AMERICAN FOOTPRINTS= And Why Not? They Even Look the Same*

AMERICAN FOOTPRINTS

9/9/08

And Why Not? They Even Look the Same*

Eric Martin

This should be unremarkable news:

Al Qaeda has issued a video marking the September 11 attacks, in which deputy group leader Ayman al-Zawahri accuses Iran of taking part in a Western "Crusader" war against Islam, Al Jazeera television said on Monday. [...]

In a segment on the video aired by al Jazeera, Zawahri attacked Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, questioning the Islamic Republic's anti-Western stand.

"The (leader of Iran) collaborates with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and recognizes the puppet regimes in both countries, while he warns of death and destruction to anyone who touches an inch of Iranian soil," Zawahri said.

Al Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist group, often criticizes predominantly Shi'ite Iran, which has good relations with Afghanistan's anti-Taliban leaders and Iraq's Shi'ite-led government.

I say this should be unremarkable because al-Qaeda and Iran have visions of the world that are in direct conflict. al-Qaeda, for example, wants to incite the overthrow of regimes led by apostate leaders throughout the Muslim world (which, to them, includes portions of Spain and Asia that were previously under Muslim rule). al-Qaeda's definition of apostasy in this regard amounts to the failure to adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam (the Salafi interpretation). This made the relatively secular Saddam Hussein a prime target of al-Qaeda. Considering that Iran is a Shiite theocracy (not just insufficiently "pious" in the Sunni-Salafist sense, but not Sunni at all!), one can extrapolate the regard for which al-Qaeda holds Iran's leaders (and citizens).

But one doesn't need to extrapolate alone. The Taliban in Afghanistan was the closest modern day example of the al-Qaeda ideal of piety in terms of ruling regime. The Taliban were, predictably, hostile toward Iran and brutally repressive of the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. Iran, in turn, cooperated closely with the US during the early stages of the US-led Afghan campaign in order to aid in the ouster of the Taliban.

Despite this backstory, Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings caught one pundit treating the Reuters story linked above as some harbinger of a fragmentation within the ranks of a monolithic "Islamofascist" front (a splintering brought about by the US invasion of Iraq, naturally). As if al-Qaeda and Iran were longtime allies that had begun turning on each other due to the guile of the Bush administration.

At the risk of stating the obvious (it passes for wisdom these days), it is absolutely essential that we take the time to differentiate between factions, groups, nations, ethnicities and religious sects in our attempt to implement sound and effective counterterrorism policy. Enough to recognize that Iran and al-Qaeda, while perhaps willing to cooperate in some limited way in certain discrete contexts (possibly), are adversaries that should not be lumped together.

While it's understandable that some pundits might not be entirely familiar with the basic al-Qaeda/Iran animosity, it is much less forgivable that John McCain, the supposed foreign policy "master," can't seem to keep these two distinct groups separate. Repeatedly.


_______________________________________________

Kidnapping Ahmadinejad

TIME (Middle East Blog)
9/10/08

Kidnapping Ahmadinejad

Tim McGirk

The Iranians are a little peeved. An Israeli cabinet minister hinted darkly that Mossad ought to kidnap their president.

And this threat comes from Rafi Eitan, an ex-Mossad agent who used to strangle people with a piano wire.

No wonder the Iranians are upset. They've probably sent down word to their underground labs to make their uranium-enriching centrifuges spin faster.

What Eitan says is childish, and a lot of Israelis laugh off Eitan as a clown. They roll their eyes when Eitan comes out with zingers like this. But I dug out a quote from Eitan, about his days as a Mossad assassin. "Whenever I killed, I needed to see their eyes, the whites of their eyes. Then I was calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it," Eitan told Gordon Thomas, author of "Gideon's Spies", a history of the Mossad.

Eitan also knows about kidnapping, too. He led the Mossad team in May 1960 that grabbed Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the dead camps, off a Buenos Aires street and smuggled him back to Israel where he was tried, executed and his ashes were cast out to sea.

The trickiest part wasn't the actual kidnap. It was sneaking Eichmann past the Argentinian guards at the airport so they could board a waiting El Al plane. First they got Eichmann sozzled on an entire bottle of Scotch. "We played the drunken Jews who couldn't handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look."

Don't think that ploy would work terribly well in Tehran. A drunken Ahmadinejad, howling out songs of unrequited love in the arms of his Israeli kidnappers, might just attract a tiny bit of attention as the getaway car whizzes through Tehran.

Also, there seems to be a lull in classy Israeli kidnappings. During the last Lebanon war, a superbly-executed commando raid netted Hassan Nasrallah, only it wasn't the fugitive Hizballah leader. It was Hassan Nasrallah the green grocer, no relation. Nice try, guys.

Ok, so Eitan's strangler's grip has probably weakened. He's still a tough guy, but he's old, leader of the Pensioners' Party, which did well in the last elections (young, cool Israelis voted for Eitan on a lark) but will probably score zero Knesset seats next time around. This means that Eitan will be unemployed again, and available for nefarious plots and schemes. Trouble is, as a spy he fell into disgrace over the Jonathan Pollard affair, the U.S. naval intelligence specialist arrested in Nov. 1985 and sentenced to life in prison as an Israeli spy.

Don't underestimate the power of Rafi's hands. After carrying out a Mossad job—car-bombings were another specialty—he'd come back to weld and hammer together metal sculptures in his garden. He still sculpts, his hands are sinewy and he may soon be without a job, restless. Sleep well tonight, Mr. Ahmadinejad!

A 'Failed Business Model'

A 'Failed Business Model'




Opinion: Steve Forbes: What Next For Fannie & Freddie? A 'Failed Business Model' Washington: Outsiders' Insight May Be Right Thing For GSEs Fannie And Freddie's 15-Month Fix Dodd On The Bailout The Road From Here Wall Street: BofA's Bailout Benefit Some Banks Get Burned The Bailout Boon For Euro Banks Video: Beyond The Bailout Fannie, Freddie And The Taxpayer Banks After GSE Bailout

Henry Paulson's plan is a major disappointment.

Although it was certainly necessary to bail out ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ), the plan put forward by the treasury secretary this weekend prioritizes steering them back to financial health and defers into the future what is to become of the companies.

What's worse, after blaming the collapse of the companies on a "flawed business model," the plan will preserve that model indefinitely, allowing the shareholders of what are now insolvent entities to recover some value.

