TW3 + 1

[Political Waves]

I'm befuddled. Ever get that way? The brain just refuses to process one more bit of information? If it was working, I'd probably think of something clever ... but as it's just  sitting there, humming and snapping in a vacant kind of fugue state, I haven't got much interesting to say.

 

As a discouraging aside, mMy son just came back from a mandatory unemployment seminar on how to find work, where he reports the instructor broke down in tears; said America was 'not coming back.' Included in the topics: how to dress down for your interview. I dunno, kids -- it ain't pretty.

Short post today. That Was The Week That Was and a piece from Salon about how the Right can't stop slobbering over this opportunity to deal a blow to Iran, which Obama is missing because he's such a candy-ass. By GOD/DESS I'm grateful we didn't elect one of these errant adolescents president! You can find info on the last one we suffered, running his mouth, here.

 

Jude



Harper's Weekly Review
June 16, 2009

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's
presidential election. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei called the election results a "divine miracle,"
but fraud and voter irregularities were reportedly
rampant; Ahmadinejad's main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi,
asked the ayatollah for an investigation into the
results. "They didn't rig the vote," said an official with
Iran's interior ministry, which conducted the
election. "They didn't even look at the vote. They just
wrote the name and put the number in front of it."
Iranians protesting the results took to the streets, where
they were attacked with clubs, metal batons, baseball
bats, stones, and teargas. "He ran a red light," said
Ahmadinejad of Mousavi, "and he got a traffic ticket."
During the campaign, Mousavi advocated increased
engagement with the United States and accused Ahmadinejad
of being "superstitious" and "brazenly staring at the
camera and telling lies to the nation," citing September
2005 footage in which Ahmadinejad discussed being
surrounded by a mysterious light during an appearance at
the United Nations: "I felt the atmosphere changed," he
said, claiming that, for 27 minutes, his audience did not
blink. "I'm not exaggerating," he continued, "when I'm
saying they didn't blink." New York City planned to gas
geese near airports.

North Korea announced plans to weaponize
plutonium. Chicago Reverend Jeremiah Wright claimed that
he hadn't spoken with Barack Obama, his former
parishioner, since Obama assumed the presidency, because
"them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me." Asked to
explain what he meant by "them Jews," Wright explained
that he was referring only to "Zionists." James von Brunn,
an 88-year-old white supremacist and author of the book
"Kill the Best Gentiles!," opened fire in the Washington,
D.C., Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard before he
was shot in the face and hospitalized. A woman in Tel Aviv
was searching through the city dump after she bought her
mother a new mattress as a gift and threw out the old one,
which was stuffed with $1 million in cash. The
U.S. Treasury said that it would set executive
compensation at seven firms receiving government support,
including AIG, General Motors, and Chrysler. The parents
of young "trustafarians" who live in fashionable
Williamsburg, New York, could no longer afford to pay rent
for their adult children. A bakery in the Spanish city of
Valencia was sued when the arm of an undocumented Bolivian
worker was severed by a kneading machine and put out with
the garbage, and French prosecutors commenced the trial of
a woman accused of killing her babies and storing their
bodies in the freezer.

Johanna Ganthaler, a woman who missed the May 31 Air
France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and
killed all aboard, died in a car accident. Farmers in the
Netherlands were using pig excrement to generate
electricity, and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu
suggested that painting roofs white might reflect
sufficient sunlight to stave off global warming. A
Nebraska doctor said that he would offer third-term
abortions. Nurses in the Czech Republic were receiving
free breast implants and liposuction as signing
bonuses. "It helps to improve the morale," explained a
clinic manager, "of both our employees and our patients."
Young girls in Zimbabwe were trading sex for food, three
boys in Dorset, England, stomped a baby deer to death, a
16-year-old boy in California was running for city
council, and a 14-year-old boy in Germany was hit by a
meteorite. California scientists studying guppies found
that evolution can take place in as little as eight years,
and scientists conducting research in Africa announced the
discovery of a penis-shaped mushroom that they christened
Phallus drewesii, after herpetologist Robert Drewes. "I'm
utterly delighted," said Drewes of the new species of
stinkhorn fungus, which is two inches long. "The funny
thing is that it is the second-smallest known mushroom in
this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp."

