The story has no analysis or commentary tag, so presumably it’s a news story. It carries the byline of David E. Sanger, who has written for The Times for more than a quarter of a century and serves as the paper’s chief Washington, D.C., correspondent. He’s a foreign policy and nuclear deproliferation expert, which I am not. He’s a member of two Pulitzer-winning teams at The Times, an exceptional historian, and a damn good writer. But that doesn’t leave him immune from criticism.

It’s irritating that this piece carries only one — that’s one — named source. He expects his readers to swallow a steady diet of anonymice. Worse, Sanger provides no reason for withholding their names. That’s a disservice to readers, who have no way of assessing those grants of anonymity. And Times reporters do this frustratingly, irritatingly often.

Sanger’s story provides no sources at all until the sixth graf. There, the readers are asked to digest this:

As one senior adviser to Mr. Obama said late last year, “We’ve got a near-perfect record of being wrong about these guys for 30 years.”

Why was this “senior adviser” granted anonymity? If Sanger’s answer is “well, he would not have talked to me without it,” then don’t use the adviser’s quote. For heaven’s sake, Sanger works for The frickin’ New York Times —stand up to these anonymice. Hold them accountable.

Yes, I know: Sanger would risk “losing access.” But why should readers not conclude that Sanger is merely a tool of unnamed sources? Consider these other passages from Sanger’s story:

“There’s no technical explanation, so there has to be some other motivation,” one senior administration official who studies the Iranian strategy said after a White House briefing last week following the atomic agency’s revelation.

As one senior European diplomat noted Thursday, an Israeli military strike might be the “best thing” for Iran’s leadership because it would bring Iranians together against a national enemy.

Or, as one American intelligence official said, “You can’t dismiss the possibility that this is a screw-up.”

No reason is provided for granting anonymity to any of these so-called sources. And what is the worth of the information for which Sanger traded anonymity? Watergate this isn’t.

But here’s the kicker — the shirt-tail tag at the end of the story:

Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo and Amman, Jordan; Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon; and Mark Landler from Washington.

A team worked on this story. And that much journalistic horsepower could arouse only one fully identified source? And that one, Kenneth Pollack, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, doesn’t really count. Think-tank folks get in a lather if they’re not fully identified.

Readers deserve better from The Times. Its reporters should stand up to government officials who refuse to be accountable for their words.Taxpayers fund their salaries. Give taxpayers clear evidence whether those officials are worth the price.

On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command [Operating Environment 2008] report, the Army includes Israel within “a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east.”

. . . writes Bryan Jordan recently at DefenseTech. He speculates that, although Israel’s nuclear weapons program has been an open secret since even before former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu disclosed details to the British press in 1986, this may be the first time that the United States has publicly acknowledged it. Though. . .

Given the U.S.’s long history of selective blindness when it comes to Israeli nukes, it’s unlikely that the Joint report compiled by the Army amount[ed] to much more than a minor faux pas.

Why, after all this time, does Israel insist on remaining coy about its nuclear status? Partly, as Paul Kerr explains in a recent Total Wonkerr post, out of concerns “that Israeli disclosure of its nuclear weapons could destabilize the region, lead to nuclear or CBW proliferation, etc.”

Why does the United States enable this kind of disingenuousness? If it didn’t, aside from destabilization, the United States would be forced “to cease providing billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel if it determined the country had a nuclear weapons program,” as Jordan writes.

With respect to Israel’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy about its nuclear weapons program, one of Kerr’s commenters replied: “If you think it’s hard to deal with the Iranians now, just imagine if some Israeli loose cannon were threatening to annihilate Tehran on a routine basis.” Restoring the horse to its rightful place before the cart, I would amend that to read: “If you think the Israelis are causing trouble now. . .”

Kerr then quotes a May 2007 International Herald Tribune article by Avner Cohen, perhaps the leading authority on the subject of Israel and the Bomb (which is the title of not only the article but a book he wrote). Before we explore this piece — elements of which we found troubling — some background on Israel’s bomb, courtesy of a June 2007 Arms Control Today piece by Cohen, Crossing the Threshold: The Untold Nuclear Dimension of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Its Contemporary Lessons:

[Then Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol knew that a nuclear test would be a blatant violation of. . . the pledge that Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. [While freezing] the program in a nondeployable mode was unthinkable. . . there are indications that [Eshkol] was cautious, hesitant, and even ambivalent about its future.

Reluctant, that is. Cohen then explains that when Egypt massed troops on the Sinai peninsula in May 1967 and conducted high-altitude reconnaissance flights over Dimona, Eshkol actually feared that the nuclear complex may have not only triggered the deployment but that Egypt was planning to attack Dimona.

In other words, by developing a weapon intended to deter an attack, Israel was provoking the very attack it hoped to deter.

Indeed, Egypt may have been very close to launching an aerial attack on Dimona. . . but it was called off by Nasser on a few hours’ notice. … Between that an an industrial accident at Dimona. . . I believe Eshkol was open to political solutions that would have allowed him not to [proceed with developing a nuclear weapon].

[But as] the likelihood of war intensified. … it was simply unthinkable for its leaders that, at such a national dire moment. . . they would sit idle and do nothing. … Israeli teams assembled virtually all the components, including the handful of nuclear cores it had, into improvised but operational explosive devices … [But in Cohen's opinion] had the 1967 war not broken. . . Israel would have signed the NPT.

Or, as Cohen puts it in his International Herald Tribune piece:

Israel has always been a different kind of nuclear proliferator — a reluctant proliferator.

I’m sure the knowledge that the state which is about to detonate a nuclear weapon just over your head developed it with reluctance instead of bravado (like, say, Pakistan) is a tremendous source of consolation. Then Cohen writes:

Israel is now uniquely distinguished among all nuclear states in its legacy of extreme nuclear caution, keeping nuclear affairs low profile, nearly invisible and away from politics. [Emphases added.]

From this author’s perspective, the words “distinguished” and “nuclear state” should never appear in the same sentence. Also, because of the dangers inherent in a nuclear program such as the myriad documented accidents, “extreme nuclear caution” is wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, how can the world’s most destructive weapons possibly be kept “low profile” and “away from politics”? Even if “keeping the blinders on is necessary politically [for the United States] in order to avoid a policy confrontation with Israel,” as Jordan writes at Defense Tech, it’s tough to ignore an 800-megaton gorilla.

To give Cohen his due, elsewhere he said:

“Not only is Israel’s nuclear posture of taboo and total secrecy totally anachronistic, it is inconsistent with, and costly to, the tenets of modern liberal democracy. Israel needs a better way to handle its nuclear affairs.”

He also attempts to use Israel’s development as a precautionary tale to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

One can reasonably make the case that Iran’s nuclear project today is at a similar juncture to Israel in 1963-1964 as it started to operate the Dimona reactor.

Needless to say, however, the only sure means to circumvent Iranian development of a nuclear bomb is for Israel (not to mention the United States) to disarm.

The Deproliferator (the column’s title, not the author’s nom de plume) covers nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, with an emphasis on treaties, negotiation, and diplomacy. The author is not employed in the arms control field.

A term coined by sociologist and professor of international relations Amitai Etzioni, “deproliferation,” he writes, “calls for removing the access to nuclear arms and the materials from which they can readily be made — first and foremost in unstable and noncompliant states, and only then in all others.”

Whatever the merits of this approach, it lends itself to reinforcing the distinction between the nuclear haves and have-nots. Fond of his phrase, though, we’re appropriating it to our own ends. For the purposes of this column, deproliferation means, simply, disarmament.

Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton bombed relations with the Iranians back to the Cheney age when she said that diplomacy with Iran probably won’t work. You can be assured it won’t work if she’s in charge of it. After two days of talks in Egypt and Israel, where she heard “over and over and over again” how worried Arabs and Israelis are about the Persian state, she accused Iran of “fomenting” divisions in the Arab world and seeking to “intimidate as far as they think their voice can reach.” That’s abject hypocrisy coming from the chief diplomat of a superpower that single-handedly placed the Middle East in a state of perpetual turmoil. If Hillary’s remarks were calculated, they were miscalculated. We need a secretary of state who sounds like an intelligent adult, not a two-faced harpy who flies around the world hurling fireballs at straw men. We just had four years of that from Keystone Kondi.

