Conned Again? Obama, Rahm-bo and the End of the New American Century

We’ve been conned all right. We can expect either the Greater Depression, or 9/11 Part Two, or maybe even both.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Counterpunch.

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

Rahm Emanuel is a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, “during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.”

In “Hail to the Chief of Staff,” Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as “a super-Likudnik hawk,” who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 “made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.”

My despondent friends in the Israeli peace movement ask, “What is this man doing in Obama’s administration?”

Obama’s election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an editorial in Pravda put it, “Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law.”

But Obama’s advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs and Wall Street banksters as Bush’s. Richard Holbrooke, was an assistant secretary of state and ambassador in the Clinton administration. He implemented the policy to enlarge NATO and to place the military alliance on Russia’s border in contravention of Reagan’s promise to Gorbachev. Holbrooke is also associated with the Clinton administration’s illegal bombing of Serbia, a war crime that killed civilians and Chinese diplomats. If not a neocon himself, Holbrooke is closely allied with them.

Madeline Albright is the Clinton era secretary of state who told Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes) that the US policy of Iraq sanctions, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, had goals important enough to justify the children’s deaths. Albright’s infamous words: “we think the price is worth it.” Wikipedia reports that this immoralist served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of Dick Grasso’s $187.5 million compensation scandal.

Dennis Ross has long associations with the Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations.” A member of his Clinton era team, Aaron David Miller, wrote that during 1999-2000 the US negotiating team led by Ross acted as Israel’s lawyer: “we had to run everything by Israel first.” This “stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be?” According to Wikipedia, Ross is “chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.”

Clearly, this is not a group of advisors that is going to halt America’s wars against Israel’s enemies or force the Israeli government to accept the necessary conditions for a real peace in the Middle East.

Ralph Nader predicted as much. In his “Open Letter to Barack Obama (November 3, 2008), Nader pointed out to Obama that his “transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights . . . to a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby” puts Obama at odds with “a majority of Jewish-Americans” and “64 per cent of Israelis.” Nader quotes the Israeli writer and peace advocate Uri Avnery’s description of Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as an appearance that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.” Nader damns Obama for his “utter lack of political courage [for] surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention.” Carter, who achieved the only meaningful peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs, has been demonized by the powerful AIPAC lobby for criticizing Israel’s policy of apartheid toward the Palestinians whose territory Israel forcibly occupies.

Obama’s economic team is just as bad. Its star is Robert Rubin, the bankster who was secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Rubin has responsibility for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and, thereby, responsibility for the current financial crisis. In his letter to Obama, Nader points out that Obama received unprecedented campaign contributions from corporate and Wall Street interests. “Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart.”

Obama’s victory speech was magnificent. The TV cameras scanning faces in the audience showed the hope and belief that propelled Obama into the presidency. But Obama cannot bring change to Washington. There is no one in the Washington crowd that he can appoint who is capable of bringing change. If Obama were to reach outside the usual crowd, anyone suspected of being a bringer of change could not get confirmed by the Senate. Powerful interest groups–AIPAC, the military-security complex, Wall Street–use their political influence to block unacceptable appointments.

As Alexander Cockburn said of Obama in a pre-eection column, column “never has the dead hand of the past had a ‘reform’ candidate so firmly by the windpipe.” Obama confirmed Cockburn’s verdict in his first press conference as president-elect. Disregarding the unanimous US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons five years ago, and ignoring the continued certification by the International Atomic Energy Agency that none of the nuclear material for Iran’s civilian nuclear reactor has been diverted to weapons use, Obama sallied forth with the Israel Lobby’s propaganda and accused Iran of “development of a nuclear weapon” and vowing “to prevent that from happening.”

The change that is coming to America has nothing to do with Obama. Change is coming from the financial crisis brought on by Wall Street greed and irresponsibility, from the eroding role of the US dollar as reserve currency, from countless mortgage foreclosures, from the offshoring of millions of America’s best jobs, from a deepening recession, from pillars of American manufacturing–Ford and GM–begging the government for taxpayers’ money to stay alive, and from budget and trade deficits that are too large to be closed by normal means.

Traditionally, the government relies on monetary and fiscal policy to lift the economy out of recession. But easy money is not working. Interest rates are already low and monetary growth is already high, yet unemployment is rising. The budget deficit is already huge–a world record–and the red ink is not stimulating the economy. Can even lower interest rates and even higher budget deficits help an economy that has moved offshore, leaving behind jobless consumers overburdened with debt?

How much more can the government borrow? America’s foreign creditors are asking this question. An official organ of the Chinese ruling party recently called for Asian and European countries to “banish the US dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own currencies.”

“Why,” asks another Chinese publication, “should China help the US to issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US can expand without limit?”

The world has tired of American hegemony and had its fill of American arrogance. America’s reputation is in tatters: the financial debacle, endless red ink, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition, torture, illegal wars based on lies and deception, disrespect for the sovereignty of other countries, war crimes, disregard for international law and the Geneva Conventions, the assault on habeas corpus and the separation of powers, a domestic police state, constant interference in the internal affairs of other countries, boundless hypocrisy.

The change that is coming is the end of American empire. The hegemon has run out of money and influence. Obama as “America’s First Black President” will lift hopes and, thus, allow the act to be carried on a little longer. But the New American Century is already over.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

The Mainstream Media and Israel: Rendering public opinion irrelevant

Source: Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com.

One of the most striking aspects of our political discourse, particularly during election time, is how efficiently certain views that deviate from the elite consensus are banished from sight — simply prohibited — even when those views are held by the vast majority of citizens. The University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes — the premiere organization for surveying international public opinion — released a new survey a couple of weeks ago regarding public opinion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including opinion among American citizens, and this is what it found:

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel’s side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.

The worldwide consensus is crystal clear — citizens want their Governments to be neutral and even-handed in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not tilted towards either side. And that consensus is shared not just by a majority of American citizens, but by the overwhelming majority. Few political views, particularly on controversial issues, attract more than 70% support among American citizens. But the proposition that the U.S. Government should be even-handed — rather than tilting towards Israel — attracts that much support. That’s not an “anti-Israeli” view — to the contrary, it’s a position that America can and should resolve that violent, four-decades-long dispute by being even-handed rather than one-sided. 

Similarly, when asked “How well do you think Israel is doing its part in the effort to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” citizens around the world, by a large margin, believe that Israel is doing either “not very well” or “not well at all” (54% — compared to 23% that say it’s doing “very well” or “somewhat well”). And there, too, that worldwide view corresponds to American public opinion as well. 59% of Americans say Israel is doing either “not very well” or “not well at all” — compared to only 30% that say it’s doing “very well” or “somewhat well.” And Palestinians don’t fare much better worldwide (38-49%) and fare worse in the U.S. (15-75%).

Yet not only is the view of “even-handedness” completely unrepresented among mainstream political figures in the U.S., it’s deemed political death to go anywhere near expressing that view. Back in 2003, then-presidential-candidate Howard Dean expressed the exact position favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans, yet triggered an intense and even ugly controversy by doing so:

Dean’s Israel troubles began at a Sept. 3 campaign event in Santa Fe, N.M. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said that day, “It’s not our place to take sides.” Then, on Sept. 9, he told the Washington Post that America should be “evenhanded” in its approach to the region.

That’s all Dean said. It’s a view held by more than 70% of Americans. It ought to be completely uncontroversial — if anything, it ought to be that view that is deemed a political piety. But what happened? This, according to an excellent account of that “controversy” in Salon by Michelle Goldberg:

The media and the Democratic establishment reacted as if Dean had called Yasser Arafat a man of peace. On Sept. 10, 34 Democratic members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, wrote Dean an open letter. “American foreign policy has been — and must continue to be — based on unequivocal support for Israel’s right to exist and to be free from terror . . .” they wrote. “It is unacceptable for the U.S. to be ‘evenhanded’ on these fundamental issues . . . This is not a time to be sending mixed messages; on the contrary, in these difficult times we must reaffirm our unyielding commitment to Israel’s survival and raise our voices against all forms of terrorism and incitement.” 

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that Dean had badly damaged his own campaign. “Sources in the Jewish community say that Dean has wrecked his chances of getting significant contributions from Jews . . .” the paper wrote. “Many believe Dean’s statement will drive more Jews toward Lieberman and Kerry, enabling Kerry to take the lead again.”

