Deadline Pundit

Primary Colours? It's more like the Muppet Show

2012-01-15T11:03:00.002-05:00

Primary Colours? It’s more like The Muppet Show

Ian Williams says Barack Obama’s bitterly-divided Republican enemies could help to get him relected

by Ian Williams,

Tribune, Saturday, January 14th, 2012

Covering the Republican primaries is a bit like watching Fraggle Rock after dropping a tab of LSD. Until John Huntsman entered the fray in New Hampshire, it sometimes seemed like only Ron Paul had his feet on the ground – with the large caveat that for him the ground is on another world, conjured up by the fertile reactionary imagination of Ayn Rand, the “philosopher” who channelled Barbara Cartland to write bodice-rippers on the model of Mein Kampf.
As always, the sound of silence was most deafening. In the media scrum around the candidates, no one seems to have noticed that, for all his faults, Barack Obama is effectively unchallenged. He will gracefully segue to be the Democratic nominee as the Republicans eviscerate each other in public.
If Gordon Brown, or Ed Miliband, had had the courage – or perhaps chutzpah is a more appropriate term – to do what the Republicans are doing, Labour would probably be in power now. If they had actively disavowed Tony Blair and New Labour along the way they could have benefited from the reflex vote.
But Republicans have not so much disavowed the two Bushes who represent their party’s last three terms in the White House as made them non-persons. They are not mentioned at all.
That neatly allows Republicans to smear Obama for the financial crisis and for the bailouts at the end of George W Bush’s presidency.
There is some justice there, since Bill Clinton’s term actually espoused much of the ethos of voodoo economics and deregulation, but it took the junior Bush to strip regulators of power and introduce the tax cuts that paved the way for the parallel financial and fiscal crises that now hamper any attempts at recover. Ironically, George Bush senior is a non-person for opposite reasons – because he opposed voodoo economics and actually increased taxes.
Two years ago, it would have been difficult to believe that a party could be re-elected on a platform that effectively vetoes any effective regulation of the banks and companies that caused the crisis. Despite their differences, that is what unites almost every Republican candidate. The sleight of hand is so audacious it is admirable: through the Tea Party, the “Grand Old Party” has channelled the understandable rage against big banks and big business against the only institutions that can challenge them – “big labour” and big government.
By invoking abstractions such as “freedom” and “enterprise” with the amplification that huge corporate donations give them, Republicans drown out their actual practice, which is to pander to any business interest that wields a cheque. Set against a faith-based minority that votes in the Republican primaries, they can get away with this. Their voters do not believe in climate change, evolution or Obama’s American citizenship, so they are addressing an audience already strongly inclined to credulity, to denying the evidence of reality. So Obama was responsible for the bailout and it was government interference in the free market that forced banks to give mortgages to the feckless poor (a coded terms for black) that brought about the crisis are easily digested counterfactuals.
However, the secret of their success is that they meet no ideological opposition. Since Bill Clinton, most of the media and most of the Democrats also hold the truths of the free market to be self-evident and scarcely attempt to defend against the attacks on regulation, unions, or government action. On the core issue, the economy, they have abandoned the field of battle to the conservative enemy.
Instead of raising Obama’s standard on the right of every American to affordable healthcare, his genuine achievement of a healthcare bill was accompanied by a welter of bureaucratese that had all the appearance of guaranteeing insurance companies’ profits rather than being a charter for citizens dying in their thousands because they could not afford medical services. Polls showed that Americans were prepared to support a single payer system of national or state insurance. What they got was a mandatory requirement to pay some of the most bloated, corrupt and inefficient companies around.
That being said, those on the far left who do know different are as off-planet as the GOP. Far too many are prepared to overlook Ron Paul’s determination to do away with any social welfare provisions at all and give him elbow room for being opposed to foreign wars. He would of course have opposed American involvement in the Second World War as well, but then some of the American left would have picketed the Normandy Landings as foreign intervention.
Their insignificance means that this will have negligible electoral effect, but their detachment from real politics in the US has deprived America of a politics able to combat the Chicago school. It is significant that a bunch of anarchists around the Occupy Wall Street protests have done more to push Obama into egalitarian eloquence than the whole Noam Chomskyite left academia.
And despite those who prefer Ron Paul to Barack Obama, the President did get millions of uninsured on the rolls. He did end the war in Iraq. He has appointed a consumer protection head in the teeth of Republican opposition. On every count, even when disappointing, his record has been better than anything likely from the gaggle of reactionary Muppets on the other side.
So, while any diagnosis of the state of American politics based on the primaries is necessarily gloomy, the prognosis is not so bad. The Republicans are busily making themselves unelectable, while Obama has a real chance to win. And he is by far the least worst option. What is more, if he and the Democrats can get their act together, it is possible that they might stave off disaster in Congress by tapping sane voters’ revulsion at the ugly face of American conservatism revealed in the ugly contest that is the Republican primary race.

