When Necessary, Manufacture a War

"[C]risis initiation is really tough." 

Washington Institute for Near East Peace (de facto 'think tank' arm of AIPAC) is pushing for war with Iran. Patrick Clawson, director of 'research', made that remarkable statement, reported by Mondoweiss.

What a striking comment. Of course, the US has done a lot of crisis initiation. The Bush administration initiated the post-9/11 crisis with Iraq. I've often thought that the cruel sanctions regimes, previously imposed on Iraq and now on Iran, are calculated to provoke the victim.

When I saw the headline here, I thought that "covert attack" war's idolaters might have in mind would be more in the vein of old-fashioned US covert ops. During the Reagan years, the US would dress up its "advisers" and Contra terrorists in the uniforms of the Nicaraguan Sandanista soldiers, then have them commit atrocities while so outfitted. The idea, of course, was to bring down blame on the Sandanistas.

The IDF and Mossad are known to have their operatives dress up as Palestinians. Reports have noted that they are so well-trained that their accents can match regional Palestinian ones.

The caveat here is that such reports are easily misstated (over or under) and even more easily dismissed as "conspiracy theory." Past charges by Americans (especially African Americans and Native Americans) that FBI or local police forces were infiltrating protester ranks to sow discord or provoke violence have invariably been dismissed by the likes of Man's Greatest Newspaper, the Times. The catch is that such charges have repeatedly been shown to be true. For example, we now know that the NYPD infiltrated protester groups during the 2004 RNC and continues to do spy on Muslims and Arabs, including through planted NYPD operatives.

Seymour Hersh and others have reported on US/Israeli covert operations already underway in Iran. If these have failed to provoke the overt Iranian response that Clawson would like to see, one has to wonder why he thinks a sabotaged submarine would. My guess is he has something more drastic in mind — something like the 1988 US destruction of the Iranian Airbus, killing 290 innocents.

Young Friedmanstein

Glenn Greenwald has a piece in Salon and Jonathan Schwarz in A Tiny Revolution on Jeffrey Goldberg's newest entry in the bid for More War — War with Iran.

Jeffrey Goldberg is a young Thomas Friedman, with shades of Judy Miller (shades shared by Friedman 30 years ago, when he was coming up).

Simmering out of sight is plenty of plausibility-evidence to undermine Goldberg's claims (not that any such evidence will make any difference to the mainstream). For one thing, Iran is not suicidal. They know how an attack on Israel would go — massive Israeli (and almost certainly American) retaliation, truly massive, as in Dresden-Hiroshima massive.

Second, if American and Israeli government and mainstream claims are to be believed (a very big "if"), then Iran is doing perfectly well needling Israel via Hamas and Hezbollah. Why go overt when you can stay covert and maintain 'plausible deniability'?

Ultimately, the question regarding Goldbergs (and Netanyahus, Cheneys, etc.) is, Why? Do they really think Iran is a threat? My guess is that they do. They are so bigoted, such thoroughly violent true believers, that they really do believe that even purely verbal criticism constitutes a physical attack on Israel.

That raises the question: After Iran, then what? Do Goldberg and Company believe that, with the Iranians gone, the Palestinians will just disappear? Or that Israel will then be able to annex southern Lebanon with all its water resources? Or take the east bank of the Jordan River? Or retake the Sinai?

Israel and its 'allies' seem to proceed with on the premise that any and every war is just a natural prelude to the next war. (Obama shows no sign of thinking all that differently.)

So after Iraq, ramp up Afghanistan. Then Iran. Then . . . ? Is the monster unstoppable?

Stanley Fish on Divine Vengeance!

December 29th's New York Times has Stanley Fish considering the joys of divine vengeance in film — the license we are granted to relish violence in film when the perpetrator is unqualifiedly justified because of some awful wrong done him or her. My response below.

Great topic. Let's not forget the leading advocate of divine justice is the God of Judeo-Christian religion.

Vengeance is arguably one of two Great Motives in film, the other being love. Vengeance and violence are uniformly just in war films, especially if the war involves the US. Can any of us imagine a war film showing the US as fundamentally morally awful? If the US is at war, in fact or fiction, it is taken as axiomatic that the violence is just. Today, we even get POV reality footage of 'surgical strikes' -- surgeons are engaged in violent acts, are they (!)