Dean was roundly attacked by the political elite for uttering “anti-Israel” comments, notwithstanding the fact that Dean is married to a Jewish woman, raised his children as Jews, and, most amazingly of all, had a campaign that was managed by Steve Grossman, a former President of AIPAC. But no matter: Dean had uttered a Forbidden Thought — forbidden even though it is embraced by the vast majority of Americans — and thus Grossman and Dean had to subject themselves to abject Apology Rituals:

According to the Dean campaign, the uproar involved semantics, not substance. “Here’s what I think happened,” says Grossman, Dean’s campaign co-chair. “Howard made some comments in someone’s backyard in New Mexico that were shorthand, if you will, for some of his Middle East views. In the course of those remarks and some others in the subsequent days, he used some language that gave people consternation, and it was immediately jumped on by Joe Lieberman and John Kerry that somehow Howard Dean was breaking faith with this 55-year tradition of the United States’ special relationship with Israel, which is patently absurd”. . . . 

If Dean’s Israel position really puts him far out on the left, it proves that not showing unequivocal support for the Jewish state remains a political poison pill — for members of either political party. . . .

After all, according to Grossman, the candidate remains in sync with the goals of Bush’s Israel policy. . . . No serious candidate took a position to the left of Bush. Indeed, it’s precisely because there’s no real leftist alternative that Dean’s been cast in that role. . . . . But a campaign is always more about images and impressions than carefully formulated positions, and that’s where Dean has blundered.

It was conventional wisdom that that Dean had committed some grave mistake even though, as The Nation‘s John Nichols highlighted at the time, Dean was expressing the overwhelming majority view even back in 2003:

More troubling is the condemnation by Pelosi and other party leaders of even a hint of “evenhandedness.” That smacks of the old game of positioning Democrats to the right of the Republicans on Middle East policy — in a perceived contest for Jewish-American votes and contributions. The problem with this approach, as Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes points out, is that “this suggests you cannot be firmly committed to Israel and question [Israel's hawkish Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon’s policies. If that’s where Democrats put themselves, they don’t leave room to debate Bush on the issue.” They’ll also have a tougher time appealing to American voters — 73 percent of whom, according to a recent University of Maryland poll, prefer that the United States not take sides.

It’s pretty extraordinary that in a democracy, the political elite is able to render completely off-limits a view that the vast majority of Americans support. They actually render majority-held views unspeakable and then remove the issue entirely from what is debated. No matter what one’s views are, there is no denying that our policy towards Israel is immensely consequential for our country. Yet, by virtue of the fact that presidential candidates are required to affirm essentially the same orthodoxies, there’s very little difference in their positions towards Israel and therefore our current policy approach towards Israel will simply not be part of anything that is debated, even though most Americans overwhelmingly oppose that course. 

Indeed, as soon as he secured the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama made a pilgrimage to AIPAC in order to avoid the “Howard Dean mistake” and to vow that there would be no such debate over Israel in this election:

I have been proud to be a part of a strong, bi-partisan consensus that has stood by Israel in the face of all threats. That is a commitment that both John McCain and I share, because support for Israel in this country goes beyond party. . . . 

And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region. These voices blame the Middle East’s only democracy for the region’s extremism. They offer the false promise that abandoning a stalwart ally is somehow the path to strength. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.

That starts with ensuring Israel’s qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran. Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As President, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel’s security that will not be tied to any other nation.

In fairness, Obama did attack what he called the “failed status quo”; disputed that “America’s recent foreign policy has made Israel more secure”; and pointed to “eight years of accumulated evidence that our foreign policy is dangerously flawed.” Moreover, Obama — to his great credit — spent the primary season making some important and unorthodox points about Palestinian suffering and pointing out that the President should not be blindly supportive of everything Israel’s right-wing does, that being “pro-Israel” doesn’t mean a refusal to oppose Israeli actions. 

But by uttering such Forbidden (though quite mainstream) thoughts, Obama was mercilessly attacked as anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic, and with the nomination secured, the crux of his June AIPAC speech was an affirmation of our political establishment’s mandated Israel orthodoxy: the continuation of America’s one-sided alliance with Israel, as highlighted by commitments such as this:

Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. . . . That is the change we need in our foreign policy. Change that restores American power and influence. Change accompanied by a pledge that I will make known to allies and adversaries alike: that America maintains an unwavering friendship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its security. . . . 

As members of AIPAC, you have helped advance this bipartisan consensus to support and defend our ally Israel. And I am sure that today on Capitol Hill you will be meeting with members of Congress and spreading the word. But we are here because of more than policy. We are here because the values we hold dear are deeply embedded in the story of Israel.

Again, the point has nothing to do with one’s views of the best policy towards Israel. The point is that a position which the vast majority of Americans embrace is one that, simultaneously, is forbidden to be expressed, and the election consequently will involve no debate over that issue. 

That profoundly anti-democratic dynamic is by no means confined to Israel. That’s just an example. A different University of Maryland poll was released in April of this year, which surveyed public opinion in Iran and the U.S. regarding the disputes between those two countries. The populations of both countries have strikingly similar views with regard to those matters, with large majorities favoring the same deal to resolve the dispute (Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy accompanied by IAEA inspections to prevent weaponization), and large majorities also favor the NPT’s goal of “eliminating all nuclear weapons.” More strikingly, the citizens of both countries overwhelmingly favor the same policies of rapproachment and cooperation, rather than the bluster, threats, and ongoing provocative acts engaged in by both of their governments:

Remarkably, this desire for cooperation rather than confrontation is the view of most Americans despite the Iraq-level misinformation and propaganda which our political elite has disseminated about Iran:

And while Iranian President Ahmadinejad is depicted by our political class as the Equivalent of Adolf Hitler, savagely oppressing Iranians as some sort of insane, vicious tyrant, that isn’t how they see it:

Iranian public opinion distinguishes between the U.S. Government and the American people — holding favorable views towards the latter and unfavorable views towards the former (“some portrayed the American people, like the Muslim people, as victims of the American government”) — and to the extent there is “anti-Americanism” in Iran, it is based on this widespread assessment:

That, too, is a belief widely held in many places in the world, yet is one that no mainstream politician in the U.S. could express.

There are all sorts of reasons why our presidential elections center on personality-based sideshows (even Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said as much about her own paper’s coverage today). Those gossipy matters are easier for our slothful, vapid media stars to digest and spout. They require very few resources to cover. The campaign consultants who run national political campaigns are experts in P.R. strategies for packaging personalities and indifferent to policy debates, etc. etc.

But one principal reason is that so many of the Government’s most consequential actions are concealed behind a wall of secrecy and thus not subject to public debate. Meanwhile, those policies which are publicly disclosed are kept off-limits from any real debate and, even when they are debated, public opinion is almost completely marginalized in favor of the minority elite consensus (see, for instance, the endless Iraq war even in the face of long-standing, overwhelming support for its end).

That remarkable dynamic of debate-suppression is most conspicuous — and most urgent — when the policies favored by the political establishment are ones that are vigorously rejected by the citizenry. Thus we have the extraordinary fact that a policy that has long been favored by the vast majority of Americans — even-handedness in the Israel-Palestinian conflict — is one that no mainstream American politician of any national significance can espouse without triggering an immediate end to their political career. That discrepancy is a rather potent commentary on how our democracy functions.

AIPAC’s Hirelings Rush to Resolution

Source: William Cook, Media with Conscience.

Perception is often the stepchild of ignorance, especially when controlled by those with the most to gain. It is especially difficult for our Congress to perceive clearly when it grovels at the feet of its master, AIPAC. America’s Knesset, servile hirelings of Israel’s lobby, rush to pass yet another resolution conceived by AIPAC and authored and co-signed by its most slavish puppets, Ackerman and Ros-Lehtinen in the House and Lieberman and Bayh in the Senate, Resolutions H. Con. 362 and S. 580, the “Iran War Resolution.” Virtually all Congressmen with the exception of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and all Senators, including McCain and Obama, will vote to support this resolution. Passage provides Bush with power to impose a unilateral blockade on Iran, an act, if done without UN sanction, is an act of war. This resolution, a virtual carbon copy of the resolution that has mired us in Iraq, does nothing for the security of the United States, indeed it does the opposite, but it does secure continued funding of Republicans and Democrats by AIPAC and Israel.

The wise man seeks to see through the eyes of his perceived enemy; only then will he know his perceived failures and the rationale that gives purpose to those arraigned against him. Our Congress is driven, like the horse carriage of old, with blinders that prevent vision beyond that dictated by Israel’s interests, not America’s. Consider the “Iran War Resolution” from the perspective of the nations that compose the United Nations General Assembly, not the Security Council that is controlled by the U.S. veto.