Long after Paulson is gone from the Treasury, Washington will be wrestling with the problem of what to do about Fannie and Freddie. And if the two companies are eventually nationalized, privatized or liquidated, the government--meaning taxpayers--will have to compensate the existing shareholders in some way.

The plan is relatively simple, but its implications for the future are troubling. First, Fannie and Freddie will be put under government control in an arrangement called a conservatorship. The purpose of a conservatorship is, essentially, to keep things as they are.

A conservator does not have the power to make any significant changes to the business model of a company; rather, its focus is to guide the company back to stability. Why anyone would sustain what Paulson himself called a flawed business model is hard to understand.

It gets worse. Under the plan, the Treasury is committed to providing equity capital to Fannie and Freddie. Another puzzle: Why is it necessary to inject taxpayer funds into these companies as equity? Ordinary companies need capital so that they can meet their obligations, but both these companies will have access to a financial facility at the Treasury that will allow them to borrow all the funds they require.

They don't need capital. The injection of capital is, in fact, a gift to the existing shareholders, who--as the owners of insolvent companies--own nothing and deserve no benefits from the taxpayers. By injecting these taxpayer funds and enabling the companies to survive, the Treasury plan opens the possibility that the existing shareholders will eventually profit from their investments, when, by all rights, they should be wiped out.

The nature of this gift is further emphasized by the fact that the Treasury is taking warrants for its agreement to finance these companies. These warrants will only be worth something--and thereby allow the Treasury to compensate the taxpayers--if the companies are nursed back to financial health under the conservatorship. So the government has created an incentive for itself to keep the companies alive and restore their well-being.

Once that occurs, the current shareholders will again be able to reap the benefits of holding interests in government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)--only in this case, the two companies will not be implicitly backed by the government; they will be explicitly backed. In that case, the shareholders and the managements will once more profit from the government backing, while the taxpayers will still be the ones taking the losses.

There was an alternative, one that was simpler and much more sensible from a policy perspective. Since Fannie and Freddie operated under this "flawed business model"--by which Paulson probably meant government backing for shareholder-owned companies, the essence of a GSE--the plan should have set things in motion for the elimination of this model.

Instead of a conservatorship, the plan should have provided for a receivership. That system would get rid of the common stockholders while still monitoring the companies for an indefinite period in order to keep the mortgage market functioning smoothly.

Thus, while Paulson's plan was intended to provide some "breathing room" for consideration of the companies' future, what it will do in effect is restore them to health as government-sponsored enterprises, and, more critically, allow them and their newly empowered shareholders to bargain about the companies' collective future from a position of strength.

No wonder U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York--probably the GSEs' most ardent supporter in Congress--issued the following statement after Paulson addressed the press on Sunday: "This plan will be met with broad acceptance in Congress, because it doesn't prejudge the ultimate fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.'' Translation: Prepare for a fight--because we intend to keep the GSEs alive.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been campaigning against the culture of corruption in the federal government. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has based his campaign on the idea of change in Washington. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are telling illustrations of corporate welfare--the profitable private exploitation of a cozy relationship with the government. And the Paulson plan will foster just what a cynic might expect: more of the same.

Peter J. Wallison is the Arthur F. Burns fellow in financial policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute . General counsel of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, he is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Trouble With Fannie, Freddie

Freddie, Fannie Bailout

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/09/08/...tml?partner=rcm

The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge' By Robert Parry

The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge'

By Robert Parry
September 9, 2008

Since Jan. 10, 2007, when George W. Bush announced his troop “surge,” more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq War – about a quarter of the total war dead – but now an even higher cost may loom ahead, the indefinite continuation of the conflict under President John McCain.
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Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the “surge” was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq’s violence. It’s also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the “surge” idea early.

Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised – even badgered – for opposing the “surge.” His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.

The latest example came during an ABC News “This Week” interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you escape the logic that … John McCain was right about the surge?”

When Obama responded that he didn’t understand “why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?”

In other words, the big-name journalists don’t want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the “surge” has virtually won the war.

In reality, the “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops sent to Iraq appears to have been only one factor and – according to military officials interviewed for Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within – possibly a secondary one in explaining the drop-off in the violence that had made Iraq a living hell.

As Woodward writes, “In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”

Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.

A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.

But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]

Successful Repression

As we’ve reported previously, other brutal factors – that the Washington press corps almost never mentions – help explain the decline in violence:

--Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.

--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also have “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.

--During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison.

--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.

--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.

The only time they get tough in interviews is with Obama, demanding that he get in line with the rest of Washington’s conventional wisdom and hail the media’s old favorite, John McCain, for his courage and wisdom.

In playing this role, the U.S. press is again playing into Bush’s hands and his desire to make sure that outright defeat in Iraq won’t occur on his watch – and that he will leave behind a successor who is committed to the neoconservative strategy of open-ended warfare against Muslim militants.

That is what appears increasingly likely as McCain surges up to – and in some polls moves decisively ahead of – Obama.

Domestic Images

As Woodward’s book makes clear, Bush always understood the importance of controlling American perceptions about the Iraq War, even when that required lying to the public.

Not only did Bush insist in 2006 that the war was being won when he knew differently – and he said he was listening to his commanders when, in reality, he was overruling their judgments – he talked privately about the need to control the Iraq War images to influence the voters back home.

“The U.S. presence helps to keep the lid on,” Bush told the top regional commander, Gen. John Abizaid, in explaining the reasoning for a troop buildup, and “also helps here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2008]

In that assessment, Bush was politically prescient.

When the catastrophic levels of violence finally declined to the simply terrible, Bush’s partisans – especially the many well-placed neoconservative opinion leaders – began baiting anyone who had doubted the “surge,” much as they had hectored anyone who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003.

The conventional wisdom about the “successful surge” has transformed Campaign 2008, throwing Obama onto the defensive in interview after interview, while virtually no journalist presses McCain about his judgment to make a rapid pivot out of Afghanistan in early 2002 toward Iraq.

Arguably, McCain’s advocacy for this premature pivot – while Afghanistan was still in a fragile state and top al-Qaeda leaders were finding new safe haven in northwest Pakistan – was the biggest strategic blunder in modern American military history.

It has locked the United States into two open-ended wars with costs likely to soar into the trillions of dollars, while the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorates and nuclear-armed Pakistan slides toward instability.

