Keeping it Straight
by digby
For those of you who are having trouble keeping track of all the allegiances among the various countries, groups, militias and terrorists in the mid-east, Slate put together a handy dandy interactive Middle East Buddy List
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Chi Sandwich
by digby
Ezra expertly slices and dices TimesSelect:
Wandering through the nation’s op-ed pages is like ambling through a dojo. Each writer has his own particular style, technique, finishing move. There’s Tom Friedman, who rushes in with the Implausible Conversational Anecdote, links it to an Off-Topic Invocation Of World Travels, and finishes you with a Confusing Metaphor From Above. Or there’s Maureen Dowd, who deploys Unfounded Personal Speculation mixed with Confusing Allegories till she’s set up her killing blow: Insinuation of Character Defect. It’s impressive stuff.
The deadliest op-ed columnist, however, is unquestionably David Brooks. He’s the drunken boxer of the opinion page, luring you into a false sense of security with Banal Observations that comfort through Faux Bipartisanship until you’re ready for the Illogical Conservative Conclusion. Today’s column is an archetypal example of the master at work: a series of cogent critiques of Hillary Clinton’s college aid proposals that effortlessly glide through research demonstrating their uselessness, a couple lavish compliments to Clinton and her team, and finally a conclusion that explains the only way to increase college attendance is to encourage two-parent homes, fundamentally reform schools, and increase church-sponsored mentoring programs. Funny thing — this is exactly the rightwing’s agenda! And yet it comes wrapped in such warm bipartisanship and elevated chin stroking that you’d never notice Newt Gingrich silently mouthing along in the background.
And then there’s Krugman who wanders in from the alley and while the other columnists are practicing their qigong he just plants a facer on the opposition.
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Destroy The Village In Order To Save It: Part Deux
by digby
“Our mission and our goal is to have a lasting peace — not a temporary peace, but something that lasts,” said Bush. “We want a sustainable ceasefire. We don’t want something that’s, you know, short term in duration.”
This is the middle east he’s talking about. Apparently somebody has told him that getting a lasting peace there is just a matter of resolve. If only people hadn’t accepted all these temporary ceasefires in the past, everything would have been straightened out by now. (He’s not saying they wouldn’t have gotten their hair mussed…)
I know he’s just an idiot who doesn’t even have the barest grasp of simple logic. But when children are being killed and maimed, you’d think they could at least have the foresight to come up with a talking point that doesn’t make “collateral damage” sound like a moral concept by comparison. This idea that in order to achieve longterm peace you can’t have a temporary ceasefire is gibberish, yes, — but it is immoral too. Apparently, he really doesn’t grasp the fact that during a “short-term” ceasefire actual human beings are not being killed — real people with jobs and homes and lives and everything.
I think that one of the sad consequences of Democrats being so hapless these last few years is that these silly Republicans have gotten it into their heads that the whole world works like the American political system. If you humiliate your enemy enough, they will become like “neutered barnyard animals” who will happily go along with their second class status. But that only works when the other side is comfortable and fat and enjoying the perks of the status quo as much as the victors. In the real world this is a very provocative and dangerous way to try to manage human events. It tends to create hatreds that can’t be mitigated by a nice slice of political pork down the road.
I’ve always been quite fond of this statement by Bush back in 2001, which I think perfectly reflects his temperament:
The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.
That’s been working out really well for us, don’t you think?
That was at the zenith of Bush’s post bullhorn power and I don’t think he’s progressed one moment past that point. When you combine it with the neocon obsession with war as the answer for every problem, you get an administration that sees sustained violence as the only way to achieve lasting peace and that the problem in the middle east is that there just hasn’t been enough of it over the years.
It’s as if “1984” were true, except that Big Brother is a hulking, braindead thug.
