WhirledView

One Thing at a Time

by CKR

The Washington Post and The Guardian reported David Albright’s observations of a new heavy-water reactor being built at Pakistan’s nuclear complex. Now the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick tells us that the Bush administration says it knew about this all along, but didn’t want to tell Congress. Or anyone.

The deal to allow nuclear trade between the United States and India is making its way through Congress and will be debated tomorrow (26 July) in the House of Representatives. India, like Pakistan, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the third nonsigner being Israel.

The joint effort between the United States and Russia to secure Russia’s nuclear materials seems to be breaking down. That’s supposed to be a key part of keeping those materials out of the hands of terrorists.

The Bush administration deals with nuclear matters as it does all foreign policy: one thing at a time. But the world isn’t structured that way: countries have good or bad relations with others besides the United States, and what the United States does can affect those relations.

Here are my—Oink! Oink!—Signing Statements

By PLS

As a red-blooded, authentic, native-born American, I am entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet my god-given life is hemmed in by laws and regulations that give me grief from the time I get up to the time I finally fall asleep.

And—stupid me!—I had been obeying them. I thought the so-called rule of law was a good thing. I figured we were all in it together, each one of us, on an equal basis, so I was meekly paying all my taxes and stopping at red lights and teaching my kids that contracts are a sacred trust.

But little by little I woke up to the fact that George Orwell was right. I was acting like a self-defeating sheep, while the pigs, especially the really big porkers, were throwing their weight around. Oink! Oink!

Fortunately our President showed me the way to freedom, the way to true liberty, and my cup of happiness runneth over. Presented with a law not to his liking, I discovered, George W. Bush brazenly ignored it or reinterpreted it.

After all, what’s the use of being President if you aren’t free to do whatever you damn please? As one of those fancy French kings so famously said, “L’etat—c’est moi! I am the state!”

So this is what I decided: Mr. President, I’m with you. My motto from now on is: “The law–I’m it!”

1. The Tax Code is what I say it is, but I’m not going to evade it stupidly. Just try and catch me —Ya! Ya! Ya! The auditors who know the loopholes have been axed, and I’m not one of those Welfare Queens collectors love to squeeze for pennies.

“And we wonder why they hate us . . .”

By PHK

"And we wonder why they hate us . . ." Pat Buchanan

It’s clear that the Bush administration gave the Israeli government the high sign to launch an attack against Hezbollah and destroy Lebanon as part of the collateral damage well before the bombardment began. This administration’s “hands-off” so as to allow the Israelis time to “crush” Hezbollah before sending twinkle-toes Condi to the region to do the diplomatic shuffle at least a week too late is so different from every other U.S. administration’s approach to wars in the Middle East that it should be viewed with incredulity. But then, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. And one can only speculate as to the role the controversial and pro-Israel Elliott Abrams, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, played when he was in the region representing the White House just as this latest crisis was about to spin out of control.

This is not "our war"

Bill Kristol may claim that it’s “our war” and Ken Mehlman, of the Republican National Committee, may exuberantly exhort at a gathering of Christians United for Israel that “today, we are all Israelis!" and they may all think that it’s just fine to allow the once-upon-a-time victim now neighborhood bully to destroy schools, churches, mosques, shops, homes, grapes, grape arbors as well as kids playing in the schoolyards, but I come down on the Pat Buchanan side of this conflict.

We are not Israelis; this is not "our war;" we did not provoke Hezbollah and Hezbollah did not provoke us. Or vice versa, depending upon how one chooses to characterize the relationship. Just as it is not in our interest to set Hezbollah against us, it is not our interest to have our public face abroad besmirched even further than has already happened under this administration simply because this time the Israelis can’t control their own military and W won’t remind them that the U.S. foots the bill.

And just how many Americans including those “Christians United for Israel” know that Lebanon has a sizeable and influential Christian population? Or that our tax dollars paid for the IDF bombs used against them too?

Sunday Reading

by CKR

I was planning to go to a Sunday afternoon band concert (Washington Post march promised - dee-dum-de-didddly-da-dee-dee - I am a sucker for John Philip Sousa), but a very rumbly raincloud is moving overhead, so I'll put on a cd and work through the good stuff I found this morning. Then maybe I'll get my e-mail running regularly.

Rodger Payne provides a succinct observation that capability no longer seems to be a part of threat assessments. I've been wanting to write about this for some time, and, since I have some things to add to what Rodger has said, I probably will.

Zev Chafets doesn't care that the Christian pre-millenialists expect the Jews to convert or die at the final call, as long as they support Israel. Loonies are okay as long as they support your program. Or perhaps the concept of useful idiots isn't dead on either side of that friendship.

Wondering why North Korea hasn't collapsed economically yet? Stephen Mihm explains their counterfeiting operations, as far as an outsider can infer what's going on. It's easier to keep the economy going if you can just print dollars. And they do it quite well.