Hillary has confirmed that despite her campaign claim of possessing a foreign policy experience edge over Obama, it was Bill, not she, who was commander in chief during the Clinton administration. Like candidate Hillary, Secretary Hillary feels the need to act tough so the draft dodging neocons won’t call her a girly man. She shouldn’t worry. They’ll call her a girly man no matter what she does. And if she goes into high orbit every time the Arabs and Israelis lie to her about Iran, she’ll never come down to earth.

The neocons will never have anything bad to say about Hillary’s counterpart at Defense. Bill Kristol must have thought he’d ascended into heaven when young Mr. Bush named Bob Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Gates was brought in to serve as a welcome mat for the surge strategy, the key to attaining Kristol’s dream of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Kristol especially likes having a warmonger around who says even dumber things than he does.

Gates is a grand master of self-contradiction, as he illustrated once again on a recent Tavis Smiley Show. He said that one of the “biggest lessons learned” from the Iraq experience “is if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have.” Gates repeated that sentiment several times, then noted that the war in Afghanistan is now his “biggest challenge,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that he encouraged Obama to preemptively escalate the conflict there on the basis of no intelligence at all. We will never have good intelligence on the Bananastans. You can count the number of people who speak both Pashtun and English and can also pass a background check on the toes and fingers of a duck. Our best sources of intelligence on Afghanistan and Pakistan are Afghan and Pakistani intelligence officials. If we’re going to trust them, we may as well believe everything the Mossad tells us.

You’d think Gates would understand that, having been chief of the CIA, but you’d be wrong. Where Hillary made her mark in Washington by clinging to a coattail, Gates built his career as a bureaucratic dimwit the old fashioned way: by not rocking the boat. He “succeeded” as Secretary of Defense by telling Bush what he wanted to hear and being more popular with his subordinates than Rummy was, a feat considerably easier than falling off a log. You do everything General A tells you to do, say everything General B tells you to say, pretend you don’t know General C is tagging his enlisted driver and, by golly, you’re such a military genius the next administration simply has to keep you on for a year or so.

After Admiral William Fallon lost the showdown for control of Central Command, the generals that remained—including Admiral Mike Mullen, now the Joint Chiefs chairman—were all aboard the Petraeus train; there’s nobody left but the long warriors. The way things look now, the Status of Forces agreement won’t amount to a speed bump on the road to eternal occupation of Iraq, and we’ll continue to bury ourselves in the Bananastans whether we cook up a flimsy excuse to be there or not.

In a bizarre turn on the BBC comedy Yes, Minister, our State and Defense secretaries are little more than figureheads for the career military officers who have gained a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy. I recommended several weeks ago that Obama should order every officer from the full bird level up to submit a request to retire, but he may consider that politically untenable. And if he canned Hillary, oh, my: double, double, toil and trouble!

He can marginalize Hillary by encircling her with advisers and special envoys and such who report directly to him. Hopefully, by the end of Gates’s “year or so,” Virginia governor Tim Kaine will have been succeeded by a Democrat and can take Jim Webb’s Senate seat, freeing Webb to take over at Defense. The best way to “get rid” of King David may be to promote him to Joint Chiefs chairman. The chairman doesn’t have any command authority; he’s merely the president’s top uniformed military adviser. Obama can privately make it loud and clear that he expects Petraeus to have his ten-word advice memorandum to the Oval Office by 5 p.m. every tenth Friday, pronto.

With Petraeus neutralized, maybe—just maybe—Webb or someone like him can begin developing a new generation of generals who don’t believe that defending their country involves keeping it entangled in never ending, counterproductive wars that defeat its economy.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link)

Shashank Bengali, McClatchy News, Israel’s destruction of U.S.-style school shocks Gazans:

“It seems that targeting our school . . . was one of the very few things that fanatic groups and Israel could agree on,” said Sharhabeel al Zaeem, a member of the school’s board of directors. … Yet of the 25 schools and hospitals that Israeli forces hit during the 22-day war, according to a tally by Palestinian officials, only the American International School was destroyed.

Why did they do it? No one to stop them.

Paul Woodward at War in Context:

Meanwhile, Tzipi Livni claims that the carnage in Gaza has advanced the peace process. This is an Orwellian, obscene, and outrageous insult to common sense. It displays a sociopathic view of human suffering.

Claire McCaskill, who introduced a bill calling for a cap on compensation for employees of bailout recipients, interviewed by Sam Stein, Huffington Post, interviewing:

This culture, this idea, that these guys are entitled not just to their jobs but to excessive compensation, even when their companies were in moments of extinction because of the decisions they had made, just seemed unreal to me.

Daniel Bergner, New York Times, What Do Women Want?:

“Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”

Chew on that cigar.

Kai Ma, AlterNet, Is a GED More Valuable Than a PhD?:

But by all indications, recent university hiring freezes and evaporating grant money have reduced the world’s most elite degree to junk-bond status.

Philip Bethge, Spiegel Online, The Disturbing Sex Lives of Deep Sea Squid:

Using their sharp beaks or the hooks on their tentacles, males of the species Taningia danae make cuts more than five centimeters (two inches) deep into the females’ flesh. They then deposit sperm packets, called spermatophores, into the wounds.

Male sea squid need to stay away from Internet porn. It’s turning them into deviants.

Sports

Tim Layden at SportsIllustrated.com on Larry Fitzgerald:

He did remarkable things at Pitt [where he went to college]. Big things. And little things, never seen, like when, during practice, an assistant coach would throw fastballs from 15 yards away and Fitzgerald would snatch the ball, one-handed, on the point, without the point reached the palm of his hand. Here is what I wrote about that drill six years ago: “Try it sometime.” It’s unfathomable.

Les Carpenter, Washington Post, League Honors Military, but Moves Away from Using Its Terminology:

“It’s not so much of a frontal attack anymore. You’re lobbing artillery over the lines,” said Steelers offensive line coach Larry Zierlein, a former Marine who fought in Vietnam. “You’re not seeing fighting like World War I or World War II. It’s almost like guerrilla warfare.”

Alan Schwarz, New York Times, The Physics of the ‘Hit’:

“Jack Tatum was vicious — that helps — but he had a way of popping with the perfect angle and timing,” Gay said of the former Oakland Raiders safety called the Assassin in both reverence and fear. “The best hitters accelerate at the last instant. That final jolt of speed allows them to apply a bigger force to their victim.”

Peter King, SportsIllustrated.com, interviewing one-time Cardinals’ quarterback Jake Plummer:

But I’ll probably TiVo it. I hate TV timeouts. When I played, they felt so long. It was like holding back a horse. You’re out there, you want to play, and you have to stand around waiting.

The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a “campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of the RMA program—nearly six years after it had been initiated. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon’s web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, “the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude” that RMA activities “violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda,” but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because “the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear.”

So it all depends what your definition of “propaganda” is. I feel the I.G.’s pain, don’t you?

Rewriting Military History

I first started hearing the expression “we’re losing the public affairs war” about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.

Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure each and every one of those reporters got on and off the ship safely and received a triple dose of gee whiz by watching flight operations from Vulture’s Row high atop the ship’s island.

What the air wing did over the beach didn’t matter; the targets they bombed were mainly plywood decoys. I didn’t have to worry about defending the ship, either. Bad Guy’s Navy was sinking at the pier. We never did accomplish our original objective, which had something to do with keeping Bad Guy Milosevic from cleansing his ethnics, who were the good guys in this particular war because then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said they were. Milosevic cleansed as many ethnics as he wanted to before he quit and everyone left him alone, a technique the Israelis later exploited to great effect in Lebanon and Gaza. None of our guys got killed in combat. In fact, the biggest friendly casualties of the war were the careers of most of the flag and general officers involved, some of whom retired in disgust, and some who just got caught taking their pants off in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong company, a trait they shared with their commander in chief, who unlike them managed to keep his job for a few more years.

In all, the Kosovo Conflict was a perfect play war to end the 20^th century with.

Boondoggle or no, we came home to heroes’ welcomes, and our carrier was hailed as a keystone of the greatest naval and air victory ever won under the command of a clueless Army general. The carrier Navy held onto its slab of the defense budget, and lived to play war in a new American century.

