By John Ballard
Hello, Mr. President. Where you been the last couple of years?
This is more like it.
"They talk about me like a dog...that's not in my prepared remarks, but it's true."(@2 minutes)
"Republicans always say NO." (@13 minutes and following.)
By Steve Hynd
Guess who paid for the shiny Dubai mansions the Karzai elite of Afghanistan purchased? I invite you to join the dots.
Firstly, US taxpayers have always been the ones paying for much of the Afghan government's structure, especially the security forces. They're going to be doing it for the forseeable future too
The United States expects to spend about $6 billion a year training and supporting Afghan troops and police after it begins pulling out its own combat troops in 2011, The Associated Press has learned.
The previously undisclosed estimates of U.S. spending through 2015, detailed in a NATO training mission document, are an acknowledgment that Afghanistan will remain largely dependent on the United States for its security.
Secondly, those Afghan security forces get paid through the Kabul Bank that it so near collapsing - and taking what little there is of the Afghan economy with it. The throughput of that wageroll money may be the only thing keeping the bank afloat.
Despite the heavy demand for withdrawals, Fitrat chose to look at the positive side, saying that customers have deposited between $11 million and $17 million per day over the past several days. However, those deposits were made largely by companies that route payments through the bank and have little choice. Kabul Bank has more than 1 million customers and handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers.
Thridly, not only are US taxpayers paying those salaries washing through Kabul Bank, they paid to set up the failing Afghan banking system in the first place.
Set up with U.S. financial assistance following the Taliban's ouster, the Afghan banking system is young yet already deeply integrated into the country's affairs. Of the country's banks, Kabul Bank controls perhaps 40% of the industry, until last week holding deposits of around $1.3 billion, spread out over 1 million accounts — among them the accounts of some 250,000 public employees. But, according to insiders, toothless oversight by the country's central bank has allowed well-connected business interests to abuse the system. "Everyone knew a year ago — even before that — that Kabul Bank was going to crash," says a top executive at another major private bank. Given Kabul Bank's lopsided role in the country's banking sector, he reckons that a couple of smaller banks with liquidity troubles may also fail if the crisis of confidence deepens. "If in five years [Kabul Bank] can fail so dramatically," he says, "then you have to have doubts and misgivings about others."
The Kabul Bank is failing because Karzai's elite used it as a personal piggy bank. Karzai's brother Mahmoud was loaned millions by the bank, without meaningful collateral - and used that loan to buy a 7% stake in the bank (!) as well as a Dubai mansion. He's not the only member of the Karzai elite to have made out like a literal bandit from the bank's crony capitalism. Anti-corruption expert Prof. William K. Black, in a must read post in which he connects Kabul Bank to the New Ansari money-moving scandal and to another bank, Afghan United, writes:
The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai's circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members: a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.
"What I'm doing is not proper, not exactly what I should do. But this is Afghanistan," Kabul Bank's founder and chairman, Sherkhan Farnood, said in an interview when asked about the Dubai purchases and why, according to data from the Persian Gulf emirate's Land Department, many of the villas have been registered in his name. "These people don't want to reveal their names."
Afghan laws prohibit hidden overseas lending and require strict accounting of all transactions. But those involved in the Dubai loans, including Kabul Bank's owners, said the cozy flow of cash is not unusual or illegal in a deeply traditional system underpinned more by relationships than laws.
The curious role played by the bank and its unorthodox owners has not previously been reported and was documented by land registration data; public records; and interviews in Kabul, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Moscow.Many of those involved appear to have gone to considerable lengths to conceal the benefits they have received from Kabul Bank or its owners. Karzai's older brother and his former vice president, for example, both have Dubai villas registered under Farnood's name. Kabul Bank's executives said their books record no loans for these or other Dubai deals financed at least in part by Farnood, including home purchases by Karzai's cousin and the brother of Mohammed Qasim Fahim, his current first vice president and a much-feared warlord who worked closely with U.S. forces to topple the Taliban in 2001.
Prof. Black's essay is entitled: "Kabul Bank: When They Don’t Fear the Regulators Enough to Even Hide the Abuses".