Let’s rewrite the legislation so that it expresses the sense of the United Nations General Assembly regarding “the threat posed to international peace, stability in the Middle East, and the vital security interests of the United Nations by Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and regional hegemony.”

Whereas Israel is NOT a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), has NOT foresworn the acquisition of nuclear weapons by ratification of the NPT, and is therefore able to avoid declaration of all its nuclear activity and defy constant monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA);

Whereas for nearly 50 years, in clear contravention of the explicit obligations of the NPT, Israel operated a covert nuclear program until it was revealed by Mr. Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in solitary confinement for providing the world information on this deceit, and, recently, by Prime Minister Olmert and former President Jimmy Carter;

Whereas Israel continues to expand the number of illegal nuclear weapons available to its military forces, as has become evident in its most recent invasion of a neighbor in 2006, Lebanon, and continues in defiance of binding UNSC resolutions demanding suspension of all such illegal activities;

Whereas the Israeli nuclear weapons capability poses a grave threat to international peace and security by fundamentally altering and destabilizing the strategic balance in the Middle East, and severely undermining the global nonproliferation regime;

Whereas Israel’s overt sponsorship of several terrorist groups, especially those aligned with the Settlers occupation in Palestine, and its close ties to the United States, demonstrates that Israel and the U.S. share their nuclear materials and technology with others;

Whereas Israel continues to develop ballistic missile technology and pursues its capability to field intercontinental ballistic missiles, a delivery system suited almost exclusively to nuclear weapons payloads;

Whereas Israeli leaders have repeatedly called for the destruction of Palestine and Lebanon, respected members of the United Nations;

Whereas Israel’s support for its rogue terrorist group, the IDF, has enabled that group to wage war against the government and people of Lebanon and Palestine leading to the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and its political and physical domination of Palestine;

Whereas Israel’s support for its Settlers and IDF has enabled it to illegally seize control of the West Bank and Gaza and to continuously bombard and devastate Palestinian civilians with F-16s, bulldozers, tanks, and missiles;

Whereas through these efforts, Israel seeks to establish regional hegemony, threatens longstanding friends and allies of all nations in the mid-east, and endangers vital United Nations security interests; and

Whereas nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization of the use of force against Israel: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the United Nations General Assembly that the world’s international body

1. Declare that Israel disband all nuclear weapons capability;
2. Join the nations of the mid-east in signing the NPT;
3. Remove its troops from the occupied territory of Palestine;
4. Tear down the illegal wall that it has used to imprison the Palestinians;
5. Return all natural resources to the people of Palestine;
6. Pay reparation for its destruction of Lebanon;
7. Return occupied land to Lebanon and Syria;
8. Provide for the refugees illegally prevented from returning to their legitimate homes;

The above document modifies the wording of the House and Senate resolutions to indicate a totally different perspective on world affairs, one built on Justice, the requisite foundation for a lasting peace, not those of Israel alone. Considering the magnitude of the reality that exists in Israel versus Iran relative to nuclear capability alone, the absurdity, the hypocrisy, the sheer arrogance of these resolutions boggles the mind. How can the world respect a nation whose representatives avoid seeing the world from the eyes of those most impacted by the threat that Israel poses in the mid-east? How can the world understand that a nation rejects the testimony of its own CIA National Intelligence Estimate that Iran has not actively pursued nuclear weapon capability since 2003 and the evidence brought to the United Nations by the IAEA’s Director, El Baradei, after nine unannounced investigations of Iran’s nuclear facilities in this past year all revealing no evidence of weapon development? How can the world respect a Democracy that is led to such acts of vengeance by a small nation more invested in its own interests than those of America as Mearsheimer and Walt’s report testifies.

The most evil deceit resides in the conceit of those who pretend to be a friend and achieve their end by flattery, bribery, or coercion; those who fall victim to such evil remain forever the bondslave of their Overseer. They have, in effect, surrendered their principles, their conscience, and their personal freedom to a ruthless, merciless, amoral force, willingly sacrificing in the process the people they represent. Such is the state of affairs in our spineless Congress.
William Cook, A senior editor of MWC News, is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Deception: Bush’s Mideast Policy

By this author: http://mwcnews.net/william-cook

Congress Delivers Promised Israel Aid Bump Despite Budget Cuts to Domestic Programs and Crumbling U.S. Infrastructure

No money for bridges, dams, or levees. No money for veterans. No money for libraries, schools, or fire departments. Does anyone else see a pattern here? We no longer have a government that puts our country’s needs first. We need to fire the fuckers behind this outrage.

By Nathan Guttman, The Jewish Daily Forward.

Washington – While almost all federally financed programs were denied any funding increase for the coming year, aid to Israel from the United States will increase thanks to a legislative loophole and some deft maneuvering by pro-Israel lobbyists.

Congress bypassed the normal appropriation process on June 26 when it approved a $170 million raise in military aid to Israel, as part of a larger supplemental spending bill. The increase contrasts with the standstill in budgeting for almost all other government programs. Due to fighting between Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget, most government spending will be held in what is known as a “continuous resolution,” which maintains all spending at the same level as in the previous fiscal year and allows no raise in government spending.

Aid to Israel would normally be covered by this resolution, but legislators made the aid into an amendment to special legislation covering funding for the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to an official in the Washington pro-Israel community, the only other instance in which aid to Israel went through this channel was after the first Gulf War, 16 years ago.

The move was quickly applauded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“The effort to secure this vital increase in American aid to our ally Israel could not have happened without the active support of the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate and Aipac applauds their effort,” Aipac spokesman Josh Block said in a statement published following the aid increase approval.

Israel had been promised a bump in military aid before the current wrangling over the budget.

Last August, Jerusalem and Washington signed an agreement that should direct $30 billion to Israel over 10 years.

For the agreement to actually turn into cash for Israel, Congress is required to appropriate the money. This legislative process has become increasingly difficult to complete in recent years, since Republican and Democratic lawmakers could not find common ground on spending bills. A continuous resolution this year would have put the promised increase in aid in jeopardy and would have left the implementation of the new aid package in the hands of a new administration and new Congress.

The first indication of the special maneuvers came at the annual conference of Aipac, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the podium.

“I don’t know if Harry or John Boehner told you this earlier,” Pelosi said in her June 4 address, referring to Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Minority leader John Boehner, “but the first installment of this increase, $170 million, will be in the supplemental appropriation bill the House will consider soon, in fact, that we are considering now, so we can expedite this.”

The pro-Israel community’s desire to see the aid increase, even in the face of a Continuous Resolution had been raised earlier by members of Norpac, a New Jersey-based pro-Israel political action group, in a lobbying day they held May 21.

But a source following the issue closely said Aipac leaders were surprised by Pelosi’s pledge, saying it was an initiative that came from the highest congressional ranks.

On June 19, Aipac’s director of legislative policy and strategy briefed congressional staffers and explained the need for increasing foreign aid to Israel, stressing that the Jewish state’s expenses on security are higher than any other country in the industrialized world because of the threats it faces.

Bipartisan support for bypassing legislative hurdles was apparent in the June 27 Senate vote, which tallied 92 supporters and only six senators opposing the bill. Aid to Jordan and Mexico are the two other foreign military assistance items included in the bill.

The $170 million raise to Israel will bring the overall military funding to $2.38 billion — the highest of any such package.

The new aid to Israel is part of a larger deal which includes multi-billion-dollar arms deals with Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries, all aimed at strengthening nations seen as crucial in curbing Iran’s influence in the region. That package is an arms deal and does not require the appropriation of any funds.

Ex Weapons Inspector: Iran Not Pursuing Nukes, But U.S. Will Attack Before ’09

This is one of the more rational assessments of Iran’s nuclear “threat.”

Source: Jason Leopold, The Public Record.

In 2002, Scott Ritter, the former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector In Iraq, publicly accused the Bush administration of lying to Congress and the public about assertions that Iraq was hiding a chemical and biological weapons arsenal.

By speaking out publicly, Ritter emerged as one of the most prominent whistleblowers since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in the early 1970s.

Ritter’s criticisms about the Bush administration’s flawed prewar Iraq intelligence have been borne out by numerous investigations and reports, including one recently published by the Senate Armed Services Committee that found President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other senior administration officials knowingly lied about the threat Iraq posed to the United States.

