Burning the Qur’an? ‘Wherever they burn books, they will in the end Burn Human Beings’

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Juan

A tiny, fringe fundamentalist cult in Florida, of the sort that American popular Christianity specializes in producing, has announced that it will burn the Qur’an on the anniversary of September 11 because it considers Islam an evil religion. The group also targets gays and the Wicca worship of the Goddess.

This is more cult-like thinking, of the sort I discussed yesterday, in which ‘good’ equals ‘us’ and ‘evil’ equals people we don’t agree with.

The German poet Heinrich Heine (d. 1856), in his play lamenting the forced conversion of Spain’s Muslims to Christianity, “Almansor,” wrote, “Wherever they burn books, in the end they will burn human beings.” (When the Nazis burned books in 1933, Heine’s were among those set afire, and his prediction was borne out).

The antidote to hateful and grandstanding ignorance such as this is learning and reading. The way to combat book-burning is to spread around books and consume them.

I discuss in my book, Engaging the Muslim World, the various charges against Islam from groups like this one and show how they are not true.

I liked the response of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, to this proposal, which is that Americans should take the opportunity presented by this controversy to actually read the Qur’an. I’d go them one better and suggest that some book reading groups who meet regularly select the Qur’an for their next set of discussions.

For the early chapters of the Qur’an, I warmly recommend Michael Sells’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, which manages to be both a pleasure for the English style and sensitive to the nuances of the underlying Arabic.

I’ve done study groups on the Qur’an from time to time in informal settings, and was surprised to find that the translation people told me they found most accessible is Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s rendering of the Holy Qur’an. Intended in in part for English-speaking South Asian Muslims, it is steeped in the Muslim tradition of Qur’an commentary but goes out of its way to explain phrases that are cryptic or telegraphic in the original Arabic.

Reading the Qur’an without context is actually not very useful since it is a highly historical work that refers to contemporary events constantly. Although it is now an older book, W. Montgomery Watt’s Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman is still a good place to start for understanding the context of the Qur’an. In fact, I’d advise people to read it first, and then read the Qur’an backwards, starting with the shorter Meccan chapters that Sells translated and moving toward the front of the book with its longer Medinan chapters, many of which retell the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and Jesus or refer to Muslim attempts to avoid being wiped out by the attacking Meccan pagans (which anti-Muslim polemicists misinterpret as Muslim aggression).

I’ve done a little spadework on issues in Qur’an interpretation on issues of peace at this blog from time to time, and the links are here.

And, speaking of Heine and old Muslim Spain or Andalus, for a delightful book about the relations of Christians, Jews and Muslim in medieval Spain, see Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. You’ll find there that current controversies like that in Florida are nothing new. But Menocal argues that while there were periods of fundamentalism and persecution, the over-all achievement of Spain (both Christian states like Valencia and Muslim ones like the Umayyad Caliphate centered at Cordoba) was of a broad tolerance and a shared love of learning (the library at Cordoba had 600,000 volumes at a time when there were probably only a few thousand manuscripts in all of France). In many ways, the multicultural religious atmosphere of medieval Spain , before the Almohads from one direction and the Inquisition from another did it in, most resembles that in the United States today.

Menocal is brilliant throughout, but especially good at recognizing the secular aspects of Arab culture that often formed an attraction even for those in Andalusia who did not convert to Islam. Alvarus, a hard line Christian priest, lamented:

‘The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literture as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their own language. For everyone one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.’

Menocal suggests, in more elegant language, that Arabic romantic poetry was a babe magnet in Cordoba even for the Christian girls.

In many ways, the shoe is now on the other foot. Young Muslims often devote themselves to English and to American pop culture, and it is English that has the massive library, whereas the modern Arabic one is thin despite areas of excellence, as with the novels of Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz. But all along, the two cultures have interacted on a basis of admiration, not just competition or bigotry. Menocal thinks that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were actually peculiarly parochial in Europe, in contrast to the mixed-up character of medieval Spain, and despite the ugly periods and occasional fundamentalist movements, there are certainly innovations in toleration achieved in Valencia (a Christian kingdom that made a legal place for its Muslim subjects) and Cordoba that can inspire us today.

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July Deadliest Month ever for US troops in Afghanistan

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Juan

Taliban killed three US troops in the Pashtun south with two bombings, bringing the death toll for July 2010 to 63, the highest since W. began the war.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bacevich points out that having a big army and lots of state of the art weapons no longer guarantees quick victory in contemporary warfare.

//

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The Closing of the Zionist Mind

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Juan

It finally happened. The Jerusalem Post has declared archeology itself anti-Semitic.

To tell you the truth, I am frankly worried about some of my colleagues who are committed Zionists having difficulty in dealing with reality in the wake of the severe difficulties facing the Zionist project in historical Palestine.

