Maybe that’s the right thing to do. The committee put great stock in Obama’s policy for nuclear disarmament. And while we haven’t destroyed a single weapon, the goal is as noble as they come. My own criticisms of Obama would be wiped away if he leaves office with even significant progress towards nuclear disarmament.

I appreciate that much of the world views my native land more favorably since Obama’s election, and i hope that he will follow the carrot being dangled in front of him. But i have my reservations.

According to the committee:

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

This is nice talk, but what of arresting a social worker for twittering police orders in Pittsburgh? Where is the stern response to the coup in Honduras? What of America’s world leading prison population? Am i the only one who questions that the US speaks to everyone of peace while waging war? What sort of values are represented by telling Iran that it cannot develop nuclear weapons but refusing to speak on Israel’s arsenal? Can a man who presides over the world’s largest exporter of arms be a standard bearer for peace?

Yes, my idealism is peeking through. But remember that a cynic is just an idealist who’s been confronted with reality one too many times. I cannot disagree with the idealism that formed the basis of the committee’s decision. I applaud that idealism even if i cannot share it.

But i would like to see the Nobel Peace Prize given to someone who has achieved something rather than discussed achieving something. I would rather see the prize money used to build another hospital for Congolese rape victims or applied to removing land mines around the world. I would like to see the award given to someone who’s work has come in the face of severe adversity, someone who has suffered for his/her idealism and retained it.

I appreciate the thank you given to a president who has, at least apparently, chosen to rejoin the world after the disaster of the previous administration. But is that such a great achievement? Shouldn’t that be expected of our nation?

I hope that President Obama leverages this award to good effect. But i’m finding it more and more difficult to sustain myself on hope. So i’m left with Gogol, laughing my bitter laugh.

I’m either the best or worst type of commentator for this situation.  I don’t have a dog in this fight.  And while i can see some point to both sides being right, i mostly see both sides being terribly, terribly wrong.  The more pressing issues are, as usual, buried under the weight of politics, punditry, and personal animosity.

Let’s begin with the picture.  That’s photographic evidence of Israel using either artillery fired cluster munitions or white phosphorus (probably the latter) in an urban area.  Hardly civilized.  Almost certainly that shell was payed for with the American taxpayer monies, and may well have been manufactured right here in God’s country…at least we still have some export manufacturing sector, no?  That Israel is using cluster munitions suggest one of two things: either that wanton destruction is the military plan or that Israel is not so confident in the vaunted IDF.

Robert Fisk recently wrote a scathing estimate of both sides of this conflict from a military point of view.  This isn’t Southern Lebanon, and Hamas is not the same caliber of fighting force as Hezbollah.  It seems unlikely that Hamas has learned any significant lessons from Hezbollah’s success.  That the IDF can target Hamas leadership suggests that the organization is riddled with spies and informers.  On the other hand, there have been suggestions that Hamas has spent the blockade years amassing heavy weaponry and deploying booby traps; that may be mostly bluster, but the IDF has said that much of the artillery barrage was meant to detonate planted explosives.  Assuming that the IDF has seriously infiltrated Hamas, they are likely to know what awaits their forces and where it has been planted.

But none of that changes the fact that this is full blown war in very tight confines with huge numbers of civilians trapped in the crossfire.  US media has made it a point to relay Israeli’s warning to Palestinian civilians that full war is on the march and they should leave the area.  That same media fails to point out that there’s nowhere for civilians to go.  Gaza is a walled ghetto.

Urban warfare is the most chaotic and dangerous form of conflict.  Even the most highly trained and experienced forces have difficulty in full urban combat.  There is reason to believe that the IDF is not the vaunted fighting force of song and legend.  Fisk points out that it hasn’t won a war since 1973.  It pretty well got its ass handed to it by Hezbollah in 2006, and that was in a situation where the overall superiority of the IDF should have been overwhelming.  I’ve seen a fair number of pictures of Israeli tanks massed at the border.  It’s an impressive sight, but the last place a tanker wants to go is down an urban street.  If the opposition can take the first and last tank in a column, everything in between is trapped for a massacre.

Can Hamas manage that?  Maybe not; they’re better known for shooting their guns into the air than military discipline.  But the Hungarians managed it against the Red Army, and they did so without much more than Molotov cocktails.

But the IDF forces arrayed against Hamas might not be much better.  It appears that a large portion of the fighting will fall to called up reservists…hardly “elite”.  And once the IDF forces engage Hamas on the streets of Gaza, their air and artillery superiority may well be of zero consequence.  Contrary to popular belief, most munitions are not “smart” and even the smart munitions are not so accurate as the Pentagon’s propaganda machine would lead us to believe.

Imagine an armor supported infantry unit in Gaza.  Hamas manages to block at least one path of exit by destroying an Israeli tank.  The ambush is sprung and IDF troops are trapped.  Any call for air support at that point takes a serious risk of blowing up the IDF as well (or instead of) the Hamas fighters.  The quarters are too close, and Hamas should have the advantage of knowing the area far better than the IDF.

And then, of course, there are the civilians…if they were trapped to begin with, they are further trapped by the Israeli strategy of splitting Gaza into three regions.  Israel is also, and somewhat understandably by the methods of modern warfare, targeting infrastructure.  Understandable though it might be, it significantly worsens the conflict’s effect on the civilian population…er, it increases “collateral damage”.

Tzipi Livni appears comfortable taking the low road, “The moment they fire we will respond with great force,” she said, “It could be that several operations are needed.”  In other words, Israel is not attempting to dissuade Hamas but to crush it once and for all.  Ehud Barak reinforced her point and suggested that this operation might take a while.  Whether it will be successful depends on a great many variables, but the most salient variable is the very definition of success.

Does Israel actually want peace?  It must surely understand that ravaging the Palestinian population will only act as a bellows on the flames of this conflict.  Barak insists that Israel is not “war hungry”, but his nation’s actions make his statement questionable.  Just as Hamas’s ineffective rocket attacks provoke Israel, Israel’s invasion will surely provoke Palestinian retaliation.

Unfortunately, that may be the whole point.  It has been pretty solidly established that Israel founded and funded Hamas in an effort to counteract the power of the PLO.  There was some sense (albeit perverted) to such an action.  The PLO was effectively secular and nationalist, so it was hard to portray them as blood thirsty Islamic terrorists.  Hamas was always an Islamist counterweight to the PLO, and much evidence suggests that Israel allowed the counterweight to get heavier.  Now Hamas must be destroyed.  It is impossible to tell if a situation like this was part of the original plan or if we’re watching blowback on a large scale.  Considering the long-term recycling of Israeli power players, the former cannot be discounted…though i would surmise that the truth is a blend of the former and the latter.

Which leads us to the most unfortunate casualty of this conflict: any hope for peaceful dialogue.

Abu Yussef (Palestine Monitor) writes, “The fourth casualty, and perhaps the most tragic, is the Palestinian voice of peace and non-violence. Anyone who has devoted their time and work to teaching the merits and methods of non-violent resistance and joint dialogue have been made to look like utter fools and apologists for the ongoing horror.” [Emphasis added.] The Palestinians are being cajoled by Hamas, with the help of Israeli examples, into believing that peace is not even possible.  They’re happy to paint Israel as a blood thirsty monster as much as Israel is happy to paint Hamas as an evil terrorist organization.  It’s a self-perpetuating circle of violence and recrimination, proven by the actions of both sides.  And it has descended, according to Yussef, to the point where Hamas has threatened to target rival politicians along with Israelis.

It becomes harder and harder to not wonder if the circle of violence is by design.  The violence that begets violence forms the rationale for Israel being surrounded by enemies and for Palestine to be oppressed and attacked by its enemy.  The interlocking memes keep the military aid from the US flowing…no doubt happily for those who profit from it…and the region so unstable as to necessitate a large US presence in the region (directly and by proxy).  A non-violent campaign by the Palestinians would almost certainly be effective in turning world opinion firmly against Israel; consequently, Israel (and its financial patron…that would be us) has a vested interest in making sure such a campaign never gathers momentum.

It seems that the point is to perpetuate the cycle of violence.  And in this the United States is complicit.  We know that the Bush administration is whole-heartedly with the program.  We still don’t know where the incoming Obama administration stands, but its avoidance of the issue may well mean that it will have no choice other than to be with the program by the time Obama takes office.  There is good reason to believe that Israel may have timed the operation for this reason, and by not speaking immediately, Obama walked right into the trap.

We’ll have to wait and see, but it certainly appears that yet another presidential administration will pass without significant progress towards peace in the region…unless Israel manages to thoroughly decimate Hamas; in which case the President Elect will be somewhat relieved of the burden.  But the most likely outcome is that everyone will lose except the most violent and war like ideologues on both sides.

*This post may already be out of date, considering the talk of cease-fire possibilities.  And i am traveling and unable to make some adjustments that i would prefer to make before posting…my apologies.

Image credit: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

Hat tip: Russ Wellen for the Yussef quote

It’s been going on for so long now that we can’t even assign blame anymore. I got pull-off-the-road-and-calm-down furious on Monday when, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered Monday afternoon, a Gaza politician claimed that either a) Israeli collaborators had launched the rockets into Israel as a pretext or b) there had been no launches at all and Israel was faking the whole thing. And I got just as furious this morning when I the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. refused to admit that Israeli commandos had been assassinating Hamas leaders during the cease fire in yet another NPR interview.

Hammurabi came up with the first written code of laws – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And the result of following that law is that Israelis and Palestinians have each become toothless, blind, deaf, mute, and stupid.

I’ve lost the hope for a negotiated peace I had when I was young and naive – there have just been too many cycles of violence and so-called ceasefires for me to believe that diplomacy is viable at this point. All that’s left is a final solution to the conflict – annihilation. Either the state of Israel will cease to exist or the Palestinians will.

Let’s be frank here: if the international community wanted the conflict to end, it would. Neither Israel nor its neighbors could resist the combined military and economic might of the rest of the world. So if Europe, the U.S., Russia, and the rest of the Middle East was willing to say “enough is enough,” then the conflict would be over within a year, two at the outside (the first year for both parties to realize we’re serious, and a year to negotiate the actual agreement). This means that the rest of the world wants the conflict to continue; other nations find it valuable or useful.