Nicholas Sambanis concludes that we may call what is going on in Iraq a civil war. Dana Priest also did, somewhat less academically, in her Thursday chat (scroll to the very bottom). Thomas Ricks treats us to some of the material from his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Not too many surprises there; it sounds like this book brings together a lot of things we've suspected and sort of known into a coherent story of how the US missed opportunities to slow or defeat the insurgency before it started. He notes something else I've been wanting to write about: how stuff that seems obvious to some of us was rejected or ignored.

Naturally, there's a lot on Israel and its enemies. The New York Times has a rather complex graphic purporting to illuminate the conflicts in the region. I don't think it does, but there are a number of tidbits that may be helpful. If there's one takeaway message, it's all the hostility links to and from Israel and Iran. Clearly the two problem centers in the region.

David Bosco presents a number of scenarios for a World War III [roll eyes] expansion of the current conflict. Some are considerably less likely than others, but the point is that it's not at all difficult to imagine ways that armed conflict could start in any number of places.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb is concerned that Hezbollah is overconfident and overreaching and that the overreach on both sides means that bloodier battles are yet to come. Ned Temko worries about another occupation of Lebanon by Israel and wonders if Israel's leaders have learned from history.

The Bush administration's theory on democratization of the Middle East, as I understand it, is that Iraq's keystone position made it the central candidate for a model democracy that would cause other countries in the region to become democratic. The trouble is, things don't seem to be working out that way. Anatol Lieven argues that the United States's strategy in the region has collapsed into a remake of Israel's as the democratization project fails. Noah Feldman takes note of the new subnations of Hamas and Hezbollah, how Israel is addressing their threat, and the complexity they add to negotiations in that area, another topic on which I'd like to write more. Robert Worth surveys a number of Middle Eastern scholars on the topic of democratization and America's role. Jason Burke looks at the Shia resurgence.

[I had to take a few minutes off in the middle of composing this post. When I put my two Sousa cd's on shuffle, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" came up first, one version following the other. Too much happiness for this old piccolo player. I hope the neighbors didn't mind.]

War Talk

by CKR

The Bush administration proclaimed its “War on Terror” shortly after September 11, 2001. That phrase has morphed through a number of revisions.

More recently, a coterie of pundits, desirous of more war, are trying to decide whether we are in World War III, IV, or V this week. Keeping score, as it were.

I hate to repeat myself or others, but I suppose it’s a natural outcome of the intersection of blogging and politics. But the rhetoric of war is important, it seems to me, so let’s look at this concatenation of wars.

Escalation - Update 6

by CKR

Israel isn't about to leave Lebanon alone, but my sense this morning is that the US and others are less likely to jump into the fray. That could change in about five minutes, though, and those in the US who love war are still advocating for more of it.

The United States is removing some of its citizens from the war zone, although it seems less capable in this regard than other countries. I'm wondering whether this is a problem of those on the ground there or those in Washington, who are insisting on all the proper bureaucratic procedures to cover their careers, just as they insist that American embassies repel all invaders, including the friendly type--those who might want to study in the US or just visit.

The LA Times has an editorial that considers the larger picture, and the Rand Corporation provides the Washington Post with a rather insipid set of suggestions for what to do in the Middle East. I'll venture into some of the strategic territory, I hope within the next two days, but my project for today is making my new pc operational. The old one melted down a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure all the pieces are here, though.

I just have to comment on this. Lindsay has it right, but I think that most of us who have experienced this kind of attack can feel Angela Merkel's horror and humiliation. It's a power play, I can touch you at will because I'm the one in charge, and the surprised reaction, sometimes angry, serves to humiliate the victim as the perpetrator plays innocent. Too many bad memories there.

Bush seems to be blind to the consequences of physicality beyond the fratboy level. My pet peeve is his wide-open legs when he is seated with, Jacques Chiraq or Tony Blair, who have their legs neatly crossed, trouser creases evident. It happened again at the G8 meeting. He's got people to advise him on these things; there is no excuse for a president to behave this way or to grope Merkel.

I'm particularly puzzled (in a geopolitical sense) that he would single out Merkel in this way. She has been much friendlier to the US than was her predecessor. Humiliating someone who's bucking the tide to befriend you hardly seems smart. Maybe Bush just couldn't resist the temptation to show his power over a woman and Germany. Maybe he just isn't able to make such calculations.

I've got an additional thought on this and the open mike incident, though. Russian tv was there in both cases. Could it be payback? That's the trouble with being a goodoldboy and doing diplomacy your way; it opens things up for others to do it theirs.

War Hungry, War Wary or War Weary?

By PHK

Once upon a time before 2001, the U.S. played a balancing role in the Middle East – helping to keep the lid on when things started to spin out of control. Yes, we were seen as Israel’s greatest protector. But we also had credibility with the Arabs and others precisely because they knew we could, and would, keep Israel in check. This was long standing bipartisan policy based on a rational understanding of how things worked in this volatile part of the world. One can certainly argue that the importance of keeping the world’s major concentration of oil flowing and at a reasonable price was part of the calculation. This hard-headed realism was balanced against an emotional attachment to Israel founded on the horrors of the Holocaust and the power of the hard line Jewish lobby in Washington.