Now Ritter, who was a Marine Corps intelligence officer for 12 years, is speaking out about what he sees as history repeating itself regarding U.S. policy toward Iran and the inevitability of a U.S.-led attack on the country, which he believes will happen prior to a new president being sworn into office in January 2009.

“We’re going to see some military activity before the new administration is sworn in.” Ritter said. But he added that “Iran is not a threat to the United States and Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. That’s documented.” Ritter teamed up with the Los Angeles-based U.S. Tour of Duty’s Real Intelligence, a nonprofit organization that represents former intelligence officials who openly discuss domestic and foreign policy issues. Ritter went on the road nearly a year ago to promote his recently published book, Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement. But over the past several months, issues related to Iran have dominated his discussions.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Public Record, Ritter said he has been keeping close tabs on the issue for years and continues to approach the issue as if he were still employed as an intelligence officer. He explained why he believes the U.S. is gearing up toward launching a military strike in Iran and how the media has misrepresented a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) regarding Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium.

AIPAC

He said one of the reasons he believes Democratic lawmakers have been reluctant to address the issue is the powerful Israeli lobby, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC has been pressuring the Bush administration to be even tougher on Iran. The lobby is largely responsible for drafting a resolution calling for stricter inspections and harsher economic sanctions against the country, which is expected to be voted on by the House next week.

Resolution 362 introduced by Congressman Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, has 170 Democratic and Republican co-sponsors.

The bill “demands that the president initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program.”

The resolution calls on President Bush to impose “stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran”

Ritter says AIPAC’s involvement in Iran policy is partially the reason Democrats have not been been willing to take a stand against the Bush administration’s hard-line tactics toward Iran.

“Congress has linked Iran policy to Israel. In this day and age of presidential politics no one wants to take on the Israeli lobby. That’s just the facts,” Ritter said. “You have to find a way to address this issue that sidesteps Israel. Some people may object to that. On the other hand, if you couch this thing in economic terms I think you now empower Congress to address this issue in a manner that sidesteps Israel.”

Last week, a Senate committee approved legislation to strengthen sanctions against Iran by restricting the import of Iranian carpets, caviar, and nuts to the United States.

“The strong sanctions we’ve approved today will work to deter the Iranian government from producing a nuclear weapon,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Ritter said the public would likely become more outspoken on the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran if they understood how an attack on Iran could lead to an economic collapse here at home.

“You have to talk about what’s going to happen to the price of oil, the price of food. People have to focus on that. Iran does not pose a threat whatsoever to the average American. We’ve got this hyped up threat. We need people to understand that they are being sold a bill of goods. There is no threat. Our welfare is going out the door right now because of this policy. We have to find a way to get this to resonate.”

Intelligence vs. Smoking Guns

One of the first questions Ritter says he is asked when he explains why the administration is planning an air assault against Iran is “where’s the smoking gun.”

“People will say ‘how do you know for certain,’” Ritter said. “You know I was in the in the intelligence business for a long time and we don’t make a living off of smoking guns. That’s what politicians do. We evaluate the totality of the available information and we make informed assessments and we do it in a systematic fashion. And that’s what I’ve been doing on the issue of Iran.”

Ritter said the increased rhetoric toward Tehran by various White House officials is a key indicator in understanding the Bush administration’s intent.

“I don’t like the word intent usually because the Bush administration used that with Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Intent void of a factual basis is speculation. But here we do have documentation. We have a national security strategy. We have repeated statements by the current players themselves that they seek regional transformation in the Middle East inclusive of regime change in Iran. This is the policy objective of the Bush administration.

“So we have the intent. Now with the intent we have the escalation of rhetoric. So we not only have stated intent we now have statements that reinforce those intents and seek to activate this intent,” Ritter added. “And then you have the rhetoric that’s matched with the capabilities. Clearly you have the capabilities deployed in the region to act on this. We’ve seen the nature of the strike be defined down to a limited strike to one or two strikes inside Iran affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard command. So you have all of these facilitators taking place.”

IAEA Report

In May, the media characterized a report by the IAEA into Iran’s uranium enrichment program as evidence that Tehran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration held up that report as evidence that Iran is a grave threat to the United States and Israel.

But Ritter said the media misrepresented the report and likely did not thoroughly review its findings.

“We have a situation where the IAEA has published several technical reports all of which state there is no evidence Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. None. Zero,” Ritter said.

Ritter explained how the IAEA report was drafted.

“Information has been provided to the IAEA by member nations, intelligence information. Now the IAEA has to be very circumspect when it says this but we all know that it’s basically intelligence provided to the agency by the United States of America, a nation openly hostile to Iran, a nation that has a track record of fabricating, exaggerating, and misrepresenting intelligence data. The data that’s been provided to the IAEA has derived from a laptop computer which even the IAEA claims is of questionable providence,” he said.

Ritter said that because the United States has such a dominating role in the United Nations Security Council and in the Board of Governors the IAEA couldn’t ignore the information it receives from the United States about Iran.

“The IAEA can’t go to Iran with information that isn’t serious. So they say it’s serious and it needs to be investigated. So they go to Iran and the Iranians say, correctly so, ‘this is bullshit.’ You’re basically serving as a front to the CIA. The CIA is asking intelligence based questions about issues that are not relevant to the safeguards agreement, which, by the way, is the legally binding mandate that gives the IAEA the authority to do its work in Iran. You have to read the small print.

“The IAEA acknowledges that what it’s asking Iran to answer has nothing to do with its mandate of the nuclear non proliferation treaty. It is related to Security Council resolutions calling for the suspension of uranium and an investigation into a nuclear weapons program but the bottom line is what the IAEA has said is that Iran has not been forthcoming and Iran is saying it’s not their job to answer the CIA’s questions. So the IAEA reports that Iran is not being forthcoming on these issues and now it’s unnamed diplomats, i.e. American and British diplomats, who say they are very concerned because Iran’s refusal to cooperate only reinforces their concern that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

“This is purely CIA instigated tripe. When we get down to the nuts and bolts of the technical question of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and whether or not there’s any infrastructure in Iran that supports a nuclear weapons program and the IAEA technical find says there is none,” Ritter said.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, said in an interview last week with Al Arabiya Television that he would resign from the agency if Iran is attacked and warned that a military strike against the country would be catastrophic.

“I don’t believe that what I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger. If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time … it would make me unable to continue my work,” ElBaradei said. “A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball,” he said, emphasizing that any attack would only make the Islamic Republic more determined to obtain nuclear power.”

Israel Not Involved

Ritter said an attack on Iran would come in the form of a “sustained aerial bombardment.” He added that a military strike would not involve Israel as asserted last weekend by John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who told Fox News that Israel would attack Iran after the presidential election in the fall. Moreover, Ritter said a report in The New York Times last week that alleged Israel conducted a major aerial exercise over the eastern Mediterranean as a warning to Iran is simply untrue.

“Only a few analysts have reflected on what I’ve said all along: Israel cannot initiate and sustain an air strike against Iran,” Ritter explained. “They’re incapable of it because they don’t have the military force. They don’t share a common border [with Iran]. They have to fly over sovereign states. The immediate international outcry would be tremendous. When we sought to fly U2 aircraft into Iraq when I was a weapons inspector if we felt that the Iraqis delayed in their acknowledgement the United States Air Force would SORTE a support package to go in. That included electronic warfare aircraft, refueling aircraft, etc. Just to get one U2 to fly a mission over Iraq with a support package involved 80 aircraft.

“For Israel to strike Iran, and remember Iran isn’t Iraq, Iran has a viable air-defense system, an Air Force, radar, and Israel would have to suppress it all and it can’t do it,” Ritter added. “Israel just doesn’t have the capability. Israel does not have the ability to initiate and sustain major combat operations against Iran. Israel is not going to start this fight. It will be the United States. All this talk about Israel getting involved I minimize that. Israel’s not going into Iran.”

Ritter said Bolton’s comments is an indicator that the “clock is running out” for ideologues in the Bush administration.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that John McCain is not going to become the next president of the United States of America, which means the next administration has the potential of deviating in a meaningful fashion away from the policies of the current administration,” Ritter said. “Clearly, the Bush administration is populated by ideologues that are very serious about what they want to accomplish. They aren’t playing games here. They aren’t children. They are serious. They believe there is a threat to the United States and that the United States has to take action. Why I bring this up is that the clock is running out for them.”

Congress Refuses to Act

Ritter had some tough words for Washington lawmakers for continuously failing to put any obstacles into place to block the Bush administration from even attempting to attack Iran without first consulting Congress.

