[Peace] News notes, 2nd week in July 2008

[C. G. Estabrook]

SUNDAY 13 JULY 2008  [Anniversary of the original US “Status of Forces 
Agreement” for Illinois and environs: the Northwest Ordinance on this date in 
1787 provided that “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the 
Indians; their land and property shall never be taken without their consent; 
and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or 
disturbed.”  Three years later President Washington sent an army to kill Indians 
who wanted that provision observed.  Perhaps the Iraqis should take note.]

[1] WAR. This morning's NYT announces the Bush administration's adoption of 
Obama's “peace” plan: “US CONSIDERING STEPPING UP PACE OF IRAQ PULLOUT,” it 
headlines.  “More Troops Could Be Freed For Operations in Afghanistan,” it 
continues (with an interesting use of “freed,” when the Pentagon has just 
extended the tour of 2,200 Marines in Afghanistan, after Defense Secretary Gates 
repeatedly said he did not intend to extend or replace the U.S. Marines in 
Afghanistan.)

The administration is able to steal Obama's clothes because of course Obama's 
peace plan is not a peace plan at all.  It rather simply readjusts some 
unprofitable strategy in the general US Mideast War (formerly known as the GWOT) 
and actually expands it on other fronts, notably AfPak.

This is the policy of both Obama and what we might call the “foreign policy 
establishment” (hereinafter FPE) in the administration. Meanwhile, the Neocons 
left in the administration (including the Petraeus set in the uniformed 
military) seem at the moment less belligerent than the FPE: the Neocons, 
barricaded primarily in the office of the Vice-President (OVP) prefer a more 
extensive holding action in Iraq, coupled with fervent denunciations of Iranian 
perfidy as the source of any problems there.  This faction however no more 
desires a devastating attack on Iran than American Cold Warriors desired such a 
descent on the Soviet Union: how then could they say to their new Sunni allies, 
“Stick close to Nurse, for fear of Something Worse”? From the US POV (in the 
words of the poet), “They were, those people, a kind of solution” (C. P. Cavafy, 
"Waiting for the Barbarians").

The matter is explained further by another article on the front page of the NYT 
today: headlined “Dissident's Tale of Epic Escape from Iran Grip” and written by 
the awful hack Michael Gordon, it recalls the moldy Cold War 
“I-escaped-from-the-Commies” genre.  It's part of the ongoing campaign to 
construct the Iranians as The Enemy, so we don't have to admit who our real 
enemy in the region is: those (whatever we call them – militants, insurgents, 
terrorists, Al Qaeda, Taliban, etc.) who want the US and US clients out of their 
country and off of their resources.  That's who we (and President Obama-McCain) 
will be fighting in the Mideast for the foreseeable future.  As a result, the 
FPE and the Democrats are trying to kill them more vigorously in the Eastern 
Theatre of the war, even if they often kill wedding parties instead.

...as we did this week, when “US-Led Strikes Killed 47 Afghan Civilians, Mostly 
Women and Children” [AFP].  Meanwhile, a “NATO Base In Afghanistan Gets Major 
Expansion,” reports NPR.  (We've got to convince those guys to stay somehow.) 
And the UK defense secretary (who's down with the US program) says Afghans “must 
be free to set laws that clash with western values and legal principles if order 
is to be established in the country” [FT]. MOD head Des Browne said 
policy-makers must drop any illusions of "imposing a Jeffersonian democracy" in 
Afghanistan.  (Sneering references to “Jeffersonian democracy” is the dismissive 
cliché used by our rulers to mask their contempt for all democracy, particularly 
for lesser breeds without the law.)  What in fact the Brit toady was saying, on 
behalf of his American masters, is that we want “strong men” in AfPak (and Iraq) 
who will do US bidding – like Saddam Hussein, before he stopped following orders 
and therefore became a tyrant. (Karzai, Maliki and Musharraf: please copy.)

