Failing Nationalism Syndrome

Juan Cole: The Closing of the Zionist Mind

"Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the strangest things."

The Neocons have not been defeated, their ideas have been insitutionalized

Gareth Porter: Bomb Iran?

"The idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts, “are mentally in a different galaxy than they were under President Bush.” Even though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the world as a rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando killings of unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the U.S. Congress appears as strong as ever.

Moreover, polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran – in large part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to exploit that advantage. “If the Israelis bomb now, American public opinion will probably be with them,” writes Gerecht. “Perhaps decisively so.” "

Anthony DiMaggio: Iran Under Siege

"As Haaretz reports, the former CIA chief, Michael Hayden, is also now warning that "military action against Iran now seems more likely because no matter what the U.S. does diplomatically, Tehran keeps pushing ahead with its suspected nuclear program." In his own words, Hayden explained that during the Bush years, "a strike was way down on the list of options," but now such an attack "seems inexorable....In my personal thinking, I have begun to consider that that [a military strike] may not be the worst of all possible outcomes." "

Conn Haliinan: The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

Conn Haliinan: The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

The Marijuana Mode of Production

The Green Rush is On!

The Great Marijuana Boom

By BRUCE McEWEN

"Pot growers and their legions of strictly legal support staffs with their truck loads of irrigation hose, fertilizers, timers, netting, and everything else a remote pot enter prise might need, depart daily from Mendocino County's thriving garden supply businesses, head off to the hills. Many of these supply trucks drive east to Covelo and points north to irrigate marijuana out of the Middle Fork Eel River, the only reliable source of water in the summer time in the Mendocino National Forest."

M. Shadid Alam on Zionism

Running Out of Solutions

Israel: a Failing Colonial Project?

By M. SHAHID ALAM

"Perhaps, the best chance of unwinding the Zionist colonial project lies with the Jews themselves. Only when liberal segments of the Jewish diaspora are convinced that Zionism endangers Jewish lives, only when they act to countervail the power of the Jewish lobby in leading Western societies, will Israel finally be moved to dismantled its apartheid regime. In the end, the alternative to this orderly dismantling of Zionism is a destructive war in the Middle East that may not be limited to the region. Whatever else happens, it is unlikely that Israel or US interests in the Middle East will survive such a war."

Bacevich, The End of Military History

The End of (Military) History?
The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
By Andrew J. Bacevich

" “In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course."

Iraqis, by and large, were better off under Saddam

John McCain: "We Already Won That One"

Monday 26 July 2010

by: Marjorie Cohn, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

"Most Iraqis have less than six hours of electricity per day. Baghdad's poorer neighborhoods have as little as one hour per day, leaving them without so much as an electric fan to withstand the blistering heat - 120 degrees in some places. The electricity shortages caused thousands of Iraqis to join street demonstrations in Baghdad last month.

The political situation in Iraq is worse than it was before the US invaded. Although Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, he nevertheless raised the Iraqi standard of living to a respectable level. "Saddam [had] improved the school system in Iraq and literacy for women was phenomenal for that of an Arab country at the time," William Quandt, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Virginia, who has served as an adviser to the American government on Mideast policy, said on the PBS "News Hour." "People didn't go hungry in those days in Iraq," Quandt added."