-- Genevieve Smith
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/06/WeeklyReview2009-06-16

Night of the living neocons
The shameless fools whose Iraq folly empowered Iran's hard-liners are back, smearing Obama as an appeaser
Gary Kamiya, Salon
Jun. 18, 2009
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/06/18/neocons_iran/print.html

Like Rasputin, the unhinged "Mad Monk" whom they sometimes seem to have adopted as an intellectual role model, the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq war refuse to die. Although they have been figuratively stabbed, poisoned, shot, garroted and drowned, they somehow keep standing, still insisting that history will vindicate George W. Bush's glorious crusade. In a world governed by the Victorian moral code conservatives claim to uphold, they would be shunned, shamed and forbidden to appear on television or write Op-Ed columns. But because Beltway decorum apparently requires that disgraced pundits be given a permanent platform to bray their discredited theories, the rest of us are condemned to listen to their ravings.

What caused the neocons and their fellow travelers on the right to sit up in their coffins this time is the almost certainly rigged Iran election and the massive unrest that has roiled the country in its aftermath. Outraged that Obama has not behaved like their hero Bush and begun loudly rattling his saber, the neocons have denounced him as -- you guessed it -- an appeaser. In a piece titled "Obama's Iran Abdication," the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, that bastion of unreconstructed neocon lunacy, attacked Obama for not supporting the Iranian protesters more vigorously and derided his "now-familiar moral equivalence" in citing the 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh. In an Op-Ed two days earlier, the paper's Visigothic editors, who have been calling for the U.S. to bomb Iran for years, took the opportunity to climb into the Wayback Machine to pay homage to one of George W. Bush's greatest hits. "It turns out that the 'axis of evil' really is evil -- and not, as liberal sages would have it, merely misunderstood," sneered the editors, suggesting that the crackdown should make Obama rethink trying to strike a grand nuclear bargain with Iran.

In his own attack on Obama, Sen. John McCain also rushed to resurrect Bush's Axis of Evil line, saying, "Look, these people are bad people and I know that it was unpopular to call them part of an axis of evil or whatever it was, but we just showed again that an oppressive regime will not allow democratic elections, free and democratic elections."

Neocon stalwart Danielle Pletka also made a not-so-subtle attempt to use the turmoil in Iran to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq. In a piece in the New York Times, she and fellow American Enterprise Institute pundit Ali Alfoneh wrote, "Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him." Earth to Pletka: George W. Bush is not president anymore, and even if he still was, the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to attack Iran. It would be more accurate to say that the soon-to-depart U.S. troops in Iraq are encircled by Iranian forces than the other way around.

The nadir of neocon idiocy, however, may be a piece by Robert Kagan that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post. Titled "Obama, Siding With the Regime," it argues that because Obama wants to begin negotiations with Iran as soon as possible and does not want to appear "hostile to the regime," his "goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it." In other words, Kagan is saying that Obama would prefer to rush into a deal with a repressive, anti-Western Iranian regime than do what he is in fact doing, which is to recognize that U.S. meddling is counterproductive and wait and see what government emerges from Iran's current turmoil. That Kagan adduces no evidence for his bizarre assertion is hardly surprising, because there is none. Kagan's real purpose is to smear Obama as a craven appeaser, and the only way he can do that is to paint a ludicrously crude caricature of Obama and the foreign-policy realism he has embraced.

That these neoconservative pundits have the gall to talk about Iran at all, let alone pose as defenders of the Iranian people, would be stunning if it were not so familiar. For it was their own policies that were largely responsible for the rise of the hard-liners in Iran. As Islam expert Malise Ruthven notes in an essay on Iran in the current New York Review of Books, "external factors, driven by U.S. policies, were decisive" in thwarting Iran's nascent democratic movement. And of those U.S. actions, none was more consequential than the very "axis of evil" statement that the neocons are now tumbling over each other to glorify.

"George W. Bush's notorious 'axis of evil' speech in January 2002, linking Iran to its enemy Iraq and the maverick Communist republic of North Korea, undermined many of Khatami's achievements in improving Iran's international profile, and convinced the hard-liners that the Islamic Republic would become the next target in Bush's 'war on terror,'" Ruthven writes. "The build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 -- one month before the invasion -- conservatives regained nearly all the seats they had lost in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement.

This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for 'Islamic suitability.' The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad's election as president."

In short, the very rhetoric the neocons are now demanding that Obama use backfired disastrously when Bush used it -- which is precisely why Obama has avoided repeating it. And, of course, the entire Iraq war greatly empowered Iran by removing its greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and shifting power to Iran's coreligionist Shiites.