Caroline Glick’s inaccurate and angry attack on me in the Jerusalem Post reminded me again of why I am anxious about the Closing of the Zionist Mind.

Glick is actually alleging that anyone who practices critical history of the ancient world or the Middle East in general is thereby an anti-Jewish bigot. Glick, from Chicago, was a captain in the Israeli army and a judge advocate-general during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which the Israeli army brutally crushed. She seems to be going off the deep end, having made herself notorious with the sick satirical video ‘We Con the World,’ which made fun of the civilian aid workers killed by Israeli commandos on May 31 of this year (and which appears to have had some backing from the Israeli government itself).

I don’t know if Captain Glick ever was not a zealot, but the bitterness and extremeness of her comments are now to the point of irrationality.

It is not just she. I’ve been at conferences where committed Zionists in the audience would afterwards approach me and, with a sort of glazed look in their eyes, give me a little set speech, then abruptly walk away. I initially always think they want to have a discussion. They don’t. They want to engage in some sort of strange ritual speech to exorcise the doubts I raised. They want to tell me off and then escape before I can reply.

One time some Orthodox students approached me at a conference to say that in their reckoning, Israeli settlers on the West Bank had almost never done any harm to anyone and maybe in total had killed 14 persons, for which they were sorry. I was frankly outraged. I mean, what world did these university students live in? Had they never read even one academic book on the effects of the Israeli Occupation on the Palestinians of the Palestinian West Bank? Why invent fairy tale statistics, and what is with the passive aggressive ‘apology?’ There is something wrong with this way of thinking, and it is a kind of group think that reinforces itself in small, tight, communities of discourse.

Last month, I was at a conference where a prominent academic at a prominent university gave a whole series of set speeches on various occasions.. Hamas is a terrorist organization that says it will never negotiate with Israel. Iran is near to being able and willing to nuke Israel. It was like a series of mantras to ward off any real, critical thought. When I told the person he was being essentialist, he was taken aback, then in a passive aggressive way, said he ‘hoped’ that what I was saying was true. It is so weird dealing with people who are supposed to be critical thinkers by trade who, when it comes to Israel, suddenly exhibit all the originality of a mynah bird. And they don’t let you get a word in edgewise once they start. And they constantly imply, with body language and innuendo, that you are misinformed or actively lying.

Other strange features of this discourse are the disregard for any evidence that contradicts the set talking points, unwillingness to seriously reconsider positions in the light of such evidence, the repetition of key phrases in an impenetrable way, the allegation that critics said things they never said, and insistence on demonizing the source of the alternative evidence.

I got exactly the same treatment in the 1970s from Maronite Christians in Lebanon and in the 1990s from pro-Milosevic Serbs, and recognize the condition. It is Failing Nationalism Syndrome (FNS).

Not all national projects succeed. There are by some counts 5000 ethnic groups in the world of a sort that could be the basis for a nation-state, but there are only about 190 countries. Some political projects, such as French Algeria (dominated by colons or colonists as a privileged group) or a Christian-dominated Lebanon, get going but just don’t have staying power. Algeria is now an almost wholly Muslim country, and Christians in Lebanon, while still powerful and numerous, are probably down to less than a third of the total population. But if we went back in time to 1935, we could sit at cafes in Algiers or Beirut and talk with these two about the future of their countries, and the ones in Algiers would have said that Algeria’s fate was to always be a part of France, and the Lebanese Maronites would talk have talked about their majority being strengthened and about the Phoenician identity of their country in the future.

Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the strangest things.

Let me take Glick’s weird screed section by section (she is replying to my : essay in Salon.com

‘ One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.

Zionism is just Israel nationalism. Nationalism is of two sorts. It can be a sane patriotism in which people take pride in their identity and pull together to achieve national projects of self-improvement. Or it can be an aggressive, expansionist, grasping and destructive movement that exalts the in-group over out-groups and disadvantages or damages the latter. The second sense of the word ‘nationalism’ was the more common in the 19th and the early 20th century.

So, I am not an anti-Zionist in principle (and it is weird that Glick would accuse me of being one), since Israel nationalism is fine with me as long as it is of the first sort. Any nationalism of the second sort, I roundly denounce, whether adopted by Jews, Arabs, or Melanesians. It is the virulent sort that Closes the Mind.

‘ Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.

To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.

Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.

Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”

This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.’

Glick is the one who is out of touch with reality. She cannot bump into a single monument from the period 1000-900 BCE in today’s Jerusalem. The position I hold is what is called the ‘Copenhagen school’ or ‘biblical minimalism,’ and it is a perfectly respectable academic movement. I think all archeologists and historians would hold it if some were not religious believers in the Bible. It is people like Capt. Glick who are politicizing archeology and tampering with science.

