ADDED: Thoughtful comments from friends and response from Norman, with thanks

I have a bone to pick with Norman Finkelstein, whose scholarship and stances in the past I have expressly supported. He comes out swinging in an interview on Lebanese TV last month, and I can only agree with the first half of the interview. While no doubt the Israeli neocons who own MEMRI will latch on to and inflate statements such as ‘Israel has to suffer a defeat’, I was more bemused with his expression of singular values in “there is no alternative” to military resistance. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick Cheney rendering a judgment, publicly, on the strategic ill-advisability of invading and occupying Iraq in 1994, before the full-throttle war-mongering of the Israel Lobby and the profiteering prospects of his own companies would change things. (R/T: 1:22)

UPDATED with transcript from Editor&Publisher after video clip

Read the rest of this entry »

Some time-pressed recent links I found of interest rather than write-up(s) as I take some time out.

Like many people, I have experimented with social bookmarking sites (Reddit, Newsvine, Clipmarks, Delicious, Digg etc) that are very useful in collecting and organising your bookmarked links, though they do seem to be predicated upon the links being permanently live — if you also use primary news sources such as press agencies (Reuters, AP), you’ll know that often valuable articles are not archived and URL links lapse.

So a year ago, I started up a group-list, commonly used for notification and/ or as fora for discussion, simply for the purposes of archiving articles. The articles are all full-text contemporary political pieces I find valuable and/or interesting and send to the list where they can be archived and accessed anytime, anywhere, by members. My fellow members are free to add to and access articles in this shared archive. I’m going to open it up for subscription for a short time for those who may be interested in the types of issues Peoples Geography covers. As it can be a high volume list, I encourage people to choose the Daily Digest or No Email option which I myself choose (lets you access all articles online rather than receiving them individually by email online). Click here if you happen to be interested in joining.

Australia

Two issues have marked media coverage: Defence Minister Brendan Nelson’s admission that the war on Iraq was, in part, about oil, and the federal government’s heavy-handed approach sending in the military to remote indigenous communities using child protection as a justification.

• ABC News (Australia), Iraq deployment linked to oil: Nelson, 5 July
• Adrian Newstead, Paternalism, Petrol and Paedophilia, HomePage Daily, nd
• Dave on Fire, Apartheid Down Under - Welfare, Not Warfare, 26 June
• Peter Robson, Indigenous communities reject Howard’s racist hypocrisy, GLW, 29 June
• The Orstrahyun, Howard Hits Iraq Oil Slick As Truth Becomes A WMD/ Murdoch’s Media Rewrites Stories After Furious Calls From Prime Minister’s Office, 7 July
• James Sturcke, Oil a factor in Iraq conflict, says Australian defence minister, Guardian, 5 July

Economy

• Monte Asbury, (On Kiva): I helped Grace’s business!, 4th July
• Catherine Austin Fitts, The American Tapeworm (Overcoming Tapeworm Economics)
• Mike Whitney, Another Great Depression?: The Fed’s Role in the Bear Stearns Hedge Funds Meltdown, Global Research, 1 July

Iran

• Al Alam, Iran, Iraq to Build Joint Power Plant
• IRIN, Iran, Venezuela to establish joint oil company, Payvand, 3 July

Iraq

• Pepe Escobar, Iraq, the new Israel, Asia Times, 6 July
• 24 Steps to Liberty, “Soft Partition” of Iraq!, 7 July
• David Bacon, Iraqi Oil: A Benchmark or a Giveaway? Why Iraqi oil workers oppose the much-vaunted oil law, The American Prospect, 6 July
• Sarah Baxter, Powell tried to talk Bush out of war, Sunday Times, 8 July:
  THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE from Franklin Lamb courtesy Jeff Blankfort:

Update: Saturday, June 3, 4 a.m. Tripoli Time
Contrary to many media reports the Lebanese Army has not entered deeply into Nahr al-Bared. According to PLO Fatah official Abu Imad Halwani this morning, the Army has “not entered the camp, but have been besieging it from the north and the east”. The army has heavily shelled much of the camp but the positions they currently control include only peripheral sniper positions of Fatah al-Islam around the edge of the camp. There are many untouched underground bunkers and tunnels.

Media and Army estimates of casualties are very speculative since no one has any idea, with 20 hours of intensive shelling, how many are dead or wounded there are among civilians and Fatah al-Islam. Two hours ago the Army announced that it lost 5 more troops today bringing its total to 40.

The government and Army are disposed to minimizing the number of civilians killed by their bombardment lest the other 11 Palestinian Camps in Lebanon erupt with violence.