One of the things the neocons would like the rest of us to forget is that they were the most ardent proponents of invading the very country whose people they now piously claim to support. Back in the heady "Mission Accomplished" days, the neocon slogan was "Wimps go to Baghdad -- real men go to Tehran." Leaving aside the fact that the neocons were a bunch of paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks who never "went" anywhere that didn't have room service, the point is that they have been burning to attack Iran for years -- an attack that would inevitably result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Yes, some of them claimed that invading Iran would be a cakewalk, that the long-suffering Iranian people would welcome Americans as liberators, and so on. (Some of them even managed to keep a straight face while saying this.) And if you believe them, there's a bridge in Fallujah I'd like to sell you.

Beneath their talk of spreading freedom and democracy, the neocons have always hated and feared Iran. There are several reasons for this, including the state of enmity between Iran and America spurred by the Khomeini revolution and the 1979 hostage crisis, but the main one is that Iran is Israel's most dangerous enemy. Removing Iran as a threat to Israel is the main strategic goal of the neoconservatives, and that goal is far more important to them than "liberating" the Iranian people.

For the truth is that the neocons' supposed "idealism" was and is in fact a fig leaf covering utter, cavalier indifference to the massive death and destruction their reckless -- but so "principled" -- policies caused. This was true of Iraq, for which the Bush administration did not even keep figures of Iraqi deaths, and it is even more true of Iran. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the same neocons who now claim to want to help the Iranian people were -- and still are -- quite prepared to kill countless civilians in a large-scale military attack on the country.

The situation in Iran is a tricky moving target, but so far, Obama has played it exactly right on. He has expressed deep concern about the election and the regime's violent response to peaceful demonstrators, but added that "it is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling -- the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections." Obama's caution is wise. As Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council told the Washington Independent, "The framing that Ahmadinejad is presenting is one in which essentially the whole [opposition] is a Western media conspiracy ... So the administration is doing exactly the right thing. They're not rushing in and they're not playing favorites ... [This] is not a battle in the slightest to be fought by any in the international community or any entity. Iranians have tremendous pride in doing this themselves."

It should be amply clear by now that America's ability to influence events in the Middle East is severely limited. Indeed, as the Bush years showed, U.S. actions in the region tend to result in the exact opposite of their intended consequences.

No one denies that it would be in America's interests to have a less autocratic regime running Iran. And it goes beyond that. Everyone with a conscience and a heart is horrified by images of Iranian protesters being beaten or killed by thugs and police. Everyone wishes the best outcome for the Iranian people. The question is how to achieve that. The U.S. may be able to help, but it could end up hurting. And beyond that, there are legitimate questions about whether the U.S. should take upon itself the role of world policeman.

Neocons like Kagan deride Obama's cautious approach to Iran as a return to amoral "realism." But this is a caricature. Obama's foreign policy is still evolving, but it is becoming clear that he is pursuing what Robert Wright has called "progressive realism." It is realistic, because it recognizes the limits of American power and the fact that all states must ultimately act out of national self-interest. But as his historic Cairo speech showed, it is also progressive, because it defines that self-interest broadly enough to include a commitment to human rights, democracy and social justice. Obama's foreign policy eschews imperialist ambitions, but recognizes that for a superpower, total isolationism is neither possible nor desirable. (Case in point: Rwanda.)

His approach has already borne fruit. The success of the March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, a major victory for the U.S., is widely attributed to the "Obama effect." Just one month of U.S. pressure induced Israel's far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to utter the magic words "Palestinian state." And most critically, as David Ignatius noted in an important column in Tuesday's Washington Post, Obama's openness to the Muslim world and more sophisticated presentation of America has empowered the reformers in Iran and throughout the Arab/Muslim world, and diminished the appeal of militant jihadism.

The neocons are demanding righteous outrage, and claiming that Obama's failure to deliver it is a sign of cowardice, moral relativism and even anti-Americanism. (Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer claimed that Obama is displaying a "disturbing ambivalence toward [his] country.") But outrage is not a foreign policy, and their own "moral clarity" resulted in the maiming of an entire country and one of the worst foreign-policy debacles in U.S. history. Instead of mounting their bully pulpit yet again, they should be seeking a confessional. ++


"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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