There is no evidence for a monotheistic cult in Canaan in the period leading up to 1000 BCE. Monotheistic Judaism appears to have been invented in the Babylonian exile or perhaps a little before, and the fables of a great kingdom of David and Solomon were woven together then. The Assyrians were the gossips of the ancient world and they wrote down everything that happened in their clay tablets, and even talk about minor Arab queens in the Hijaz, and they didn’t know anything about a magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon with palaces. If these figures existed at all, I suspect they just had really, really nice tents, not golden palaces (which by the way have not been found despite what ideologues like Glick assert). Historical Judaism was a reformation of Canaanite religion over a period of time. (Some readers asked me who I thought was carried off to Babylon in the first place, and the answer is simple: Canaanites, perhaps those of a certain religious cult, but very possibly not the sort of monotheist depicted in the Bible).

‘ Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.

I don’t know where she found a quote by me saying that the Jews are not a people. She doesn’t actually seem good with like, evidence. But peoples anyway are not eternal essences. They are formed over time. All I am saying is that her timeline for the formation is off by several hundred years.

Anyway, if Israel nationalism depends on the Bible’s stories of David and Solomon being historical, then kiss it goodbye. But note that my point in the Salon article was not that Israelis had no right to be in Israel but rather that they have no right to expel all Palestinians from Jerusalem ( Yes, that is what Israelis of Glick’s stripe are doing) . Glick’s shouting is designed to cover up an ongoing set of crimes against someone else, by painting herself the victim of, horror, biblical minimalism of an academic sort.

And note Glick’s segue from calling me an ‘anti-Zionist’ to calling me an ‘anti-Semite’ because I won’t accept the bible at face value as a privileged text without some kind of supporting evidence (and in the face of contrary such evidence). I’ve gotten so I really don’t care about being called a bigot by people who are very obviously bigots.. And I am afraid that pretty much everyone is getting that way, which is a shame. Because the history of anti-Jewish bigotry in the West is cosmically ugly and should not be trivialized.

‘ And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti- Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti- Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti- Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.’

I’m still looking for evidence of anti-Semitic muck in anything I’ve written, as opposed to just practicing history. And, I’m glad she thinks me a success, but lets face it, I’d have gone much further in conventional life if I hadn’t gotten on the wrong side of strident fanatics such as she. But, I was never interested in a conventional career. I have a sneaking admiration for Hunter S. Thompson that I doubt very many deans share.

‘ What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.

And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.

And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.

And I am sorry I wrote this column.

Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.’

If all that ranting makes sense to anyone, they should please explain it in terms that sane people can understand. Some of it is just guilt by association and conspiracy thinking.

Glick let slip at the end what is really going on. She is a cultist, who sees the world as black and white, good and evil. She and her movement are pure good. Those who oppose anything it does, including Apartheid, are evil.

And since the world will increasingly oppose Israeli Apartheid against the Palestinians, we are in for lots more furious rants and character assassination like Glick’s.

The Closing of the Zionist Mind, so evident in Glick’s weird column, is dangerous because a cult-like, black and white mindset is the first prerequisite for a turn to violence and it makes compromise and flexibility impossible. But what the Mideast needs more of is reasoned, humane, complex openness to change, to negotiation, to seeing the Other as human. Glick is foreclosing that process, and in so doing is helping dig the grave of Israel as we know it.

Luckily, most Israelis I know are nice people and Glick is not representative, so maybe I’m wrong to see a trend here as opposed to just a supremely annoying and ignorant individual.

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Posted in Israel/ Palestine, Uncategorized | 67 Comments

Dems Souring on Afghan War as 25 Killed by Roadside Bomb in Nimroz

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Juan

Those opposed to President Obama´s escalation of the Afghanistan War were crestfallen when Congress approved another $33 billion in war funding. But as Richard Wolfe at USA Today points out, the interesting thing about the vote is the 103 Democratic Party ´no´ votes, triple the number who voted against a similar bill in summer 2009. Even David Obey, the chairman of the committee that crafted the legislation, voted against it. War exhaustion is setting in with Democrats, who have big domestic priorities, and the Wikileaks will take their toll. Obama may end up being a Democratic president fighting a Republican war, since if the GOP does well in the mid-terms, they will be in a position to support the escalation.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan in Nimroz Province, a crowded bus hit a roadside bomb, which killed at least 25 passengers. I doubt the Taliban were trying to kill bus passengers, but once you set a roadside bomb you never know who will hit it. Meanwhile, another US soldier was killed, this time in the Pashtun south, on Wednesday, bringing July´s toll for US troops killed to 59, only a little less than the 60 who were killed in June, according to the Associated Press. The figure of 60 US troops killed in one month is the highest monthly toll since the war began in 2001.

