Investigative reporting hits the mark from within the corporate mainstream media: a NYTimes report on how the compliant media companies spins the media by reproducing the Administration’s own talking points; David Barstow examines primary source documents detailing the Pentagon’s response to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld by a group of prominent retired generals. Could this possibly signal that sections of the establishment are furnishing a basis for the US military to finally withdraw from Iraq?

The Generals Revolt Part 1 (8 minutes)

Read the rest of this entry »

Al Jazeera has produced a few programs recently that engage with the topic of the Israel Lobby; the Inside Iraq program features a short debate between John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein; Frontline America also recently examined the influence of the Israel Lobby on Capitol Hill.

Inside Iraq - Motives for war - 04 April 08

Inside Iraq examines the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ reasons the US invaded Iraq.

Part 1 (12.09)

Read the rest of this entry »

Some time-pressed picks and recommended reads on this reprehensible fifth anniversary of the US neocon-led invasion. Cartoon credit: Carlos Latuff, Iraq war: Five Years

• Salon Iraq Roundtable, Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

• Jim Lobe, Reasons Revisited: Why Did the U.S. Invade Iraq?

• Dahr Jamail, Five Years, And Counting

• Patrick Cockburn, This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie

• DN!, Half a Decade of War: Five Years After Iraq Invasion, Soldiers Testify at Winter Soldier Hearings

• Juan Cole, Five years of Iraq lies

• John Ross, What Do We Owe Iraq?

• Seamus Milne, There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

• Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘We live in a nightmare. Death and carnage is everywhere’ Ali, Baghdad resident Read the rest of this entry »

Ditching the ‘Victor’ of Nahr el Bared for “Dr Death”?

Franklin Lamb,
Beirut

Barack v. Hillary isn’t the only Presidential election game in Washington these days. There is also the Samir v. Walid v. Michel (as in Geagea, Jumblatt and Suleiman) campaign underway as each seek through direct contact and surrogates, the US imprimatur in their quests to lead Lebanon.

This week it appears that Walid’s support is dropping faster than Hillary’s and Suleiman may end up like Fred Thompson (”failed to live up to expectations and not enough fire in the belly for the job”) and Geagea is skyrocketing faster than Barack did in February.

How so?

Despite months of heaping praises on Head of the Lebanese Army General Michel Suleiman, the Bush Administration has pretty much decided to dump the General, for reasons noted below by US Congressional sources. Read the rest of this entry »

From We Are Change (10:49). H/t: Agent 99

And in other news, the self-appointed crusaders against “Islamofascism” ain’t doing so well: David Horowitz Bombs on Opening Night

Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer as featured in UC Berkeley’s Conversations With History interview series hosted by Harry Kreisler.

61-minutes

Mondoweiss, via the Fanonite, is calling it the Walt and Mearsheimer perestroika — some overdue restructuring coming about in tandem with greater glasnost about the flagrantly hawkish role and financial clout wielded by a group of unrepresentative American Jews, as crystallised in key Lobby groups. In this case the “openness” comes from Sy Hersh in a comment made in the last seconds of a Democracy Now interview this week (see video clips below). Philip Weiss writes:

This is a significant moment. Hersh is a wild man, wild and brilliant. Yet in all his anti-Bush and -Cheney interviews about Iraq over the last few years, I’ve heard him talk code on this issue. He’s attacked the neoconservatives as a crazy band of thinkers; but he’s never put the blame fully where it belongs–on a broader segment of the Jewish community that has immunized the neocons from blame for the war, on the Israel lobby, which includes many Democrats too. Now he’s done so (though apparently not in the New Yorker, which regards Walt and Mearsheimer as fueling hysteria).

This is a beautiful moment, too. Hersh is a progressive Jew. Now he is turning on other Jews. “New York Jewish money,” he says. The soulsearching that I have called for within the Jewish community has begun …

This is what the cause for applause is: after being showed a clip of Hillary Clinton being told off by fellow Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel comes Hersh’s admission that her hawkish position on Iran is shaped by New York Jewish money — something Wesley Clark got into trouble last year when he told Arianna Huffington that “You just have to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office-seekers.”

AMY GOODMAN: [after short clip] That was Hillary Clinton laughing. Fifteen seconds, Seymour Hersh. Your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it’s as simple as that. When you’re from New York and from New York City, you take the view of — right now, when you’re running a campaign, you follow that line. And there’s no other explanation for it, because she’s smart enough to know the downside.

Read in full. Read the rest of this entry »

I present Hersh’s latest New Yorker article in full here not because I treat his articles as gospel — one should always treat every piece, especially those who purport to have insider knowledge, critically — but because of the salient facts and administration ‘mood’ gleaned from the following.

