The Mitchell Mission

Is the Mitchell Mission Doomed from Inception? Obama has his hands full with domestic woes. It is unlikely that he will expend any political capital on seeking justice in Palestine, nor will he be willing to offend any key constituencies by straying from the traditional American playbook on the issue (Rabbani and Toensing's first paragraph says it all) .

Until the US is willing to negotiate with the elected representatives of the Palestinian people it is wasting time. The PA is politically and morally bankrupt - it has no capacity to deliver a peace deal, it has no credibility among Palestinians.

Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing (Middle East Report) on "The Continuity of Obama's Change"

US media outlets were quick to pronounce Obama’s “big phone calls to the Middle East” “another marker of change” that the new president is, rather unfairly, expected to bring to every domain of American life. Yet the American political system is not one given to sudden and significant shifts in foreign policy, least of all on account of directives emanating from the Oval Office. Rather, foreign policy, and perhaps nowhere more so than toward the Middle East, is characterized by evolution, typically at a slow pace. Produced by a variety of competing interests encompassing the bureaucracy, business elites, the military, Congress and various lobbies, policy tends to change only when consensus is achieved on a new direction, with the role of the president generally limited to formalizing rather than catalyzing the process. Bush’s notorious aphorism, “I’m the decider,” represented ambition, not reality.
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Even at the rhetorical level, a bromide like, “we are confronted by extraordinary, complex and interconnected global challenges: the war on terror, sectarian division and the spread of deadly technology. We did not ask for the burden that history has asked us to bear, but Americans will bear it,” could just as easily have emanated from Obama’s predecessor. The same is true of the president’s statement: “Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.” The source of Israeli fears is named, but the perpetuator of Palestinian despair is not.
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The Mitchell report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.
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How Mitchell intends to produce a durable ceasefire, with the limited toolbox in his possession, remains something of a mystery. Insisting he will neither visit Gaza nor engage with Hamas -- at a time when Israel is all but ignoring Abbas and focusing on Egyptian-mediated talks with the Islamists -- he has once again produced a situation where US diplomacy is hamstrung by being more pro-Israel than Israel itself.
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On the available evidence, it is almost certainly too late to implement a viable two-state settlement. Israeli settlement expansion appears to have proceeded too far, for far too long, to be able to be reversed by an Israeli government that can remain legitimate, even if genuine US pressure is bought to bear. The real test for Washington will therefore be not how often Mitchell shuttles to and around the region, but how rapidly it acts to freeze Israeli settlement expansion in all its forms and reverse Israeli impunity in the Occupied Territories.
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The problem is that the death notice will not be accompanied by a birth announcement for a binational state. With the vast majority of Israelis committed to retaining a Jewish state, and the vast majority of Palestinians in response demanding that their ethnicity be privileged in their own entity, a South African-type transformation on the Mediterranean is at best many years away. The more likely scenario, for the coming years, is a descent into increasingly existential, and regionalized, conflict.

Here are couple different views of Mitchell:

AFP on Mitchell

Zunes on Mitchell

Tone Deaf in Gaza: Obama on al-Arabiya

Much is being made of Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya. Though it should be noted that if Obama really wanted to "reach out" to those of the Muslim worlds with something other than "Predator Ariel Drones" (how exactly did we end up in this episode of Star Wars?), he would have went on Al-Jazeera. However, Obama would not go on Al-Jazeera because, Al-Jazeera would have asked him tough questions, such as how Israel's occupation of and settlements in the the West Bank affect prospects for peace. Al-Jazeera would have most certainly asked Obama about his position on the Israeli assault on Gaza. It is rather amazing that in that entire interview, Hisham Melhem did not ask one question about the Gaza massacre. How they can go on pretending that massacre didn't take place is beyond me. As is how an American president can expect to have any credibility in the Arab world after have stood by Israel as it added one more atrocity to its fast growing list.

This is why Obama went on Al-Arabiya, which is owned by Saudi King Fahd's brother-in-law, and should be considered an organ of Saudi state propaganda.

Indeed, in the interview, Melham describes the US as "the only western power with no colonial legacy" (about 9:45 into the video, transcript here). As long as erasing America's colonial past and present remains a crucial presuppositions for all discussion of America's place in the world, we'll remained trapped in a world of universal deceit. The minute we start putting the Zionist project in the same context as Manifest Destiny and the ethic cleansing of Natives, we'll begin to start working our way out of this morass.

This portion of the interview stood in my mind as particularly egregious:

Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel's security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.

This last sentence says it all. "... if the time is right"? What is that supposed to mean?

Another of Obama's greatest hits:

But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power [yeah, just ask the Native Americans...], and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that.

US respect and partnership with the Muslim worlds in 1988 or 1978? What is he talking about?

The Continuing Failure of the Corporate Media

Our media outlets are part of massive project of ideological and psychological conditioning:

Despite two wars involving more than 200,000 U.S. troops and a global economic crisis, foreign-related news coverage by the three major U.S. television networks fell to a record low during 2008, according to the latest annual review of network news coverage by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

This psyop has deadly consequences. As Chris Hedges points out with regard to the (non)reporting of Israel's massacre in Gaza:

It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports.
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But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.