Bull Feather Merchants

The Kosovo War was a watershed conflict in that it illustrated—or should have illustrated—that the efficacy of American military power was nearing the terminus of its collision course with a brick wall. No one could really say the Kosovo War had defended America or had protected its interests overseas or had even protected innocents abroad because the good guys in the conflict were no better than the bad guys. At that point in history, the military’s full time mission shifted to self-preservation, and the purpose of the relatively new “information warfare” specialty went from supporting armed conflicts to fabricating convincing arguments for having them.

Shortly after 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Office of Strategic Influence, an information warfare directorate with “a broad mission ranging from ‘black’ campaigns that use[d] disinformation and other covert activities to ‘white’ public affairs that rely on truthful news releases,” according to its chief, Air Force one star Simon P. Worden. Protests arose when the Pentagon announced that the OSI would “provide news items, possibly even false ones.” Rumsfeld shut down OSI to quell the controversy. Well, he sort of shut it down. “You can have the [OSI] name,” he said at a press conference, “but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

Before it skulked out the servants’ door, OSI spawned a number of truth sub-ministries within DoD, one of which was the Retired Military Analyst program.

Part II will analyze RMA as a microcosm of the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to protect and defend the military industrial complex.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Bill Simmons, ESPN.com, the Sports Guy, on the airliner guided to a crash-landing in the Hudson River:

And was anyone else on a “what will be the New York Post headline?” e-mail chain Thursday? My pick was “FLY-TANIC!!!”

Gideon Levy, Haaretz:

No pilot or soldier went to war to kill children. Not one among them intended to kill children, but it also seems neither did they intend not to kill them. They went to war after the IDF had already killed 952 Palestinian children and adolescents since May 2000.

Paul Woodward, War in Context, Wars against ideas always fail:

However, the difference between Israel and Hamas is that Hamas does not fear its annihilation. That has nothing to do with glorifying “martyrdom”; it’s because the movement is much more durable than its constituent parts.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, The Crying Game:

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gabriela Shalev, has charged Hamas with using kids as human shields. But, really, they are just part of the terrain.

Chris McGeal, the Guardian, Why Israel’s war is driven by fear, quoting the mother of an Israeli soldier:

“If you do open your heart to the fact that 40 completely innocent people in a United Nations school were killed you have a very hard time. It’s difficult to open your heart to that place and also hold on to wanting the soldiers to succeed. It’s a very hard split in personality. I think it’s necessary but it’s a difficult thing to do.”

I think that’s called cognitive dissonance.

Lionel Beehner, Huffington Post, What Ukraine’s Gas Crisis Has In Common With Gaza:

What confuses most people is the way in which Russia and Israel conduct their foreign policies — with nary a thought of how they are perceived by their peers. It’s not enough for Russians to explore and lay claim to a ridge beneath the North Pole — they have to brazenly plant a Russian flag there. It’s not enough for Israel to negotiate the release of its soldiers taken hostage by Hezbollah — it has to invade and rain cluster bombs over southern Lebanon.

Former member of the Israeli army Professor Avi Shlaim, the Guardian:

[When Israel was founded in 1948] British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

Ulrike Putz, Der Spiegel, interviewing an Islamist extremist in Gaza:

So far, Hamas has done what it can to keep the Salafis under control. They know the ultra-radicals are just waiting to take over Hamas’ position of leadership. “They are traitors,” [Islamist extremist] Abu Mustafa says of Hamas. “Compared to us, they are Islamism lite.”

Wallace Shawn, the Nation, Israel in Gaza: Irrationality:

After the war, the world felt it owed the Jews something — but then showed its lack of true regard for the tormented group by “giving” them a piece of land populated and surrounded by another people — an act of European imperialism carried out exactly at the moment when non-European peoples all over the world were finally concluding that European imperialism was completely unacceptable and had to be resisted.

Der Spiegel, Interview with Israel author Meir Shalev:

I certainly don’t consider Hamas to be friendly people, but Israel’s attitude is absurd. We behave as though it were our hobby to find new groups with whom we refuse to speak — only to do so later. Twenty years ago, the PLO was the archenemy; today, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as its leader, the group is our best friend. In five years’ time, we will also be speaking with Hamas.

Michael Scheuer, AntiWar.com, Bringing the Arab-Israeli War Home:

Once the Arab-Israeli religious war has been brought into the United States and is producing blood in America’s streets, the Israel-firsters will claim the carnage proves that secular America and theocratic Israel are in the same boat and facing the same enemies. Flogging this plausible but palpable lie, AIPAC-owned American leaders will consign this country to an unending war against Islam, the same catastrophe that is Israel’s lot.

Ted Rall, Smirking Chimp, New Year’s Revolutions: There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It:

When I was young, I assumed that revolutions resulted from ideology, because idealists wanted a fairer world. Now, as we stare down the barrel of economic apocalypse, I realize that they’re carried out by desperate people who have nothing to lose, in Marx’s words, and everything to gain. They take stuff from the rich and write the ideological tracts after the fact.

Michael Rosenfeld, the Washington Post, Madoff Exposed Investors’ Weak Spots:

One of the many mysteries of Bernie Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is why so many people broke a cardinal rule of investing by over-allocating money in one position. … A chart of Madoff’s purported returns shows a line going steadily up, month after month, 1 or 2 percent. Those kinds of gains are intoxicating. [Psychiatrist] Richard Peterson said we actually fall in love with them.

Vanity Fair, An Oral History of the Bush White House, Alberto Mora, general Navy counsel:

. . .there are general-rank officers who’ve had senior responsibility within the Joint Staff or counterterrorism operations who believe that the number-one and number-two leading causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been, number one, Abu Ghraib, number two, Guantánamo, because of the effectiveness of these symbols in helping recruit jihadists into the field and combat against American soldiers.

Bing West, National Journal’s National Security blog:

We’re fighting irregular wars that most of the books and articles treat academically as a branch of sociology; to wit, combine a dollop of economic aid with a pinch of rule of law, stir in good governance, listen sympathetically to local complaints and withdraw gracefully.

Sports

Kerry Byrne, Cold Hard Facts Football:

Sure. . . we all know that turnovers cost teams. [But] throwing INTs — or, more specifically, not throwing INTs — is actually more important than throwing touchdowns in the playoffs.
• Teams that toss more touchdowns than their opponents are 207-62 (.770).
• Teams that toss fewer interceptions than their opponents are 258-56 (.822).

Brian Costello, the New York Post:

There’s no questioning his Xs and Os acumen, but head coaches in the NFL have become administrators as much as game planners. “I was talking to a head coach the other day who said, sometimes you have to pick out things like paint, things that don’t even involve football,” Giant great Carl Banks said.

Costello again, Mangini Pal Atlas Takes Jabs at Favre:

[Boxing manager Teddy] Atlas said Johnson saw Favre as a salesman for his controversial personal seat licenses in the team’s new stadium. “You’re paying a guy ($13) million. . . you’ve got a new facility, you’ve got money all over the place,” Atlas said, “You bring this guy in and in your mind, you’re looking at Mick Jagger.”

It was recently suggested that a glossary of terms should be developed.  Unfortunately, many of these terms are subjective and a true glossary would need to be provided by each user of the word.  But the call to duty was raised and i’ve supplemented what i already knew with some quality time at Mid-East Web, the Jewish Virtual Library, and E-Zion.  I purposefully did not visit “anti-Zionist” resources because i don’t really believe that there’s a Zionist in my closet or that a shadowy cabal of powerful, Jewish bankers is plotting the domination/destruction of the planet.  I don’t believe in Leprechauns either.

Originally, the request for a glossary covered all the various modifiers that might be put before the noun “Jew” (which may, in itself, be offensive to some…but i’ve failed to find a connotationless moniker for the situation).  A secular Jew might similar to a Christmas/Easter Christian.  He would be a believer, but would not define himself by his religious belief.  The same definition applies to a “cultural Jew”.  A secular Jew might also be a person of Jewish extraction.  There is debate within the Jewish community as to what it means to be a Jew; many of these labels come from within Judaism rather than without.  But i don’t have the time and you don’t have the patience for the kind of reading necessary to explain all that.