Shifting Targets: The Administration’s plan for Iran

Seymour M. Hersh
October 8, 2007 edition of The New Yorker

ILLUSTRATION: GUY BILLOUT

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran.

“Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Accompanied by the superlative cartoonists Andy Singer and Carlos Latuff, here is Pepe Escobar in a piece aptly entitled Welcome to Planet Gaza (Asia Times Online, 22 Sept 2007). For a related piece, see also Chris Marsden, Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza.

Just added: see also Sonja Karkar, The Quality of Mercy in Gaza, Counterpunch (25 Sept) and Chris Doyle, Life Behind the Wire, Guardian CiF (24 Sept)

Escobar reflects upon the recent decision by the apartheid Israeli regime to designate the occupied territory of Gaza, for which it has responsibility it is attempting to abrogate, a “hostile entity”, and rendering the region’s population as Unpeople in the service of neocon US and Israeli exceptionalism. He writes:

It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded “international community”? It’s the standard “three monkeys” - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.

This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet’s decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a “hostile territory” has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun “gradually” to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.

Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza’s hospitals will not be affected.

There’s more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha’aretz so nicely put it, this is just a “plan to limit services to civilians”.

Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.

This comes on top of other “restrictions” already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be “fundamental humanitarian needs”. Read the rest of this entry »

American historian Carl Becker has an astute observation, previously cited here, that often,

Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.

Excepting the encouraging alternative streams of discourse on the web, Becker’s truism seems well demonstrated in the current level of propagated public discourse in the USA regarding Iran and President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University this week.

It is as if Faux Fox News writ large has permeated even the hallowed halls of Columbia University, with its President Lee Bollinger repeating half-truths, canards and lies and adding ingracious personal insult to these injuries.

First, let’s choose to look at the glass half-full. Under the aegis of academic freedom, Columbia University did not succumb, at least, to the denial of a Head of State’s visit, as happened with the rejection of the Iranian President’s request to visit Ground Zero to pay his respects. The invited address went ahead and many people will now have the opportunity to hear Ahmadinejad directly through the web (videos below; see also full transcript available here).

In a thirty minute address, the populist figurehead President speaks about academic freedom, science and religion. Towards the end of his address (20 minute mark, see third video clip) he is impassioned about the perennial need to have academic inquiry open on subjects such as the Shoah, and questions why Palestinians are paying the price for the Holocaust in WWII. He then defends Iran’s rights to nuclear technology and energy self-determination, citing Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA’s inspections.

Read the rest of this entry »

When General Abizaid succeeded Tommy Franks as Commander of CENTCOM in 2003, much was made of his paternal Lebanese heritage, Middle East scholarship and fluent Arabic. He claimed that he “loved” the Arab world, and he was certainly good PR for the Bush administration. His role and complicity in the greater architecture of disaster that is the US destruction of Iraq would however flatly undermine and contradict this claim, and reveal his thorough neocon conditioning. That said, some of his calm recent comments on living with a nuclear Iran are sentiments the current administration would do well to imbibe.

Retired Gen. John Abizaid, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, said all efforts should be made to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but if Tehran did the world could live with it.

“Iran is not a suicide nation,” he said. “I mean, they may have some people in charge that don’t appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon.”

Gen. Abizaid said the U.S. could deter Iran from using such weapons against it. He said the Iranians know the U.S. is far superior militarily.

“I believe that we have the power to deter Iran, should it become nuclear,” he said.

Gen. Abizaid also said the U.S. has lived with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and now Russia, as well as China and other nuclear powers. “There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran,” he said.

As the much anticipated book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Walt and Mearsheimer is released this month, the liberal Jewish-spiritual progressive magazine Tikkun has its current issue devoted to the Israel Lobby (including, but not limited to, AIPAC) and its disproportionate and highly unrepresentative influence on US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East.

The cover reads: The Israel Lobby: Bad for the U.S., Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews. With an interview of Democratic Congressman Jim Moran as its centerpiece (interview excerpt follows), the Israel Lobby’s major role in the decision to go to war in Iraq and its position on calling for an attack on Iran is scrutinised.

Congressman Moran speaks sensibly about Iran, and reading his comments here was a breath of fresh air.

Jim Moran’s voicing of the obvious has however all too predictably earned the ire of Lobbyists and some MSM journalists who sing to the Lobby tune (see WaPo here and here—thanks Fanonite). Interviewer Rabbi Lerner defends Moran’s statements as observations with which he himself would agree, supporting his assertions with evidence and personal experience. Lerner writes:

To take an example from these past few months of the Israel Lobby exercising its power, liberals in the House of Representatives in the spring of 2007 sought to include in the defense-funding budget an amendment that would require specific authorization from Congress before the Administration could use the defense budget monies for a military strike at Iran. The amendment failed. Most liberals in the U.S. today oppose preventive wars in general and a military strike against Iran in particular. So who supports such a move? The answer is: the right wing government of Israel and its champion in the U.S., the Israel Lobby.

