Sic Semper Tyrannis

It's "Bibi" time again.

Natanyahu takes office today with his cabinet of extreme nationalists, religious parties and a variety of other "friends of AIPAC." 

What can be expected from this cast of characters?

- An endless evasiveness on the subject of a state for the Palestinians.  Bibi and co. will instead try to sell them on the idea of a comfortble life as serfs, helots or whatever term one prefers.

- An effort to strike a clearly unequal bargain with Syria.  The deal must be seen by the Likudniks as unbalanced and in Israel's favor or they will not feel good about themselves.  After all, if you are not screwing your "enemies," then who are you?  This is a very Middle Eastern attitude, a place where a game that is not a zero sum game is thougt to be a defective game.

- An endless hostility toward Iran.  An Iran that fulfills the need for enemies, enemies that can be defeated and frustrated as a kind of memorial to bygone enemies.  Bibi's government will lean toward a unilateral first strike on Iran if the USA can not be maneuvered into doing the "business."

- the Iran "issue" will probably be the proximate cause of the confrontation between Bibidom and the Obama White House that I have been expecting.  Bibi has let it be known that he will not "tolerate" an American effort toward an "opening" with Iran.  Bibi thinks the United States is a sort of "cash cow" to be manipulated by clever people like him.  He, Avigdor Lieberman, et al will seek to bully and dominate the US using propagandists in the media, propagandists from captive think tanks, friendly media outlets and servile members of Congress.  In the end, a personal confrontation involving President Obama himself is an inevitability.  Then we will see...  pl

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLU207116

"Cast Lead," a useless effort.

"There have been numerous allegations of Israeli atrocities during the three-week campaign,including the charge that Israel fired white phosphorus shells "repeatedly over densely populated areas."

Human Rights Watch made the accusation in a report last week.

White phosphorus burns on contact with oxygen. It is legal to use as an illuminant, but the human rights organization alleges that Israel used it as a weapon.

Israel has rejected those claims as well.

Other Israeli investigations into the conduct of its troops in Gaza continue." 

CNN.com

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Of course they will, of course.  This reminds me of the time an Arab dictator of my acquaintance displayed on his local television two scoundrels whom he accused of murdering a cabinet minister who had known too much.  The dictator (later a pal of President GW Bush) had ordered the killing, but there, on television, the two miscreants cowered in a corner while their guilt was proclaimed and el Jefe swore by the Qur'an that investigations would continue until all the evil doers would be punished, were punished as these two evil doers would be punished.

Nothing further was ever said or printed of the two miscreants, further investigations or the death of the inconvenient minister. 

Well, the photograph above is of white phosphorus shell fired from either artillery or mortars.  It is bursting over an upscale civilian apartment development.  There are a lot of pictures like this.  Any old soldier, including ones from the IDF, knows that this is white phosphorus shell.

White phosphorus (a metal) burns on contact with air.  If you get it on you, it will burn through your arm, leg, etc., until the burning phosporus comes out the other side.  Your only real recourse is to cut it out of you with a knofe before it does so.  White phosphorus shell is legally used for generating smoke on the battlefield.  It used to be common in aerial bombs.  Germany and Japan were heavily bombed with this among many other  things for the specific purpose of burning down their towns.

So.  The IDF spokeman is a liar.  The question of whther and to what extent the IDF also shot civilians deliberately I leave to the conscience of IDF soldiers who seem unwilling to shut up about it.  God bless them.

On a grander scale, Israeli complaints of continued Palestinian (Hamas) smuggling of supplies and munitions are a validation of the analytic comments I made here and on television to the effect that the Israeli effort at Gaza (Cast Lead) would be a total strategic failure if the Palestinians did not submit to the Israeli collective will as a result of that punitive campaign. 

They have not submited and so it is fair to say that "Cast Lead" was strategically a total failure that served once again to demonstrate the impotence of Israeli arms in dealing with the essence of their "problem" with the Palestinians.  What is next, forced "re-locations," a first strike against Iran as a relief from having to deal with the truly existential issue of Palestine?  How about face to face negotiations with the Palestinians as equal human beings?  How about that?  pl

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/30/israel.gaza.abuses/

Bob Gates on FNS - Yes, that's what we are doing.

The Secretary of Defense appeared on Fox News Sunday today.  Chris Wallace, the moderator, took the opportunity to ask every divisive, provocative question available and Gates breezed through the interview coolly answering all questions in a factual, calm way that utterly defeated the Fox instinct for trouble making.