Which brings me to the final dot, one I blogged about yesterday: the US government has known all along what's going on and blithely looked the other way.
American officers and anti-corruption teams have drawn up intricate charts outlining the criminal syndicates that entwine the Afghan business and political elites. They’ve even given the charts a name: “Malign Actor Networks.” A k a MAN.
Looking at some of these charts—with their crisscrossed lines connecting politicians, drug traffickers and insurgents — it’s easy to conclude that this country is ruled neither by the government, nor NATO, nor the Taliban, but by the MAN.
It turns out, of course, that some of the same “malign actors” the diplomats and officers are railing against are on the payroll of the C.I.A. At least until recently, American officials say, one of them was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother. Mr. Karzai has long been suspected of facilitating the country’s booming drug trade.
Ahmed Wali Karzai denies taking any money from the C.I.A. or helping any drug traffickers. But consider, for a second, the other brother: President Karzai. When he receives that stern lecture from the American diplomat about ridding his government of corruption — and he receives a lot of them — what must President Karzai be thinking?
One possibility: That the Americans aren’t really serious.
So you - yes, you - paid for the Karzai elite's Dubai mansions and opulent lifestyles. And your government over two administrations has not only connived to help make that happen but intends that you should go on doing so for the forseeable future.
Happy Labor day!
By John Ballard
From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.
Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.
But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.
The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.
I can't think of much to add. There's more at the link filling column-inches, but that's the point in a nutshell.
Somebody put this fascinating sentence into the Wikipedia article on Keynesian economics. My bold.
Some interpretations of Keynes have emphasized his stress on the international coordination of Keynesian policies, the need for international economic institutions, and the ways in which economic forces could lead to war or could promote peace.
Economic theory, like science fiction, feeds fertile imaginations.
Too bad our politics remains in the stone age. After thousands of years we are still just baby steps away from hunting and gathering. That's why we call economics the dismal science.
By Steve Hynd
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Struggling to contain asset-stripping at Afghanistan's biggest bank, Afghan authorities have barred the sale of Kabul properties held by the troubled bank's principal owners. But the freeze excludes President Hamid Karzai's brother, who is the third largest Kabul Bank shareholder.
The Afghan Central Bank ordered the property-sale ban in a letter reviewed by The Washington Post. Sent to Kabul municipal authorities, it targets five people, including Kabul Bank's two biggest shareholders - who were ousted last Monday as executives of the bank - and the brother of Afghanistan's vice president, who is both a shareholder and major borrower.
No restrictions were placed on the president's own brother, Mahmoud Karzai, who has also borrowed money from Kabul Bank, including $6 million that he used to buy a 7 percent stake in the now crumbling bank.
"They couldn't freeze my property because I don't have it," said Mahmoud Karzai in a telephone interview from Kabul. "I don't have a single house or parcel of land in my name in Afghanistan."
They loaned him millions, without collateral of any meaningful kind, to buy a stake in their own bank?
The crisis at Kabul Bank, which still has over a million customers and handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers, flows from a tangle of murky loans by shareholders to themselves and from risky investments in Dubai real estate. With so many people's savings, salaries and political fortunes at stake, what began as a financial mess has morphed into a serious challenge to the credibility of President Karzai and also of his American backers.
Washington has ruled out using any American money for a bail-out, despite fears that the collapse of Kabul Bank could leave soldiers unpaid and set back the fight against the Taliban, a struggle in which the United States has already lost more than 1,100 troops and has spent billions of dollars. During their own years in power in Kabul from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban banned private banks.
...Some Afghan officials want the Central Bank to seize shares in Kabul Bank that were not paid for in cash. Around half the shares - including those of the president's brother and also of the brother of the vice president - were purchased with Kabul Bank loans. These loans, said Kabul Bank's founder and former chairman, are all still outstanding. Transferring the shares would lead in effect to the partial nationalization of Kabul Bank.
"I'm not in favor of nationalization," said Mahmoud Karzai, who suggested that the government simply lend Kabul Bank cash "when our money is finished."
Holy hells, I bet he's not!
The Kabul Bank's money is expected to run out by early next week. I'm guessing Mahmoud Karzai isn't expecting to be one of the losers.
