A Dreadful Tale of What America Has Become Under Obama

Aung San Suu Kyi, Omar Khadr, and Barack Obama

A Dreadful Tale of What America Has Become

by John Chuckman / November 17th, 2009 / Dissident Voice

During his trip to Asia, President Obama called for the government of Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted dissident who has spent years under house arrest.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist — an American no less — with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

John Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. Copyright © 2007 by John Chuckman. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Children, Obama, Torture, War Crimes.

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Mother Jones

Mr. President: Time to Quit Fibbing and Spinning

I’ll always knock on doors for Obama. But on the climate, we need more than rhetoric and excuses.

by Bill McKibben

Nearly two decades after writing a book that popularized the term "global warming," MoJo contributing writer Bill McKibben founded 350.org. He is chronicling his journey into organizing with a series of columns leading up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen this December. You can find the others here. And you can put yourself on the cover of MoJo's special issue on climate change here.

Two caveats. First, early in the primary season, when I was asked to join Environmentalists for Obama, I signed on immediately. I knocked on doors, made phone calls, gave money, and celebrated his victory-I think he's the best president of my lifetime.

Second, Obama has done much that's right about climate, including surround himself with a stellar staff of advisers. From auto mileage to green stimulus spending, he's done more to deal with global warming than all of the presidents combined in the 20 years that it's been an issue.

But that's a pretty low bar. And the announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is-as it has been for the last two decades-the United States.

And in fact none of this should come as a surprise to anyone paying attention. For a year now it's been clear that the president is not particularly focused on applying the political pressure that would have been necessary to reach any kind of pact, much less one that approaches what the science demands. Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year. He talked very little about climate, tending instead to talk about green jobs and energy security, and in the process left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day. And then-as with health care-he left it pretty much entirely up to Congress to write the necessary legislation. That kept him from having to bear the blame for a byzantine bill, but it also meant that the Senate-the body from which he came, and whose culture he had to know-could work in its usual style, without White House pressure. Which at the moment means that Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham are essentially rewriting the legislation, to what end no one really knows.

The real tip-off of Obama's unwillingness to lead, however, has been the endless spinning of his climate negotiators. For 12 months they have been fibbing about the science-reiterating over and over again that their goal is the "scientific standard" of 450 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's no longer scientifically accurate-in the last two years, since the rapid Arctic melt in the summer of 2007, scientists have made it clear that a treaty that aimed at 450 ppm would be a treaty that left the planet free of ice, a planet where many current nations would disappear beneath the waves. We're at 390 now-we're already too high. The 450 number came from the various graphs and tables of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-but Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC, has said repeatedly in the last year that that science is out of date. Recently, asked why he'd endorsed a 350 target instead, he said, "As a human being, I just couldn't keep quiet in the face of all this overwhelming evidence. I know it's probably not right for me to take a position such as this, but on the other hand, I think it would be totally immoral on my part not to take a position, so I came out and said so."

By contrast, the Obama administration's position has been that a tough treaty is politically unrealistic-that the Senate would never pass it. That's certainly true, at least for the moment. But the White House is starting to use the Senate in the same way that the Bush administration used China-as a scapegoat for doing too little. You don't get to blame the Senate if you haven't pushed the Senate as hard as you possibly can. It would take a huge commitment of presidential leadership, the sacrifice of large amounts of political capital, to change political reality. It would also take a movement of citizens-which we've tried hard to build. Three weeks ago we at 350.org organized what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." Many prime ministers, environmental ministers, and foreign ministers participated-heck, the president of the Maldives convened an underwater Cabinet meeting to make the point about how desperate the situation was. We asked the White House if anyone-some spare undersecretary of something-might come to one of the 2,000 demonstrations across the United States. They couldn't find a soul.

They'll have another chance. With groups around the world, 350.org will help organize candlelight vigils across the planet on the weekend of December 12. Many will take place at American embassies and consulates. Not because anyone is anti-American. Because everyone remains hopeful that America will finally help lead to solve the problem that it, far more than any other nation, caused.

None of this is easy. (I haven't even mentioned the obscenely low amounts of money the administration and Congress are talking about appropriating for the foreign aid that will be required to help developing countries adapt to the global warming America has caused.) But all of it is easier than trying to deal with the world that's coming at us faster every day we don't act. Pressuring Senate Republicans (or coal-fired Democrats) is hard; pressuring physics and chemistry is harder still. In fact, it's impossible. That's why this is different than health care reform or financial re-regulation. You have to actually meet the scientific standard, not just do better than George Bush.

And of course, politically, Obama doesn't need to do it. He doesn't need to worry about environmentalists abandoning him for someone else-he'll always be the preferable choice, and I'll always be out there knocking on doors for him. But his legacy won't depend on the shiny medal the Norwegians hang around his neck next month; it will depend, more than anything else, on whether or not he really tackles the biggest problem the planet faces. There is still time for him to make the crucial difference, but not if his administration continues in fib-and-spin mode. At the same meeting in Singapore where he made it clear that Copenhagen would not negotiate a new climate treaty, he invited all the other APEC leaders to meet in 2011 in Hawaii, adding, "I look forward to seeing you all decked out in flowered shirts and grass skirts." Whatever-that sounds more like his giggly, sophomoric predecessor than the leader we desperately need.

© 2009 Mother Jones

Bill McKibben is the author of many books, including his latest: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future . McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and cofounder of 350.org.

Obama's Health Care Deformity

Published on Monday, November 16, 2009 by The Alburquerque Journal

Health Deform

by Carol Miller

A very complex, mandatory private insurance scheme recently passed the U.S. House. The public is being overwhelmed by sound bites on one hand about how great it is, on the other, how terrible. We are hearing few of the details that are actually in the bill. Having read the bill, it is clear now that what started as health reform has emerged from the political process as health "deform," building on the worst, not the best of the current system.