An “observant Jew” is just what it sounds like: someone who observes the calender, dietary restrictions, festivals, etc. of Judaism.  But being an observant Jew falls into a multitude of categories too.  Reform, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, etc.  And none of these variations on a Semitic theme have anything to do with politics.  A secular Jew might well be very conservative, politically, and there’s nothing that says an observant Jew cannot be a flaming liberal Defeatocrat…i know at least one of those.

All of the above exist in a spectrum, and the spectrum is more important than the label.  Just because one is Jewish does not mean that one must hold certain political beliefs.  Labels are useful until they trap us.  For example, most would probably think that the ultra-orthodox Jewish community is very ‘Zionist’; the labels fit together nicely.  But it’s wrong.  The ultra-orthodox community is often the most anti-Zionist section of the Jewish community.

Which brings us to today’s loaded word.  I’ve read a lot on this now, much of it overlapping and in basic agreement, and it’s as confusing as confusing gets.  We’ve reduced the word “Zionist” in a manner similar to our reduction of the word “Communist”  to mean Stalin’s USSR.  There are enough twists, turns, and schisms in the Zionist movement that it would be a good subject for a Russian novel.  You’d need that kind of page count to do it justice.

“Zionism” was coined in 1891 by Nathan Birnbaum, but Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in 1897.  There is no official Zionist ideology, sorry.  But basically Zionist ideology boils down to the belief that the Jews are a people or a nation like anyone else, and that they have the right, and should, gather together in a national homeland.

The idea of the Jews as distinct people is not entirely religious.  It is also a product of the 19th Century enlightenment, which also gave us the full flowering of nationalism.  European Jews gained their first measure of freedom; some left Judaism, some converted, but there was still a sense that they would be Jews no matter what they did. (Here i call philosophical bullshit.  Of course the first generation would always be Jews, just like first generation immigrants are more old country than new, while their grandchildren are old country in name only.) The idea of a Jewish nation fit nicely with the the ideas of German racists and gave them an excuse to persecute.  But if the Jews were a people, they lacked an actual nation.  Zionism is the ideology to achieve the nation.

The late 1800’s were not a good time to be Jewish in Russia.  Leon Pinsker was originally an assimilationist, at least until the Odessa pogrom of 1871.  He changed his mind and penned Auto-Emancipation.  Pinsker thought that Argentina would make a nice homeland, but his fellow Russians liked the idea of Palestine much better.  The idea at this point was to organize and lobby the great powers to grant the Jews a homeland, a movement that became known as political Zionism.

Herzl was all for political Zionism and he had the power and connections to pursue it.  The first Zionist Congress was willing to settle for Uganda or Cyprus, but the Russian Zionists would have none of it and declined the offer.  Herzl, and other Europeans weren’t actually looking for new digs themselves…they were just trying to be helpful to their “brethren to the East”.  All this was happening at the same time as political philosophy in Russia was tending towards Marxism and revolution, and Zionism was pretty entangled with that process.  (Is this complicated enough for everyone?)

Herzl died about the same time that any hope for political Zionism ended.  At the time, Russian Zionists were mostly members of the SDLP (the party that would later split into Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.  Unfortunately, the antisemitism that would come to characterize Russian Communism  was already evident.  Ber Borochov left the SDLP and founded his own party, Poalei Tziyon, which rested on a synthesis of Marxism and Zionism.  Borochov theorized along Marxist lines but ran into the same problem as other Russians: how do you throw a prolaterian revolution without a proletariat?  Simple, you get a new country and build a proletariat…no revolution needed.

There ended up being multiple forms and groups of socialist Zionists.  Arthur Ruppin (an ethnic Pole born in German territory and trained as an economist) was sent to examine the Palestinian situation in 1907.  His ideas led to the kibbutz, which solved some practical problems of settlement and dovetailed nicely with the socialist ideals of the settlers.  Where the colonial model of the first aliya failed the kibbutz succeeded.  It also made a handy place to hide arms and organize defense force.

Combining the remnants of political Zionism with the practical, settler approach became known as synthetic Zionism; it is generally credited with producing the Balfour Declaration.

Now begins the growth of serious conflict between the Arabs and the Jews of Palestine; WWI; and the British fiddling with their mandate in the post war years.  Mostly it wasn’t pretty and grew ever more violent and unyielding.  Yet another split developed between those who wanted to work with the British and those wanting to fight whoever got in the way.  Enter Ze’ev Vladomir Jabotinsky.  He formulated the idea of a Jewish defense force that would show Arab neighbors that the Jews could not be pushed into the sea.  When the British balked at overseeing such a force, Jabotinsky went ahead with it anyhow.  He also founded the revisionist Zionist movement in 1925 with fellow radicals who disagreed with the socialist Zionists and were bitter over the British subdivision of Palestine.  The main tenent of revisionist Zionism is a claim to both sides of the Jordan river.

The revisionist didn’t gain much power in the official Zionist council.  The labor Zionists under David Ben-Gurien held the real power.  The two groups cooperated at times and fought each other just as often.  Labor basically controlled the Israeli government until after the Six Days war, after which the revisionists were allowed to participate in the government.  The Yom Kippur war broke the hold of Labor over the Israeli government.  It soon found itself in the minority, replaced by militant, religious Zionists and the Likud party, which inherited revisionist Zionism.

At this point, Likud revisionist Zionism basically represents the ideology to the world.  It is through Likud policies – the settlements in particular – that Zionism has taken on its current connotations.  Obviously it is a form of Zionism; just as obviously it is not the only form of Zionism.  Unfortunately it portrays itself as true Zionism, similar to our own politicians making pronouncements about the “real” America.

I hope that i disappointed the black and white crowd, as you suck anyhow and i’m far less worried about Zionists in my closet than i am about you shouting your proclamations far and wide.  And one thing is abundantly clear after this headache inducing experience: the word Zionist is thrown around with far too much abandon by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.  I realize that some of those people will be here any minute to rant from one side or the other; most of them won’t even have read the above.

Fuck it, i’ll light the fuse.  3-2-1…

– Attributed to a Union colonel of the Civil War serving as an adviser to the Prussian General Staff during the Franco-Prussian War.

The United Nations has called for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza strip.Pope Benedict XVI has also called for a ceasefire, and senior Vatican official Cardinal Renato Martino describes Gaza as “a big concentration camp.”

The Senate and the House of Representatives have passed resolutions endorsing the assault on Gaza by what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi describes as our “friend and democratic ally.”

There you have the difference between the U.N., the Catholic Church and the United States Congress; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) doesn’t own the U.N. or the Catholic Church.

And isn’t it striking that there can be two presidents at a time when it comes to the economy but not when it comes to foreign policy?Barack Obama is hot to ram an economic recovery bill of uncertain merit past Congress’s tonsils, but when asked at a recent press conference why he has remained silent about Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Obama explained that his “silence is not a consequence of lack of concern,” giving the Palestinians in Gaza a bird’s eye view of the veins between his wrist and knuckles.

Let’s Play Hard Bull

Our Secretary of State Condi Rice told reporters on January 9 that “it’s hard” for Israeli forces to avoid killing civilians in Gaza because Hamas is using them as human shields.Maybe that’s why Israel didn’t bother to even try to avoid killing civilians in Gaza, and went ahead and firebombed it.

I was hesitant to buy into the stories of Israeli forces using white phosphorus on civilians until I saw the AP picture of the incendiary airburst over Gaza City at the Voice of America website, and The Times confirmed that it had identified Israeli stockpiles of U.S. made white phosphorous rounds on the Israeli-Gaza border. White phosphorous and other incendiary munitions can create night illumination and smoke, but their main purpose is to burn things, like Tokyo and Dresden, and now Gaza City.

Condi also told reporters that she was “encouraged that Prime Minister (Ehud) Olmert, after an extensive conversation we had, agreed to open a new humanitarian corridor.”Condi didn’t mention if she encouraged Olmert to have his troops open fire on Red Cross trucks as they attempted to use the “humanitarian” corridor, a gambit that forced the Red Cross to suspend relief efforts. Nor did Condi offer a guess as to whether Israel forcing the Red Cross to cease operations had anything to do with its relief workers finding four starving children next to their mothers’ corpses in a Gaza City neighborhood that Israel had denied the Red Cross access to for days.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel says the suffering in Gaza was “brought on by Hamas.”Somebody needs to tell Scott that even if Hamas had incendiary bombs like those, they probably wouldn’t explode them above Gaza City like the Israelis have.If they had artillery equipment like the Israelis have, Hamas also probably wouldn’t herd 100 or so Palestinian civilians into a “shelter” and then shell them, like the Israelis did, and if Hamas had a tank, they most likely would not, like the Israelis did, use it to demolish a school that nobody was shooting at them from.