However, public opinion regarding that lawless frontier outpost on the Eastern Med is changing very fast, much faster than the media and its corporate sponsors are able to adjust to. This is evident in the skyrocketing viewership of Al-Jazeera English during the most recent Israeli atrocity.

Interestingly CBS "60 Minutes" is the first network to respond to the shift in attitudes by filing this incredibly hard hitting report from the Occupied West Bank. Given the realities that Robert Anderson reports in this video, it is obvious that the two-state solution is officially dead, victim of a disingenuous Oslo "peace process" that was all an elaborate cover and stalling tactic so that Israel could consolidate its control over the West Bank.

Obama's Vietnam?

Norman Solomon listens to Obama's inaugural and hears "The "Ghost of LBJ." Juan Cole, makes similar observation in "Obama's Vietnam":

Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

The Economy of Empire: Cut "Entitlements," Increase Defense Speanding

Paul Krugman critiques Obama's approach to economic reform:

I ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning.

Just to be clear, there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the address — although for those still hoping that Mr. Obama will lead the way to universal health care, it was disappointing that he spoke only of health care’s excessive cost, never once mentioning the plight of the uninsured and underinsured.

Also, one wishes that the speechwriters had come up with something more inspiring than a call for an “era of responsibility” — which, not to put too fine a point on it, was the same thing former President George W. Bush called for eight years ago.

But my real problem with the speech, on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

The Pedagogy of Empire

I suspect that people are not natural imperialists. If left to their own devices, most could care less about what goes on in far flung lands. People are more generally concerned about their jobs, their homes, their families. People have to be educated to believe that they know best how an Iraqi election should turn out, or who the legitimate representatives of the Palestinians are. One is not born with a sense that their government has the natural right to bomb Pakistani villages from "unmanned aerial drones" (the phrase sounds like something out of an Orwell novel).

Here are a few stories on the Pedagogy of Empire:

Andy Kroll on TomDispatch:

As he [Arne Duncun] packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that's hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a "reformer," his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.

Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.

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Officials like Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley justify the need for the military academies by claiming they do a superlative job teaching students discipline and providing them with character-building opportunities. "These are positive learning environments," Duncan said in 2007. "I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline."

Without a doubt, teaching students about discipline and leadership is an important aspect of being an educator. But is the full-scale uniformed culture of the military actually necessary to impart these values? A student who learns to play the cello, who studies how to read music, will learn discipline too, without a military-themed learning environment. In addition, encouraging students to be critical thinkers, to question accepted beliefs and norms, remains key to a teacher's role at any grade level. The military's culture of uniformity and discipline, important as it may be for an army, hardly aligns with these pedagogical values.

Henry Giroux on "Educated Hope" as a form of resistance to the Pedagogy of Empire:

[Society] needs a conception of educated hope, one that is both bold in its vision and keen in its understanding that only by supporting those institutions that provide the conditions for an educated citizenry can reform actually work in the interest of sustaining a substantive democracy in which hope as a precondition for politics itself.

Educated hope begins in opposition to a long legacy of privatization and corporatization that has shaped the public imagination, especially with respect to public and higher education. Oddly enough, Obama seems to miss this. He is a strong advocate for education that is engaged, critical, and on the side of public service an yet he reduces the goal of higher education to providing a competitive work force, while supporting some of the most reductionistic and instrumental elements of educational reform.
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Educators need a new vocabulary for linking hope, social citizenship, and education to the demands of substantive democracy. I am suggesting that educators and others need a new vocabulary for connecting how we read critically to how we engage in movements for social change. I also believe that simply invoking the relationship between theory and practice, critique and social action will not do. Any attempt to give new life to a substantive democratic politics must address both how people learn to be political agents and, what kind of educational work is necessary within what kind of public spaces to enable people to use their full intellectual resources to both provide a profound critique of existing institutions and struggle to create, as Stuart Hall puts it, “what would be a good life or a better kind of life for the majority of people.”4

Giroux on neolibearlism as a cultural practice of domination at work in the classroom:

Unfortunately, what so many writers and scholars have taken for granted in their thoughtful criticisms of neoliberalism and their calls for immediate economic reform is the presupposition that we have on hand and in stock generations of young people and adults who have somehow been schooled for the last several decades in an entirely different set of values and cultural attitudes, who do not equate the virtue of reason with an ethically truncated instrumental rationality, who know alternative sets of social relations that are irreducible to the rolls of buyer and seller, and who are not only intellectually prepared but morally committed to the staggering challenges that comprehensive reform requires. This is where the fairy tale ending to an era of obscene injustice careens headlong into reality. Missing from the roadmaps that lead us back out of Alice's rabbit hole, back out of a distorted world where reason and judgment don't apply, is precisely the necessity to understand the success of neoliberalism as a pervasive political and educational force, a pedagogy and form of governance that couples "forms of knowledge, strategies of power and technologies of self."(5) Neoliberalism not only transformed economic agendas throughout the overdeveloped world, it transformed politics, restructured social relations, produced an array of reality narratives (not unlike reality TV) and disciplinary measures that normalized its perverted view of citizenship, the state and the supremacy of market relations. In the concerted effort to reverse course, dare one not take account of the profound emotional appeal, let alone ideological hold, of neoliberalism on the American public? The success of a market ideology that has produced shocking levels of inequality and impoverishment and a market morality that has spawned rapacious greed and corruption should raise fundamental questions. How did market rule prove capable of enlisting in such a compelling way the consent of the vast majority of Americans, who cast themselves, no less, in the role of the "moral majority?" The refusal of such an analysis, framed nonetheless as a response, by many theorists (including many leftists) typically explains that working people "do not, under normal circumstances, care deeply about anything beyond the size of their paychecks."(6) But this is too quick, and far too inadequate. We argue that matters of popular consciousness, public sentiment and individual and social agency are far too important as part of a larger political and educational struggle not be taken seriously by those who advocate the long and difficult project of democratic reform.
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In spite of the crucial connection between various modes of domination and pedagogy, there is little input from progressive social theorists of what it might mean to theorize how education as a form of cultural politics actually constructs particular modes of address, identification, affective investments and social relations that produce consent and complicity with the ethos and practice of neoliberalism.

Libby makes some similar arguments.

The Continuity of Empire: Obama's Pentagon

Ray McGoverns pleads with the president to not send more American soldiers to Afghanistan.
But as he does, The Guardian reports:

Islamabad - The US military is investigating claims that more than two dozen Afghan civilians were killed during an attack on militants [on Monday]. The issue has badly undermined support for the international coalition and President Hamid Karzai.

And The Washington Post reports:

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

Ron Jacobs, wonders why Gate's is still there:

The American people did not elect the Pentagon. They elected Barack Obama based a good deal on his promise to get US troops out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Since he was elected, Mr. Obama has hedged on this promise. Since he was inaugurated, the Pentagon and its civilian boss Robert Gates have hedged even more. Now, they insist, US troops should remain until the Iraqis hold a national election that is as of today not even scheduled. Then, even after that election is held, the departure of some US troops should depend on the outcome of the election. In other words, the Pentagon and Defense Department are telling Mr. Obama that no US troops should leave Iraq unless the election results meet the expectations of Washington.

This is exactly why Robert Gates should be removed from his position.

But rather than getting rid of Gates, it looks as though Gates is actually calling the shots. As the LA Times reports:

William Lynn III, the top lobbyist for Raytheon Co., was chosen by Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the position of deputy secretary of Defense.

The new ethics rules banned lobbyists from serving in the administration. But the executive order allowed waivers to let some former lobbyists take government jobs if doing so was in the public interest.
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Gates pushed hard for Lynn's appointment and favored him over other officials suggested by the Obama transition team. At a news conference Thursday, Gates said he was impressed with Lynn and argued he should get the job despite the lobbying ban.

"I asked that an exception be made because I felt that he could play the role of the deputy in a better manner than anybody else that I saw," Gates said.

And this from Obama's Admiral:

"He [Blair] said that the Obama administration would carry out a review of interrogation policy, and that both military and intelligence interrogators would follow a uniform standard. Under questioning, however, he said he believed that some interrogation procedures and methods ought to remain secret so potential adversaries cannot train to resist them."

California Oil Map

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/12/29/MN4G14QMVE.DTL&o=2

No Negotiations with Hamas?

Many of the most insightful Middle East observers are skeptical of the Obama administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Robert Fisk, Obama's speech failed to break with the War on Terror frame to the issue:

But however much distance the new President put between himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still hung like a cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" was pure Bush; the one reference to "terror", the old Bush and Israeli fear word, was a worrying sign that the new White House still hasn't got the message. Hence we had Obama, apparently talking about Islamist groups such as the Taliban who were "slaughtering innocents" but who "cannot outlast us". As for those in the speech who are corrupt and who "silence dissent", presumably intended to be the Iranian government, most Arabs would associate this habit with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call from Obama yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other autocrats and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the Middle East.

Tony Karon at TomDispatch warns:

any peace process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail - and with catastrophic consequences. That's why the position outlined by Obama's Secretary of State-designate is dysfunctional at birth, because it repeats the mistake of trying to marginalize Hamas. For its part, Hamas officials have sent a number of signals in recent years indicating the organization's willingness to move in a pragmatic direction. Its leaders wouldn't bother to regularly explain their views in the op-ed pages of American newspapers if they did not believe a different relationship with the U.S. - and so Israel - was possible.
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Had Barack Obama taken office in a moment of relative tranquility in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian relationship, he might have had the luxury of putting it on the backburner. Indeed, any move to change the Bush approach might have been challenged as unnecessarily risky and disruptive.

In Gaza in the last few weeks, however, the Bush approach imploded, leaving Obama no choice but to initiate a new policy of his own. Hopefully, it will be one rooted in the pragmatism for which the new President is renowned.

And indeed, this collection of pro-Israel statements by prominent Democrats gives cause for skepticism.