Hitchens, more right (and Left) than wrong

2011-12-17T12:53:00.002-05:00

Tribune: 23 December 2011
Ian Williams

Christopher Hitchens was prickly and combative: a neo-Trotskyist tendency of one, who had discovered democratic socialism and the importance of human rights - and even become a Labour Party supporter. Many on the hard left were quick to swarm with the torches and pitchforks against Christopher Hitchens, sadly and bravely dead with cancer this week with his atheist integrity intact.

His big mistake was, of course, to support Blair and Bush’s war against Iraq. The hard Left has tendencies, but one of its most enduring tendencies is the abuse of leftist litmus paper: to pick upon a single expedient issue to find someone lacking in socialist virtue.

In the case of Iraq, I can find more explanations than excuses for Hitch. He knew that Saddam Hussein ran a vicious, murderous totalitarian regime. In his intolerance for that genocidal thug he overlooked the Hippocratic approach to humanitarian intervention: first do no harm. I never had such a cold frisson in the presence of pure evil as when the late Iraqi ambassador to the UN excused Saddam’s reintroduction of amputation by saying they used doctors and anaesthetics. But far more limbs were lost after the invasion than even the Baathist butchers had dismembered.

But Hitch was right about Saddam, the Middle East, about Kosovo and the Balkans, about Libya, about, Chile, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton’s spineless camouflaged conservatism and his opposition to the death penalty regardless of who tied the noose.

How many of those who rally for Mumia on death row grovel before mass killers and practicers of mediaeval amputations? Many of the vilifiers of Hitchens have sung the praises of Saddam, Ghaddafy, Milosevic, or even Mugabe but are still huddled in the warm embrace of the so-called Left.

I can’t help thinking that Hitch was actually quite insecure. Like Orwell, from the lower Upper Middle Classes, his public-school and Oxford background had given him a sense of entitlement without the income, and so he had become an inveterate freelancer - who I suspect turned down a commission as rarely as a cocktail invite. But that insecurity and his rebarbative polemicism gave him some of the characteristics of his detractors: he was quicker to discern enemies than friends. When he had exposed the mendacity of the Clinton team for a Congressional Inquiry and turned up at the Nation’s boardroom to explain himself, he never noticed he had far more allies than enemies in the room.

When the Nation afterwards rapidly joined the Slobodan Milosevic fan club over Kosovo, we were told the magazine had “a line,” which he, as a columnist, could and did defy. His disgust at that and his perceived excommunication by the self-appointed commissars of the left drove him to seek approval from others. He was unaccustomedly impressed with being summonsed to lunch with Paul Wolfowitz in whom he saw a like intellect.

Once again, that is more explicable than excusable. Many people forget that the NeoCons originally began as a Trotskyist sect whose Drang nach rechts began on the issue of Soviet tyranny and was confirmed when the rest of the of Left abandoned Israel. His NeoCon sponsors dropped him like a red hot ice pick when they discovered that he was not prepared to drop his former positions on the Middle East in return for speaking fees and fellowships.

They were, course, also confused because of his vociferous opposition to “Islamo-Fascism.” But this had nothing to do with their simple-minded tribal anti-Islamism. He opposed religious thugs of all kinds and abhorred those on the so-called Left who tried to make excuses for fatwahs against Rushdie or to overlook Mother Theresa’s bigotry that the wimple hid from the simple.