With a report earlier today that the Karzai elite's corruption is the single thing most likely to push Afghans into the arms of the insurgency, and the wheels finally coming off financially, Obama's strategy - what little there was of it to begin with - is looking more and more like an impending car-wreck.
By Gareth Porter
In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday , Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.
The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.
In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.
The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge. The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.
At an Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo, November 19-21, 2005, leaders of the three major Sunni armed groups (one of which was a coalition of several resistance organization) told U.S. and Arab officials they were willing to track down al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and deliver him to Iraqi authorities as part of a negotiated agreement with the United States. The Sunni insurgent leaders were motivated not only by hatred of al Qaeda but by the fear that a Shi’a-dominated government would consolidate power and exclude the Sunnis permanently unless the United States acted to rebalance its policy in Iraq.
Two months later, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad actually entered into secret negotiations with the three major Sunni insurgent groups 2006, as later reported by the Sunday Times and confirmed by Khalilzad. The Sunni leaders even submitted a formal peace proposal to Khalilzad. They insisted on a “timetable for withdrawal” as part of the deal, but it was “linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces and security services”, according to Sunday Times.
Khalilzad cut off the negotiations in February 2006, because such an agreement would have conflicted with a broader strategy of standing up a Shi’a army to suppress the Sunni insurgency.
The major Shi’a factions, determined to eliminate any possible threat to its power from the Sunnis in Baghdad, unleashed death squads, mostly from the Mahdi Army, in Sunni neighborhoods across the entire city in 2006 and early 2007.
The result was the defeat of the Sunni insurgents’ political-military bases in Baghdad, and the transformation of the capital from a mixed Sunni-Shi’a city into an overwhelmingly Shi’a city, as shown dramatically in this series of maps, based on U.S. military census data.
As a result, by late 2006, the Sunni leaders were feeling much more vulnerable to Shi’a power. Col. Sean McFarland, U.S. Army brigade commander in Al Anbar province throughout 2006, found Sunni sheiks expressing “[a] growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias….”
It was that fear of the Shi’a power that drove local Sunni decisions to join U.S.-sponsored Sunni neighborhood armed groups in Anbar.
The sectarian violence in Baghdad began to abate by August 2007, but not because of additional U.S. troops as the official narrative of the war suggests. It was because the Shi’a had accomplished their aim of confining the Sunni population to relatively small enclaves in Baghdad. That relationship between the achievement of that aim and the reduced violence was noted by the September 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.
The main Petraeus conceit about his strategy in Iraq is that it defeated a Shi’a insurgency that represented an Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq. But the main premise on which that claim was based -- that Iran was backing “rogue elements” of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army -- was simply a psywar ploy by Petraeus and his staff. The objective of the “rogue elements” line was to divide the Mahdi Army, as military and intelligence officials admitted to pro-war blogger Bill Roggio.
The official narrative suggested that Iran exerted political influence in Iraq by supporting armed groups opposing the government. In fact, however,Iran’s key Iraqi allies had always been the two Shi’a factions with which the United States was allied against Sadr -- the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party. They had both gotten Iranian support and training during the war against Saddam, and the fiercely nationalist Sadr had criticized SCIRI leaders as Iranian stooges.
The al-Maliki government had no problem with Iranian training and financial support of the Mahdi Army in 2006, when the Mahdi Army was eliminating the Sunni threat from Baghdad. But once it was clear that the Sunnis had been defeated, the historical conflict between Sadr and the other Shi’a factions reemerged in spring 2007.
The Iranian interest was to ensure that the Shi’a-dominated government of Iraq consolidated its power. Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei told al-Maliki in August 2007 that Iran would support his taking control of Sadr’s strongholds. Later that same month, al-Maliki went to Karbala and gave the local police chief “carte blanche” to attack the Sadrists there. After two days of violence, Sadr declared a six-month “freeze” on Mahdi Army military operations August 27, 2007.
By late 2007, contrary to the official Iraq legend, the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration were both publicly crediting Iran with pressuring Sadr to agree to the unilateral ceasefire – to the chagrin of Petraeus.