Reuters draws on As'ad Abu Khalil to analyze Middle East reactions to Obama's approach to the region:

CAIRO - President Barack Obama has taken the Middle East by surprise with the speed of his diplomacy but his first statement on the conflict between Arabs and Israelis was strikingly similar to old U.S. policies...

The conservative Arab governments saw the calls as an affirmation of their privileged status -- another sign that Obama is sticking to traditional approaches.

"It took two long days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in U.S. Middle East policy," said As'ad Abu Khalil, Lebanese-born and pro-Palestinian professor of political science at California State University.

"Obama's speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulphuric acid on the wounds of the children in Gaza," he added.

We will not Apologize

Obama's inaugural address has been received with near universal acclaim. It was indeed very well conceived, well-written, and of course brilliantly executed. But I fear that there are monsters lurking in its rhetorical shadows. In some senses, it reads as a "not guilty plea" at a time when we need to be praying for atonement, seeking redemption.

Tom Engelhardt, has a similar read. Before the inaugural he wrote a column on the history of inaugural addresses, and outlining what he would like to see. He explains that in the early days of the Republic - when Empire was only a twinkle in the eyes of the Founders - it was traditional to call attention to the limits of American power, and the limits to the capacity of the state's Chief Executive. But as America's power grew, its humility and modesty shrank. The election of JFK marks an important symbolic turning point - a moment in which the US grew Mad with Power. The pomp and ceremony of the contemporary spectacle are accouterments of what he describes as a "victory culture."

He explains:

They [contemporary inaugurals] must, in fact, sing hymns to our strength, as well as to our unquestioned "mission" or "calling" in the world. In the first moments of a presidency, they must summon Americans to do great things, as befits a great power, not just on the national, but on the planetary stage.

By the time John F. Kennedy came along, there was no more talk of shrinking from contemplation. "In the long history of the world," he said in his inaugural address, "only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it." He then sounded a "trumpet" to call on Americans to engage in "a long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself," not to speak of Soviet Communism.

The one exception to this trajectory was Jimmy Carter. Only Jimmy Carter had the moral strength to speak honestly about the kind of world we live in. No self-aggrandizing fictions, no "necessary lies" (as Chomsky might call them) - a call to reckon honestly with our past and present, which do not always conform neatly to the post-Enlightenment discourse of progress.

Again, Engelhardt:

Jimmy Carter's 1976 inaugural address, coming in the wake of Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the disaster of defeat in Vietnam, called Americans to "a new spirit," a new way of thinking about the country, which was to include a recognition of "our recent mistakes" and a realization that "even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems."

This would be a theme of his presidency, most famously in his "malaise" address to the nation in July 1979 in which he called on Americans to face their "intolerable dependence on foreign oil" and to recognize the limits of their "worship" of "self-indulgence and consumption."

The "malaise" address (actually entitled "Crisis of Confidence") was prophetic, a searing soul search for sources of our modern afflictions. The Carter revision is only now beginning to take shape. The documents have only just begun to be released. History will look kindly on Carter. (For a preview of what that revision will look like see the first chapter of Andrew Bacevich's recent The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.)

But unfortunately, this kind of honest self-examination, has no place in a modern politics so deeply rooted in deceit. As we all know, Carter was annihilated in 1980 by, as Engelhardt explains, "a candidate who imagined a very different kind of "morning in America," involving a nation without global limits."

With all this in mind, Engelhardt sat down before the inaugural to think about what he would like to hear from our 44th president. Engelhardt's voice of reason offers an insightful lens for interpreting what Obama ended up saying. Engelhardt admits that what he would like to hear "may be an address which no American president would care to give, centering as it does on an apology." Indeed, as Obama made clear in his address: "We will not apologize for our way of life; we will not waiver in its defense." But as Engelhardt explains it is an apology which we need more than anything else:

I remain convinced that the Vietnam War has dogged this country for endless decades largely because most Americans and their leaders were never willing to come to grips with what we had done, and so never offered a word of apology or any restitution for the damage caused. What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us.

This last line bears repeating and emphasizing: "What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us." This gets to the heart of what frustrates so many radicals and progressives, who are not yet ready to turn the page on what Obama calls the "stale arguments of the past." As an historian, I can't help but take exception to the notion that a nation can move forward without an honest assessment of its past. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." If the US continued to "ignore this sobering reality," Dr. King predicted that the US would be condemned to repeat its experience in Vietnam with every new generation. How did we get from Vietnam to Iraq- to so many other places? How did we get from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMD? Answering such questions, in the words of Dr. King, "demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people."

In this sense, Obama's address, while marking some important discontinuities with the Bush years, remains an exercise in evasion. Our problems are much deeper than George W. Bush. The universal castigation that that dark soul receives serves only to scapegoat what is in truth a malady of our collective soul. Bush is not the problem. Bush has never been the problem.

Norman Soloman on the dark art of triangulation:

Now, looking at Obama's choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama's 2008 campaign pledge to "end the mindset that got us into war." On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it's hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as "an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see."

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There's little point in progressives faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that "one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base."

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama's campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew - from the bottom up.