“We see not only has Congress not seeking to put any obstacles in the way of this policy but in fact Congress is actively facilitating this policy by refusing to enact legislation that would require the president to get the consent of Congress before going into Iran,” Ritter said. “The fact that Congress has opted out from tying the president’s hands reinforces, at least in the Bush administration’s mind, that Congress is legitimizing the potential of action.

“So when you put all of this together you start to see that there is not only a real risk of war but that those who would like to do it see that there aren’t any obstacles being put in the way of their accomplishing this, which makes the likelihood of military action even greater. Everyday that goes by without Congressional action is another day that reinforces that there will be a military strike against Iran.”

Ritter has been trying to pass along his intelligence analysis on Iran to Congress for some time. He said “given the political situation that exists I don’t think you’re going to find any politician on either side of the political spectrum reaching out to me or talking with me directly.”

But he has been able, at the very least; distribute his intelligence to middlemen who can get the information to Congress.

“What I am saying to you is being said to the powers that be in Washington so there is no way [Democrats and Republicans] can say that they haven’t been made aware of this analysis,” Ritter said. “Ideally, there would be hearings and I would be invited to testify. So that not only these words would be given to the policymakers but it would be done in a way that the constituents would be cognizant of the fact that this is an analysis that was made available to policymakers who chose to act upon it or ignore it at their own risk.”

I contacted aides in the Democratic leadership offices of both Houses over the past week and also spoke to aides in minority offices. No one would comment on the record about the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran or discuss whether they have been made aware of Ritter’s intelligence analysis on the issue.

An aide to John Conyers, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, pointed to the congressman’s May 8 letter sent to President Bush stating that Conyers would initiate impeachment proceedings if an attack on Iran was launched without first receiving approval from Congress.

“Late last year, Senator Joseph Biden stated unequivocally that ‘the president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach’ the president,” Conyers’ letter says. “We agree with Senator Biden, and it is our view that if you do not obtain the constitutionally required congressional authorization before launching preemptive military strikes against Iran or any other nation, impeachment proceedings should be pursued..”

Ritter was critical of the letter Conyers sent to Bush, saying the congressman is still avoiding the issue.

“John Conyers is so off base on this one,” Ritter said. “I appreciate his passion, but the fact is rather than Conyers say [to President Bush] if you attack Iran I am going to impeach you why doesn’t Conyers reflect on the fact that there is no basis for impeachment because he’s been constitutionally empowered by Congress. If Conyers is so worried about this what Conyers needs to do is work with Congress to revoke the two existing war powers resolutions concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and then reconfigure the president’s war powers authority in a manner which constitutionally permits ongoing combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but tells the president that if you seek any expansion of your authority you have to get the consent of Congress. Now if the president attacks Iran you can impeach him.”

Conyers office declined to comment.

Ritter said he understood that the hotly contested presidential election makes it difficult for Democratic lawmakers to address the issue of Iran.

“Let’s talk about political reality here. You cannot expect a politician, especially Democrats who want to retain control of Congress and want a Democrat to be president of the United States, to commit political suicide,” Ritter said.

Obama And McCain: Two Sides Of The Same Coin

Brilliant!

Source: Timothy V. Gatto, CounterCurrents.org.

I’ve waited to write this article for a while now. I used to be a loyal die-hard Democrat for 54 years of my life. I no longer know what a “Democrat” is anymore; I don’t know what a “Progressive” is either. I once thought that a “Progressive” was words that people who were too shy to say they were “liberals” used in its place. I don’t feel that way anymore. These so called “Progressives” aren’t liberals, they are something else completely. They are not people that have liberal values that put the welfare of the people of our country first. There are mass-media believers that can’t think past the last “sound-bite” they heard on a campaign video from the DNC.

The current state of the Democratic Party is about as close to an “opposition party” as Eli Lilly is to Searle. They are just different brands of the same product. The product in this case is the Military-Corporate-Industrial-Complex that owns America, owns the media, owns the banking system and owns just about every main-stream politician in this whole damn country. Don’t think I’m telling the truth? It’s easy to see the truth if you want to take the time to look at it. Just find out where the money is coming from for these campaigns that buy the hopes and dreams of the American people. The candidates have spent a quarter of a billion dollars on their primary campaigns just in the Democratic Party. That’s a half Billion Dollars between Hillary Clinton and the “sainted” Barack Obama. Where did they get this money, from ordinary people that are loosing their homes to foreclosure that are working two jobs because their good job was outsourced by corporations that wanted to cut costs? Are they getting donations from people that can’t make the minimum on their credit card bills? You tell me.

I’ll save you the trouble of looking on your own. Go to WWW.Opensecrets.org, a website that was made so everyday people like you and I could find these things out. The Center for Responsive politics tell you who gave and who got from whom. Check it out, or are you afraid of being disillusioned? If you care about the truth, take your look and see who’s behind the campaigns. You’ll see who corporate America is betting on to keep the status Quo. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the same Military-Industrial-Corporate-Complex is behind both candidates of the two major parties.

A few days ago, Senator John McCain spoke to AIPAC. Maybe you don’t know it, but AIPAC does not speak for the majority of Jews living in America. The truth is that AIPAC represents the right wing of the Israeli Government and the right wing Jews in America. The other 80% of Jews living in America are the most part liberal Democrats. They don’t subscribe to AIPAC. AIPAC also has fundamentalist Christians that are betting on the “Rapture”. AIPAC is a right wing, predominantly Republican organization that takes a hard line against and concession to peace that Israel might be asked to make in the interests of peace in the Middle-East. Another thing you might ask these people, why hasn’t Israel signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? The answer is that America has colluded with the Jewish State to allow them to produce from 150-to 300 nuclear weapons. Nice trick. We rant about Iran building reactors while Israel stocks nukes. Isn’t that rather one-sided? We are a country that claims we are non-judgmental and want only to keep peace and stop future nuclear wars? The American people have been deceived.

When McCain spoke to AIPAC, he warned about Iran. He said that Israel should not negotiate with Hamas. He said that the US is Israel’s #1 ally. That’s just great. What do they need us for when they can wipe Iran of the face of the Earth? It’s because we give them legitimacy. Not only that, AIPAC donates over $110,000,000 to Congressmen ands Senators in our government. McCain was predictably for the cause of AIPAC. What was surprising was the speech given by the presumptive nominee, the so-called anti-war Democratic Presumptive nominee, Barack Obama when he spoke to AIPAC inured him to the right-wing AIPAC. Wasn’t this the anti-war candidate?

Senator Barack Obama, with his two years in Washington politics, wanted to win the hearts and minds of AIPAC. So he too brought up the fact that Israel should not negotiate with Hamas. He even went so far to say that they never should have been able to be on the ballot, because there was evidence before the elections that they would win. How’s that for a “believer in Democracy”. Don’t let the people’s choice get a chance to run. The truth is that 64% of Israelis citizen’s want to negotiate with Hamas. Obama says that unless Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist, that they should not be talked to. Does he realize that if Hamas agrees to Israel’s right to exist that the wording in the phrase means that they also must disavow the right of return or compensation to Palestinian lands usurped by the Jewish State and to give up reparations for the land, businesses a property taken by Israel since 1946? To all Americans, think about it. If people took these things from us, would you let it slide?

At one time Barack Obama was outraged about what was happening in Gaza. Time and attitude change quickly when you clinch the Democratic nomination. He calls for a Palestine that is united contiguously, that doesn’t bode well for the surrounded ghetto that once was the Gaza strip. What’s to become of them? More ethnic cleansing and killing of women and children as Israeli jets and Tanks keep blowing the city to hell? Its accepted genocide in Gaza and the majority of the world is turning a deaf ear to the plight of these people. We hear of “terrorist” attacks against Israel. But the truth is that more Israeli citizens have died in automobile accidents than in terrorist incidents. Think about this.

Obama had some hard words for Iran. This is a nation that knows that America looks to that country as its next victim of “regime change”. That’s a catchword for overthrowing their government and putting in American puppets that will sell their resourses for pennies on the dollar. We have been doing this as a nation since 1951, in all of Latin America and Central America. The American people know this, but as long as they can maintain their standard of living, it seems unimportant how many people die from CIA operations that install strong-Arm governments that oppress their people and sell off their resources to this “American Empire” we seem to have developed.