The FPE is stealing Obama's thunder by arranging for more killing in AfPak 
before Obama, who's calling for the same thing, is inaugurated. They're both 
getting their wish, unfortunately: today nine American soldiers were killed “in 
one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion [-- an 
attack on a new US outpost] in the northeastern province of Kunar, a mountainous 
region that borders Pakistan ... NATO said in a statement that there have been 
casualties on both sides but accurate numbers could not be confirmed because the 
fighting was ongoing” [AP].  The fighting is close to where US forces attacked 
the wedding party from the air a week ago. [BBC]

The FPE also seems closer today to another of their goals, a settlement between 
the Israeli government and the Palestinian quislings. (In this too the FPE is 
bitterly opposed by the Neocons, who some time ago exposed the failure of an 
attempt by the FPE – particularly the US Secretary of State -- to promote a 
pro-quisling coup in Gaza.) Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said today that Israel 
and the Palestinians have never been closer to a peace deal than now. 
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, standing with Olmert at the French 
presidential palace, nodded and wagged his tail. Olmert and Abbas held talks 
Sunday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of a sweeping summit 
launching the Union for the Mediterranean, bringing together leaders of some 40 
nations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

[2] TORTURE. In this country, the Bush administration is like earlier 
administrations in that they feel that they too “must be free to set laws that 
clash with western values and legal principles if order is to be established” 
(in the words of the British war minister).  But they differ from earlier 
administrations in that they admit their taste for torture more honestly.

There's an important new book on the subject -- "The Dark Side: The Inside Story 
of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer. 
(Meyer's work may be the most important reporting on the US Mideast War to 
appear in the New Yorker.)  It reveals that Red Cross investigators concluded 
last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's 
interrogation methods were war crimes; that a CIA analyst warned the Bush 
administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may 
have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding 
and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite 
incarceration; and that the Red Cross said that the methods used on Abu 
Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 
'categorically' torture, and 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, 
placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being 
prosecuted.'"

[3] TERRORISM. What is sometimes called the international community is 
determined to proceed against war crimes, and to that end the International 
Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest warrant on Monday for the first 
time against a sitting head of state.  No, it's not G. Bush, tho' he may profit 
from the example. The African Union has warned against this move to prosecute 
Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's president, saying that a trial could jeopardize peace 
efforts in the Darfur region.  The UN says up to 300,000 people have died and 
more than 2.2 million have been displaced since groups in Darfur took up arms 
against the Sudanese government in February 2003. The toll of the 
contemporaneous US invasion of Iraq is at least twice that, and – if there were 
any justice in the world -- George Bush would be sharing a cell with Bashir at 
The Hague -- because of course the international community would have to be 
consistent.  But neither Sudan nor the US recognize the jurisdiction of the 
International Criminal Court, so it won't happen...
	Nelson Mandela is now no longer officially considered a terrorist by the US. He 
will be removed from US terrorism watch lists under a bill President Bush signed 
Tuesday.

[4] SPYING. Bush signed a law on Thursday overhauling the rules for 
eavesdropping on terrorism suspects but immediately met a civil liberties 
challenge calling it a threat to Americans' privacy. The American Civil 
Liberties Union filed suit in Manhattan federal court as Bush signed the measure 
and called for the law to be voided as a violation of constitutional speech and 
privacy protections.

[5] DIPLOMACY. The excellent blogger who calls herself Emptywheel writes about 
the analysis by WP hireling David Ignatius of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece 
on the US in Iran: “he pretty much agrees that covert stuff is going on, even 
while he points out that that -- like our Iranian policy more generally -- is 
amateurish and ineffective ... Looks like they're potentially illegal covert ops 
just for the sake of potentially illegal covert ops ... I can't help but think 
we're hearing the same kind of report--well, worse, really--from that other area 
of our foreign policy that Dick [Cheney] is in charge of: our Pakistan policy...
     “The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 
9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban's main patron: 
ignoring Musharraf's despotism in return for his promises to crack down on 
al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to 
Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in 
Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda's senior leadership has set up another haven inside 
Pakistan's chaotic border regions.
     “The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on 
Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. 
history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia 
bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the 
National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne 
W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin 
American 'drugs and thugs'; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state 
for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served 
three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. 'They 
know nothing of Pakistan,' a former senior U.S. diplomat said.”

