TW3 ... and "oral understandings"

[Political Waves]

That Was The Week That Was ... jumpin' -- a little of this, a little of that, a whole lot of hot air and sadly ... for swans, cats and squirrels ... cruelty.

Crappy news of the day is -- over 5000 killed in Iraq, now. The numbers continue to add up.

Happy news of the day is -- New Hampshire has become the 6th state to legalize gay marriage.

Ridiculous lede of the day is -- Obama wore the same tie to meet both Netanyahu and King Abdullah.

After the review, you'll find a short collection on Israel ... this is shaping up to be quite a flap, and one dear to the progressive heart. The first article will prove that the New Kid ain't the Old Boy, no matter how much Israel whines. The next, a Froomkin roundup, explains Obama's intent. The last is a bizarre bit ... not strictly speaking about the Israeli's but certainly applicable to the Middle Eastern conversation ... that I threw in to illustrate why the Old Boy was never, ever up to the job of leader of the free world -- stuff just keeps oozing out that explains so much!

Reports are that Obama's Egyptian speech tomorrow will be brutally honest; the Pubs are supposing that if he displays anything but absolute authority, he'll be labeled "subservient."  By them, for sure! Tonight, Fox's O'Reilly suggested The Godfathers' Michael Corleone as the prototype for the leadership Obama must display, selling our nation as 'nobel' ... or else? And Abu Ghraib not withstanding, I suppose.

 

Let's see -- that would be a speech declaring no quarter, quietly threatening and delivered with unsmiling arrogance ... ummmm ... I think Uncle Dick's already given that one, again and again.

 

Back in Realityville, the press is watching this with fascination. It's tricky, this -- CNN's David Gergen said he doesn't know how Obama can split these hairs ... without apologizing to the Muslims and creating shitfire at home; and without snubbing Israel. Gergen says it will have to be a Mount Everest of a speech, for which Obama, admittedly, has the talent. We'll see what happens next.

Jude


Harpers Weekly Review
June 2, 2009

President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a
Bronx-born, divorced, childless, diabetic, Hispanic
federal judge on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit, to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme
Court. Analysts studying Sotomayor's decisions were unable
to determine whether she would uphold Roe v. Wade, or
whether she was distinctly pro- or anti-business, but much
was made of a 2001 speech at the University of California
at Berkeley in which she expressed hopes that a "wise
Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would
more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white
male who hasn't lived that life." During the speech she
also expressed fondness for "platos de arroz, gandoles y
pernil," a dish made with rice, beans, and pork. "Her word
choice in 2001 was poor," offered White House Press
Secretary Robert Gibbs, but many Republicans were
unconvinced. "The comments she made about the quality of
her decisions being better than those of a white male--I
mean, we need to go further into her record to see whether
this is a trend," said Senator John Cornyn (R., Tex.), one
of 98 non-Hispanic senators, who was considered for the
Supreme Court in 2005 but not appointed. Newt Gingrich,
who in 2007 spoke out against bilingual education by
suggesting that students should "learn the language of
prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,"
criticized Sotomayor via Twitter. "White man racist
nominee would be forced to withdraw," tweeted
Gingrich. "Latina woman racist should also withdraw."
Abortionist George Tiller was shot dead in the lobby of
the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, where
he was an usher, and the California Supreme Court upheld
Proposition 8, thereby maintaining the state's ban on
same-sex marriage. General Motors filed for bankruptcy,
and President Obama unveiled his plan to save the former
industrial giant by nationalizing it, closing plants, and
firing workers. American scientists promised to develop
robot farmers.

A white tiger killed a zookeeper in New Zealand, and a man
in Munich received a two-year suspended sentence for
beating another man with a swan. Someone was skinning
Miami's cats. Osel Hita Torres, 24, who as a toddler was
enthroned by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of Lama
Yeshe, had left his order and was studying film in
Madrid. "They took me away from my family and stuck me in
a medieval situation," said Torres, who complained that
the only movie he was shown was Eddie Murphy's "The Golden
Child." The Tiananmen Square massacre turned 20, and Phil
Spector was sentenced to at least 19 years in prison for
murder. Six people were killed in the West Bank when Fatah
raided a Hamas hideout. Fairfax County, Virginia, sued
Krispy Kreme for dumping massive quantities of "doughnut
grease and other pollutants" into the sewer system, and
Bausch & Lomb reportedly had so far paid out $250 million
to settle nearly 600 lawsuits over its contact-lens
cleaner product ReNu with MoistureLoc, which prior to its
recall caused hundreds of fungal infections, necessitating
60 corneal transplants and seven eye removals.