Stanzel also said the present troubles began because Hamas refused to extend the ceasefire.Thanks to historian and journalist Gareth Porter, we know that Hamas made an offer to renew the ceasefire in December, and Israel shunned it.

Those cabinet secretaries and White House spokesmodels really should get the facts straight before they make up new ones, shouldn’t they?

And maybe creatures like Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NV) ought to get their ducks in a line before they call criticism of Israel “anti-Semitism.”

Nothing but Their Eyes to Cry With

The purpose of strategy in war is to focus the violence on a tangible policy aim.Not surprisingly, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Sallai Meridor freely admitted in a recent lecture at George Washington University that, “we have no grand political scheme” in Gaza.

That means our “friend and democratic ally,” with the endorsement of our executive and legislative branches of government and with the tacit approval of our president elect, are conducting slaughter for the sake of slaughter.This is also known as total war, and war of annihilation, and genocide.

What a crying shame it is that the land of the free and the home of the brave should sanction such monstrosity.

_____

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy(Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Image Credit:
Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

In the first days after the ceasefire took effect [in June 2008], Islamic Jihad fired nine rockets. … In August another eight rockets were fired by various groups [and] only one rocket was launched from Gaza in September and one in October.

Contrary to Israel’s argument that it was forced to [retaliate] against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original. . . ceasefire arrangement.

Porter adds that Hamas even tried to make other Palestinian groups abide by the ceasefire, detaining and confiscating the weapons of those in violation. But on November 4. . .

. . . just when the ceasefire was most effective — the IDF carried out an attack against a house in Gaza in which six members of Hamas’s military wing were killed. [Its] explanation for the operation was that it had received intelligence that a tunnel was being dug near the Israeli security fence for the purpose of abducting Israeli soldiers.

First, admitting that the prospect of Hamas popping out of a tunnel, snatching an IDF member, and then scurrying back into the tunnel with him or her in tow is cause for scuttling a truce is a stunning admission of fear. Such willingness to cast the IDF in a frightened light only shows the length to which Israel will go to continue the conflict. Even more telling: Israel violated the ceasefire, as Porter wrote, “just when [it] was most effective.”

It’s not Hamas launching rockets (and certainly not Hamas emerging onto Israel soil from beneath the earth) that Israel fears –- it’s Hamas not firing them.

On a conscious level, Israel seeks to crush Hamas. On an unconscious level it needs it to remain the Hamas it knows and loves (to hate) in order to comply with a militarized state’s imperative to perpetuate itself.

From the Washington Post:

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children — emaciated but alive — in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

You think my subject line was sacrilegious? Paul Woodward didn’t pull any punches either at War in Context with the heading to his link to the WaPo story: “Israel provides Palestinians with snacks as it takes massacre rest breaks.”

Meanwhile, the BBC reportered:

“This is a shocking incident,” Pierre Wettach, ICRC head for Israel and the Palestinian territories said in a statement.

“The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestinian Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”

Correspondents say the criticism is unusually strong, coming from an agency considered to be neutral.

What are the odds that even a story like this will make a dent in the hardened hearts of the Israeli administration, the outgoing and incoming US administrations, nor even the US congress?

This is a signal characteristic of administration’s behavior in foreign affairs: require the target to cede its bargaining chips as a precondition of negotiations. In the case of Iran, the “offer they must refuse” is the demand that they give up their UN guaranteed “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear development. The administration gave Hamas an ultimatum to bare its throat to an armed and U.S. backed Israel, a move that would have been suicidal. Given the overwhelming preponderance of the Israelis’ actions and rhetoric over the past three years, I see no way to avoid the conclusion that they consider genocide of a defenseless adversary to be a perfectly legitimate course of action.

And it looks like they can get away with it for at least as long as George W. Bush is in office.

Beggars and Choosers

In September 2006, both U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that they would not accept a Palestinian government that included the newly elected Hamas majority. The Bush administration brought pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the Hamas government and Rice talked Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into providing covert funds and training to the militant branch of the corrupt Palestinian Fatah party that been voted out of power.

Push came to shove, shove came to biff, Hamas ran Fatah out of Gaza, Israel slapped a blockade on Hamas and the rest is front page news. Israel’s latest talk of agreeing to ceasefire proposal “principles” sounds like a stall stratagem. Condi says the U.S. doesn’t want a ceasefire that will restore a “status quo,” which means the administration wants Hamas even more outgunned than it was before. Israel is equipped to spank the militaries of three neighboring countries. Hamas is armed with rockets that it makes from steel tubes and fertilizer. Israel says that any ceasefire it agrees to will have to include a “working” arms embargo. I guess that means Gaza farmers will have to adopt closed loop fertilizing; a fitting analog of what Israel, with help from the rest of the world, has been forcing the Palestinians to do for generations.

Israel is supposedly allowing a three-hour daily window for food and other supplies to get into Gaza via “humanitarian corridors.” Who do they think they’re kidding? Gaza was in a long-standing crisis situation before began its aerial assault. Three hours of humanitarianism in the middle of an all out invasion won’t amount to a sand ant’s breakfast.

Israel will go on pounding Gaza and Condi will make sure the get to do so as long as they want to, just like she provided high cover for them during the Lebanon travesty. How long Israel keeps this up is a matter of what it hopes to accomplish.

I googled “eliminate hamas” and got 774,000 hits. A lot of people out there are rooting for the best bloodbath ever. Uber-Likudnik Benjamin Netanyahu thinks Israel “ultimately” needs to remove the Hamas government from in Gaza, but doesn’t know if it can be done “right now.” Uh, huh. That sounds like a new entry in the Brave New World Dictionary: ul-ti-mate-ly (adverb) before January 20, 2009. Maybe.

“Eliminate Hamas” is code for something far more sinister; in the present context, it means pretty much the same as “eliminate Democrats and Republicans.”

There is no wiggle space for crazy talk like “We’re here to liberate the freedom loving people of Gaza from their Hamas oppressors” in this scenario. The people of Gaza put Hamas in power to free themselves from the oppression of Israel toadying Fatah. The Gaza Strip covers less than 140 square miles, and almost a million and a half Palestinians live in it. You can’t separate combatants from non-combatants in that kind of situation. The canard about how Hamas “uses women and children as human shields” is the most preposterous mantra in the history of war propaganda. Hamas fighters are defending their homes from within them, and unlike some people, they can’t pack mommy and the kids off to stay with relatives in Florida.

Burn, Babies, Burn!

There’s also no such thing as a “precision” weapon in a theater of war like Gaza. Maybe that’s why the Israelis aren’t being coy about their use of cluster munitions and incendiaries.

I’ve witnessed dozens of debates in the past few days over whether or not these weapons are legal, and I refuse to participate. You can argue laws of armed conflict until the return of the Jedi, and it won’t make a bit of difference. The Israelis are using them whether they’re legal or not. The pertinent question is what the Israelis are trying to accomplish with them.

Like many weapons, clusters and incendiaries have multiple applications, but they were designed with one thing in mind. Bomblet dispensing cluster weapons are for killing people. They’re okay for certain types of dispersed soft targets like fighter jets parked on a flight line, but the “AP” in APAM stands for “anti-personnel,” and Hamas doesn’t have any fighter jets.

Cluster munitions work great against large infantry units moving across open ground, but if the Hamas fighters were dumb enough to move across open ground in large numbers against the Israelis, the fighting would have ended really, really fast. Someone suggested to me that the Israelis may be using clusters to clear minefields. That might clear a few mines I suppose, but the unexploded munitions would create an even denser minefield than the one they were trying to clear. International organizations are still trying to clean up the cluster munitions Israel used in Lebanon and the ones we dropped on Afghanistan. Millions of the things are lolling around the world today, waiting for some kids and a mommy and a dog and a picnic basket to come along. The Israelis will leave tens of thousands of them behind for the Palestinians to remember them by.