The autocratic governments around the Middle East are the ones whose motivations are easiest to divine. What they get out of the ongoing conflict is a convenient distraction for their own restless population, and especially for their angry youths. Young people who would otherwise be focused on their own government’s failings on human rights, their country’s lack of jobs and services, and so on spew their bile on, and occasionally detonate their bodies in, the state of Israel instead. And in the process the autocrats maintain their own power. So the governments of the Middle East have every reason to keep the conflict going forever – they need to keep Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah powerful enough to harass Israel, but weak enough that they can’t actually destroy Israel. And Egypt, Iran, Iraq under Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Syria, et al have become masters at it.

I’m hardly an expert, so I have to make an educated guess about what Europe in general gets out of this, but I think it’s very similar to what the Middle East nations get – a distraction. Europe has massive Arab and Muslim minority communities that are pretty much shat upon by their host nations – just look at the riots by Muslim immigrant youths in France in 2005, or how the Turkish minority claims to be treated in Germany, or the lack of integration of Muslims in Great Britain. All of these communities would be more likely to demand rights and services and integration from their host nations if the conflict didn’t exist. In other words, second-class citizens would start demanding the same rights that all other citizens get automatically, and that not only be economically expensive but would also create unrest throughout the rest of society. And as the gay marriage debate in the U.S. shows, large numbers of people irrationally believe that granting rights and privileges to others somehow denigrates their own rights and privileges.

I’m also not entirely sure what the United States gets out of the conflict, but I know what the U.S. gets out of the existence of Israel, and it’s entirely possible that U.S. politicians have historically viewed the conflict as an unfortunate but tolerable side effect. By supporting Israel, the U.S. gets a ally in a mostly friendly and democratic nation smack in the middle of a region that is vital to our national interest. We need the Middle East’s oil, and it’s possible that prior administrations have considered the oil supply so vital that no disruptions could be permitted. And I can understand the logic of how the devil you know (the al-Saud royal family, for example) may well be better than the devil you don’t (any government that rises up following a hypothetical overthrow of said royal family). So anything that keeps the Saudis stable and in power keeps the oil flowing to American automobiles and trucks, and if that means the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, then at least it doesn’t mean the deaths of Americans. Or something along those lines, anyway.

So the world has an interest in keeping the conflict going. And that’s why diplomacy won’t work. Stopping the conflict is as simple as the U.S. stopping aid to Israel and the various Middle East governments stopping aid to the Palestinians until a final treaty was negotiated and signed. The economic and social disruption that would result would be so devastating that the two sides would have no choice but come to the table in good faith and with a willingness to compromise. But instead we’ll continue to have European governments bemoaning the carnage in Gaza while the U.S. defends Israel’s right to defend the citizens of Sederot from Katyusha, but since everyone has a vested interest in keeping the carnage going, it’ll never stop via diplomatic means. At least, not until the U.S.’ vested interest in keeping Israel going fades with our dependence on Middle Eastern oil….

Which brings us to the latest cycle of violence in the conflict, the bombing of Gaza and the launching of Katyusha rockets in to southern Israel.

Officially, Israel is seeking a military solution to the problem of the Katyusha rockets. No military solution exists. In the sphere of military conflict, when one side loses the ability to continue fighting, the other wins. The problem in Gaza is that the conflict is military vs. insurgent/terrorist, and the only way to destroy Hamas’ and the Palestinians’ ability to fight is to convince the people to turn against the insurgents and terrorists hiding among them and to stop producing more insurgents/terrorists. You can do that a number of ways – economic reconstruction, improved human rights and greater freedoms, bribry – but you can’t do it by bombing neighborhoods or destroying government buildings. Bombing neighborhoods injures so many innocent people (who’s only crime is to be Palestinian) that it creates more new Hamas members than it destroys and thus increases Hamas’ ability to fight. And destroying government buildings hurts Hamas’ command, control, or communications infrastructure not at bit.

Actually, I was wrong – there is a military solution to the conflict, but just one – ethnic cleansing via the forced relocation or mass murder of all 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and probably the million or so Israeli Arabs too. Israel almost certainly has the military might to do this, especially if the U.S. didn’t cut off military assistance in the process – the Gaza Strip, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians, is only 139 square miles, or about 1/11th the size of the state of Rhode Island. The other 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, in an area about 20% larger than Rhode Island. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) normally has only a couple hundred thousand active soldiers, and 200,000 soldiers against four million Palestinians means the Palestinians win. But the IDF is composed of conscripts – nearly every physically able man and woman enters the IDF at the age of 18, resulting in upwards of three million available soldiers. So when you’re putting three million Israeli soldiers against four million Palestinian civilians, the Israelis win. And with the overwhelming technological superiority of the IDF, the IDF wins against a guaranteed Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. assault to protect their fellow Arabs too.

But let us assume that the state of Israel is unwilling to become like the very monster that nearly destroyed them during World War II. It’s a pretty good assumption, after all. Israel won’t be committing genocide against the Palestinians any time soon. As harsh as the Israeli governments tactics are, they’re not as bad as gas chambers. But Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and, to a lesser extent, Hezbollah have no such historical moral restrictions. In fact, they’ve called for the destruction of Israel and actively work toward it. And with Israel’s counterproductive military tactics of punishing families and entire communities backfiring and creating more terrorists, Hamas et al will ultimately gather enough force to existentially threaten Israel. Not this year or next, but given the demographic advantages the Palestinians have over Israelis, it’s only a matter of time. And if Israel thinks that they’re facing an existential threat today, imagine how bad it’ll be when they’re facing not 10,000 Palestinian terrorists hiding among four million civilians, but rather a million Palestinian terrorists hiding among 10 million civilians.

Three million IDF soldiers against 10 million Palestinian civilians and one million Palestinian terrorists isn’t a guaranteed win for Israel by any stretch.

Of course, the state of Israel could be destroyed by peaceful means instead of by Palestinian pogrom. It was created by international fiat, it could be dissolved and the citizens spread throughout the world in another diaspora by another international fiat backed by international military might. Not that this is likely, of course – it’s more likely that the international community would force a negotiated settlement, and you know how likely I think that is.

So what will be the final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? More conflict. More rockets and suicide bombings. More airstrikes and assassinations. And the conflict will last until the developed world no longer relies on dictators and monarchs who rely on oil wealth to fuel their economies instead of freedom and education.

When the world doesn’t need or can’t afford Middle Eastern oil any more, it won’t need or enable the Israeli-Palestinian conflict either.

All images from AFP

As I was saying, I’m already tired of hearing about how Obama’s election was historic. Not because it’s not true, but rather because it’s already overdone. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase “historic election” even before President-elect Obama took the stage in Chicago election night, never mind all the times I’ve heard it on the radio and read it on nearly every webpage, blog, and news site I’ve visited since election night.

There’s another reason I’m sick of the phrase, too. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to just elect the first black man to be President. It’s not enough to elect the first biracial man to be President. It’s not enough to elect someone who actually knows what it’s like to live on food stamps. It’s not enough to elect a compentent President after 8 years of rank presidential incompetence. It’s not enough that Obama organized the youth of this country into a force to be reckoned with. In fact, no matter how historic Obama’s election is, it’s not enough.

Enough already with the “historic election”. The election of Barack Obama was only the first step. In 10 or 20 years, what will define whether President Obama’s election was truly historic won’t be that he was black, or mixed race, or anything else I mentioned above. Instead, it will be what he does during his administration.

If Obama gets the U.S. out of Iraq without leaving a mess we’ll have to re-invade to fix later, that will be historic.

If Obama puts an end to the Taliban and al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan without provoking a war with Pakistan, that will be historic.

If Obama keeps the country from slipping into a second depression, that will be historic.

If Obama puts the U.S. onto a path of oil independence without relying on environmentally destructive shale and coal-to-liquids programs, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the U.S. to a renewable energy standard and strips away market-distorting carbon fuel subsidies, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the country in upgrading our collapsing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure, that will be historic.

If Obama helps Congress develop a solution to the linked problems of entitlements, defense spending, and national debt, that will be historic.

If Obama can rebuild our relations with the rest of the world, that will be historic.

If Obama can cut U.S. carbon emissions in the short time the best science available says we have, and can get the rest of the world to do the same, that will be historic.

If Obama can reduce the costs of health care, provide health care to the millions of Americans who lack it at present, and maintain the quality and freedom our health care system provides at present, that will be historic.

If Obama can implement all the economic, regulatory, scientific, technological, social, cultural, and diplomatic changes required to do everything I just listed off, at the same time, and still deal with all the other things that will come up, that will be historic.

President-elect Barack Obama will always be the first black President. No-one will ever be able to take that from him, and no one should try. But there will come a time when our next President’s “blackness” will be an important historical footnote. And when that happens, when Obama’s race has been relegated to the status of a footnote by the accomplishments of his presidency, that too will be historic.

It will also, ultimately, be enough.

Then I’d get one of the untied students to “attack” one of the tied students. As he moved towards the other, he would have to cross the threads in the middle and would quickly draw others into the conflict.

The thread, I told my students, are the ties of international trade and politics. And Russia has just played silly-buggers with everyone else’s party.

Punishing America

When the US invaded Iraq in a so-called pre-emptive strike, Russia and China vetoed the chance for the US to put it to the UN. Neither Russia nor China were particularly interested in Iraq, but the principle at stake was crucial to both of them.

If it becomes acceptable to physically intervene in the activities of a sovereign state – no matter what cause is given – then the actions of China and Russia in pacifying their own self-declared zones of control (Chechnya, in the case of Russia, and Tibet for China) become something in which the rest of the world can intercede. And it isn’t only these two big nations. The list of contentious break-away regions is quite large. Indonesia and Aceh, the Yugoslav republics, India / Pakistan and Kashmir, Sri Lanka and the Tamil … hell, even Canada and Quebec, or the UK and Scotland.

Most recently, South Africa joined China and Russia in refusing to allow sanctions against Zimbabwe using the claim that this would be intervening in an internal conflict.

But the US did invade Iraq and, in so doing, triggered the collapse of the central state and unleashed a civil war. It hasn’t been declared outright illegal. Given the US’ global power and their importance to most nation’s, this was never likely. But that is, in any case, merely symbolic.

Simply declaring the US guilty and telling them to leave Iraq wouldn’t achieve any sort of solace for Iraqis. It would leave them with a violent and unstable country, locked in civil war. The US’ default punishment has been to stay there and sort out the mess they caused. The US electorate may not like it, but – too bad – their president led them into it, and now they all have to pay for it. The total cost of the war, so far, is estimated at around $1 – 2 trillion over a 10 year period. Savour that and consider whether the punishment fits the crime?