Admittedly, his refusal to admit he had ever been wrong protected from abandoning his principles, but in the end, Christopher, (no pseudo-prole Chris for him!) was right (and Left) far more than he was wrong, because he derived his positions from opposition to all forms of tyranny and barbaric governments without making expedient tribal or geopolitical exceptions. The last time we spoke, he threatened to visit the cellar where the research material for my book on Rum is stored. I will always regret he didn’t make it. Better a well-oiled Hitch than a cranky commissar any day.

Nukespeak

2011-12-17T11:41:00.002-05:00

Tonight 1900 EST I talk to Rory O'Connor, Orwell Prize winner about the new Fukushima commemorative edition of his book "Nukespeak". On WJFF and streaming http://Wjffradio.org

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2011-12-16T13:38:00.002-05:00

Why Hitchens Matters

By Ian Williams

In These Timeshttp://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/27/02/culture1.shtml

Nov. 22 2002

Terry Laban

Christopher Hitchens explains Why Orwell Matters, and does so with feeling. One can see that he identifies strongly with his countryman, the socialist daring to stand up against doublethink and prepared to think and speak thoughtcrime against the orthodox. The identification is not totally misplaced. The would-be Big Brothers on the left have indeed vilified Hitchens for several years now for daring to question the lines they laid down on. The interesting question, made even more topical by his recent defection from The Nation, is whether Hitchens himself has broken under this intellectual torture and deserted the cause of a humane and democratic socialism.An earlier generation on the left used Israel as their excuse to defect and become neoconservative: There are some disturbing indications that Hitchens’ disillusion with some of the left has him veering toward Israel, from his recent comments that one of the reasons for supporting the Bush drang nach Baghdad is that it would cut off support for some of the more thuggish elements around Arafat. This may be true, but the most thuggish elements around Arafat at the moment are Sharon and his ilk.
In 1984, Goldstein’s heretical text read: “In the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
Orwell wrote this in the aftermath of Spain, Manchuria and World War II, and while Stalin continued to use the techniques he had perfected at home to seize Eastern Europe. The horrifying thing about the turn of the millennium is that there are still apologists for all these practices and more.
They span the whole traditional political spectrum. On the establishment side, there has been toleration for death squads in Central and Latin America; on the left, apologetics for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and users of poison gas in Iraq. The Khmer Rouge found support from both the left and the right as a stick to beat the Soviets and Vietnamese; while recently both right isolationists and alleged left anti-imperialists found common cause in defending Slobodan Milosevic.
Orwell would have berated them all— just as Hitchens has honorably done, too, although with an increasing intemperance that hints at a shared polemical heritage with his detractors.
--------------
On reading Hitchens’ defense, my first reaction was almost “why bother,” since the direction and motivation of Orwell’s detractors is so clear. In any event, Hitchens correctly shows that Orwell matters because he was so accurate in his depiction of so many of the people who are now his detractors and, one regrets to say, even some who would see themselves as his supporters.
After the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party confirmed what Orwell and others had said about Stalin, leading British Communist theoretician R. Palme Dutt was asked why he had not mentioned these details in his constant praise of the alleged socialism of the USSR. “I never said there were no spots on the sun,” he replied.
You can see why such people hate Orwell for depicting just how in reality the sun was eclipsed with mass terror. He was never forgiven for being so accurate about the nature of totalitarianism even when it donned a red fig leaf. Hitchens robustly defends the “List,” a catalogue of people who Orwell thought were not suitable writers to be employed by a British Social Democratic government agency, which brought some of the Big Fraternity to apoplexy.
If anything, Hitchens understates the defense here. Orwell escaped from Spain with the KGB on his tail; other independent socialists were not so lucky. Stalin was an ally of Hitler for two years of war, during which German Communists and socialists met their end. Victory in Eastern Europe led to a purge of socialists across the region—and people are angry that Orwell compiled a list of fellow travelers, most of whom would, on the evidence of their previous work, have found excuses for his liquidation if he had been late leaving Spain!
