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."