What is clear is that the humanitarian crisis for Palestinians inside Nahr al-Bared is almost beyond description, with up to 11,000 hunkered down praying they will remain alive. It appears that the next two days will clarify whether the army actually has made deep inroads towards taking the Camp and expelling Fatah al-Islam, who minutes ago denied that their leader, Shakir al-Absi is wounded or cornered, according to FAI’s deputy leader and military commander, Mohammad Abu Hureira. FL

The Lebanese Army have entered Nahr al Bared, the Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Set up in 1948 originally as a temporary home to shelter those refugees driven from their homeland after the creation of Israel, it is now one of twelve camps housing a good number of Lebanon’s 400 000 Palestinian refugees, now one tenth of the population.

The entrance of the Lebanese Army is significant not only because of the recent clash between a recent shadowy militant group Fatah al Islam backed by the Saudis, US Neocons and Siniora and the loss of innocent lives after indiscriminate bombing, but because by a 1969 Arab agreement, the Lebanese Army has not entered a Palestinian refugee camp in decades to maintain calm and ameliorate tensions that may lead to another civil war.

Here’s Lamb’s latest dispatch in which he takes stock of the likely beneficiaries and the losers in this conflict, and the implications for Lebanon, the US and the region. I can only hope his hunches are right when he writes:

Significant losers also include the Bush administration whose project has been fairly widely exposed. Possible personal losers may be anyone including David Welch, Eliot Abrams, Dick Cheney et al. shown to have violated US federal law, including, but not limited to, several provisions of the US Patriot Act, to wit: providing material support for terrorists and violating title III, “International Money Laundering”.

Franklin Lamb, writing from Bibnin Akkar, opposite Nahr al-Bared Palestinian Camp, Lebanon:

The Lebanese Army is poised to enter.

With fighting raging this June 1, 2007, humid afternoon, less than 200 yards from the front line Lebanese army position, reporters huddled behind cinder block walls in Bibnin Akkar, speculate that the Army will shortly enter deeply into Nahr al-Bared unless repelled. The smell of rotting corpses which have not been able to be retrieved this past week are pungent across the Tripoli-Syria road as more than 80 Lebanese army Tanks and APC’s line up along the road, gun pointing into Nahr al-Bared. There appear about one thousand nervous Lebanese troops behind cover awaiting orders at 3:30 pm local time as their leaders assess the situation.

Nearly two weeks into the fighting at Nahr al-Bared (Cold River) Palestinian Refugee Camp) across the Tripoli-Syria highway, from the beautiful Sunni Lebanese mountainside village of Bignin Akkar, the fog may be lifting a bit allowing for some tentative findings concerning the short term political consequences of what happened here.

Social Bookmarks:

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**UPDATE June 1-2: See Lamb’s Lebanese Army Enter Nahr al-Bared

In his most recent piece (update: now posted at Counterpunch), Franklin Lamb expounds further upon the proposed US airbase in northern Lebanon as the rationale for the recent terrible covert operations that saw dozens of Palestinian civilians, Fatah al-Islam and Lebanese Army soldiers lose their lives. The proposed airbase — marketed as a US/ NATO initiative, with an Israeli lineage going back to the Phalangists — was a topic previously broached in his previous articles and he elaborates here. Boldface emphasis is mine, and I have made slight editing corrections for misspelled words.

It’s the US air base, Stupid!: Memorandum on the planned US Air base at Kleiaat
from Franklin Lamb

Bibnin Akkar, Lebanon, site of proposed US Air base
Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee Camp

On July 14, 1982, (Bastille Day) the late Bashir Gemayel sat with Ariel Sharon, Raphael Eytan, and Danny Yalon at the French flag draped Le Chef Restaurant in Achrafieh, east Beirut for one of their working lunches.

As was by now their habit, the Israelis were inclined to pressure their recently anointed selection for Lebanon’s next president. They were there to present a request for one more favor from the handsome ‘golden boy’ of the Phalange movement, as their army tightened its noose around west Beirut.

There was a good chance they would succeed. After all, Bashir was beholden to the Zionists, for their many ‘considerations’, including the arms for drugs arrangements, the weapons skimmed from what the US reflectively shipped to Israel on demand, the intelligence sharing and assassinations of Palestinians who Bashir could not abide. The trio lunching with him that day, under the celebratory French flags in this Francophone neighborhood could easily destroy Bashir Gemayel and he knew it.

Yet, despite their intimidating talk, the self described ‘cream of the IDF’, exhibiting what Bashir had often explained to his nerdy younger brother Amin, who, unexpectedly was to become his successor as President of Lebanon, and to some of his aids, was a case of ‘congenital arrogance’ erred that day.