Aljazeera English reports on the threat of roadside bombs in Afghanistan:

In other news, it is being alleged that the Taliban have overrun much of the Qalai Zal district of Qunduz Province and actually captured a NATO aircraft. Pashtuns only make up one third of Qunduz, a northern province, but they have been militarily very active there, in part in hopes of cutting off NATO supply lines from Tajikistan and Central Asia. But, a plane? The only good news here is that they have no idea what to do with it.

Declan Walsh at the Guardian looks again at a 2007 incident in which US Marines, having had their convoy hit by a bombing near the eastern Pashtun city of Jalalabad, laid down suppressive fire all around them as they made a mad dash to base 6 miles away, so as to get medical help for a wounded colleague. The automatic machine gun fire killed innocent Afghans in cars along the way, including school girls. The whole incident was covered up when the papers were filed, simply by not mentioning the carnage.

Military folks can correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that laying down fire all around is standard response to a bombing, though some green units take it too far and so produce a lot of civilian deaths. I was told that some National Guard units in Iraq were the worst in this regard. I have long suspected that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, having noticed the tactic, bomb US troop convoys near markets and other populated areas, counting on this response so that the US troops end up getting blamed for the carnage and the local people are turned against them. In this Jalalabad incident, the firing went way beyond an immediate response to danger, however.

The American press is being accused of not being very concerned to report civilian casualties in Afghanistan, in contrast to the Guardian in the UK. Eric Michael Johnson can count, so so does his analysis.

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Meyer: NY Times: Saber-rattling Against Turkey

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Juan

Carlyn Meyer writes in a Guest Editorial for Informed Comment, also mirrored here:

NYT Saber-Rattling Against Turkey

The New York Times prides itself on being a newspaper “of record’ reporting crucial information for citizens to make informed choices in policy and elections. What I want to know is how NYTimes editors can claim that last Friday’s article, Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Turkish Elite, about so-called ‘ties’ between Turkish officials and I.H.H., the Turkish foundation that organized the Gazan Blockade flotilla, did anything to inform me or anyone else who read it. Instead the article confuses and misinforms its readers by throwing several stand-alone facts and vague statements together, never clearly saying what it certainly implies. It plays brinkmanship with a loaded gun.

I’ve learned enough about Islam to know that the faith requires that observant followers contribute regularly to charity as one of five basic duties. “Giving” in Islamic countries if huge. And from the Dan Bilefsky/Sebnem Arsu article we learn I.H.H. is a large Islamic charity originally founded to help needy Turkish children and that now operates in over 100 countries. The article mentions I.H.H. support for besieged Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars, as well as a sizable donation to Haiti in the wake of last January’s disaster. We also learn that many currently-serving Turkish officials support I.H.H. (Most of this information is available through open public records.). Then the sizzling link: the article tells us I.H.H. is accused of having ‘ties to terrorists.’

What we don’t learn is the nature of those ties, who is making these accusations, whether the ties are direct or indirect and what those ties mean. This is not the first instance that a New York Times article linked I.H.H. to terrorists. Yet there is no indication that Times reporters have checked out and independently verified whether such ‘ties’ actually exist, even as the newspaper prints another story making that claim!

What is going on here? Before I give a hoot about Turkish officials giving to a large Islamic charity, I want the NYT to answer the immediate questions flowing from previous reporting.

Did I.H.H. give money to Hamas to buy guns? Did its $8 million donation in support of Gazan orphans filter through one of the many social service agencies Hamas runs in Gaza? Is I.H.H. funding a shell front-group or corporation? Or funding projects where money is illicitly skimmed off by genuine terror suspects? Are Turkish officials who serve on the board of I.H.H. also being accused for ‘ties’ to terrorism? Do they know of any I.H.H. ties to terrorism? These would be the logical questions to be answered by second and third NYT follow-up stories that focus on I.H.H.

Just as The Times quoted government officials certain that Iraq possessed MWD yet neglected to investigate other expert views and independent sources, the newspaper repeats a cavalier brand of reporting this time by linking I.H.H. to ‘terrorism’ and Turkish officials to I.H.H. – and by extension Turkish officials to terrorists – through innuendo and unnamed sources.

Addendum: The Times continues with its saber-rattling in today’s paper.

Turkey’s shift toward the Muslim world — from the recent clash with Israel to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s description of Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful — has prompted concerns in the United States and Europe that Turkey, an important NATO ally, is turning its back on the West.

Turkey, a NATO ally and candidate member of the European Union turning its back on the West? This type of alarmist rivals Fox News in its lack of documentation and example. Though the New York Times has mentioned some Western sources in a previous article who were critical of Turkey, Turkey has taken no actions that in any way supports the charge it is turning its back on the West. It is this type of preemptive saber-rattling that is disastrous to US foreign policy and paves the war for needless aggressive actions by the US government.