But the US is a big nation and, even at that price, it amounts to only 0.7% of GDP. Hardly anything to really feel.

The whole point of not coming out with a ruling, though, satisfied all sides to the conflict. If there is no clear ruling on intervention, and everything is left vague, then the US can have their little war in Iraq, Russia can continue killing Chechnyans, and China can continue subjugating Tibet. Plus, no one has a precedent on which to base direct intervention in Iran or North Korea.

Until Russia invaded Georgia, seized their break-away provinces and made them her own.

Russia’s Folly

Russia’s invasion of Georgia was premised on the following: that they were acting as peace-keepers to prevent genocide amongst a break-away region nominally under their protection and that is home to a large number of Russian citizens. We’ll ignore the fact that they only received their Russian passports conveniently recently…

In the first hours of the conflict, the Russian media declared that Georgians had targeted South Ossetian civilians and killed some 2,000 of them. This left both Europe and the US stuck in simply demanding that the Russians act with restraint. Then it turned out that “only” 150, or so, people had been killed and that Russian troops were looting and destroying Georgian homes and pushing 115,000 of them out of South Ossetia. Human Rights Watch then declared that Russia had deliberately dropped cluster bombs over civilian areas. Human Rights Watch continues to monitor the ongoing onslaught by Russian troops on Georgians within their zone of control. It’s chilling.

Now, there are some pointed differences between the US invading Iraq and Russia invading Georgia, not least of which is that the US, at least, has tried to rebuild Iraq, while Russia is simply looting and trashing Georgia.

However, Russia’s original claims have changed. Firstly, they have wrecked the Georgian’s ability to put their point across with active DOS attacks against their telecommunications infrastructure. Then they promptly, and unilaterally, “recognised” the South Ossetians and Abkhasian’s independence, and they now accuse the US of “forcing” the Russians to invade. Meanwhile, they continue to hold large parts of Georgia, and blockade their main port of Poti, in contravention of the cease-fire they signed with Georgia. And, just this morning, Russia has announced that they will integrate both Abkhazia and South Ossetia into the Federation and any independence will be short-lived.

The Russians have declared they will provide $ 400 million to rebuild South Ossetia. The US has sent aid to Georgia. Russia’s intervention in the Caucasus now stands revealed for the land-grab it always was.

Since Russia would veto any UN attempt at international redress, what stands to punish Russia? Especially considering that the US and Europe have no real appetite for war with the Russian bear.

Punishing Russia

All the punishments are already happening, again, by default.

Firstly, Russia has uncorked the separatist genie. Russia has plenty of regions that wish for independence. Even worse, is that so many of them share borders with South Ossetia. They include Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan. Now Chechnya has been bombed into submission, but the other states may consider this an opportune moment to push for their own independence.

Russia’s only support so far has come from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that consists of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia. I haven’t seen any press from China suggesting that they’re into this and, given their own internal breakaway regions (Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uighars in Xinjiang), I’m not too sure they’ll stand around for too long.

Update: China didn’t. As soon as Russia announced their annexation, China withdrew and now Russia is relying on the even more insignificant Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) to validate her claims. The CSTO comprises Russia and the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

So Russia is politically isolated. Worse is that, as in my tied up students example, small countries attempting to escape Russia’s embraced have rushed into alliances with Europe and the US. Poland, which had been cagey about hosting a US defensive missile system, signed up immediately. Ukraine has called for closer ties with the EU and even Turkey has looked nervous.

Financially, Russia declared that their oil wealth kept them safe. Not so. Investors are fleeing as rapidly as Georgia’s refugees. Something like $ 16 billion have left the country in the past weeks. Investors were already nervous given Putin’s bellicosity over listed companies and the war appears to have been the last straw. In order to keep the economy afloat, the government is considering a bailout.

But Russia is significantly smaller than the US. All posturing aside, Russia’s economy is only 6.1% the size of that of the US. Their military expenditure is 4.8% of total US military spending. Crushing Georgia may have been easy for the Russians, but they’re kidding themselves if the US really takes them seriously.

So, here we have Russia, isolated, with a collapsing economy and only one product to sell. They have given an excuse to every separatist movement inside the Russian Federation to call for their own independence, and the Europeans an excuse to raise prices on energy and push for energy-self-sufficiency.

As ye sew, so shall ye reap. Or, in American, go fuck yourself.

I ducked out a few minutes ago to grab a gelato over at Gelazzi on Larimer Square and didn’t realize, as I tried to walk in, that it was reserved temporarily for a private party. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, retreating. But when the woman at the door saw my press pass, she invited me right in. I figured that whoever was hosting, I could take the press packet handed to me in exchange for a cup of chocolate-chocolate chip and coffee Italian-style ice cream.

Turns out it was a gathering to establish a U.S. Department of Peace. That’s the goal of The Peace Alliance, a D.C.-based organization whose mission with such a project is
“to reduce and prevent violence domestically and internationally.”

It sounded a little gimmicky at first. But as I thumbed through the press kit, I started to wonder, why not? We have cabinet entities dedicated to all kinds of essential aims: education, health and human services, diplomatic relations, security abroad and at home, taking care of public lands, even the prosaic task of getting ourselves from place to place.

We no longer have a War Department – it’s been the Department of Defense since 1949, in a post-WWII effort to downplay the suggestion that military preparedness is inherently geared to foment war – but the DOD’s concerns are not generally with finding nonviolent ways to foster peace.

I was reminded, as I contemplated the proposed name – the U.S. Department of Peace – that what we assume to be normal or acceptable is very much a social construction. Why does the official pursuit of peace seem like such an odd notion? As a journalism student, I remember one professor asking students why we thought newspapers had business sections, but no labor sections. Most of us had never stopped to think about it. We were ensconced within the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ that permeates the way we look at and understand the world.

Imagine how differently a Department of Peace would engage with global conflict, versus the Department of Defense. Its stance would be proactive, rather than reactive. It would be focused collectively, rather than just internally. It would seek to understand and correct the roots of violence, rather than merely protect against it. A Peace Department wouldn’t deny the necessity odefense, but its agenda would be larger.

The press kit, which I skimmed in good faith in exchange for my gelato, says, “We live in a world in which military solutions alone are entirely insufficient to ensure national security.” There seems to be plenty of evidence for that, especially if we draw a broad definition of what “national security” means. The World Health Organization estimates that we spend $300 billion annually just on violence and its consequences that occur within our own country – let alone our staggering expenses for the war in Iraq.

Makes me wonder what a Department of Peace might be able to accomplish, for genuine homeland security and as the policy complement The Peace Alliance envisions for our military. They’re not mutually exclusive, proponents contend, who suggest funding it with two percent of the current Defense Department budget — less than we spend in a month on military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Alliance. Heck, they could get a great start with a one-fifth of one percent of the DOD budget, which, based on the Alliance’s numbers, would be a paltry billion dollars. I’d say that’s worth looking into – and not just because I got a free gelato.

• proven track record for getting country out of wars
• strong foreign policy diplomat who forged stronger relationships with powerful developing (and enemy) nations
• implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program
• dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries
• organized a daily press event and daily message for the media
• oversaw first large-scale integration of public schools in the South
• advocated comprehensive national health insurance for all Americans
• imposed wage and price controls in times of crisis
• indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income
• created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise
• promoted the Legacy of Parks program
• appointed four Supreme Court Justices, three of which voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade

Have you figured out where this is going yet?

No, I’m not here to tell you that what American needs is Richard Nixon. I’m sure as hell not here to laud the man, who was – as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it – so crooked he had to screw his pants on in the morning. I’m not here to argue that his policies were always noble or implemented with unrelenting elegance. Yes, he got us out of Vietnam, but not before considerable mucking around in the region. Yes, his record on race was … mixed. And so on.

The point I’m making isn’t about Nixon at all. Instead, it’s about our major political parties and the people who occupy them today. It’s about how far to the right even the left has slid in the last 35 years.

Let’s advance a posit, shall we?

If he were a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees.

Discuss.

Thanks to Wikipedia for pulling a lot of stuff together in one handy-dandy place. I don’t usually cite them, but for things like this they’re a good jumping-off point.

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street.

The project, organized by a veritable “Who’s who” of Jewish liberals, promises to both reframe the debate on the lobbying level and actually push money towards candidates with a more progressive approach to Israeli/Arab politics:

“The genesis of this is really the frustration on the part of a very substantial portion of the American Jewish community that despite the fact that there is broad support for a peace-oriented policy in the Middle East, there doesn’t seem to be the political will to actually carry it out,” Ben-Ami said. “We have not been effective at transmitting the message that there is political support for these positions in the American Jewish community and their allies.”

Another article on J Street from the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman catches a very smart point about the differences between America and Israel on this issue:

An irony of the American-Israeli relationship is that, while J Street’s perspective is controversial in the U.S., it commands a good deal of support in Israel. “We’ve been dealing with this in Israel since the late 80s and the 90s, from [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to the Kadima phenomenon,” said Levy, who negotiated peace accords for multiple left-wing Israeli governments. “If you understand security only as the war on terror and you’re not dealing with the occupation, you’ll never solve the problem. That fundamental change [in perspective] never took place here. We want to be a catalyst in closing that gap.”

This is absolutely correct. Safe from viewing the brutalities of occupation close-up, the armchair generals and quarterbacks of AIPAC and their allies in established media outlets can safely call for the eradication of Arabs as an ethnicity and culture, without even blinking at the irony of this coming from a bunch of those goddamned Jewish New York Liberals ™. As if it wasn’t less than seventy years ago that we were being gassed to death by the millions and buried in ditches by the hundreds.
Don’t forget that many equally insane fundamentalist evangelical Christians have every desire to see a great war begin in the Middle East, as it heralds for them the start of the return of Jesus and the great Armageddon that will send them rising on waves of rapture into Heaven. Think I’m kidding?:

At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.

He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”

Wow, that Hagee sounds like a real nut. Good thing he isn’t in bed with any of the current Presidential candidates.

Seriously, we have let these lunatics dominate the discussion of Israeli/Palestinian affairs for longer than I have been alive, and that has to end. You can’t expect any kind of peace or rapprochment to come from these people–they’re too far gone. It’s time for the debate to be realigned. As Matt Stoller so succinctly put it:

It’s a significant moment for progressive Jews who have previously not had our voices represented in the foreign policy realm, drowned out by right-wingers intent on the most hawkish policies out there. I am pro-Israel, I believe that respect for the Palestinians is the only way to build a sustainable living space for the Israeli populace to live in peace.