Chris Hedges on Realism:

The rise of militarism is a familiar path taken by collapsing states. Militarism arrests social decay. It shoves this decay underground where it cannot be challenged by critics and social movements. Those who launch crusades hold out beautiful fantasies of freedom, liberation and peace. But the impossibility of these utopian dreams always turns these projects for human advancement into squalid justifications for atrocity. Realism, as John N. Gray writes, "requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above anything else, and it is a reasonable question whether western liberal societies are capable of the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of world-transformation."

It is realism, an unflinching acceptance of our stark and severe limitations and an end to self-delusional utopian visions-those that embrace force and those that do not-that we must accept if we are to survive as a nation and finally as a species. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. We have to stand in the shoes of those we brand as the enemy. We have to see ourselves as others see us. Israel must negotiate with Hamas and end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to secure a lasting peace. We must withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and negotiate with those arrayed against us to find stability. Until this happens we all remain trapped on a merry-go-round of death.

Towards a Democratic Empire

The American Empire has a new PR Rep. Madison Avenue has worked it magic once again. Never underestimate the power of a marketing gimmick.

From Obama's inaugural:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred… Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable… our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause… We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense… To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West… you are on the wrong side of history… [and] we will defeat you…

The fear of hegemonic decline is palpable. The ideology of Manifest Destiny is given a new lease on life.

The above is how the interests and values of the ruling class are transmitted to subaltern classes. These are the cognitive bonds that keep us safely within the Matrix. We are batteries. Power source to a Death Machine.

The Elders of Zion Strike Again?

On Sunday night I had the opportunity to attend a dinner with Stephen Zunes at which he spoke on what we can expect in terms of US-ME policy in the Age of Obama. The occasion gave me an opportunity to revisit the controversy that surrounded the John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt argument that the pro-Israel lobby weilds a "heavy - and malign influence upon the formulation of US Middle East policy."

In terms of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument, it was of course refreshing to hear the obvious stated by the Deans of the Realist school of International Relations. But many of those who have spent decades studying the effects of US policy in the Middle East objected strongly to the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in that it overstated the influence of the Lobby and overlooked other factors such as American long-standing hegemonic designs in the region. What many of these critiques (from the Left) take special exception to, is the notion the US invaded Iraq because top level policymakers are beholden to the Lobby, and were therefore led to wage a war of aggression to "make Israel more secure" (in the words of Mearsheimer and Walt). For these critics, the Iraq invasion and other such policies must be explained in terms of US Grand Strategy- control of oil resources and access to military bases. In the words of Joseph Massad: "it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around."

But I wonder, if the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is overstated, then how do we explain Obama's June 4 address to AIPAC? I don't believe that that speech can be accounted for in terms of US Grand Strategy - I think there is something more insidious at work - it has to do with the position of Palestine within the dominant American political culture and the structure of the American state. I think we need to step back from the structural realism (though I am, for the most part, a structural realist...) of Hans Morgenthau, and look closely at American class structure and the nature of bureaucratic politics in the US.

I believe that there is a danger, in the analysis of Massad, Zunes, Plitnick and Toesing, et al., of overstating the rationality and coherence of the American State and its Grand Strategic Designs. There is a danger of reifying the State and its interests, and assuming that said interests (economic, security, or otherwise) are natural, self-evident, or can somehow be logically deduced from the structure of the international system, rather than seeing said interests as socially constructed in a process that is as much discursive as it is material.

To my way of thinking, it is not Israel as such (a strategic object on a Grand Chess Board), but rather "Israel" as a symbol of American nationalism -- the cultural resonance of the New Jerusalem and the City on the Hill run deep among America's dominant social groups -- Israel as a symbol of strength and continued expansion in the post-Vietnam era when apparitions of American hegemonic decline haunt all policymakers. Unconditional ("non-negotiable") support for Israeli expansion has become code for continuity with the the 500 year American tradition of frontier expansion. By supporting Israeli colonization efforts, US policymakers signal their own commitment to "strength" in the face of "barbarism." It seems to me that a radical redefinition of the terms of American nationalism is in order if we're to see a truly transformative change in American politics and society. Until we (the Left) confront the pernicious cultural hegemony of Manifest Destiny and its Evil Twin Zionism, we'll remain ineffective in the face of the organized Money Power of The Lobby- and Palestinians will continue to pay a price in blood for our cowardice.

The Iron Wall Strategy

John Mearsheimer in The American Conservative on Israel's true purposes in Gaza:

The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

...

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

...

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

I think we've played this game before...

From Louis Lapham, "By the rivers of Babylon," Harper's Jan 09:

The looting of the U.S. Treasury is never an easy trick, but to carry off more than $1 trillion in broad daylight while the members of Congress stand around applauding the exit strategy as one certain to guarantee the health and happiness of the American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial enterprise that surely deserves some sort of tip of the hat. happiness of the American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial enterprise that surely deserves some sort of tip of the hat. When the James gang robbed the Kansas City Fair in the fall of 1872, the local paper acknowledged the achievement as “so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators,” and I would have thought that our own easily awestruck news media might have found a few words of respect and esteem for the perps who knocked over the Wall Street fairgrounds last year. How not at least revere the scale of the undertaking—nine banks emptied of more than $500 billion in capital, as much as $8 trillion withdrawn from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, $2 trillion from the country’s pension and retirement accounts.