Indeed, there are portions of the book where one feels the need to spring to the defense of Orwell against Hitchens, such as the persistent insinuation that Orwell was a Trotskyist, whether he knew it or not, and that his ire was reserved for “Stalinism.” In fact, Orwell called it “Communism” and, as Hitchens himself admits, saw the line of succession from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin. In Animal Farm, Lenin and Trotsky are rolled into one exiled pig for just that reason. Hitchens quotes Orwell as feeling that “something like” the purges was “implicit in Bolshevist rule.”
There is a conflict here between Hitchens’ intellectual honesty and his nostalgia for Trotsky, whose record while in power in the Soviet Union showed no signs of overly deep attachment to democracy or human rights. Hitchens’ introduction claims that the three great subjects of the 20th century were fascism, imperialism and “Stalinism.” In fact, looking at Orwell’s work, the one subject is totalitarianism, which encompasses clogged rivers in Rwanda, death squads in Central America—and Leninism in all its forms.
--------------
But why go on about Trotskyism in 57 varieties? Well, there are two reasons. One is that I suspect Hitchens’ residual adherence to it has distorted some of his analysis of where Orwell stands in the socialist tradition. While he establishes firmly that Orwell is in that tradition, and remained so until he died, Hitchens underestimates the homegrown influences on Orwell. Throughout the ’30s, the large cooperative movement, and even some of the unions in Britain, considered the dangers of state control and centralization before Hayek ever put pen to paper on the subject.
Hitchens mentions the Independent Labour Party, which was a Marxist-leaning but non-Leninist body with its own traditions of activism and militancy. It was Orwell’s political home until it and he rejoined the Labour Party, which he supported even in government. It is fashionable among many on the American left to mock the achievements of British Labour. But when the American left builds large unions committed to socialism, has legislated universal health care, pretty much free education at all levels, and the type of social benefits that remain in Britain even after Thatcher, maybe their mockery will have more substance.
The other reason for dwelling on Hitchens’ roots has nothing to do with Orwell. In the Troskyist/Leninist milieu where Hitchens has spent so many years, the polemical approach takes no prisoners. Luckily, Trotsky’s followers have not had the power of life and death for some time. The reason for that is the same reason we should rejoice that it is so. The concept of “thoughtcrime” in active use has meant that expulsions or splits afflict any section of the Fourth International whose membership looms much above the high three figures. Every week is “Hate Week” in the sects.
In his enjoyable and generally accurate literary eviscerations of the likes of Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, Hitchens shows few signs of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian. We almost like O’Brien in 1984, and we feel for the apparatchiks who do Big Brother’s work. Hitchens himself shows that Orwell went out of his way to defend and maintain friendly relations with people he disagreed with, sometimes profoundly.
My worry is that Hitchens’ time in the Fourth International dimension has affected his sense of relativity so that the constant ad-hominem attacks on him, which are indeed often of the specious sort leveled at Orwell, may have driven him into a political form of “synecdochism”—taking the part for the whole. The would-be Big Brotherhood who have reviled him may manufacture more vitriol than the real left, but they do not represent it. I suspect that a majority of Nation readers might actually agree with him most of the time.
Hitchens is right about the nature of the Iraqi regime, but I’d like to see a little more ambivalence from him about signing up for the obsessive crusade against it. Quite what motivates the Bush hawks’ quasi-theological obsession with Iraq is a mystery to most observers—but looking at the personnel, from Sharon to Rumsfeld, surely no one believes that concern for the Iraqi people or the spread of democracy is one of their motives.
I invite Hitchens to read his own book, where he praises Orwell for his realization that there was no facile analogy with appeasement when he resisted suggestions for a quick war against Stalin’s Russia. With Animal Farm already out, and 1984 in preparation, he points out that Orwell opposed what could have been a successful—if bloody—attempt to overthrow a tyrannical evil regime guilty of monstrous crimes against its own people and its neighbors.
The left needs contrarians: It doesn’t need neo-neocons while the original breed have so much power in the White House. So I hope Hitchens sticks around. Orwell did.