In less than two weeks, it will be Yom Hashoah. As we take time to remember those lost to the greatest act of villainy in human memory, I am happy to see many of my fellow Jews taking a step into the future and not letting the dogma of the past dictate their actions. I’ll be doing my part to take those steps with them.

The Supreme Court essentially invalidated an international treaty by blocking federal enforcement of the treaty’s obligations.

First, a little background. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations insists that foreign nationals be provided consular access if they’re charged with a crime that could bring the death penalty. And even though Bush has withdrawn the U.S. from this part of the treaty (while still demanding that our citizens be granted similar rights, nonetheless), he sought to force the state of Texas to comply with the treaty regarding a Mexican national who confessed to the rape and murder of two teenage girls. Texas refused and, yesterday, the Supreme Court sided with the state of Texas.

On the surface, this is a rebuke to the Bush Administration and a victory for “states rights”, and in fact most media outlets are playing these aspects up. The Washington Post opened their story with “The Supreme Court yesterday issued a broad ruling limiting presidential power and the reach of international treaties, saying neither President Bush nor the World Court has the authority to order a Texas court to reopen a death penalty case involving a foreign national.” The Post doesn’t even mention the diplomatic fallout from the story, focusing entirely on the domestic side of the decision. The New York Times did a little better in addressing the international ramifications by quoting from the dissenter’s opinion:

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer disagreed with that interpretation. He also said the majority had set too rigid a formula for deciding whether treaties were “self-executing.” He warned that the decision threatened to destabilize the country’s relations with treaty partners under dozens of pacts.

As a result of the decision, Justice Breyer said, “the nation may well break its word even though the president seeks to live up to that word and Congress has done nothing to suggest the contrary.”

NPR’s Supreme Court reporter, Nina Totenberg, covered the diplomatic side of this decision the best in her story.

Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, who served as a State Department official in the Clinton administration, said the decision would create havoc in diplomatic circles for some time to come.

“If our international allies have no assurance that we’re actually going to keep our word, then they have much less incentive to keep their word when they’re being obliged to do something,” he said….

Temple law professor Duncan Hollis, an expert on international law, said that nonetheless, Tuesday’s ruling will have practical consequences. Because enforcement of some existing treaties may now be in doubt, negotiations over future treaties could be more difficult, he said, with general assurances of enforcement failing to suffice.

Until yesterday, the President’s authority to enforce our treaty obligations was largely unquestioned. Today, however, that’s no longer the case. Now the President needs to negotiate and sign a treaty, the Senate needs to ratify it, and then the entire Congress needs to pass explicit enforcement legislation in order to implement the very directive of U.S. Constitution:

All Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby…

Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, and, amazingly enough, Justice Stevens – it’s obvious what your problem is.

Here, though, it is Google – owner of 62.9% of all Internet searches ($16.4 bn in ad revenue) – which dwarfs any tie up (Yahoo-Microsoft have a combined search share of 15.7% and $ 9.8 bn in ad revenue). Could it be that Google is trying to pull a Microsoft and protect its home-turf advantage from a healthy rival?

The Shock of Protectionism

Recent respondents to my weekly newspaper column here in Cape Town have expressed shock – shock – that businesses appear to actively seek protection from their competitors. Such protection naturally increasing prices and hurts consumers.

One of the easiest ways to raise barriers to competitors is through calls for the patriotism of consumers. South Africa has become one of the most regular claimants against dumping from foreign business rivals at the World Trade Organisation. For those of you not acquainted with the business strategy, I shall briefly digress.

It may horrify you to know that some countries have lower costs of labour, rent and taxes than do others. Products made there are, therefore, somewhat cheaper. When imported – even with the cost of distribution and import tariffs added on at the border – they are still cheaper than manufactures produced locally. Sometimes the results are a tad unusual. For instance, while the breast-meat of chickens is very popular in the US, thighs, wings and legs are less desirable. Eager to divest themselves of this part of the bird, US distributors sell it for quite low prices around the world.

South African companies find it hard to compete against this and so they have won a case against US chicken distributors allowing for large fines (tariffs) to be imposed at the border. This helps local producers keep their margins firmly in place and defrauds local consumers. US prawn fisherman won a similar dispute against farmed prawns sourced from China.

Suing foreign competitors for “dumping” products by selling them for less than local firms is very popular. It appeals to xenophobia and nationalism by declaring that “jobs will be lost due to the predations of these evil foreigners”. At the same time it allows businesses to keep their prices high. It is now known as the “third rail” of US trade policy.

Monopolies make slaves of us all

Companies that trade their monopoly power into influence to keep competitors out of their markets are justly held to account. So too are companies that collude with their competitors to raise prices. However, governments confuse the issue through promoting such anti-competitive behaviour in their chosen industries. Agricultural subsidies are one hefty example. Why not subsidies to US software designers?

A tax allowance given to one chosen industry is equivalent to a special tax levied against all that industry’s foreign competitors at the border. Given that other industries are consumers of the favoured industry, this raises all prices for them. American corn farmers (who receive hefty subsidies) are in competition with American software writers (who don’t). If corn farmers are protected from competition they can charge more. They pass those costs on to their customers. Many of their customers are software writers (who, even if they don’t eat corn, may eat beef which does). Higher corn prices become higher programming costs. A tax supporting corn farmers becomes a tax decreasing the competitiveness of American software programmers.

Price controls are another way that governments like to imagine they can “protect” consumers from the perils of competitive markets. Venezuela is currently out of coffee and milk. Price controls have made it impossible to import coffee, and farmers no longer milk cows when the cost of doing so is higher than what they’re allowed to charge. Closer to home (South Africa) the government’s price controls on pharmaceuticals have meant that first-line antibiotics – such as Amoxycillin – will soon be unavailable.

Not content with this state of affairs, the South African government is to introduce price controls on gas as well as legislative monopolies to protect gas suppliers.

Bulls to the wall

Price controls are like slavery; forcing people to provide their labour at a price other than it is worth. As slave-owners discovered; slaves work to their lowest ability, not their best. So too with monopolies.

A good government approach to competition is one that promotes it and keeps the competitors fighting it out, no matter how tired they are. Try and imagine a sports match with protectionism, monopolies and anti-dumping laws?

Anti-dumping? A rookie hotshot isn’t allowed to play because he costs less than the opposing team’s seasoned veterans. Monopolies? Only one team is allowed to earn advertising revenues and use them to build up their player base. Protectionism? Our star player has a cold; the opposing team has to send three of their players off to keep things even.

Good competition policy works a bit like an all out bull-fight. Even when they beg for mercy you keep them in the ring; so that the blood and bones of the losers become fertile soil for the growth of the next generation of champions.

Soros devotes the book to exploring and questioning the larger philosophical frames that enabled America to buy into such absurd concepts as “The War on Terror” without any questioning, breaking it down using his oft-discussed “theory of reflexivity,” the essence of which I’ll quote here:

And that is the starting point of my theory, the theory of reflexivity, which holds that our thinking is inherently biased. Thinking participants cannot act on the basis of knowledge. Knowledge presupposes facts which occur independently of the statements which refer to them; but being a participant implies that one’s decisions influence the outcome. Therefore, the situation participants have to deal with does not consist of facts independently given but facts which will be shaped by the decision of the participants. There is an active relationship between thinking and reality, as well as the passive one which is the only one recognized by natural science and, by way of a false analogy, also by economic theory.

I call the passive relationship the “cognitive function” and the active relationship the “participating function,” and the interaction between the two functions I call “reflexivity.” Reflexivity is, in effect, a two-way feedback mechanism in which reality helps shape the participants’ thinking and the participants’ thinking helps shape reality in an unending process in which thinking and reality may come to approach each other but can never become identical. Knowledge implies a correspondence between statements and facts, thoughts and reality, which is not possible in this situation. The key element is the lack of correspondence, the inherent divergence, between the participants’ views and the actual state of affairs. It is this divergence, which I have called the “participant’s bias,” which provides the clue to understanding the course of events. That, in very general terms, is the gist of my theory of reflexivity.

Soros largely applies this theory to the ebbs and flows of the financial markets, using a reformulation of what is, essentially, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle–that the act of observing changes the conditions of that which is observed, or sometimes even failing to observe can make the same changes. Put in even simpler terms, it’s impossible to look at anything with an unbiased view, because we all have biases and bends to our observations, inculcated by culture, personal foibles, and social interactions. That’s why simplicity is equated to looking at the world through the eyes of a child–because only a child’s mind is free from the weight and burdens of years of accumulated experience, and can see things with a clarity we complex adults lack.

You can see Soros’ observations play out in the collapse of the housing market and how it has rippled into a larger economic malaise (succinctly summed up here by Gavin). People bought into the myth of the bubble because they wanted to be rich, because they wanted to escape the risk, because they thought, somehow, that the consequences wouldn’t touch them. And indeed, some people were smart or lucky enough to get out right at the peak and enjoy the rewards of timing. But many others were not. Were the “winners” smarter or inherently better than the “losers?” Of course not–neither group had perfect knowledge, but one group simply made better decisions with the information they had.

Soros said in his book that in order to achieve a model of a truly open society, America has to undergo a deeper philosophical and sociological transformation than simply getting rid of Bush and the Republican neocon machine, although that would certainly be a good start. I’ll let him elaborate:

My contention is that America has become a “feel-good” society unwilling to face unpleasant reality. That is why the public could be so grievously misled by the Bush administration. Unless this feel-good attitude can be changed, the United States is doomed to lose its dominant position in the world. There will be serious adverse consequences not only for America but also for the world…I contend that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect and all human constructs are flawed in one way or another. Open societies recognize our fallibility, closed societies deny it. America is an open society, but people are not well versed in philosophy and they do not fully understand the principles of open society. That is how they came to be misled.

You can see this fundamental flaw in so many aspects of our culture and view of the world–everything from the almost terminal inability to keep up with concepts for more than a few seconds before tossing them aside out of boredom. The cynical passive-aggressiveness that drives people into mewling despair or undirected anger the moment life doesn’t go exactly the way they want it to. The aversion of responsibility when things go wrong (”XYZ Big Corporation agreed to a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing”) while soaking up the privilege of success. The constant trilling whine of a need for certainty, for stability, direction, and purpose. The overwhelming disgust with the media machine for not reporting the issues exactly the way we want them to be said.