Carlyn Meyer

Apologies for the typo in Ms. Meyer´s name in the first edn.

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Cameron Calls Gaza under Israel Blockade a ‘Prison Camp’

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Juan

British Prime Minister David Cameron went to Turkey this week and engaged in some refreshingly blunt talk about Ankara’s application to join the European Union (which does not appear to be going anywhere fast), and about the strained Turkish-Israel relationship. Cameron slammed France and Germany for putting the brakes on Turkey’s EU membership, which US secretary of defense Bob Gates has blamed for the turn to an eastern policy by Turkey’s present government.

Cameron also said that the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million impoverished Palestinians, cannot be allowed to remain a prison camp. Calling the territory, which Israel has blockaded for several years, a prison camp outrages many Israelis because it seems an implicit comparison of Tel Aviv to the totalitarian governments of the WW II period.

But note that Cameron did not call Gaza a ‘death camp,’ only a big outdoor prison. And that it surely is, since it is not allowed by Israel to export its goods and even after a supposed ‘easing’ of import restrictions by the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, only a fourth as many goods are allowed in today as came in in 2006. One Israeli official said that the Gazans were to be put on a diet.

That is why the Israeli response to Cameron, that the blockade of Gaza is the fault of Hamas, the fundamentalist party that came to power in the 2006 elections, is absurd. What is going on is that Israeli officials are half-starving Gaza children as a political move, to turn Palestinians away from Hamas and to weaken the party. But you cannot blockade civilian populations for political purposes in international law. That is a war crime, and contrary to Israeli assertions, it would be illegal for any other country to cooperate with such a blockade primarily targeting civilians, including of children. If the blockade were solely for military purposes, then why did the Israelis have such a long list of goods that could not be brought in, including chocolate? No, the policy is punitive, not for security, and Cameron is correct in his diction.

Cameron is perfectly clear that he is trying to improve British relations with Turkey, in part because that country is Europe’s fast-growing economy. In 2008 before the crash, Turkey did over $13 billion in trade with the UK. (Turkey’s total external trade is $100 billion, so Britain is a major trading partner. In contrast, in 2007, all of Israeli trade with Europe only came to about $19 bn.). Cameron wants to improve British trade with economies outside the North Atlantic, including India. But it would be wrong to dismiss Cameron’s straight talk as merely a way of buttering up the Turks for the purposes of commerce. He is just saying what virtually all European leaders actually think.

Moreover, Cameron wants to see Turkish relations with Israel return to normal and may be attempting to pave the way by saving Turkish face in this way (Israel has adamantly refused to apologize for its deadly raid on the Mavi Marmara Turkish aid vessel, which left 8 Turkish and one US citizen dead. In fact, it is not clear that they even said they were sorry that the aid workers died.)

Last June, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu likened the Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla to Somali piracy. It may be a while before the two countries have the kind of relationship again that would allow Turkey to play broker between the Palestine Authority and Israel.

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War is Theft: Pentagon cannot account for $8.6 Billion of Iraq’s Reconstruction Funds

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Juan

The Pentagon cannot account for the over $8 bn. given out to cronies in the first years of the Iraq occupation, money which came from Iraq’s oil proceeds to begin with.

The reason is that in the chaotic days after the fall of the Baath government and the collapse of the old economy, Paul Bremer & Co. attempted to jump-start the Iraq market economy by giving out large sums in brown paper bags with no questions asked. They did not understand that the Iraqi market had been killed by decades of government control and that no magic hand any longer existed, so they might as well have taken that money and buried it in the ground. (Actually some of it probably was buried, in back yards in Fairfax County, Va.)

The real problem, though, is not petty larceny but that no one can account for our whole country being gone in the aftermath of the 2003 illegal war– with a cancellation by John Roberts of our Bill of Rights, $2 trillion missing from the treasury for the wars and their related costs (at least), torture still permitted overseas, arbitrary no-fly punishments meted out to peaceful protesters, the entire Republican Party kidnapped and stealthily replaced with glaze-eyed Manchurian cultists, and habeas corpus permanently embezzled and bamboozled out of existence.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was wrong when he declared in 1840 that ‘property is theft.’

But I can offer a more solid and more consistently true aphorism: “War is theft.”

And not only of money; of supposedly inalienable rights, as well.

Nor is it over with. AP notes that the US has put $51 billion into Afghanistan since 2001 for education, roads, water, jobs and electricity. Now Washington is planning to spend another $20 bn. in Afghanistan the coming year alone. That total sum, $71 bn. is greater than what was spent (from US monies) on Iraq. The news service writes:

“An Associated Press investigation showed that the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good. The number of Afghans with access to electricity has increased from 6 percent in 2001 to only about 10 percent now, far short of the goal of providing power to 65 percent of urban and 25 percent of rural households by the end of this year. ”

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Dietrich: Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Juan

Christopher R. W. Dietrich writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:

Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy

In a paper written in conjunction with Lloyds of London, Dr. Paul Stevens of Chatham House recently predicted that oil could arrive at $200 per barrel by 2013. As the events in the Gulf of Mexico begin to recede from the front pages, the unpleasant price of oil dependence remains starkly clear.