RIP Hitch

2011-12-16T13:28:00.003-05:00

Ian Williams

A Short Long DiatribeChristopher Hitchens, A Long Short War:the Postponed Liberation of Iraq
reviewed byIan Williams

It is sad to read Christopher Hitchens’ shrill and un-nuanced polemics in ALong Short War. It is also confusing, since he is trying to maintain all theformer positions he held while on the left, while uncritically embracing hisnew friends, whom he calls, “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougherthinkers in the Defense Department.” The resulting portmanteau politics arean ill-matched and disturbing mix.
It is a shame because Hitchens has often performed an indispensable role indebunking the unthinking dogmas pushed by the thought police of the left.But now he has finally succumbed to the disease of the Leninist left: he hasbecome a free-floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accept assuch his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration.Everyone who disagrees with him on the cardinal issue of uncritical supportfor the war on Iraq is attacked in quasi-Vyshinkyist fashion.
It has always been lonely on the American left, one reason being its tendencyto shrink itself by throwing people overboard at the first hint ofthoughtcrime. One wonders over the years how many other decent peoplemay have been harried rightwards by dogmatic intolerance and application ofpolitical litmus tests. Were you for or against Vietnam, McCarthy, Kosovo,Afghanistan?
Few of those doing the persecution had much time for nuance. Pleasecomrade, may I be anti-McCarthy and anti-Soviet at the same time? May Ioppose the Vietnam War, without condoning the behavior of Vietnamesecommunists? All too often the answer has been “certainly not,” and one canalmost (almost, I stress) sympathize with the neocons and others, and wonderif the intolerance of the left did not drive them to the right.
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

Luckily, orthodoxy in all its left forms took a serious hit with the fall of theSoviet Union, but even so one could easily get a feeling of thankfulness thatthe tumbrels were no longer running when one saw the reaction tosuggestions that Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein were not nicepeople. Hitchens was in the honorable vanguard of those on the left whothought that human rights were a cardinal moral and political principle inthemselves, not just a cudgel with which to beat imperialism. One mayinstance those who campaign for Mumia while cheering on Cubanexecutions.
But old habits die hard. Hitchens, like so many of the neocons he now seemsto have joined, is steeped in the robustness of Trotskyist and Leninistpolemics. When he was under attack for supporting NATO action againstMilosevic, he was robust, and mostly correct in his counter-attacks. And thencame September 11th. Ironically, some on the left who had opposed a war inthe Balkans over ten thousand dead Kosovars, supported one in Central Asiaover three thousand dead Americans.
Very few on the left, or indeed anywhere else, actually tried to justify theattack on the World Trade Center itself, but some did oppose the ensuingwar in Afghanistan. However, with broad sweep, Hitchens now accuses“many cultural leftists,” of “somewhat furtively” uniting with the Europeanhard right in “believing that September 11 was a punishment for Americanhubris.”
It is at this stage that Hitchens has become his own enemy. He has becomethe mirror image of the shrill dogmatists who had opposed him all along. Inemulation of George W. Bush’s instructions to his speechwriters, he nolonger does nuance. It was, in fact, perfectly possible to be horrified by theatrocity at the World Trade Center, and even to admit that military actionagainst the Taliban and bin Laden was desirable, while still pointing out thatit was the previous amoral work of the hard right now in the Bushadministration and their involvement in Afghanistan that had made theTaliban and Al-Qaeda possible. After all, Neville Chamberlain’s name is stillmud for his part in paving the way for the Blitz on London. One can deplorethe cause without condoning the effect.
September 11 was, of course, what made the invasion of Iraq possible. Therewere and are some serious arguments to be made for a multilateralhumanitarian intervention in Iraq and other places to remove genocidal
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