Don’t be surprised that Jim Moran was pushed from his office as one of the leaders of the Democrats in Congress by AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby. Here is how it happened: Congressman Moran was asked at a constituents’ meeting by a woman identified with the Jewish community why we had gotten into the war in Iraq. Moran responded provocatively “If the Jewish community had organized against it, we wouldn’t be in this war.” It’s the kind of statement I would have made to any religious community, or to any labor movement audience, citing their own failures to act as a critical factor in why we had gotten involved. In the case of the Jewish community there is the added factor that leading people in the Israel Lobby actively supported and still support the war in Iraq and that some of the strong supporters of the Israel Lobby played central roles in the effort to push the Iraq war inside the Bush Administration.

Why the “Liberal” Media is Illiberal on Israel

I’ve had similar experiences with the Israel Lobby and the media. For the first few years of Tikkun’s existence Tikkun’s perspective was covered on many topics in American politics. But once we got on AIPAC’s radar screen, this began to change. I finally got the op-ed editor of The San Francisco Chronicle to tell me the story. He had been approached by the Executive Editor, Dick German and told by German in no uncertain terms to stop publishing op-eds from American Jews critical of Israel, because Israel had “too many enemies.” This is what he told me.

A similar thing happened to me at The New York Times. I was asked by The Times to do a review of a book on Israeli settlers. Without any shame, my editor insisted that I change what I had written so that it would accord with his politics. I was never again given a chance to write a review for The Times. Hundreds of other liberal Jews have had similar experiences trying to write for The Times op-ed or book review—the voices of those of us who are seriously and intensely critical of Israeli policy but still lovers of Israel and proudly committed to Judaism are rarely part of the acceptable discourse.

Here is an excerpt of the Tikkun interview between Rabbi Michael Lerner and Congressman Jim Moran on AIPAC and its role in pushing the United States into war with Iraq and calling for an attack on Iran:

TIKKUN: What do you think the reasoning is for the Democrats who voted against the amendment requiring that the president get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran?

JIM MORAN: Well, AIPAC strongly opposed it. In fact, Rep. Murtha, Rep. Obey, and myself wanted it in the supplemental. We had it in and then the leadership had to take it out because AIPAC was having a conference in Washington, and insisted with the leadership and many of the members with whom they have close alliances.Yesterday [NB. interview conducted in May], AIPAC had an amendment to recommit the whole Armed Services Bill in order to add language requiring America to develop missile defenses jointly with Israel, to share all its missile defense technology with Israel. That passed overwhelmingly. There were only thirty members—that’s less than 10 percent—who voted against sharing all our missile technology with Israel. It received about 400 votes in favor of it. I was one of the thirty.

My feeling was that it wasn’t just the incendiary language that Israel is under immediate attack and we need to protect it from another Holocaust, it was also the idea that the solution to Israel’s security is a militaristic one. I would urge you to read the Congressional record for the debate on the recommital. It put our loyalty to Israel in terms of complete military support. My feeling is that both America and Israel have acted in counterproductive fashion and have undermined their security by focusing exclusively on military capability.

That was a key vote yesterday. It was phrased by many as an “AIPAC vote.” As a result, it prevailed approximately 400 to thirty.

TIKKUN: In your estimation, how does AIPAC get that power?

MORAN: AIPAC is very well organized. The members are willing to be very generous with their personal wealth. But it’s a two edged sword. If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically. Their means of communications, their ties to certain newspapers and magazines, and individuals in the media are substantial and intimidating. Every member knows it’s the best-organized national lobbying force. The National Rifle Association comes a close second, but AIPAC can rightfully brag that they’re the most powerful lobbying force in the world today. Certainly they are in the United States. Not in Europe, obviously. Most people that are involved in foreign policy especially look at a broad range of issues and consider a person’s entire voting record. AIPAC considers the voting record only as it applies to Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Mild Congressional Democrat-front group MoveOn.org have launched a full-page $65,000 ad in the New York Times entitled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?: Cooking the Books for the White House.“

First, credit where its due: MoveOn recognises the obvious danger of General Petraeus (read his testimony here), like Colin Powell before him, serving as a shill to deliver the Bush-Cheney White House version in order to justify its agenda of prolonged war, as well as to downplay the extent of violence wracking Iraq. The advertisement (.pdf here) notes, for example, that “We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.” This is the type of public mainstream dissent that was altogether absent when it was Colin Powell justifying war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In terms of historic parallels, we are reminded about the Johnson administration’s General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War here (read Westmoreland’s address here). Are these former generals and administration officials troubled about their role? In Powell tried to talk Bush out of war (Sunday Times, 8 July), the former US secretary of state subsequently claimed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq. He believes, moreover, that today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

While General Petraeus is rightly copping flak, he’s outranked by the Thief-Commander-in-Chief: he’ll ultimately deliver what’s favourable for the Bush-Cheney junta and the AIPAC lobby, and ultimately do as he’s told. He has been called the iPod general (Pepe Escobar), programmed to play the tune(s) selected by his owner, the White House.