It is still a toss-up as to whether the Senate will pass any bill this year. However, due to intense political pressure, the Senate is likely to pass a bill that will make some House provisions better and others worse. What actually comes out in the final conference-committee bill is anyone's guess at this point - so little time, so many deals still to be made, so many political funders to be appeased.

A careful analysis of the bill shows that it is designed more for political goals than to eliminate financial barriers to health care. For example, the actual coverage doesn't even begin until 2013, opportunistically after the next presidential election, in 2012. Run on having accomplished "historic reform" but before anyone actually experiences how bad it is? How cynical is that?

Yes, there are some good provisions. The best relate to improving existing programs like the Indian Health Service, community health centers, and health professionals education and training; all are important for New Mexico.

But there bad provisions, which comprise most of the 1,990 pages of the bill. Five key reasons this legislation must be stopped:

• If passed, this law will move the U.S. farther from universal health care, making it harder than ever to accomplish health care justice in the future. If Congress does not have the courage to stand up to the private insurance industry now, it will be even more difficult in the future, especially after giving the industry trillions of new dollars through this terrible legislation. Let's call this what it is: another corporate bailout on the backs of working people.

Pay attention to your federal representatives as they carefully talk about "health insurance reform." They aren't talking about health reform any more. Congress could have defended and built up a system based on popular, high-quality government-run health programs like the military and veterans fully socialized health systems or Medicare, a single-payer program. Instead, the president and Congress let the corporations and government-haters take control of the agenda.

• The legislation institutionalizes permanent inequality in health care. Unlike Medicare where all beneficiaries have a single plan, this bill further divides the U.S. system into tiers based on ability to pay. It creates basic, enhanced, premium and premium-plus plans. A basic plan will provide only 70 percent of the coverage of a "reference benefit package," one that includes even fewer services than most insured people have today. The bill doesn't even mention coverage for essential services like vision and adult dental care except in the most costly premium-plus plan.

• Out-of-pocket costs remain sky high. Everyone will be required to pay monthly insurance premiums. Some low-wage workers will receive taxpayer subsidies on a sliding scale. The lowest income people will have full subsidies. But remember, this is not money for care, it is support only to buy insurance.

Almost everyone will have to meet a deductible, capped in the bill at $1,500 a year, higher than most insurance-plan deductibles today. On top of this, insurance companies can charge even more under various "cost sharing" schemes for items like co-pays and co-insurance.
The bill puts a cap on cost sharing, but the total amount is obscene. The cap for an individual is $5,000 a year and for a family it is $10,000 before the plan must cover everything. Well, not exactly everything. Even after paying this huge amount of money, the legislation still allows the corporations to make us pay, billing for non-network providers and, since it is not a comprehensive benefit package, we are still on our own to pay for health care that the plans refuse to cover.

The legislation creates a law to let these corporations increase what they charge people as they get older. In fact, they can be charged up to twice as much as younger people for identical coverage.

• The legislation makes it illegal to not buy health insurance. The penalties are described in a section of the legislation called "Shared Responsibility." This will let the IRS impose a tax of up to 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income for not having health insurance. People on the financial edge, people fighting foreclosure to stay in their homes or people who are unemployed all or part of a year will not be able to afford the insurance premiums or the penalties for not having insurance.

• We will all be drowning in paperwork, which will continue to drive up administrative costs. Right now, insurance administrative waste is about 30 percent of every health care dollar- or about $1 billion a day. Adding more people to an insurance-based system will result in even more money going into this bottomless pit.

As if this isn't bad enough, the government will be setting up many new agencies to oversee the whole process including, at the top, the Orwellian Health Choices Administration, headed by the Health Choices Commissioner. This is not an agency to help us make health care choices, but to choose a health insurance company. The IRS will play a very large role in everything from certifying our income for subsidies to monitoring and taxing people who don't buy insurance.

Health Insurance Exchanges will be created across the country with at least one in every state offering both Web sites and telephone assistance. This is where we will go every year to pick our insurance plan in an open enrollment period of at least 30 days between September and November. We can add this unpleasant task to all of our other fall chores.

It is hard to imagine the chaos and wasted resources with the entire country picking insurance plans at the same time, attended by marketing, billboards, advertising and misinformation. We will gamble as we choose a plan, decide which corporation will be the best for us, hoping we pick one that is not dominated by corporate bureaucrats focused on rationing care to maximize their profits. It is not an easy task and if a wrong plan is selected, we are stuck for a year, until the next national open enrollment cycle.

The United States can do better. We can build on a strengthened and well-funded Medicare program. In Medicare, when a person reached the age of eligibility or is determined to qualify because they have a permanent disability, they are in, and there is no re-enrollment.

Imagine real reform, as simple as adding people ages 55 to 65 years old to Medicare in 2010, 35-55 in 2011, and so on until everyone is included by 2013. The bills that promote this kind of reform are under 200 pages, they are simple to implement, cost effective and equitable. Choose a doctor, choose a hospital when needed and let the government pay the bills. Everyone in one system.
That is what real health reform would look like.

© 2009 The Alburquerque Journal

Miller is a long-time public health professional and health care advocate. She lives in Ojo Sarco.

Obama's Intentional State of Collapse

Intentional because the task was given to Rahm Immanuel

Published on Sunday, November 15, 2009 by The New Statesman

A State of Collapse

Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to strengthen “co-operation between peoples”, but his attempts to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together have failed

by Edward Platt

Since 2003, we have been told repeatedly that the principles of the "two-state solution" envisaged in the so-called road map will lead to a peaceful settlement in the Middle East; and since Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president ten months ago, we have been told that he is preparing to put them into practice. Yet far from leading to the fulfilment of the "two-state solution", Obama's presidency seems more likely to lead to its demise. The committee that awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize cited his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples", but his attempts to force the Israelis and Palestinians into meaningful negotiations have only revealed the differences between them, and how empty the concept of the two-state solution has become.