Conventional technologically advanced oil recovery—the offshore, tar sands, and shale sources that policymakers in the 1970s called “traditional alternatives”—has begun to decline, as their production costs rise and their environmental impact becomes a political imperative. Stevens’ prediction, based largely on an analysis of increased Asian demand, brings more gloomy news, especially for those who believe in the close connection between oil prices and the world economic health.

A similar crisis arose thirty years ago, when an increasingly integrated global economy faced oil prices that quadrupled in 1973-1974 and more than doubled again between 1978 and 1980. In 1980, Jimmy Carter declared foreign oil dependence “a clear and present danger to our Nation’s security.” But, by 1982, the traditional alternatives, as well as other new production, brought supply in line with demand and oil prices dropped. Ronald Reagan had the solar panels installed by Carter on the White House roof removed in 1986.

Today, as the recent debate over offshore drilling has shown, many commentators employ the lessons of the past to hold that a strong position by the federal government will do little to ameliorate our energy problems. Some analysts, often taking a strident ideological position, argue that the combination of an always-innovative energy industry and the free market will again resolve the dilemma of global energy upheavals. Others, historians of science and technology who put forward a more nuanced position, still essentially hold a similar belief: In a century of stunning technological advances, most critical breakthroughs have rarely occurred as a result of government policy, but rather as a confluence of individual creativity and steadily growing scientific knowledge.

That was then. This is now. The emphasis on traditional alternatives in the 1970s and 1980s led to problems within a global society that remains, in the words of the Group of 77, “unduly oil-oriented.” The changes in the world economy fueled by the explosive growth of those decades, as much a result of relatively inexpensive energy as anything else, today points towards oil’s decline.

Nowhere else are the problems of energy dependence more disturbing than in American diplomacy. Even though the Obama administration’s national security strategy, released in late May, emphasizes the deepening of relations with increasingly assertive “emerging centers of influence”—China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa—relations have floundered, especially in energy diplomacy. Most recently, Turkey and Brazil reached a deal with Iran for the shipment of enriched uranium abroad, in spite of Washington’s misgivings. This setback followed the Copenhagen climate summit last December, when U.S. suggestions were hauled over the coals by an informal alignment of developing nations, including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

Given the gravity with which most experts view our energy future, government policy needs to stand at the forefront of changing the national and international energy infrastructure. Major new investment in energy alternatives, well above the levels currently considered by the energy industry and the current bills before Congress, is necessary.

It is clear that Obama understands the imperative of a green energy revolution. Yet, the administration has offered few specifics, despite opportunities to orchestrate such change. If the government ups the ante in a comprehensive energy bill, perhaps by transferring a large part of the Senate’s recent $35 billion subsidy to the oil industry to research and design of alternative sources, it will be easier to draw the colossal investment necessary for the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

This substantial increase in government funding will mitigate many potential problems. Most broadly, by pushing industry to do away with the pathologies of oil dependence, such a policy would help diversify the domestic economy. In the field of diplomacy, more specifically, the escalation of home-grown energy technology will have multiple uses. Foremost, in the ideological frame of promoting a global green revolution, technology transfers will help the major developing nations that stand at the center of the national security strategy to overcome the considerable barriers to clean and sustainable economic development.

——-
Christopher R. W. Dietrich is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and Smith-Richardson Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University.

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Posted in Energy, Environment | 6 Comments

40 Killed in Bombings of Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq;
Constitutional Crisis Unfolds

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Juan

Despite Republican senator John McCain’s conviction that “We’ve already won that one,” i.e. the Iraq War, actually you couldn’t say either that the war is over or that things are going well politically in that country. It lacks a new government, the political wrangling is interminable, the apparatus of state is paralyzed, and big bombings are undertaken with frightening efficiency.

Two bombings by guerrillas killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims and wounded 68 in the holy city of Karbala, where hundreds of thousands of devotees had gathered to commemorate the hidden Twelfth Imam, who this branch of Shiism holds will return in the future as a sort of messiah figure (analogous to the return of Christ for many Christians). The time and place of the bombing made it especially dangerous for Iraq’s inter-sectarian politics. Karbala is sacred ground for Shiites, the burial place of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Imam Husayn, who was killed by the Muslim Umayyad dynasty in 680 CE (AD) and so is considered the supreme martyr. A big bombing in Karbala reverberates throughout Shiite Iraq and among Shiites everywhere. In February of 2006, when guerrillas blew up the golden dome shrine of Imam Hasan al-Askari (a descendant of both the Prophet and of Imam Husayn), the 11th Imam and father of the Twelfth Imam, Iraq descended into an orgy of sectarian violence that killed as many as 2500 civilians a month.