But the political commentators place none of the blame on John McCain.

No Drawdown

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the supposedly “successful surge” apparently does not mean the United States can withdraw significant numbers of troops in the foreseeable future. President Bush has decided to leave U.S. troop levels in Iraq at about where they are now.

That means the number of American soldiers on the ground in Iraq at the end of January 2009 may well be about the same – or even slightly higher – than when the “surge” was announced two years earlier.

However, the likeliest long-term outcome for the United States in Iraq appears to be that eventually the U.S. occupation forces will be told to leave by an increasingly nationalistic Iraqi government, a kind of thanks for all the help but don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

The odds then would be that any post-U.S.-occupied Iraq would remain divided by bitter sectarianism as the country has been for centuries and that any democratic institutions would be fragile at best. The likeliest regional winner would be Iran, which has seen its Shiite allies gain the upper hand over the old Sunni power structure.

A possible alternative outcome, of course, would be a unilateral decision by Washington to refuse to leave.

That may be what the victorious neoconservatives in a McCain administration would want, but that would come at an even higher price in blood and treasure. It also would mean that the few remnants of the old American Republic would be wiped away by the arrival of a new American Empire.

Yet, the U.S. news media, which mostly has cheered on the Iraq War from its “shock and awe” beginning through today’s “successful surge,” has no time to assess the future cost of the Iraq War in lives, money and American principles. That staggering price tag is simply not in the media's frame of reference.

Instead, it’s all about hailing McCain and bashing Obama.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/090808.html

Worshiping the Indispensable Nation by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt

Worshiping the
Indispensable Nation

by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch

Can anyone be surprised that, once again, the attacks of 9/11/01 were reflexively ground zero for embattled Republicans? George W. Bush led the way at the Republican National Convention, saying of John McCain, "We need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001." In his convention keynote address, Rudy Giuliani followed suit, zapping Obama and his supporters this way: "The Democrats rarely mentioned the attacks of Sept. 11. They are in a state of denial about the threat that faces us now and in the future." Post-convention, it's evidently time to assure the nation that Sarah Palin is just the pit bull to handle the next 9/11. Now comes the news that this Thursday, the endless presidential election campaign will finally make it – quite literally – to Ground Zero. Barack Obama and John McCain will "put aside politics" and appear together for the yearly ceremonies. By now, however, it's far too late to "put aside" 9/11, much less remove it from American politics. Our world has been profoundly reshaped, after all, by the decisions Bush and his top officials made in the wake of those attacks.

Still, taking up the president's implied question, what "lessons" exactly should be drawn, seven years later, other than that you stand a reasonable chance of winning elections by invoking 9/11 ad nauseam? As Andrew Bacevich, author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, indicates below, there are indeed lessons to be drawn. They are, in fact, devastating to the Bush administration, and unless they are grasped, further disaster is undoubtedly in the offing. (To watch a video of Bacevich discussing those post-9/11 lessons, click here.) Tom

9/11 Plus Seven

by Andrew J. Bacevich

The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable – a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

On Sept. 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.

The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.

Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evildoers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.

When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move – into Afghanistan – had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.

Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."

The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to al-Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq – any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.

Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course – so Perle and others believed.

Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East – and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.

In either case – whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization – today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.

In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Sen. John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.

The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East – unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either – at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform – even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.

In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His best-selling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can read excerpts from it by clicking here, and here, or watch a video of him discussing the lessons of 9/11, seven years later, by clicking here.

Copyright 2008 Andrew J. Bacevich
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=13437

US 'In Need of Rebellion'

US 'In Need of Rebellion'

An Interview With Howard Zinn:

Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US "empire" is close to collapse. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20721.htm

Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502659.html

Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash
Mira Kamdar, The Washington Post
While everyone has been abuzz about Georgia, the Beijing Olympics and Sarah Palin, perhaps the most important development in the world has been unfolding with almost no attention. India and the United States, along with deep-pocketed corporations, have been steadily pushing along a lucrative and dangerous new nuclear pact, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.

U.S. Plans $7 Billion Missile-Defense Sale to UAE Jim Wolf, Reuters

U.S. Plans $7 Billion Missile-Defense Sale to UAE
Jim Wolf, Reuters
The Bush administration is planning to sell the United Arab Emirates an advanced U.S. missile defense system valued at up to $7 billion that could be used to defend against Iran, people who have attended briefings on the matter said on Monday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0845547120080908

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America) Nouriel Roubini

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America)
Nouriel Roubini | Sep 9, 2008 The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (" leveraged buy-out") in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke (as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue "regulators" who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash "unnecessary regulations" are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions=2 0of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don't run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.

A Bad Deal The New York Times

A Bad Deal The New York Times

President Bush has failed to achieve so many of his foreign policy goals, but last weekend he proved that he can still get what he really wants. The administration bullied and wheedled international approval of the president's ill-conceived nuclear deal with India.

The decision by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (which sets rules for nuclear trade) means that for the first time in more than 30 years — since New Delhi used its civilian nuclear program to produce a bomb — the world can sell nuclear fuel and technology to India.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/opinion/09tue2.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

* Final Version of NSG Statement on India
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=21950

* Atomic Club Votes to End Restrictions on India
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/world/asia/07india.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin


* Goodbye to Nuclear Export Controls
http://www.thehindu.com/2008/09/09/stories/2008090956071100.htm

Why The Fannie-Freddie Bailout Will Fail

Why The Fannie-Freddie Bailout Will Fail

By Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.

With yesterday's announcement of the most massive federal bailout of all time, it's now official: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest mortgage lenders on Earth, are bankrupt. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20707.htm

The Worsening Debt Crisis

The Worsening Debt Crisis

by Mike Whitney / September 9th, 2008 (0)

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas …
(Full article …)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/09/the-worsening-debt-crisis/

The Airline Bomb Plot & the Visa Waiver Program By Michael Cutler

The Airline Bomb Plot & the Visa Waiver Program
By Michael Cutler

ABC Nightline aired a news story last night about the conviction of the British citizens who were involved in a conspiracy to carry out terrorist attacks to bring liquid explosives on board a number of airliners that were destined to arrive in the United States. This plot is the reason that we are restricted to bring no more than 3 ounce bottles of shampoo and other fluids on airliners. It is the reason that so many seemingly bizarre measures have been taken by TSA officials, such as when nursing women were reportedly required to drink their own breast milk brought to feed their infant children.

