WHAT IS THE WAR?

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-03-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

Terrorists And Freedom Fighters

2010-03-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

Dozens of Palestinian students from the youth division of Fatah, the mainstream party led by President Mahmoud Abbas, gathered here on Thursday to dedicate a public square to the memory of a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. [...]

The woman being honored, Dalal Mughrabi, was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that sailed from Lebanon and landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They killed an American photojournalist, hijacked a bus and commandeered another, embarking on a bloody rampage that left 38 Israeli civilians dead, 13 of them children, according to official Israeli figures. Ms. Mughrabi and several other attackers were killed.

To Israelis, hailing Ms. Mughrabi as a heroine and a martyr is an act that glorifies terrorism.

Indeed it does.

But, of course, so does this (from 2006):

[Israeli] rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

They have erected a plaque outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.

The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas.

“It’s very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action,” he said. “Imagine that Hamas or Hezbollah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, ‘We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area’.”

Yes, imagine they did that -- does anyone think it would make a lick of difference? That Israel wouldn't still treat it as terrorism? That Israel wouldn't raise a fuss when the Palestinians honored the attack with a plaque and a celebration fifty years later?

As for the "Irgun weren't terrorists, they were freedom fighters" nonsense, it's worth pointing out that the World Zionist Congress thought differently. In December 1946 the organization voted to strongly condemn the terrorist activities in Palestine and "the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare" by the terrorist groups Irgun and the Stern Gang. But I guess Bibi's coming from a different place...

Will Obama Hand the Cheneys - And Al Qaeda - A Victory?

2010-03-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post reports that "President Obama's advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal," reversing Attorney General Holder's plan to try him in civilian court:

Marine Col. Jeffrey Colwell, acting chief defense counsel at the Defense Department's Office of Military Commissions, said it would be a "sad day for the rule of law" if Obama decides not to proceed with a federal trial. "I thought the decision where to put people on trial -- whether federal court or military commissions -- was based on what was right, not what is politically advantageous," Colwell said.

When he announced his decision to close Guantanamo Bay prison, President Obama said this:

"This is me following through on not just a commitment I made during the campaign, but I think an understanding that dates back to our Founding Fathers, that we are willing to observe core standards of conduct, not just when it's easy, but also when it's hard."

If the Obama administration abandons its effort to try Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in civilian court, it would represent a significant capitulation by President Obama to his political enemies, and a betrayal of his supporters who took seriously his promises to bring America's anti-terrorism policies back within bounds of the law.

It will also represent a significant propaganda victory for Al Qaeda, who crave the status and recognition that treating them as "soldiers" in a "war" bestows, and would love to be able to show the world that Obama, just like Bush and Cheney, will cast American principles aside when faced with a threat.

President Obama should understand by now that no matter how much he reaches out his hand to his neoconservative critics, they will never unclench their fists. They'll just look for a new place to strike. The president's struggle to cultivate bipartisanship is admirable. But a bipartisan consensus in favor of fashioning a new legal framework for dealing with an age-old problem -- terrorism -- is worse than worthless, it's an admission to Al Qaeda, and to world, that our existing insitutions aren't strong enough to deal with it, and that we'll abandon our core values when it gets hard.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-02-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

DeWayne "Blackbyrd" McKnight (money at 3:07)

What Next In Iran?

2010-02-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

I recommend Juan Cole's analysis of yesterday's Revolution Day demonstrations in Iran, which the government seems to have had well in hand. Internet access was shut down, preventing pro-reform demonstrators from employing the real-time protest strategies they'd developed over the past months, and security services were out in force to intimidate, beat and arrest the anti-government crowds that did gather.

I have to disagree, though, with Cole's suggestion that the regime "checkmated the Green dissidents." Check, more like. It was clearly a discouraging setback for the Greens, who appeared to have some momentum coming out of the Ashura demonstrations that they were not able to capitalize on yesterday, but it's a long game. I think the Greens continue to represent a credible challenge to the system, but I don't know of anyone, apart from the usual neocon hallucinators, who says that the Islamic Republic is in imminent danger of collapse. Based on statements both from movement leaders and street activists, I think the Greens themselves understand that this process is going to take a while, and has a range of possible outcomes, and so should we.

As for the best policy on Iran going forward, on Wednesday I did a bloggingheads with Eli Lake of the Washington Times, we discussed this among other things. I described my view that the "realism" versus "regime change" narrative that seems to have taken hold among some in Washington is not productive, and the Obama administration should perhaps take a page from the Cold War (the actual Cold War, not the comic book version that conservatives peddle) and continue to seek some accommodation with the Iranian regime over its nuclear program (and keep the onus on the regime through continuing engagement), but which also puts human rights solidly on the agenda.

As I note, based on past U.S. treatment of Middle East peoples as disposable instruments in the maintenance of regional power balances (aiding both sides in the staggeringly destructive Iran-Iraq War, for example) Iranian democrats have a lot of reason to believe that the U.S. would sell them out in favor of a chance to resolve the nuclear impasse with the regime. I hope the Obama administration will make it clear that we won't.

Even though I'm skeptical for a number for reasons that a nuclear deal is still possible, understanding that domestic Iranian nuclear enrichment is broadly supported by the Iranian public, even the Greens, I think it's worth considering offering an explicit recognition of Iran's right to peaceful domestic enrichment, as opposed to the implicit recognition of already-enriched uranium contained in the Tehran Research Reactor deal. But rather than presenting this as simply an attempt to sweeten the pot, it should be accompanied by a demand that Iran commit to abide by its international human rights obligations, and the creation of some sort of verification regime along the lines of Helsinki Watch. This won't provide the soothing satisfaction of an Iranian capitulation, but it could possibly bring Iran's nuclear program under control, while also helping to create space for Iranian reformers to continue their work.

(Cross-posted from Wonk Room)

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-02-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

Bill Frisell.

Glenn Beck: Drunk Driving The Express Bus To Clown Town

2010-02-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on Glenn Beck's Wild-Eyed Hysteria Hour, the Tearful One managed to pack an unusually impressive amount of incoherent stupidity into one rant about Iran. "This week Iran successfully launched a rocket into space," Beck informed us. "The media yawned. The only thing they found interesting about the launch was that the rocket had a rat, two turtles and a worm on board. But they don't look any further than that":

But technically, if Iran can send a missile up into space and have it explode, it could shut down our electronics; that would do more damage to us than any conventional bomb ever could. Imagine the chaos if an EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] bomb took all of our computers, phones, TVs, lights and flipped them off? America would be out of business.

"Imagining" the effects of an Iranian EMP attack is exactly what you're going to have to do, because there's not a credible national security expert alive who thinks that this sort of attack is even remotely feasible. You have to love how Beck throws "technically" in there, as if to indicate that he has some idea what he's talking about, but there's a rather enormous "technical" chasm between "send a missile up into space and have it explode" and "shut down our electronics." It's like saying "technically, if Iran has lasers, they can blow us up with their Iranian Death Star." Well, yes, maybe, someday, theoretically. Not any time soon. Certainly not before Glenn Beck has scared himself into a stroke.

Turning to a video clip of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praying to God to "hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi," Beck asks "'Hasten the return of Imam al-Mahdi' -- what's he talking about?" Glenn Beck is going to tell us!

He's talking about the 12th Imam. He's a "Twelver." What is that? If journalists weren't so busy trying to land jobs with the Obama administration (14 to be exact), they'd look into that.

The "Twelvers" believe that the Mahdi, or 12th Imam, will soon return. This is end times, stuff. They are different than most Muslims because they believe that the return needs to be hastened. It's not a good idea to hasten the return of the Chosen One, because to do that, the world has to be in chaos, carnage and even genocide — so the Messiah comes and brings peace.

"Twelvers" are so dangerous that at one point the Ayatollah Khomeini banned them.

While it's true that Twelver eschatology describes the return of the Mahdi, most Twelvers (like most Christians who believe similar things about a returning Messiah and an End of Days) do not believe that it is their duty to trigger it. It’s also true that Ahmadinejad, a pious conservative Shia Muslim, lards his speeches with references to the return of the Hidden Imam, so much so that he was chastised by several Iranian clerics, who told him he “would be better off concentrating on Iran’s social problems…than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.” There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that Iranian policy is guided by a strategy to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return.

The idea that "Twelvers" are some sort of secretive, extreme apocalyptic sect is patent nonsense. If Beck, or anyone at Fox, would bother to Google "Twelvers," they'd learn very quickly that Twelvers are, in fact, the largest sect of Shi'ism. The idea that "Ayatollah Khomeini banned them" is rather confounding, given that Ayatollah Khomeini was a Twelver, as are all the leading ayatollahs in the world, including those serving as religious guides for the Iranian pro-democracy movement.

This isn't the first time Beck has authoritatively delivered these complete, and easily disprovable, non-facts about Twelver Shi'ism to his audience. The last time, to my knowledge, was last September. What this tells us, as if we didn't know already, is that neither Beck nor anyone who works at Fox News really gives a damn whether it's true or not. The point is it's scary.

Skilled entertainer that his, Beck saves the very best for last:

By the way, do you know what "Iran" means in Farsi? Aryan.

Actually, the Farsi word for Iran is "Iran." But still, it's derived from "Aryan," so... whoa dude. Now that I think about it, it's actually pretty crazy how Ahmadinejad caused historians in the 1700's to adapt the Sanskrit word arya to denote a subset of Indo-European languages and peoples, and then caused French racialist Arthur de Gobineau to steal the term in the 1850's for his goofy theory of a master "white" race, and then caused the Nazis to weave that nonsense into their ideology, and then caused Reza Shah Pahlavi to decide as part of his modernization program that he wanted people to use the term "Iran" instead of "Persia" so that later, decades after the Pahlavi dynasty had been overthrown by the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad would get to run a country whose name really means "Hitlerland."

This is what can happen when you treat Jonah Goldberg as a serious historian.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-01-29T08:50:00.000-08:00

Billy Gibbons.

Narratives Matter

2010-01-29T04:50:00.000-08:00

In an uncharacteristically obtuse response to Adam Serwer's article on how the GOP seems intent on unlearning hard-won lessons about the importance of countering extremists narratives, Spencer Ackerman writes:

“Narrative” and “Framing” have always struck me as intelligence-insulting bullshit. The use of euphemism is a flashing light on the road to Error. First off, al-Qaeda fucked itself terminally by — as Adam notes — the thousands of Muslims it kills without pity, mercy or explanation. It was probably fucked from the start: it wants to create a Caliphate that stretches from Spain to Indonesia. I can cite about five different Doctor Doom storylines that are more plausible outcomes for world domination. (One of them involves the Negative Zone.)

But anyway. The U.S. approach to al-Qaeda’s “narrative” should be to point and laugh. I’m serious. Ridicule is a powerful tool, particularly when aimed at conspiracy theorists. I believe in taking al-Qaeda’s capabilities and its plans seriously and its lunacy about the way the world works not even remotely seriously. The only significant aspect of that sort of crap is the fact that among some people it has social currency. That needs to be confronted.

I don't think that "narrative" and "framing" are euphemisms, any more than "negative externalities" is a euphemism for "bad consequences of your choices that you don't have to bear the cost of but others do." I suppose one could to take the position that all social science terms are, to some extent, euphemistic, but I don't really see the point in insisting that everyone write these things out in long hand.

The second graf I totally agree with. But here Spencer basically acknowledges that Al Qaeda's narrative needs to be confronted, through mockery or otherwise. So I'm not sure what the original disagreement is. If it's just a recognition that we shouldn't put as much effort in combating Al Qaeda's narrative as we should in just making sure we don't do things that strengthen it, while leaving space for them to screw themselves, then fine, but that still requires a recognition that narratives matter.

Related, some comments on the state of Al Qaeda's narrative from Steve Coll in his recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

UPDATE: Spencer responds:

Matt Duss defends “narrative” as a useful concept and I don’t really know why. Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but I really do think actions speak louder than framing.

I don't disagree, but I do think that what speaks even louder than actions are actions placed within an effective narrative frame. We all agree that not kidnapping and torturing Muslims while trying to communicate that we are not at war with all Muslims is far better than kidnapping and torturing Muslims while trying to communicate that we are not at war with all Muslims. But even when we've stopped kidnapping and torturing Muslims, it's still important to try to communicate that we are not at war with all Muslims, because extremists are sure as hell still trying to communicate to all Muslims that we are.

'Team B' Revisionism

2010-01-15T14:49:00.000-08:00

I think Yglesias did a good job knocking back David Frum's bizarre claim that the Team B hawks were right about the Soviet threat, but the fact that Frum thinks he can get away with such an assertion helps explain why some conservatives have been calling for a Team B revival, this time "to reassess the threat the U.S. faces from Islamic terrorist networks":

"The Team B concept has been successful in previous administrations when fresh eyes were needed to provide the commander in chief with objective information to make informed policy decisions," Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. wrote in a letter to President Obama on Tuesday. "I believe it can work now, too."

By June 1976, the middle rounds of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had exceeded the U.S. in several key weapons categories, leading an alarmed CIA director, George H.W. Bush, to create "Team B," which included a number of future aides in the Reagan administration. Among them, a young arms control officer named Paul Wolfowitz and a former Pentagon official named William Van Cleave.

"We were all known as the so-called hawkish element of that time, but we let the conclusions stand on their own," Van Cleave told Fox News. [...]

"Team B got it right," said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and a Defense official in the Reagan administration

This is, to use a political science term, just plain nuts. As Fred Kaplan wrote in 2004, "In retrospect, the Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point." Or, as Larry Korb wrote, Team B was right about only one thing:

The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been "substantially overestimated" every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.

So the CIA had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat. The Team B assessment, on the other hand, was simply a work of science fiction. Or, to be more specific, a work of political advocacy, with the authors deriving conclusions of Soviet capabilities from their own apocalyptic beliefs about the Soviet ideology, and then using those deeply flawed conclusions to justify more defense spending and more foreign policy adventurism. Which is precisely what they would like to do again in regard to the threat of Islamic extremism.

I should also highlight this from Yglesias:

Incidentally, the whole [Team B] report is full of amusing accusations that the CIA has erred in its analysis of the Soviets by engaging in “mirror-imaging”—basically assuming that the Soviet state is prudent and risk-averse—by not recognizing the Russians’ inherent and insatiable thirst for conquest.

In December, I attended a screening of the pro-missile defense documentary "33 Minutes" (which warns of the nuclear missile threat of countries like Iran, which has neither nuclear weapons nor missiles capable of delivering them) hosted by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. During the post-film discussion, I suggested to FDD president Cliff May that the film had failed to demonstrate either that any nuclear weapons state would be inclined to give away to terrorists a weapon in which it had invested considerable resources and borne considerable international opprobrium to develop, or that a state like Iran would use a nuclear weapon itself, given the huge consequences to a regime that has placed the highest premium in self-preservation.

May responded -- I kid you not -- that unlike during the Cold War, where we were dealing with a rational enemy that could be deterred, it's unclear that the Iranians are likewise rational. Furthermore, May said, there was a real danger of "mirror-imaging," of assuming that our Iranian enemies think like we do.

Just in case you wondered how deep the revisionism goes.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-01-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, Jimmy Page. Because I've been mainlining Zeppelin lately.