Al-Khaleej reports that the two bombs were set off at the city gate, distant from the Shrine of Husayn.

Also on Monday, the offices of the al-Arabiya satellite television news network were bombed, killing 6 persons and wounding a member of parliament from the secular Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi, Salam al-Zawbaie. The al-Arabiya offices are near to the Iraqiya headquarters.

The bombings may have been intended as interventions in the political wrangling about the formation of a new government, something that still has not happened all these months after the March 7 election. (In Iraq’s parliamentary system, they hold the election first, then see who has enough seats to form a government; so far no one has put together a viable coalition, unlike what happened in Britain recently, where the election did not yield a majority party but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats managed to form a government together despite their significant ideological differences.)

Big bombings in Karbala make Shiite caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki look weak and ineffective, undermining his claim to a second term, which is based in part on his partial successes in restoring some security to major cities such as Basra and Baghdad.

The bombing of al-Arabiya, in the vicinity of the Iraqiya Party, may have been a strike at Sunni Arab interests (al-Arabiya is based in the United Arab Emirates and is sympathetic to moderate Sunni Arabs in Iraq).

Leaders of the major parties are said to be planning to meet in Baghdad, including Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Alliance, Iyad Allawi of the secular Iraqiya Party (mainly voted for this time by Sunni Arabs), Nuri al-Maliki of the middle class Shiite State of Law Coalition, and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr of the fundamentalist Shiite Sadr Bloc. Al-Sadr is said to prefer not to meet al-Maliki face to face. A parliamentary session is also planned to discuss the prerogatives of al-Maliki’s caretaker government, which remains in power 5 months after the election, given the constitutional crisis and relative power vacuum (parliament has not been meeting regularly in the absence of a new government). One plan is to strip al-Maliki’s caretaker government of many of its prerogatives, allowing it only to deliver government services.

The problem is that the army reports to al-Maliki and neither may be interested in what parliament thinks. Nor is it clear that what Iraq needs at this point is a weaker caretaker government.

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Posted in Iraq | 11 Comments

Cloughley– “Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban”

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Juan

In light of the Wikileaks Pentagon documents are full of allegations by US military personnel of Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban, and they have increased tensions among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is worth taking a step back, however, and remembering that not everything in classified documents is true or well founded. It is also worth remembering that some of the allegations of meetings with Taliban center on former head of Inter-Services Intelligence Hamid Gul, a hard line fundamentalist who is retired and, even if the accusations are true (which is not yet proven), who may be involved in rogue ISI cells not under Islamabad’s direct control. Moroever, the alleged meetings occurred in 2006, before Pakistan’s military took on the Taliban. Brian Cloughley replies in a guest editorial for Informed Comment to those who cast doubts on Pakistan’s efforts against the Taliban :

Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban

A paper published on June 13 by the London School of Economics states that Pakistan, at the highest political and military levels, fosters and supports insurgents in Afghanistan.Its author, Matt Waldman of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,declares that “as the provider of sanctuary, and very substantialfinancial, military and logistical support to the [Afghan] insurgency,the ISI [Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence]appears to have strong strategic and operational influence –reinforced by coercion. There is thus a strong case that the ISI andelements of [Pakistan’s] military are deeply involved in the insurgentcampaign [in Afghanistan].”

The ISI of Pakistan is headed by Lt General Ahmad Pasha who meets frequently with senior American and other foreign intelligence representatives. Pasha’s direct superior is General Ashfaq Kayani,chief of the army, who also has discussions with the highest ranking US military officers, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who came calling in Islamabad last week.

Two days after publication of the Waldman paper a band of about 600 well-armed brigands – call them ‘Taliban’ or whatever – from Afghanistan attacked an isolated border camp in Pakistan manned by two platoons of the locally-recruited Frontier Corps which is commanded by officers of the Pakistan army. The post was one of the few that has to be supplied by air, there being no road access, and the garrison ran out of ammunition. Ten soldiers were killed and some thirty captured and taken into Afghanistan. Most were later released. Six bodies were sent back to Pakistan.

Waldman wrote that “American and other western intelligence agencies must be aware of Pakistan’s conduct” in allegedly supporting the Afghan Taliban insurgents. But if they have evidence of this supposed behavior it is presumed they would have conveyed their awareness to senior military officers, including Admiral Mullen. They could hardly sit on such important information. After all, their own soldiers are being killed day by day in ever-greater numbers by insurgents in Afghanistan, who are automatically referred to as ‘Taliban’ – this “James Joyce-style portmanteau word” as defined so pithily by Pepe Escobar – or, in more headline-luring style, as ‘al-Qaeda-associated Taliban’.