Much sci fi involves sublime violence — Wars or the Worlds.

In some films, the vengeance is explicitly granted divine status -- take The Crow, with Brandon Lee, who died in a _representation_ of violence.

Look at the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, who perfectly mashes the fine line between justice and absurdity. Lucy Liu's character in Kill Bill begins as a victim on a divine quest and becomes a violent beast.

I think my personal favorite is Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, which does a pretty good job (the best I can recall) of stripping away the veneer of justice. A woman horribly wronged, and an assortment of entirely unrelated men setting out to balance the scales of justice -- for money. Each of these men with his own vile violent past, including Clint Eastwood's Will Munny (hint hint), who of all the assassin's has the most terrible past.

And then there's Hamlet.

Will War's Idolaters Ever Just Shut the Fuck Up?

Martin Bright in the Spectator

Incidentally, I now think the invasion was indeed an error: carried out at the wrong time, by the wrong coalition for the wrong reasons. But where I do agree with the “decents” is that those who opposed intervention in 2002/3 were arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power. This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war.

(via Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, via comments at Aaronovitch Watch)

Martin Bright's assertion that those who argued against the war were arguing for preservation of the Baathist regime is simply idiotic. False logic, false dichotomy.

First, it is patently obvious that the intent of the two sides was different, and the difference is essential. The pro-war brigade intended that the 'coalition' go to war. (I'm tempted to say they wanted a war. That might be unfair, though not in the case of the Dick Cheneys. It both fair and accurate that a significant portion of them wanted to see Arabs killed. Whether Martin Bright is among those genocidal racists I do not know. Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter and their ilk certainly are.)

The anti-war activists expressly (1) advocated other techniques for achieving 'regime change (if that really was the goal of war's advocates — it wasn't), or (2) argued against war on the grounds that the consequences of war would be disastrous (which has proven true), or (3) argued that Bush & Co had not only failed to make their case but had likely misrepresented the facts (at best) or lied outright (which has also proven true). This is by no means an exhaustive list of the arguments against the war. The second argument is unambiguously one of accepting the lesser of two evils — by no stretch of the imagination an argument for the continuation of the lesser evil.

Let's take an example from ethics and popular entertainment. A person is threatened with the murder of her child if she does not surrender secret X — the nuclear launch codes that will enable terrorists to kill vast numbers. Any of us can easily imagine the person herself desperately arguing that she cannot surrender the codes. I do not imagine many, if any, saying that she is arguing for the murder of her child even though a consequence of her following the line of her own argument will be the child's death. You might as well suggest that, because she won't surrender the codes, she is killing her child. And of course, the weak-minded right-wing did indeed take this line of un-reasoning from 2001 on — that those not "with us" were "against us," those against the war were for terrorists. Utter nonsense, bordering on actionable libel.

What the Times or the BBC Will Likely Never Show You About Israel's Occupation

Below is a map of the West Bank (in French, but it's easily read).

The red line — the Wall. Note how most of it runs well inside Palestinian territory.

Yellow squares — permanent checkpoints (there are far far more 'temporary checkpoints')

Black triangles — settlements started after Israel agreed to cease new settlement activity.

Orange — the glaring truth-teller — land barred to Palestinians. Note especially the Jordan River Valley, a crucial source of water. Israel gets approximately 40% of its fresh water from the West Bank. Be assured that Israel has no intention at all of ever leaving the Jordan River valley.

Orange lines — "Jewish-only" roads. Sound like apartheid?

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of the State of Nature

The word is now about that Obama may name Clinton his Secretary of State, perhaps in the awful tradition of Madeleine Albright (who, some may remember, dismissed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian fatalities as a 'necessary price' [1] during the years of Clinton bombing campaigns, little reported in the US).


In the Context of Policy

With Obama's choice of Rahm Emanuel, hawk and privateer, for White House Chief of Staff, a pick of Clinton would signal just how liberal the Obama administration is not going to be. Of course, as of this writing, it's quite possible he will pick real liberals for domestic policy while adopting a hawkish stance abroad. Americans, usually conservative across the board, might like to keep the imperial foolishness abroad but adopt an FDR liberalism at home. But despite popular hopes, there is little chance of that with the likes of Austan Goolsbee or Robert Rubin or Larry Summers advising Obama on economics.