On 4 November, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said what is supposedly the unsayable - that unless settlement expansion stops, Palestinians may have to abandon the goal of an independent state. Even the compliant Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, was forced to acknowledge that the Israelis had put him in an impossible position: already gravely weakened by his hastily retracted decision to help defer a vote at the UN on the Goldstone report on human rights abuses during Israel's offensive in Gaza last December and January, he admitted that he can no longer justify his conciliatory stance as a means of winning concessions. He has since announced he will not stand for office in elections to be held in the Palestinian territories in January.

Yet the deadlock had been apparent for some time. The speech made by Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, on 14 June, in which he endorsed for the first time the notion of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, was reported as a "historic" breakthrough, but it fell far short of acknowledging Israel's internationally recognised obligations. The demilitarised entity that he envisaged in the West Bank barely merited being called a "state". Meanwhile, Hamas has attached similarly sweeping provisos to the idea of establishing a state within pre-1967 borders. "Hamas struggles for an end to occupation and for the restoration of our people's rights, including their right to return home," Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, said in an interview in the New Statesman two months ago.

There are now more than four million descendants of the Palestinians made homeless refugees by the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49. Some would say their right to return is symbolic, others that it is a matter of personal conscience which no politician can barter away. Yet, given that its implementation in even a partial way would mean the end of Israel in its current form, insisting on such a condition is nothing more than a restatement of the cause of the original conflict. As Hussein Agha and Robert Malley put it in the New York Times earlier this year, "Acceptance of the two-state solution signals continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle by other means".

Israel's determination to resist meaningful compromises is apparent in the way it confronted the Obama administration over the "natural growth" of settlements. Israel maintains that people who are born in a settlement in the occupied territories should be allowed to live there when they grow up, and that the settlements should be allowed to expand "naturally" to accommodate them. It is an absurd argument: research suggests that "natural growth" includes significant numbers of incomers with no previous connections to the settlements. And besides, it does not address the existence of the settlements themselves. Yet it has served Israel's purpose: "It has provided a smokescreen behind which Israel can pursue more significant and urgent construction that, when completed, will truly render the occupation irreversible," says Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

The Jerusalem Light Rail, or JLR, is a case in point. The construction of Line 1, which is intended to run from the settlement-suburb of Pisgat Ze'ev in the north-east of the city to Mount Herzl in the west, is three years behind schedule, but in the past month or so the tracks have begun to climb the hill past the medieval walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. What used to be a four-lane road has been reduced to two, with inevitable effects.

One Sunday evening last month, I took a taxi back to my hotel in east Jerusalem. When we reached the north-west corner of the Old City, my driver gestured at the cars queuing down the hill towards Damascus Gate, just beyond the commonly accepted divide with the Palestinian quarters. He believed the JLR would not persuade drivers to leave their cars at home - in the long run, he said, it would generate more congestion and pollution. Others believe it will have even more profound implications for Jerusalem's future: the scheme's planners say it is intended to fulfil the vision of the father of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, of a city with "modern neighbourhoods with electric lines" and "tree-lined boulevards", but critics say it will fulfil another element of Herzl's Eurocentric vision. "The true objective," says Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, "is to entrench irreversibly the 'Judaisation' of Jerusalem, and perpetuate its current reality as a unified city with a predominantly Jewish population under Israeli control." The international community does not recognise Israel's annexation of east Jerusalem after the Six Day War of 1967, which means that settlements such as Pisgat Ze'ev are built on illegally occupied land, yet the JLR will bind them closer to the Jewish districts in the western half of Jerusalem, and make the task of partitioning the city even harder.

Other events in the summer, such as the eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, and a series of announcements about planned building projects, provide further evidence of Israel's intention to preclude meaningful negotiations about the city's future. In September, it said it was beginning work on 500 new apartments in Pisgat Ze'ev, and in August it vowed to build on the important "E-1" site, which lies between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, and drives a wedge through the heart of the West Bank.

Elsewhere, Israel has been building bypasses in an attempt to redraw the map of the West Bank, continuing the construction of the hated "separation fence" and forcing thousands of people off their land by appropriating water required for irrigation. As Halper sees it, these actions were Israel's way of telling Obama to "go to hell" while he was preparing a peace plan to present at a UN summit in September.

Two states or one?

In the event, Obama failed to produce a plan of any kind. It was all that he could do to force Netanyahu and Abbas to shake hands in public. Abbas had always insisted that the resumption of negotiations would be dependent on a complete freeze in settlement building, and his position was officially endorsed by the US - in May, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said that the US "wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions". And yet, at the end of last month, she made the extraordinary statement that Netanyahu had made "unprecedented" concessions on "the specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements".

It isn't clear whether this pronouncement was a consequence of the undiminished influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a reflection of Obama's wavering will in the face of Israeli intransigence, or evidence of hidden tensions within the US administration, yet Clinton's distorted language suggests that even she was embarrassed to be mouthing such nonsense: the only "restraint" that Netanyahu has offered is to restrict settlement construction in the West Bank to 3,000 homes that have been approved already by the Israeli authorities, and he has not considered any halt to construction in east Jerusalem.

It was Clinton's announcement that prompt­ed Erekat to break diplomatic cover. He said that Netanyahu had issued the Palestinians with an absurd list of preconditions to restarting talks, insisting, among other things, that Jerusalem would remain the "eternal and united capital of Israel", that the issue of refugees would not be discussed, and that Israel would not withdraw to the pre-1967 borders. "This is dictation, and not negotiations," Erekat said.