regimes. Hitchens did in fact have an honorable record of opposing theBa’athist barbarism against Kurds, and indeed all opposition in Iraq.
But Hitchens’s uncritical support for the motives and methods of the Bushadministration dropped him to a whole new level. To begin with, while muchof what George W. Bush said about Saddam Hussein was, of course, true, asHitchens knows, it was equally true when many figures in this administrationwere covering for Baghdad in the honeymoon years before their protégé ranamok and invaded Kuwait.
In real politics, one accepts good consequences even from evil actors. Butwhile welcoming, for example, Stalin’s belated support in the war againstHitler, Hitchens’s hero, George Orwell, did not flip to uncritical support forthe regime in Moscow the way that Hitchens has for the Bushadministration. The White House’s motives for intervention were neitherpublicly nor privately about democracy in Iraq and it betokens a desperateact of faith on Hitchens part to presume they were.
It is true that Hitchens has a long and honorable record of support fordemocracy in Iraq, and for the rights of the Kurds. But that does not reallyjustify his adulatory defense of Bush and calumniation of his critics. Forexample, he himself managed to support intervention in Kosovo withoutbecoming a noticeable cheerleader for Bill Clinton’s all around moral probity.
Hitchens’s well established contempt for Clinton should not obscure theissue that many in this administration, with the help of Clinton’s own deepirresolution, harried him into military ineffectiveness because he had notserved in Vietnam, a war he had in fact opposed. In contrast, many of themost sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the war—butdodged the draft. Hitchens’s response is to attack those who used the well-deserved epithet “chicken hawk” against them. It is true, as he says, thatthere is now a volunteer army, and even if it were not, those he calls the“Pentagon intellectuals” are not of age or health to qualify. But that does notdetract from their fundamental hypocrisy.
While we touch upon Vietnam, along with McCarthy for long the Shibbolethof the Left, it seems equally odd that Hitchens vilifies Harold Wilson, theBritish prime minister for his “disgusting” support for the war in Vietnam. Infact, Wilson successfully resisted LBJ’s extreme political and economicpressure and refused any British military involvement in the conflict
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

whatsoever, which was no mean achievement under the circumstances. I’mafraid that vilifying Wilson while praising Bush and Blair does not make aseamless political and historical whole. In his realignment of his politicalperspectives, Hitchens has not made the necessary adjustments to theintellectual baggage he inherited from his Trotskyist youth
Hitchens quite rightly excoriates primitive anti-Americanism, but then doesBush’s work with equally primitive anti-anti-Americanism, tarring everyonewho disagrees with current American policies with the same brush. He isquite right that the simple-minded refrain of “blood for oil,” made littleeconomic or political sense. He is even right about the motives of the someof the organizers of the mass protests who did not allow criticism of SaddamHussein on their platforms (not, incidentally in New York, where anti-Saddam dissidents spoke from the platform). But the delusions of themarginal are surely a lesser subject for polemics than the Orwellian use ofimages and hints from the administration that led 70% of Americans toentertain the likelihood that Baghdad was involved in September 11th?
Hitchens neatly avoids this question with a humorous hypothetical aside onthe likely fate of the Iraqi intelligence chief who denied knowledge of theperpetrators the day after, which sadly avoids the main issue: there is noevidence whatsoever of Iraqi involvement.
For evidence of a nuance missing from neo-Hitchens, one could look at KofiAnnan’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23, in which hecalled for multilateral support for genuine humanitarian intervention, whilewarning of the grave dangers to the world order of the unilateral attack thatthe U.S. had undertaken.
In these polemics, Hitchens allows no room for those who agreed with himabout Saddam Hussein, but saw profound dangers in the Bushadministration’s contempt for International Law and the United Nations. Sixmonths after the Iraqi invasion, with chaos spreading across Iraq, Bushreinforcing support for Sharon’s rampages, no sign of weapons of massdestruction, and no evidence of any links between the still at large SaddamHussein and terror, it is sadly evident that Hitchens has bravely but foolishlyjumped on a sinking ship, morally and practically.
Unlike the neocons who have only their residual admiration for LeonTrotsky and their utter self-certainty remaining of their old politics,
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

Christopher Hitchens’s portmanteau politics retains enough hybrid vigorfrom his old principles for us to hope that he will recover from being a neo-neocon. We can rejoice together in the downfall of Saddam Hussein whilederiding the parochial, self-centered and faith-based worldview of thosecurrently making every predictable and indeed predicted mistake in theoccupation of Iraq. But sadly this book represents a fine mind boiled invitriol.

New Dimensions for Trading Algorithms

2011-11-29T21:33:00.001-05:00

Speculator: Fast forward to the future of trading

Ian Williams

Blink and you may miss this amazing investment opportunity

It’s what science is for, I guess. In recent weeks two separate news items came together to produce a true Eureka! moment.

Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 mn to lay a new underwater cable between London and New York that will accelerate financial transactions to 59 milliseconds, about 10 percent faster than the current 65-millisecond voyage.

Hibernia Atlantic expects to be able to charge hedge funds and similar traders 50 times the rates of its rivals, because it estimates that every millisecond saved can boost a fund’s annual bottom line by $100 mn.