A major glaring error of the advertisement, however, is MoveOn’s claim that

“Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

An unwinnable war, yes; a “religious” war, no. This claim altogether fails to address the fact that the root cause of violence is the occupation. Sunni and Shia have been living together and intermarrying for centuries here, why a sudden “religious” war? Any sectarian enmity that now exists is largely being created, its not pre-existing. This also deflects scrutiny from Bush administration culpability and attempts to instead pretend that the “real conflict” is between Shiites and Sunnis and has nothing or little to do with the US military presence. In his ‘progress report’ (video here), General Petraeus also spouted this notion in declaring that “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

Contrary to MoveOn’s and General Petraeus’s claim, the US-UK invasion, occupation and several psy-, black- and false flag-ops manufactured this sectarian conflict. We recall the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, which Mike Whitney argues has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event. We recall the two British SAS snipers who were caught out in Basra disguised as locals, captured with explosives in their car. We recall that the possibility of employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis had been openly entertained in the US, and the appointment of John Negroponte as US ambassador to Iraq—Negroponte oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the 1980s—only added to the suspicions of US-Israeli designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq.

Why would the occupier and its neocon-AIPAC underwriters want to manufacture a civil war? At least three reasons. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupation’s interests not only in deflecting attention away from the crimes of the occupier, it furnishes further rationale for their continued presence, to “protect” the civilian population. This ignores, among other things, how US soldier atrocities in Iraq have been systemic and that increasing numbers of soldiers, already stretched, are resisting the war. Thirdly, it sets up the case for the ‘soft partition of Iraq‘, as raised openly by many punters, including columnist David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Dividing Iraq makes it easier to divide the spoils of war and removes the threat (primarily to Israel) of Iraqi regional hegemony.

As veteran correspondent Robert Fisk acknowledged last year in his suspicions about attempts by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq:

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…

We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting - that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide - is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.

MoveOn started with a strong antiwar message; after coopting 3 million antiwar activists, it watered down to insipid levels its antiwar agenda and became a front for the Democratic “impeachment is off the table” branch of the War Party. Recalling that most voters gave the Democrats a mandate to end the war, let us hope the MoveOn leadership does not betray its own constituency, never mind the contrived establishment outrage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Any intelligent observer can easily discern that the “new” anti-semitism today has little connection with discrimination against Jews. Anti-semitism nowadays is mostly about deplorable discrimination and racist attacks against Arabs. Right now in New York, the Likudnik thought police are trying their darndest to designate Arabic words like intifada and madrassa (which simply means ’school’ in Arabic, regardless of religious affiliation), treasonous. Madrassa does not mean religious school.

We see this playing out in the trumped-up brouhaha about the Kahlil Gibran International Academy, wherein Debbie Almontaser, the head, was branded a terrorist for not apologising enough (for the hardline-Zionists liking) about the word ‘intifada’ (which simply means ’shaking off’) on a T-Shirt–worn by someone else! The racist bullying and defamation resulted in Almontaser resigning.

This reflects poorly on NYC, which has a rich history of cosmopolitanism, the same American tradition that brought Kahlil Gibran, the timeless Lebanese-born poet and philosopher, to the shores of the US where he made such a lasting impact upon the world of literature.

As Anthony DiMaggio notes, Daniel Pipes is one of the reactionaries spouting utter rubbish about Arabic, such as: “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage” and “Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam…”

Islamophobe Pipes fails to mention that the most populous Muslim country is Indonesia (pop: 242 million), whose national language is Bahasa Indonesian. He neglects to mention that there are a great many Christian Arabic speakers too, such as myself. Yes, Arab culture is attached to Islam—since when then is that a crime?–but also to Christianity and Judaism, too. The demonisation of Islam and of Arabic as a language by ignoramuses and ideologues such as Pipes and Bella Rabinowitz is all in service of the terror-blather that has hijacked public discourse in the United States.

Samuel Freedman is one of the very few voices in the MSM to more accurately document the affair, as Richard Silverstein observes.

Press Picks:

• Anthony DiMaggio, The Right-Wing’s War on the Gibran Academy: Arabic as a Terrorist Language, Counterpunch
• Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) Statement on Debbie Almontaser

Al Jazeera news clip (Thanks Ressentiment)