Day: January 5, 2007

The Mess in the Middle East: Iraq Insurgent, Iran Emergent, and Two Civil Wars Temporarily On Hold

Buck Banks

Muddled East: Given the limited and slanted reporting on the Middle East we get from in the MSM, and our Western lack of understanding of the political forces at work, not to mention our ignorance of the cultural and religious currents driving events in the region, it’s no wonder we don’t understand what’s happening there. A cogent, clear and unflinching assessment of the situation and its position in global politics is provided by a column in the latest edition of Challenge magazine.

Challenge is a bi-monthly leftist magazine written by Arabs and Israelis and published in Tel Aviv. It looks at the Israeli-Palestinian situation and attempts to contextualize it within the region and globally. It’s a good read:

From Challenge # 101, January – February 2007

Two Civil Wars with Brakes On

By Roni Ben Efrat

THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN conflict was once the mother of all problems in the Middle East. Today it is one among many. For this demotion we may largely thank US President George W. Bush and his war in Iraq. Apart from splitting that unhappy country into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish sectors, Bush’s war has changed the geopolitics of the region. The Iraq of Saddam Hussein used to be the area’s major power, but today it is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Saddam was a secular dictator who represented Arab nationalism; Ahmadinejad represents Shiite fundamentalism — and his country, of course, isn’t Arab.

In Bush’s new Middle East, then, two axes have emerged. There is the American axis, which includes Fouad Siniora in Lebanon and Abu Mazen in Palestine, along with older members: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Over against them, in the Iranian axis, stand Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. Does the Iranian axis aim to become America’s global opponent, like the Soviet Union in the Cold War? No. Apart from the central role of Islamic law in Iran, this axis presents no counter-agenda, political, social or ideological. Iran and its allies would prefer to have American and European recognition, but they aren’t willing to change their spots: they aren’t willing, that is, to become American lackeys, eradicating their own identities. They are encouraged in this self-assertion by the weakening of the US as a global power, thanks again to its entanglement in Iraq.

If we want a good example of lackeyism, we may look to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In a recent cabinet meeting, he justified his rejection of Syrian peace overtures, saying that a positive response was forbidden at a time when President Bush, “the most important strategic ally of Israel, opposes any negotiations with Syria.”

The two axes confront each other at three flashpoints: (1) Iran, which opposes the world on the nuclear issue while backing Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Shiites of Iraq.(2) Israel/Palestine, which includes not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but now also that between Fatah and Hamas.(3) Lebanon, where the opponents of Syria’s interfering hand are at odds with those who eat from it, namely Hezbollah.
[…]

Dem Leaders to Bush: Escalation of Troops in Iraq Won’t Work

Jon Ponder

Here’s an excerpt from a letter sent to Pres. Bush today by the Democratic leaders of the Congress:

We believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror.

Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed. Like many current and former military leaders, we believe that trying again would be a serious mistake. They, like us, believe there is no purely military solution in Iraq. There is only a political solution. Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain. And it would undermine our efforts to get the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future. We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq.

In a recent appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John Abizaid, our top commander for Iraq and the region, said the following when asked about whether he thought more troops would contribute to our chances for success in Iraq:

“I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the Corps commander, General Dempsey. We all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no. And the reason is, because we want the Iraqis to do more. It’s easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future. ”

Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror. A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement. In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.

Our troops and the American people have already sacrificed a great deal for the future of Iraq. After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, and over $300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close. We, therefore, strongly encourage you to reject any plans that call for our getting our troops any deeper into Iraq. We want to do everything we can to help Iraq succeed in the future but, like many of our senior military leaders, we do not believe that adding more U.S. combat troops contributes to success.

We appreciate you taking these views into consideration.

Sincerely,

Harry Reid, Majority Leader

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker

More for the Rest of Us

Buck Banks

This just in from High Times:

Steve-O (Steven Glover) is quitting all drugs, except for pot. “I’m going to make more money, have more sex, become more famous and quit smoking,” the CelebStoner stuntman told The Sun in England where he was born in 1974. “I’m quitting all drugs too. I quit cocaine and I’m off nitrous oxide. So now I’m just a pothead.

The co-star of the Jackass movies and MTV’s Wildboyz was arrested for smuggling pot into Sweden in 2003 as part of an “international drug smuggling skit” the Swedish government didn’t find so funny. He’d swallowed a condom filled with marijuana and hash at the Oslo Airport in Norway en toute to Stockholm. After boasting about the skit to reporters, Swedish police arrested and jailed him for five days.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written: it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and the golf course.

— A.A. Milne

The ‘Secular Fundamentalists’ Are Coming!