[6] IRAQ. Discussions about a schedule for a withdrawal of US forces continued 
on the pages of Iraqi newspapers. Politicians associated with PM Maliki speak of 
“a flexible 3-5 year timetable” -- which of course means almost nothing.  They 
know (a) the US has no intention of leaving, and (b) the Maliki government 
wouldn't last long without US military support.  The timetable talk is a 
bargaining chip in the SOFA arrangement with the US – made possible only because 
there is a serious political force in Iraq who does want the Americans to leave 
soon: Muqtada al-Sadr.
	A US Marine sergeant accused of murdering an unarmed Iraqi captive during heavy 
fighting in Fallujah in 2004 was heard on tape as saying he "did one guy."
	Gary Brecher, probably pseudonymous author of The War Nerd, a twice-monthly 
column discussing current wars and other military conflicts, published in The 
eXile, a Moscow-based English-language biweekly free newspaper, now only on the 
internet, writes “How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out. One 
thing the United States doesn't get about guerrilla warfare: It's not over until 
the guerrillas win.”  He draws a comparison between the Iraqi resistance and the 
Irish Republican Army, just as Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of 
Northern Ireland and former IRA leader, arrived in Baghdad on a mission to help 
Iraq’s warring sects to seek reconciliation -- a two-day visit to Baghdad with 
Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC negotiator, and Lord Alderdice, the chairman of the 
Northern Irish decommissioning body. They met a group of Sunni and Shia leaders 
in a conference financed by a wealthy Bostonian who inherited a furniture 
business.  (Noam Chomsky used to point out that threats to bomb countries that 
“harbor and support terrorists” meant that the British should have bombed Boston 
to get at the IRA.)
	Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy 
advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain “a 
prisoner of its energy dilemma” as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.  That 
April 2001 report, “Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,” was 
prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council 
on Foreign Relations at the request of Vice President Dick Cheney.  In 
retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on 
why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world’s 
second largest oil reserves.

[7] ISRAEL. In 2007, former President Carter challenged students at Brandeis to 
visit the Israeli- occupied Palestinian territories and "determine whether I 
have exaggerated or incorrectly described the plight of the Palestinians," notes 
Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times. Some took up the challenge and have 
produced a report: http://www.studentscrossingboundaries.com/. Many were shaken 
by what they saw.

[8] EUROPE. Russia threatened to retaliate by military means after a deal with 
the Czech Republic brought the US missile defence system in Europe a step 
closer. The US and Poland have finalized details of an agreement that would 
station a US missile system on Polish soil. The deal awaits final approval from 
Polish lawmakers. Ten ballistic missiles would be based in Poland, along with a 
radar site in the Czech Republic. Majorities in both Poland and the Czech 
Republic oppose the missile plan, which is widely seen as a first-strike threat.
	Following his escape from a zoo, a bear was found prowling the streets of the 
Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. The bear was surprisingly tame, and local 
residents were able to feed and play with him; they nicknamed him “James Bond.”
	A bronze statue of Ronald Reagan has been turned down by Westminster council 
for a spot in Grosvenor Square (near the US embassy) because it lacked gravitas 
and would have caused "clutter".

[9] LATIN AMERICA.  Ecuador's government seized three television stations on 
Tuesday to collect debts stemming from the Filanbanco bank failure. 
Representatives of the TV stations called the seizures an attack on press 
freedom, but Ecuador's two largest television networks, which are much more 
critical of the government, are still privately operated. The president of the 
Filanbanco Shareholders Association called the seizures "a positive sign" for 
60,000 creditors who lost $350 million when Filanbanco went under. The three TV 
stations were operated by relatives of fugitives William and Roberto Isaias, who 
fled to the US after the bank collapsed. Ecuador has asked the US to extradite 
them to face embezzlement charges.
	Fidel Castro has called on the Colombian Farc rebel movement to release all of 
its remaining hostages.
	In Cuba, health officials have approved what’s believed to be the world’s first 
registered vaccine for lung cancer. Doctors say the treatment, CimaVax EGF, can 
extend survival rates by an average four to five months, and in some cases 
longer. The vaccine is said to have few side effects because it attacks only 
cancer cells.
	The General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP) has staged a 24-hour strike 
in protest against the government's economic and social policies.
	A coalition of human rights groups has accused the US government of withholding 
money intended to provide clean drinking water to Haiti as leverage to push for 
regime change in the country. In 1998, the Inter-American Development Bank 
approved $54 million to help the Haitian government revamp the country’s water 
and sanitation systems. Ten years later, the water projects have yet to be 
started, because the US government aggressively attempted to block the 
disbursement of the loans. According to the report, the US government derailed 
the projects in 2001 at a time when it was pushing for the ouster of 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s democratically elected president. Aristide was 
eventually overthrown in 2004 in a US-backed coup.