Such tactics serve only to entrench the paradox at the heart of Israeli policy: by humiliating its so-called "partners for peace" in the Palestinian Authority, and hastening the demise of the two-state solution, it seems determined to bring about what the majority of its citizens fear most - the prospect of Jewish Israelis becoming a minority in a single, bi-national state. Barghouti opposes the colonisation of Palestinian land represented by projects such as the JLR, yet he is glad that it is rendering the two-state solution practically impossible. "For over 25 years, I've supported the unitary, secular, democratic state solution for historic Palestine, because I regard it as the most ethical solution to all involved. It reconciles the inalienable rights of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs with the acquired rights of Jewish Israelis," he says.

It may not be as simple as that. Israel's ultra-nationalists are preparing for the day when the Jews find themselves in a minority in historic Palestine by proposing legislation designed to shore up the Zionist vision of a Jewish state. The Netanyahu government has adopted a bill brought forward by the radical ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party of the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, which sanctions three years' imprisonment for anyone who mourns the nakba - the Palestinian name for the events of 1947-48, when hundreds of thousands of Arabs were driven from their homes, and the state of Israel was created. And earlier this year, the Israeli Knesset passed the preliminary reading of another bill proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu: an amendment to the citizenship law that includes an oath of allegiance and stipulates a year's imprisonment for anyone who publishes a "call that negates the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state".

Neither Israel's 1.5 million Arab citizens nor the even greater number of Palestinians in the West Bank who would become part of a putative "Greater Israel" could be expected to recognise the contradictory notion of a "Jewish and democratic" state. If the day came when a Jewish minority found itself presiding over an Arab majority, then the focus of both the domestic struggle and the diplomatic and international effort would have to change: instead of attempting to create two separate states, the emphasis would be on securing equal rights for all the new country's citizens. It is a situation with an obvious precedent: Israel is already accused of running an apartheid regime in the West Bank, and the BDS movement targeting Israel for boycott, divestment and sanctions is beginning to assume the dimensions of the one directed against South Africa in the 1980s.

The sanction solution

Some maintain that targeting Israel for sanctions has grave consequences for the fragile Palestinian economy, though its proponents say it is the only effective way to force Israel to comply with international law. Either way, the movement is gathering pace. In the past few months, it has scored some notable successes, including one in the fight against the JLR. The French company Veolia, which owns 5 per cent of the City Pass consortium contracted to operate the line after completion, has come under concerted pressure to withdraw from the project. In 2006, the Dutch ASN bank broke off financial relations with it because of its involvement in JLR, and earlier this year a French court heard a lawsuit by a pro-Palestinian group demanding the project be halted on the grounds that it violates international law. Barghouti claims Veolia has lost billion-dollar contracts around the world as a result, and in September the company said it intends to sell its stake in City Pass to the Israeli Dan Bus Company.

If, or when, it does so, the focus of the campaign will switch to another part of the consortium - the French power generation and urban transport group Alstom. "In the coming weeks, Alstom will feel the heat, particularly in Arab states where it has won lucrative contracts," says Barghouti. The BDS campaign also claims credit for precipitating the financial collapse of one of Israel's most high-profile businessmen, Lev Leviev, whose company, Africa-Israel, built settlements in the West Bank.

Yet it was the British TUC's decision in September to mount a partial boycott of Israeli goods that convinced Barghouti the Palestinians' "South African movement" had arrived: he believes the endorsement of BDS "will reverberate across the world". It may even prove more significant than the best efforts of the Nobel peace laureate and his team of negotiators.

© 2009 The New Statesman

Edward Platt is a contributing writer of the New Statesman. He is writing a book about the West Bank city of Hebron.

President Obama’s Opportunity to Speak Truth to Power

Part 2 – Rahm Emanuel Does It for Him

by Alan Hart / November 14th, 2009 / Dissident Voice

When I wrote and posted Part 1 of this article, I was, of course, aware that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of President Obama speaking truth to the power of Jewish America as it was represented at the General Assembly of The Jewish Federations of North America. The words I put into his mouth could only have been spoken by him if he was going to be true to his statement to Netanyahu and Abbas – “We must all take risks for peace”.

As it happened, Obama cancelled his scheduled contribution to the proceedings in order to address the memorial service for the 13 who were killed in the shooting on the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood in Texas. (At the risk of giving offense where none is intended, I have to say that I think the conference agenda could easily have been re-arranged to provide the President with an alternative podium slot if he had wanted it. He did, in fact, put in an appearance at a reception for Jewish leaders attending the conference, but he didn’t talk about foreign policy. Instead he delivered a 20-minute homily on Jewish values of charity and the importance of health care reform).

Obama’s place as the main speaker was taken by his chief of staff (and Zionism’s number one minder in the White House) Rahm Emanuel. Reviewing his address to conference as a whole, I saw no reason to disagree with what Paul Craig Roberts wrote. Emanuel “surrendered for his boss”.

It would seem that a very similar thought was in the mind of Uriel Heilman who wrote an analysis piece for the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency). Under the headline “Obama shifts to Israel’s corner, but tries not to show it,” Heilman noted that “when the chief of staff took to the podium… he sounded almost exactly like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day earlier”.

It’s true that Emanuel did say that “Israel must halt settlement construction on the West Bank” (not the occupied West Bank, just the West Bank); but in the context of his whole speech, that was mere lip-service to a presidential call that had been rejected by Netanyahu and served only to confirm that it’s Zionism’s stooges in Congress who call the policy shots on Israel/Palestine, not the White House.