He's With Us On Everything But The Dusty Antique Orientalism

2010-01-11T17:35:00.000-08:00

Responding to Matt Yglesias' response to Marty Peretz's latest bout of Tourette's, Jonathan Chait writes:

[M]y basic view is that the Islamic world today is not unlike the Christian world before the enlightenment (a time, of course, when Islam was more tolerant and advanced than Christendom.) It is a culture where notions of liberalism and religious tolerance are largely foreign -- where even the most liberal mass movement that can be found, the Green movement in Iran, has to make its case in religious terms in order to have any chance at legitimacy. I would not blame the mass of Muslims for al Qaeda's terrorism any more than I'd blame the average medieval Christian for the Crusades. Still, an illiberal, non-secular culture like this is far more capable of producing, or even merely accepting, violence against non-believers qua non-believers.

A lot of liberals have an unfortunate tendency to brand as racist any analysis that holds one culture above another. But there's nothing inherently racial in believing that the illiberal culture that dominates the Muslim world is a key source of the problem, just as it wouldn't be racial make a sweeping indictment of pre-Enlightenment European culture.

First, whatever the unfortunate tendencies of "a lot of liberals", context matters. Marty Peretz is, as he has demonstrated time and again, a racist. Statements asserting the inherent superiority of one culture over another and advocating a "harsh view of Islam", while they may only qualify as regrettably inane when expressed by others, have to be seen in that context.

As to the more general point, there's no question that Islamic faith currently encompasses some deeply objectionable trends. It also encompasses a number of trends that are rigorously and admirably working to elevate human freedom. Asserting a single "Islamic" "world" "culture" is a pretty clear sign that one hasn't really bothered to do the work.

Even understanding that Iran's Green movement makes its case in terms of political rights, why should the fact that the Green movement "has to make its case in religious terms in order to have any chance at legitimacy" count against it? Iran is a fairly deeply religious society, and we shouldn't be surprised that any Iranian political movement should deploy religious themes in making its case.

Such things are not unheard of here in the West:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Also, Pac-Man Totally Turned Me Off Eating Ghosts

2010-01-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

I'd like to endorse Spencer's criticisms of David Hajdu's argument that Rock Band will result in the extinction of rock bands, but I can't, because based upon my own experience, I know the article to be accurate.

Specifically, I used to play a lot of Kung Fu Master as a kid, and I'm quite sure that this is what caused me to never learn kung fu. Likewise, hours spent at Contra clearly dissuaded me from joining the special forces to fight aliens in Central America.

UPDATE: More evidence for Hajdu's thesis:

Notice how playing the video game utterly drained the enthusiasm from the normally ebullient J Mascis. I can't imagine the herculean effort it must have taken for him to later pull himself together to put out one of the best albums of 2009.

As Seen At Target

2010-01-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

Friday Guitar Blogging

2010-01-08T09:38:00.001-08:00

Brownie McGhee (with Sonny Terry)

Unlearning What We've Learned Since 9/11

2010-01-07T14:40:00.000-08:00

In the hyper-charged atmosphere following the 9/11 attacks, anyone who suggested that U.S. policies or behavior played any -- any -- part in the spread of extremism was denounced for "blaming America" or "excusing terrorism" or some such. The Terrorists hated us for who we are, we were told, and that was that, and any further attempt to understand the conditions that produced terrorism was strictly for hippies and appeasers.

In the intervening years, though, and especially with the implementation of counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, that view has been largely discredited. Not only is it no longer seen as "excusing terrorism" to try and understand what activates and motivates extremists, or to explore whether and what U.S. policies and behavior have played a part in that, it's seen as necessary for U.S. national security.

In the wake of the failed Christmas attack, though, and the discussion over what motivated Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab to become a violent jihadist, a few neoconservatives seem to have been emboldened to exhume some of this "they only hate us for our freedom" nonsense that so many Americans, Iraqis and others died to debunk over the past years. Sounding this tired note last night on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer scoffed at Al Qaeda's grievances, saying, "These are excuses and not actual grievances":

KRAUTHAMMER: When you hear Gibbs talk about Guantanamo as a recruiting tool, this is what we hear over and over again, I mean it's as if he knows no history at all. The list of grievances that Al Qaeda has is endless and replenishing. [...]

The reason the war is on is because Al-Qaeda hates our way of life, our independence, our tolerance, our respect of women and the threat it poses to the fanatical kind of Islam that they are advocating.

Apparently, General David Petraeus is also one of those who Krauthammer thinks "knows no history at all." Here's what Petraus said about Gitmo last May:

PETRAEUS: Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us. We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activities since 9/11. And again, Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of some in that regard.

It's really hard to believe that we even still need to have this debate. The point, again, is not whether Charles Krauthammer buys Al Qaeda's grievances, or whether he thinks that they're merely "excuses," it's whether the next guy that Al Qaeda tries to recruit as a suicide bomber buys them. And it's simply no longer a matter of serious debate that a significant number of potential recruits buys Guantanamo as a grievance.

Then here's Hugh Hewitt and Victor Davis Hanson:

HEWITT: I want to play for you a segment of his remarks today, Professor Hanson, because he talks about Guantanamo Bay as a causative agent for the Christmas attack, and I’ll pick up on it after we hear it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Some have suggested that the events on Christmas Day should cause us to revisit the decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. So let me be clear. It was always our intent to transfer detainees to other countries only under conditions that provide assurances that our security is being protected. With respect to Yemen in particular, there’s an ongoing security situation which we have been confronting for some time along with our Yemeni partner. Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the Attorney General, and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time. But make no mistake. We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests, and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

HEWITT: Now Victor Hanson, this seems to me to be his argument Bush made the Christmas bomber do it, the underpants bomber, because no Gitmo, no bomber. This is absurd, and it’s dangerous.

HANSON: Yes, I think it’s shameful, because we…nobody listens to what the grievances are of an enemy. That’s like saying Hitler went into Poland because he had grievances from Versailles. Every aggressor always dreams up rationalizations, but anybody who’s sober and judicious doesn’t believe them. And if he doesn’t think Guantanamo serves a purpose, then he should close it. There’s no need to delay. But the very fact that it’s been open one year under his administration, shows that it has some utility, otherwise he would have closed it. But he has this very strange, schizophrenic attitude that I’m going to trash Bush on tribunals, Guantanamo, renditions, predator attacks, when I’m demagoguing as a candidate, but as a president, when I’m responsible for governance, I’m going to keep them open, and keep them useful. And it’s not sustainable. It’s going to get people very, very angry.

First, as Greg Carlstrom noted, the president did overstate the explicit impact of Gitmo on the formation of AQAP. But you'll notice that nowhere did Obama say anything about "Guantanamo Bay as a causative agent for the Christmas attack." This is a strawman. No one's saying that Gitmo, and only Gitmo, caused the Christmas attack. What we -- "we" as in the overwhelming majority of people who actually study Islamic extremism -- are saying is that the existence of Gitmo is and has been a source of hatred and resentment which has effectively enlarged the pool of young recruits willing to attempt attacks like the failed one on Christmas. If you can't recognize the distinction there, then I suspect you're either extremely dim or extremely a hack.

Hanson's attempted point about Hitler is also instructive, but in precisely the opposite way that he supposes. Hitler may not have gone into Poland "because he had grievances from Versailles," but it's a pretty firmly established historical fact that German grievances regarding the Treaty of Versailles (regardless of whether "anybody who’s sober and judicious" thinks those grievances were silly) are part of what made it possible for the Nazis to mobilize popular support, and that the successful exploitation of those grievances is thus a part of what got Hitler into Poland. This is not that complicated.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

Tales Of The Obtuse

2010-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Weekly Standard's John Noonan might want to think about thinking out loud less:

[W]ould Obama have doubled-down in Afghanistan if Petraeus' Iraq pacification hadn't succeeded beyond expectation? Where would our Afghanistan strategy be if General Petraeus hadn't provided a perfect case-study for effective prosecution of a tough counter-insurgency?

Could Iraq have saved Afghanistan?

Yes, wouldn't be ironic if the triage strategy that was employed to contain the catastrophe created by the Iraq invasion was also employed in Afghanistan to contain the catastrophe created by the Iraq invasion?

The more appropriate question, at least for those interested in avoiding situations where massively costly counterinsurgency efforts are required to salvage incompetently managed wars, is: Where would our Afghanistan strategy be if we hadn't diverted U.S. attention, expertise, and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in the first place? Would we even have to have one? Would we currently be preparing to triple the number of U.S. troops there in the space of a year?

This Man's Death Is Not Your Talking Point

2009-12-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

Working in his capacity as amplifier of Israeli alarm over Iran, Jeffrey Goldberg passes this along regarding the murder of Ali Moussavi, a nephew of opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi:

From the Times: "Moussavi was first run over by a sport utility vehicle outside his home, Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote on his Web site. Five men then emerged from the car, and one of them shot Mr. Moussavi. Government officials took the body late Sunday and warned the family not to hold a funeral, Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote."

Now imagine this regime with nuclear weapons.

While I think Mr. Moussavi's death represents an escalation, we already know that the Iranian regime was brutal. Here's an interesting little factoid, though: The number of nuclear-armed brutal regimes who have never actually used their nuclear weapons is only every single one of them.

Another Bad Argument For Iran Strike: 'The Worst Might Not Happen!'

2009-12-24T12:20:00.000-08:00

Today, Iran's leading daily newspaper featured an op-ed by a conservative Iranian university professor insisting that there is only one way to deter the American war on Iran that all serious Iranian analysts believe is coming: A massive wave of guerrilla attacks on American military facilities.

This tells us a lot about Iran. They really are a bunch of crazies intent on blowing up the Middle East. Look at what they publish their leading newspapers!

Oh, wait -- the op-ed is actually in this morning's New York Times, and it's written by an American conservative, Alan Kuperman, who argues that there's "only one way to stop Iran": by bombing them. Trotting out the most overworked noun in the conservative foreign policy vocabulary, Kuperman writes "in the face of failed diplomacy, eschewing force is tantamount to appeasement."

We have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.

Kuperman doesn't bother to mount an argument about Iran's intentions or capabilities -- he simply presupposes that Iran wants a weapon, will get one soon, and that nothing short of military action can change this:

Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear facilities, to remind Iran of the many other valuable sites that could be bombed if it were foolish enough to retaliate.

Ah, yes, "precision attacks" that wonderful salve for the modern, sophisticated warmonger's conscience. This paragraph, by itself, should have disqualified Kuperman's op-ed from running in any serious publication. The amount of work that "relatively" is doing is here is pretty staggering. One can argue that the benefits of a strike outweigh the risks and costs. I think that's clearly wrong, but one could argue it. But stating that those costs and risks would be "little" -- even "relatively" -- is a flat out, bald-faced admission that you just haven't bothered to do the work.

Kuperman uses Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility as an example of a strike that worked to delay a regime's nuclear program. He says nothing about the fact that the Osirak example is one of the reasons that Iran has dispersed and buried its nuclear facilities around the country, though he does suggest that "Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons."

Considering the consequences of such a strike for American troops and allies in the region, and for Iran's domestic opposition, Kuperman's argument amounts to: "Hey, the worst might not happen!" In Kuperman's defense, he's not alone here. I have yet to hear any advocate of an Iran strike do better.

Kuperman has a history of providing intellectual cover for policy choices that result in huge numbers of deaths. In a 2000 Foreign Affairs essay, he argued that humanitarian intervention in Rwanda would've just made things worse. In 2006 op-ed, he suggested that Darfur's victims kind of had it coming. It is utterly unsurprising that he should now apply his brand of human bean-counting to the thousands of Iranian (and American, and Iraqi, and Israeli) casualties that would very likely result from the action he advocates.

It is, however, deeply discouraging that the New York Times would choose to run it. The Weekly Standard and National Review already exist for promoting this sort of harebrained militarism. The Washington Post's editorial page, too, has, at least in regard to foreign policy, long since devolved into a neoconservative rat's nest. If we're not to repeat the tragic mistakes of the very recent past, then the Times needs to start insisting on quite a bit more intellectual rigor from its guest opinionators.

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

The Mullahs Versus 'The Mullahs'

2009-12-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

Here's an easy way to tell where someone stands on the Iran question: If they constantly refer to "the mullahs" (religious leaders) who rule Iran, then you're most likely dealing with someone who is disdainful of U.S.-Iran engagement, who thinks that the only problem with the Bush administration's 2003-06 hardline approach was that it wasn't hard enough, and who buys the nonsensical "Islamofascist" construct that powered the "Global War on Terror." You're probably also dealing with someone who either hasn't been following, or would like to ignore, the way that the Iranian system has been changing, especially in the wake of the June 12 elections, from one controlled primarily by "the mullahs" into one that, though still presided over by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and furnished with a fading veneer of religious legitimacy by a cadre of extremist clerics, is increasingly a military dictatorship controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

While using "the mullahs" in such a pejorative fashion may allow certain commentators to communicate their prejudices in a marginally acceptable way and stoke fear of scary guys in robes and turbans, it also elides one of the most important aspects of the current situation in Iran: The role of the mullahs in confronting "the mullahs."

Flipping through the TV channels late last night, I landed on the 700 Club just as Pat Robertson was offering his, err, "analysis" of Iran. Suppressing with great difficulty the urge to turn away from the stupid, I watched as Pat assured his viewers that the Iranian people "hate those mullahs," but then noted that the latest anti-government demonstrations had occurred at the funeral of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Montazeri, "one of the better-liked mullahs." I could see on Pat's face that he realized that he'd just kind of clowned himself, but this is the situation that a lot of conservatives find themselves in now. Having fulminated for years against "the mullahs," they're unsure how to react to an Iranian opposition movement powered in considerable part by mullahs.

And not just mullahs, but Islamist mullahs, such as Montazeri himself, who even though he had turned against what the Iranian Islamic Republic had become, remained a firm believer in the principles of the Iranian revolution, in the idea of an Islamic Republic, and in the appropriateness of Islam as the organizing force in society.

Noting Montazeri's passing, neoconservative analyst Michael Rubin (who, though an occasional "mullah"-baiter himself, has also been very clear-eyed about the costs of a military strike on Iran, unlike many other neocons) gets part of the way there:

While the media focuses on popular protests in Iran, such as those which occurred in Iran after this summer's flawed elections, the real Achilles Heel to the Iranian regime is Shi'ism. Simply put, it is hard for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to claim ultimate political and religious authority when he is outranked by many clerics who oppose him and his philosophy of government.

Rubin's right: Shi'ism supplies a powerful anti-authoritarian critique, and Khamenei's meager religious credentials make it difficult for him to convincingly push back against it (the fact that his government has been murdering people in the streets certainly doesn't make it easier). It's very important to recognize, however, that these critiques are not just being generated from within Shi'ism, but also from within Islamist Shi'ism of the same sort that enlivened the 1979 Iranian revolution. Having ceaselessly condemned Islamism as inherently inhumane and undemocratic, many conservatives are now simply unable to appreciate the manner in which Islamist arguments have been redeployed against the Iranian regime's inhumane and undemocratic behavior.