This is not new technology. The data cannot go faster than the speed of light through the fiber-optic cable; indeed, they only travel at two thirds the speed they would in a vacuum.

The pioneers simply drew the route for the Hibernia Express on a globe instead of a flat map, so the path takes the shortest route between the two cities. It might or might not be significant that the Titanic was steering the same course.

One wonders whether, when Adam Smith spoke of the invisible hand of the markets, he really envisaged a market with no human hands involved at all, one where my algorithms speak to your algorithms, each second-guessing a human agency that is nowhere to be seen.

Money maker

Regardless of the answer to that question, if this is the way of the future, we must confront the more fundamental question: how can we make money out of it?

News of the faster cable inspired Speculator to float a new company, New York Securities Instantaneous Neutrino Yield Dispatcher (NYSINYD). Our business plan is breathtakingly simple: neutrinos go at the speed of light even through solid rock.

By building particle accelerators and detectors under New York and London we can shoot data directly between them in a straight line 2,500 miles through the Earth at maximum light speed, giving us a theoretical data speed four times that of the Hibernia Express.

Allow for some relay problems, and let’s assume it only doubles the transaction speed: that still means, if hedge funds would pay 50 times the going rate for a 10 percent speed increase, they would pay at least 500 times more for doubling the speed.

Faster than light

But then the second news item appeared: the clever guys at CERN in Switzerland sent neutrinos to Italy – and they traveled faster than light! Time to reconfigure the prospectus, not least since one explanation for this is that the neutrinos breaking the speed limits go into another dimension en route.

It is fitting that Italy should inspire our synergistic alliance of creative physics and finance: money often disappears into other dimensions there, as indeed it does between the City of London and Wall Street.

It’s also possible that information traveling faster than light will arrive before it leaves, adding a whole new – and probably legal – form of insider trading because the concept is certainly faster than Dodd-Frank.

We considered changing the name of the firm to Now You See It, Now You Don’t, evoking the most inventive of modern banking rules, but decided just to stick with NYSINYD. Buy now and the money will leave the account before you have made your decision!

OWS in Tribune

2011-11-29T21:29:00.001-05:00

Ian Williams

Anger can be power – now build on it

by Ian Williams

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Sometimes, you just have to be there. I was in Wall Street when the protestors were allowed into the park – minus sleeping bags and tents. As they waited while billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg went jurisdiction shopping to find a tame judge to overthrow the earlier verdict that had ordered him to stop the eviction, it was fascinating to see the interaction between the occupiers and the public servants he had ordered to evict them. The normal cops, despite their brand-new riot helmets, were friendly, laughing, bantering with the demonstrators, who had sedulously “reached out to them”, real as public workers threatened by budget cuts.
In the background were the thugs, the senior officers. Old school cops with bullhorns on this occasion, but pepper sprays on others, whose whole demeanour reflected their visceral distaste for the occupiers and all they stood for. And behind them, of course, stood Bloomberg and the political leaders of most major cities in the United States, 18 of whom had co-ordinated a nationwide crackdown. Bloomberg, who has made his billions from Wall Street, was under particularly heavy social and political pressure to remove the occupation that had started such a
global avalanche of protest.
However, Bloomberg and his cops would have served the bankers better by ignoring their whims. Instead, they inadvertently did the Occupy Wall Street movement a big favour, almost on a par with when a senior officer gratuitously pepper-sprayed three women in the early days. Even though the occupiers had had training from Norwegian ski-troop veterans and Alpinists about cold weather, New York’s cold would really have demanded “Winter Soldiers”, as Tom Payne would have recognised. The forced evacuation made them honourable victims, who can build on their own considerable success, which exceeded their wildest original expectations. The nationwide over-reaction of the police renewed support and interest.
Their success is as a catalyst, igniting the various elements which had accumulated. In some ways, the most puzzling question has been the deafening sound of silence around the financial crisis. The occupation has brought the issue of inequality out from the vaults where the politicians, pundits and their plutocratic payrollers had hidden it.
For example, quite possibly inspired by OWS, New York Judge Jed S Rakoff has been examining a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement with Citibank. Like most such boilerplate agreements, the defrauding companies agree to pay a cash settlement, without admitting to any wrongdoing. Rakoff has been having fun. Instead of rubber-stamping the settlement, he read it. Like all the other previous settlements, it included a promise not to do it again. Yet the SEC attorney had to admit that they had never ever brought any company before a judge for contempt of court when, over and over again, they broke the law.
Set to a backdrop of a wacko Supreme Court decision that corporations are people when it comes to “free speech” or bribing politicians with campaign donations, the contrast with their lack of personhood when it comes to the criminal law has been rankling.
So where does it go from here? One can only hope that now they are freed from the chores of housekeeping and eccentric rituals of bonding hitherto involved in maintaining the occupation, the OWS cadre does not go further into manifesto writing. Some of the draft versions that have emerged read like pastiches of John Cleese’s band of revolutionaries in Monty Python’s Life of Brian – politically correct psychobabble devoid of effective content.
In many ways, that is better than if they knuckled down to serious manifesto-writing, which would have alienated not just the 57 varieties on the left, but all the others who are united in detestation for what Wall Street has done, but disagree about almost anything else.
Despite the understandable disdain for the American political machine, anyone who is touch with reality will realise that motivating people to vote and forcing elected politicians to take notice is the only way out of the impasse. If the Tea Party, representing a cultist minority, can wield so much influence over the Republicans, then the sentiments represented by OWS can surely find expression in the Democratic Party whose time-serving fifth columnists have so often represented corporate interests. OWS can maintain the anger. It is up to others to focus it electorally and ensure that it is not dissipated in apocalyptic angry visions, or new age fatuities.
One aspect of that is re-electing Barack Obama. At the time of his election, I wrote that he was not the second coming: but he wasn’t the Anti-Christ. The Republican line-up, beneath the clownish presentations, makes Lucifer’s lot look angelic.