According to Emanuel, Israel seeks a lasting peace. The truth telling of that day was left to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He said, in Paris, “Israel’s desire for peace seems to have completely vanished.” (That, of course, is not completely true. Israel does want peace, but not on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept).

Emanuel went on: “Make no mistake, the path toward peace is not one that Israel should be asked to walk alone” (my emphasis added). That, it seemed to me, was the chief of staff’s coded way of saying, “The Arabs are to blame for the fact the President’s efforts to kick-start a peace process are going nowhere”.

At the time of writing there are signs that the growing despair of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians will trigger a third intifada at a not too distant point in a foreseeable future.

In terms of realpolitik, there’s a case or saying that could be a good thing to the extent that Israel’s brutal suppression of it would probably inspire more global sympathy and support for the Palestinian claim for an acceptable amount of justice. But there’s a much stronger case for saying that it could be catastrophic for the Palestinians. A third intifada could give Zionism’s in-Israel mad men the pretext they will one day invent if they are not presented with it on a plate to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The price of President Obama’s refusal to tell truth to Jewish power might well be blood and destruction on a scale not yet seen in Israel/Palestine and far beyond.

Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle East and globally as a researcher, author, and a correspondent for ITN and the BBC. Read other articles by Alan, or visit Alan's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 9:01am and is filed under Israel/Palestine, Obama, Zionism.

Published on Sunday, November 1, 2009 by Salon.com

Obama's Latest Use of 'Secrecy' to Shield Presidential Lawbreaking

What was once depicted as a grave act of lawlessness -- Bush's NSA program -- is now deemed a vital state secret.

by Glenn Greenwald

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the "state secrets" privilege -- which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) -- to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government's domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday -- just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead -- as predicted -- the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration -- which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned -- and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

In the case of Shubert v. Bush, the Electronic Frontier Foundation represents numerous American citizens suing individual Bush officials, alleging that the Bush administration instituted a massive "dragnet" surveillance program whereby "the NSA intercepted (and continues to intercept) millions of phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans, with no connection to Al Qaeda, terrorism, or any foreign government" and that "the program monitors millions of calls and emails . . . entirely in the United States . . . without a warrant" (page 4). The lawsuit's central allegation is that the officials responsible for this program violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA and can be held accountable under the law for those illegal actions.

Rather than respond to the substance of the allegations, the Obama DOJ is instead insisting that courts are barred from considering the claims at all. Why? Because -- it asserted in a Motion to Dismiss it filed on Friday -- to allow the lawsuit to proceed under any circumstances -- no matter the safeguards imposed or specific documents excluded -- "would require the disclosure of highly classified NSA sources and methods about the TSP [Terrorist Surveillance Program] and other NSA activities" (page 8). According to the Obama administration, what were once leading examples of Bush's lawlessness and contempt for the Constitution -- namely, his illegal, warrantless domestic spying programs -- are now vital "state secrets" in America's War on Terror, such that courts are prohibited even from considering whether the Government was engaging in crimes when spying on Americans.

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama's argument is true -- that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government's surveillance activities, even when criminal -- doesn't that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn't that the logical conclusion from Obama's claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe?

Beyond that, just consider the broader implications of what is going on here. Even after they announced their new internal guidelines with great fanfare, the Obama administration is explicitly arguing that the President can break the law with impunity -- can commit crimes -- when it comes to domestic surveillance because our surveillance programs are so secret that national security will be harmed if courts are permitted to adjudicate their legality. As EFF put it last July (emphasis in original), government officials:

seek to transform a limited, common law evidentiary into sweeping immunity for their own unlawful conduct. . . . [They] would sweep away these vital constitutional principles with the stroke of a declaration, arrogating to themselves the right to immunize any criminal or unconstitutional conduct in the name of national security. . . .

For that reason, as EFF pointedly noted the last time the Obama DOJ sought to compel dismissal based on this claim: "defendants' motion is even more frightening than the conduct alleged in the Amended Complaint." Think about that argument: the Obama DOJ's secrecy and immunity theories are even more threatening than the illegal domestic spying programs they seek to protect. Why? As EFF explains (click image to enlarge)

Can anyone deny that's true? If the President can simply use "secrecy" claims to block courts from ruling on whether he broke the law, then what checks or limits exist on the President's power to spy illegally on Americans or commit other crimes in a classified setting? By definition, there are none. That's what made this distortion of the "state secrets" privilege so dangerous when Bush used it, and it's what makes it so dangerous now. Back in April, 2006 -- a mere four months after the illegal NSA program was first revealed, and right after Bush had asserted "state secrets" to block any judicial inquiry into the NSA program -- here is what I wrote about the Bush administration's use of the "state secrets" privilege as a means of blocking entire lawsuits rather than limiting the use of specific classified documents:

[Q]uite unsurprisingly, the Bush administration loves this doctrine, as it is so consistent with its monarchical view of presidential infallibility, and the administration has become the most aggressive and enthusiastic user of this doctrine . . . . As the Chicago Tribune detailed last year, the administration has also used this doctrine repeatedly to obstruct any judicial proceedings designed to investigate its torture and rendition policies, among others . . . . This administration endlessly searches out obscure legal doctrines or new legal theories which have one purpose -- to eradicate limits on presidential power and to increase the President's ability to prevent disclosure of all but the most innocuous and meaningless information.

That was the prevailing, consensus view at the time among Democrats, progressives and civil libertarians regarding Bush's use of the state secrets privilege: that the privilege was being used to exclude the President from the rule of law by seeking to preclude judicial examination of his conduct. Plainly, Obama is now doing the same exact thing -- not just to shield domestic surveillance programs from judicial review but also torture and renditions. Is there any conceivable, rational reason to view this differently? None that I can see.

