Tag Archives: Israel Palestine

Political Rants

Mitt’s excellent adventure.

Did you hear it last week, over the noise emanating from the London Olympics? That collective groan from points east? That was the world reacting to the man who might be president next January. There are, I’m sure, millions in Europe and the Middle East thinking, Really, America? So soon after Bush, you’re going to elect yet another ham-fisted idiot? Really? In many respects, our president is president of the world, if only because he (and thus far, it’s always been “he”) wields enormous power – military, economic, and diplomatic – over virtually everyone else. (They should probably get a vote in the matter, but then here in America we’re not even guaranteed that right, depending upon which state we live in.)

Though his spinmeisters have been working overtime to put a positive gloss on it, Mitt’s softball trip to friendly nations was an unmitigated (or un-Mitt-igated, perhaps) disaster, from the crypto-racist tone of the adviser referencing our shared “Anglo-Saxon heritage” with the British, to the Olympic gaffe, to name-checking MI6 (psst, Mitt: it’s supposed to be a secret), to blaming Palestinian poverty on their “culture” or lack of same. That last comment is something of a bookend to the Anglo-Saxon trope he started off with, making Romney seem strangely fixated on issues of ethnic identity. (He later doubled down on the Palestinian remark in an essay in National Review online.)

Of course, the stop was another opportunity to signal his willingness to countenance war with Iran, whether started by Israel or by the United States. In this we hear his neocon Bush-era advisors speaking, such as Dan Senor, former military flack during the early days of the Iraq invasion, who said on Romney’s behalf that the governor would “respect that decision” if Israel chose to strike Teheran militarily. No doubt. I hope everyone over here is listening closely to what Romney and his campaign are saying about foreign policy. They seem anxious to get another war started, having tasted what they seem to consider “success” in the Iraq catastrophe. And for those who say the economy is the only issue that matters, it’s worth considering what yet another pointless war would do to the federal budget.

Mitt’s got FoxNews syndrome – too much time spent with friendly media. He just doesn’t know how to behave in the real world. Ergo, his press availabilities were practically zero during this trip. I’ll bet he’s glad to be back home, in the comforting embrace of Sean Hannity.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

More of the same.

Israel has been knocking the living hell out of Gaza again this week. This round of bloodshed began with the killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi, head of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant Palestinian group. Rockets fired into southern Israel in response were supposedly shot down by their new anti-missile system. I will reserve comment on that until I see convincing confirmation that the system worked, having lived through bogus claims about Patriot missile batteries during the Gulf War. I can say, anecdotally, that the one thing I hear repeated by defenders of the Israeli government here in the U.S. is missiles, missiles, missiles. It’s like the G.O.P. candidates talking about gas prices. A million Israelis are under the threat of missile attack, they say.

Little is said about the fact that more than a million and a half Palestinians live constantly under the far more credible threat of attack from the fourth most powerful military in the world. Well over a thousand have been killed in attacks by the IDF over the past three years. Rockets from Gaza have killed about 30 Israelis – too many, clearly, but losses at a whole different order of magnitude from what’s happening on the other side of the Green line. Palestinian deaths have equaled that number just over the past week to ten days. Add this to the fact that, even without being shot or blown up, Palestinians live like dogs in Gaza mostly because it is under a constant state of siege by Israel and a U.S.-led coalition of powerful nations. At the very least, Israelis have some kind of a life between the missiles. Palestinians, not so much.

The fact that Hamas has, in essence, broken with Syria and Iran and are aligning themselves more with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is in that country’s ruling parliamentary coalition, may seem to offer hope of some progress in this bloody standoff. The Egyptian group, a progenitor of Hamas, is no longer a militant organization; it appears to be having a moderating influence on Hamas. Prelude to a peace agreement? Don’t bet on it. If there is one thing the Israeli government fears more than anything else, it is the threat of a negotiated settlement. They prefer to settle things on the battlefield, where they hold a distinct advantage. Negotiations mean giving something up of value, like the 22% of historic Palestine that lies outside of the Green Line, including the West Bank – namely, the territory that would make up a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu, like Sharon, Shamir, and Begin before him, will never allow diplomacy to get in the way of Israel’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Expect more IDF attacks in Gaza as negotiations grow more likely.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Free hand.

Just a few quick comments on Iran. What the hell – why should this week be any different from all the others?

The rhetoric on Iran is heating up. This is beginning to feel like 2002 all over again – I hope with a different ending, our having benefitted from a bad experience, but I have my doubts. The Israeli government has gone into overdrive in an apparent attempt to prompt into more aggressive action against Iran. Their threat to bomb the place is not an idle one – this is what they do and what they have done, in Syria and in Iraq, not to mention various assaults on Lebanon, though not related to nuclear arms programs. We’re hearing the same kind of trope we heard about Saddam Hussein. They’re creating a “nuclear arms capability”! They’ve got missiles that can reach the United States! Be afraid!

Of course, we all know how this story ends. What became of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons ambitions about which “there can be no doubt”? It was just as defector Hussein Kemal described it in the mid 1990s, in interviews that were well circulated before the Iraq war: Iraq had never gotten beyond the theoretical stage in weapons development, and what technology they had relating to uranium enrichment was broken up and buried after the Gulf War. And their missile technologies? We all know about the aluminum tube hoax. Then there were the deadly drones – basically model planes bound together with duct tape. This is why the current claims about Iran shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Frankly, if we were intentionally trying to encourage Iran to build nuclear weapons, we couldn’t have come up with a better scenario than has occurred over the past ten years. For one thing, they have a nuclear state – Israel – constantly threatening them with attack. They have the sole remaining superpower – us – doing very much the same thing. We included them in an “axis of evil”, one nation of which – their neighbor Iraq – was invaded and destroyed. The one that wasn’t invaded… had nuclear weapons. What lesson would we expect them to draw from that? Also, the nation that capitulated to the U.S. and gave up its nuclear ambitions – Libya – was later attacked and overthrown. More incentive to negotiate. Is anyone surprised that they would want to keep their options open?

The fact is, with the wind down of the Iraq and Afghan wars, we now have a hand free. That, no doubt, will put a lot of countries on high alert, Iran amongst them. If you don’t want another war, tell your congressional representatives, your president, your neighbors: We don’t need this.

luv u,

jp