You would think the Bush2 administration would have understood the importance of playing the balancer to keep the oil flowing at a reasonable price, but obviously not. W prefers to wing it - basing his decisions upon the ill-begotten advice of an unholy alliance of neoconservative warmongers and fundamentalist onward-Christian soldiers who got this country mired in Iraq and then, since March 2003, turned us into a pariah nation in the hearts and minds of much of the world. Now some Bush and Cheney advisors and their right wing cheerleader columnists and ideologues are clamoring to engulf the entire Middle East in flames – but could that be just part of their larger plan? W, himself, doesn’t seem to have a policy, a plan or anything else except to let Israel’s generals destroy the fruits of last year’s Cedar Revolution that brought fragile democracy to neighboring Lebanon as the Syrian troops retreated.

Neocon Middle East plan still in play?

If I remember correctly, the neocon plan for the Middle East drawn up by Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Douglas Feith and others that they first tried to hawk unsuccessfully to Likud drew the line to Jerusalem first through Baghdad and then Tehran. The group of eight drafters didn’t mean for the plan to become reality through diplomatic negotiations either. They continue today to see the world in military terms. Wurmser is Cheney’s Middle East advisor and Wurmser’s wife, Meyrav, another neocon and member of the group of eight, cofounded MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), a pro-Israeli Washington-based think tank with a singularly opaque webpage. This is a not-for-profit organization with a questionable reputation.

The U.S. obligingly, invaded Iraq three years ago implementing the first step in the neocon plan that the Israelis had smartly rejected. But the second step didn’t happen because Iraq has proven far more of a handful than the-road-to-Jerusalem-through-Baghdad-Tehran-and-Damascus architects expected. Neither were the Iranian clerics destabilized as the “brilliant” strategist Wurmser had predicted. Since the Ahmadinejad government has been even more intransigent than its predecessor, the possibility of convincing Iran to stop its support for Hezbollah’s low-intensity warfare against Israel along the lines of Wurmser’s plan is like attempting to convince Stalin to keep his mitts off the Baltics in 1939.

For the past year, however, it’s been pretty clear that certain elements of the Israeli government – perhaps hardliners, generals or military intelligence? - have been trying to push the U.S. into destroying Iran’s nuclear processing sites by claiming that Iran’s capability of producing a nuclear weapon was not much more than a year a way. This tall tale which pops up every so often like the intrepid rabbit munching happily in my vegetable garden, has, however, failed to wash with the nuclear experts in the U.S. and at the IAEA.

More rational heads have prevailed thus far including some disaffected ex-neocons as well as high level U.S. military officers who have had their fill of American military involvement in the Iraq debacle.

They question: 1) the lack of credible intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program and 2) the difficulty of taking out any number of underground sites militarily. They also point out that Iran is far larger, more populous and more cohesive than Iraq and that a military attack against the country would more likely solidify support for the clerics and Ahmadinejad than cause the regime to crumble. Then there’s the issue of the disruption of the flow of oil from Iran and Saudi Arabia if the Straits of Hormuz are blocked.

None of this, however, seems to dissuade the Israeli government from using a disproportionate show of force against the Palestinians and in particular the Iranian-funded Hezbollah. There’s an excellent post by Ilan Pappe “What does Israel Want?” on The Electronic Intifada, July 14 that explains why: Israeli generals itching for a fight in which they can use all the tools of modern military warfare to crush, once and for all, their enemies without understanding that no amount of firepower or advanced weaponry can quell a low intensity guerrilla war. And a weak Israeli defense minister and prime minister who have given the generals their head.

Tuesday Bird Blogging

by CKR

I’ve been collecting bird observations in the hope of getting some photos to post. But the birds have been very wary. Finally, a flock of piñon jays gave me my chance.

They’ve flown into the neighborhood every day for the last four or five. Their cries are many and distinctive, partway between a caw, a scrub jay’s squawk, and a dove’s coo, sort of “cawrrrr.” They are usually after the piñon nuts, so I was a bit surprised to see them so soon, before the nuts are mature, but this time was no exception, and I have the evidence.

Another regular morning visitor has been a Cooper’s or sharp-shinned hawk (pictures in that order). They’re similar looking, and this one has been elusive. He glides between my house and the one next door, toward my backyard and an open area below. The books say that these hawks can take birds up to the size of doves, and there are lots of those. One morning, he stopped on my porch railing, enough for me to see his long yellow legs and striped underside, but definitely not for a photo. As soon as I brought my camera up to my face, he was gone. If I had to guess from these two photos, I’d say it was a sharp-shinned hawk. The railing is a nice perch from which to survey the yard, though, so I’m hoping he’ll be back, although I haven’t seen him since the piñon jays arrived.
Speaking of unconventional feeding stations, the flycatcher pair were back to check out the squirrel situation, but fly activity has slowed down a lot. So has the smell. I can’t say I’m too unhappy about that.