Incendiaries are designed to start fires, like the ones they started in Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. Incendiary bombs provide night illumination and daytime smoke screens as a side effect, but seriously folks. If you’re a modern army like the Israeli Defense Force and you plan a major operation for months like the IDF planned this one, and all you want to do is turn day into night and vice versa, you use non-exploding flares and emission type smoke rounds, not incendiaries; just like you don’t pop off a couple of tactical nukes because you “forgot” batteries for the flashlights.

From the looks of things, Israel aims to leave the Palestinians in Gaza with what a Union colonel of the Civil War depicted as “nothing but their eyes to cry with.”

America is inertly watching a nation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls our “friend and democratic ally” conduct a war of annihilation. Pressed about his lack of comment on the Gaza debacle at a January 7 news conference, President-elect Obama said that his “silence is not a consequence of lack of concern.”

If I threw my dogs a bone like that they wouldn’t get up to sniff at it.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

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

Speaking of perdition, somebody needs to throw another handful of clean coal in the brazier under Yasser Arafat, and hopefully someone has confirmed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s reservation for the spot next to Arafat’s. Bush and Kondi and Lord Cheney and Bad Will Ambassador John Bolton must be looking forward to occupying adjoining rooms with a view of the inferno in the LBJ Hilton, because they appear bent on squeezing in as much last minute evil as they can before a house drops on them.

Never tired of watching its own horror show, the Bush team is reprising the scenario it ran in Lebanon: Cheney goads Bush into giving tacit approval for Israel to launch a military offensive against a group of sand colored people who, in terms of relative firepower, amount to an ant colony. Kondi does her hair up like a fright wig and drags out the ceasefire process until Israel a) has killed all the sand colored people it wants to kill or b) starts getting its tohkes kicked by the sand colored people and wants mommy to make them stop it.

Take Two

Dick Cheney says Israel didn’t seek “U.S. approval” to begin the ground attack into Gaza. Heh. They didn’t seek “U.S. approval” before they attacked Lebanon, either. They sought Dick Cheney’s approval, and he gave it to them. Dick Cheney isn’t the “U.S.” He’s just the vice president, and the president of the Senate. He’s not in the military chain of command at all, and according to him he doesn’t even work in the executive branch of government.

No word yet on whether Israel got Dick’s permission to use cluster munitions on the sand colored people, this time or last time. Israel’s Haareetz says the Israeli Defense Force is aiming the cluster ammunition at “open areas.” I have trouble imagining Hamas placing suitable cluster bomb targets in the open. You might shell an open area to set off mines that could be buried there, but if you use cluster bombs to do that you’ll create another minefield on top of the one you’re trying to clear. Cluster bombs are made for killing people. Maybe the IDF is shelling open areas with cluster bombs as a humanitarian gesture, something to remind the Palestinians to stay in the closed areas where it’s safer, but I doubt it. Journalist Jamal Dajani of Link TV, posting from the Israel-Gaza border, judges Israel’s self described “surgical strikes” to be “as surgical as shooting chickens in a coop with a shot gun.”

Mr. Bush blames the Gaza debacle on Hamas, saying it has “once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization” with attacks on Israel. Bush didn’t mention that Israel broke the ceasefire in November when it sent ground troops into Gaza. Cheney probably didn’t let anybody tell Bush that part. Maybe it’s a moot issue; Israel has had Gaza under a blockade since January 2008, six months before the ceasefire went into effect. Since a blockade is an act of war imposed by armed force, one has to marvel at how even the most adroit Rovewellian can say with a straight face that a ceasefire exists within a blockade.

But then logic has never been a requirement of Bush administration rhetoric. Kondi says that, “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of (Palestinian Authority) President Mahmoud Abbas.” The “illegal coup” she refers to was the January 2006 election in which Hamas won a large majority of Palestinian Parliament and ousted the corrupt, self-serving Fatah party. Fatah, you may recall, was the political organization of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who built a personal nest egg of $1 billion and $3 billion out of public funds.

Kondi says that she won’t settle for a ceasefire that allows Hamas to keep its rockets to defend itself with. Hamas makes the Qassam rockets themselves, since they can’t afford to buy weapons from anybody. The rockets are simple steel filled tubes with no guidance system. The fuel is a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, and the warhead contains fertilizer and scavenged TNT. Qassam rockets are worthless against the F-16 fighter-bombers we gave the Israelis.

FOX News put fear and loathing merchant John Bolton on the air to say the Israelis has a right to use those F-16s to “eliminate” Hamas. After that, Bolton said, Israel should use the F-16s to attack Iran for us.

Bush neocons aren’t the only U.S. politicos lifting their skirts for Israel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally.” Dick Cheney must not have let anybody tell her that Israel attacked first either. On Meet the Press last Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prattled on about how generous the Israelis were when they gave the Palestinians control of the Gaza Strip in 2003. He didn’t mention that Israel was giving back land the UN parceled to the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 when it established Israel.

It’s too bad for the Palestinians they can’t afford to set up a lobbying group like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and to buy all of our politicians and our media like the Israelis have done.

Lonely at the Bottom

The Armistice Agreements that ended the 1948 Arab-Israeli War eliminated Palestine as a defined territory. The land not ceded to Israel was distributed to Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who essentially told their Palestinian Arab pals to go fish in a sand dune. In early December 2008, Egyptian president Mubarak blocked the Iranian Red Crescent from delivering food to Gaza to relieve Palestinians who had been reduced to eating grass. I reckon Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni hadn’t heard about the grass eating business when she said, “There is no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Or maybe she doesn’t think Palestinians eating grass constitutes a humanitarian crisis.

The Telegraph describes how the U.S. blocked the UN Security Council from passing a statement urging an immediate ceasefire on both sides on Saturday. Historian and journalist Gareth Porter exposes how the Bush administration has been plotting the current Gaza confrontation since early 2007.

I once had the audacity to hope that my country would become that shining city on a hill, a champion of the oppressed and abandoned. Human societies don’t get much more oppressed or abandoned than the Palestinians, but political regimes don’t come any more malignant than the Bush administration.

It would be nice to believe that change is just around the corner, but the ear-splitting silence from Barack Obama, on a holiday surfing safari as the Gaza debacle unfolded, has me suspecting that the Israelis now own U.S. foreign policy trigger, stock and barrel regardless of who the American public puts in power. I don’t buy Obama’s “one president at a time” excuse. Bush, Cheney and the neocons have gotten away with atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for eight merciless years because people who could have stopped them didn’t want to speak out of turn.

I’d also like to believe that Barack Obama is more concerned with doing the right thing than with what the John Boltons and Sean Hannitys and Bill Kristols of this world have to say about him.

But just now, I’m more inclined to believe in Scientology.

___

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

“Hamas. … deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people. … This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage — or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb — will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.” [Emphasis added.]

We’re all familiar with this argument, made in this case by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post today. You often hear it from those who reflexively support Israeli offensives, as well as conservatives in general on the subject of urban warfare.

It occurs to me that I’ve heard it so often, I just assume it’s true. But let’s take a look at this story in Israel’s Ynet. . .

Hamas leader, 20 Palestinians killed in IAF strike

Excerpts:

The air strike killed Nizar Rayyan [who was considered the Hamas leadership's liaison with the group's military wing] along with nine other people, including his wife and three children, Hamas said. … Security sources told Ynet that the house was also used as an arms cache, a communications headquarters and concealed a tunnel’s opening.

Prior to striking Rayyan’s house the IDF tried to warn his family about the imminent attack and urged them to evacuate the place, but they refused to do so.

The army has recently held deliberations regarding the legality of striking homes used as weapons storages when sufficient warning is given to the residents. It has been decided that this falls within the boundaries of international law and is therefore legitimate.

Most of Hamas’ leaders have gone into hiding since the Israeli operation in Gaza began, but Rayyan recently pledged not to leave his house under any circumstances. …

He also sent his son to carry out a suicide attack in the community of Eley Sinai in 2001 in which two Israelis was killed.