People reading this know the truth, they know what I’m writing is the truth. We are backing people that support our world-wide agenda, whether it is right or wrong. Obama showed his true colors when he spoke to AIPAC. He is too young to realize that this world is being manipulated by moneyed interests that are after power and control. I’m sure they did a good job of convincing him that with words they stuck in his mouth that he believes are proper and for the good of all. He doesn’t understand the reality of how the world works. The right-wing government wants no peace as long as they are playing with a full deck, and that deck has the total blind support of the American people. Senator Obama might truly believe he’s going to bring change; I want to make it clear to him that as long as he listens to the ultra capitalists’ that run his campaign and the people that he uses as advisors, that he will be no different that the MICP wants him to be. There will be no change. Let him talk about giving the American people our civil liberties back. Let him talk about overturning the Military Commissions Act that scrapped Habeas Corpus and the John Warner Defense Act of 2006 that totally eliminated posse comitatus so that the Federal Government could not use Federal troops without the permission of Congress for law enforcement in the United States that brings America closer to martial law, let his talk about “Extraordinary Rendition” flights where we pick up “suspects” and bring them to other countries so that they may be tortured. Let’s talk about Guantanamo and the presidential signing statements. Let him talk about PD 51 and the North American Union. Let him talk about the right of nations to determine their own destiny. Let him speak about dismantling the “Unitary Presidency” and making Congress perform their oversight duties. These are the issues. Our jobs in this country are the issues. Freedoms of the Press are our issues. The “Good Ole Boy” system is rife with entrenched Congressman and Senators who work for their own best’s interests and not for their constituents. “Professional Politicians who work to make a career out of looking after themselves, not constitutes at home, they come last. Some of these Congressman and Senators have been there for decades! The time for Corporate Government must come to an end. Government by the people and for the people must be re-instituted. Government for the sake of profiting the Military-Industrial-Complex must be stopped. The corporate policymakers should be damned. They have damned themselves by promoting this travesty.

When the 10% of American families own 71% of this nation’s wealth, something went terribly wrong in this country. The “Robber Barons” have returned. When the 90% of us have to share to remaining 29% of this countries’ wealth when we are the ones that give our blood and sweat to make the money that goes in the bank accounts of the “Privileged Few” while we lose benefits and heath care and CEO’s make seven figure salaries on companies that are running at deficits, the government is not looking after the interests of the majority of our people. Let me say this, Americans are too proud to be your serfs. We want change. Not the phony change of the corporate controlled Democrats, but real change. I hope this brings some kind of enlightenment to Americans. Regime change and world domination is not what Americans want. Your multi-national corporations don’t care about the American people anymore. The politicians just want to stay in power.

We Americans, or a majority were born with our eyes closed and they have been closed for a long time. They are open now. Let this be a warning to all you global industrialists and your military industrial complex. In the words of President John F. Kennedy:

We do not want a PAX Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” John F. Kennedy (1963)

The American people are fooled into thinking “Progressivism” is something different. There are many Progressives that are real; the majority uses the word to hide behind. I am an American that does not want to conquer or control the world for the sake of greed. You may not realize this now, but my name is legion. Americans are peaceful people that want to live with the world, and be a part of the world. PAX Americana is not our goal. You industrialists’ are leading this country into run with your own insatiable greed. Wake up and smell the coffee. Your political parties are not offering us anything new except strife at the price of American sacrifice. We will not stand for this much longer. You will bankrupt our once proud nation, and lead us into the dustbin of history. Most Americans realize this but are at a loss of what to do, so they embrace a junior Senator that promises “change”. He will bring no change, just a softer continuation of what is in the interests of the people that dominate this nation. That my friends are not you and me, it could be, if we would all wake up and smell the coffee. That coffee must be strong, we must be strong, or we will give our children a nation that is run by people that are not anything like the average citizen. We will be their chattel, if we are not already. I for one think that American will never stand for it. The Mainstream Media did a remarkable job in their propaganda and their debates and articles that never asked the important questions that I have asked in this article. Let this article see the light of day, it asks the questions that we as Americans want answers too. Do we want never-ending war and saber-rattling as the defense industries make huge profits, or do we want a return to peace and a chance to rebuild America for our children?

Obama’s Right Turn : A Slap in the Face for Progressives?

Is anyone really surprised? Did you expect change? Sorry.

Source: Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus.

In many respects, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has played right into the hands of cynics who have long doubted his promises to create a new and more progressive role for the United States in the world. The very morning after the last primaries, in which he finally received a sufficient number of pledged delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination and no longer needed to win over voters from the progressive base of his own party, Obama – in a Clinton-style effort at triangulation – gave a major policy speech before the national convention of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Embracing policies which largely backed those of the more hawkish voices concerned with Middle Eastern affairs, he received a standing ovation for his efforts.

His June 3 speech in Washington in many ways constituted a slap in the face of the grass roots peace and human rights activists who have brought him to the cusp of the Democratic presidential nomination.

In other respects, however, he pandered less to this influential lobbying group than many other serious aspirants for national office have historically. And at least part of his speech focused on convincing the largely right-wing audience members to support his positions rather than simply underscoring his agreement with them.

Much of the media attention placed upon his speech centered on the ongoing debate between him and incipient Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Iran. While embracing many of the same double-standards regarding nuclear nonproliferation issues and UN resolutions as does the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties, Obama did insert some rationality into the debate regarding the need for negotiations with that regional power rather than maintaining the current U.S. policy of diplomatic isolation and threats of war.

When it came to Israel and Palestine, however, Obama appeared to largely embrace a right-wing perspective which appeared to place all the blame for the ongoing violence and the impasse in the peace process on the Palestinians under occupation rather than the Israelis who are still occupying and colonizing the parts of their country seized by the Israeli army more than 40 years ago.

Progressive Israeli Reactions

While there were some faint glimmers of hope in Obama’s speech for those of us who support Israeli-Palestinian peace, progressive voices in Israel were particularly disappointed.

Israeli analyst Uri Avneri, in an essay entitled “No, I Can’t!”, expressed the bitterness of many Israeli peace activists for “a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.” Avneri goes on to observe the irony of how Obama’s “dizzying success in the primaries was entirely due to his promise to bring about a change, to put an end to the rotten practices of Washington and to replace the old cynics with a young, brave person who does not compromise his principles. And lo and behold, the very first thing he does after securing the nomination of his party is to compromise his principles.”

Avneri addressed the view of many Israelis that “Obama’s declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people.”

Support for Further Militarization

In his speech, Obama rejected the view that the Middle East already has too many armaments and dismissed pleas by human rights activists that U.S. aid to Israel – like all countries – should be made conditional on adherence to international humanitarian law. Indeed, he further pledged an additional $30 billion of taxpayer-funded military aid to the Israeli government and its occupation forces over the next decade with no strings attached. Rather than accept that strategic parity between potential antagonists is the best way, short of a full peace agreement, to prevent war and to maintain regional security, Obama instead insisted that the United States should enable Israel to maintain its “qualitative military edge.”

Over the past three years, the ratio of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip killed by Israeli forces relative to the number of Israeli civilians in Israel killed by Palestinians is approximately 50 to one and has been even higher more recently. However, Obama chose only to mention the Israeli deaths and condemn Hamas, whose armed wing has been responsible for most of the Israeli casualties, and not a word about the moral culpability of the Israeli government, which Amnesty International and other human rights groups have roundly criticized for launching air strikes into Gaza’s densely crowded refugee camps and related tactics.

Since first running for the U.S. Senate, Obama has routinely condemned Arab attacks against Israeli civilians but has never condemned attacks against Arab civilians by Israelis. This apparent insistence that the lives of Palestinian and Lebanese civilian are somehow less worthy of attention than the lives of Israeli civilians have led to charges of racism on the part of Obama.

Despite his openness to talk with those governing Iran and North Korea, Obama emphasized his opposition to talking to those governing the Gaza Strip, even though Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian parliament in what was universally acknowledged as a free election. Though a public opinion poll published in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz showed that 64% of the Israeli population support direct negotiations between Israel and Hamas (while only 28% expressed opposition), Obama has chosen to side with the right-wing minority in opposing any such talks. Furthermore, Obama insists that Hamas should have never been even allowed to participate in the Palestinian elections in the first place because of their extremist views, which fail to recognize Israel and acts of terrorism by its armed wing. Yet he has never objected to the Israelis allowing parties such as National Union – which defends attacks on Arab civilians and seeks to destroy any Palestinian national entity, and expel its Arab population – to participate in elections or hold high positions in government.