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Cakewalk
by digby
Via Laura Rozen I found this startling foreign policy index from the Democratic Policy Committee. Rozen and Democracy Arsenal highlighted a few of the items pertaining to Iraq:
Number of Iraqis who had access to potable water before invasion: 13 million
Number of Iraqis who have access to potable water, according to the April 2006 SIGIR report: 8 million
Number of Iraqi physicians registered prior to the invasion: 34,000
Number of Iraqi physicians who have been murdered or fled the country since the invasion: 14,000
Infant mortality rate in Iraq: (Middle East average is 37, sub-Saharan Africa average is 105): 102
Average number of daily attacks by insurgents in June 2004: 45
Average number of daily attacks by insurgents in June 2006: 90Rank of Iraq on the “failed states” index: 4
Rank of Afghanistan on the “failed states” index: 10
Rank of Iraq among all nations as a training ground for terrorists:1
The last we heard from Joe Lieberman, (who isn’t talking about foreign policy on the campaign trail, apparently) was that there was tremendous progress being made in Iraq, especially on the political front. Here’s the index on the political situation:
Amount requested by the President in his Fiscal Year 2007 budget for democracy promotion in Iraq: 0
Percent of Iraqis who say they are optimistic about their future: 30 percent
According to a recent World Public Opinion poll, percent of Iraqis who approve of a timeline for U.S. withdrawal: 70 percent
Degree of corruption in Iraq on the Transparency International 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index (on a scale of 0-10, with 0 representing “highly corrupt” and 10 representing “highly clean”): 2.2
Number of corruption cases that have been filed since the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity was established in 2004: 1,400
Approximate number of Iraqi families internally displaced as of February 2006 (prior to February 22 bombing of Shiite shrine in Samarra): 3,000
Approximate number of Iraqi families internally displaced as of June 2006, according to Iraq’s Ministry of Displacement and Migration: 21,731 or 130,386 people
Number of Iraqi civilians killed in May, according to data from the Iraqi Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue: 2,669
Number of Iraqi civilians killed in June, according to data from the Iraqi Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue: 3,149
Civilian death toll in Iraq in June 2006: 100 per day
Rank of Iraq in Minority Rights Group International’s list of peoples most under threat from persecution, discrimination, and mass killing: 1
The number of passports issued in the past ten months, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees:2 million
Percent of Iraq’s professional class that has left the country since late 2003:40 percent
You have to wonder what it would have looked like if it were going badly.
Update: The Poorman has a post up about one of those displaced Iraqis — a catblogger named Raghda, whose family finally gave up and left the country.
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When Will They Ever Learn?
by tristero
When the present batch of Democratic consultants finally give up the ghost – that is, part this world for the next, ie. croak – it is my fervent wish that they be consigned a special space in hell where they’ll be forced to watch unto eternity these Ed Sullivan shows with all the Beatles performances removed. I seen the shows recently so I realize that is an extremely cruel fate to wish on anyone. They deserve it.
Consider this small but important indicator of the continuing disaster that is national Democratic strategy:
Democrats plan to press for a minimum wage increase and “tough, smart” national security in their final push to wrest power from the Republicans in the November elections.
Something missing, boys and girls? Like the Iraq war, perhaps? Or the awful economy?
And guess what? When you avoid a subject, no matter what it is, you leave the field wide open for Republicans – who are so fluent in Newspeak by now that they don’t even hesitate a beat – to define the playing field for you:
Danny Diaz, a Republican National Committee spokesman, said: “It is both ironic and amusing that Democrats believe they are making a final argument to the American people, while being incapable of deciding how much to raise taxes on working families or how quickly to retreat from Iraq.”
Trying arguing from those premises.
And that, in the opinion of the Dems’ most lavishly compensated advice-peddlers, is the problem. You can’t, so it’s best to avoid the subject. Nevermind that avoiding talk about a war that’s costing the mothers of American soliders thousands of their children’s lives – and for no purpose whatsoever – is just about the worst thing you could possibly do if you were trying to convince someone you were a serious alternative to Republican incompetence. Nevermind that avoiding talk on insisting that the Paris Hiltons and Dick Cheneys of America pay their fair share is simply insane. Better to avoid these subjects altogether than taking the effort to set a level playing field for these subjects. That would take work.
What should the Dems have done? Made Iraq and tax breaks for the Scaifes and the Ahmansons the central issues or at least define them clearly and loudly and long before the Republicans. Instead, they will now face an uphill rhetorical battle trying to counteract Republican rhetoric. And the Republicans will repeat Diaz’s crap until Democrats won’t be able to avoid it.