The reality is that we have to recognize that the only way to understand something perfectly is to first admit that our understanding is flawed. Everyone approaches, reports, writes, and shapes something according to the conditions we bring to the table. We’ve been taught to enshrine Reason as this distinct plane of existence apart from our own imperfect minds–that our own rationality is perfect and everyone else is bugfuck nuts. This, of course, contributes to the continual breakdown of debate and idea-sharing into angry words and flamewars–because we have to be right, so the other guy can’t possibly be right. Let me tie this back to an eloquent summation of how Buddhist principles can help build an open society:

Buddhism teaches awareness and acceptance of change. Change is a fundamental reality of our conditioned existence.

The concept of not-self also has a profound lessons for all of us. Our Western understandings of self often keep us from living in right relationship with each other and with our environment. When we understand ourselves to be distinct, static selves, we keep ourselves from the awareness of how radically interconnected we are. We literally constitute each other. Our intentions, and not just our actions, have an impact upon everyone and everything around us. It is our responsibility to change them through a difficult process of change. There is a difference between being interconnected and taking other into one’s own ego. With strong ego, and a sense of ourselves as separate, we tend to relate to other people as if we are taking them into are own ego. We perceive them through our own preconceptions and we are not able to perceive them as they are. An awareness of interconnectedness leads to unconditional love and compassion, rather than a conditional love born out of the needs of a ravenous ego.

In order to achieve a truly open society, we have to overcome the distinctly (but not uniquely) American tradition of worship of individiualism as the cult of self, the be-all/end-all of existence. The odds aren’t particularly good that we will achieve perfect knowledge, but to coin a phrase, the journey matters more than the destination. The glory of perfect understanding may or may not lead to the ability to perform miracles, but it can lead us to a more harmonious state of existence that recognizes individuality while urging understanding of others’ views, cultures, beliefs, and the shared connections that bind us all.

Generally speaking, volcanoes emit lots of stuff, including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lots and lots of ash. However, it’s been shown scientifically that the dominant climate factor in nearly all volcanic eruptions is the sulfur dioxide, a gas that combined with water vapor in the atmosphere to create sulfuric acid droplets. Those droplets are very reflective, and when combined with high-altitude ash and dust, they create very white clouds that cool the Earth down far more than any carbon dioxide emissions would heat it up. This effect was seen most recently with the Pinatubo eruption in 1991. But Robert Keen of CU-Boulder thinks that, since there haven’t been any major eruptions since 1991, the lack of volcanic dust in the atmosphere might be contributing to global heating. However, Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado believes that the IPCC’s computer models correct for the difference in haze, and that there has been more haze in the air over the last 60 years – when there was a lot more heating instead of cooling as expected from haze – than in the 20 years prior to that.

Ultimately the data will determine who’s right and who’s calculations or models need to be updated.

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High oil prices don’t automatically mean a reduction in carbon emissions. As the Weekly Carboholic pointed out on February 20, high oil prices are actually leading to an increase in emissions from Canadian tar sands operations and U.S. Midwest refineries. Now there’s new information that supports the idea that high oil prices are actually increasing carbon emissions instead of decreasing them. Part of the reason is shifts to source of oil like tar sands. But another reason is that nations are transitioning away from expensive oil to cheap, but super-ultra-mega-dirty, coal.

Coal can be converted via chemical processes to oil. Nazi Germany is perhaps the most well-known example of coal liquefaction, as Germany has large coal reserves and was cut off from oil during World War II. These same techniques for coal conversion are used today around the world, but they have a huge cost. Not only do you have to mine the coal in the first place, coal liquefaction releases a LOT more carbon dioxide in the refining of a gallon of gasoline than the equivalent process of refining petroleum. And until carbon dioxide is assessed as a pollutant and either taxed or capped, the true cost of coal conversion will be borne by the atmosphere instead of by the energy users themselves.

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According to Time Magazine, increasing food prices due to the direct and indirect effects of global heating are already causing food riots around the world. Prices of staples (wheat, rice, corn, barley, potatoes, etc.) have increased 75% since 2005, and the increasing food prices are forcing aid organizations to slash the amount of food they can purchase and deliver – they simply aren’t capable of buying enough food at the current prices. And so riots over food prices and availability have occurred in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mauritania, and India.

According to the article, food prices are being upward driven by the cost of oil, freak weather leading to poor crop yields around the world, and supply problems driven largely by U.S. corn ethanol subsidies, the last two of which may be impacted by global heating. After all, if the climatologists are right, then global heating will lead to harsher weather all around – colder cold snaps, hotter heat waves, more flooding and more drought – and crummy weather is bad for most farmers and most crops. And the U.S.’ misguided ethanol subsidies are a direct result of Congress (and the politically powerful state of Iowa) trying to improve energy security and reduce carbon emissions at the same time. All together it appears we’re already starting to see some of the effects of global heating predicted by both the Pentagon and the CNA Corporation in studies on the national security effects of global heating.

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In other global heating-driven conflict news, Canada’s National Post reports that Former U.S. Coast Guard Lt.-Cmdr. Scott Borgerson has claimed that the U.S. has to take the lead in addressing resource claims in the Arctic lest the region become a flashpoint for resource wars. Given that several of the nations around the Arctic are nuclear armed, conflicts over prospective natural resources under the rapidly retreating Arctic icecap could be bad.

According to the Post’s article, Canada is bulking up its northerly surveillance and military capabilities in order to enforce sovereignty claims over the Northwest Passage, something that the U.S. doesn’t presently accept. And Russia has already claimed a significant portion of the Arctic Ocean under existing international laws regarding territorial waters, although their claims remain to be scientifically verified.

Geologists know that there is oil under the northern reaches of the North American continental shelf – off-shore oil pads and rigs north of Alaska are proof of that. But geologists also suspect that there is a lot more oil in the deeper reaches of the Arctic Ocean as well. Given the potential for conflict over oil resources in the Middle East and both Central and South America, and given the intentions of autocratic regimes like Russia and Venezuela to use their energy resources to manipulate other nations into doing their bidding, the sooner the resource and sovereignty issues of the Arctic are resolved, the better.

Yesterday both John and Elizabeth committed their still-formidable political muscle behind a different campaign–joining the effort to withdraw from Iraq by tying it to our looming recession.

John Edwards had this to say:

“There is great concern, anxiety and angst out there among most Americans about their economic security. They are worried about a lot of things. They are concerned about the cost of a health care system that is broken and needs to be fixed. They are worried about how to pay to send their kids to college. The mortgage and foreclosure crisis is now becoming central to the economic insecurity an awful lot of Americans are feeling. All of these things are made much worse due to the war in Iraq. The American public sees a direct connection between the spending in Iraq and the economic anxiety caused by the price of oil and gasoline. They want to see this war brought to an end.”

Elizabeth had some sharp words of her own:

Elizabeth Edwards, in traditional fashion, saved many of her choice words for media. Lamenting that reporters “certainly don’t cover the connection between the issues,” she said the American people see there is “undoubtedly a connection between oil, the costs of transportation in this country, and this war.”

The effort, tentatively called Iraq Campaign 2008, intends to focus heavily on the domestic costs of a protracted Iraq war. “We have a limited amount of money and we’re spending much too much of our available resources on this war,” Elizabeth Edwards said.

The campaign already consists of a number of progressive heavyweights, including MoveOn.org, SEIU, the Center for American Progress, and the Campaign for America’s Future. The group also has the advantage of tapping in to the zeitgest of the public will, which clearly believes that Iraq is a millstone around our economic neck:

The way to get the country out of recession — and most people think we’re in one — is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they’ll spend the economy into recovery. (Emphases added.)

It pleases me to no end to see an idea I strongly advocate getting such traction from the public, the press, and the political players alike. Without question, withdrawing our troops from Iraq, even at the likely slow rate it will take, will free up billions of potential tax dollars that, if properly spent (as outlined in this excellent plan from the Economic Policy Institute), could jumpstart our economy and provide needed infusions of cash, jobs, and improvements to our decaying society–much more than handing out a few hundred dollars that are actually drawn from your own tax refunds ever could.

If John Edwards can’t be President, and Elizabeth Edwards can’t be First Lady, then here’s to them joining this campaign instead. I intend to ensure that this time, the outcome is very different for all concerned.

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In related news, Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced during the World Future Energy Summit’s opening address that Abu Dhabi was investing $15 billion in renewable energy research and development to be funneled through the Masdar Corporation, a company that exists to build the world’s first completely green city. Masdar City will be low-rising buildings housing 50,000 people with solar panels on the roof of each building. It will rely exclusively on solar power and is envisioned as being zero-emissions and car-free, using publicly available electric transportation. The city itself will be a blend of old and new, relying on cool sea breezes funneled into buildings via towers atop buildings and a wall around the city to keep the desert heat out. Crops to feed the city will be grown nearby using reclaimed and treated wastewater. It will also incorporate the world’s largest hydrogen plant, and the UAE may also choose to use nuclear energy to help power the city – and the rest of the United Arab Emirates.

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This past week also saw U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman tell the world that there had to be a global push for improved energy efficiency. This is excellent, although hearing it come from a representative of the U.S. is a bit odd. After all, Secretary Bodman did also call for OPEC to increase output this week (earning a big fat “NO!” from Venezuela), and his underlings worked hard to torpedo the Bali Climate Change Conference last month. To be fair, it is Secretary Bodman’s job to demand more oil, cheaper coal, and to toe the loyalty line with his employer, President Bush, but I still don’t envy any person who has to stand up and say “cut energy consumption – give me more oil!” (It reminds me of a hilarious Bloom County cartoon with Farmer Opus screaming “Keep them flat-footed goombahs in Washington outta my business. Hurry up with my federal bailout check”….)

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One of the aforementioned Bali conference spoilersdelegates, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab, has warned the European Union not to use global heating as a pretense to implement protectionist tariffs against non-EU manufactured products and services. The warning came about as a direct result of European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso’s comments that the EU might have to “either protect Europe’s industries by giving them all their carbon allowances in the European Trading System (ETS) free of charge, or charge importers at the same rate for the allowances.” Conveniently ignored by Mr. Schwab is the fact that President Barroso’s preferred solution would be a comprehensive global treaty on carbon emissions and/or applying “uniform standards on energy-intensive export industries.” Unfortunately for the rest of the EU, the United Kingdom has already indicated that it will stand with emission-heavy nations like the U.S. and China in resisting trade sanctions if another solution is not forthcoming. There’s concern that any tariffs wouldn’t stand up to World Trade Organization review, but given that the tariffs would exist exclusively to equalize costs between an economy with environmental restrictions that other nations wouldn’t have, the WTO might approve the tariffs. According to the BBC article, the WTO has permitted environmentally-based tariffs in the past, and so Ms. Schwab’s comments sound more shrill than serious.