Al-Maliki launched the attack on Mahdi Army forces in Basrah in March 2008 in the knowledge that Iran would back him against Sadr. And when it went badly, he turned to Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard official in charge of day-to-day Iraq policy, to force a ceasefire on Sadr. Soleimani told Iraqi President Talibani that Iran supported al-Maliki’s efforts to “dismantle all militias”, and Sadr agreed to a ceasefire within 24 hours of Iran’s intervention.
So it was Iran’s restraint -- not Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy -- that effectively ended the Shi’a insurgent threat.
It was Soleimani who had presided over the secret April 2006 meeting of Shi’a leaders that had chosen al-Maliki as Prime Minister, after having been smuggled into the Green Zone without telling the Americans. And that was only one of a several trips Soleimani made to the Green Zone over a two-year period without U.S. knowledge.
But Biden doesn’t want to know this and other historical facts that contradict the official narrative on Iraq. For the Democratic foreign policy elite, staying ignorant of the real history of the Iraq War allows them to believe that deploying U.S. military forces in Muslim countries can be an effective instrument of U.S. power.
By Steve Hynd
Because the last "combat brigade" has been removed from Iraq, we're to believe:
As many as five suicide bombers killed 12 people on Sunday at an Iraqi army complex in Baghdad, with US troops among those who fired back in a bid to repel the coordinated attack.
American involvement in the response was the first such engagement for US forces in Baghdad since they declared an end to combat operations in Iraq four days ago.
...Lieutenant Colonel Eric Bloom said an American team of military advisors had been stationed at the complex and when the attack occurred, their security team provided "suppressive fire."
"The team was there, and there was a small security element with them, and they did provide suppressive fire," Bloom told AFP.
"They provided suppressive fire while the Iraqi army got into position to go in (to a building two insurgents had entered). There was some return fire -- the insurgents were firing down into the compound.
"It went on for mere minutes, it was over very quickly."
Under the terms of a bilateral security pact, US soldiers are allowed to return fire in self-defence, and take part in operations if requested by their Iraqi counterparts.
...He added that the US military had provided bomb disposal support as well as surveillance with drones and Apache helicopters.
Fuck, don't you hate being so obviously lied to? If politicians are going to tell lies for crass political purposes, is it really too much to ask that they at least make their lies plausible? Where's the professional pride?
By Steve Hynd
Andrew Bacevich picks up on a new study:
Kriner and Shen possess little of Moore's penchant for self-aggrandizing theatrics. Yet by cross-referencing official casualty records with Census data, they reach a conclusion that affirms Moore's verdict: "when America goes to war, it is the poorer and less educated in society who are more likely to die in combat." Furthermore, this gap is by no means a recent development. Kriner and Shen survey the pattern of US military fatalities in four conflicts, beginning with World War II and proceeding to Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. (Regarding the distribution of casualties in earlier US history—during the Civil War, for example—the authors are silent.) Only in the case of the war against Germany and Japan did "the nation's long-held norm of equal sacrifice in war" prevail. Given the reliance on conscription to raise the very large forces required for that conflict along with the military's refusal to induct anyone who didn't meet strict, if arbitrary, health and literacy standards, "the poorest and most undereducated counties actually suffered lower than average casualty rates." In 1941–45, there was no casualty gap. During the cold war, fairness vanished. With the US intervention in Korea, Kriner and Shen write, "the data show a dramatic change: strong, significant, socio-economic casualty gaps begin to emerge." The evidence they amass strongly suggests that this gap widened further during Vietnam and became greater still when the Bush administration invaded Iraq.
And continues:
Officials in Washington, Kriner and Shen observe, "have a keen interest in reducing the visibility of casualties for fear that greater public exposure will minimize their freedom of action." The casualty gap is "an inconvenient truth" that both parties choose to ignore. For the same reason, officials have a keen interest in concealing war's fiscal implications. They do this by pretending that there are none. Sustaining that pretense works in the near term to preserve the status quo.
This status quo—which includes grotesque inequality at home and perpetual war abroad—persists not because Americans are insufficiently alert to reality but because the powerful are determined to preserve arrangements that serve their own interests. After all, for the rich and the well-connected, inequality translates into privilege. Those who enjoy these privileges—and the politicians who do their bidding—are determined to retain them.