Will the Dems win either house or both in November? Let’s put it this way: if they do (and God help us if Republicans continue their assault on the fabric of American government unopposed), it will be because the Republicans couldn’t hide any longer how dangerously awful they are. Democratic victories will come in spite of their best efforts to remain powerless. And Republicans will easily reverse any Democratic wins in ’08.
Why? Please. How much effort do you think it will it take a Republican propaganda machine that comes up with lines like “how quickly to retreat from Iraq” to blame Democrats for anything that goes wrong in the next two years if Dems actually control a house or two of Congress? Talk about cakewalks! (Well to be literate, “pieces of cake,” cakewalks are dances.)
Now there are responsible people, for example Sean Wilentz in this important article in The New Yorker, who apparently feel the march into fascism hasn’t progressed to the point where they’re all but irreversible. I disagree. The assault on American values and institutions has been so thorough and relentless over the past 6 years they cannot be effectively counteracted simply by wresting temporary control of a house of Congress, especially if that control is won by avoiding talking about the important things that are going on. Think of all the extremist judges and bureaucrats Bush has placed in power. Think of all the good people who fled the CIA in the past few years. Sorry, Sean, I love your new book but I think you’ve misunderestimated the extent of the damage.
It’s now generally accepted, once again and hallelujah for that, that avoiding reality is a Really Bad Thing and that Bushism is premised on avoiding reality. However, an opposition strategy that fails to confront head-on the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan, the tax breaks for the wealthy, and the increasingly fascist nature of mainstream Republicanism is also entirely divorced from reality. If anything, it is even more so in some ways. And just like Bushism, it is doomed to spectacular failure.
Here’s hoping I’m wrong. But I’m afraid I’m not. The pity of it all is that if mainstream Democrats would simply ditch the consultants and speak the truth, it would be utterly persuasive. There are some good people there – Kerry, Pelosi, Obama, Dean, Reid, Clark – and feel free to substitute/add others, they’re are dozens of great politicians in the Dem party. But the campaign advice they are getting is just godawful.
And thus, eternal Ed Sullivan without the Beatles, without Elvis, without Buddy Holly – man, do they have it coming. There will be no mercy.
[UPDATE: As Atrios sez, Democrats should read this.]
Who Needs Arab Language Specialists, Anyway?
by tristero
The Iraq war’s forgotten, and in Iran the official language is Persian so this guy’s totally expendable:
A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, though he says he never told his superiors he was gay and his accuser was never identified.
Narrowing The Debate
by tristero
One further point in re: Digby’s post on the neocons’ alarm that Rice is misleading Bush into accepting diplomatic rather than military approaches to Iran, Hizbollah, NoKo, etc. On the face of it, the notion that Bush is seriously pursuing diplomacy is laughable. Rice surely is incompetent, but there is no possible way anything she says or does will prevent Bush from waging further war in the Middle East.
The airing of the neocon nutjobs’ views at this time has a different purpose. It is part of a blatant attempt to define the limits of acceptable discourse on Israel/Hizbollah so that the only sensible position – an immediate halt by Israel of all hostilities and a withdrawal from Lebanon – is framed as so far left as to be beyond the pale of serious discussion. The Bush/Rice position – let’s not too be too hasty about asking Israel to stop killing UN observers and Lebanese civilians – looks in comparison as the path of sober moderation, a compromise between the views of all serious observers.
Just as in 2002, there is a deliberate attempt to marginalize anyone in the reality-based community. And once again, the views of those to the right on Israel get defined as the reasonable center so the extreme right – Perle and Gingrich – are reframed merely as to the right and worthy of attention. In the process, genuine moderates are swept off to a far left corner. You want Israel to withdraw now? Forget it. Did you just mention Edward Said? Come on, get real.
Assuming no new terrorist attacks in the US, it is arguable whether again recasting the moderate/right center as far left will work as well as it did for drumming up support for the lunatic notion of invading Iraq. But it may confuse folks long enough for Bush to feel he has the “support of the people” to attack Iran. And that is all that is needed.
Neocon Nutballs In Full Effect
by digby
So, the long knives are out for Miss Condi:
Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda.