We do know one thing. In the best of times, Americans are both grossly ill-informed (thanks to the slavish and complicit media) and largely indifferent to what is happening even in Canada or Mexico, let along Iraq or the Palestinian Territories or Kashmir. Now, with the economy clearly forecasting an early fall for the American empire, Americans won't just be indifferent to foreign suffering. They will welcome a little 'entertainment' in the form of 'surgical strikes' in Afghanistan or Pakistan. (Never mind that there is simply no such thing as a surgical strike, especially when a drone is being piloted remotely from Florida or Wyoming.)

My prediction: Obama will do something akin to Clinton not long after taking office. In June of 1993, Clinton launched cruise missile attacks, ostensibly on the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Baghdad. No strategic or tactical success, but woman and children were killed, including Iraq's leading woman poet.

The George Packers and Thomas Friedmans, not to mention whole institutions like CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Brookings Institution, will readily provide the 'intellectual' rhetoric and 'expertise' to support something like this. (I omit the Times as a wholly supportive institution because Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and one or two others might dissent.)


Clinton at State as a Political Strategy

The choice of Hillary to head State could also be a brilliant political move if there are any fears regarding her political plans. From the standpoint of 'keeping one's enemies closer,' it would officially make Obama Hillary Clinton's boss, so future saber-rattling by Clinton could be cast in a new light of irresponsibility. With Clinton at State in a time of international turmoil, Obama could keep her abroad for extended periods or at crucial times, hampering her ability to run domestically. Getting her out of the Senate would also limit her ability to claim credit for a role in solutions to domestic problems at a time when domestic issues are clearly trumping international ones in the eyes of American voters.


NOTES

1. Interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996:

Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

American Injustice

The Bush Department of Injustice has declared that seventeen Chinese prisoners at Guantanamo may be held there for the rest of their lives, though they have never been charged with any crime in the seven years they have been held.

This could be an early test for the next administration. The men, ethnic Uighurs (an oppressed Muslim people of western China), were captured by Pakistani troops in Afghanistan in 2001 and handed off to the US. (Afghanistan borders western China.)

A federal judge has ruled they should be freed, but the Bush regime has blocked their release.

At every turn, the Bush brigade has trampled their rights under domestic and international law. To this day by stipulation of the Department of Defense, they are chained to the floor through meetings with their lawyer, Sabin Willett.

Here is the Orwellian logic of the US Department of Injustice, quoted in the Guardian article:

[T]he men "are linked to an organisation that the state department has labelled to be a terrorist entity, and it is beside the point that the organisation is not 'a threat to us' because the law excluding members of such groups does not require such proof."

"Linked to a terrorist entity" . . . . After seven years of Bush crimes against humanity, we have a sense what that does and does not mean. We know that someone "is linked" just in case the Bush administration asserts that there is a link.

"The law . . . does not require proof" . . . . Well, the Bush administration has never required proof — never even required evidence — of something to proceed with attacks, injustices, an entire war.

The Bush standard for seven long years has been "If it might be the case, proceed as if it were the case. Assert what ever is required, lie as 'need' dictates, regardless of proof or evidence."

This hasn't been a bootstrapping technique, which requires something like a foundation or rational starting point. It has been nothing more than outright fabrication, from start to finish. Purely, utterly circular. A true Catch-22. "They are in our custody. They must be their for a reason, because we make no mistakes. Therefore, they must remain in custody."

US Radar and Troops Deployed to Israel

Defense News and al-Jazeera (largely picking up the News story) are reporting that the US has deployed an "x-band" radar to Israel along with 120 US troops to operate and maintain it. This would the the third deployment of this kind, following one to northern Japan and the more notorious case of the Czech Republic (which is receiving a more powerful system).

The Israel deployment clearly targets Iran. Japan might aim at China though northern Japan puts the array much closer to Russia. The Czech Repubic targets Russia and the Middle East, despite protestations of the US to the contrary.

So again, we see an old Cold War mentality -- encircle Russia. And we see the new obsession -- Iran.

X-band radar uses the high-frequency, short-wavelength microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because it is of much higher frequency, it can be used to resolve much smaller objects with greater detail.

Check The New York Times, CNN and others to see whether they carry this. Prediction: They won't.