[10] ECONOMY. IndyMac Bank, a prolific mortgage specialist that helped fuel the 
housing boom, was seized Friday (7/11) by federal regulators in one of the 
largest bank failures in U.S. history. The thrift was one of the largest savings 
and loans in the country, with about $32 billion in assets. It now joins an 
infamous list of collapsed banks, topped by Continental Illinois National Bank 
and Trust Co., which failed in 1984 with $40 billion of assets.  The bank will 
be run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., a federal regulator, and will 
reopen Monday. [WSJ]  The Treasury Department is also considering the takeover 
of two New Deal-inspired government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) in the mortgage 
business, the Federal National Mortgage Association FNMA (NYSE: FNM), called 
“Fannie Mae,” and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, FHLMC (NYSE: FRE), 
called “Freddie Mac.”
	On the general state of the economy, the following comment comes from Doug 
Henwood, editor of the excellent Left Business Observer: “The risks of financial 
collapse are receding, but the system is still far from healthy. The U.S. 
economy has probably been in recession for about six months, but I don't think 
the major issue right now is the state of the business cycle; we're likely to 
see several years of stagnation and general trouble. The likelihood of a boom, 
either an uneven one like the 1980s or a manic one like the late 1990s, is very 
small. But the U.S. economy is not going down the drain, or to hell in a 
handbasket, or suffering its death agony, or anything like that.”
	A leaked World Bank report says that biofuels are the prime cause of the world 
food crisis, according to the Guardian (UK).

[11] MEDIA. Slate reports that the new HBO series about the Iraq invasion, 
Generation Kill, “is too skeptical about authority to entertain neocons or 
red-meat nationalists and too depressing to delight a good liberal.”
	“Al-Hurra,” an Arab-language television network,  was a propaganda ploy by the 
Bush administration that cost at least $350 million in taxpayer money and has 
been a flop. Many of its top executives had no experience in the TV business and 
couldn't speak Arabic.  and the Arabic world is well-served by media.  For 
obvious reasons, the political discussion in a coffee shop in Baghdad is far 
better informed than in a coffee shop in a US city.  In the former it's a matter 
of life and death, but not in the latter.
	The WP describes what it calls “The latest propaganda coup orchestrated by 
al-Qaeda: an online chat between Zawahiri -- one of the world's most wanted 
fugitives -- and hundreds of curious people around the globe. After announcing 
in a Web forum in December that he would entertain questions on virtually any 
topic, Zawahiri received 1,888 written queries from journalists and the public. 
He patiently answered about one-fifth of them, even hostile postings that 
condemned al-Qaeda for harming innocents and perverting Islam.  The war against 
terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts 
and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda's 
voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new 
technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda's core leadership has built 
an increasingly prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate 
constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential 
recruits worldwide.”

[12] COURTS.  Now we know why the Bush gang is so adamant about not giving 
detainees habeas corpus rights: because they often have no "evidence" for 
holding them: “In the first case to review the government's secret evidence for 
holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that 
allegations against an ethnic Chinese man held for more than six years were 
based on bare and unverifiable claims, according to the decision released 
Monday.” [NYT-7/1]  “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government 
has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS CARROLL, THE 
HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (”I have said it thrice: What I tell you three 
times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are 
independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions.”  With some 
derision for the Bush administration's arguments, a three-judge panel said the 
government contended that its allegations against a detainee should be accepted 
as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents. . .
	In the history of legal challenges to the Bush administration's assertion that 
it can hold "War on Terror" prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, 
Parhat v. Gates has just joined a trio of Supreme Court verdicts – Rasul v. Bush 
(2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumediene v. Bush (13 June) ... In a 
one-page ruling in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur (a Muslim from the 
oppressed Xinjiang province of China), the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington 
"held invalid a decision of a combatant status review tribunal that petitioner 
Huzaifa Parhat is an enemy combatant." The court also "directed the government 
to release or transfer Parhat" (or, more worryingly, "to hold a new tribunal 
consistent with the Court's opinion"), and also "stated that its disposition was 
without prejudice to Parhat's right to seek release immediately through a writ 
of habeas corpus in the district court, pursuant to the Supreme Court's decision 
in Boumediene v. Bush."