The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“The president has yet to understand that people make policy and not the other way around,” a senior national security policy analyst said. “Unlike [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell, Condi is loyal to the president. She is just incompetent on most foreign policy issues.”
The criticism of Miss Rice has been intense and comes from a range of Republican loyalists, including current and former aides in the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have warned that Iran has been exploiting Miss Rice’s inexperience and incompetence to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They expect a collapse of her policy over the next few months.
“We are sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you’re doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you’ll get out of us is talk,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.
What is he, 10? Is he seriously suggesting that we should launch a military attack for “viciously describing things in public?”
Mr. Gingrich … said Miss Rice’s inexperience and lack of resolve were demonstrated in the aftermath of the North Korean launch of seven short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles in July. He suggested that Miss Rice was a key factor in the lack of a firm U.S. response.
“North Korea firing missiles,” Mr. Gingrich said. “You say there will be consequences. There are none. We are in the early stages of World War III. Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don’t have the right attitude.”
Several of the critics have urged that Mr. Bush provide a high-profile post to James Baker, who was secretary of state under the administration of Mr. Bush’s father. They cited Mr. Baker’s determination to confront Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 1990.
A leading public critic of Miss Rice has been Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and regarded as close to Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Perle, pointing to the effort by the State Department to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, has accused Miss Rice of succumbing to a long-time State Department agenda of meaningless agreements meant to appease enemies of the United States.
“Condoleezza Rice has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away,” Mr. Perle wrote in a June 25 Op-Ed article in the Washington Post that has been distributed throughout conservative and national security circles. “What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice’s influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of “and increasingly represents” a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries.”
Mr. Perle’s article was said to have reflected the views of many of Mr. Bush’s appointees in the White House, Defense Department and State Department. Mr. Perle maintains close contacts to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Robert Joseph, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams and Mr. Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah.
A major problem, critics said, is Miss Rice’s ignorance of the Middle East. They said the secretary relies completely on Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who is largely regarded as the architect of U.S. foreign policy. Miss Rice also consults regularly with her supporters on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Richard Lugar and the No. 2 Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.[…]
The critics within the administration expect a backlash against Miss Rice that could lead to her transfer in wake of the congressional elections in 2006. They said by that time even Mr. Bush will recognize the failure of relying solely on diplomacy in the face of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“At that point, Rice will be openly blamed and Bush will have a very hard time defending her,” said a GOP source with close ties to the administration.
They’re all 10.
Look, I think Condi Rice is a bad Secretary of State, but not for those reasons. She’s a bad Secretary of State because she is loyal to a delusional moron and can’t contain the crazies like those who are speaking in that article. If she really is some sort of dovish appeaser, she certainly has been ineffectual. She has been, after all, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for the last five years of non-stop warfare.
But this isn’t really about Condi anyway. Remember Newtie’s speech to AEI right after the invasion?
It’s been barely a week since the U.S. took control of Baghdad, but the Pentagon is already embroiled in a new war, this time with the State Department…
Gingrich, who is close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, aimed the full fury of his rhetorical fire at the State Department, accusing it of actively subverting President George W. Bush’s agenda in Iraq and beyond.“The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success,” Gingrich charged, adding, “Now the State Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory.”
It was a stunning attack from someone so closely identified with Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative hawks around him. “I’ve never seen a wholesale attack on America’s entire diplomatic establishment like this,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at Georgetown University. “This is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the neo-conservatives to institutionalize their victories over the moderate and liberal internationalists.”
[…]
Kupchan also said it was unlikely that Gingrich, as a member of the Policy Board, would not have cleared his remarks with top officials. The fact that Gingrich’s remarks were leaked to the Washington Post in advance is also highly significant. So is his choice of venue. The AEI — where Gingrich is a Fellow — is where Bush presented his most comprehensive proposal yet for democratizing Iraq and the Arab world nearly two months ago. It is also home to the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle and several other neo-conservative analysts who have been the most outspoken about promoting “regime change” in the Middle East and U.S. military dominance in the world.