According to Kriner and Shen, "The idea that poorer segments of the country bear a disproportionate share of the nation's sacrifice on the battlefield is antithetical to American democratic norms." This is not political science but wishful thinking. However regrettable, the fact that poorer segments of the country bear a disproportionate share of wartime sacrifice is entirely consistent with the actual practice of American democracy.
That "equality of sacrifice" fable also extends into the mythical equality of representation. Poor folks generally are far more likely not to vote, because they know neither party is interested in representing their interests. It's the very understandable anger at that equality that the Tea party is riding, and misdirecting with it's "God, guns and gays" bigotry.
At what point will American's figure out that"It's the Class War, Stupid"?
By Steve Hynd
Here's one from the NY Times, right out of the "Duh" files: "Loss of Faith in Afghan Leaders May Hurt Push Against Taliban."
First, the Western view:
Since 2001, one of the unquestioned premises of American and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that Americans and others do in the West. Diplomats, military officers and senior officials flying in from Washington often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it — and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build.
The Central Intelligence Agency has carried that line of argument even further, putting on its payroll some of the most disputable members of Mr. Karzai’s government. The explanation, offered by agency officials, is that Mother Theresa can’t be found in Afghanistan.
“What is acceptable to the Afghans is different than what is acceptable to you or me or our people,” a Western official here said recently, discounting fears of fraud in the coming parliamentary elections. He spoke, as many prominent Western officials here do so often, on the condition of anonymity. “They have their own expectations, and they are slightly different than the ones we try to impose on them.”
But, as has so often proven to be the case, Afghans themselves refuse to live up to our stereotyping of them:
the rationalization offered by the Western official — that Afghans are happy to tolerate a certain level of bribery and theft — seems to have turned out terribly wrong. It now seems clear that public corruption is roundly despised by ordinary Afghans, and that it may constitute the single largest factor driving them into the arms of the Taliban.
You don’t have to look very hard to find an Afghan, whether in the government or out, who is repelled by the illegal doings of his leaders. Ahmed Shah Hakimi, who runs a currency exchange in Kabul, had just finished explaining some of the shadowy dealings of the business and political elite when he stopped in disgust.
“There are 50 of them,” Mr. Hakimi said. “The corrupt ones. All the Afghans know who they are.”
“Why do the Americans support them?” he asked.
Mr. Hakimi, a shrewd businessman, seemed genuinely perplexed.
“What the Americans need to do is take these Afghans and put them on a plane and fly them to America — and then crash the plane into a mountain,” Mr. Hakimi said. “Kill them all.”
You hear that a lot here — that the kleptocrats are few in number; that most Afghans know who they are; and that the country would be better off if this greedy cabal met a violent end. Why not get rid of them?
Why not indeed. After all, it seems that we know exactly who they are:
American officers and anti-corruption teams have drawn up intricate charts outlining the criminal syndicates that entwine the Afghan business and political elites. They’ve even given the charts a name: “Malign Actor Networks.” A k a MAN.
Looking at some of these charts—with their crisscrossed lines connecting politicians, drug traffickers and insurgents — it’s easy to conclude that this country is ruled neither by the government, nor NATO, nor the Taliban, but by the MAN.
It turns out, of course, that some of the same “malign actors” the diplomats and officers are railing against are on the payroll of the C.I.A. At least until recently, American officials say, one of them was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother. Mr. Karzai has long been suspected of facilitating the country’s booming drug trade.
Ahmed Wali Karzai denies taking any money from the C.I.A. or helping any drug traffickers. But consider, for a second, the other brother: President Karzai. When he receives that stern lecture from the American diplomat about ridding his government of corruption — and he receives a lot of them — what must President Karzai be thinking?
One possibility: That the Americans aren’t really serious.
To paraphrase the old real estate adage for a COIN strategy: legitimacy, legitimacy, legitimacy. And the US seems determined to shoot itself in the foot just so that every agency involved can have as many "options", and as many fingers in as many pies, as possible.