Given the resonance of Islamist arguments, in both their Shia and Sunni variants, to significant numbers of Muslims throughout the world, developing a more nuanced view of the various trends that have too often been carelessly grouped under the scare-term "Islamist" is essential in order to cultivate a more serious and rigorous U.S. policy discussion about political reform not only in Iran, but in the broader region. We shouldn't have any illusions that Islamists are our allies, but neither should we presume that they're all necessarily our enemies. As events in Iran show, moderate Islamists can be an important source of religious legitimacy for the forces of reform.

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

The Tortured Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection

2009-04-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

New item up at Comment is Free:

Though dozens of civilians continue to be killed every week by terrorist bombings in Iraq, and simmering tensions between the Shiite-dominated central government and Sunni and Kurdish factions threaten to boil over, the American people have by and large tuned out the Iraq debate.

Exhausted of hearing about a war that most now believe never should have been fought, and lulled and distracted by endlessly repeated claims that the surge worked, it is perhaps understandable that Americans would prefer to read and hear about more immediate concerns such as the deepening economic crisis.

But the Iraq issue crept back into the public eye this week in an unexpected way – as an element of the torture debate.

Among the most notable and disturbing revelations of the recently released full report of the Senate armed services committee's Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody was that one of the principle drivers of the use of torture – I refuse to use the term "enhanced interrogation" for waterboarding, a technique invented by torturers for use as torture – on key detainees was the need to produce evidence that would support the Bush administration's arguments about the threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Read the rest here.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2009-03-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

Roy Buchanan.

Our Enemies Are Not Monolithic

2009-03-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

Dismissing President Obama's Nowruz message last week as a "video mash note to Iran," The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes notes Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei's "defiant and hostile" response, which is very bad:

[This] suggests that Khamenei, far from being put on the defensive, sees the U.S. in a position of weakness. And why shouldn't he after Obama's ingratiatory message.

Rachel Abrams, also of The Weekly Standard, notes that Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal "expressed satisfaction" at the Nowruz message. Which is very bad:

As Meshaal sees it, it’s "only a matter of time" before U.S. officials are dealing directly with the terrorist organization he runs from his hiding-place in Damascus. And why not? If we can talk to the mullahs in Iran, surely we can talk to their "Palestinian" puppets.

You know, if -- if -- one were inclined toward intellectual honesty, one might have to admit that the "puppet" and the "puppeteer" responding to the exact same statement in two substantially different ways reveals something of a weakness in Islamofascist puppetry theory.

Related, Rob Farley has an excellent post on the hard, hard work done by the word "connections" in the conservative discourse on Islamic extremism and terrorism:

[N]oting that two groups are "connected" really doesn't lead to any specific policy recommendations. One response to discovering that the [Islamic Courts Union] has been working with al-Qaeda is to sponsor an invasion of Somalia; another response is to undertake a political effort to split al-Qaeda from the ICU. The ICU, after all, is a different organization than al-Qaeda, with different interests and priorities. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the same organization; they have different interests, and they each have goals distinct from those of their purported sponsor, Iran. Arguments to the effect that Hamas and Hezbollah will march lock-step to the dictates of Tehran, or that the ICU is a creature of al-Qaeda, are worse than useless; they ignore the fact that organizations share only some interests, and consequently will collaborate under only some circumstances.

Indeed, it's worth noting that the Bush administration's only genuine national security accomplishment -- successfully bringing violence in Iraq down from catastrophic to merely crisis levels -- occurred largely as a result of Gen. David Petraeus' decision (on his own, without fully informing his superiors in Washington, as Tom Ricks reports in The Gamble) to reject the neoconservative conceit of a united Islamofascist front and reach out to Al Qaeda's erstwhile allies in the Iraqi insurgency. It's a bit strange why conservatives seem unable to apply this lesson elsewhere.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2009-03-20T08:50:00.001-07:00

Ali Farka Toure.

What Has Been Accomplished?

2009-03-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

New item at Comment is Free:

There is another significant cost that must be factored into the Iraq debacle: Afghanistan. New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins recently quoted a western aid official lamenting "the tragedy ... the $70bn that would have given you enough police and army to stabilise this place all went to Iraq". By diverting troops and resources to Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration allowed the Taliban to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, and the country had steadily collapsed back into insurgent warfare. Having failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, the Bush administration handed the new president a war that promises to be as difficult and costly as Iraq has been – if not more.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2009-03-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

T-Bone Walker.

The Wages Of Schnapps

2009-03-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

The dream is over:

The teenage daughter of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her fiance have broken up just over two months after the birth of the couple's child.

People.com reported Wednesday that sources said the split between Bristol Palin, 18, and Levi Johnston, 19 occurred a few weeks ago, and Johnston confirmed to the Associated Press that he and Bristol mutually decided to end their relationship "a while ago." He did not elaborate.

I'm tremendously happy to hear that Levi and Bristol will not be forced to carry on this charade through the 2012 primaries.

Levi is tremendously happy to hear that he will no longer be forced to wear blazers.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2009-03-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

Lonnie Johnson.
Born in New Orleans in 1899, Johnson is generally credited with inventing the guitar solo -- playing featured, single note melodies on what had previously been regarded solely as a chordal rhythm instrument.

One of 12 children in a highly musical family, in addition to the guitar, Johnson played violin, mandolin, banjo, bass, and piano. After getting his start playing in his father's jazz group, Johnson became one of the first American jazz musicians to perform abroad, touring England in 1917. When he returned to the States he discovered that his entire immediate family except for one brother had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Johnson moved back and forth from performing and recording music to other trades, paying the bills however he could. He played with Duke Ellington in the late 1920's, worked in a steel mill in the 30's, then went back into the studio in the late 30's to record more pop-oriented tunes and ballads.

In 1959, Johnson was discovered working as a janitor in a Philadelphia hotel by a local radio DJ, Chris Albertson. Albertson helped engineer Johnson's comeback, and Johnson toured extensively over the next few years. In 1965, Johnson played a series of dates in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and decided to make his home there. His health declined after a car accident in 1969, and he died in Toronto on June 16, 1970.

Gorenberg On Settlements And Cynicism

2009-03-04T19:08:00.000-08:00

Responding to my argument that the conservative "settlements are reversible" defense is deeply cynical, Gershom Gorenberg agrees, but notes that "Settlement backers in Israel don’t normally argue that settlement is reversible."

I can’t claim to have heard every defense of settlements ever made, but this is a defense I hear almost entirely abroad (with one exception, which I’ll get too).

Perhaps the reversibility argument was an invention of foreign defenders of Israeli policy. More likely, it has been provided to them by Israeli officials - in which case the the officials have treated their foreign supporters as useful idiots.

Settlements, in Israeli debate, have always been regarded as “facts on the ground” - physical statements of policy, of intent to keep a particular piece of land under permanent Israeli rule. The debate on where settlements should be built has been intense precisely because it’s an argument over whether Israel should maintain permanent rule over some or all of the occupied territories.

Right, but it also seems to me that the creation of these facts involves Israel's anticipation of future concessions. That is, the more land that is seized and settlements built, the more Israel can later claim to have "given up" in any final status agreement.

The Left Takes The Lead On Afghanistan

2009-03-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

New item up at Comment is Free:

While it's good that McCain seems finally to have noticed the extent of the crisis in Afghanistan – where he had previously suggested we could just "muddle through" while focusing the bulk of our resources on Iraq – McCain simply refused to acknowledge the single most significant factor contributing to that crisis: the decision to invade Iraq. "The shift of US resources and attention to Iraq in 2003 gave al-Qaida and the Taliban the respite they needed to reconstitute safe havens in the ungoverned border areas of neighbouring Pakistan," wrote analysts Spencer Boyer and James Lamond.

A firm grasp of this fact is one of the reasons that the far more vigorous debate over the future of the US intervention in Afghanistan – and about American national security in general – is now taking place on the left. While McCain and the military-centric thinkers at AEI continue to present Afghanistan as a problem that can be overcome by the application of more guns backed by stronger wills, (as they delusively believe problems in Iraq have been) progressive organisations like the Center for American Progress (where I am employed), National Security Network and grassroots groups like Get Afghanistan Right have been engaged in a deeper debate over what the appropriate mission should be in Afghanistan, and how much blood and treasure Americans should be willing to spend to complete that mission.

The Ruckus Over Chas Freeman

2009-03-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

In addition to the requisite outrage over Chas Freeman's (should be) wholly uncontroversial position that military occupations tend to be provocative, a number of conservatives are now up in arms over a statement Freeman made in April 2002, at a Washington Institute for Near East Policy event discussing U.S.-Arab relations after 9/11. Freeman asked "And what of America’s lack of introspection about September 11?"

Instead of asking what might have caused the attack, or questioning the propriety of the national response to it, there is an ugly mood of chauvinism. Before Americans call on others to examine themselves, we should examine ourselves.

It's important to note that Freeman was responding here to a specific question about the amount of self-criticism in the Arab world regarding the teaching of extremist ideologies in their societies. Predictably, Freeman's response is being marketed by rightwing blogs as blaming the victim, etc. etc.

While I'm personally not a fan of Freeman's brand of realism, there's no question that he's very well qualified for the position he's been assigned. Charges that Freeman would "politicize" intelligence -- especially coming from such places as the Weekly Standard, whose editors obviously have no problem with politicized intelligence as long as it's politicized in favor of ruinous policies they like -- shouldn't be taken seriously on substance, but they should be taken seriously as strategy. Raising a fuss over Freeman probably can't do much to dislodge him from his position as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, but it does serve to lay the groundwork for challenges to the intelligence estimates produced by that shop.

As for the dyspepsia over Freeman's statement above, there's always been something really bizarre about conservatives' tendency to interpret the merest suggestion that U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed in any way to the September 11 attacks as evidence of traitorous anti-Americanism, especially since this is a mainstay of the neoconservative critique of pre-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. Here it is elucidated by Sen. John McCain a year ago, in his first major foreign policy address of the 2008 campaign:

For decades in the greater Middle East, we had a strategy of relying on autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah of Iran, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family, and even, for a time, on Saddam Hussein. In the late 1970s that strategy began to unravel. The Shah was overthrown by the radical Islamic revolution that now rules in Tehran. The ensuing ferment in the Muslim world produced increasing instability. The autocrats clamped down with ever greater repression, while also surreptitiously aiding Islamic radicalism abroad in the hopes that they would not become its victims. It was a toxic and explosive mixture. The oppression of the autocrats blended with the radical Islamists’ dogmatic theology to produce a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred.

We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on these out-dated autocracies is the safest bet. They no longer provide lasting stability, only the illusion of it.

Without getting into the quality of McCain's analysis here, it's pretty obvious that he is, in fact, suggesting that past U.S. policy in the Middle East bears some of the blame for the 9/11 attacks. You'll notice that no one on the right attacked McCain for this. Funny.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room

Ask Not For Whom The Twitter Tweets

2009-03-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

I think this really underestimates how hip Pac-Man is:

John McCain took to the Senate floor Monday and talked about Twittering.

For the increasingly popular networking tool, it was either a moment that marked the technology's full-bore entry into the cultural mainstream -- or a sign that Twitter is now about as hip as Pac-Man.

Just last year, McCain, the Republican nominee for president, was frequently mocked by late-night talk show hosts for barely knowing how to turn a computer on. But McCain 2.0 is now plugged in, sending multiple "tweets," as Twitter messages are called, several times a day.

"We have the most followers out of any congressman," boasts his spokeswoman, Brooke Buchanan, "topping over 122,000."

Coincidentally, my first and probably last experiment with Twitter took place when I went to hear McCain at AEI last week:

AEI has warm oatmeal cookies.8:36 AM Feb 25th

Here to hear McCain on Afghanistan.8:43 AM Feb 25th

Prediction: He'll call for a 'new strategy' for 'victory'8:45 AM Feb 25th

Cookies almost gone.8:47 AM Feb 25th

Am now considering a temporary surge toward the cookie table.8:49 AM Feb 25th

Surge succeeded. Have now redeployed back to my seat.8:52 AM Feb 25th

Yay! Randy Scheunemann!8:55 AM Feb 25th

once again, for mccain history begins with the surge.9:12 AM Feb 25th

mccain: "i am confident victory is possible in afghanistan."9:15 AM Feb 25th

mccain in nov 03: we'll "muddle through" in afghanistan.9:28 AM Feb 25th

asked about "muddle through," mccain accused me of taking words out of context.10:08 AM Feb 25th

Gripping.

One To Grow On

2008-04-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Stories like this are why I make it my policy never, ever to go in the water. Ever.

Authorities kept watch Saturday over a stretch of Southern California beaches, scanning the waters for a shark they believe killed a triathlete a day earlier. [...]

Helicopters kept searching for signs of the shark that killed triathlete David Martin, Solana Beach Lifeguard Capt. Craig Miller said.

Martin, 66, died on the beach Friday morning after a shark, presumed to be a great white, lifted him out of the water with his legs in its jaws, leaving deep lacerations and shredding Martin's black wetsuit.

Yes, I know shark attacks are statistically rare. I'm sure that made a hell of a lot of difference to this dude as he was lifted out of the water in the razor-sharp jaws of a 5,000 pound, 17-foot long apex predator.

A Hundred Floors Above Me, In The Tower Of Song

2008-03-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

Leonard Cohen is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner
Take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I'm your man

If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I'll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver
Climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I'm your man

Ah, the moon's too bright
The chain's too tight
The beast won't go to sleep
I've been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby
And I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty
Like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart
And I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please, please
I'm your man

And if you've got to sleep
A moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I'll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while
Across the sand
I'm your man

A Poor Excuse For Statecraft

2008-03-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Michael Ledeen, outraged over the Turkish invasion of Iraq:

I thought we were supposed to be the guarantors of Iraqi sovereign integrity. Yet we mumble into our beer and do nothing when the Turkish army invades Iraq, attacks Kurdish positions and carries out all manner of military operations there. […] The current situation is an invitation to open warfare between groups we should want on our side. It's a poor excuse for statecraft.

Michael Ledeen, in 2002, clamoring for the American invasion of Iraq:

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.

Smarter, please.

Another Kind of Iraq Blowback

2007-12-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

Negar Azimi explains how, rather than continuing to pressure Egypt on human rights and democratic reform, the Bush administration has reverted to supporting Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, treating it as an ally in the "war on terror" and a bulwark against the growing Iranian and Islamist influence which has resulted from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Isn't that wonderful? By agreeing to be a recipient of extraordinary rendition detainees, you too can get the heat off your authoritarian regime.

There's no overstating how deeply dispiriting this sort of thing is to Arab political reformers, or how strongly it confirms al-Qaeda propaganda about American methods and intentions in the Middle East. Ayman al-Zawahiri was himself radicalized by the torture he endured in Mubarak's prisons, and now, after a head fake in the direction of political reform, the U.S. is back to underwriting that torture. Ring, freedom, ring.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-09-28T04:55:00.000-07:00

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown.