Gingrich was careful to insist that he was not faulting Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom he depicted as a prisoner of the Department and its Near East bureau. But he charged that the administration was split between two “worldviews”: the State Department worldview as one of “process, politeness, and accommodation,” and president’s worldview was that of “facts, values and outcomes.” [hahaha — d] Gingrich said that the Pentagon appeared far more faithful to the latter. When the State Department failed to persuade key allies, such as Turkey, South Korea, France and Germany to support Washington, it was the Pentagon who brought along Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, according to Gingrich, thus making it far easier to go to war. “The military delivered diplomatically and then the military delivered militarily in a stunning, four-week campaign,” he declared.
Damn, these neos really smoke the good shit, don’t they? And they are so high they just keep on being obliviously wrong in exactly the same way, decade after decade.
Whether they will succeed in mau-mauing Condi and/or persuading Bush that she’s making him look like a wimp is anybody’s guess. He’s just that stupid and he might believe it. I suspect the real problem is that Junior may not trust Uncle Dick the way he once did and that means that the neos are probably going to have to do better than this to really get their war on. The best they can hope for is that through continued incompetence and incoherence, their greatest desire — World War III — will start by accident.
Hey, a lil’ neocon boy can dream, can’t he?
Oh and by the way, I’m looking forward to hearing the shrieks and bellows from noted civil rights activist Ann Coulter that criticizing Condi Rice for being incompetent is racist.
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Sometimes Politics Is Local
by poputonian
These folks have guts. First they pass a city ordinance (November 2005) ordering the United States to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and now they’re pushing around Wal-Mart:
Chicago Orders ‘Big Box’ Stores to Raise Wage
After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a ground-breaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.The ordinance, imposing the requirement on stores that occupy more than 90,000 square feet and are part of companies grossing more than $1 billion annually, would be the first in the country to single out large retailers for wage rules.
A gallery packed with supporters of the bill broke into cheers as the measure passed, by a vote of 35 to 14, after four hours of intense speeches and debate.
“This is a great day for the working men and women of Chicago,” said Alderman Joseph A. Moore, the measure’s chief sponsor. Mr. Moore said he had had inquiries about the ordinance from officials in several other cities.
An Illinois retailers’ group said it would challenge the measure in court, and Wal-Mart’s response was swift and blunt.
“It’s sad — this puts politics ahead of working men and women,” John Simley, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said in a telephone interview. “It means that Chicago is closed to business.”
Wal-Mart will still open its nearly completed branch on Chicago’s West Side this September — the company’s first store in the city — but any future plans “will likely change,” Mr. Simley said.
In arguing that Wal-Mart and other companies can easily afford to meet the new standards, proponents of the measure pointed to Costco, which says it already pays at least $10 an hour plus benefits to starting workers around the country.
In existing stores in the Chicago area, Wal-Mart pays entry-level wages of about $7.25 an hour but its average pay is $11 an hour, a company spokesman told The Chicago Tribune. The company has not revealed details of its benefits.
With this ordinance, Chicago has opened a contentious front in the growing national movement, led by labor and poverty groups, to raise the incomes of bottom-rung workers through local minimum wage and “living wage” legislation. Some economists say such measures will only stifle development and deprive consumers of access to cheap goods, but many poverty experts say that local efforts elsewhere to raise wages have not choked off growth and that the expanding, low-paying retail sector can be safely pressed to raise pay.
So maybe there is an antidote to wealthy elite politicians and a negligent federal bureaucracy.
Exploding The Mystique
by digby
Marc Lynch writes:
I don’t know anyone who will be surprised that the Rome conference failed – it seems to have been designed to fail, to give the US the chance to appear to be “doing something” while giving Israel the time it wants to continue its offensive. But this policy is so transparent, such an obvious stalling mechanism, that it is probably making things even worse for the United States and for Israel: when you are faking it, you’re supposed to at least try to maintain the pretence so that others can at least pretend to believe you. The call for an immediate ceasefire has become more or less universal now, other than from the United States and Israel: even the pro-American Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, which initially blamed Hezbollah for the crisis, are now loudly demanding an immediate ceasefire.