Note, too, how this latest episode eviscerates many of the excuses made earlier this year by Obama supporters to justify this conduct. It was frequently claimed that these arguments were likely asserted by holdover Bush DOJ lawyers without the involvement of Obama officials -- but under the new DOJ guidelines, the Attorney General must personally approve of any state secrets assertions, and Eric Holder himself confirmed in a Press Release on Friday that he did so here. Alternatively, it was often claimed that Obama was only asserting these Bush-replicating theories because he secretly hoped to lose in court and thus magnanimously gift us with good precedent -- but the Obama administration has repeatedly lost in court on these theories and then engaged in extraordinary efforts to destroy those good precedents, including by inducing the full appellate court to vacate the decisions or even threatening to defy the court orders compelling disclosure. No rational person can continue to maintain those excuses.

Is there any doubt at this point that, as TalkingPointsMemo put it in a headline: "Obama Mimics Bush on State Secrets"? Or can anyone dispute what EFF's Kevin Bankston told ABC News after the latest filing from the Obama DOJ:

The Obama administration has essentially adopted the position of the Bush administration in these cases, even though candidate Obama was incredibly critical of both the warrantless wiretapping program and the Bush administration's abuse of the state secrets privilege.

Extreme secrecy wasn't an ancillary aspect of the progressive critique of Bush/Cheney; it was central, as it was secrecy that enabled all the other abuses. More to the point, the secrecy claims being asserted here are not merely about hiding illegal government conduct; worse, they are designed to shield executive officials from accountability for lawbreaking. As the ACLU's Ben Wizner put it about the Obama DOJ's attempt to use the doctrine to bar torture victims from having a day in court: "This case is not about secrecy. It's about immunity from accountability." That's what Obama is supporting: "immunity from accountability."

What makes this most recent episode particularly appalling is that the program which Obama is seeking to protect here -- the illegal Bush/Cheney NSA surveillance scheme -- was once depicted as a grave threat to the Constitution and the ultimate expression of lawlessness. Yet now, Obama insists that the very same program is such an important "state secret" that no court can even adjudicate whether the law was broken. When Democrats voted to immunize lawbreaking telecoms last year, they repeatedly justified that by stressing that Bush officials themselves were not immunized and would therefore remain accountable under the law. Obama himself, when trying to placate angry supporters over his vote for telecom immunity, said this about the bill he supported:

I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses.

Yet here is Obama doing exactly the opposite of those claims and assurances: namely, he's now (a) seeking to immunize not only telecoms, but also Bush officials, from judicial review; (b) demanding that courts be barred from considering the legality of NSA surveillance programs under any circumstances; and (c) attempting to institutionalize the broadest claims of presidential immunity imaginable via radically broad secrecy claims. To do so, he's violating virtually everything he ever said about such matters when he was Senator Obama and Candidate Obama. And he's relying on the very same theories of executive immunity and secrecy that -- under a Republican President -- sparked so much purported outrage. If nothing else, this latest episode underscores the ongoing need for Congressional Democrats to proceed with proposed legislation to impose meaningful limits and oversight on the President's ability to use this power, as this President, just like the last one, has left no doubt about his willingness to abuse it for ignoble ends.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World

Published on Thursday, October 29, 2009 by TomDispatch.com

Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail

Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World

by Dilip Hiro

While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat -- whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles -- must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran's recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington's fresh threats of "crippling sanctions."

Most important, the Obama administration is ignoring the altered international order that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street's excesses. While its stimulus package, funded by taxpayers and foreign borrowing, has arrested the decline in the nation's gross domestic product, Washington has done little to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. That task -- performed by the U.S. in recent recessions -- has fallen willy-nilly to China. History repeatedly shows that such economic clout sooner or later translates into diplomatic power.

Backed by more than $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the state-owned Chinese oil corporations have been locking up hydrocarbon resources as far away as Brazil. Not surprisingly, Iran, with the second largest oil as well as gas reserves in the world, looms large in the strategic plans of Beijing. The Chinese want to import Iran's petroleum and natural gas through pipelines across Central Asia, thus circumventing sea routes vulnerable to U.S. naval interdiction. As this is an integral part of China's energy security policy, little wonder that Chinese oil companies have committed an estimated $120 billion dollars -- so far -- to Iran's energy industry.

During a recent meeting with Iran's first vice president, Muhammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao stressed the importance of cooperation between the two countries when it comes to hydrocarbons and trade (at $29 billion a year, and rising), as well as "greater coordination in international affairs." Little wonder, then, that China has already moved to neutralize any sanctions that the United States -- backed by Britain, France and Germany -- might impose on Iran without United Nations authorization.

Foremost among these would be a ban on the export of gasoline to Iran, whose oil refining capacity falls significantly short of domestic demand. Chinese oil corporations have already started shipping gasoline to Iran to fill the gap caused by a stoppage of supplies from British and Indian companies anticipating Washington's possible move. Between June and August 2009, China signed $8 billion worth of contracts with Iran to help expand two existing Iranian oil refineries to produce more gasoline domestically and to help develop the gigantic South Pars natural gas field. Iran's national oil corporation has also invited its Chinese counterparts to participate in a $42.8 billion project to construct seven oil refineries and a 1,000 mile trans-Iran pipeline that will facilitate pumping petroleum to China.

Tehran and Moscow

When it comes to Russia, Tehran and Moscow have a long history of close relations, going back to Tsarist times. During that period and the subsequent Soviet era, the two states shared the inland Caspian Sea. Now, as two of the five littoral states of the Caspian, Iran and Russia still share a common fluvial border.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between the Islamic Republic and Russia warmed. Defying pressures from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Russia's state-owned nuclear power company continued building a civilian nuclear power plant near the Iranian port city of Bushehr. It is scheduled to begin generating electricity next year.