Blatantly Foolish

2007-09-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

This bit from Peter Galbraith's article on how George W. Bush helped establish Iran as the Middle East's new regional hegemon deserves more attention:

"In May 2003, the Iranian authorities sent a proposal through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, for negotiations on a package deal in which Iran would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for an end to U.S. hostility. The Iranian paper offered "full transparency for security that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD [and] full cooperation with the IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments." The Iranians also offered support for "the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government" in Iraq; full cooperation against terrorists (including "above all, al-Qaeda"); and an end to material support to Palestinian groups like Hamas. In return, the Iranians asked that their country not be on the terrorism list or designated part of the "axis of evil"; that all sanctions end; that the United States support Iran's claims for reparations for the Iran-Iraq war as part of the overall settlement of the Iraqi debt; that they have access to peaceful nuclear technology; and that the United States pursue anti-Iranian terrorists, including "above all" the MEK. MEK members should, the Iranians said, be repatriated to Iran.

Basking in the glory of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, the Bush administration dismissed the Iranian offer and criticized Guldimann for even presenting it. Several years later, the Bush administration's abrupt rejection of the Iranian offer began to look blatantly foolish, and the administration moved to suppress the story. Flynt Leverett, who had handled Iran in 2003 for the National Security Council, tried to write about it in the New York Times and found his Op-Ed crudely censored by the National Security Council, which had to clear it. Guldimann, however, had given the Iranian paper to Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, now remembered both for renaming House cafeteria food and for larceny. (As chairman of the House Administration Committee he renamed French fries "freedom fries" and is now in federal prison for bribery.) I was surprised to learn that Ney had a serious side. He had lived in Iran before the revolution, spoke Farsi, and wanted better relations between the two countries. Trita Parsi, Ney's staffer in 2003, describes in detail the Iranian offer and the Bush administration's high-handed rejection of it in his wonderfully informative account of the triangular relationship among the United States, Iran and Israel, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States."

Parsi was quoted in a June 2006 Washington Post article on the Iranian offer:

"Parsi said that based on his conversations with the Iranian officials, he believes the failure of the United States to even respond to the offer had an impact on the government...Iranian officials decided that the United States cared not about Iranian policies but about Iranian power.

The incident "strengthened the hands of those in Iran who believe the only way to compel the United States to talk or deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers but by being a nuisance," Parsi said."

In other words, the aggressive unilateralism of our hardliners strengthened their hardliners. It bears repeating: Here we had Iran offering not just to talk, but even agreeing in advance to the U.S.'s main demands: transparency in Iran's nuclear program, cooperation in Iraqi security and reconstruction, and ending support for terrorism against Israel. Not only didn't the Bush administration pursue it, they didn't even respond. In a presidency almost completely defined by its successive foreign policy blunders, this will surely be remembered as one of the worst.

Giuliani: Bringing the Crazy to a World Near You

2007-09-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

My new piece on Giuliani's war cabinet is up at The American Prospect.

The New Order

2007-09-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

Writing in Salon yesterday, Peter Galbraith goes into great detail about Iran's new role as regional hegemon. The LA Times reported on Mahmoud Ahmedinajad's growing popularity throughout the Middle East, a result of his steadfast opposition to the U.S.'s continuing occupation of Iraq. I think the latter story is very significant in that it suggests the troubling prospect of a scenario in which the U.S. is allied with authoritarian Sunni Arab governments against popular Arab movements increasingly inclined, if not specifically toward Iran, then at least toward the Shi'i ethic of resistance which Ahmedinajad, along with Hizballah's Nasrallah and Muqtada al-Sadr, have come to represent.

On Tequila

2007-09-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

Scott’s liquor blogging got me thinking about one of my own current hobbies: Tequila. As I wrote in comments over there, most of my formative tequila experiences, like probably many people, involved shots/margaritas with Cuervo Gold or worse, and then later, in the morning, writhing in pain in bed, clutching my flaming skull and screaming at god to kill me. A few years ago a buddy of mine brought a bottle of fresh mezcal back from Mexico, and I loved it. In trying to find something like it, I began sampling 100% agave tequilas, and have been a convert ever since. Though I do occasionally enjoy a nice, big margarita (I would not have survived this summer in DC without them) I tend to think that any tequila worth putting in a margarita is better taken neat, in a lowball glass, or, if you're a big fancy-pants, in a snifter.

I generally prefer the blanco (also known as plata, platinum, or silver), clear, unaged tequila. This is where the agave flavor comes through the strongest. I like a few reposados ("rested" in charred oak barrels between two months and a year) and fewer still anejos (aged a least a year), though some connoisseurs insist that the latter represents the height of the tequilero's art. I disagree. While there's no question that quite a few reposados and anejos achieve a very impressive balance of flavors, for me there's nothing like the crisp, peppery finish of a good blanco.

As for brands, my number one fave is El Tesoro de Don Felipe. Interestingly, this bottle is less expensive than some of the other top-shelf brands like Don Julio, Casa Noble, and Herradura, all of which are great tequilas, but, in my opinion, don't come close to El Tesoro's flavor. Even in El Tesoro's anejo, the agave is right up front. A few other good brands to look for are Corralejo, El Charro, and Cazadores.

Irony: A Tool, Not a Raison D'Etre

2007-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

On their blog, the Bad Plus defend their choice of modern pop and rock cover tunes from the charge of "irony":

"Irony -- and its allies: surrealism, sardonicism, and dementia -- do occasionally play roles in our music, just as it does in the work of many artists we admire. Consider some famous performances of jazz standards: What is more ironic than Thelonious Monk's "Just a Gigolo?" What is more surreal than Duke Ellington's trio version of "Summertime?" What is more sardonic than Charlie Parker's quote of "Country Gardens" at the end of many ballads? And what is more demented than Django Bates' "New York, New York?"

But just like with those artists, irony is just a small part of the story in The Bad Plus. Here's our real story: We love songs. We believe in the power of song. We write songs as well as we can. There is not anything in TBP's repertory that is not based on melody, originals included. Thinking that we are not serious about the melodies we play is incorrect.

Once, a very straight-ahead jazz player came up to us after a gig and said, "You know, I'm surprised! 'Heart of Glass' is actually a good song!" Hell yeah it is."

Hell yeah it is. One of the reasons I think a lot of people find jazz so inaccessible is that it tends to rely on a reportoire of "standards" that were never experienced by modern audiences as popular songs in the first place, and thus provide no entry point for audiences to appreciate what the musician is doing with it. That's why I really like what the Bad Plus does with their choice of "new standards," taking familiar pop songs and recognizing them as compositions worth exploring, (I think the greatest example of a modern artist doing this is probably Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner") and why their approach has never struck me as overly ironic. That they get tagged so often as "ironists" says more about critics' inability to approach music on its own terms, and their fear of being seen as "not getting the joke," than about the band.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-09-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Jeff Beck.

Let the Outrage Begin

2007-09-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

Pop Matters rates the 100 Best Country Music songs. It seems obvious to me that a Hank Williams tune should be at the top, but apparently not.

Don't Let's Stay the Course

2007-09-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson, promoting the carnival shooting game model of anti-terrorism:

"One of the untold stories is just how many of the al Qaeda kingpins who started this war on 9/11 are now dead, arrested, or in hiding. It is not just the likes of Zarqawi or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Mohammad Atef or Ramzi Binalshibh who are not longer free or alive. On August 31, the U.S. military announced that the Egyptian and Afghan veteran senior al Qaeda leader Abu Yaqub al-Masri was killed.

I think that this is the same al-Masri whom Sheik Mohammed, in a transcript of his testimony, said was responsible for setting up recruiting protocols for al Qaeda prior to 9/11 in Afghanistan. Although it is taboo to say so, it really is true that Afghan veteran terrorists like al-Masri and Zarqawi did flee from Afghanistan to Iraq where they often ended up dead."

It's not "taboo" to say that Masri and Zarqawi fled from Afghanistan to Iraq, it's just more relevant to point out that they did so because they saw the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a great opportunity to expand their jihad. Yes, they were both eventually killed there, but not before they'd facilitated the arrival, indoctrination, and training of scores of new Salafist mujahideen. I don't think this can be considered a success for the war on terror.

The lesson to be drawn from the "untold story" of the capture or death of various al-Qaeda kingpins (each of which is celebrated in Right Blogistan as proof that we've turned yet another corner) is how little effect each has had on the level of violence in Iraq, or on the growth of al-Qaedism internationally. The simple, unavoidable fact, which has yet to penetrate Hanson's secure bunker of a skull, is that Bush's anti-terrorism strategy is creating terrorists faster that the military can kill them.

Everybody Can Take It Easy, We Got The Toyman

2007-09-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Goldfarb notes the killing of reputed al Qaeda car-bomb specialist Abu Yaqub al-Masri, and links to this wonderful post that I think perfectly captures the deliriously triumphal macho-geek essence of the species warblogger:

"Important that we don't understate how important of a kill this was... if Al-Qa'ida Iraq was structured like the Legion of Doom, this clown would be sitting somewhere between Bizzaro Superman and the Black Manta. I bid a fond farewell to all terrorists, but for this guy I'd be willing to break out the champagne and party poppers, and hire a band to belt out the Axl Rose version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"..... all while steely eyed soldiers usher him along to meet Allah."

Yeah, remember when the we got AQI's Lex Luthor, and then the Iraq war was over? That was awesome.

It's great that we've gotten rid of a guy who was blowing up civilians. It's tragic that we created a situation where he could practice and perfect his craft, and teach it to others. Before popping the corks over the death of the Toyman, we should consider that he's created dozens of other Toymen, who will in turn create dozens more.

Steady as a Rock

2007-09-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

Jonah Goldberg, on the inconstancy of President Bush's war critics:

"Perhaps the answer is that when it comes to bashing Bush about the war, no accusation is inaccurate -- even if it contradicts all the accusations that came before. Some say it's all about the Israel lobby. Others claim that Bush was trying to avenge his dad. Still others say Bush went to war because God told him to.

Which is it? All of those? Any? It doesn't seem to matter. It's disturbing how many people are willing to look for motives beyond the ones debated and voted on by our elected leaders."

Right, on the other hand, President Bush's justification for invading Iraq has always stayed the same: Saddam has WMD. Or, Saddam has connections to al-Qaeda. Or, Saddam wanted to develop WMD, and might could possibly have had connections to al-Qaeda. Or, we're building democracy in Iraq. Or, now we're fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here. Or, now we're fighting Iran in Iraq.

Why can't Bush's critics be more consistent?

Redneck Chic

2007-09-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

Is there anything more pathetic than the spectacle of the wealthy conservative pundit, that creature of millionaire-funded think tanks, TV studio green rooms, and catered symposia, trying to establish some red-state cred by pretending to be down with redneck culture?

Michael Ledeen:

"Barbara and I went to Indianapolis for a Toby Keith concert, where we partied with something like 25,000 happy rednecks, most of them young, most of them wearing boots and cowboy hats (and cheering Keith's great song "I Should Have Been a Cowboy"). It's a great show, and he's a wonderful performer, not least because of his deeply moving patriotic songs like "American Soldier," "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," and " The Taliban," etc.

It's great to get out of the Washington culture of narcissism and spend some time with the rednecks, a.k.a. real Americans. And it's simply great, as the encores end, and a downpour of red, white and blue confetti covers the crowd, to see Toby say "don't ever apologize for your patriotism," and then lift the middle finger of his right hand to the skies and say, "F*** 'Em!"

Which, after a week of disgusting anti-Americanism in Washington, nicely summed up our feelings.

You ought to try it. Does wonders for the spirit."

The condescension of Ledeen's little paean should be obvious, as he treats his visit to flyover country as if he had just been swimming with the dolphins ("Does wonders for the spirit"!) There's also a pretty clear racist subtext to his assertion about "real Americans" (Read: white, conservative Americans.) What, Michael, the people who cater your speaking engagements, clean your office, and park your car aren't "real American" enough for you? (I wonder if, when, at long last, his very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care is finally released, Jonah Goldberg will have anything to say about the tendency of fascist propagandists to locate the authentic soul of the nation among the rural volk, away from the corrupting, cosmopolitan intellectualism of the cities, and, if so, whether this tendency is more characteristic of Democrats or Republicans?)

Bottom line, rednecks and caterers: Whether he considers you a real American or not, Michael Ledeen has no problem with your being sent to fight and die in his next war.

Dream Palace of the Neocons

2007-09-17T04:59:00.001-07:00

Fouad Ajami yesterday in Tigris Beat magazine, err, the Wall Street Journal, remembering Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha:

“This was the dashing tribal leader who emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power, and who was assassinated by al Qaeda last week. I had not been ready for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the legendary director of "Lawrence of Arabia," would have savored encountering this man. There was style, and an awareness of it, in Abu Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha, and a matching headdress.”

The air was heavy with cardamom and fatoush, the palms beat gently in the breeze...or was it my heart? The rest of Ajami’s piece shows Abu Reisha as someone who had mastered the art of telling Americans exactly what they wanted to hear, and Ajami as someone completely committed to playing along. Given Ajami’s reputation as an analyst and interpreter of high-flown Arab rhetoric, it’s astonishing how credulous he becomes when that rhetoric accords with his own political beliefs. As tragic as Abu Reisha’s death is, at least we’ve now been spared the spectacle of conservative pundits inevitably turning against him after it finally became apparent to them, long after it had become apparent to everybody else, that Abu Reisha actually had his own political agenda, and it was quite different from theirs.

I should mention that Ajami’s The Foreigner’s Gift is actually a pretty good book on Iraq. Ajami writes about the various elements of Iraqi society, particularly modern Iraqi Shia history and political thought, with an elegance and depth that is to be found nowhere else among the various experts upon whom neoconservatives usually rely to consecrate their aggression. That Ajami employs this elegance in the service of a fantastically simplistic and transparently self-serving thesis, Iraqis stupidly refused America’s gift of freedom, is unfortunate, but it’s also key to understanding Ajami’s role in the neoconservative vanguard.

In his most popular work, Dream Palace of the Arabs, Ajami criticized modern Arab writers and intellectuals for having created a fictional sense of their own modernity and secularism, which Ajami claims has promoted a chauvinistic and conspiratorial worldview throughout the Arab world. Consider this quote from the book:

“In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.”

Heh, indeed, those deluded Arabs and their ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests. Luckily, we in the modern, civilized, freedom-loving West have abandoned such things. The ramifications of this kind of analysis should be clear: We don’t really have to listen to what Arabs say, they’re dishonest with themselves and with us, and thus we can ignore their protestations and warnings as we set about remaking their societies.

I don’t particularly disagree with Ajami that much of modern Arab political and intellectual discourse has been constrained within a series of rhetorical edifices, nationalist mythologies, and self-justifying victimization narratives. I disagree, however, that there is anything profoundly or uniquely "Arab" about this. The construction of rhetorical edifices is not just a feature of Arab politics; it is a feature of politics. The fact that Ajami’s quote above could serve as an accurate description of George W. Bush’s Middle East adventurism bears this out. Fouad Ajami has been a tireless propagandist for that adventurism, and, I would argue, given that he’s one of the very few neoconservative writers who possesses more than basic knowledge of the region, an invaluable one. He has consistently employed his literary and rhetorical skills to help the neocons construct and maintain a picture of the Middle East, and of America, that is a fantasy in the service of folly. It’s deeply ironic that, having notably attempted to deconstruct the Arabs’ "dream palace," Ajami has so enthusiastically laid stone for the neocons’ own.