The timing of this news story is coincidental but it is certainly worth remembering that this week our nation will mark the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. What is, in my judgement, utterly unacceptable is that fact that even with all of these concerns about potential future devastating terrorist attacks, our nation still permits aliens from some 27 countries to seek to enter the United States without first applying for and receiving a visa.

Those British terrorists, not unlike Richard Reid, the so-called "Shoe Bomber," would not require visas in order to board an airliner destined for the United States. The point is that while far from perfect, the visa requirement could well have kept Richard Reid off the airliner he had planned to destroy by detonating explosives secreted in his shoes. The point is that these British terrorists could have sought to board an airliner they were intent on destroying without first securing visas. The visa requirement also provides other significant benefits to law enforcement and hence, represent a vital, additional layer of security that is being ignored by our government, even as the administration pushes forward with plans to expand the Visa Waiver Program to include additional countries.

Last year I was interviewed by Mike Ahlers of CNN for a news report he was writing about the Visa Waiver Program and the fact that the executives of the travel and hospitality industries advocating that our government expand the Visa Waiver Program. As you read these articles and my commentaries you should be asking yourself, "Are we safer today than we were on September 10, 2001?" Our government is supposed to represent the best interests of We the People and the best interests of our nation. That our government would ratchet up security at airport and other vulnerable venues makes good sense, if those measures are truly effective and enhance our safety and the security of our nation. These measures must make a "real world" difference and not simply create an illusion of addressing vital national security issues.
September 9, 2008 01:34 PM Link http://counterterrorismblog.org/

The "Not so Just in Time" Note from Steve Clemons: Lincoln Chafee, Zbig & Brent & Ignatius, Convention Events and more

Greetings Colleagues and Friends:

On November 5th, we’ll all have to have a kick off the shoes and ‘veg’ day...we’ll stream it online for those around the world who are equally exhausted from this political season. But I’m writing now to bring a few things to your attention. Hope you enjoy — all the best, Steve Clemons

LINCOLN CHAFEE (TODAY)

First of all, I am hosting former Senator Lincoln Chafee today from 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm EST on the subject of “What Patriotism Looks Like”. Chafee is now a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and the author of Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. This meeting will STREAM LIVE at www.TheWashingtonNote.com if you would like to join us over the internet. You may also join us at the New America Foundation today if you are in the neighborhood.


BRENT SCOWCROFT, ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, AND DAVID IGNATIUS

Next, I wanted to announce that today is the release date of a new New America Foundation/Basic Books imprint, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and David Ignatius. We are very proud that this book has been published with support from the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. You can buy your copy here (and I hope you do): http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ignatius+scowcroft&x=0&y=0


SHERLE SCHWENNINGER AND BERNARD SCHWARTZ

The New America Foundation has launched its new BIG IDEAS SERIES with a paper and video commentary by Sherle Schwenninger on the America’s post-bubble economy. Check out this cool video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4lUsWJ4SeQ


US-MIDDLE EAST POLICY AT DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

Here are some great clips from the US-Middle East Policy events we organized in both Denver and St. Paul at the respective political conventions. The Denver meeting featured Senator John Kerry (D-MA), Obama campaign national security adviser Greg Craig, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Aspen Institute President and former CNN Chairman & CEO Walter Isaacson, and former Congressman and Obama campaign adviser Mel Levine. Respondents and commentators included New America Foundation Middle East Policy Initiative Director Daniel Levy, New America Foundation President and New Yorker Staff Writer Steve Coll, International Crisis Group Middle East Program Director Robert Malley, Arab American Institute President James Zogby, Stonebridge International Senior Adviser and former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senior Staff Member Janice O’Connell.

THE DEM/DENVER EVENT VIDEO CLIP IS HERE (ABBREVIATED): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3Tjs5Ho00k&feature=user


US-MIDDLE EAST POLICY AT REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION

The Republican Convention/New America Foundation US-Middle East Policy event featured: Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, former Bush Administration Asst. Secretary of Energy Alexander Karsner, former Associate Deputy Secretary of Energy and Senior Adviser to Senator Spencer Abraham Randa Fahmy Hudome, Economist International Correspondent Lane Greene, theologian Deal Hudson, Atlantic Associate Editor and New America Foundation fellow Reihan Salam, Al Hayat Senior Diplomatic Correspondent and Columnist Raghida Dergham.

THE REPUBLICAN EVENT VIDEO CLIP IS HERE (NOT ABBREVIATED): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNL8Fd79VS0&feature=user


UPCOMING EVENTS OF NOTE

Beyond Wall Street, Beyond Fannie and Freddie: Financing the Productive Economy
Delore Zimmerman, President, Praxis Strategy Group
Sherle Schwenninger, Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation
Joel Kotkin, Senior Fellow, New America Foundation and Presidential Fellow, Chapman University
Dennis Donohue, Mayor, City of Salinas
12 September, Friday, 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm EST
This event will stream live at The Washington Note

Film Screening
“The Battle in Seattle”
featuring academy award winning actress Charlize Theron
Regal Gallery Place Cinema
701 7th Street, Washington, DC
15 September, Monday, 7:00 pm SHARP
RSVPs required at clemons@newamerica.net

September 03, 2008 Leading Journal Publishes a Desperate Portrait of Israel as a 'Failed European Fragment' Hated by Its Neighbors

Mondoweiss
Iraq comes home: the war of ideas, mostly by Philip Weiss
September 03, 2008
Leading Journal Publishes a Desperate Portrait of Israel as a 'Failed European Fragment' Hated by Its Neighbors

The forthcoming issue of Middle East Policy contains an astonishing piece by Ian Lustick of the University of Pa. on the desperation inside Israel about its future, titled "The Abandonment of the Iron Wall: Israel and the 'Middle Eastern Muck.'" The long piece explores the mistaken ideology that "Israel and Israelis can remain in the Middle East without becoming part of it" and it will surely be grabbed by Barack Obama (and ignored by Sarah Palin), for it pulls together all the narratives that we keep hearing from I/P--the ruthless violence, the hateful fence, the emigration, the "war on terror" as a model for Americans, and not least, the Arabs' hostile passivity and righteous, hardened resistance.

I will never think about the region in the same way. The analysis is sure to find its way to the highest levels. It is not online yet, but here is my summary of the argument.

