there is still enough basic food in the international system to feed everyone quite adequately, if it were distributed more fairly…
Why does the figure “six million” seem familiar?
That was the number of Jewish people who– along with smaller numbers of Romas and gay and disabled people– ended up dead because of the deliberate policy of the Third Reich to exterminate them.
But that was during the entirety of the European Holocaust.
What the UN Third Committee is talking about six million children being condemned to death each year by an international “system” in which the US is still by far the most powerful actor.
How can this be, for a single moment, acceptable?
Back on December 10, I noted the gross anomaly that the US government, which has presented itself as a strong “advocate” for human rights around the world, has still not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, in which the right to “adequate food, clothing and housing” is explicitly spelled out.
I also spelled out that this language has strong relevance to the current situation inside the US, as well as in other countries.
Our country’s longstanding refusal to join the ICESCR makes it something of a “rogue state” on these issues, since 159 other nations have all signed and ratified it.
It is in the ICESCR, which entered into force in 1976, that the reference to the “progressive realization” of the listed rights can be found.
But since the US government hasn’t even fully joined the ICESCR, it is quite hypocritical that the US representative on the Third Committee was using that language about “progressive realization” to try to justify his vote that, essentially, allowed the killing of six million innocents each year to go ahead into the future, as heretofore.
Anyway, back in 1976, maybe some people thought it would take a few more years to get to the stage where it would, indeed, be possible to feed all of the world’s people.
That was 32 years ago. Nowadays, there is plenty of food to go around… if it is properly distributed.
But Washington now tells the world No, that needn’t happen.
And people in other countries are supposed to like and admire our country???
Here’s a strong plea to President-elect Obama and the incoming US Congress: Please have our country rejoin the world by ratifying the ICESCR as speedily as possible. And then do everything possible to ensure that everyone in the US and around the world can have access to healthy, assured food supplies, including by the restoration of agricultural systems inb low-income countries that have been wiped out by US food subsidies.
And let’s embed the rights spelled out in the ICESCR into all of the programs designed to save our own country’s economy and society from the ravages of the current crisis.

Afghanistan: “What would Thomas Jefferson do?”

Vampire06 of ‘Afghanistan Shrugged’ had an informative, well-written post yesterday about the challenges of trying– as the head of a US Army ‘Embedded Training Team’– to put into place the building blocks of procedural democracy in a place in eastern Afghanistan. (HT: Registan.)
V06 has enough self-awareness to understand some– but not all– of the ironies of his situation. Plus, he’s a good writer with an engaging, self-deprecating sense of humor.
His immediate challenge is to identify a location for the voter-registration center, in the northern part of Goumal District, right next to the border with Pakistan. The traditional tribal coloration of all the local terrain deeply impacts this issue.
He writes,

Now, V06 is in that district, as head of the ‘training team’ working with a battalion of the Afghan National Army. But don’t be in any doubt as to who’s really calling the shots here.
He writes:

Be nice to everyone but have a plan to kill them.

Of course, the people flying CAS are Americans; and almost certainly the people able to “call them in” when needed would be the American “trrainers”, rather than the Afghan National Army officers. So it’s clear that it’s the US military that dominates the strategic environment there.
(I imagine our friends in Iraq are well aware this is what would happen there, too, if the US military is allowed to retain ‘training units’ with the Iraqi army even after US ‘combat troops’ have all supposedly evacuated the cities… )
But then, there is the also conundrum, very vividly represented by Vampire06, of how anyone can “implant” democracy in a distant foreign country, on the tip of a cruise missile or under the weight of a 2,000-pound bomb such as– in a big fight– the CAS people would be capable of delivering.
Democracy is, after all, at its very base a mutual agreement among the participants in a political system that they will not use force or coercion to decide tricky issues of policy arising amongst them, but will do so on the basis of an egalitarian respect for the views and preferences of all citizens, as brought together through a non-coercive process of deliberation and an accepted, well understood, and egalitiarian decision mechanism.
So how can you implant “democracy” in a situation where you have foreigners, backed up by cruise missiles and 2,000-pound bombs, making the decisions on behalf of a people who are living under foreign military occupation?
“Be nice to everyone but have a plan to kill them”? It doesn’t quite stack up to the high ideals and timeless principles of the US Declaration of Independence, does it?

Happy Yalda

Happy Yalda! Many Iranian friends make a fun festival out of this longest of nights, the winter solstice. While the traditions are ancient, the term “Yalda” or “new birth” ironically came to Sassanian Persia via Christians fleeing Roman persecution.
In recent years in America, as I pondered how we abandoned our core values, I would send private “Yalda greetings,” with an unusual night photo of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home. (see extension) On such metaphorically dark political nights, I took comfort with John Adams, who on the very day that both he and Jefferson died, July 4th, 1826, remarked:

“Jefferson lives.”

This year, I have a sense of hope, that the latest “reign of witches” in America might soon be over.
So I’ll give a different emphasis in my Yalda greetings this year, borrowing a line from this IRNA description of the Yalda traditions:

Because Yalda is the longest and darkest night, it has happened to symbolize many things in Persian poetry; separation from a loved one, loneliness and waiting.

After Yalda a transformation takes place — the waiting is over, light shines and goodness prevails.

Sounds like a plan.

Continue reading “Happy Yalda”

Is there an Islamic Charlie Wilson?

As the US and NATO lose control of surface roads in Afghanistan they are more and more dependent upon air transport and air cargo delivery.
According to USA Today:

Canadian forces have even resorted to leasing Russian helicopters:

Canada’s battle group moved into southern Afghanistan in 2006 without any helicopters, unlike the British, U.S., and Dutch forces. The lack of air assets forced the Canadians to rely more heavily on road convoys, which the Canadian commanders described at the time as an advantage because it would give the troops more familiarity with the Afghan people and terrain. But regular traffic of military vehicles on Afghan roads has proven deadly for Canadian soldiers as the rising insurgency targets supply convoys.

Many Forward Operating Bases (FOB) are outposts in the Afghan back country that are normally reached only by weekly helicopter supply flights.
Air transport seems like the answer to loss of ground control. But is it? Soviet forces had a similar experience in 1978-1988. One of their downfalls was the supply of MANPADS by the CIA to Afghan partisan forces resulting in the downing of many Soviet aircraft.

Continue reading “Is there an Islamic Charlie Wilson?”