Buck Banks

God knockers: I suppose it was bound to happen. There are a bunch of pissed-off atheists and nontheists out there who have finally had enough of George W. Bush and the Christian Coalition’s attempts to create an American theocracy. They are fighting back with overheated rhetoric that sounds a lot like the Bible thumpers who think Jesus is their co-pilot and anyone who thinks differently from them is a hell-bound sinner. Well, seems the hell-bound sinners are fed up with the Christian Right’s antics and are responding in a movement some say has morphed from “secular humanism” to “secular fundamentalism.”

Apparently, the athesists and nontheists are mad as heck and they are not going to take the babble from the Bible Belt anymore.

That’s the gist of an article that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday. Apparently, the athesists and nontheists are mad as heck and they are not going to take the babble from the Bible Belt anymore. They’ve formed a lobbying group.

Now I’m no believer in God or Jesus, heaven or hell. I don’t even believe in the Pope, though I admire his tailor. And I can sympathize with the other nonbelievers who are tired of those who feel they need to have a friend in Jesus or rest in the bosom of the Lord insinuating their beliefs into the political and social structure of America. From opposition to stem-cell research that could save millions of lives to promotion of the teaching of intelligent design in public schools to having the Ten Commandments displayed in public buildings, the religious right has hijacked what originally was conceived as a deistic, nonreligious country. It’s the intolerance of difference, stupid.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they would just believe what they believe, sing their hymns and tithe in their churches, but they insist on inflicting what I consider to be childish superstitions on the rest of us. If you want to believe that there’s a paternalistic white guy who made everything in the universe in six days sitting up there in the clouds, I’m fully prepared to allow you to believe that and not invoke the Baker Act (as it’s called in Florida) to commit you to an asylum where you can receive treatment for your delusions. I think that’s pretty Christian of me, don’t you?

Used to be, if you had folks claiming to be speaking directly to God, you’d either hail them as a prophet, burn them at the stake or send them to the loony bin. Today, you give them their own TV show and the mainstream media dutifully reports their absurd predictions, and not ironically, either.

But if you’re an unbeliever like me, you are treated as if there’s something wrong with you because you believe a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, people of the same gender should be allowed and encouraged to enter into long-term relationships under the rubric of marriage and that Muslims have as much right to fly on an airline as a knuckle-dragging snake-handling evangelical Christian.

So I’m joining the Secular Coalition for America today. You can join too, by going here and signing up. You don’t have to believe anything except that you should be able to not believe anything you don’t want to believe without having the sims and the pod people shoving their Christian tenets down your throat via the U.S. gubmint.

Meanwhile, I look forward to watching the secular fundamentalists kick some Christian butt.

Biden: Bush Knows Iraq Is Lost, ‘Surge’ Goal Is to Delay Collapse Until ’08

Jon Ponder
Nothing can stop Bush’s war escalation except public outrage at the obscenity of a president sending troops to die for no other purposes than to burnish his epitaph.

Operation Save My Legacy: As we have been saying in these pages (here and here, for starters), the “surge” President Bush will announce next week has nothing to do with “winning” in Iraq and everything to do with tamping down the violence sufficiently so that Bush and Rove can create a false reality of “victory” before they leave office. Ever the coward, Bush plans to hand off the inevitable U.S. retreat from Iraq, and the bloodbath that will ensue, to the next president.

While this president’s objectives are nakedly obvious from where I sit, 3,000 miles from Capitol Hill, Beltway media and political insiders have been playing dumb about Bush’s audacious double-down in American blood and treasure. That is, until today, when Sen. Joe Biden spoke up:

[Biden]said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will “be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof,” in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

“I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost,” Biden said. “They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively

Biden’s senatorial hemming and hawing is maddening — he has reached a “tentative conclusion” that the Bushies know they have screwed up the war? “Tentative” conclusions can be withdrawn later. Sounds like wiggle room to me.

Even the Republican were occasionally criticial of Bush’s war when they held power. They never took action, of course — and the question now is, what will Joe Biden and the Democrats do to force the president to end the worst military operation in American history, if not in the history of the world.

The answer is, probably not much — not unless the American middle class finally becomes as outraged as they should be that the same president who started this war for no reason other than aristocratic whim is now planning to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more American troops for no other purpose than to burnish his epitaph.

Democratic Senate’s Top 10 Action Items

Jon Ponder

Bob Geiger has the complete list but here are the bullet points:

1. Ethics reform.

2. Raising the minimum wage.

3. Reform the Medicare Prescription Drug program.

4. Acting on the 9/11 Commission Recommendations.

5. Funding stem cell research.

6. Energy reform.

7. Easing the financial burden of college tuition.

8. Strengthening and rebuilding America’s military.

9. Comprehensive immigration reform.

10. Pay-as-you-go legislation.

Sounds like a pretty good start.