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In yet another bit of U.S. news, Money Magazine is reporting that the tax credits for renewable energy research and development are set to expire at the end of 2007. The National Hydropower Association, Geothermal Energy Association, Solar Energy Industries Association, and American Wind Energy Association have warned that an extension of the tax credits and the requirement that investor-owned utilities produce 15% of their electricity via renewable sources is necessary for long-term planning, and that the impacts to the renewable energy industry could be broad and cause long-term problems. Nearly all sources of electricity require years of planning, and barring a carbon tax or similar national movement on reducing carbon emissions, renewable energy simply won’t be cost-competitive without mandates and credits. I’m not one to support tax credits and other forms of subsidies for mature industries, but immature industries like geothermal, solar, and to a lesser extent wind will need subsides for some time yet, especially barring action on making carbon dioxide emissions from coal and oil cost money.

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Last week also saw yet more science tying the melting of Greenland’s glaciers to global heating, this time using a statistical analysis to correlate melting to regional vs. global heating. The paper, to be published in the Journal of Climate, reports that there is a statistical correlation over the last 15 years between Greenland melting and global heating vs. a correlation between melting and regional heating between 1960 and 1990. Dr Edward Hanna of the University of Sheffield was quoted by Cordis as saying “the Greenland ice sheet which, as a relict feature of the last Ice Age, has already been living on borrowed time and seems now to be in inexorable decline.” I haven’t seen the actual paper, and I’m not sure I have a sufficiently advanced statistics background to understand it all anyway, but keep in mind that statistics are notorious for being easily misconstrued. That being said, however, this is yet another piece of evidence that the Greenland ice cap is very likely being affected by global heating, and yet another nail in coffin of the Greenland melt “debunker” myth.

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Image from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board

And finally for this week, news that another World Heritage Site will be under threat from rising sea levels associated with global heating. According to the BBC, the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is at increased risk of erosion from storms and submersion due to sea level rise. This is added to a number of other sites around the world whose natural beauty is under threat from global heating, such as the glaciers in Glacier National Park in the U.S. and Canada, and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia.

The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq Surpasses the American Civil War in Duration: The United States’ involvement in World War I lasted only 19 months and World War II lasted 44 months for the United States, even though the war itself was nearly six years long. The occupation of Iraq (aka the Iraq War) outlasted World War II in November of 2006, making the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq the third longest foreign occupation in U.S. history. The American Civil War lasted 48 months, and the Iraq occupation surpassed that duration on March 20, 2007. This makes the Iraq occupation the third longest running period of continuous conflict in U.S. history, behind only the Vietnam War and its sister conflict in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The United States invaded Iraq on March 18, 2003. By the end of 2007, the United States will have been involved in Iraq for 4 years, 9 months, and 14 days. (Brian Angliss)

Al Gore Takes the Heck Over: The big deal here isn’t the movie, the Oscar, or even the Nobel. No, the real reason Al is one of the citizens of the year is because he, more than anyone, has pushed concern for the environment close to, and perhaps over, the tipping point from “librul treehugger” issue to common sense bipartisan issue. You may have noticed recently that a lot more people seem to have accepted that Green is Good. Gore doesn’t deserve all the credit, of course, but he merits a lot.

The question now is whether he’s done more good as non-President than he could have had he not lost the 2000 election 5-4.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Releases its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4): This year saw the release of the United Nations’ Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the state of the global climate since the inception of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Composed of the governments who make up the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and chartered “to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information about climate change,” the IPCC has independently assessed the best available climate science for the fourth time and concluded that there is over a 90% chance that human-created greenhouse gas emissions are driving up global mean temperature.

Starting in February, the IPCC released three massive reports, Working Group I’s “The Physical Science Basis”, Working Group II’s “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, and Working Group III’s “Mitigation of Climate Change” throughout the year. Two weeks before the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, the IPCC released the AR4 Synthesis Report, the final AR4 document that distills all the detailed scientific an socio-economic conclusions and analyses to create a single document that is supposed to guide the entire world’s policy planning from now until the IPCC next addresses global heating.

The net result of the four reports was a softening of the U.S. position that global heating wasn’t occurring, although the Bush Administration continues to pursue a policy of voluntary reductions in CO₂ emissions in opposition to the centralized government regulations favored by most of the rest of the U.N. In addition, the IPCC reports triggered a sudden explosion of interest by mainstream and alternative media in the United States, the world’s largest CO₂ producer. As a result, the bulk of the U.S. Presidential candidates have detailed their positions on what the U.S. should do to combat global heating, many are on record supporting or co-sponsoring anti-global heating legislation of some form, and energy and global heating policies have been taken up by the U.S. federal government repeatedly, albeit without significant action. And in lieu of federal action on global heating, multiple states have formulated their own approaches to mitigating the effects of global heating.

The scientists and policymakers involved in crafting the various IPCC reports had their work validated with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in December. (Brian Angliss)

A Bridge Over In Troubled Waters: Thank goodness America is committed to rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq. Tragedy, sure, but your politicians are on it.

The First Nuclear Power Plant Construction Permit Since 1978 is Requested: In the late 1970s, public outcry against nuclear power, plant safety concerns, and high construction costs combined to make new nuclear power plants cost ineffective when compared to other sources of electricity, especially coal and natural gas. These concerns were proven in the public mind by the accident at Three Mile Island and then later reinforced by the Chernobyl accident. As a result, there were no new requests to the U.S. Department of Energy for new nuclear power plants since 1978 until NRG Energy of Princeton, New Jersey requested one on September 25, 2007.

Significant changes in two factors in opposition to new nuclear plant construction since the late 1970s have enabled NRG Energy to take the risk of adding two new reactors at an existing Texas plant. The first is a president friendly to nuclear power and a nuclear-friendly Republican Congress for President Bush’s first term. This resulted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which had significant government incentives designed to spur the development and construction of new nuclear power plants, mitigating much of the economic risk of constructing new nuclear reactors. The second is a rising number of scientists and environmentalists who have concluded that nuclear power is the lesser of evils when it comes to environmental damage vs. carbon dioxide-intensive fossil fuels like natural gas and coal. A third factor also plays a minor role in the timing of the new permit request – it’s been nearly 30 years since the last request and the public has lost some of its fear (for good or ill) of nuclear power and its risks. (Brian Angliss)

Tragedy at Virginia Tech: Horrible, unspeakable – there just aren’t words to describe it. Worst of all, I remain convinced that the toll could have been less than it was. Hopefully the tragedy got people on campuses across the country to thinking more concretely about what they can do if it happens where they work.

The iPhone: Don’t buy one until they make it available on all carrier platforms. That said, this is an innovation that’s eventually going to live up to and exceed all the hype.

The Minot to Barksdale Nuclear Express: At the end of August, the security blunder of this young century occurred when six nuclear warheads were flown from one US Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota to another in Barksdale, Louisiana. But Philip Coyle, a think tanker and former assistant secretary of defense, said, “This wasn’t just a mistake. I’ve counted, and at least 20 things had to have gone wrong for this to have occurred.”

Since Barksdale is an embarkation point for Middle East military operations, speculation inevitably arose that the nukes were intended for use in Iran. But a base commander lacks the authority to order the transport of nuclear weapons. Was the order issued by an alternate Cheney chain of command?

It’s been stated that the US military would never release data this sensitive to the public without authority from the White House. According to this line of thinking, the intent wasn’t to bomb, but, instead, to put the fear of God-Allah in Iran.

The disturbing nature of the story has only been compounded by a related Cheney chain of events. Immediately preceding and following the event, six personnel at the two bases died in apparent accidents or by suicide.

Especially unsettling was the unlikely death of a member of the Special Forces in the wild. (Dave Lindorff has been all over this.) Besides the ultimate destination of the nukes, one can’t help but wonder if the dead were whistleblowers.

Even though the US has become blanketed in secrecy, it’s still not PC to compare Bush & Co. to Nazi Germany. How about, with its all-pervasive Stasi, East Germany? (Russ Wellen)

The Jena 6: In July the NAACP buried “the N-word.” There was never racism in America again.

“Don’t tase me, bro!” High profile politician gives a public address. College students fill the building. Cast of Reno 911 hired to manage security. Hilarity ensues! It’s the feel-good hit of the summer! Starring Toby Maguire and John Kerry. (Dr. Sid Bonesparkle)

Sioux Sue for Sovereignty: In December, a Lakota (Sioux) delegation delivered a statement of “unilateral withdrawal” to the State Department. In other words, it plans to secede. Not all Lakota, just the delegation, which was led by Russell Means. He, of course, is famous for surviving the siege at Wounded Knee in 1973 and founding the American Indian Movement (AIM), as well as for his movie roles.

One can imagine the federal government’s response: “Go ahead, enjoy your little secession. Of course, we won’t be subsidizing your reservations anymore. Plus you have no chance whatsoever to change your mind about the $122 million in compensation the Supreme Court awarded you a couple of decades ago and which you refused.”

Means, however, also announced that his group planned to file liens on property in parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. “The Missouri River is ours, and so are the Black Hills,” he said.

But while Means taketh away with one hand, he giveth with the other. He invites one and all to live in the Lakota Nation, tax-free, as long as they renounce their U.S. citizenship. Don’t worry: It will issue drivers’ licenses and passports.

Once Americans get it through their heads that this isn’t a reprise of the Confederacy, many might find the idea of a nation free of taxes, as well as war, appealing. After all, like Ron Paul, Means is a libertarian, under which guise, he too has run for president.

Still, the first person with whom I shared the Lakotas’ plans for secession said, “Oh great, it’s bad enough we have to worry about the terrorists. Now, this too.”

Primal frontier fears resurface: Will the redskins return to their renegade roots and take revenge — not to mention scalps? Not likely.

But Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, as well as Venezuela are following events closely. Those Americans bent out of shape about the “NAFTA Superhighway” from Mexico to Canada may as well start worrying now about One Indigenous Continent for All. (Russ Wellen)

Arkansas Couple Welcomes Their 16th Child: “It’s a blessing from the Lord,” who apparently wants to bless the world with rampant overcrowding. It would be wrong to ask the Lord to bless these people with some counseling, wouldn’t it? (Dr. Sid Bonesparkle)

Scott McClellan on the Road to Damascus: “So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. There was one problem. It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.” Scotty, we’re looking forward to your book and we hope it helps put some richly deserving criminals where they belong. But there’s one little problem with your story. We knew you were lying. If you didn’t, you’re either a raging moron or a man of “tremendous faith.”

The Subprime Lending Crisis: For a few years now I’ve been watching the housing market and not fully understanding how you could have all that junk financing, spiraling housing prices, massive new construction and high used home inventory all at the same time. I mean, I’m no expert. But this year reality set in – in a big ugly way. And just when we thought we were going to be able to sell our house back in New York.

President Bush Commutes the Perjury Sentence for Scooter Libby: We learned in History of the World, Part 1 that it’s good to be da king. If you can’t be da king, we now know that next best thing is to be the guy who has evidence against da king.

Astronaut Lisa Nowak Allegedly Attacks Astronaut Colleen Shipman: Lisa, when your friends told you that you needed to “pamper” yourself, this isn’t what they meant. (Dr. Sid Bonesparkle)

Join us tomorrow for more of 2007 in review.

Credits: All items not attributed were written by Sam Smith.

After all, it’s hardly news to hear that the governments of the United States and China are doing everything they can to eviscerate meaningful international action on global heating.

China has again rejected mandatory carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions cuts even though they’re the largest or second-largest CO₂ emitter in the world. The United States proposed text for the agreement, introduced late at night the night before the conference closed, “uses phrases such as ‘as appropriate’, ‘depending’ and ‘may’ in reference to emissions cuts, which would effectively make any agreement reached voluntary.” Japan and Canada have joined the U.S. in rejecting numerical targets that the European Union and most other nations want included in the Bali roadmap to the ultimate Copenhagen treaty in 2009, and the U.S. is also refusing to act unless China and India do as well.

And as all of this was happening in Bali, the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit released data that showed that, globally, this year was the seventh hottest on record and that the top 11 hottest years (global average) have all occurred in the last 13 years. This is remarkable given that this year had a cooling La Nina event in the Pacific Ocean and given that the North American temperature dataset had been corrected slightly earlier in the year.

OK, so there was some news out of Bali over the last two weeks: Al Gore showed up and accused the United States of being obstructionist:

“I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties,” Gore said in an hour-long speech on Thursday evening. “So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.” (source)

And the White House struck back at Mr. Gore for not being constructive.

Oh, wait – that’s not really news either.

John Edwards opted for flat honesty:

The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy. This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war. And it’s why I have proposed that we pursue a comprehensive diplomatic approach instead.

Obama treads a little lightly for my taste, but his point is nonetheless apt:

By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president’s suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force.

Harry Reid is characteristically gutless in a way that only an invertebrate who imagines himself a “statesman” can be:

Today this nation’s senior intelligence analysts concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, directly challenging some of this Administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran. Democratic Committee leaders and I requested this assessment early last year so that the Administration could not rush this Congress and the country to another war based on flawed intelligence. I am very glad that the Administration has finally provided the NIE and I will examine carefully the full classified version in coming days.I hope this Administration reads this report carefully and appropriately adjusts its rhetoric and policy vis-à-vis Iran. The Administration should begin this process by finally undertaking a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran. President Reagan had the wisdom to conduct diplomacy with America’s adversaries in order to advance U.S. interests. President Bush should follow Reagan’s example.

Chris Dodd engages in a bit of kitten-taming, although he’s right to backhand Congress. It would have been nice had he done so with a spiked gauntlet.

The NIE on Iran contains some very important findings by the intelligence community. Taken together these findings make a strong case for pursuing robust diplomacy to resolve our differences with Iran and for an end to the reckless talk by the Administration and reckless votes by some members of Congress.

Bill Richardson leads with a bitch-slap, which is nice.

This NIE tells us one of two things. Either the Bush-Cheney administration has been willfully misleading the American public on Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities or they are incompetent and were not aware of the consensus view of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies until yesterday.

The NIE underscores what I have been saying all along. The next President will have to use diplomacy to accomplish our goals and strengthen our interests around the world. I am the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, who has served as an Ambassador. I will be ready on day one to go toe-to-toe with the toughest leaders in the world.

The Clinton camp put Lee Feinstein, its National Security Director, out front for the big reply, and I think his/their statement is pretty revealing. Specifically, I think it casts some light on why so many of us are uncomfortable about the idea of President Hillary Clinton.

First, the statement:

The new declassified key judgments of the Iran NIE expose the latest effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends. The assessment of the NIE vindicates the policy Senator Clinton will pursue as President: vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation, and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns. Neither saber rattling nor unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad will stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Senator Clinton has the strength and experience to conduct the kind of vigorous diplomacy needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

If it seems like somebody is inviting you to an all-inclusive cruise on the USS Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too, you may be right. Let’s take the statement piece by piece.

The new declassified key judgments of the Iran NIE expose the latest effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends.

Dead-on. Honest, direct, boot to the nards. This is how a real leader talks. So far, so good.

The assessment of the NIE vindicates the policy Senator Clinton will pursue as President: vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation, and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns.

Ummm, are we talking about the same Sen. Clinton who eschewed multi-lateral diplomacy and voted to authorize George Bush’s ideologically driven war on Iraq in the first place? The one who still hasn’t apologized for that fuck-up? The one who still hasn’t committed to getting our troops out of that debacle? Or is this a different Sen. Hillary Clinton who’s running for president?

Neither saber rattling nor unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad will stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Senator Clinton has the strength and experience to conduct the kind of vigorous diplomacy needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Ummm, what?! Note the part I highlighted. What this statement does is try to sneak an arguable statement of fact past the reader in the form of an embedded assumption. Does Iran have “nuclear ambitions”? Maybe. There has been much yarping to that effect from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to be sure, but you have to remember that in the Iranian system he has roughly the stroke of an agency director. The real and ultimate power is Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and he has “issued a fatwa (religious decree) declaring that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are all forbidden in Islam and has said that Iran shall never acquire these weapons…”

So perhaps Iran has nuclear ambitions and perhaps it doesn’t, depending on whether you think their supreme leader has more or less credibility than ours. But in no way, shape or form can you merely assume this, and Feinstein’s rhetorical trickery either points to a disturbing level of ignorance or an even more disturbing level of intellectual dishonesty – neither of which makes me feel better about either him or his candidate.

Further, the statement essentially spanks Dubya for acting erroneously on an assumption about Iran’s intent, and then it turns around three sentences later and makes clear that Clinton herself is making the same assumptions.

Which means, if I have it all straight, that she’s asking us to understand that she agrees with Dubya on everything right up to the point where he invaded.

I could accept that, I guess, if it weren’t for the part where she was directly culpable in helping him invade.

In sum, the Clinton/Feinstein statement is a mealy-mouthed, double-dealing, fork-tongued exercise in Newspeak. Sadly, our culture has grown so acclimated, so numb to this kind of cynical rhetorical chicanery that we barely notice it. It may feel a little off, but how the hell would we get through the day if we tried to stop and parse the underlying truth of every claim that comes across the transom?

I want to say we deserve better, but I believe Disraeli once said that “each People has exactly the Government they deserve.” When candidates behave badly and get elected anyway, the lesson they learn is that bad behavior pays. And since they won, they become the object lesson for other candidates.

I’m Sam Smith and I’m running for president. Please, feel free to quote me on anything I have written here.

Saudi: Why we punished rape victim

I’ll be waiting right here.

In defense of the indefensible.

If you go through life without making any enemies you’re doing something wrong. If you go through life making a lot of enemies you’re doing something worse.

For a long time, the US contented itself with one enemy, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the CIA conducted covert operations such as rigging elections for dictators and assassinating their opponents. But those thus tyrannized had neither the inclination nor the resources to retaliate against the US.

Then, operating under the illusion that the mujahideen in Afghanistan were “freedom fighters,” as Ronald Reagan called them, we armed and supported them to the tune of billions of dollars. After driving the Soviets out, though, they were feeling their oats and looked around for a new target.

Watching us stand by as Israel poured salt in the wounds of Palestine and as, during the Gulf War, we stationed our troops in their holy land, Saudi Arabia, they found one what. Armed with our shoulder-mounted Stinger, among other weapons, the mujahideen turned around and bit the hand that fed them.

In other words, both by arming them and alienating them, we constructed enemies out of whole cloth. Who says the US doesn’t make anything anymore?

Then we retaliated for 9/11 against a sitting (Saddam Hussein) instead of a moving target (bin Laden). Our lack of discrimination sent the message that all of the Middle East was fair game. Voila –- instant enemies: all you can fight.

To the right, making enemies is a problem only if you’re a wimpy liberal. To most Americans, it just comes with the territory when you’re in the right. To our corporate-friendly administration, it justifies billions for defense.

In fact, our overwrought foreign policy almost seems like a make-work scheme for defense industries. If indeed it is a New Deal for defense, then the Department of Homeland Security is the largest WPA project ever.

Presumably, the term “homeland” was chosen to make us feel safe. But to those with even a glancing knowledge of the past, it’s a sick joke. Its uses the terminology of our two most formidable foes from last century: the Nazis, who called Germany the fatherland, and Russia — the motherland.

Besides, a homeland is a region from whose loins sprung the ethnic group inhabiting it. The US, a melting pot, is the exact opposite. “Is that guy an Arab?” we wonder as we pass someone on the street. “Or a Hispanic?”

Even sicker is how little bang for the buck we’re getting from the Department of Homeland Security for $30 billion this year. In his recent Mother Jones series on the DHS, veteran journalist James Ridgeway writes that “safeguards against domestic terrorist attacks. . . despite a few marginal improvements, remain terrifyingly lax.”

Even the Government Accountability Office recently criticized it for failing to improve its ability to respond to emergencies. To add insult to injury, each year it routinely flunks its audits. But that’s probably of no concern to the administation, which was never on board with the creation of the DHS and, most likely, would be just as happy to see it implode.

Meanwhile, Ridgeway explains, for those Congess members, whether Democratic or Republican, who are inclined to lend the DHS a helping hand, “expanding federal regulation, increasing federal spending, hiring unionized federal workers, and facing down industries with powerful lobbies” is “politically risky” in today’s climate.