For the first 90 years of Zionism the Zionists understood that the Arabs didn't want them there and in spite of Arab resistance they were going to just hang in there and pound the heck out of the Arabs till they reluctantly accepted their presence. "The iron wall" strategy of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which even Rashid Khalidi said recently in the Nation has worked: Israel's there, the Arab states have given in to its presence. Pile up the bodies a little more, sign a peace deal.

But in the wake of the first intifadah, the Iron Wall idea has been cast aside, giving way in a climate of mutual hatred to a sense of existential struggle: that Arabs and Israelis are fundamentally opposed, and that both cannot live in the region. The Israelis have yielded to irrational uses of violence typical of the French in Algeria and other pariah states. And meantime, the Arabs have gotten over the insuperable Iron Wall idea themselves--and begun to believe that if they just last the Israelis out, they will go away.

Neither side really believes in the other's humanity. This explains the hysteria around Iran from Ahmadinejad and Benny Morris too: They want us gone. It explains the World War IV feelings of Norman Podhoretz and other neocons, basically saying that the U.S. has to destroy the Arab world in order to make it safe for Israel. And it explains the triumphalism of Hezbollah and Hamas, and also the growing support for a one-state solution even in leftwing Arabist circles in the U.S.--because it sure is feeling like the long Zionist nightmare is about to end. Israel is another "failed European fragment," like the Crusaders or South Africa or India, but the last one to go.

Lustick admits that he doesn't know the full range of Arab attitudes, but he ruthlessly explores the spiritual sickness in Israeli society, the resort to horrifying violence (wanting to turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years), the lack of faith in Zionism, and the desertion of Israel by as many as 1 million of its citizens who would prefer to live in Europe or the U.S. Oh exile, where is thy sting!

Lustick concludes by saying that the moment is truly desperate and the key is to reimagine Israeli existence, to reach some actual modus vivendi with the Palestinians through some real acknowledgement of Palestinian humanity and rights. He fully articulates something I've repeated here: that the Israelis want nothing to do with Arabs, though they live in the Arab world, 500 miles east of Istanbul. And that going forward requires asking, What do Palestinians want?

Below I'm going to sample choice bits of the piece, which is getting passed with excitement among followers of Middle East policy. As soon as it's online, I'll let you know. Ian Lustick:

Among Israelis, a natural and very
prominent result of this deep-seated
alienation from the region, its peoples and
its cultures is an urge to escape. It takes
many forms. Consider the construction of
the "security barrier," a network of fencing,
concrete walls, barbed wire, trenches
and embankments intended to surround the
Jewish state. One can usefully imagine the
barrier as transforming Israel into a kind of
"gated community" sealed off from the
Middle East as hermetically as possible.

However, it must also be noted that
the effect of the barrier, and perhaps more
of its purpose than is commonly acknowledged,
is not to keep Middle Easterners
out of Israel, but to physically and psychologically
remove Israel from the Middle
East....

Israelis with the training, skills and
wealth to do so are also literally "escaping"
from the Middle East and from those parts
of Israel that are more Middle Eastern.

There is significant evidence that,
since the collapse of the Oslo peace
process and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa
Intifada, the emigration of Israeli Jews has
increased, as have activities that would
make future emigration easier. In February
2007, Israel's minister of immigrant
absorption, Zeev Boim, acknowledged that
there were between 700,000 and 1 million
Israeli expatriates worldwide, with some
600,000 in North America alone...

The core idea [of the Iron Wall] was not to
avoid war, but to insure victories of such
vividness and consequence that Arabs
would come to regard Israel's existence an
immutable, if unpleasant, fact of Middle
Eastern life. Once that attitude was
instilled, the objective was to combine the
stick of coercion with the carrot of compromise
to achieve negotiated peace
agreements....

What Arabs learned from the
Lebanon War was not the inevitability of
accommodating themselves to Israeli
diktats, but the vulnerability of the Israeli
army and Israeli society to determined
Arab and Muslim political and military
action...

As I have stressed, Zionism's use of
violence against Arabs was traditionally
conceived as a pedagogical device to
convince Arabs of the Jewish National
Home's indestructibility, and then to
persuade some among them to negotiate
mutually acceptable deals based on the
alternative of suffering painful defeats. It
is natural, then, that, as images of a future
in which Arabs and Muslims can come to
accept the Jewish state fade from Israeli
consciousness, the rationale for violence
also changes. Instead of being conceived
as a persuasive instrument in service of
political or diplomatic aims, force against
Arabs and Muslims is increasingly treated
as a kind of rattonade. This was the term
used to characterize the French practice in
Algeria of entering casbahs and other
Muslim quarters, killing inhabitants, and
then quickly returning to European areas or
bases. Its literal meaning is "rat hunt."
More generally, it refers to a violent strike
against the enemy "on the other side of the
wall" for purposes of punishment, destruction
and psychological release....

Israel, of course, is the only survivor in
this list [of outposts of European settlement].Counting from the state's establishment,
it is almost 60 years old. Counting
from the first arrival of Zionist settlers
in Palestine, it is 125 years old — compared
to almost two hundred years for the
Crusaders; about 80 years for the white
version of the Union, then Republic, of
South Africa; 120 years for French Algeria;
and 34 years for independent (white)
Rhodesia. Israel's biggest challenge,
indeed the biggest challenge facing Zionism
and its descendants, is to escape the fate
of all other polities falling within this
category. Can Israel do what no other
country in this category has done —
establish itself as a commonsensical,
naturalized, and presumptively permanent
feature of a non-European landscape?

The argument set forth here has
been that Israel and Jewish Israelis are
deep into the process of abandoning any
image of the state or of themselves as part
of the Middle East. Instead of hoping to
transform Arab/Muslim attitudes toward
the Jewish state by a pedagogy of force
followed by diplomacy (the Iron Wall
strategy), or of transforming the cultural
content of the region via modernization
cum Westernization, Israelis are seeking
isolation or escape....

[I]t may be noted that in each of the modern cases of
failed European fragments, international
pariah status preceded the polity's demise.
There is ample evidence that Israel is
assuming this image..

Certainly it is
true that some Arab regimes continue to
express their willingness to sign peace
treaties with Israel. But in a region whose
deepest and strongest political sentiments
are those of religion, it would seem that, if
democracy does take hold in the Middle
East, it may simply accelerate the rise to
power of forces unwilling to accept Israel
as a long-term partner in the future of the
region...