The Israel Bubble

2007-09-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

Via Ezra Klein , Tony Karon has an excellent, detailed post that gets at a lot of what I've been thinking about the tendency of some liberals to damn Walt and Mearsheimer with faint criticism, and to resist engaging with the actual facts of Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.

[Mearsheimer and Walt] share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.

I noticed this phenomenon last year when Jimmy Carter made the entirely valid comparison between Israel’s West Bank regime and the apartheid system that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. That prompted Michael Kinsley — a well-known and generally smart liberal pundit — to denounce Carter’s comparison in an op-ed that only served to show how little he knew about either the Middle East or apartheid South Africa. Clearly, though, the idea that Israel was committing crimes equivalent to apartheid clearly made Kinsley so uncomfortable that he felt compelled to blurt out something — anything, really, to negate Carter, and make the discomfort he caused go away. (I critiqued his lame response to Carter in an earlier post.)

This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel.

Karon takes on David Remnick's confounding snipery in last week's New Yorker:

In response to Mearsheimer and Walt, New Yorker editor Remnick offers a fresh specimen of the denial pathology.

What is most strking about his piece, however, is that it is more of a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, than a serious engagement with their argument.

[...]

While denying that M&W are anti-Semites, Remnick nonetheless questions the bona fides of their intervention. His message to his readers is, don’t worry about what these guys are saying, they’re just grinding an axe. Wink. “Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws,” but he suggests that, intead, the authors are a product of a polarized political moment, reducing all ills to a single cause — the Israel lobby. But Remnick hasn’t honestly engaged with their arguments aside from clucking over the settlements: Does Remnick agree, for example, that the U.S. should leave Israel no choice but to withdraw its West Bank settlements, by threatening to cut off the spigot if it doesn’t stop and reverse its colonization of the West Bank? Should the U.S. not use its considerable power over Israel to march it back to its 1967 borders? That, really, is what’s at issue here.

[...]

But he’s substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America’s public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter’s apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression.

Indeed. Just as the U.S.-Israel special relationship is an anomaly in terms of Mearsheimer and Walt's realist model, so, I think, reflexive support for Israel is an anomaly in the worldview of many otherwise liberal pundits. Even recognizing that opinions and degrees of support vary among this group, I don't think there's any question that the general and continuing failure of the liberal punditocracy to deal honestly with the consequences of the U.S.'s unquestioning support for the Israeli occupation is a critical component of the lobby's efforts to keep that support coming.

UPDATE: In regard to the broader mainstream media's role in maintaining a state of denial about the Israeli occupation, last Tuesday the Washington Post ran an editorial offering Israel's detainee policy as a model for how the U.S. could "fight terrorism without sacrificing due process." I'm at a loss to really convey the Alice in Wonderland quality of the Post's description of the various rights and privileges enjoyed by Palestinian detainees, which is utterly at odds with the vast majority of reportage on the subject. The "due process" afforded Palestinians, who are rounded up on the flimsiest charges and whose detention can be renewed indefinitely, is so superficial as to be meaningless. There are literally thousands of Palestinian men who spent the better part of their young adulthoods in Israeli detention, essentially for the crime of being a Palestinian nationalist. Do you think this has made them less radical, or more radical? (Unfortunately, I think Israel's detainee policy already does serve as a model for the U.S.) But hey, it's in the Washington Post, so it must be true.

Ironically, or maybe just sadly, on the same day, the Post published this story, entitled "Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach." Heh.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-09-07T09:38:00.002-07:00

Apropos of my review of the new Van Halen biography at TAP: Eddie Van Halen

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-08-24T04:24:00.001-07:00

John Lee Hooker.

Cultivating His Only Constituency

2007-08-23T06:48:00.000-07:00

Following on last Saturday's "Put me in, Coach!" op-ed from Ayad Allawi, Iraq Slogger reports today that Allawi has retained Haley Barbour's lobbying firm in his bid to be installed as the Iraqi Pinochet. (As if Maliki hadn't gotten the message yet, yesterday Bush called him a "good man," putting Maliki in the august company of such political success stories as Bernie Kerik and Michael Brown.)

Juan Cole relays rumours of a coming coup, and a two-year security plan involving the installation of a "military commission," presumably to keep the lid on Iraq while Bush sallies forth into Iran, and even greater disaster.

The Faithful

2007-08-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

Last night's CNN documentary on Israeli religious extremists, and their Jewish and Christian supporters in the U.S., was something we don't often get in U.S. media: An honest look at institutionalized and systemic Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the way that violence is directly supported by American money, rhetoric, and policy. There's simply no credible argument for classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization, but not Gush Emunim.

The section on NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind surprised even me. Here's a man, a legislator, who openly and proudly raises money to expand and construct new illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in clear, blatant violation of U.S. law. If he were raising money for Palestinian kindergartens, you can bet the FBI would be all over him. But thanks to the double-standard which exists in regard to Israeli violence against Palestinians, as well as general American ignorance of the nature of the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, Hikind has no reason to fear any repercussions from going on national television and essentially declaring his support for ethnic cleansing.

Special Scrutiny

2007-08-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

Via Richard Silverstein, a play by play of the attack on Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Anyone familiar with the NY Post will be unsurprised to learn that the paper completely misrepresented the sequence of questions and answers given by Almontaser about the Arabic word "intifada" in the article which eventually led to her resignation. Anyone familiar with Daniel Pipes will be unsurprised to learn that the man is a shameless bigot:

The Arab-American community right now — and any Arabic language and culture school — should be subject to “special scrutiny,” [Pipes] said.

“I believe such a school requires scrutiny beyond that of any other group’s school, he said. “It fits into a larger pattern in which Muslim officials require greater scrutiny, whether they be chaplains [or] law enforcement officers. There is a tendency to sympathize with Islamism that we ignore at our peril. ... When law enforcement is looking for a rapist, it looks at men, not men and women. If you’re looking for terrorism you must give special scrutiny to this community.”

[...]

“What I am arguing for — special scrutiny — is often done,” he said. “But it’s done in an unofficial, underhanded way. It’s lying basically. It’s a disservice to Muslims who don’t believe law enforcement when they say you’re not being singled out.

“Let’s make it overt. Let’s say there is a difference. It would be healthy to have a debate about it.”

Asked if he would have favored “special scrutiny” of the immigrant Jewish community teeming with socialists, communists and anarchists on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century to deal with terrorist bombings by some anarchists during that period, Pipes replied, “I’m happy to apply this wherever it’s useful.”

Wow. Just...wow. You almost have to be impressed at the stones on someone who tries to present overt anti-Muslim prejudice as a service to Muslims.

People, It's Bad

2007-08-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Shorter cross-section of national security experts (as well as Daniel Pipes, who was disappointed that the poll contained no question like: How seditious are American Muslims? A) Very seditious; B) Extremely seditious indeed; C) Michelle Malkin is a half-stepper) polled for the Center for American Progress's latest Terrorism Index:

"Sh*t's all f'ed up!"

More later.

The Giants Depart

2007-08-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

Max Roach 1924-2007.

Guilt by Assertion

2007-08-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

Reporting from Iraq, Michael Totten writes about how Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi have infiltrated the Iraqi security services. Totten makes some interesting observations, talks to some Iraqis, but then gives us this:

The Mahdi Army is Iran’s major proxy in Iraq. It is, in effect, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah.

The Iranians know what they’re doing. Lebanon was their proving ground. The Revolutionary Guards built Hezbollah from scratch along the border with Israel and in the suburbs south of Beirut during the chaos of civil war and Israeli occupation. In Iraq they’re simply repeating the formula, only this time more violently.

I've seen it repeatedly asserted that Sadr is an Iranian tool, usually by right-of-center types who are trying to gin up a war with Iran, but have never seen any evidence for it, and Totten offers none. Most of the reporting I've seen from Iraq doesn't support that contention, and my own research on Sadr and his movement strongly argues against Sadr's being an Iranian agent.

The problem here is that Totten throws his assertion into the middle of some actual reportage, and then Powerline parrots it, and on up the food chain until it's simply an article of faith among conservatives, just like the Saddam-al Qaeda connection and the WMDs to Syria nonsense, to be folded into the larger argument for war with whomever, all the time. (In one of those delightful examples of unintentional irony that continually crop up like leafy spurge amid the defiant know-nothingism of rightwing blogdom, a later Powerline post is entitled "Never let the facts stand in the way of a meme." Heh, indeed.)

I don't think it's correct that the Pasdaran (Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) built Hezbollah from scratch. The Pasdaran trained and indoctrinated several breakaway extremist Lebanese Shia factions which became Hizb 'Allah ("Party of God.") The claim is even less true of the Mahdi Army, which developed, like Muqtada's entire movement, out of the clerical activism of Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr. A central element of the elder Sadr's program, and now Muqtada's, is opposition to Iranian influence. While his pro-Arab nativist rhetoric has alienated Muqtada from a significant portion of Iraq's Shia clerical hierarchy, many of whom, including Grand Ayatollah Sistani, are of Persian origin, it has endeared him to Iraq's Arab Shia underclass, which is where he finds his greatest support.

If any group can be said to have been created by the Pasdaran "from scratch," it is the Badr Brigade, the militia wing of SIIC (formerly SCIRI), formed out of Iraqi exiles and defectors, and POWs from the Iran-Iraq War. It is the Badr Brigade that continues to serve as "Iran's major proxy" in Iraq, constantly battling the Mahdi Army for control of Shia neighborhoods in southern Iraq. However, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of SIIC (and former commander of the Badr), is now George W. Bush's friend , so it won't do to point this out.

This isn't to say that Sadr receives no Iranian support, he certainly does, as do various groups in Iraq, directly and through proxies. After their offers to help stabilize Iraq were rebuffed by the Bush administration, elements in the Iranian government clearly foresaw the coming chaos, and starting hedging their bets, getting their fingers into different pies, betting on various horses to win, and mixing every possible metaphor, as a way to produce the best possible outcome for Iran. It is true that Sadr admires and emulates Hezbollah. Like them, he has fashioned a political identity that combines sometimes contradictory elements of populism, nationalism, pro-Arabism, and pan-Shiism. The tendency of some to elide these elements in favor of a "Iranian tool" narrative indicates a failure to appreciate some of the complexities of Iraqi-Shia identity, and, of course, an attempt to gin up a war with Iran.

There is one thing Sadr and Iran undoubtedly do share, however. The U.S. has effectively done for Sadr in Iraq what we've done for Iran in the wider Gulf region: Pursued a series of policies which seem to have been designed in a lab to facilitate his becoming the dominant actor.

Update: Eric Martin has some other observations.

Be Very Afraid

2007-08-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Rob Farley takes a first look at Norman Podhoretz's...err, Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy manifesto in Foreign Affairs.

[The] piece offers a pretty faithful recitation of what I'll call the Neoconservative Romance. According to this narrative, the United States began the Cold War with a vigorous challenge to the Soviet Union that was made all the more pure by virtue of American beliefs in the evangelical power of "liberty." (The key elements to the romance would include, for example, the Truman Doctrine or the Berlin Airlift.) Over time, however, true believers watched as the nation's leaders fell into apostasy, drawing the nation farther from its Original Purpose; rather than challenging the Soviets directly, the US reigned itself to an unacceptable status quo that stifled the aspirations of half the planet. At the darkest hour, Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency and retrieved history from the drainpipe.

It goes without saying that, in the neocon fairy tale of Good King Ronnie, the rescue of History Itself was not the culmination of decades of diplomacy, engagement, containment, negotiation, and occasional confrontation. (And don't even think of suggesting that it had anything to do with the inherent weaknesses of the Soviet system. What are you, some kind of historian?) Reagan's single-handed victory over the Evil Empire represented the repudiation of anything other than confrontation, and thus justifies the confrontation of all subsequent Evil Empires.

It's obvious why Rudy is embracing the very kinds of policies which have proven so disastrous in the last years: "Toughness" is all he has to run on, especially in the primary. It speaks volumes about the Big Strong Daddy issues of the evangelical Republican base that a thrice-married, occasionally cross-dressing, pro-choice New Yorker even has a chance, let alone is one of the top contenders.

The Vilification of Language

2007-08-15T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I read this story about Debbie Almontaser, the principal of a new Arabic-language school in NYC, who, after having the bad form to discuss in public the actual meaning of the word "intifada," was mau-maued into first apologizing, and then resigning:

The principal of a new Arabic-themed public school in Brooklyn resigned under pressure, days after she was quoted defending the use of the word “intifada” as a T-shirt slogan.

Debbie Almontaser, a veteran public school teacher, was hired to lead the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a middle school that was scheduled to open this fall. An immediate replacement was not announced, and Ms. Almontaser’s abrupt exit left the future of the school in question.

[...]

The remarks that made her the focus of criticism were in response to questions from The New York Post over the phrase “Intifada NYC,” which was printed on T-shirts sold by Arab Women Active in Art and Media...

Here is The Post’s account of Ms. Almontaser’s comments:

“The word [intifada] basically means ’shaking off.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic,” she said.

“I understand it is developing a negative connotation due to the uprising in the Palestinian-Israeli areas. I don’t believe the intention is to have any of that kind of [violence] in New York City.

“I think it’s pretty much an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society … and shaking off oppression.”

Ms. Almontaser issued an apology the next day, saying that she regretted her remarks. “By minimizing the word’s historical associations, I implied that I condone violence and threats of violence,” she said in a statement.

But the apology was followed by criticism from Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. Ms. Weingarten stopped short of calling for Ms. Almontaser’s resignation, but called the word intifada “something that ought to be denounced, not explained away.”

The Palestinian intifadas, which encompassed actions both violent (front page of the NY Times) and non-violent (tucked deep inside, if reported at all, as student boycotts and general strikes just don't sell papers like exploding pizzerias do), were uprisings against, the attempt to "shake off," what is widely recognized (everywhere but in the U.S., anyway) as an illegal, dehumanizing, and brutal Israeli military occupation. As with the term "jihad," right-wing elements have sought to define "intifada" solely in terms of its association with terrorist violence. Debbie Almontaser had the temerity to challenge these misrepresentations and misunderstandings, and to defend the term's proper use in the context of social activism. The fact that she has now had to resign over this, indeed that she felt she needed to apologize at all, indicates the almost complete dominance of the Israeli narrative in American media, and the ability of hardline pro-Israel and anti-Muslim activists to manipulate the ignorance and fear of Americans about Islam and Arabs to quell discussion and debate, and to make verboten the expression of certain ideas and opinions.

Speaking of ignorance and fear, here's Daniel Pipes:

Almontaser's departure, however welcome, does not change the rest of the problematic school's personnel, much less address the more basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.

To reiterate my initial assessment in March, the KGIA is in principle a great idea, for the United States needs more Arabic-speakers. In practice, however, Arabic-language instruction needs special scrutiny.

Bigotry rarely comes so blatant as this. Offering no evidence, because, of course, his audience requires none, Pipes simply asserts that an Arabic language school would obviously tend toward Islamist and Arabist proselytizing. This "madrassa," a term he employs as a pejorative, must be monitored for righthink. (I'm picturing Pipes sitting in a tiny little chair in a kindergarten classroom, pad and pen in hand, perpetual scowl on his face, as children learn the Arabic alphabet.) Yes, Pipes supports, in principle, the learning of Arabic language and culture (after all, we need spies, don't we?) provided there is nothing taught which might deviate from the Likud Party platform.