He insisted that Hamas uphold previous agreements by the Fatah-led Palestine Authority with Israel, but did not insist that Israel uphold its previous agreements with the Palestine Authority, such as withdrawing from lands re-occupied in 2001 in violation of U.S.-guaranteed disengagement agreements.

In reference to Obama’s speech, the anchor to Israel’s Channel 2 News exclaimed that it was “reminiscent of the days of Menachem Begin’s Likud,” referring to the far right-wing Israeli party and its founder, a notorious terrorist from the 1940s who later became prime minister. By contrast, back in February, while still seeking liberal Democratic votes in the primaries, Obama had explicitly rejected the view which, in his words, identifies being pro-Israel with “adopting an unwaveringly pro-Likud view of Israel.” Now that he has secured the nomination, however, he has appeared to have changed his tune.

Endorsing Israel’s Annexation of Jerusalem

Most disturbing was Obama’s apparent support for Israel’s illegal annexation of greater East Jerusalem, the Palestinian-populated sector of the city and surrounding villages that Israel seized along with the rest of the West Bank in June 1967.

The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions (252, 267, 271, 298, 476 and 478) calling on Israel to rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem and to refrain from any unilateral action regarding its final status. Furthermore, due to the city’s unresolved legal status dating from the 1948-49 Israeli war on independence, the international community refuses to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with the United States and other governments maintaining their respective embassies in Tel Aviv.

Despite these longstanding internationally-recognized legal principles, Obama insisted in his speech before AIPAC that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Given the city’s significance to both populations, any sustainable peace agreement would need to recognize Jerusalem as the capital city for both Israel and Palestine. In addition to its religious significance for both Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims, Jerusalem has long been the most important cultural, commercial, political, and educational center for Palestinians and has the largest Palestinian population of any city in the world. Furthermore, Israel’s annexation of greater East Jerusalem and its planned annexation of surrounding settlement blocs would make a contiguous and economically viable Palestinian state impossible. Such a position, therefore, would necessarily preclude any peace agreement. This raises serious questions as to whether Obama really does support Israeli-Palestinian peace after all.

According to Uri Avneri, Obama’s “declaration about Jerusalem breaks all bounds. It is no exaggeration to call it scandalous.” Furthermore, says this prominent observer of Israeli politics, every Israeli government in recent years has recognized that calls for an undivided Jerusalem “constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared – quietly, almost secretly – from the arsenal of official slogans. Only the Israeli (and American-Jewish) Right sticks to it, and for the same reason: to smother at birth any chance for a peace that would necessitate the dismantling of the settlements.”

Obama argued in his speech that the United States should not “force concessions” on Israel, such as rescinding its annexation of Jerusalem, despite the series of UN Security Council resolutions explicitly calling on Israel do to so. While Obama insists that Iran, Syria, and other countries that reject U.S. hegemonic designs in the region should be forced to comply with UN Security Council resolutions, he apparently believes allied governments such as Israel are exempt.

Also disturbing about his statement was a willingness to “force concessions” on the Palestinians by pre-determining the outcome of one of the most sensitive issues in the negotiations. If, as widely interpreted, Obama was recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of greater East Jerusalem, it appears that the incipient Democratic nominee – like the Bush administration – has shown contempt for the most basic premises of international law, which forbids any country from expanding its borders by force.

However, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Obama campaign, in an attempt to clarify his controversial statement, implied that the presumed Democratic presidential nominee was not actually ruling out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem and that “undivided” simply meant that “it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.” The campaign also replied to the outcry from his speech by declaring that “Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.” This implies that Obama’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel does not necessarily preclude its Arab-populated eastern half becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Israel, however, has shown little willingness to withdraw its administration and occupation forces from greater East Jerusalem voluntarily. Obama’s apparent reluctance to pressure Israel to do so makes it hard to imagine that he is really interested in securing a lasting peace agreement.

It Could Have Been Worse

Perhaps, as his campaign claims, Obama was not rejecting the idea of a shared co-capital of Jerusalem. And perhaps his emphasis on Israeli suffering relative to Palestinian suffering was simply a reflection of the sympathies of the audience he was addressing and was not indicative of anti-Arab racism. If so, the speech could have been a lot worse.

Indeed, Obama’s emphasis on peace, dialogue, and diplomacy is not what the decidedly militaristic audience at AIPAC normally hears from politicians who address them.

Obama did mention, albeit rather hurriedly, a single line about Israeli obligations, stating that Israel could “advance the cause of peace” by taking steps to “ease the freedom of Palestinians, improve economic conditions” and “refrain from building settlements.” This is more than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain was willing to say in their talks before the AIPAC convention. And, unlike the Bush administration, which last year successfully pressured Israel not to resume peace negotiations with Syria, Obama declared that his administration would never “block negotiations when Israel’s leaders decide that they may serve Israeli interests.”

Furthermore, earlier in his career, Obama took a more balanced perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, aligning himself with positions embraced by the Israeli peace camp and its American supporters. For example, during his unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama criticized the Clinton administration for its unconditional support for the occupation and other Israeli policies and called for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He referred to the “cycle of violence” between Israelis and Palestinians, whereas most Democrats were insisting that it was a case of “Palestinian violence and the Israeli response.” He also made statements supporting a peace settlement along the lines of the 2003 Geneva Initiative and similar efforts by Israeli and Palestinian moderates.

Unlike any other major contenders for president this year or the past four election cycles, Obama at least has demonstrated in the recent past a more moderate and balanced perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As president, he may well be better than his AIPAC speech would indicate. Though the power of the “Israel Lobby” is often greatly exaggerated, it may be quite reasonable to suspect that pressure from well-funded right-wing American Zionist constituencies has influenced what Obama believes he can and cannot say. As an African-American whose father came from a Muslim family, he is under even more pressure than most candidates to avoid being labeled as “anti-Israel.”

Ironically, a strong case can be made that the right-wing militaristic policies he may feel forced to defend actually harm Israel’s legitimate long-term security interests.

A Political Necessity?

If indeed Obama took these hard-line positions during his AIPAC speech in order to seem more electable, it may be a serious mistake. Most liberal Democrats who gave blind support to the Israeli government in the 1960s and 1970s now have a far more even-handed view of the conflict, recognizing both Israeli and Palestinian rights and responsibilities. In addition, voters under 40 tend to take a far more critical view of unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies than those of older generations. There is a clear generational shift among American Jews as well, with younger Jewish voters – although firmly supporting Israel’s right to exist in peace and security – largely opposing unconditional U.S. support for the occupation and colonization of Arab lands. The only major voting group that supports positions espoused by AIPAC are right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who tend to vote Republican anyway.

Furthermore, Obama has been far more dependent on large numbers of small donors from his grassroots base and less on the handful of wealthy donors affiliated with such special interest groups as AIPAC. This speech may have cost him large numbers of these smaller, progressive donors without gaining him much from the small numbers of larger, more conservative donors.

Indeed, there may not be a single policy issue where Obama’s liberal base differs from the candidate more than on Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Green Party and its likely nominee, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along with independent candidate Ralph Nader, are both using this issue to gain support at the expense of Obama.

Only hours after his AIPAC speech, the Nader campaign sent out a strongly worded letter noting how, unlike Obama and McCain, Nader supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements and would change U.S. Middle East policy. The widely-circulated response to the speech makes the case that, in contrast to Obama, “Nader/Gonzalez stands on these issues with the majority of Israelis, Palestinians, Jewish-Americans and Arab Americans.”

Betraying the Jewish Community

Through a combination of deep-seated fear from centuries of anti-Semitic repression, manipulation by the United States and other Western powers, and self-serving actions by some of their own leaders, a right-wing minority of American Jews support influential organizations such as AIPAC to advocate militaristic policies that, while particularly tragic for the Palestinians and Lebanese, are ultimately bad for the United States and Israel as well. Obama’s June 3 speech would have been the perfect time for Obama, while upholding his commitment to Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, to challenge AIPAC’s militarism and national chauvinism more directly. Unfortunately, while showing some independence of thought on Iran, he apparently felt the Palestinians were not as important.

Taking a pro-Israel but anti-occupation position would have demonstrated that Obama was not just another pandering politician and that he recognized that a country’s legitimate security needs were not enhanced by invasion, occupation, colonization and repression.

That truly would have been “change you can believe in.”

Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst, serves as a professor of politics and chair of Middle East Studies at the University of San Francisco.

THE A.I.P.A.C. CONFERENCE – HATE IRAN WEEK GETS UNDERWAY IN WASHINGTON.

By Damian Lataan.

The annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference got under way yesterday and wasted no time in kicking off the proceedings with Republican presidential candidate John ‘Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran’ McCain launching into a hate tirade against Iran by accusing his likely presidential election opponent, Barack Obama, of having ‘policies toward Iraq and Iran [that] would create chaos and endanger the United States and Israel’. It’ll be interesting to see how Obama responds to McCain’s accusations when he gets to address AIPAC. Hillary Clinton too is down to address the conference and, if by the time she appears she has decided that she’s still in the running, it’ll be interesting to see what she has to say as well. If, on the other hand, Hillary has decided to withdraw from the Democrat race, it will be just as interesting to see how closely whatever remarks she makes to the conference fall in line with Obama’s. Either way, it’s going to be interesting.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is scheduled to address the conference. He will, no doubt, be telling them and the world how evil the Iranians are for developing nuclear power and how underhanded they are being because they may be pursuing nuclear weapons. And the audience, of course, will be totally oblivious to the superb irony of an underhandedly nuclear armed Israel telling the world that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.

Well, why not? The world fell for it last time when they accused that other thorn in the side of Israeli aspirations for a Greater Israel, Iraq, of secretly developing nuclear weapons long after they’d actually given the idea away. Surely, they believe, the world will fall for it again. And, while they’re at it, they will more than likely accuse Syria of the same thing in the hope that two birds might be killed with the same stone if they could just get America to do the job for them.

And while the US is dealing with Iran, it would leave Israel free to deal with Hamas in the Gaza and Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

There’s a lot riding on this years AIPAC conference what with it being the last one to be held during the Bush administration and, therefore, the last opportunity the American Israel Lobby has to effectively call for America to attack Iran. They know that a US under an Obama administration will not be likely to attack Iran. For this reason, the ‘Hate Iran Week’ will be the most intense yet.

And the winner is … the Israel lobby

By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times.

WASHINGTON – They’re all here – and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates – John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as “a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US foreign policy”, but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel’s direction”.

Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite”. Anyone for that matter who “says that there is an Israeli lobby” also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.

All the candidates in the House say yeah
Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year’s AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer’s verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: “None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside.”

Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York: “Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism.” A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran’s leadership.

And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago; no reference at all to Palestinian “suffering”, as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.

No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, “Si” Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby – the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs – in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.

The top leadership – mostly former AIPAC presidents – is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state – without endorsing it – when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby – Jews and non-Jews (It’s important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous “A Clean Break” document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 – the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

The house that AIPAC built
AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as “stunningly effective”. Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet”. The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel”. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. “Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world.”

AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel. Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, according to which “Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies”.

AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don’t. In the end, it’s all about money – specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US.

Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC’s bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff “usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes”.

Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser’s wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel, and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund “peace process” when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it “recognized Israel, renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements”.

AIPAC and Iraq
It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: “Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.“

And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war”.

Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.

Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.”

AIPAC and Iran
Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead”. Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany’s Focus magazine in April 2007 that “it would take 10 days … and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles” to set back Iran’s nuclear program.

A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer’s power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.

Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners – very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:

* The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East, against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.
* Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.
* The unconditional support for Israel, regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak’s Egypt and King Abdullah’s Jordan, and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.
* Fighting Israel’s wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East.

Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves – with unassailable establishment credentials – could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.

Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it – because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option “off the table”. The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.

AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was “America and Israel standing against terror”. Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time – just as in PNAC’s letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an “axis of evil” alongside the US.

During AIPAC’s jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop “surge” in Iraq. Pelosi was dutifully present. But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing – even though Hagee maintains that “anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ rebellion against God”.

On Iran, Hagee definitely set the tone: “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran’s nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel.” He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year – and he’ll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.
*******************
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

From AIPAC to the Cuban Exiles: Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

I think the comparison to Sen. Kerry is apt. There’s only one political party in the U.S.: The War Party.

By Greg Kafoury, CounterPunch.

This week, Senator Barak Obama traveled to Florida and spoke to Jewish and Cuban-American audiences. In those speeches, he embraced the right-wing policy positions of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and the hard-line program of the most reactionary elements of the Cuban exile community.

Senator Obama was for many years considered pro-Palestinian, but a year ago when he spoke sympathetically about the suffering of Palestinian people, he quickly backed off his statements under pressure from the Israeli lobby. His surrender to AIPAC this week is particularly troubling because it comes at a time when more and more Americans – including Jewish Americans – are awakening to the fact that the Israeli lobby is a threat to both America and Israel, because its unwavering support for the expansion of colonial settlements and its resistance to serious peace negotiations serve to block the two-state solution which could otherwise be within reach.

Last year, George Soros wrote in the New York Review of Books that the power of the Israeli lobby should be challenged by the creation of a new Jewish lobby in America, one committed to peace and justice. Just such a group was recently formed in Washington, D.C., calling itself “J Street.” Former President Jimmy Carter has warned that the occupation of Palestine is creating an Israeli apartheid.

On May 7, Carter appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” and explained the need to negotiate with Hamas, negotiations that are opposed by the Israeli lobby and by the U.S. administration. He noted that Hamas prevailed in an internationally-supervised Palestinian election that had been sponsored by America and Israel. Carter pointed out that a recent Ha’aretz poll found that 64% of Israelis favor negotiations with Hamas. Yet Senator Obama has now fallen in line with AIPAC, ruling out negotiations with Hamas, and adopting the language of the Bush administration in calling Hamas a “terrorist organization.”

Occupation invites resistance. To demand an end to resistance as the price of discussing the occupation is to invite endless casualties. As Ralph Nader has pointed out, the American media makes much of the primitive rockets fired at Israel by Palestinians, while minimizing the use of heavy weaponry and helicopter gun ships by the Israelis in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Over the last year, Palestinian civilian casualties outnumber Israeli civilian casualties nearly 400 to 1.

In his speech to the Cuban exiles, Senator Obama said he was willing to meet Raul Castro, but declared that members of the exile community would have to have “a seat at the table.” This is the sort of precondition which Obama had previously ruled out, and the likelihood of Castro sitting down with exiles is beyond remote. Obama said that the release of political prisoners would have to be on the agenda, yet the exiles’ notion of who is a political prisoner consists largely of those who not only resisted the regime, but who took money from the American government, and coordinated their efforts with those who supported the overthrow of the regime. (See ” Cuba: U.S. Diplomat is Accused of Delivering Cash to Opposition,” N.Y. Times, 5/24/08.)

While Obama spoke in favor of allowing Cuban-Americans to more frequently visit their families in Cuba and to send money to them, these reforms are widely popular in the exile community. Most tellingly, Obama failed to oppose the Bush Administration’s ban on ordinary Americans traveling to Cuba on educational tours, tours that until 2004 allowed thousands of Americans to visit Cuba, and to come to their own conclusions about the Cuban Revolution.

Worse yet, the same Senator Obama who only a year ago supported ending the embargo declared that the embargo would continue until Cuba knuckled under to American demands.

In 1959, Cubans overthrew a dictator who was in partnership with the Mafia and who allowed Cuban workers and natural resources to be exploited by giant American corporations. In response to their nationalizing American assets, the Cubans faced nearly fifty years of U.S. sponsored invasion, embargo, sabotage, terrorism, and attempts to assassinate their leaders.

Yet Obama spoke not a word of how the restrictions of political liberty in Cuba are linked to Cuba’s struggle to maintain independence in the face of relentless attempts by a succession of U.S. administrations to use their great power to bring Cuba to heel.

Senator Obama spoke not a word of the accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, the world-class health system, the high quality education, rural development, cutting edge research on infectious diseases, and the provision of thousands of Cuban doctors to the most disease-ridden, God-forsaken corners of the earth.

Senator Obama essentially gave the same kind of speech on Cuba that we have heard from American Presidents for the last fifty years. Where is the “change” that we have been waiting for, that we have been promised so repeatedly?

We have been down this road before. In 2004, progressives lined up behind Senator Kerry, and progressive organizations made no demands upon him. The anti-war movement folded its tents. After this early and unconditional surrender on the part of the American left, Senator Kerry moved sharply to the right. The Democratic Convention was militaristic in form and corporate in policy. The candidate who had called himself “anti-war” wound up running against Bush’s war policy from the right, calling for tens of thousands more troops, and criticizing Bush for having pulled back from Falluja simply because of the massive civilian carnage. Yet for all of this appeasement of the right, Kerry lost the election. Shortly thereafter, Bush leveled Falluja, and four years later American forces have been bombing major cities in Iraq.