[If] Israelis are so disconnected from Middle
Eastern realities as to have lost the empathy
with Palestinians necessary to convince
them that negotiations will lead to a satisfying
outcome, and if Arabs and Muslims in
the Middle East are as intransigently hostile
to Israel as most Israelis believe them to
be, then, in effect, a two-state solution has
been rendered impossible. This is not
because of the oft-discussed supposed
impossibility of actually establishing a
Palestinian state next to Israel (Hamas, for
its part, is perfectly ready to accept one as
a prelude to a 20-year lull in the battle.).
The impossibility of a the two-state solution
hangs, instead, on the question of whether
the belief in the rationale behind it —
achieving some semblance of a comprehensively
stable and peaceful end to the
Arab-Israeli dispute — will have vanished
from inside Israeli political life. Why
should Israelis tear themselves to pieces to
produce a state that will satisfy the Pales
tinians if they come to believe that the rest
of the Middle East hates Israel more than
they care for the Palestinians?

...Having abandoned the Iron Wall,

Israelis are increasingly confused and even
distraught about the future. Yet they face
a stark choice: engagement with the real
Middle East and the demands it makes
upon Israel for justice, democracy and
territory, or escape from it.

The danger for the Jewish state is that, given the choice between convincing Middle Easterners that Israel can be a good neighbor and leaving the neighborhood, more and more Israelis are attracted to the latter...

Most unsettling of all is the interaction between two logical but mutually reinforcing trends. Israelis are embracing coercive and unilateralist policies that destroy whatever is left of its
image as a potential good neighbor. Arabs and Muslims can be expected to treat signs
of Jewish abandonment of the region as encouragement to forget any inclination
they may still have to make peace with the Jews rather than wait them out....


_______________________________________________

Palestinians lose faith in two-state solution Study group calls for new form of resistance to Israeli occupation with goal of single, bi-national stat

Palestinians lose faith in two-state solution
Study group calls for new form of resistance to Israeli occupation with goal of single, bi-national state
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Thursday September 4 2008
guardian.co.uk


A group of prominent Palestinian figures has proposed a radical change in strategy to demand a single, bi-national state if the current round of Middle East peace talks fails.

The Palestinian Strategy Study Group, an EU-funded project written by 27 leading Palestinian figures from across the political spectrum, argued that the current two-state framework for peace talks is failing to bring the promised independent state. Instead, it suggested ending the negotiation process that has gone on now for nearly 20 years, reconstituting the Palestinian Authority into what might become a "Palestinian Resistance Authority", and developing a form of "smart" resistance.

"The central aim will be to maximise the cost of continuing occupation for Israel, and to make the whole prospect of unilateral separation unworkable," it said. The final, and most striking proposal, is to shift to a "single state outcome" as the Palestinians' preferred goal. This, it said, would regain the strategic initiative for the Palestinians.

"Although many Palestinians may still prefer a genuine negotiated two-state solution, a failure of the present Annapolis initiative will greatly strengthen those who argue against this," the report said. "Most Palestinians are then likely to be convinced that a negotiated agreement is no longer possible."

It is not the first time a bi-national state has been proposed as a Palestinian goal, but the new report signals a marked shift in Palestinian thinking at a time when the latest peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are yet again struggling to make any headway. Questions are now being asked on both sides about the future of the two-state solution that for so long has been the framework of Middle East peacemaking.

The greatest disquiet is on the Palestinian side, where even moderates are now beginning to sense the two-state formula is moving out of reach.

"I feel that a two-state solution is losing currency amongst both our peoples and with the world community beyond," said Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister and former World Bank and IMF economist, in a speech he wrote for a meeting of former Israeli diplomats yesterday and which was delivered by Riad Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister.

Malki himself admitted that, despite 10 months of talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, which began in Annapolis, in the United States, not a single word of agreement had been put on paper. The Annapolis process, the first such peace talks in seven years, were supposed to produce a peace agreement by the end of this year - a goal that has proved wildly unrealistic.

Another group, the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information, published a policy document this week with proposals for the Palestinians to change the status quo. Among the options it said were available were dissolving the Palestinian Authority, calling for a one-state solution and making a Kosovo-style unilateral declaration of independence.

However, it noted that the chief risk of calling for a single, bi-national state was that nothing would change and the status quo would simply worsen given how deeply unpopular the idea is among Israelis. "With so little support from the more powerful neighbour, it seems unlikely that the Palestinian call for unity will bring many positive results in the near term," it said. Instead, it concluded: "We feel that a tightly coordinated non-violent campaign toward statehood is the best option."

One of the key obstacles on the Palestinian side now is the bitter infighting between the two leading factions, Fatah and Hamas. Since last year, Hamas, the Islamist group that won elections in 2006, has been in full control of Gaza and daily seems to be dividing ever further from its rival Fatah, which effectively controls the West Bank. Even if a peace agreement was reached this year, it is hard to see how it might be implemented in Gaza without reconciliation between the rival factions, and for now that seems out of their grasp.

Hamas has long argued against negotiations with Israel. "We don't see any fruits from the political negotiations," Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas advisor said in a recent interview in Gaza. "So we have to make an evaluation for the whole Palestinian national project. Since Madrid in 1991 until now it's been 17 years but we've seen nothing on the ground. How can I convince people that we are going in the right direction?"

On the Israeli side, opinion is more mixed. In general the two-state solution is still broadly regarded as a reasonable goal, although there are many on the rightwing who say Israel should not give up the land it captured in 1967 or who say Israelis have a Biblical right to settle in the West Bank that cannot be negotiated away.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister who will step down later this month, has pursued negotiations, arguing that a two-state solution is attainable. On Sunday he will discuss with the cabinet a plan to pay compensation to encourage some of the more distant settlers in the West Bank to move either to Israel or to settlements within the West Bank barrier.

Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister who is likely to replace him as head of the ruling Kadima party, also argues in favour of negotiations and has been deeply involved in the latest talks, although she has said she would resist pressure to hurry the negotiations. Ehud Barak, the defence minister, suggested yesterday that some of the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem might become the future capital of a Palestinian state, an idea which has not always been palatable to Israelis.

Yet there are others beginning to voice different ideas. In a newspaper column in the Yedioth Ahronoth this week, Giora Eiland, a former head of the National Security Council and former national security adviser under Ariel Sharon, said the gap between Israel and the Palestinians was "enormous" and growing.