There has been concern here about the new US policy in Afghanistan.  When asked if Obama was denying the US command there of forces, Gates said that the president had approved all requests that he, Gates, has made for deployment authority for forces going to Afghanistan.  When asked what the US goal is in Afghanistan, Gates repeated the president's statement that we are there to "defeat, disrupt and destroy"al-Qa'ida forces in the country.  Wallace tried several times to expand that mission statement to include the Taliban.  Gates ignored this and would not be drawn.  The implication is clear that an attempt will be made to suborn the more suborn-able parts of the insurgent array.  Wallace also tried to insist that a lot more troops would be needed.  Gates ignored that as well.  There will not be a lot more US troops over and above the 60,000 number that are now scheduled.  These are several reasons for that.  The most important one is that the administration does not want to be pulled into an open ended commitment to Afghanistan.  Al-Qa'ida is the objective, not a renaissance for Afghanistan.  The second most important reason for a limited force in Afghanistan is the state of exhaustion of the US Army.  Materiel, soldiers, families, are all exhausted.  The force is brittle.  Money for the "operations and maintenance" costs of another big war would be unsustainable.  The right wingers on FNS want to see a bigCOIN campaign in the policy that Obama announced for Afghanistan.  They want to see a policy that represents an Obama acceptance of what they call the "Bush Surge."  In fact the Obama Afghanistan policy if very limited in scope, and cleverly disguised to look like something that the right thinks it likes.  pl

A good plan for Afghanistan...

And more importantly, for the United States.

I have been holding my breath to to see what the White House and CENTCOM strategy reviews would produce with regard to Afghanistan in particular.  In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I was consulted in a very small way on one of these.  It was agreed at the time that I would not mention this until policy was announced.

There have been two basic possibilities for US policy in Afghanistan:

- One choice might have been to commit to a full blown, multi-decade nation building COIN war that would have "sucked up" trillions of dollars in money that we could ill afford to leave littering the heights of Central Asia.  All the "old Afghanistan hands" whom I know insist that the country known as Afghanistan does have a seat in the UN and an embassy in Washington but that those two "data points" mark the closest approach to "nationhood" in the political science sense of the word that can be detected.  The creation of "Afghanistan, the Country" would have been dear to neocon hearts (and the idea still is).  That goal would have involved de-racination of Afghanistan to such a degree that it would become a very Westernized country.  The costs would be enormous.  The assumption in this (peddled by the neocons) is that a drained swamp does not breed alligators.  The "swamp" in this case is the matrix of traditional lifeways.  Those lifeways are despised and feared by the neocons.  Why?  Work it out.

- The other possibility in policy was that the US would spend a reasonable, but not excessive amount of money helping the Afghans in the development of physical and governmental infrastructure, would assist in enlarging Afghan security forces and improving their training in an effort scheduled to end in 2011 and most importantly would concentrate on energized and mobilizing native Afghan and Pakistani forces against their enemies and ours, the takfiri jihadis centered on the Al-Qa'ida group.  The idea being to disrupt and disorganize our real enemies enough to keep them off balance and unable to plan significant attacks against the West and most importantly the United States.  This intelligence and special operations task is small scale compared to neocon dreams and it is likely to be with us for a long time.

This latter option appears to be the one selected and if that is true, I support it.  This is a rational plan, proportionate to the problem rather than some silly idea centered on the "end of civilization."  pl

BTW.  The cognoscenti point out to me a serious US problem in Pakistan/Afghanistan.  That is a badly divided command structure.  Something should be done about that.

"Oil falls as U.S. inventories rise to 16-year high" Marketwatch

"Total petroleum products supplied over the past four weeks averaged 19.1 million barrels a day, down 3.2% from a year ago, the Energy Information Administration reported.

Meanwhile, crude inventories rose 3.3 million barrels last week, more than the 1.4 million barrels expected by analysts surveyed by Platts. At 356.6 million barrels, stocks are at the highest level since July 1993.

Crude oil for May delivery dropped $1.21, or 2.2%, to end at $52.77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It ended the previous day's trading at $53.98, the highest closing level for a front-month contract since Nov. 28."  MW

 

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I suppose that some of you would like to bet that crude will continue to rise in price?  pl

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/oil-falls-us-inventories-rise/story.aspx?guid=%7B3DF1D39F-2233-4495-9559-50598BFDBC28%7D&dist=google

CNBC as a negative indicator, of everything.