Besides its aversion to federal agencies (except the Defense Department), neither is the administration’s heart in defending our soil. It, of course, subscribes to the get-’em-over-thar theory (if it’s geopolitically convenient, that is — vide bin Laden).

A Defense Department program that embodies Bush & Co.’s policy of thwarting threats before they reach the US was already entrenched before they were elected: It’s called the national missile defense system (it doesn’t deserve initial caps). But as the administration does with bin Laden, the program ducks the obvious threats.

As a recent Rolling Stone article explained: “Even the Missile Defense Agency concedes that the [missile defense shield] — originally envisioned as a defense against a rival superpower — is no longer of any use against China or Russia.”

Let’s see if we’ve got this right. Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons would overpower the shield. Meanwhile, Iran is years away from developing nukes and North Korea negotiates them away. Against whose nukes then are we spending billions to defend ourselves?

“Would you believe,” as America’s most beloved intelligence agent, Maxwell Smart, used to say, “Venezuela?”

Meanwhile, the more prosaic threats remain legion. They include the obvious: flying planes into buildings (9/11) and blowing up trains (Madrid) and buses (as in London). Equally vulnerable are ports, especially, as Ridgeway details, liquified natural gas tankers.

These come under the heading of what John Robb of Global Guerillas fame calls “systems disruption.” Also included are attacks on bridges, tunnels, water supplies, pipelines and refineries. Equally as devastating is a cyber attack on an electrical grid.

Meanwhile, the hard right stokes fear of terrorists storming across the borders as an excuse to bash immigrants. But that doesn’t mean the danger doesn’t exist. If only a thousandth of each year’s three-quarter million illegal immigrants were Islamic terrorists, that still adds up to a battalion of 750. Many believe that sleeper agents, along with nuclear materials such as suitcase bombs, have already infiltrated the US.

The FBI and, especially, local police forces deserve some credit for the six-year sabbatical terrorists have taken from attacking us on our soil. More likely though, thanks to al-Qaeda’s reputation for making a virtue of patience, we’re in the eye of the storm.

An example of how it may be toying with us was described by Ron Suskind in his book “The One Percent Doctrine.” In 2003, plans to release hydrogen cyanide gas (a staple of Nazi gas chambers) in New York City’s subways was called off by Ayman al-Zawahiri. Apparently the prospect of a body count that might not exceed 9/11’s failed to light his fire.

In other words, the A-man and the Big O dream of a terror extravaganza like a multi-city nuclear attack. Acquiring nuclear know-how and materials requires serious money, though, to which al-Qaeda central may no longer have access.

Bin Laden, for instance, squandered much of his fortune on building projects in Sudan. (Once the heat came down from the US, though, it was: Thanks for the modernization program, Sheikh. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.)

Author Paul Williams (”Osama’s Revenge,” “The Al Qaeda Connection”) maintains al-Qaeda has generated significant cash through drug and blood diamond transactions. However, in 2005, Zawahiri wrote a famous letter to Abu Musab Zarqawi urging him to cool it with the beheadings (bad P.R., you know).

Also, claiming they were short on funds, he hit him up for a donation to the home office. Then, last month, President Bush’s homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, called bin Laden “virtually impotent.” (One can’t help wonder how she knows.)

Whatever al-Qaeda central’s financial standing, there’s actually no need to raise a king’s ransom to spend on nuclear weapons. After all, attacking the infrastructure is as cheap as it is cost-effective.

In his recent book, “Brave New War,” Robb wrote that 9/11 was a “$250,000 attack. . . converted into an event that cost the United States over $80 billion.” One of bin Laden’s goals, he reminds us, remains “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

To expedite that, al-Qaeda has gone viral. As has been well-documented, it grants copyright-free use of its brand to knock-off terrorists like the late Zarqawi.

Along with groups advancing other causes, an “almost endless supply of attackers,” writes Robb, “could generate hundreds of millions, potentially billions, in damage.” In tacit agreement with bin Laden, he maintains that the “cumulative effect of these attacks could grind down even the strongest nation-state.”

The administration looks at threats through a telescope, thus magnifying al-Qaeda to the status of a state. Actual nations like Iraq and Iran, meanwhile, are inflated into near superpowers. But al-Qaeda is just a glorified crime syndicate.

Like all such organizations, as countless security experts have testified, it’s more susceptible to good old-fashioned crime busting than the heavy hand of the military. Ideally, local police forces, in collaboration with federal and international crime and intelligence agencies, should lead the way.

Along with urging the FBI to bring local officials into the loop, think-tanker Daniel Byman, writing on Slate, offers other suggestions for shoring up security stateside. Among them, the federal government needs to work harder to win the unequivocal support of American Muslims. (How that can be accomplished while the US continues to foment disruption in many of their homelands he doesn’t say.)

Byman also urges us to improve “perception management.” For example, in order to minimize societal impact, Israel cleans up immediately after a terrorist attack. Yet, from the executive branch to the DHS, the American government elevated our one substantial attack (9/11) to near-Holocaust status.

Robb too would like to see us adopt a “philosophy of resilience” to help us survive terrorist attacks. Because “strikes of the future will be strategic, pinpointing the systems we rely on,” he continues, “they will leave entire sections of the country without energy and communications for protracted periods.”

In other words, when it comes to security, not to mention other services, communities will be left to their own devices. Suburbs will become armed and patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries; the rich by the likes of Blackwater.

Still, he maintains, we don’t need an “activist foreign policy that seeks to rework the world in our image, police state measures to ensure state security, or spending all of our resources on protecting everything.” (Bear in mind that he’s no liberal.)

Rejecting an “activist foreign policy” obviously implies embracing diplomacy. But success isn’t guaranteed the next administration just because it’s more committed than Bush’s to relying on its statesmen (notice how that word has all but vanished from common usage). Is there any way to ensure a cure for the impotence of soft power without turning it hard?

By way of a preface, read what Arthur Silber, one of the Web’s top bloggers, has to say about Congressional Democrats (edited for conciseness). They “fail to mount serious opposition to our inevitable course toward widening war and an attack on Iran, not because they are afraid of being portrayed as ‘weak’ in the fight against terrorism. They don’t object because — they don’t object.

“That is: they agree that we have the ‘right’ to pursue a policy of aggressive interventionism supported by an empire of military bases.”

In other words, for all of Bush & Co.’s rapaciousness, not just congressional Democrats but, deep-down, most of us concur that, if we’re running out of oil, it’s our right, simply by dint of our might, to take what we need.

If it weren’t for all those pesky jihadis, mujahideen, global guerillas, terrorists — call them what you will — conspiring to topple us with everything from the slings of systems disruption to the arrows of nuclear missiles.

Attempting to secure our shores from them is like trying to defend the indefensible — literally. And metaphorically, as well, when we cling to the myth that we’re manifestly destined to determine the fates of other nations. Our military might, 700 bases around the world and nuclear capability have outlived whatever their usefulness they had.

The US has become like Russia — our once-and- (the way things are going) future enemy. We’re a lumbering mastodon, which the cave people of the world lure into traps, like Iraq, where we thrash around and lash out blindly. It could all have turned out differently if we hadn’t been stomping around their territory ravishing their resources.

In short, the US needs to take the “super” out of “superpower.” We might be surprised to find that a country could get used to life without the pressure of being number one.

Meanwhile, Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), the International Atomic Energy Agency chief, has been the object of an ongoing campaign by the administration to strip him of his credibility. Every chance it gets, it brushes aside the passing grades the IAEA has given Iran’s nuclear program and portrays ElBaradei as not only too lenient, but a loose cannon.

Worse, the Washington Post has seen fit to carry the administration’s water. In a recent editorial, it wrote: “Rather than carry out the policy of the Security Council or the IAEA board, for which he nominally works, Mr. ElBaradei behaves as if he were independent of them, free to ignore their decisions and to use his agency to thwart their leading members — above all the United States.”

Due to his failure to deliver Iran an ultimatum — never mind that it’s unwarranted — and “represent anyone other than himself,” “the options of the Bush administration. . . may be greatly attenuated.” (That’s “weakened” to us rabble.)

In other words, EB, if Bush & Co. launch another witless war, the Post will lay the blame at your feet.

As if that weren’t insulting enough, the editorial was titled “Rogue Regulator.” Considering the term “rogue” is more often applied to states that have acquired nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, that’s clearly a low blow by the Post.

Perhaps the New York Times would be more sympathetic to ElBaradei’s alarm at the administration’s eagerness to attack Iran. An editorial Thursday got off to a promising start.

“Like Mohamed ElBaradei, we want to make sure what he calls the ‘crazies’ don’t start a war with Iran.” By crazies he meant the unholy alliance of Cheney and the Neocons. The editorial continues by claiming it fears that ElBaradei’s “do-it-yourself diplomacy is playing right into the crazies’ hands — in Washington and Tehran.”

Reading the Post editorial, one can’t help wondering if what really concerns it is that ElBaradei could thwart the administration’s war plans. The Times, however, is apprehensive that those plans might succeed, especially if the IAEA’s el jefe doesn’t adopt different tactics.

“According to the so-called work plan agreed to by Mr. ElBaradei, Iran will address one set of questions at a time, and move on to the next set only after his inspectors have closed the file on the previous set. . . . The further along the Iranians get, the greater our fear that President Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney, will decide that one more war isn’t going to do their reputation much harm.”

Iran, it urged, should suspend enrichment and the administration should tread the diplomacy track. “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained last week that the I.A.E.A. shouldn’t be in the business of diplomacy,” the editorial continued. “Yes, that’s her job. And she’s not done nearly enough. . .”

Sure, Rice is seeking to give her legacy a makeover from dupe of the Neocons to stateswoman. But, even with Secretary of Defense Gates’s support, she still lacks the wherewithal to stare down Cheney. Putting all your peace eggs in Rice’s basket is as delusional as believing in the Easter Bunny.

“Some critics,” the Times writes, “charge that the Nobel Prize has gone to Mr. ElBaradei’s head and that. . . . he believes he’s the only one who can stop what he fears is an imminent war.”

Is that grandiosity — or a realistic assessment? As became abundantly clear when Congress passed the Kyl-Lieberman bill, no government figure has seen fit to make a mission of halting the march to war in its tracks.

But nature abhors a vacuum and who better to fill the void than ElBaradei? The Post and the Times seem to think, sure, he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but he’s taking the “peace” part way too seriously.