"The maximum that the Israeli government [any government] will be able to offer the Palestinians [and survive politically] falls short of the minimum that the Palestinian government [any government] can agree to accept [and survive politically]," he wrote. Eiland argued that a final status peace deal "will not be achievable in the foreseeable future" and that new ideas should be considered. He suggested returning control of the West Bank to Jordan, who controlled it before the 1967 war.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

Gearing Up to Strike Iran By: P. David Hornik

Gearing Up to Strike Iran
By: P. David Hornik
Jerusalem sees the eleventh hour approaching. More>

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F73D2A2E-D81B-4AB8-BF06-A966041E2B99

The Georgias to Come

In the absence ot a Saakashvili to provide the requisite provocation (a difference not addressed by the author), these could indeed provide test cases....

The Georgias to Come

By Michael Radu
*FrontPageMagazine.com 9/5/2008

Those who thought that wayward Georgia marks the end rather than the
beginning of Russia's appetite for regional conquest should consider a
recent headline from a Romanian newspaper: "The other Georgia to come:
The 18 tanks of Transnistria could reach Chisinau in 30 minutes." The
August 22 article went on to warn that Russia now threatens Europe's
easternmost reaches.

This will indeed come as news to Americans, most of whom have never
heard of Transnistria, a breakaway republic in Moldova, or of Chisinau,
Moldova's capital. Moldova, despite being a UN member state, is another
of those legalistic entities – such as Somalia – whose existence is
largely dependent on the willingness of powerful states to recognize it.
Transnistria, a Stalinist creation like the now better known Abkhazia,
South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabagh, offers a militaristically resurgent
Russia yet another opportunity to flex its muscles and presents the West
with yet another insoluble problem. When it takes just 18 Russian tanks
to reach the capital of a sovereign European country, that is cause for
international concern.

To justify its military presence in Georgia and Transnistria, Russia has
used the Kosovo analogy. Kosovo, it will be remembered, was part of one
internationally recognized country, Yugoslavia, and later of another,
Serbia. Because the local ethnic Albanian majority wanted to separate
and claimed oppression or even "genocide," the EU and NATO, without UN
blessing, used force to expel the legal Serbian authorities. Earlier
this year the same EU/NATO and the United Nations recognized a new state
of Kosovo. Kosovo is in fact no more a viable entity than Abkhazia,
albeit more viable than South Ossetia or Transnistria. Russia would like
it's occupation of sovereign countries to be seen in the same context.

There are, however, important differences between Kosovo and Georgia's
separatist regions that* *Russia prefers not to mention. Albanians in
Kosovo were a clear majority for decades, while the Abkhaz represented
only 17 percent of the region's population by the early 1990s, when
Russia helped evict the majority Georgians from the area. Ossetians in
South Ossetia were about two thirds of the total for a long time, while
Russians in Transnistria were for decades the third largest ethnic
group, after Romanians ("Moldovans") and Ukrainians, and Armenians in
Nagorno Karabagh were always a majority.

Just as Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin's hanging a Stalin
poster in his office is a symbolic demonstration of the continuity of
Russia's imperial ambitions, Transnistria is the most concrete
manifestation of Stalinist tactics. Created on a piece of Ukrainian land
after World War I with a few Romanians on the left bank of the Dniester
after the Soviets lost the historic Romanian province of Bessarabia
(actually eastern Moldova, annexed by the Tsars in 1812), the grandly
named Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was intended to
create the impression that it represented the "real" Moldova, unjustly
divided by the Romanian annexation of the right bank area. After World
War II, Moscow re-annexed Bessarabia and, with Transnistria attached,
renamed it the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. Today it has an
area of 34,000 square kilometers and 4.3 million inhabitants.

Despite strenuous Soviet efforts at Russification, Bessarabia retained
its Romanian ethnic majority (about 66 percent), even if not a very
strong self-identity. The very term "Moldovan" as a national description
is fictitious. Not only is most of the historic province still in
Romania, but in language and religion Moldovans are as much a distinct
"nation" vis-a-vis Romanians as Kansans are vis-a-vis Americans.

After the Soviet collapse there was a certain amount of pressure,
especially among the young, to bring the area under the Romanian flag.
Moscow, weak as it was at the time, still reacted rapidly, following a
pattern similar to that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Slavic
majority in Transnistria (made up of both Ukrainians and Russians,
despite Romanians being the largest single ethnic group) panicked at the
idea of becoming a marginal minority in a Greater Romania. It proclaimed
"autonomy", requested and immediately received Russian military aid (a
combination of "peacekeepers" and Cossack mercenaries) and annexed the
city of Tighina on the right bank. Moreover, to further ensure that
Moldova will never be a viable state, Moscow encouraged and supported
"autonomy" within the remaining territory for the small Gagauz, an
Orthodox Turkic minority (140,000 people on 1,600 square kilometers).

Russian "peacekeepers" have remained in Transnistria ever since 1993,
despite Moldovan protests and Moscow's promise to withdraw them, first
by 1997 and again by 2002, in effect protecting a Mafia-run enclave,
where, as this author has seen, admiration for Lenin and the Soviet
Union are officially exhibited, giving the "capital" Tiraspol the
atmosphere of an ideological Jurassic Park. Not surprisingly, the local
"authorities," who have repeatedly expressed their desire to join
Russia, receive the enthusiastic support of Russian nationalists and
systematically suppress all manifestations of "Moldovan" (i.e. Romanian)
language and culture. As for the economy, just as in the case of other
such separatist enclaves (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, indeed Kosovo), it
amounts to a Russian subsidized smuggler's paradise, with some arms
exports, controlled or owned by a small clique around "President" Igor
Smirnov, a former Soviet petty bureaucrat from Eastern Siberia who is
still a Russian citizen.

While Moldova is powerless to resist Russian pressure and Transnistrian
threats and blackmail, one should resist the temptation of sympathizing
too much with its regime--or its voters. Government after government in
Chisinau--and they have all been freely elected since 1991--has refused
to make any hard decision regarding the country's future. The best
explanation is the confused identity of the voters themselves and of the
political elites.