Standing Athwart the Center Wicket, Yelling Stop!

2007-08-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm troubled by this article, which describes the Xtreme-ization of the noble and wonderful game of croquet.

For the last two years, Jim Grupe has tried to stir up local interest in his favorite extreme sport. It’s not something you’ll come across while watching skateboarders or cyclists fall from the sky during the ongoing X Games.

Grupe’s game of choice, actually, is among the last you’d think would be suited to the sort of extremism that’s taking over so many established pastimes.

It’s croquet.

“I was looking for something new,” he says, “and this is what I found.”

Grupe, 60, is the founder and force behind the DC/MD/VA Extreme Croquet Club. Once a month, he invites folks to his home in Brookeville, Md., to take a whack at the new version of the old lawn game. His 17-acre spread has all the fixin’s that separate an extreme croquet course from that of its genteel predecessor, including a pond, a stream, lots of trees, lots of mud, and various livestock.

In my opinion, physical exertion (like, say, walking around on 17 acres) is anathema to the very spirit of croquet. No croquet field should be so big that you are ever, at any time, more than ten steps away from the makeshift bar or the cooler filled with beer. The beauty of croquet is that you can play it, and play it well, without spilling your drink. If polo is the sport of kings, croquet is the sport of kings' lazy, good-for-nothing brothers. Like vegetarian barbecue and smooth jazz, extreme croquet completely misses the point.

On the Beach

2007-08-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

The battle over modern Muslim identity is being fought on the shores of the Mediterranean. This article in today’s International Herald Tribune about beaches in Egypt and the increasing pressure on women to dress more conservatively reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend who lives in Turkey. He told me that many Turkish resorts are going Islamist, putting up curtains to divide the beach between men's and women's sides, or else simply requiring the head-to-toe burquini. These resorts aren't being forced into this, they're simply responding to the market, catering to an increasingly wealthy, and increasingly devout, Turkish middle class. As in Egypt, the number of beaches where women and women and men can swim together, and where women can wear Western-style bathing suits without fear of harassment, is growing smaller.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-08-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

Nels Cline (w/ Wilco).

Denier for Hire

2007-08-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

Following up on this article on the Armenian genocide lobbying war currently taking place in Congress, Michael Crowley blogged this video starring Clinton impeachment casualty Bob Livingston, who is now employed by the Republic of Turkey to lobby against official U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide. Words really don't do justice to Livingston's pathetic, unprinicipled propagandizing ("Historians disagree...No one really knows...There were atrocities on all sides...") over what is, at this point, a rather overwhelmingly accepted historical fact: Between the years 1915 and 1918, around a million and a half Armenians were killed in an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing, transfer, and extermination by the Ottoman forces. It's certainly true that official recognition of this historical fact by Congress would seriously complicate the U.S. relationship with Turkey, a very important relationship which is on shaky ground right now because of Iraq, among other things, but I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for Livingston, which is to say I'd have some, if he'd just make that argument rather than attempting to "teach the controversy" over the systematic murder of 1.5 million human beings and the destruction of Turkey's Armenian community.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-08-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Angus Young.

Gasoline for the Fire

2007-08-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

My new piece on Bush's Middle East arms deal is up at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Your Autographed Copy of "Left Behind" Won't Get You Into Heaven Any More

2007-07-30T06:16:00.000-07:00

Following up on last week's post about Christians Impatient for Armageddon, here's an article about a letter written by group of moderate Christian evangelical leaders who support the creation of a Palestinian state, and a more even-handed approach by the United States to the Israel-Palestine conflict. By "moderate," I simply mean that they don't subscribe to a brand of eschatology that mixes populist ressentiment with a plotline drawn from a prog-rock concept album, and that they believe Jesus probably wouldn't be in favor of Israel's colonization of Palestinian land, and the misery which this produces among the Palestinians.

CUFI's ruling cleric, Rev. John Hagee, responded:

"Bible-believing evangelicals will scoff at that message.

"Christians United for Israel is opposed to America pressuring Israel to give up more land to anyone for any reason. What has the policy of appeasement ever produced for Israel that was beneficial?" Hagee said.

"God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob a covenant in the Book of Genesis for the land of Israel that is eternal and unbreakable, and that covenant is still intact," he said. "The Palestinian people have never owned the land of Israel, never existed as an autonomous society. There is no Palestinian language. There is no Palestinian currency. And to say that Palestinians have a right to that land historically is an historical fraud."

Now, of course, you can hear precisely this sort of thing from hardline preachers and demagogues on al Jazeera and Hezbollah-run al-Manar television all the time, in regard to the Jews and Israel: They have no legitimate claim to the land, Palestine is Islamic waqf, "true" Muslims reject compromise witht he Zionist entity, and so on. When Islamic leaders say these things, however, they are appropriately condemned in the U.S. media as extremists. When John Hagee says them, he is invited to the White House, embraced by the Republican leadership and AIPAC, and compared to Moses by Joe Lieberman.

Reimagine This

2007-07-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Amongst the various commercials shown to me last night as I waited for the Simpsons movie to start was a five minute spot on the new Bionic Woman, which is apparently "getting the Battlestar Galactica treatment." That is, a hokey TV show of yore is being revamped, er, excuse me, "reimagined" as serious television. (This was obvious even before I learned that BSG's executive producer David Eick is producing the show.) At one point in the ad, actor Miguel Ferrer even said "This is not your parents' Bionic Woman," as was said by every other reviewer of BSG when it premiered. (No word yet whether Lindsay Wagner will be brought on to play a conniving politician with questionable loyalties.)*

Surely, there are a host of other TV series that could use the BSG treatment, shows which at the time were treated purely as escapist entertainment, the moral and political implications of their premises left woefully unexplored. Here are some possibilities:

The Beverly Hillbillies
In this "reimagining" of the beloved 60's series, Jed Clampett, a poor, humble farmer, strikes oil on his land, gets rich and moves to LA, where he and his family struggle with the pressures of newfound wealth and power. Jed becomes active in conservative politics, eventually buying a formerly liberal magazine and using it to call for war in the Middle East. Jethro and Elly Mae are almost destroyed by drugs and cliquishness at their new high school. With nothing left to do but sit around drinking, and steadily losing her sight from a lifetime of moonshine, Granny goes slowly senile, becoming an angry prophet of doom, her physical blindness a metaphor for the moral darkness which increasingly engulfs the Clampett family. This is not your grandparents' Beverly Hillbillies.

Knight Rider
Brilliantly anticipating the looming midlife crises of this show's original demographic, in this "reimagining" of the beloved early 80's car commercial, a mortally wounded good-looking cop in tight jeans is given a new name, a gooder-looking face, and even tighter jeans, as well as a souped-up, penis-shaped sports car, which goes 200 mph, has a full bar, and talks in the voice of Demi Moore. Michael Knight travels the country, arguing with his car/lover/self, saving young kids from gangs and drugs, and then bedding their mothers. The psychological dimensions and consequences of satyriasis are explored. This is not your older brother's Knight Rider.

The A-Team
In this "reimagining" of the beloved mid-80's Hollywood stuntman full-employment program, instead of Vietnam, the team served in Iraq. This is not your second cousin's A-Team.

Newhart
In this "reimagining" of the beloved occasionally moderately funny 80's comedy series, a disillusioned high-powered executive, tired of a life of moral compromise, leaves Wall Street to run a cozy little hotel in a small Vermont town. His dream of rural tranquility is shattered when he runs afoul of Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, local psychotic inbred marijuana-smugglers who rule the town. While initially packing up his Benz and running for his life, Bob soon recognizes the clear moral choice before him, and is reborn as a shotgun-wielding avenger/hotelier in a place where violence is the only law, and everybody's baked. This is not your uncle from North Jersey's Newhart.

*My snark should not be taken to indicate that I will not totally be watching the new Bionic Woman.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-07-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

B.B. King.

Misunderstanding Muqtada

2007-07-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

I have a new piece on Muqtada al-Sadr over at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Who Would Jesus Ethnically Cleanse?

2007-07-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

Max Blumenthal just posted this documentary taken at last week's Christians United for Israel rally in DC. As Blumenthal's footage makes abundantly clear, these people are extremists committed to bringing about the Apocalypse. Think I'm kidding? You really have to watch it to understand the bigotry, zealotry, and resentment which powers Christian Zionism. And then shudder at how many conservative leaders were in attendance.

Here's the text of Joe Lieberman's speech to the rally, in which he compares CUFI founder John Hagee to Moses. What do you think would be the response if a U.S. Senator had spoken before a gathering of Muslim fundamentalists who refused to recognize any Jewish claim to Palestine, who who claimed all of Palestine for Islam? An organization that was actively raising funds to support the expulsion of Jews from Palestine? Why do I think we'll never find out?

The mutually cynical relationship here is stark: The largely secular Israeli right cultivates support of loony American Christian fundamentalists in order to help maintain the unquestioning support of the U.S. Congress for the occupation. Loony American Christian fundamentalists support the expanionist policies of the Israeli right in order to speed the return of Jesus, at which time the Jews will be given the opportunity to convert, or go to hell. No, really, literally: Hell. At one point the rally organizers approach Blumenthal and request that he not engage attendees in discussions about eschatology, lest anyone out themselves as barking mad, I suppose. Oops, too late. In a brief interview with former Sharon adviser Dore Gold, Gold perfectly embodies Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit by denying that CUFI is at all concerned with "moving the clock of eschatology forward," claiming that "the only one who believes that [he can do that] is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad." Gold clearly knows what he's saying is false, he just doesn't care.

For the effects of the policies supported by CUFI, see this morning's Washington Post article on life in Israeli-occupied Hebron in the West Bank. Hebron provides us a view of the Israeli occupation in perfect miniature: Palestinians are coralled within a series of ghettoes, watching from behind barbed wire and concrete as their crops die, as their homes and lands are taken over by radical Jewish settlers, enduring daily harassment and violence by those settlers who are supported by the Israeli army. Any resistance by Palestinians is immediately labeled "terrorism," brutally suppressed, and used to justify more closures, stricter curfews, and the expropriation of more land. It's a considerable understatement to say that U.S. support for this sort of thing doesn't win us friends, at least not the friends that we want.

Helping the Enemy

2007-07-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Reading about President Bush's latest attempt to defend the Iraq war by presenting al-Qaeda as SPECTRE reminded me to link to this Abu Aardvark post from a couple weeks ago. In discussing the various groups fighting the US in Iraq, and criticizing the way that Bush and his flacks try to conflate them all into al-Qaeda ( i.e. "The folks who attacked us on September 11"), Marc Lynch made this point:

The real harm comes in the wider Arab and Muslim world, where the exaggeration of al-Qaeda's role works directly and devastatingly against American goals. It magnifies al-Qaeda's perceived power, strengthening its own media campaign and feeding its most powerful propaganda instrument. Attributing all these attacks to al-Qaeda certainly doesn't hurt al-Qaeda's image: Iraq is the one place where al-Qaeda's violence is actually widely supported in the Muslim world (a recent PIPA survey found that over 90% of Egyptians thought that attacks on American civilians were against Islam and illegitimate, but over 90% of Egyptians thought that attacks on American troops in Iraq were legitimate). The administration in effect claims more power and military success for al-Qaeda in Iraq than al-Qaeda claims for itself - for which the al-Qaeda leadership can only be bemusedly grateful. Forget al-Hurra - if you're looking for a real public diplomacy fiasco, you'll be hard pressed to do worse than the US acting as al-Qaeda's agent in promoting its Iraqi success.

We constantly hear conservatives condemning talk of withdrawal as "helping the enemy." We don't want to withdraw from Iraq and "hand bin Laden a propaganda victory," or some such. Leaving aside that it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, whenever that may occur, is not spun as a victory by Islamic extremists, as Lynch makes clear, the propaganda victory that Bush is handing al-Qaeda is not a matter of prediction. It is happening. By continuing to cling to and defend a failed policy by inflating al-Qaeda's power in Iraq, by treating al-Qaeda as a top-down organization with command and control capability, rather than a loosely affiliated ideological network, Bush is effectively waving al-Qaeda's flag for them. He got us into Iraq by misrepresenting Saddam Hussein's capabilities, and he's keeping us there by doing the same with al-Qaeda. We know the tragic consequences of the former; we haven't begun to grasp the consequences of the latter.

Friday Guitar Blogging: Special Drums Edition

2007-07-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

Buddy Rich vs. Animal.

This Has Been Tried Before

2007-07-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

Charles Krauthammer:

Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation.

Blackadder Goes Forth :

Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.

Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?

Blackadder: That's right, there was one tiny flaw in the plan.

George: Oh, what was that?

Blackadder: It was bollocks.

Heads, He Wins; Tails, We Lose

2007-07-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

While reinforcing my point from last week about Muqtada al-Sadr's significance in Iraqi politics, the deep roots of his movement, and the utter folly of attempting to stand up a government which doesn't accomodate it, this article in today's NY Times also sheds some light on Muqtada's "insider/outsider" strategy:

After months of lying low, the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd strategy that reaches out to Iraqis on the street while distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular government.

Mr. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from government, contributing to the political paralysis noted in a White House report last week. That outsider status has enhanced Mr. Sadr’s appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less relevant to their daily lives.

Mr. Sadr has been working tirelessly to build support at the grass-roots level, opening storefront offices across Baghdad and southern Iraq that dispense services that are not being provided by the government. In this he seems to be following the model established by Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite group, as well as Hamas in Gaza, with entwined social and military wings that serve as a parallel government.
...

The Sadrists exhibit a quiet confidence, and are pulling ever more supporters into their ranks. “The Sadr movement cannot be marginalized; it is the popular base,” said Sheik Salah al-Obaidi, the chief spokesman and a senior strategist for Mr. Sadr’s movement in Najaf. “We will not be affected by efforts to push us to one side because we are the people. We feel the people’s day-to-day sufferings.”

A number of working-class Shiites reflected that sentiment in conversations about the Mahdi militia and Mr. Sadr. Their relatives and neighbors work both for the Sadr offices and for the militia, blurring the line between social programs and paramilitary activity.

Mr. Sadr’s offices are accessible storefronts that dispense a little bit of everything: food, money, clothes, medicine and information. From just one office in Baghdad and one in Najaf in 2003, the Sadr operation has ballooned. It now has full-service offices in most provinces and nine in Baghdad, as well as several additional storefront centers. In some neighborhoods, the militiamen come around once a month to charge a nominal fee — about 5,000 Iraqi dinars, or $4 — for protection. In others, they control the fuel supply, and in some, where sectarian killings have gone on, they control the real estate market for empty houses.

Sadr essentially has the best of both worlds here. His staunch and consistent opposition to the U.S. presence and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, and the confrontational stance which the U.S. continues to take toward him, allows him to credibly criticize the failure of the government to deliver services and security. At the same time, his loyalists' control of the Health and Transportation ministries provides access to government funds and resources, which can then be distributed as patronage and charity under the banner of his movement. Clever.