If this were a nation of fringe strategic importance that we hadn't already spent a trillion occupying, we'd probably take the view that the locals were ready to revolt, understandably so, and were welcome to it.
By Steve Hynd
Oh, the right wing of Blogtopia is piiiissseeeddd. Fareed Zakaria, in what James Joyner rightly says is a "linkbaiting column", writes that "It's clear we over-reacted to 9/11".
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities.
Joyner's post is the most thoughtful right-of-center response you'll read today. But despite the hyperventilating from those further right than James, Zakaria is correct. Yet he's touched the Third rail of US national security debate.
It should be pointed out that a "major attack on high-value targets" does not include Madrid 2004 or London 2005 despite the terrible loss of life in those attacks. They simply didn't create enough of an economic shock or enough awe at the choice of target in the way 9/11 did. It would, however, include the IRA bombings of the City of London in 1993 and 1994. Yet neither of those - nor any of the dozens of other attacks by groups like the IRA and ETA over the decades - occasioned a world-wide over-reaction like 9/11 did.
Nowadays, despite the ravings of the US right, Al Qaida is not who we are fighting in Afghanistan (unless you're willing to believe it takes 130,000 NATO troops to fight 50 Al Qaeda supermen) and was only ever a particularly virulent fraction of who we were fighting in Iraq. Yet as Zakaria points out, fear of Osama has fuelled a "homeland security" industry worth tens of billions of deficit dollars every year, a defense industry spending nearly a trillion every year, and has directly caused hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Not to mention the poisonous legacy of Abu Graib, Gitmo, torture and illegal rendition. Then there's the proliferation of intelligence agencies tripping over each other to provide reports no-one reads.
Zakaria writes:
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?
Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: ..."No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.”
The response has costs, in lives and in dollars and in impact upon free, civil, society that utterly outweigh the costs of the original "causus belli". How can we not call that an over-reaction?
The Right's strawman counter-argument is that there have been no more high value attacks because of all this. But it's a strawman because, as one of Joyner's commenters points out, "You can argue that you shouldn’t have been using a machine gun to kill a fly without disputing that the fly is indeed dead."
By John Ballard
Hidden somewhere in what passes for news are a few dutiful reports of "talks" that got underway this week between Benyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.
Philip Weiss describes himself and his site, Mondoweiss, as a progressive Jewish voice, offering "alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity." Of all the sites I track, this is by far the most prolific keeping tabs on matters regarding Israel and Palestine. Since there is no pretext of impartiality (Weiss -- who is Jewish, remember -- is candidly pro-Palestine) the information is delivered with an obvious spin, but the content is clear and details are easy to validate.
His report of this week's events, with links to relevant State Department releases, strikes me as excellent.
I watched Thursday's State Department show on the peace talks on C-Span the other night and was left with a sense of despair. There were very few people in the fancy rooms and little sense of excitement. The leaders all seemed motheaten, except for Netanyahu, who always reminds me of a landlord or a mob boss. George Mitchell is the most impressive, but even he looks out of date and a little hard of hearing. (Here's a link to the Clinton, Netanyahu, Abbas table. And here to George Mitchell.) Clinton seems to know she's screwed. She appealed over the heads of Abbas and Netanyahu to real people over there-- and implicitly to you and me at our dinner tables-- not to desert her.I want to conclude by just saying a few words directly to the people of the region. Your leaders may be sitting at the negotiating table, but you are the ones who will ultimately decide the future. You hold the future of your families, your communities, your people, this region, in your hands. For the efforts here to succeed, we need your support and your patience. Today, as ever, people have to rally to the cause of peace, and peace needs champions on every street corner and around every kitchen table. I understand very well the disappointments of the past. I share them. But I also know we have it within our power today to move forward into a different kind of future, and we cannot do this without you.Translation: these guys can't deliver a newspaper. Abbas has dignity and Netanyahu is frightening. Abbas spoke concretely of the final-status issues, including water, and called on Israel to honor its commitment re settlement building, while Netanyahu spoke emotionally about his only real topic, Israel's security:In these 12 years, new forces have risen in our region, and we’ve had the