The United Kingdom placed the cuckoo on its list of
endangered birds but was culling gray squirrels, which
taste good in a pie. "They are going to top restaurants,
butchers, the working man," said conservationist Paul
Parker. "They don't belong here." The Archbishop of
Canterbury called for Christians to chat less and take God
seriously. "It's like being on an ocean liner," he said of
the church, "where all the staff are talking brightly and
smiling rather too cheerfully-- you think 'what's wrong?',
as you feel the great swell underneath you." The last
survivor of the Titanic died at age 97. AOL split from
Time Warner, and President Obama announced a new Pentagon
command that will fight in cyberspace, led by a cyberczar;
defense contractors were advertising for
"cyberninjas"--hackers who will work for the government to
protect the nation against foreign and domestic
cyberweapons. "These attacks start in other countries,"
explained one intelligence analyst, "but they know no
borders. So how do you fight them if you can't act both
inside and outside the United States?" Russia agreed to
export uranium to the United States, a Russian firm bought
nearly 2 percent of Facebook, and a five-year-old Russian
girl was discovered who speaks in barks and hisses because
she was raised as a pet. British scientists found that
cats, like babies, have a poor understanding of the
relationship between cause and effect. Researchers in
Leipzig, Germany, inserted human language genes into a
mouse, resulting in baby humanized mice that squeak at a
lower ultrasonic range than normal. Geneticists in
Kawasaki, Japan, announced that they had used an
engineered virus to insert a jellyfish gene into marmoset
embryos, producing monkeys that glow green in ultraviolet
light and that can pass on the glow to their
offspring. "It's hard to put your finger on what is it
about this research that is likely to stimulate ethical
debate," said a bioethicist in Kentucky, "besides the sort
of gut feeling that this is not the right thing to do."

-- Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/06/WeeklyReview2009-06-02

bonus


Israelis Says Bush Officials Agreed to West Bank Growth
ETHAN BRONNER, NYT
June 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/middleeast/04israel.html

JERUSALEM — Senior Israeli officials accused President Obama on Wednesday of failing to acknowledge what they called clear understandings with the Bush administration that allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines while still publicly claiming to honor a settlement “freeze.”

The complaint was the latest in a growing rift between the Obama administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over how to move forward to achieve Middle East peace. Mr. Obama was in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and is scheduled to address the Muslim world from Cairo on Thursday.

The Israeli officials said that repeated discussions with Bush officials starting in late 2002 resulted in agreement that housing could be built within the boundaries of certain settlement blocks as long as no new land was expropriated, no special economic incentives were offered to move to settlements, and no new settlements were built. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity so that they could discuss an issue of such controversy between the two governments.

When Israel signed on to the so-called road map for a two-state solution in 2003, with a provision that says its government “freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements),” the officials said, it was after a detailed discussion with Bush officials that laid out those explicit exceptions.

“Not everything is written down,” one of the officials said.

He and others said that Israel agreed to the road map and to move ahead with the removal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 on the understanding that settlement growth could continue.
But a former senior official in the Bush administration disagreed, calling the Israeli characterization “an overstatement.”

“There was never an agreement to accept natural growth,” the official said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. “There was an effort to explore what natural growth would mean, but we weren’t able to reach agreement on that.”

The former official said that Bush administration officials had been working with their Israeli counterparts to clarify several issues, including natural growth, government subsidies to settlers, and the cessation of appropriation of Palestinian land. The United States and Israel never reached an agreement though, either public or private, the official said.

A second senior Bush administration official, also speaking anonymously, said Wednesday: “We talked about a settlement freeze with four elements. One was no new settlements, a second was no new confiscation of Palestinian land, one was no new subsidies and finally, no construction outside the settlements.” He described that fourth condition, which applied to natural growth, as similar to taking a string and tying it around a settlement, and barring any construction outside that string.

But, he added, “We had a tentative agreement, but that was contingent on drawing up lines, and this is a process that never got done, therefore the settlement freeze was never formalized and never done.”

A third former Bush official, Elliott Abrams, who was on the National Security Council staff, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post in April that seemed to endorse the Israeli argument.