Arafat, AIDS and the Clown Choir

2007-07-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

The various bozos of the wingnut circus have had their little chortle about the rumor of Yasser Arafat's having died of AIDS (much like their sporadic concern for women's rights, wingers care deeply about homophobia if and when it can be used as a weapon against their political enemies), but leave it to Marty Peretz's Mini Me to go the extra mile and try to spin the story into a slander of the Palestinians in general. I give you James Kirchick:

Of course, no amount of evidence will convince the Palestinians that Arafat was a homosexual, or that his death was caused by anything other than Israel's machinations. I found this out a few weeks ago in the West Bank, where everyone I spoke to told me that Israel killed Arafat. The denials that will inevitably spill forth about the causes of Arafat's death will mirror the rejection of a two state solution: both are part and parcel of the Palestinians' self-delusion.

Yes, those silly, delusional Palestinians. It's amazing how people whose leaders have been assassinated by Israeli bullets, missiles, bombs in telephones, poisoning, and secret lethal injection ambush will believe any damn thing. Sure, Ariel Sharon had openly declared Israel's right to kill Arafat if Israel so desired, but to actually suspect Israel of having gone through with it? That's just another example of the conspiratorial anti-Semitism which infects Palestinian society. As for the Palestinian's "rejection of a two state solution," given the fact that a substantial majority of Palestinians have for over a decade been in favor of just that, I suggest that the thing that's actually mirrored here is James Kirchick's bigotry.

Rumours about Arafat's homosexuality have been around for a long time. A number of Israeli scholars I've spoken to over the years, as well as a few Palestinians, simply acknowledged it as fact. Obviously, if true, it would be very interesting to consider how this was kept secret, or at least mostly secret, for so long. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that quite a few people knew about it, but said nothing or ignored it because they considered Arafat's leadership indispensible.

To be sure, this particular story has a suspicious provenance. To say that I was initially wary of something that I first saw posted on the Corner after it had been picked up from Little Green Footballs is like saying I would be wary of eating a ring-ding that I first saw on the floor of the Newark bus station men's room after it had been transported through customs between Bill O'Reilly's ass cheeks. Ahmad Jibril, who apparently floated the rumor in an al-Manar TV interview translated by the hatefully anti-Palestinian MEMRI, and linked by LGF, is the head of the rejectionist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, a longtime rival of Fatah's, currently based in Damascus. It's easy to see why he might want to slander and discredit Arafat, and by extension the current Fatah leadership, by outing Arafat as having been "infected." That's not to say that the story isn't true, just that not one of the links in the chain is a source that I consider particularly, or even nearly, credible.

Misunderestimated, Again

2007-07-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Others have ably dismantled Kimberly Kagan's unconvincing defense of the Kagan Family Surgeshow, but I found this bit particularly amazing:

The larger aim of the new strategy is creating an opportunity for Iraq's leaders to negotiate a political settlement. These negotiations are underway. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to form a political coalition with Amar al-Hakim and Kurdish political leaders, but excluding Moqtada al-Sadr, and has invited Sunnis to participate. He has confronted Moqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has apparently prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January.

“So-called Iraqi nationalist”? Sadr is unique among Shi'i leaders in that his nationalist credentials are not in any serious dispute. His representatives relentlessly hammer at the fact that while many other Shi'i leaders, most notably the Hakims, chose the safety of exile, the Sadrs stayed in Iraq, and were executed for their activism. This is one of the main sources of Muqtada's political strength: He stayed and suffered with his fellow Iraqis. SCIRI was renamed SIIC and realigned away from Khameini and toward Sistani for exactly this reason, to make up for its nationalist deficit vis a vis Sadr, and combat the perception that it is an Iranian instrument.

I don't know how I can say this any more clearly: There will be no settlement in Iraq without Sadr. It's almost comical how many times Muqtada has gone to ground, and the usual suspects have declared him politically dead, over, dealt with. After four years of trying to marginalize Sadr, crowing every time he suffers a perceived setback, and running home for dinner every time he returns, stronger, more defiant, with bigger crowds, and even more juice than before, we must understand that A) Muqtada al-Sadr represents a genuine and extremely formidable Iraqi constitutency, one with organizational roots that go back decades, B) The survival of the Iraqi government, and probably of the Iraqi state, depends to a great extent on the government’s accommodation of that movement, and C) After four long years, the people defending Bush's Iraq policy apparently still don’t know very much about Iraq.

Barghouti

2007-07-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

There have been some reports that Israel is considering releasing Marwan Barghouti as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, to bolster Fatah against Hamas. While this should have been done years ago, it's certainly a positive development now.

Israel's Ha’aretz editorialized last month:

One of the leaders of the Palestinian people has been incarcerated for approximately five years now in Hadarim Prison, in central Israel. The time has come to release him. For years, Marwan Barghouti has tried to persuade Israelis to end the occupation through negotiation. He has gone from one Israeli party headquarters to the next, meeting with politicians across the political spectrum. He tried to persuade them in order to preempt the next confrontation.

During his years in prison, Barghouti has acted to restrain the armed struggle and bolster his people's moderate leadership, using envoys to achieve this goal. Barghouti never left his native West Bank, never took to the habits of power characteristic of the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership in Tunisia. He became a popular leader - especially in the West Bank, and to a lesser degree in the Gaza Strip.

Modern history - including Israel's - has known national leaders who turned to violence and were jailed for years, until they were released to become political leaders who marched their peoples toward independence peacefully. Nelson Mandela is one such example. The leaders of the Zionist undergrounds in prestate Israel are another. Now, Barghouti's turn has come.

The Mandela comparison is apt. Briefly, Marwan Barghouti is a leading figure among the Fatah "new guard" who came of age in the occupied Palestinian territories in the late 70's and 80's, and took a leading role in the first intifada. In 2004 he was convicted of plotting terror attacks, and received several life sentences. He has continued his activism in prison, and was one of the proponents of the 2006 "Prisoner’s Agreement” which sought conciliation between Palestinian factions.

Barghouti features prominently in Sari Nusseibeh's memoir, Once Upon a Country. A student of Nusseibeh's at Bir Zeit University, Barghouti was active in campus government, and was committed both to non-violently resisting the occupation, and to building institutions which would support a modern Palestinian state. Like countless others of his generation, Barghouti spent his youth in and out of Israeli prisons for the crime of being a Palestinian nationalist. Nusseibeh effectively uses Barghouti's increasingly militant stance, and his eventual embrace of violence in response to the continuing Israeli occupation and colonization, to track the growth of radicalism among young Palestinians.

Moshe Elad, writing in Yediot Ahronoth, condemns the idea of Barghouti's release. Elad writes:

The crowning era is over. Reality in the Territories shows that those released on the initiative of the Israeli government are tainted as collaborators and as such become a target for assassination or are destined to be forgotten. Alternately, such a person would become more radical than he was before just so he can clear the collaborator stain. The early release of Barghouti just because Israel is searching for an agreeable partner for negotiations on the future of the Territories would no doubt taint Barghouti as the "ultimate collaborator." In the early 1980s Israel already "crowned" the "Village Committees" in the West Bank and supported several local leaders and mayors.

The crowning era never existed, except in the minds of a few Israelis. The idea that Israel could install its chosen leaders over the Palestinians was always a fantasy. The Village Committees were, from their very beginning, undersood by Palestinians as an attempt by Israel to create leaders subservient to the goals of the Israeli occupation. The bitter irony that these committess almost directly reproduced British efforts to divide and control Palestinian activism during the mandate period was lost on no one, except perhaps the Israeli occupation authorities.

There is no doubt that some elements, hardline Islamists and motorcade-addicted Fatah officials, would try to tar Barghouti as a collaborator, but the fact is that he continues to enjoy more genuine support among Palestinians than any other leader. He combines nationalist credentials with a non-corrupt reputation, having eschewed the trappings of power which many other Fatah leaders embraced during the 1990's, and which led to Hamas's electoral victory in 2006. Barghouti is not a magician, and it's very possible that it's to late even for him to make a difference. It should also be understood, however, that if the occupation, house demolitions, and settlement construction continue unabated, it really doesn't matter who the Israelis release.

The Wages of Flypaper Strategy

2007-07-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day from Mohammad Bashar al Faidi, via Conflict Blotter:

"The Arabs went to Afganistan and got a masters in violent Jihad, but in Iraq they’re all getting PhDs."

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-07-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

Matt Murphy.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-06-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

Television. A very nice rendition of "1880 or So" from their underrated 1992 self-titled reunion album. (Richard solos at 1:50, Tom at 4:05.)

Sources report that Richard Lloyd, after missing the band's performance at Central Park's Summerstage last week due to being hospitalized for penumonia, "will, after 34 years, be amicably severing all ties with the band Television."

I was lucky enough to catch Television live twice, in 2001 and again in 2003. Both of the shows were among the best I've ever seen. As you can gather from the video, a band featuring either Tom Verlaine or Richard Lloyd by himself would have been very impressive; a band with them together was transcendent.

The Objectionable Smell of Blowback

2007-06-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

In Sunday's Outlook section, Warren Bass wrote a short profile of Hamas, and about the competition between it and Fatah which has now boiled over into a Palestinian civil war. For some reason, however, while noting that Hamas grew out of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, he did not mention the role that Israel played in cultivating the Brotherhood as a pan-Islamic alternative to the secular nationalist Fatah. While the true extent of Israeli support for the Brotherhood is not known, that it took place is not questioned. Sari Nusseibeh, whose memoir Bass recommends, writes about this in some detail, noting that while the Israel occupation authorities harassed and detained Palestinian activists of every stripe, Sheikh Yassin and his organization were left strangely unmolested, as Brotherhood-run social services and study centers went up at a peculiarly high rate throughout the territories. In addition to being rather relevant to Hamas’s story, you’d think that a bitter irony such as this, Israel now frantically trying to prop up Fatah against Hamas as it earlier propped up Hamas's precursor against Fatah, would be attractive to any writer.

Curious at why Bass ignored this low hanging fruit, I wrote and asked him about it. He responded that because of “limited space” he was not able to include every little bit of information on Hamas than he might have wanted. You will notice, however, that he devoted some of this very precious space to referencing a satirical Onion article about Hamas. Heh, indeed.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-06-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

Otis Rush.

Just Because Alan Dershowitz Agrees Doesn't Mean You're Wrong

2007-06-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote last week that I don't think the boycott of Israeli universities is appropriate. Having considered Alan Dershowitz's argument against the boycott, however, I have concluded that I'm still against it.

I do think it's interesting, though, that, according to Dershowitz, when British academics undertake a boycott against Israeli universities for their alleged support for, and complicity in, four decades of occupation, colonization, and expropriation, that's anti-Semitism, but when the Israeli military undertakes to bomb, displace, and kill thousands of Lebanese civilians for their alleged support for, and complicity in, Hezbollah terrorism, that's tough luck.

Dershowitz claims that the boycott "wildly overstates the significance of the Israel/Palestine conflict," and then goes on to claim that "the fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism." Right. As usual, when defending Israel, or rather, when attacking Israel's critics, Dershowitz permits himself the sort of arguments for which his TA's would fail a freshman.

Oh Yes He Did

2007-06-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Marty Peretz on George Soros:

"His authority comes from nothing more than his money."

Hey, but at least it's his own money, right Marty?

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-06-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Kenny Burrell, Barney Kessel, and Grant Green.

The Boycott

2007-06-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

I don't endorse everything Martha Nussbaum has to say here, but I strongly agree with her central argument that that academic boycott declared by British scholars against Israel is not appropriate.

I know that I tend to focus in this blog on the abuses of the Israeli occupation regime, but I do recognize that there is a great amount and variety of excellent work being done in Israeli universities, much if not most having nothing whatever to do with conflict with the Palestinians. Trying to subsume all of the Israeli academy under the heading "in service to the occupation," as the boycott essentially does, seems to me kind of bullshit. For those scholars whose work does serve to justify and support the Israeli occupation and settlement project, their work should be (and repeatedly has been, most devastatingly by their fellow Israelis), singled out and refuted. I don't think that boycotting and attempting to silence those scholars, who, by virtue of their being in and of Israel, are in a unique position to produce work on various aspects of Israeli culture and society (which, again, is obviously not reducible to its conflict with the Arabs), will be productive. If anything, Israeli scholars who oppose the occupation should be engaged and supported by those hoping and working toward a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A Man We Must Do Business With

2007-06-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

I recommend Bartle Breese Bull’s op-ed from last Sunday, in which he discusses the ways in which Muqtada al-Sadr has actually been contributing to Iraqi stability, while also maintaining his steadfast opposition to the U.S. presence.

The Sadrist movement has always been about Iraq for the Iraqis. They might accept help from Iran — and I saw Iranian supplies in their compounds in Najaf in 2004 — but the movement is not for sale. Mr. Sadr gets his strength from the street. And the Arabs of the Iraqi street have no time for Persian bosses.

Nor do they seem to want to foment an all-out civil war. For all the time I have spent with Sadrist death-squad leaders who focus on killing former Baathists and Al Qaeda’s supporters (Sunnis all), I have spent just as much time with Mahdi men who have been sent by their leaders to protect Sunni mosques after Sunni provocations, lest Shiites retaliate too broadly.

It was no coincidence that in February, a few weeks after the Baghdad security plan started, a Sunni mosque was reopened in Sadr City. Nor is it a coincidence that the current plan, while it has largely failed to stop car bombs, which are primarily a Sunni phenomenon, has for the moment more or less ended the type of violence in which the Mahdi Army participated most: roving death squads.

Why would Mr. Sadr cooperate with the Americans and Mr. Maliki’s government? While he runs the biggest popular movement in the country, his followers are far from a majority. He is doing exactly what any other rational actor would do: He keeps up the angry rhetoric, and he plays ball with the democratic project.
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The real story about Moktada al-Sadr is not his exciting sermons but his broad underwriting, both passive and active, of the official project in Iraq. Since he stood down his forces in August 2004, he has provided the same narrative time and again. It is what we should expect from the canniest politician in Iraq: the rhetoric of the dispossessed, and the actions of an heir to power.

Sadr's fierce Iraqi nationalism is always what made accusations of fealty to Iran transparently ridiculous.

This is also worth noting:

It is no accident that he preaches from the Kufa mosque rather than the more prestigious one at Najaf. As the site of the tomb of Imam Ali, the great martyr of Shiism, Najaf is the center of the Shiite clerical hierarchy, a Vatican of sorts for the faith. It is a rich city.

But Moktada al-Sadr leads a movement of the poor, inherited from his father, who inherited it from an uncle. His singsong exhortation in Kufa last week was a direct reference to the most famous cry from his father’s epic, and ultimately suicidal, sermons under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s: “Yes, yes, to electricity. Yes, yes, to water.” Young Mr. Sadr speaks not for the elites but for the biggest and most deprived group of people in Iraq: the Shiite lower orders.