...

Even more touching than Thomas Friedman’s laying of a wreath on the grave of Cotton Mather was the sight of Alan Greenspan sitting down by the rivers of Babylon, his harp hung upon the willows, silent in a strange land. During his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006) Greenspan had believed it his duty to irrigate the fruited plain of the American economy with the flow of easy money, his policy to supply the banks with the abundant credit, at low cost and presumably risk-free, that enabled the floating of both the Internet bubble (1995–2000) and the housing bubble (2003–2006). For his efforts he was accorded the title of “maestro,” his word on the country’s finances trading at parity with the word of God. When it was suggested (as long ago as 1994) that the newborn market in derivatives demanded some sort of government supervision, Greenspan discounted the suggestion as insulting to the integrity of the public-spirited Wall Street gentlemen laboring on behalf of the common good; when on October 23 of last year he appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to explain what had gone wrong with the making of something out of nothing, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

To think that the Wall Street financial institutions seek to protect the equity of their customers in preference to their own is to think that at the Las Vegas poker tables the dealers seek to protect the chips stacked in front of the sweet old lady in the blue baseball cap playing a system drawn from the book of Revelation.

...

The eighteenth-century New England privateers flew the American flag as a flag of convenience, not as a declaration of their allegiance to a cause but as a license to seize the wealth stored in the hulls of wooden ships. Their twenty-first- century heirs and assigns employ the semblance of a government in Washington as an investment vehicle permitting them to seize the wealth stored in the labor of the American people. The Republican and Democratic parties compete for the brokerage business, between them putting up $2.4 billion for last year’s presidential campaigns—i.e., for the speculative ventures that bundle junk slogans into collateralized-debt obligations, which, when it comes time to off-load the boodle, transform the upside into private property, the downside into the good news that poverty replenishes the soul.

A Revolution of Rising Expectations

(Artwork: Ben Heine)

My friend and neighbor Dan Hamburg points out the immense challenges facing the new president, and warns:

He must produce. If Clinton faced deficits, Obama faces chasms. Military quagmires. A broken health care system. Public education in shambles. Unprecedented income inequality, and an economy on life-support.

If in two years Obama voters feel cheated, their high hopes unfulfilled, there will be hell to pay--for the Democrats, but more importantly, for the country.

Here is an interesting blast from the past that offers some insight on the present:

"What was Barack Obama like in 1990?" (a story from February 1990 on Obama becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review)

Ralph Bunche and the Dream

Vijay Prashad writes on Ralph Bunche:

On June 14, 1947, Ralph Bunche arrived in Palestine. Born into an African American family of great talents, Bunche went to UCLA and Harvard, did innovative research on French colonialism and African anti-colonialism. A job at Howard did not detain him, as he was quickly taken into the United Nations, where the Secretary General hastened to send him to help the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) figure out what to do with the British (who governed the mandate), the Jews (whose numbers had begun to increase through migration from Europe and elsewhere) and the Palestinians (who had begun to be displaced from their ancestral homelands)... Two weeks into the work, Bunche wrote in his diary, “One thing seems sure, this problem can’t be solved on the basis of abstract justice, historical or otherwise. Reality is that both Arabs and Jews are here and intend to stay. Therefore, in any ‘solution’ some group, or at least its claim, is bound to get hurt. Danger in any arrangement is that a caste system will develop with backward Arabs as the lower caste.”

In 1949 Bunch won the Nobel Peace prize for his work with UNSCOP. He was the first person of African descent to be so honored. In his acceptance speech

Bunche offered a vision for the United Nations, “In the final analysis, the acid test of a genuine will to peace is the willingness of disputing parties to expose their differences to the peaceful processes of the United Nations and to the bar of international public opinion which the United Nations reflects. It is only in this way that truth, reason, and justice may come to prevail over the shrill and blatant voice of propaganda; that a wholesome international morality can be cultivated."

The Power behind the Throne

Is it me, or did Cheney's nod off at Bush's farewell address appear a deliberate affront to the impetuous half-wit that mans the storefront. Cheney's got about as much interest in the spotlight as a shitake mushroom, but you've got to guess that even he gets a little bored with hearing one of Yale's finest wax poetic about the virtues of perpetual peace and the the expansion of liberty, blah, blah, blah...

American Dynasty: Gone but not Forgotten (that is till Jeb gets his turn at the plate...)

Once again its Alexander Cockburn who offers the insightful observations and asks the important questions:

I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

As a continental transplant Cockburn is well qualified to engage in a little Royalty watching:

Was this doggedly incompetent saboteur of empire an “accident” of history, born of hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and the ruthless competence of James Baker in outmaneuvering Al Gore’s efforts to claim the White House amid the Forida recounts?