It’s possible that a man alleged to have sent his son off to meet his maker may have forced his family to stay in a home deemed a target. But is it likely that Rayyan was willing to risk his family — not to mention himself — just to increase worldwide antagonism against Israel for killing innocent Palestinians? S&R readers, kindly respond.

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

Though raised Catholic, my father was Jewish (Lithuanian and Romanian). The most WASP-ish Jew you’ll ever meet, though, he imparted none of his ancestral religion to me. My wife, who’s of Scot-Irish descent, likes to joke that she knows more about Judaism than me.

But whenever Israel launches an offensive against Palestine, it brings the Jewish in me to the fore.

Two reasons:

1. With credentials as a Jew, I’m that much less likely to be viewed as an anti-Semite for criticizing Israel. (Though in recent years, because the Jewish lobby and its adherents in the United States have overused it, that charge has lost its power to stigmatize.)

2. As a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with Judaism. I didn’t advertise my Jewish heritage because I thought Jews weren’t cool and, as one, I feared neither would I be. But I was proud of the humanitarian values long demonstrated by American Jews, especially toward those I did think were cool: American blacks.

But so much for humanitarian values when, as it routinely does, Israel injects Exodus with steroids — a HUNDRED eyes for an eye, in the words of Norman Solomon. It’s so, I don’t know, un-Jewish.

The proscription against killing your fellow man is close to, if not at, the core of any religion. Like al-Qaeda and the Taliban beheading people in the name of Islam, wiping out great swaths of Palestinians in the name of the Jewish state hollows out religion. Jews need to stand up to Israel before it renders Judaism a religion in name only.

Merry Christmas, fellow citizens. Odds are now almost certain that your country will be in a state of war throughout your lifetimes, and possibly throughout your children’s lifetimes as well.

They Lied With Their Boots On

It’s hard to be surprised any more when the NYT echoes the Pentagon’s G.I. jingo, but the experience of watching the newspaper of record cut and paste phrases like “a page from the successful experiment in Iraq” is aging poorly. From the outset, a key component of the surge strategy was the propaganda piece that would make it sound “successful” regardless of how it went.

As in the principles of war, “objective” is a prime tenet of information operations; but there’s a difference between the way objectives work in warfare and how they’re used in propaganda. In warfare—theoretically, anyway—the objective is supposed to be straightforward and tangible, and all operations and tactics should support the primary goal. In information operations, the objective, at least the stated one, is so vague and flexible that it doesn’t need to have anything at all to do with the actual military operation. In fact, it’s best if it doesn’t; the less any statement meant for public consumption has to do with reality, the greater freedom of movement the information operator (aka “bull feather merchant” or “BFM”) has.

When Bill Kristol pal Fred Kagan and the rest of the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute rammed their surge strategy past the Joint Chiefs’ tonsils, the BFMs had to justify escalating the war to the public. Too many brass hats had admitted there was no military solution to the Iraq fiasco, so the “political unification” canard was adopted.

Political unification has proven to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction; with the provincial elections just a stone’s throw away, there’s talk of a coup to oust Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. That’s been no problem for the BFMs, though; looking ahead, they nested the “security” piece of the puzzle in the original mission statement: establish security in order to allow political unity to come about. Since some measure of decreased violence has been achieved in Iraq, the BFMs can point to it as proof of the surge’s success, and be reasonably confident no one will remember that improving security was the task, not the goal. They can also be fairly sure that not too many folks will ask hard questions about how that “security” was achieved.

In his three tours of duty in Iraq, David Petraeus has followed the same operational formula: he hands out a lot of weapons, bribes everybody he gave the weapons to not to use them, and transfers the heck out of Dodge before the time bombs he set blow off his successors’ thumbs and noses (Hey, what’s this?).

Four months after Petraeus turned over command of a “tamed” Mosul, the city’s police chief defected and insurgents overran the city. When Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, his recruits disappeared into the desert night along with about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols. As commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, he created “Awakening Councils,” groups of former Sunni militants that Filkins says “are credited by American officials as one of the main catalysts behind the steep reduction in violence there.” More that 100,000 of these former anti-U.S. guerillas have been armed to armpits and put on the dole so they won’t attack Nuri al Maliki’s government forces. Creating the Awakening Councils was the single dumbest thing—among a field of highly qualified contenders for the title—that we’ve done in Iraq, and now, it’s one of the most compelling reasons for us to stay there forever: if we leave, the gravy spigot runs dry, and all our beautiful ugliness will melt out the drain pipe when the Sunni gunmen go back to their old line of business.

And thus it is that our catalyst of victory is the machinery of our failure; we’ve succeeded so well in Iraq that we must stay there always. Permanent occupation of Iraq was the operational and strategic objective all along, of course, even before 9/11, even before young Mr. Bush was selected to head the neoconservative ticket.

But the BFMs are still doing a good job of keeping the system from acquiring that target.

Hell No, They Won’t Go

They’re also doing a good job of camouflaging what the junta is up to these days. As of December 28, Barack Obama’s web site still promises to phase “combat troops” out of Iraq in 16 months. His Secretary of Defense and top generals must not have looked at his web site lately. (I’m sure they’ve been busy.)

Retired Marine General James L. Jones, the incoming National Security Adviser, and ongoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and legacy Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are all on record as being opposed to withdrawal timelines. Jones has said a timeline would be “against our national interest.” Mullen warned that a deadline would be “dangerous,” and Gates objected to the 16-month plan during the presidential campaign.

General Ray Odierno, commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq and boy sidekick to David Petraeus, recently announced that U.S. troops would stay on in Iraqi cities beyond the summer deadline called for in the Status of Forces agreement. Gates, who was on a tour of the region blaming Iran for everything wrong in the world, didn’t say boo about Odierno’s public defiance of the agreement. That’s not surprising. In a recent article Foreign Affairs article, Gates Wrote, “there will continue to be some kind of U.S. advisory and counterterrorism effort in Iraq for years to come.” From the tenor of the rest of the piece, it sounded like he meant “years to come after 2011.”

The BFM work-around to ignoring international agreements and mandates from the commander in chief is pure magic:

Q: When are armed troops in a combat zone not combat troops?

A: When we call them something else.

Presto, change-o, give them a different name and grind the new president’s campaign promises into his eye like a broken whiskey bottle. Maybe the BFM expression for that sort of thing is “following orders from the bottom up.”

The folks who brought us war without end in Iraq are rolling out advance publicity of their planned sequel set in the Bananastans, and nobody, including Barack Obama, seems to notice or care. In propaganda art that’s called “desensitizing.”

Maybe we used up what was left of our national outrage on the Iran strike that never happened. Or maybe we have this waifish notion that Barack Obama couldn’t possibly let a bad thing like Iraq happen again.

Could he?

He sure isn’t stepping up to the plate on this Gaza atrocity, is he? Maybe he’s waiting for the Pentagon to give him permission.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Last week, at a meeting of his country’s ruling party, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Iran of “trying to devour the Arab states.” Don’t worry, Hosni. Iran won’t eat you. It can’t. It can’t sit on you either. It’s too far away.

What led Mubarak to say such a mean thing about Iran? Well, it seems that a bunch of Iranian students shouted a bunch of mean things at the Egyptian embassy in Tehran, including their apparently genuine wish that someone would hang Mubarak. The Iranian students shouted mean things about Mubarak because Egypt wouldn’t let the Iranian Red Crescent sneak around Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip and deliver food and supplies to Palestinians, who have been reduced to eating grass.

So Iran wasn’t trying to eat Arabs; it was trying to feed them. Gee, how did Mubarak get that story all backwards?

Mr. Congeniality

If there’s a big blue meanie in this scenario, it’s Mubarak, who for two years running has made Parade magazine’s “World’s Worst Dictators” list. Mubarak has stayed in power in Egypt for over a quarter century through military rule, torture, emergency law, rigged elections, and keeping his nose planted in Israel’s tohkes (and, by extension, America’s as well).

But if he says the Iranians are up to no good, the no goodniks, that’s good enough for us, because we’ve had years of Dick Cheney and his Iran Directorate telling us how bad Iran is.