[13] ELECTION.
	[A] Henwood (see above) on Obama. “First, there was the appointment of Jason 
Furman as a top economic advisor. Furman, as I assume almost everyone knows by 
now, is famous for having done some apologetics for Wal-Mart. He actually argued 
that raising Wal-Mart's wage levels would force Wal-Mart to raise prices, and 
thereby hurting the working class as a whole more than helping it ... That's not 
to say Furman's a right-winger. It is to say, though, that he's sort of a 
DLC-style Democrat, someone out of the Clinton/Rubin/ Summers mold. I'm not so 
sectarian that I think that that mold isn't a little less moldy than the 
Bush/Paulson/Feldstein mold, but it's nothing to get passionate about. And 
remember that Furman joins Austan Goolsbee, the DLC's top economist, on the 
Obama economic team. Goolsbee, opponent of a mortgage foreclosure moratorium and 
eulogist of Milton Friedman.
	“Then Obama appointed a gang of foreign policy advisors. Among that collection 
of ghouls: Madeleine Albright, perhaps most famous for saying that the half a 
million Iraqi children killed by the Clinton administration's sanctions was a 
price worth paying -- not, of course, that she was paying it; Lee Hamilton and 
David Boren, two Congresspeople noted for their protective attitude towards the 
CIA; Tony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor; William Perry, whose resume 
includes, along with a stint as Defense Secretary under Clinton, jobs with 
Boeing, Martin-Marietta, and the Carlyle Group; and Susan Rice, another Clinton 
leftover, and a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq” [and for the invasion of 
Sudan].
	[B] “Whoever Wins, Iraqis Lose,” by Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail.  Iraqis seem 
divided on who they would like to see as the next U.S. president, but few 
believe that either will end the occupation ... While Obama, the Democratic 
presidential hopeful, calls for a shift in the U.S. policy in Iraq, neither he 
nor his Republican rival, John McCain, talk about changing the National Security 
Strategy of the U.S., or the military document Joint Vision 2020, which calls 
for “full spectrum dominance” of the world by the U.S. military by the year 
2020.  ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means not just total control of land, air, and 
sea, but also of information and of space. “The U.S. strategy is firm and 
unchanging,” a political analyst at Diyala University told IPS on condition of 
anonymity, given widespread fear of U.S. forces. “It makes no difference whether 
one wins or the other. The general strategy is well established, and is never 
affected by the changing of the president.”
	“I do agree with this point of view,” local merchant Abdul-Rahman told IPS. 
“During the nineties we wished that Bill Clinton would win in order to stop the 
economic sanctions that caused us so much suffering. When Clinton became 
president, sanctions remained as they were, and even worsened” ... Barak Obama 
has made public statements that he will withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. But his 
advisors speak of plans to keep at least 60,000-90,000 troops in Iraq, and at 
least until 2013, the year his first term in office would end if he is elected.
	[C] “Bush's Third Term.”  Andrew Bacevich and the WSJ recognized independently 
this week that Obama, not McCain, is the leading candidate for Bush's Third 
Term.  Some of the Journal's particulars are debatable, but it's surely correct 
to stress Bush-Obama continuity. (Cf. similar continuity in Reagan-Clinton and 
Thatcher-Blair.)
     It'll be interesting to see if McCain will be bold enough (or desperate 
enough) to "triangulate" away and run as the "peace" candidate against 
Obama-Bush.  Obama of course is already aligned with that faction within the 
Bush administration (where the only real foreign policy debate in the US is 
going on) who want more war in AfPak. (He said he wanted to expand the military, 
send US soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan, bomb "militants" in Pakistan without 
regard for the Pakistani government, attack Iran if they look like getting a 
nuclear weapon, etc.)  Obama has indicated that as president he'd retain SOD 
Gates and perhaps Generalissimo Petraeus.
     After all, the history of the last hundred years in the US is that Democrat 
presidents preside over war and expansion and Republican presidents, peace and 
recession.  The recession seems to be underway, and the Republican candidate's 
historic role awaits McCain.  Will he be clever enough to take it?

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