Blame first his mother, Barbara Bush, an unpleasant creature who never forgave George Sr for dragging her from behind the lace curtains of respectability in Connecticut to West Texas where she endured the miseries of a frontier wife, helpmeet to a failed wildcatter. She let her hair go white, grieved for the daughter that died and snarled at the lads while her faithless husband gadded about the world. It was Barbara who gave George his petty, mean-spirited vindictiveness and George Sr who passed on the relentless philistinism. Blame Laura who took in hand the lay-about cokehead of the Houston years and nudged him into politics.

How did it all go so terribly wrong?

Bush passed his final White House years in morose seclusion, despised by all, obeyed by none – a welcome rebuke to the concept of “unitary power” and an omnipotent executive.

Now Obama proclaims his mission of renewing America, always a sinister prospect. We’re heading back in to the high country of moral uplift, and dispiriting talk of America’s “mission”. I live in hopes of an acrid manuscript from Laura Bush, blaming everything on Dick Cheney.

The Elders of Zion Strike Again?

Author's note: This post has been taken down for reconstruction- it will be reposted above

Merchants of Death

Frida Berrigan in FPIF:

During the Bush administration, Israel received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. Through the FMF program, Israel remains the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid each year, which they use to purchase U.S. weapons.

Hardware continues to flow in, despite the fact the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires nations receiving U.S. arms to certify the weapons are used for internal security and legitimate self-defense, and that their use doesn't lead to an escalation of conflict. During 2008 alone, the United States made over $22 billion in new arms sales offers to Israel, including a proposed deal for as many as 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, worth up to $15.2 billion; nine heavy transport aircraft, worth up to $1.9 billion; four Littoral Combat Ships and related equipment, worth as much as $1.9 billion; and up to $1.3 billion in gasoline and jet aviation fuel.

One lone congressman - Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) - raised concerns about Israel's possible violations of the AECA. He hasn't had a response from the State Department. What use are our laws if they are not followed?

The last time the United States cut off military aid and weapons transfers to Israel was in 1981. During Israel's incursion into Lebanon, the Reagan administration cut off U.S. military aid and arms deliveries for 10 weeks while it investigated whether Israel was using weapons for "defensive purposes," as required under U.S. law.

The Guardian reports:

The Pentagon has suspended the delivery of a shipload of munitions to Israel after international concern that it could be used by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the contract for the munitions had been arranged last summer and approved in October. He said the munitions were due to be delivered to a US pre-positioning depot in Israel for US forces. But he added: "If the government of Israel requests munitions they can do so direct to the US government under the Foreign Military Sales programme." ...

Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa programme director, Malcolm Smart, said: "The last thing that is needed now is more weapons and munitions in the region, which is awash with arms that are being used in a manner which contravenes international law and is having a devastating effect on the civilian population in Gaza."

The Problem with Democratic Imperialists

The Guardian reminds us of the true legacy of JFK:

Kennedy... came to power with the complacent 1950's illusion that America's social and economic problems were largely solved. The only challenges lay abroad, with the threat of Soviet Communism and the danger that countries moving away from European colonial control would fail to "take off", as Kennedy's appalling academic guru Walt Rostow warned him. Kennedy won election largely on the basis of a fraud - the false charge of a "missile gap" which Eisenhower had allegedly permitted, leaving the USSR ahead of the US. Kennedy's inaugural was all about foreign affairs, and the only domestic reference (which was added at the last minute) was to say that America was committed to human rights "at home and around the world".

The black struggle for civil rights was already underway and the first Freedom Rides were to start four months after Kennedy became President, yet he seems to have been unaware of them. Later, when the movement became impossible to ignore, neither he nor his attorney-general brother Robert brought in significant reforms or legislation. They had the opportunity to appoint liberal federal judges, but failed. No wonder that the civil rights movement sang a sarcastic verse that went: There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty, there's a department in Washington called Justice.

...

Obama, we are told, has been re-reading books on Lincoln. I would recommend he goes through a forgotten book called The Kennedy Promise, by the British commentator (and one-time Observer reporter) Henry Fairlie. Published in 1973 with the sub-title "The politics of expectation", it is a brilliant demolition of the frenetic Kennedy governing mystique of crisis management and group-think. It points out that the constant talk of "challenges" and the need for US leadership tend to encourage confrontation and war.

That warning is apposite today. In his acceptance speech in Chicago Obama already told us "a new dawn of American leadership is at hand". Let us hope phrases of this kind do not appear in his inaugural address.

AIPAC and the CBC

Glen Ford is editor of Black Agenda Report, on the power of the Israel lobby in the Congressional Black Caucus:

It appears the old John Conyers has left the scene without those of us who used to know him having had a chance to say goodbye. The Israeli lobby has that kind of effect on erstwhile progressives and anti-war folks. The Zionist ideology, and especially the chilling effect of Zionist power, is probably the second-greatest impediment to creation of a sustained American peace movement - the first obstacle being the ideology of American Manifest Destiny, which is in practice quite compatible with Zionism.
However, African Americans are least susceptible to the Manifest Destiny/Zionist Mythology combo. Both ideologies wreak of racism, and most Black people know it. The Congressional Black Caucus knows it, too, but they are terrified of offending Israel's innumerable political hit men.