Throughout the Tzarist and Soviet* *occupation, the peasants, mostly
ethnic Romanians and, unique in Europe, the majority, did cling to their
language and identity against Russification efforts, but distrust
Romania after two centuries of Russian propaganda. Many of them also
distrusted capitalism to the extent that, when land was offered for
private property, many still preferred Soviet-type collective farms. The
young, while more pro-Romanian, mostly chose the easy option of having
it both ways--obtain Romanian passports and using them to gain access to
the European Union. The clearest manifestation of such behavior is the
election and re-election of Vladimir Voronin, a former KGB Major
General, leader of the Party of Moldovan Communists since 1994 and
president since 2001. That makes Moldova the founding member of a club
of two countries in Europe that have elected openly communist presidents
(the other is Cyprus, which did so earlier this year). Not surprisingly,
Voronin goes through the motions of moving toward "Europe," mostly
seeking economic aid and protection against imaginary Romanian
annexation, while regularly, and more sincerely, expressing his
friendship for Moscow and antipathy toward Bucharest and all things
Romanian.

All of that explains why no serious political or popular pressure exists
to force Chisinau to make the hard choices about Moldova's future. Those
choices are limited, and become more so in light of Russia's newest
demonstrations of military might. In descending order of their realism,
those choices are satellization (worse than Finlandization) by Moscow
and retention of Transnistria as a reward, continuation of the present
situation and the associated realities of a continuous exodus of the
young and deepening poverty, and unification with Romania, leaving
behind the indigestible Transnistria and Gagauzia. Painful as each may
seem, none of these choices is completely in the hands of Chisinau, but
will mostly be decided in Moscow, Kiev and, to a lesser extent,
Bucharest. If the present Russian plan for the federalization of Moldova
– in effect making almost 4 million Romanians constitutionally equal
with half a million Transnistrian Rusophiles is accepted, complete with
a Russian military presence for decades to come, Moscow would complete
its domination – legally, peacefully and at minimal cost.

For Moscow, the present situation is perfectly acceptable. Russia
controls Moldova's energy supplies, is by far the dominant market for
its exports (mostly wine and fruits), and can manipulate the
Transnistria issue should Chisinau exhibit any uppity behavior. The only
problem may appear if Ukraine succeeds in safeguarding its independence,
because then Transnistria, and by implication Moldova, would be cut off
from Russia and become hostages of Kiev, rather than Moscow. From
Russia's perspective, the fate of Moldova is not just secondary but will
be practically decided by the nature of relations between Moscow and Kiev.

For Ukraine, which has long behaved as if Moldova and Transnistria are
of marginal interest, compared to its territorial dispute with Romania
in the Black Sea and the Danube Delta, the events in Georgia should
bring home the fact that a Russian-controlled Transnistria (and/or
Moldova) on its west adds to the security threat of its long eastern
border with Russia proper. That is a situation no independent government
in Kiev could live with, but Kiev could handle it simply by isolating,
and thus suffocating, Transnistria (and a satellized Moldova), probably
in cooperation with Romania. Kiev could also remember that historically
Transnistria was part of its territory--and that there are as many
Ukrainians as there are Russians in that region.

On the other hand, if Moscow's ultimate goal of bringing Ukraine into
its area of control succeeds, the problem of Transnistria--or of
Moldova's sovereignty and territorial integrity--will cease to be relevant.

Romania, albeit one of Moldova's two neighbors and ethnically identical,
has played a much smaller role than one could have expected. True
enough, Romanian politicians have expressed concern, the Romanian
Orthodox Patriarchate has detached a minority of Moldovans from under
Moscow's religious authority, and Moldavians have received scholarships
and, most importantly, passports, but Chisinau has resisted any closer
cooperation, military or political, and, judging by this author's
observations, beyond a nostalgic solidarity that is more regional than
widespread, the overwhelming majority of Romanians do not seem very
excited about events beyond the Prut River--or prepared to do much to
influence them. They instinctively realize that Romania does not really
need and cannot really afford reunification with 3 million poor and
resentful relatives, especially if the already high cost could include
over a million inassimilable and hostile Slavs.

For a Europe that is largely unable to offer a strong and coherent
response to Moscow's mutilation of Georgia--which is pro-Western, much
larger and more strategically important, and which has a well-defined
national identity--the notion peddled by some in Chisinau and Bucharest
of Moldova's admission into the European Union (and NATO) is simply and
realistically inconceivable. All that is left is, in effect, the next
move by Moscow and the inevitably ineffective protests and expressions
of concern from Brussels to follow.

The little-known developments in Moldova since the early 1990s should
have rung alarm bells in Europe and Washington. They served as a model
for what has been done in Georgia recently. The "international
community" did nothing as a Russophile remnant of Stalinist political
mapmaking was strengthened by Russian forces disguised as
"peacekeepers"; a local puppet clique was installed, encouraged and
subsidized by Moscow; and the legitimate government was blackmailed and
threatened into tolerating the situation. Yeltsin's Russia was too weak
to fully apply this pattern beyond Moldova, but Putin's has now taken it
to its logical and intended consequences in Georgia, and very likely we
shall see it repeated, on a much larger and more dangerous scale, in
Ukraine.

All the ingredients are there. Crimea has a restive Russian majority,
used to belong to Russia (after being taken from the Ottomans), the
would-be "peacekeepers" are already there as the Russian Navy's largest
Black Sea base in Sevastopol, and Kiev's ability to resist is undermined
by the large pro-Russian sector of Ukraine's population, its dependence
on Russian energy and markets and the divisions in the country's
political class. The lessons of Moldova were not learned by Europe or
Washington, and it may be too late to apply them to the coming Ukrainian
crisis.

------------------------------
------------------------------------------
Michael Radu is Senior Fellow and Co - Chair, Center on Terrorism and
Counterterrorism, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia

US shrinks from arming Georgia

US shrinks from arming Georgia
The George W Bush administration has so far resisted making military pledges to embattled ally Georgia, but as the conflict heats up as an election issue, neo-conservative advisors to US presidential candidate John McCain say Georgia should be supplied with advanced weaponry to deter Russia. - Jim Lobe (Sep 8,'08)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JI09Ag01.html

Azerbaijan at crosswinds of a new cold war

Azerbaijan at crosswinds of a new cold war
As Azerbaijan's presidential elections near, the political direction of the country is more than ever influenced by the United States-Russia power struggle. Baku wants to cultivate military ties with the US, but if it looks to the West, it must be prepared for serious blowback from its powerful neighbors, Iran and Russia. - Kaveh L Afrasiabi (Sep 8,'08)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JI09Ag02.html