As for nuclear threats, the Kremlin's perspective varies from Washington's. It is far more concerned with the actual threat posed by some of Pakistan's estimated 75 nuclear weapons falling into militant Islamist hands than with the theoretical one from Tehran. Significantly, it was during his recent trip to Beijing to conclude ambitious hydrocarbon agreements with China that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "If we speak about some kind of sanctions [on Iran] now, before we take concrete steps, we will fail to create favorable conditions for negotiations. That is why we consider such talk premature."

The negotiations that Putin mentioned are now ongoing between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., Britain, China, France, and Russia) as well as Germany. According to Western sources, the agenda of the talks is initially to center on a "freeze for freeze" agreement. Iran would suspend its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for the U.N. Security Council not strengthening its present nominal economic sanctions. If these reports are accurate, then the chances of a major breakthrough may be slim indeed.

At the heart of this issue lies Iran's potential ability to enrich uranium to a level usable as fuel for a nuclear weapon. This, in turn, is linked to the way Iran's leaders view national security. As a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is, in fact, entitled to enrich uranium. The key point is the degree of enrichment: 5% enriched uranium for use as fuel in an electricity generating plant (called low enriched uranium, LEU); 20% enriched for use as feedstock for producing medical isotopes (categorized as medium enriched uranium, MEU); and 90%-plus for bomb-grade fuel (known as high enriched uranium, HEU).

So far, what Iran has produced at its Natanz nuclear plant is LEU. At the Iran-Six Powers meeting in Geneva on October 1st, Iran agreed in principle to send three-quarters of its present stock of 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) of LEU to Russia to be enriched into MEU and shipped back to its existing Tehran Research Reactor to produce medical isotopes. If this agreement is fleshed out and finalized by all the parties under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency, then the proportion of Iran's LEU with a potential of being turned into HEU would diminish dramatically.

When it comes to the nuclear conundrum, what distinguishes China and Russia from the U.S. is that they have conferred unconditional diplomatic recognition and acceptance on the Islamic Republic of Iran. So their commercial and diplomatic links with Tehran are thriving. Indeed, a sub-structure of pipelines and economic alliances between hydrocarbon-rich Russia, Iran, and energy-hungry China is now being forged. In other words, the foundation is being laid for the emergence of a Russia-Iran-China diplomatic triad in the not-too-distant future, while Washington remains stuck in an old groove of imposing "punishing" sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear program.

Tehran and Washington

There is, of course, a deep and painful legacy of animosity and ill-feeling between the 30-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran and the U.S. Iran was an early victim of Washington's subversive activities when the six-year-old CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953. That scar on Iran's body politic has not healed yet. Half a century later, the Iranians watched the Bush administration invade neighboring Iraq and overthrow its president, Saddam Hussein, on trumped-up charges involving his supposed program to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Iran's leaders know that during his second term in office -- as Seymour Hersh revealed in the New Yorker -- Bush authorized a clandestine CIA program with a budget of $400 million to destabilize the Iranian regime. They are also aware that the CIA has focused on stoking disaffection among Sunni ethnic minorities in Shiite-ruled Iran. These include ethnic Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzistan adjoining Iraq, and ethnic Baluchis in Sistan-Baluchistan Province abutting the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Little wonder that Tehran pointed an accusing finger at the U.S. for the recent assassination of six commanders of its Revolutionary Guard Corps in Sistan-Baluchistan by two suicide bombers belonging to Jundallah (the Army of Allah), an extremist Sunni organization. As yet, there is no sign, overt or covert, that President Obama has canceled or repudiated his predecessor's program to destabilize the Iranian regime.

Insecure regimes seek security in nuclear arms. History shows that joining the nuclear club has, in fact, proven an effective strategy for survival. Israel and North Korea provide striking examples of this.

Unsure of Western military assistance in a conventional war with Arab nations, and of its ability to maintain its traditional armed superiority over its Arab adversaries, Israel's leaders embarked on a nuclear weapons program in the mid-1950s. They succeeded in their project a decade later. Since then Israel has acquired an arsenal of 80 to 200 nuclear weapons.

In the North Korean case, once the country had tested its first atomic bomb in October 2006, the Bush administration softened its stance towards it. In the bargaining that followed, North Korea got its name removed from the State Department's list of nations that support international terrorism. In the on-again-off-again bilateral negotiations that followed, the Pyongyang regime as an official nuclear state has been seeking a guarantee against attack or subversion by the United States.

Without saying so publicly, Iran's leaders want a similar guarantee from the U.S. Conversely, unless Washington ends its clandestine program to destabilize the Iranian state, and caps it with an offer of diplomatic acceptance and normal relations, there is no prospect of Tehran abandoning its right to enrich uranium. On the other hand, the continuation of a policy of destabilization, coupled with ongoing threats of "crippling" sanctions and military strikes (whether by the Pentagon or Israel), can only drive the Iranians toward a nuclear breakout capability.

During George W. Bush's eight-year presidency, the U.S. position in the world underwent a sea change. From the Clinton administration, Bush had inherited a legacy of 92 months of continuous economic prosperity, a budget in surplus, and the transformation of the U.N. Security Council into a handmaiden of the State Department. What he passed on to Barack Obama was the Great Recession in a world where America's popularity had hit rock bottom and its economic strength was visibly ebbing. All this paved the way for the economic and political rise of China, as well as the strengthening of Russia as an energy giant capable of extending its influence in Europe and challenging American dominance in the Middle East.

In this new environment expecting the leaders of Iran, backed by China and Russia, to do the bidding of Washington means placing a bet on the inconceivable.