Kufa also has special significance Shi'i history. Kufa is where Imam Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, was travelling when his party was intercepted near Karbala by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Hussein had been traveling to Kufa at the request of the town's inhabitants, intending to lead a revolt against what they saw as the illegitimate Umayyad Caliphate. Yazid found out about this, sent his forces to crush the revolt in Kufa, and then to lay in wait for Hussein. Nearly all of Hussein's group were martyred, and Hussein's head was brought to Yazid as a trophy in Damascus. When Shi'is mourn the death of Imam Hussein during the Muharram observances, one of the rituals and themes is the lamentation and acceptance of the guilt of the Kufans for not coming to Hussein's aid in his hour of need.

Being based in Kufa, in addition to representing those who bore the brunt of Ba'athist tyranny, poor Shi'is, Muqtada is also able to place himself squarely within the Shi'i martyrdom narrative, and present himself and his movement as instruments of long-awaited Shi'i redemption and justice.

Things Dennis Forgets

2007-06-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dennis Ross’s op-ed in this morning's Washington Post is, to my mind, sadly typical of the U.S. media's treatment of the Israel/Palestine issue. Read it: Nowhere in his discussion of the conflict between Hamas and Fatah does he make a single mention of the Israeli occupation. I tend to think that if someone were writing about the violence between Sunni and Shi'i factions in Iraq, it might be considered important to mention the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq, toppled the government, and has occupied the country for the last four years. If it were also the case that the U.S. Army were bulldozing Iraqi neighborhoods, constructing huge American settlements, and diverting vast amounts of Iraqi water to service those settlements, one might consider that relevant as well. One might even be inclined toward the idea that this were contributing to Iraqi unrest.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-06-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Albert King with Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Carrying the Torch for Constantine XI

2007-05-30T05:12:00.000-07:00

Mark Krikorian, living in a small, rough lean-to and feeding on roots, berries, and moss out beyond the farthest frontiers of Wingnutistan:

We shouldn't let May 29 pass without noting the anniversary of one of the great tragedies of history, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Sure, the Byzantine Empire was already finished at that point, but its final snuffing out by the Turks was an important milestone in the jihad we continue to face.

Wow. Does this mean that we should celebrate our allies', the Mongols', sacking of Baghdad in 1258 as a victory in the war on terror? Or lament the Quraishi defeat at the Battle of Badr in 624 as the moment when 9/11 really became inevitable? Here we have incontrovertible proof that education and knowledge do not necessarily make one smarter; in many cases they just provide a grander framework for one's preexisting resentments and prejudices, a larger stage upon which to rehearse one's stupidity.

Also, I think Krikorian is letting those damn back-stabbing Paulicians off too easy. If only they hadn't weakened Byzantine resolve in the 9th century, we wouldn't all be speaking Turkish now.

How I hate the Paulicians.

Aww...

2007-05-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn objects to the president's suggestion that those against the immigration bill "don't want to do what's right for America":

I respect the President and I appreciate that his sincerity on this issue has been obvious for his entire political career. But I don't think he should impugn the good faith of those who, equally sincerely, disagree - not on "narrow slices" but on the central proposition: that drive-thru legalization for millions of people subject to desultory background checks by an agency without the resources to conduct them is not "what's right for America".

Uh huh. I'm pretty sure Steyn still considers it okay, though, to impugn the good faith, and patriotism, of those who sincerely disagree (and who have been largely vindicated in their disagreement) on the central proposition: that invading and occupying Iraq will not inspire democratic reforms throughout the region, and will serve as a recruiting poster, boot camp, and proving ground for violent, radical jihadism.

Friday Guitar Blogging

2007-05-25T05:18:00.000-07:00

Merle Travis.

Ignatius J. Peretz Has A Posse

2007-05-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

Regarding the rather entertaining dustup between Matt Yglesias and a small confederacy of dunces, let me just say, first, that having your views on Palestinian politics recommended by Marty Peretz and Jonah Goldberg is a bit like being hailed as the world's greatest living poet by Jewel and the person who cleans Jewel's pool.

Second, any analysis of the Fatah-Hamas conflict which attempts to ignore or exonerate forty years of Israeli occupation, and the cultivation of Palestinian disunity which has been a central goal of that occupation, is, quite simply, not to be taken seriously. Blaming the factional violence in Gaza on the supposedly inherently violent nature of Palestinian Arab society (which, remember, doesn't really exist, according to Peretz), while turning a blind eye to the myriad ways in which the Israeli occupation has proscribed, manipulated, and handicapped Palestinian political life during the last four decades, is as racist as it is daft.

Missed Him By That Much

2007-05-22T08:18:00.000-07:00

Patrick Cockburn, on the recently revealed U.S. attempt to assassinate Muqtada al-Sadr:

[Mowaffak al-]Rubai'e had gone to Najaf in August 2004 to try to mediate an end to the fighting. He met Mr Sadr who agreed to a set of conditions to end the crisis. "He actually signed the agreement with his own handwriting," said Dr Rubai'e. "He wanted the inner Najaf, the old city, around the shrine to be treated like the Vatican."

Having returned to Baghdad to show the draft document to Iyad Allawi, who was prime minister at the time, Dr Rubai'e went back to Najaf to make a final agreement with Mr Sadr.

It was agreed that the last meeting would take place in the house in Najaf of Muqtada's father Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr who had been murdered by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons five years before. Dr Rubai'e and other mediators started for the house. As they did so they saw the US Marines open up an intense bombardment of the house and US Special Forces also heading for it. But the attack was a few minutes premature. Mr Sadr was not yet in the house and managed to escape.

Although Dr Rubai'e, as Iraqi National Security Adviser since 2004 and earlier a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, is closely associated with the American authorities in Baghdad, he has no doubt about what happened.

He sees the negotiations as part of a charade to lure Mr Sadr, who is normally very careful about his own security, to a house where he could be eliminated.

The cloddishness on display here, the utter ignorance of history and symbolism, is no less staggering for being unsurprising. Attempting to kill Muqtada as he entered the house of his revered, martyred father Grand Ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr(assassinated by Saddam in 1999), under a flag of truce, in Shi'ism's holiest city...Like so much else having to do with this war, it seems like it could have been designed in a lab to produce precisely the opposite of the the desired result: Increased distrust of the U.S. Coalition by majority Shi'is, massively enhanced street cred for Muqtada.

Even if the assassination attempt had succeeded, I doubt it would have made things better, and could very likely have made things worse. The success of Muqtada has less to do with his own political acumen, though it's become increasingly apparent that that is a factor, more with the deep resonance among poor Shi'is of his father's populist-nationalist program, which even before 2004 was supported by a large network of clerical activists. At least, in Muqtada, you have a figure who can draw together a substantial majority of the groups identifying as "Sadrist," rather than it devolving into a contest between Sadrist leaders to see who's more hardcore.

Also, the Israelis have been killing "key" Palestinian leaders for decades; if you want to know how well that's worked out, note that they've been doing it for decades.

The Memoirs of a Palestinian Patriot

2007-05-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

“Real lasting peace is made between peoples, not governments,” writes Sari Nusseibeh near the end of his excellent memoir, Once Upon a Country. Nusseibeh is a philosopher and some-time Fatah activist who has dedicated himself to making that peace a reality by, among other things, cultivating relationships with like-minded Israelis. In this, he and his allies have been repeatedly undermined by the suspicion, mistrust, and belligerence of extremists on both sides, and in both governments, Israeli and Palestinian.

Nusseibeh comes from a noted Palestinian Arab family, whose ancestors entered Jerusalem along with caliph Omar in the seventh century. Having family roots in Palestine that go back thirteen centuries, Nusseibeh repeatedly confronts and eviscerates the notion that the Palestinians “aren’t a real people,” as well as the frankly preposterous idea that some dude just off the plane from Kiev or Brooklyn should somehow have more of a moral claim than he to the land in which he was born and raised.

One of the central themes of the book, unfortunately little remarked upon in the reviews and interviews which have followed its publication, is the way that the efforts by Palestinian activists to develop democratic institutions, such as trade unions and academic associations, organizations which could support and strengthen a mature Palestinian state, have consistently been frustrated and crushed by Israel. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, virtually all efforts by Palestinians to organize around the principle of their own nationhood have been vigorously stamped out by an Israeli government that saw the very existence of Palestinian political consciousness as a national security threat. Israeli support for the pan-Islamic Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, as a means of diluting support for the secular nationalist PLO is just one example, one with particularly severe consequences.

Nusseibeh has no illusions about his own side. He recognizes that tragic mistakes have been made, and good opportunities missed, by the Palestinian leadership. He recognizes that the use of terrorist violence has been both morally disastrous and politically counterproductive. But neither is Nusseibeh willing to give any credence to the lazy “equal blame to go around” dodge, a form of rhetorical hand-washing that works decidedly in Israel’s favor, that unfortunately characterizes so much mainstream American liberal thinking on the issue. The root cause of the conflict in Palestine is, and has always been, the attempt by one group to realize its own national aspirations at the expense of another’s, and Nusseibeh is very clear that the Israeli occupation, and the illegal settlement enterprise which it facilitates, is, has been, and continues to be the single biggest obstacle to peace between the two peoples.

Peretz Droppings

2007-05-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

I know that I cannot be the only one who finds Marty Peretz’s smug satisfaction at the escalating violence in Gaza to be reprehensible, even if it isn’t the least bit surprising. There is literally nothing that transpires among the Palestinians that Peretz will not attempt to use as a prop for his rancid bigotry, as he rehearses yet again the utterly discredited, racist hasbarist myth that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.”

Let's face facts. Only if you are "Eyeless in Gaza" can you believe that these people are a "nation."

And:

There were no Palestinians until there were Israelis. And there will be no Palestine until Israel imposes it. Then it will be a nation-state like most of the other non-nation-states in the Middle East. Yes, a fraudulent nation-state.

Why are men wearing ski masks on the streets of Gaza? So that they will all look alike, and people will think that this proves the unity of the Palestinian people.

It gets worse, if you can believe it :

And, as Steve Erlanger reported, the Palestinian death toll from Palestinian killing rose to 17 on Wednesday. Any bets on high it will go on Thursday?

What kind of twisted pervert thinks, let alone expresses, these sorts of things? And what kind of “liberal" journalistic establishment allows him to get away with, virtually without censure, for so many years?

Al-Nakba Day

2007-05-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Today, May 15, is the day in which Palestinians remember al-Nakba ("the catastrophe"), the events surrounding the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and lands by the paramilitary forces of the Zionist Yishuv, the subsequent war between the newly declared state of Israel and surrounding Arab countries, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem which continues to this day.

As an American of Ukrainian descent, I approach the remembrance of this event in several ways. The year 2007 represents the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, and the founding of the colony of Virginia. Amid all the articles, celebrations, and visits by the Queen, I recognize that my own country, indeed, my own newly adopted state, was founded on the lands and destroyed villages and homes of indigenous peoples, whose diverse cultures and societies were disregarded and crushed by European colonists.

My father's family were themselves refugees, forced to flee their homes by war. My grandparents were able to make a great life for themselves, their children, and for me, here in the U.S., but my grandmother always spoke of her homeland with a longing and an aching that never went away. I can only imagine how much more painful it would have been for her had she regularly been confronted with people insisting that the Ukrainians never existed, or that the events which caused her and her family to flee never took place, or, most ludicrously, that the Ostapenkos and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors had simply picked up and fled of their own accord. This is the sort of deeply offensive propaganda, the attempted erasing of an entire people and society from history, with which the Palestinians have had to contend since 1948.

All Dub's Children

2007-05-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

Good Daily Star profile of the Cairo-based experimental music label 100Copies. Be sure to check out some of the great music available on the site.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

2007-05-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

You’d never know from reading this article on Jewish and Arab growth rates in Jerusalem that Israel’s attempts to de-Arabize the Holy City represent a gross human rights violation.

Israel is facing a challenge it never expected when it captured East Jerusalem and reunited the city in the 1967 war: each year, Jerusalem’s population is becoming more Arab and less Jewish.

For four decades, Israel has pushed to build and expand Jewish neighborhoods, while trying to restrict the growth in Arab parts of the city. Yet two trends are unchanged: Jews moving out of Jerusalem have outnumbered those moving in for 27 of the last 29 years. And the Palestinian growth rate has been high.

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While it is virtually impossible for Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza to move to Jerusalem if they were not born there, natural population growth and restrictions on building in Arab parts of the city mean large families often share very small apartments.

An estimated 18,000 apartments and homes, or a third of all the Arab residences in East Jerusalem, were built illegally because permits are so hard to obtain, Mr. Nasrallah said, adding that Israel has not approved the development of a new Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem since 1967.

“Israel sees Jerusalem as a demographic problem,” he said, “and sees the solution as getting rid of Palestinians.”
In contrast, Israel has established many Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and more than 200,000 Jews now live in the eastern part of the city.

Since conquering and occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, successive Israeli governments have used a combination of security and bureaucratic measures, as well as violent invasions and takeovers of Arab homes and neighborhoods by government-sanctioned Jewish settler militias, to increase the Jewish population in East Jerusalem while simultaneously limiting the increase of Arabs. I tend to think that if this were an article about similar efforts to change the ethnic character of Hong Kong, Istanbul, or Detroit, we might see some indication that such efforts are, you know, objectionable.

In Israel, this policy of ethnic cleansing (which right-wing Israelis naturally refer to as the “liberation” of Jerusalem, and which Ehud Olmert strongly supported as mayor of Jerusalem, and continues to as PM) is controversial. Less so in the U.S., where pointing out that Israel’s policy toward its Arab subjects is morally reprehensible, deeply inhumane and illegal, as well as disastrously counterproductive in terms of Israel’s security, is likely to get you labeled an anti-Semite. That Israel is apparently failing in its attempt to de-Arabize the Holy City is gratifying, but it doesn’t make the policy any less racist or provocative.

From a 2002 Christian Science Monitor article on the Israeli policy:

Benny Elon, an ultra-nationalist member of the Knesset who is spearheading the settlement effort, puts it this way: "If you don't create facts on the ground, everything blows in the wind. We saw that during Barak's time – Jerusalem was on the negotiating table."

Mr. Elon says the new sites are links in a map of Jewish territorial contiguity in East Jerusalem. His plan is to ring the old city with 17 settlement points, some just a few houses, but one, with 130 planned units. Many of the points already exist, the houses or land purchased privately but the security, roads, and infrastructure paid for by the government.

In Sheikh Jarrah, at the traditional burial site of the Judean sage Simeon the Just, authorities last month paved a road for three closely guarded settler houses. The left fork, which accesses Palestinian homes, remains a dirt path.

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Sprawling Jewish settlements, considered suburbs by Israelis, have also been built in East Jerusalem territory on land expropriated from Palestinians.

Elon says he looks forward to a time when there will be no Palestinians living around the tomb of Simeon the Just and in Simeon's Heritage, the names he prefers to Sheikh Jarrah. "It was a Jewish neighborhood and it will be a Jewish neighborhood."

At a Jerusalem Day party organized by Elon, many among the thousands of young revelers draped themselves in Israeli flags. Some sported stickers reading: "The solution: Expel the Arab enemy."

Remember: When Palestinian politicians employ eliminationist rhetoric, they are to be condemned as terrorists, and deemed unacceptable to negotiate with. When Israeli politicians do the same, they are to be hailed as evidence of Israel’s “vibrant democracy.” No partner for peace, indeed,