They seriously underestimated the Palestinian hating, Muslim despising, would be phonetician [Phoenician?] Prince, Le sheik Bashir. In misjudging the charismatic Maronite, the Israeli trio had failed to appreciate that, on any day of the week, the average Lebanese is rather more sophisticated, clever, decent, and patriotic than many Israeli or American politicians give them credit for.

Sharon pulled out a piece of paper from his chest pocket, as one Phalange security person who guarded the restaurant door recalls, and shoved it across the table to Bashir. Written on it was Israel’s ‘one last request’ which contained one word: Kleiaat. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Press picks:

• Mike Whitney, Pack Up and Leave or Stay Home and Die: Bush’s New Middle East
• Eliza Ernshire, Inside Bedawi Camp: Refugees Forever
• Rami Zurayk, Hizbullah Move To Aid Nahr el Bared Controversial
• Dan Murphy, Israel, US, and Egypt back Fatah’s fight against Hamas

2. Video clips (2):

2.1. An Al Jazeera panel on the Riz Khan program discuss their takes on the current crisis, comprising Dr Fawaz Gerges and Mark Perry of the Conflicts Forum (RT: 16 mins)

2.2 This ten minute video clip is from last Thursday’s Democracy Now interview with Seymour Hersh by phone (transcript here). See also related posts: Hersh: Lebanon violence US-Saudi-Lebanese government blowback and
Who’s Behind the Fighting in North Lebanon: the Welch Club?

The Doha Debates have been invited to hold an event at the Oxford Union, the debating society of Oxford University. The Debate took place on the 1st of May and is the first Doha Debate to be held outside Qatar.

The motion debated: This House believes the pro-Israeli lobby has successfully stifled Western debate about Israel’s actions.

Speakers: Norman Finkelstein, Andrew Cockburn, Martin Indyk, David Aaronovitch

45 minutes

Ilan Pappe does a good job of refuting a recent piece by Uri Avnery (Bed of Sodom) that argues that advocacy of a one state proposal harms the Palestinian cause. Select excerpts below; it is worth reading in full at EI and Hagada Hasmalit (with thanks to the Fanonite). See also Sonja Karkar’s piece commenting upon Azmi Bishari’s campaign for Israeli democracy.

Pappe:

The South African model is young — in fact hardly a year has passed since it was seriously considered — while the formula of two states is sixty years old: an abortive and dangerous illusion that enabled Israel to continue its occupation without facing any significant criticism from the international community.

The facts on the ground are crystal clear: the two-state solution has dismally failed and we have no spare time to waste in futile anticipation of another illusory round of diplomatic efforts that would lead to nowhere. As Avnery admits, the Israeli peace camp has so far failed to persuade the Israeli Jewish society to try the road of peace.

Avnery ignores these facts and alleges that the one-state solution is a dangerous panacea to offer to the critically ill patient. All right, so let us prescribe it gradually. But for God’s sake let us take the patient off of the very dangerous medicine we have been forcing down his throat the last sixty years and which is about to kill him. Read the rest of this entry »

Excerpted from Matt Tabibi, Cheney’s Nemesis in Rolling Stone (2 April 2007). It can be read in full here.

During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of time to Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about this administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus on?
Absolutely. If there’s a Kissinger person today, it’s Cheney. But what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now! If we did, we’d know that the madness of going into Iraq would have been explained by something — maybe a clandestine deal for oil — that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had some back-channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war, what you see is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the Middle East, and yet we’re at war with the Middle East. It doesn’t make sense.

Kissinger’s genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now, a lot of people on the inside know it’s over in Iraq, but there are no plans for how to get out. You’re not even allowed to think that way. So what we have now is a government that’s in a terrible mess, with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said, the “fail forward” idea of going into Iran. So we’re really in big trouble. Real big trouble here.

A lot of people interpreted your last article in “The New Yorker” as a prediction that we’re going into Iran. But you also make clear that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from attacking Iran.
I’ve never said we’re going to go — just that the planning is under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple of weeks, it has become nonstop. They’re in a position right now where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh –

His what?
His nose, and say, “Let’s go.” And they’d go. That’s new. We’ve made it closer. We’ve got carrier groups there. It’s not about going in on the ground. Although if we went in we’d have to send Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm missile sites.