America is totally alone on this. And more than most Americans might realize, America is being blamed for Israel’s actions. The shift in Arab public discourse over the last week has been palpable. For the first few days, the split between the Saudi media and the “al-Jazeera public” which I wrote about at the time. Then for a few days, horror at the humanitarian situation, fury with the Arab states for their impotence, speculation about the endgame, and full-throated condemnation of Israeli aggression. But for the last few days, the main trend has been unmistakable: an increasing focus on the United States as the villain of the piece. (That the Israeli bombing of Beirut stopped just long enough for Condoleeza Rice’s photo op certainly didn’t help.)
While there’s disagreement as to whether Israel acted on behalf of an American project, there is near-consensus about American responsibility for not stopping what al-Jazeera is now calling “the sixth [Arab-Israeli] war”. For instance, al-Jazeera’s prime time Behind the News on July 25 was devoted to “the American project for a new Middle East” (with no American officials accepting their invitation to participate). If you review the daily Arab media selections I’ve been posting in the left sidebar (with short English comments and summaries) you’ll see something of this trend over the last few days: Sami Soroush, in al-Hayat, a new Middle East through Israeli war? America keeps making the same mistakes every single time; Hossein Shabakshi, al-Sharq al-Awsat, yes the Middle East needs reform and change… but not through the massacre of innocents; Abd al-Wahab Badrakhan, in al-Hayat: American plans require Israeli victory at any cost; Yasir al-Za’atra, al-Hayat: real roots of the escalating crisis is American drive for hegemony in the region; Hazem Saghiye, al-Hayat, America’s responsibility; and that’s not even getting in to Abd al-Bari Atwan (today: the Middle East against America) and the writers in al-Quds al-Arabi.
Perhaps this negative focus on America was inevitable, given Iraq and the war on terror and al-Jazeera?
No. This wasn’t inevitable. Real American leadership, such as quickly restraining the Israeli offensive and taking the lead in ceasefire negotiations, could have created a Suez moment and dramatically increased American influence and prestige (especially if the Saudis had delivered Iran in a ceasefire agreement, as I’ve heard that Saudi officials believed that they could). But by disappearing for the first days of the war and then resurfacing only to provide a megaphone for Israeli arguments and to prevent international efforts at achieving a ceasefire, the Bush administration put America at the center of the storm of blame. I think that the Lebanon war will go down in history as one of the greatest missed opportunities in recent American diplomatic history – not because we failed to go after Iran, or whatever the bobbleheads are ranting about these days, but because we failed to rise to the occasion and exercise real global leadership in the national interest.
I have said it before many times and I’ll say it again: the neocons have always been wrong about everything. This is just the latest in a decades long series of delusional miscalculations in which it is fantasized that if only the US would just get tough everything would fall into place. This is the simple essence of everything they believe in. And when they found themselves an empty brand name in a suit named George W. Bush they found the man whose infantile personality and outsized vanity could be manipulated perfectly to advance that belief.
The situation in Lebanon requires American leadership and we have failed miserably to provide it. The various players are engaged in a struggle in which minimizing loss of life and face saving kabuki may be the best we can hope for at any given time. The megalomaniacal belief that if only the Israelis are allowed to “get tough” or the Americans “take it to the Iranians” or whatever other simplistic schoolyard impulses they have been operating under have led us to the point at which the US is taking on the character of a rogue superpower, not a global leader.
I maintain that the players in the mid-east expected the US to exercize its power wisely and the American failure to fulfill its obligation has led to confusion, overreach and miscalculation. This is not surprising. The bumbling, hallucinatory nature of this administration’s foreign policy has been manifest for some time now, but it’s still hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the most powerful country in the world is being led so incompetently that it simply cannot rise to the occasion when the stakes are so high. I confess that I’m still shocked by that myself, although less so each time we are confronted with a challenge and these neocon magical thinkers automatically default to bellicose trash talk they are unable to back up.
This is a very dangerous moment for the world. The US is showing over and over again that it is immmoral and incompetent. That is the kind of thing that leads ambitious, crazy or stupid people to miscalculate and set disasterous events in motion. The neocons have destroyed America’s carefully nurtured mystique by seeking to flex its muscles for the sake of flexing them. What a mistake. This country is much, much weaker today because of it and the world is paying the price. At some point I have to imagine that we are going to be paying it too. Big Time.
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