Though they have yet to prove any of their allegations, the Cheney Gang has most of the world believing the Iranians are responsible for arming militants in Iraq. The world, mostly because of the mainstream media’s indolence, is largely unconscious that the party most responsible for handing out free guns to Iraqi yahooligans is General David Petraeus. Nor is the world especially cognizant that the reductions in violence that Petraeus so merrily takes credit for are actually the result of Iran brokering a peace agreement between Shiite factions headed by cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki.

The preponderance of the world believes Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, despite decisive statements by U.S. intelligence agencies that they abandoned their program in fall of 2003. The Russians didn’t begin building Iran’s first reactor until fall of 2002, so whatever nuclear program Iran had must have been the kind of thing a bunch of Revolutionary Guard colonels drew on the back of a napkin on a rainy afternoon Fort Farsi Officers’ Club. That U.S. intelligence granted the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program at all was almost certainly a result of pressure from Lord Cheney’s leg breakers.

The world perceives that Iran instigated Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon because of allegations like the one made by the Israeli cabinet that Lebanon had become infested with “Iranian-sponsored terrorist enclaves of murder.” This perception endures despite the discoverable big block facts in the Lebanon conflict: the Israelis were the ones who blew the bejesus out of southern Lebanon, and the Persian Iranians were the ones who came in afterward and offer aid to injured and homeless Arabs despite attempts by the nice guy Arabs in Turkey and Saudi to stop them.

And now the Persian Shiite Iranians are the ones trying to help Sunni Palestinian Arabs in Gaza who the Israelis are starving, and it’s Egyptian Sunni Arab Mubarak who’s assisting Israel and who’s trying to paint Iran as the bad guy.

Welcome to your Brave New World Order, fellow citizens. Black is white, up is down, scumbags rule, humanitarian works are acts of aggression and so say the round heeled news media.

Witness this statement from January 2008 by the British Telegraph: “Iran is known to use humanitarian aid to further its political aims around the region.”

Stunning humbuggery. Simply stunning.

And everybody knows, of course, that the Iranians want to get their mitts on nuclear weapons so they can blow Israel off the map because that’s what their president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. Well, actually, nobody knows that because that’s not what Ahmadinejad said. He was actually quoting the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and according to Professor Juan Cole and other Farsi speaking commentators, Ahmadinejad’s exact words were “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

But everybody says he said he wants to nuke Israel off the face of the earth, and what everybody says is what passes for gospel truth in our Rovewellian age.

Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons or a program to make any. It may or may not have ballistic missiles that will reach Israel, but without nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles are little more than multi-million dollar popguns. Iran’s army can’t project power more than ten miles beyond its borders, Iran’s air force can’t fly to the other side of the Persian Gulf, and its bathtub navy, while an effective coastal and choke point denial force, couldn’t go toe-to-to with the Somali pirates because it would sink of natural causes before it got halfway to Africa.

Iran can’t do much to our troops in Iraq. If—and this is a big if—they manage to talk the Shiite militias into throwing themselves against the fence in an all out assault on our forces, so what? You couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to wipe out the Shiite militias. You hear speculation that Iran might mobilize Hamas and Hezbollah against our Iraq enclaves, but what would they use to mobilize them? Flying carpets?

A lot of folks also believe the talk that Iran might incite the rest of the Middle East into a full-blown major regional conflict, but how on earth are the Middle Eastern nations going to fight each other? The past 50 years or so have clearly demonstrated that none of them can successfully project conventional military power into any of their neighbors’ territories, much less any other countries in the area. Iran’s maritime forces might be able to close the Strait of Hormuz briefly, and could very well pull our Navy’s pants around its ankles in broad daylight, but Iran would only do that if we attacked it for no real reason.

And as we’ve discussed, we have no real reason to attack Iran. We have no real reason to demonize them the way we have been either, except that making a boogie man out of the Persians is the best thing the warmongery has left to justify staying in Iraq, something they seem intent on doing despite the agreement young Mr. Bush just signed that says we’ll leave.

_____

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Naomi Klein on the ease of accessing Iraq’s oil, as opposed to elsewhere: “. . . stick a straw in the ground and suck.”

Don Banks of Si.com on Brett Favre’s appearance on Greta Van Susteren’s show: “For a minute there I thought Favre might have some new information on the Natalee Holloway disappearance.”

Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times reports that international talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions ended in deadlock on Saturday: “. . . for some, it is hard to understand why the Americans have made a diplomatic gesture. . . at this time. America’s negotiating partners, particularly Britain, had wanted an American presence when they traveled to Tehran last month to present an enhanced package of incentives.” Besides, this time, Iranians had give no “strong signal that it was going to be different from the past.” Like going to the Security Council before invading Iraq, maybe it’s just a pro forma step on the part of the administration preceding an attack, or sanctioning one by Israel, on Iran.

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com: “The American elites are unanimous in their verdict that the US must establish and maintain an American enclave in the Middle East: the only debate’ is over where the main forward base is to be located. McCain says Iraq, and Obama prefers Afghanistan.”

Laura Rozen at Mother Jones actually got David Wurmser, former Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk: “What those in the administration who don’t want Israel to act probably won’t want is for [the matter] to be taken to the highest level. They would always be afraid that [the president] might not be so tough on the Israelis. If the Israeli [government] really intends to do something, they would go to the highest level without a lot of people knowing.”

The Washington Post’s Ann Scott Tyson quotes Defense Secretary Robert Gates on our militarized foreign policy: “‘We cannot kill or capture our way to victory’ in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.”

In “Who’s killing aid workers in Somalia?” Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times writes: “Some Western security analysts theorize that in the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who may be the government’s last hope for survival.”

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, an account of how our torture regime came into existence: “I personally doubt there will be large-scale legal repercussions inside America for those who devised and implemented ‘The Program.’ . . . My guess is that the real accountability for President Bush will be in the history books, not the court room.”

At Politico, John Bresnahan writes: “Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November. ‘They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on everything,’ groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. ‘They are kind of insufferable at this point.’”

At In These Times, Terry Allen writes that, as an aging man, McCain is “on numerous drugs for a panoply of age-appropriate ailments: Hydrochlorothiazide for kidneys, Simvastatin for high cholesterol, occasional Ambien CR for sleeplessness, aspirin to prevent blood clots, and Zyrtec and Claritin for allergies. The amiloride he takes to preserve potassium in the blood also lowers blood pressure.” As Allen says, age-appropriate — and that’s the problem.

James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation: “With the death of the IndyMac Bank last week, and. . . Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac laying side-by-side in the EMT van on IV drips, headed for the Federal Reserve’s ever more crowded intensive care unit, there was a sense of the American Dream having passed through the. . . opening of a black hole.”

Brian McKenna at Smirking Chimp on skin cancer: “Australia and New Zealand have the highest melanoma rates on the planet and as a result have taken dramatic public health measures to fight the disease. They have a ‘No Hat, No Play‘ rule. Every child must wear a hat to play outside. Recess times are often scheduled outside the 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. time frame. Soccer games, played without hats under the high sun in the U.S. are delayed till a safer time Down Under. Children have begun wearing neck-to-knee swimsuits on beaches and at pools.”

At Alternet Ursula Sautter and Mary Desmond Pinkowish write about noise pollution: “‘We have lost our rights to enjoy our own property without the intrusion of noise,’ says Ted Rueter, founder and director of Noise Free America. ‘Noise is a form of trespassing.’”

Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone has written a less-than-complimentary book about her. On her marriage to Sean Penn: “Sean also loves his friend, the writer Charles Bukowski, who lumbers into the house, day or night, blind drunk and puking. The moment he arrives, my sister escapes into the bedroom, disgusted. She loathes few things more than an undisciplined drunk.”

Sports

Former Oakland Raiders star receiver Tim Brown on what’s got into Brett Favre: “If this was anybody else, this wouldn’t be a conversation, because they’d be like, ‘Man, you’re retired. Go on about your business. What’s wrong with you?’”

“That’s Manny” Department

Writes Dan Shaughnessy in the Boston Globe: “However, two innings later, he looked positively hideous when he turned Maicer Izturis’s shallow pop behind short into a triple. Manny flopped on the field like a seal and didn’t know where the ball was until he realized he was sitting on it. Manny got a good chuckle out of his blunder as the Sox were being routed. Sitting behind the backstop in the front row, Theo Epstein did not appear amused. Ditto for No. 1 enabler Francona.”