In moments like these, the true nature of Zionism and the Zionist state reveal themselves.

Obama's Admiral

Keep your eyes on the soft, cuddly guy heading the CIA, but whatever you do, don't look too closely at the record of DNI Admiral Blair. Allan Narin and historian Bradley Simpson report on the skeletons in Blair's closet.

Global Social Democracy?

Sociologist Walden Bello critiques the Global Social Democracy (GSD) discourse as a successor to the neo-liberal Washington Consenus.

In his view the model of GSD proposed by European leaders is just another short-term, cyclical fix for what is ultimately a structural and systemic problem. In Bello's view GSD does not even begin to address capitalism's inherent contradictions:

GSD, while critical of neoliberalism, accepts the framework of monopoly capitalism, which rests fundamentally on deriving profit from the exploitative extraction of surplus value from labor, is driven from crisis to crisis by inherent tendencies toward overproduction, and tends to push the environment to its limits in its search for profitability. Like traditional Keynesianism in the national arena, GSD seeks in the global arena a new class compromise that is accompanied by new methods to contain or minimize capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. Just as the old Social Democracy and the New Deal stabilized national capitalism, the historical function of Global Social Democracy is to iron out the contradictions of contemporary global capitalism and to relegitimize it after the crisis and chaos left by neoliberalism. GSD is, at root, about social management.

Patrick Bond, an eco-economist and the director of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa makes a similar critique:

Those who declare that the Great Crash of Late 2008 heralds the end of free market economic philosophy - "neoliberalism" for short - are not paying close enough attention... Indeed, neoliberalism may have another breath of life, with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation applied from above by Barak Obama or the IMF. Much stronger pressure is needed from below to resist. Until grassroots forces again gather their strength to mount an assault, national-scale challenges to global financial power are the only ways forward given adverse global-scale power relations.

He then draws on Keynes and Marx to argue for national solutions to global problems:

In his famous 1933 article on national self-sufficiency, John Maynard Keynes cautioned against nationalistic "silliness, haste and intolerance", yet argued forcefully for the national not global scale of economic revival: "I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national."

For those (like myself) aiming for a society left of Keynes, it is still the case that, as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie." The national scale is where the most power lies, and where strategies against commodification and corporate globalization have the best chance of success.

Silencing the Now: Shhh, the Israelis are Shooting

Obama on 12/30/08: "Shhh, the Israelis are shooting"

As Gaza burns, Obama plays golf. Boy, the New Boss, feels quite bit like the Old Boss.

The Gaurdian cautions that as al-Jazeera broadcast images of Obama taking in the "back 9" juxtaposed with images of murder and mayhem in the streets of Gaza, Obama is "losing a battle of perceptions among Muslims that he may not realize has even begun... The danger is that when he finally peers over the parapet on January 21, the battle of perceptions may already be half-lost."

How should we interpret silence? Historians of Palestine are well-trained in this art given that the history of Palestine has been largely silenced by Zioinist claims to "A Land without a People for a People without a Land." And as historians such as Gabi Pitterburg point out, the discursive erasure of Palestinians is an essential prerequisite to their their psychical removal (or "Transfer" as its known) and dispossession.

Is there any doubt that Obama will reach out and grasp that Faustian hand with full enthusiasm? Will Obama avoid rocking the proverbial boat on Palestine, the Middle East, and "National Security" issues writ large in the interest of getting his "domestic agenda" passed? Perhaps he should step back from all the FDR/ Great Depression analogies for a moment and remind himself of the fate of LBJ's Great Society. The point being that all the best laid plans for "domestic reform" can come to naught if one lacks the courage to stand up to monsters at home. LBJ thought that if he would give the Southern Dems in Congress, and the JFK foreign policy Establishment (Rostow, the Bundy Brothers, and Rusk) the War they wanted, he would get his Great Society at home- Guns and Butter for all. The problem with Faustian bargains is that they rarely turn out as expected. Trading on the backs of Palestinians may by be a time-honored Beltway tactic - but it produces consistently disastrous results for all concerned- but mostly for Palestinians. It is the Palestinians who pay the price for our cowardice at home. We lack the capacity to confront our own monsters- our own violent pathologies that lead us offer up endless human sacrifice to our Gods of the Military Industrial Complex (Boeing, Raytheon, etc), and so we project that violence outward. And then if that were not enough our Pundits have the audacity to suggest that it is Arab and Muslim political culture that is prone to spates of irrational violence. There is no single more prolific purveyor of violence than the United States. Until we muster the the courage to mount a real social revolution capable overturning the corrupt and defunct system of cruelty we will remain captives of that system. We may avert our eyes form the destruction caused by our own cowardice and we may indulge in yet more narcissistic orgies of self-congratulation for electing Barack Obama (if I see one more advertisement for a human interest special on Obamas or the "historic nature" of elec-sham '08, I think I am going to throw up), but while we dither, and avoid a confrontation with our own ruling class, the world burns. What will be left for our children to inherent? The rubble in Gaza offers one suggestion.