The other implication of your piece is that we went into Iraq as a response to Sunni extremism, and now we are realigning ourselves with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiites. Is it really that simple? Are we really that stupid?
From what I gather, there’s no real mechanism in the administration for looking at the downside of things. In the military, when they do a major study, they say something like “We give it to you with the pluses and minuses.” They usually show it to you warts and all. But these guys in the White House don’t want the warts. They just want the good side. I don’t think they know all of the consequences.

This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government unto itself.

One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring. Read the rest of this entry »

A thoughtful and worthwhile video lecture delivered in 2005 by Andrew Bacevich, who argues in his most recent book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War that a new destructive strain in the culture of militarism is seducing Americans into the imprudent use of force, embraced by conservatives and liberals alike.

Not a pacifist nor one reflexively opposed to the use of force, Bacevich nevertheless suggests that this new destructive strain is counterproductive and dangerous to advancing American interests, and dangerous for the rest of the world. He contrasts this with American founding ideals that saw militarism as a poison — one with occasional utility — but one essentially repudiated.

More importantly, he proposes ways to restore balance and transmute this strain in American foreign and military policy. The lecture itself is only 30 minutes, with a very good Q and A afterward.

Related:

* The Normalisation of War, Tom Dispatch (20 April 2005)
* Taylor McNeil, Seduced By War, Bostonia, Winter 2004-5
* Harry Kreisler in conversation with Andrew Bacevich, The Military and US Foreign Policy, Conversations with History, 2005

Runtime: 63 minutes

Related Posts:
* War profiteering in Iraq: the private Pentagon(e) contractors
* James Petras: Economic Empire Building and Domestic Decay
* Capitalism and War

The current issue of Foreign Policy (March-April) has a ‘Who Wins in Iraq’ feature. The editors have compiled a Top Ten list of groups they see as having benefited most from the war in (and on Iraq), with accompanying essays by various commentators.

Ordinarily I would see the benefit of a cui bono exercise, but here I think the editors have compiled a highly unsatisfactory list.

For starters, it imbibes the simplistic and dubious proposition that whole groups can be identified as having “won” from war, or that wars can be won or lost. The place is a quagmire and the death of a million Iraqis, the destruction of infrastructure, and collapse of the country as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion is brushed aside in favour of this dubious cost-benefit style retrospective assessment.

Next, what’s missing from the list? For a start, the most glaring omission are the war profiteers, the corporations who are profiting from the privatisation of Iraq’s oil and those engaged in private security arrangements (the second largest army in Iraq are company mercenaries such as those provided by Blackwater). My own thinking is that #10 (Israel) should be much higher in the list, and that, with some exceptions, they’ve inverted the key beneficiaries of this terrible war (Iran, #1?!). To place Huntington and his flawed Clash of Civilisations thesis at #4 further erodes the credibility of the list for me.

You may also be interested in:

* Iraq: Who Might Be Shooting at Both Sides?
* Juan Cole: Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006
* Who wants a civil war in Iraq?
* Information Warfare, Psy-ops and the Power of Myth

Who Wins in Iraq?

Newspaper headlines consistently remind us of the failures coming out of Iraq. The number of U.S. soldiers who have lost their lives continues to climb. The deaths of Iraqi civilians far exceed what almost anyone expected. And insurgent attacks are growing stronger and more deadly. But, if wars always produce losers, it is also true that most wars have a fair share of winners, too. So, we would like to ask, four years into the fighting, what institutions, countries, ideas, or individuals are better off because of the war? Who, in essence, are Iraq’s winners?

Iran By Vali Nasr After nearly 25 years of wrestling with Saddam Hussein, Iran’s Shiite rulers have the war to thank for their newfound power.	Moqtada al-Sadr By Dexter Filkins How a radical Shiite cleric became the most powerful man in Iraq.
	Al Qaeda By Daniel Byman   The terrorist network was on life support after September 11—until a new front opened in Baghdad and revived its mission.	Samuel Huntington By David Frum The man who envisioned a clash of civilizations looks more prescient than ever.   Arab Dictators By Marina Ottaway   The Middle East’s strongmen were under pressure to reform. Now, they rest easy.
	China By Steve Tsang The United States’ missteps in Iraq have given a rising superpower in the East room to grow.
The Price of Oil By Bill Emmott The war in Iraq triggered record oil prices, and the region’s petrostates will enjoy the windfall for years to come.
The United Nations By Martin Wolf Suddenly, the global body’s brand of multilateral diplomacy doesn’t look so bad.	Old Europe By Gianni Riotta Four years on, Europe’s naysayers are looking wise beyond their years. But can they do any more than sit back and gloat?	Israel By Amatzia Baram The war in Iraq eliminated several of Israel’s biggest enemies—even if it made a few new ones along the way.