Have these people ever gotten anything right?  On the Sunday news talkies, they pushed the idea that there would be no private investors for the government's toxic paper program.  Yesterday, the stock markets took off like a flock of startled geese in response to the program and the disappointment was clearly visible in the faces and voices of the money honeys and prognosticators.  The level of commitment to completely unregulated market function and the interests of the rich above all else is impressive.  Nothing else about CNBC is impressive.  I take that back.  Some of the women are impressive lookiing.  CNBC should be treated a a contrarian indicator.  "Fox Business?"  Hmmm...

The Obamanians have more things to do to sort out the economy:

- Suspend "mark to market" accounting for a bit. 

- Forget about "clawing back" the bonuses.  Contracts should not be violated.  The Senate will probably fulfill its purpose in this matter.

- The "up-tick" rule should be reinstated.

- Stop "naked shorting" as a practice.  Make it a felony if it is not already.

- Start regulating hedge funds and similar "casino" operations.

pl

"The Lobby Falters" Mearsheimer

"An even more important reason for the lobby to drive Freeman out of his job is the weakness of the case for America’s present policy towards Israel, which makes it imperative to silence or marginalise anyone who criticises the special relationship. If Freeman hadn’t been punished, others would see that one could talk critically about Israel and still have a successful career in Washington. And once you get an open and free-wheeling discussion about Israel, the special relationship will be in serious trouble.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Freeman affair was that the mainstream media paid it little attention – the New York Times, for example, did not run a single story dealing with Freeman until the day after he stepped down – while a fierce battle over the appointment took place in the blogosphere. Freeman’s opponents used the internet to their advantage; that is where Rosen launched the campaign. But something happened there that would never have happened in the mainstream media: the lobby faced real opposition. Indeed, a vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers defended Freeman at every turn and would probably have carried the day had Congress not tipped the scales against them. In short, the internet enabled a serious debate in the United States about an issue involving Israel. The lobby has never had much trouble keeping the New York Times and the Washington Post in line, but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet."  Mearsheimer

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The bloggers almost won?  pl

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n06/mear01_.html

Dr. Adam Silverman on US/Israel Relations

Download ALS_Freeman_neo_Cons_Lang

Iran, Obama, AIG and Britt Hume

"Fox News Sunday" (FNS) is always fun for the feeble minded.

Chris Wallace, the ringmaster for this circus, went on and on and on today about his "concern" that because the Congress is taxing away the bonuses of failed but still rapacious AIG executives, private money will not be committed by other rapacious executives (some of whom are with AIG counterparties in the CDS racket) to a scheme in which they have a good chance of making a lot of money in a partnership with the government in which most of the money will be government money, i.e., buying the trash paper from the banks.  Having been a "visitor" to the world of international business for ten years I find that amusing.  Businessmen are about making money, and that is all.  They are no more "concerned" for the fate or public humiliation of other businessmen than sharks are "concerned" over the blood of other sharks in the water.  If there is a reasonable chance of personal profit, businessmen will swim toward the money.  Is the bonus tax unconstitutional? Probably.  The courts will settle that and the business sharks all know it.

President Obama has now made some significant gestures toward Iran.  These should be seen as alternative to the drift toward eventual war with that country that was the basic Bush Administration policy.  The Iranians do not seem to be responding favorably to those gestures.  This is foolish.  The danger to Iran of continuing evasiveness over the exact nature of their nuclear program is suicidal.  The Iranians should insist that the IAEA pursue unlimited inspections of ALL facilities and atomic programs in Iran.  To do otherwise is to weaken all those in the West who want to see reasonable relations between Iran and its potential enemies.  When the opacity of parts of the Iranian nuclear program are coupled with continuing expressions of hostility by Iranian officials toward both the US and Israel, an atmosphere is encouraged in which eventual military action becomes probable.

The Israelis are pushing hard for this, as are their overt and covert allies in America.  Britt Hume of FNS was very open today in saying that "the worst thing that could happen would be for the Iranians to respond positively to Obama's gestures toward them."  Why? That is simple.  He believes that the iranians are utterly untrustworthy and that any temporary improvements in relations will be mere deceptions and delays in what he sees as the inevitable outcome.

This situation has nothing to do with ancient history about Mossadegh and the Iran-iraq War and everything to do with what the future will hold for all concerned.  If the Iranians do not want to find themselves fighting an air and missile war against the United States and Israel, they should take care over what they say and do.  pl

Military Access Survey

From time to time I like to take a survey of the locations from which people can access SST on military, on-base computers, NIPR net,etc.

Please write to let me know.  Someone please make me a map if you have the time.  A serving officer (O-6) has written to tell me that he feels that he is being deprived of his civil rights by arbitrary and unpredictable DoD action in blocking SST on government computers that access the internet. pl