While the futile war in Afghanistan continues, with insurgents having killed 102 foreign troops in June, Mr Waldman asks us to believe that the most senior officer in the US military is content to associate with a man who he says supports the slaughter of US soldiers by purportedly endorsing “very substantial financial, military and logistical support” to the ‘Taliban’. Presumably – if the Waldman paper is kosher, as it were – the direct military representative ofthe President of the United States must have cast aside all loyalty tohis soldiers who are fighting a hideously difficult war.

There are no shades of grey, here. Either Admiral Mullen knows that the armed forces of Pakistan are assisting the enemies of the United States, or he doesn’t believe that they are doing so. If he does not know it, then the people who refrain from telling him about“substantial support” – the US intelligence agencies who Mr Waldman says “must be aware” of this extraordinary duplicity on a massive scale – are treacherous filth.

But if Admiral Mullen has been convinced by his intelligence advisers that Pakistan’s military officers of the highest rank are condoning and even supporting the slaughter of his soldiers, he is a giant-pack, five-star, Olympic-sized traitor for continuing to associate with them. Even if he only suspects, way deep down, that General Kayani,the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, and his frequent and genial interlocutor, is in some fashion nourishing enemies of his country,then he must, in all honor, blow the whistle on him.

Then we are asked to believe that General Kayani himself, the commander of over half a million troops, of whom 150,000 on the border with Afghanistan daily risk their lives for their country, permits or even encourages some of his subordinates to be “deeply involved” in the insurgency in Afghanistan which results in the killing of his own soldiers when the Afghan Taliban attack Pakistan’s border posts.

* * *

We live in a weird and worrisome world, but it will be a strange day indeed when America’s most senior military officer shakes hands and talks with a foreign army chief who he has been told is “playing a double game of astonishing magnitude” that results in the deaths ofhis nation’s soldiers. And I state flatly that no military leader would ever aid and abet insurgents who attack his country and kill members of his own armed forces, which is what Mr Waldman asserts that General Kayani is doing.

* * *

Of course Pakistan’s ISI is “involved” in Afghanistan. It would be peculiar were the agency not committed to intelligence operations there, just as are the CIA, Britain’s SIS, India’s RAW and almost every other spy organization of note.

Mind you, the CIA team in Afghanistan is, to put it kindly, amateur,with the magnet of massive money attracting people who tell them what they want to hear. The Brits are much poorer and comparatively tiny in presence, and in product tend to condescend to their allied spooks, but have proved easy to penetrate to the extent that the Pakistanis have quiet giggles about some of their operatives and operations. The Indians try hard, but – in spite of what the Pakistanis say – are almost entirely without influence in Afghanistan, although they fund a badly-run training camp in Nimroz for a gang of moronic malcontents who call themselves the Baloch National Army.A musical about Afghanistan’s all-singing, all-dancing, international spook drama could be titled the Zigzag Follies.

* * *

Afghanistan is an enormously important neighbor of Pakistan, and the ISI would be failing in its duty were it not to have agents in as many places – politically, militarily and geographically – as it can manage to contrive.

ISI’s operatives, just as their counterparts in other nations’ agencies, are not purring pussy cats. They move in freaky circles and mix with some people who would be considered by most of us to be psychotic criminals. They meet and speak with their countries’ enemies whenever they can set up such contacts. General Kayani told me three years ago, when he was head of ISI, that “of course” his people talked with members of militant ultra-Islamic movements because otherwise “how can we keep track of them?”

We may not approve of the methods of Intelligence operatives, many of whom are jokes, but those of us living in democracies get what our governments consider to be best for us. If that involves some decidedly dubious activities in the course of seeking pre-emptive intelligence that might save our fellow citizens’ lives, then so be it. Talking with vicious insurrectionists is repugnant, certainly –but as the commander of the British army said last week, recollecting that British spooks talked with the brutal fanatics of Irish murder gangs at the height of their terrorist onslaught that killed so many innocents, “If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there’s always a point at which you start to negotiate with each other . . . ”

This is exactly what the ISI has been planning for over the past six years. Of course its agents have many contacts among Afghan insurgents. And they try to help bridge the gap between fanatical barbarism and the rule of law.

But that doesn’t mean Pakistan gives “very substantial financial, military and logistical support” to the savage Afghans who wage war against it.

It is lunacy to imagine that the chief of the Pakistan army helps kill his own soldiers. And anyone who thinks that the most senior officer in the US military would support him in doing so belongs to a different planet.

Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff. com

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Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uncategorized | 15 Comments