The Israeli officials acknowledged that the new American administration had different ideas about the meaning of the term “settlement freeze.” Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have said in the past week that the term means an end to all building, including natural growth.

But the Israeli officials complained that Mr. Obama had not accepted that the previous understandings existed. Instead, they lamented, Israel now stood accused of having cheated and dissembled in its settlement activity whereas, in fact, it had largely lived within the guidelines to which both governments had agreed.

On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” calling the American demand “unreasonable.”

Dov Weissglas, who was a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote an opinion article that appeared Tuesday in Yediot Aharonot, a mass-selling newspaper, laying out the agreements he said had been reached with Bush officials.

He said that in May 2003 he and Mr. Sharon met with Mr. Abrams and Stephen J. Hadley of the National Security Council and came up with the definition of settlement freeze: “no new communities were to be built; no Palestinian lands were to be appropriated for settlement purposes; building will not take place beyond the existing community outline; and no ‘settlement encouraging’ budgets were to be allocated.”

He said that Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, signed off on that definition later that month and that the two governments also agreed to set up a joint committee to define more fully the meaning of “existing community outline” for existing settlements.

In April 2004, President Bush presented Mr. Sharon with a letter stating, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

That, Mr. Weissglas said, was a result of his earlier negotiations with Bush officials acknowledging that certain settlement blocks would remain Israeli and open to continued growth.

The Israeli officials said that no Bush official had ever publicly insisted that Israel was obliged to stop all building in the areas it captured in 1967. They said it was important to know that major oral understandings reached between an Israeli prime minister and an American president would not simply be tossed aside when a new administration came into office.

Of course, Mr. Netanyahu has yet to endorse the two-state solution or even the road map agreed to by previous Israeli governments, which were not oral commitments, but actual signed and public agreements.

In his opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Abrams, the former Bush official who was part of those negotiations, wrote: “For the past five years, Israel’s government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted: that there would be no new settlements, no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements and no new construction except in already built-up areas. The clear purpose of the guidelines? To allow for settlement growth in ways that minimized the impact on Palestinians.”

Mr. Abrams acknowledged that even within those guidelines, Israel had not fully complied. He wrote: “There has been physical expansion in some places, and the Palestinian Authority is right to object to it. Israeli settlement expansion beyond the security fence, in areas Israel will ultimately evacuate, is a mistake.”  ++

 

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.


Is Obama Getting Tough With Israel?
Froomkin, WaPo
5/30
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/middle-east/is-obama-getting-tough-with-is.html

 

President Obama heads to the Middle East next week, where on Thursday he'll make a much-anticipated address in Cairo aimed at repairing American's ties with the Muslim world.

He has a big advantage simply not being George W. Bush, of course -- and having abolished the most egregious, Crusade-like aspects of this country's approach to counter-terrorism.

But what can he tell the world's Muslims to assuage their anger about their most long-standing grievance: America's reflexive support of Israel?

As I've written before, there are signs Obama will promote a new regional peace initiative for the Middle East, much like the one championed by Jordan's King Abdullah.

And now along comes the first distinct signs that Obama is willing to play hardball with Israel.

Paul Richter, Christi Parsons and Richard Boudreaux write in the Los Angeles Times: "President Obama and top Israeli officials staked out sharply opposing positions over the explosive issue of Jewish settlements Thursday, propelling a rare dispute between the two close allies into full public view just days before the U.S. leader is due to deliver a long-awaited address in Egypt to the world's Muslims.

"Speaking after a White House meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama reiterated that he had been 'very clear about the need to stop building settlements, to stop building outposts' on Palestinian territory.

"Only hours earlier, the Israeli government said it would continue to allow some growth in the settler communities in the West Bank.

"The exchange underscored the unusually hard-line position Obama has taken publicly with Israel early in his administration. Most U.S. presidents, aware of the political sensitivity, have worked hard to keep disagreements out of sight, when they existed."

The issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories is incendiary for Palestinians, and nearly defining for the right-wing Israeli political bloc that newly re-installed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on in order to retain power.

Farah Stockman writes for the Boston Globe: "As he prepares to fly to the Middle East next week to give a speech on his policy toward the region and US-Muslim relations, it seemed clear yesterday that his administration is willing to risk prickly relations with one of the closest US allies - and possible anger from some Jewish voters - to try to create a Palestinian state."