Copyright 2009 Dilip Hiro

Dilip Hiro is the author of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (Nation Books), among other works. His forthcoming book, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World, will be published in January 2010, also by Nation Books.

Published on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Toward a Coherent Presidency

by Rick Chamberlin

“We must pursue peace through peaceful means… in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.; The Trumpet of Conscience

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own… structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

Barack Obama; Dreams from My Father

Cohere. It is not a common word, and it’s an uncommon leader who understands the meaning of it.

As a Harvard graduate, former constitutional law professor and civil rights attorney, President Obama may understand what it means better than any president we’ve ever had, perhaps even as well as that other great Nobel Peace Prize winner quoted above, Martin Luther King, Jr.

King spoke so eloquently and coherently about so many things that it’s sometimes hard to remember the real heart of his message. Fortunately, he crystallized that message for the world when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. The award, he said, represented “a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

In other words, our means and ends should cohere. We should be coherent.

Barack Obama’s verbal and moral coherency became evident to a large segment of the electorate when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Voters across the political spectrum bought into the “Change We Can Believe In” slogan when he made a bid for the White House because Obama continued to articulate a clear moral framework out of which decisions would be made if he was elected. In his inauguration address, he said that America must not shrink from its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

By pledging to close Guantanamo, eschewing torture and beginning the draw down of troops from Iraq, President Obama has begun to bring means and ends in line again; he has begun to make us a more coherent nation.

This is in stark contrast to the policies and actions of the former administration, which epitomized what sociologist Michael Mann calls incoherent imperialism. George Bush gave lip service to unity and peace but gained office with a strategy of divide-and-conquer. These same three words could be used to sum up his foreign policy during his two terms in office. Bush’s verbal incoherence often amused but his actions, by and large, were anything but funny. I never begrudged him that he often mispronounced nuclear – an easy word to bungle. What mattered most to me were his policies and actions with respect to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise.

Bush was far from our first incoherent president, however. In a 1967 sermon that came to be known as his Christmas Sermon on Peace, King reminded those gathered that most military geniuses throughout history – and most U.S. presidents – have talked of peace while waging war. President Johnson, King said, spoke eloquently of peace even as U.S. jets pummeled North Vietnam with bombs.

King believed lasting peace would only come when the world and its leaders embraced the nonviolent affirmation that ends and means must cohere. Destructive means, King said again and again, cannot bring about constructive ends. It’s a lesson President Obama should heed, especially as he considers a strategy shift in Afghanistan.

“Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force’.” King was not dreaming when he spoke those words, he was reflecting lucidly on how far strategic nonviolence had taken the civil rights movement in America, and before that how it had been used by Gandhi and his followers to expel the most powerful military power at the time, Great Britain, from India without the bloodbath so many expected.

At his inauguration in January, President Obama seemed to echo King’s famous sermon when he said, “…our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint….”

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new,” said Obama. Is strategic nonviolence of the type wielded so successfully by the Indian people against the British, the Poles and Czechs against their Soviet overlords, the Filipinos against the Marcos regime, South African blacks against the brutal apartheid government, and Serbian students against Milosevic one of the instruments to which the president referred?

The instrument is really only new in the hands of American presidents, though a few have understood the principle behind it. President Lincoln, whom Obama says he seeks to emulate, did not have the examples of Gandhi and King to follow, but the words of those great men would have rung true to him. By ignoring the loud calls to punish the Southern states after the Confederacy’s surrender, Lincoln probably saved our nation from a second civil war. “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice,” he once told a friend.

Without such understanding, redemptive and creative goodwill toward all people – the nucleus of nonviolence – government of the people, by the people and for the people would have long ago perished from the earth. It remains the only means by which we will ensure that such government continues, spreads and endures, and the only means by which we will win the hearts and minds of our enemies and short-circuit the cycle of violence. Nonviolence, King said in his Nobel acceptance speech, was not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force.

All other means will ultimately backfire. We claimed victory in the “war to end all wars,” but that victory gave rise to Hitler and fascism. Even our military triumph in the so-called good war, World War II, spawned the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and many other bloody conflicts. Indeed, al Qaida and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sprang in large part from the fears, divisions and resentments resulting from WWII.

If the United States is to lead the world again, we must do it with soul force, not military force. The real emperor with no clothes was not, as some think, George Bush, but the myth at the heart of his presidency and so many other presidencies – the myth that might makes right and that violence is somehow redemptive. The opposite is true: right makes might. America’s greatness has always been rooted in its moral power.

By following King’s example, by ensuring that his actions cohere with his words, by trying wherever humanly possible to make means and ends cohere, and with a little creative translation on his part, President Obama could indeed help the U.S. lead the world into the new era of peace of which he spoke at his inauguration. Not only would that make him the most coherent president the United States has ever had, it would make him fully worthy of the peace prize that even he thinks he doesn’t yet deserve.

Or Obama could turn out to be like most presidents, viewing peace as a distant goal instead of the only means by which we can arrive at that goal. If so, his presidency will fall far short of its promise – and far short of the hopes the Nobel committee and billions of people around the world have placed in him.

As we face two wars, nuclear proliferation, global warming, global terrorism and global pandemics, the world needs a coherent American presidency like never before. But the fulfillment of King’s full dream of a world at peace with itself is not up to one person. We are all heirs to King and Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolent change. As President-elect Obama reminded us shortly before he took office, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, he can’t do it alone. We the people must co-lead.

So let us all commit today to make means and ends cohere in our own lives. And let us make it clear to all our leaders – including President Obama – that we expect the same from them. We expect coherency.

Rick Chamberlin is a freelance writer living in Wisconsin. Contact him at rickertel@hotmail.com.