rise of Iran and its proxies and the rise of missile warfare. And so a peace agreement must take into account a security arrangement against these real threats that have been directed against my country, threats that have been realized with 12,000 rockets that have been fired on our territory, and terrorist attacks that go unabated.Translation: We have remote control machine guns in towers set up to kill Gazans, and we will never give up the Jordan Valley. Then Netanyahu ratcheted it up, with "the blood of innocents":The last two days have been difficult. They were exceedingly difficult for my people and for me. Blood has been shed, the blood of innocents: four innocent Israelis gunned down brutally, two people wounded, seven new orphans. President Abbas, you condemned this killing. That’s important. No less important is to find the killers, and equally to make sure that we can stop other killers. They seek to kill our people, kill our state, kill our peace. And so achieving security is a must.Kill kill kill. Or as Sydney Levy of Jewish Voice for Peace says, "while the U.S. government condemned Tuesday's brutal attack, it never condemned even the assault on Gaza almost two years ago, when over 1400 people, mostly civilian, including over 400 children, were killed. This disproportionate response is an indicator of the apparent inability of the U.S. to be an 'honest broker' in these talks." No wonder the rooms seem empty. It is common to hear the analysis that Israel needs nothing from these talks because the conflict is being managed, while the Palestinians need a deal to get freedom. I don't buy this and neither does George Mitchell. The Palestinians haven't had freedom in their entire history. Most Israelis may be complacent, but the soul of their society is shriveling, and any intelligent Israeli senses the loss of the world's good opinion. Israel is stuck in an earlier era of history and daily losing legitimacy, due to rightwing ethnocentric politicians like Netanyahu. Mitchell said as much at the end, when he appealed for a sudden shift in the weather:Mitchell wasn't talking about the Palestinians there. He was saying that if Israel doesn't make sacrifices, in a hurry, it faces a choice of official apartheid, ethnic cleansing or one-state. He understands that the 62-year-old Jewish state is now at risk; he is despairing too....we believe that there are dynamic changes that [can] occur. There are more obvious difficulties that lie ahead for both sides if they don’t reach agreement that may be even more obvious than they were five or eight or 12 years ago.
You have to remember that these leaders must weigh two things. They must weigh the difficulties they face in getting agreement and they must weigh the difficulties they will face if they don’t get an agreement. And we believe it’s a very powerful argument that if you subject these to careful, reasoned, and rational analysis, to conclude that the latter difficulties, if they don’t get an agreement, will be much greater and have a much more profound impact on their societies than those they face in trying to get an agreement.
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The comments thread has some thoughtful input, opening with a discussion that these talks may be a diplomatic preemptive move to prevent European meddling in the issue.
Another link to an Alexander Cockburn piece underscores the obvious imbalance of what I regard as yet another Kabuki performance we have been watching over the years with little change besides the actors.For his part, Abbas is no longer president of the Palestinian Authority, which has no democratic mandate among the vast majority of Palestinians. They voted for Hamas and regard Abbas as a quisling, who exists solely by the favor of US money, Pentagon security advisors and Israeli support. Hamas expressed its opinion of the meeting by killing four Israeli settlers. (Half a million illegal Jewish settlers have been the most conspicuous consequence of the “peace process.”)Tactically, Netanyahu has an easy hand to play. He can proclaim Israel’s hopes for peace, yet warn that Israel’s security interests are paramount. He can lecture Obama on Israel’s primal fears of obliteration, yet not be too reticent in indicating that Israel can obliterate its enemies and is quite prepared to do so. Israel’s nuclear arsenal hover spectrally over the proceedings.
As long as Palestinians remain internally divided any expectations for a meaningful resolution to this conflict remain forever hopeful but not realistic. The Palestinian diaspora consists of four significant groups with little in the way of a common denominator other than culture, history and ethnicity.
The most high-profile group are the Palestinians of the West Bank. Presuming they are all that matter, most readers overlook the other three: expats abroad, literally scattered all over the world, the population in Gaza and refugee camps in Southern Lebanon. These last two groups, thanks to Hamas and Hezbollah, remain diplomatically invisible, but the pulsing reality of their existence cannot be ignored if any lasting solution to the conflict is to be had.
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