David S. Cloud writes for Politico: "Obama's willingness to place much of the initial onus on Israel for resuming peace talks is clearly greater than his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who rarely allowed any hint of public difference between himself and Israel. The strategy also carries some domestic political risk for Obama. That was clear Thursday when 329 House members and 76 senators sent him a letter advising against putting too much public pressure on Israel."

Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post that the 2003 "road map" for peace, "commits Israel to dismantling settler outposts and freezing 'all settlement activity,' including building to accommodate what is known as 'natural growth.' But the near-daily barrage of U.S. demands that Israel halt settlement growth has surprised Israeli officials, who argue that they greatly restrained growth under an unwritten 2005 agreement with the Bush administration. Under that deal, Israel was to stop providing incentives for settlers to move to the West Bank and was to build only in areas it expected to keep in future peace agreements....

"The Obama administration appears to have calculated that pressing Israel on settlements will help demonstrate to the Arab nations that the United States is serious about pursuing peace, even at the risk of appearing to undermine Netanyahu's nascent government."

Steven Thomma writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "President Barack Obama Thursday ratcheted up what might be America's toughest bargaining position with Israel in a generation."

Thomma also writes: "It's noteworthy that Obama this week announced that he'd go to Saudi Arabia early next week for a private dinner with King Abdullah, en route to Cairo.

"'If what Obama is trying to do is get states like the Saudis to actually do things now, not only will he have achieved something pretty significant, he'll make it almost impossible for the Israelis to say no,' Miller said.

'No Israeli prime minister can afford to mismanage Israel's most important relationship, especially at a time when the Iranians are closer to nuclear power.'"

It's also possible that Obama is willing -- heck, even eager -- to see Netanyahu's government collapse.

The prime minister has been a longtime skeptic of proposals to create a Palestinian state and refused to commit to the concept during his U.S. visit.

Laura Rozen blogs for Foreign Policy: "According to many observers in Washington and Israel, the Israeli prime minister, looking for loopholes and hidden agreements that have often existed in the past with Washington, has been flummoxed by an unusually united line that has come not just from Obama White House and the secretary of state, but also from pro-Israel congressmen and women who have come through Israel for meetings with him over Memorial Day recess. To Netanyahu's dismay, Obama doesn't appear to have a hidden policy. It is what he said it was....

"Even one veteran Washington peacemaker who had grown skeptical that Washington can overcome obstacles to get substantive progress on Middle East peace admitted to being impressed by the Obama team's resolve. 'What I'm beginning to see is that the Obama administration may be less concerned with actually getting to negotiations and an agreement and more interested in setting new rules and rearranging the furniture,' said Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Institute. 'They may have concluded that they can't get to a real two state solution with this prime minister. Maybe they want a new one? And the best way to raise the odds of that is to demonstrate that he can't manage Israel's most important relationship: with the U.S.'"

Jackson Diehl writes in his Washington Post opinion column: "From its first days the Bush administration made it clear that the onus for change in the Middle East was on the Palestinians: Until they put an end to terrorism, established a democratic government and accepted the basic parameters for a settlement, the United States was not going to expect major concessions from Israel.

"Obama, in contrast, has repeatedly and publicly stressed the need for a West Bank settlement freeze, with no exceptions. In so doing he has shifted the focus to Israel."

This is not a good thing, Diehl writes, because in so doing, Obama "has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud."

But in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth translated by M.J. Rosenberg, Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former United States ambassador to Israel, suggests that Obama is on a larger mission.

"Netanyahu should listen to Obama because Obama is telling him, in essence, that resolving the conflict is an American interest," Indyk said. "What is happening at present is that the Israeli-Arab conflict serves as an instrument in the hands of America's enemies - Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas. Time is not working in Israel's favor or in favor of peace."

Indyk says Obama's new message to Israels is this: "[A]ll these years, the US has been strengthening you precisely for this purpose - so that you can take the risk of making peace. How exactly can the Palestinians destroy you? The real existential danger is that you will not succeed in parting from them."
++


Bush, God, Iraq and Gog
CLIVE HAMILTON, Counterpunch
5/22/09
http://www.counterpunch.org/hamilton05222009.html

The revelation this month in GQ magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush had also been a “Bonesman”, as indeed had his father. Skull & Bones’ initiates are assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush Senior’s nickname? “Magog”. ++

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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