Overhangs and hangovers

2011-11-03T16:13:00.003-04:00

Investor Relation magazine

1 Aug 2011 | Rating by Ian Williams

Confiscating cash may not be the best way to win over the electorate, notes Ian Williams

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, US economists warned him about the ‘overhang’ of billions of ‘useless’ unused rubles, otherwise known as the savings of millions of hard-working Soviet citizens, who had entrusted their earnings to the state banks. So Gorbachev ruined his domestic reputation by confiscating people’s bank savings and introducing a currency conversion that demonetized the cash of anyone who did not trust the banks. Even more so than closing the vodka distilleries, it made him unelectable ever after.

Worse, it failed to stop the hyper-inflation and probably facilitated the ensuing massive looting and transfer of wealth to the kleptocrats. Reading the words of some commentators on the US deficit now, one suspects they may be planning something similar.

Ever since Senator Daniel Moynihan ‘saved’ Social Security by increasing the percentage of income paid on contributions, the system changed to one of backdoor revenue raising. The billions taken from employees and employers go into a fund that promptly buys Treasury bonds with them.

Congress treats these bonds differently from those the Treasury sells to domestic and foreign investors. It does not include them in its deficit calculations, let alone in the much-vaunted debt ceiling.

And with the new spirit in Washington there are growing signs of people there wanting to do a Gorbachev on the Social Security and Medicare funds. After all, it is a massive overhang. The Social Security Trust Fund has risen from almost nothing to more than $2 tn in the last decade, and it has all been spent by successive Congresses – especially those that claim the fund is going bankrupt.

Of course, stealing voters’ savings is not generally a winning electoral strategy, as House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is now discovering with his tentative attempt to dip into the Medicare fund. Perhaps we can introduce him to apples falling and Newton sometime. In the meantime, old Gorby might have had a point. By one of those cosmic coincidences, American corporations now also have some $2 tn in cash reserves – three times the so-called stimulus package that oozed its way through Washington.

Corporate executives could distribute these reserves in dividends, special or otherwise. They could spend them on investment, R&D or employment, which would certainly help revive the US economy. Indeed, they could even boost salaries. But companies prefer to sit on their war chests, relishing the feel of all those resources while the economy stagnates.

Such observations lead to speculation. If Washington were to confiscate all corporate cash surpluses above a reasonable amount for corporate expansion and replace them with long-term federal bonds, it could soften the blow by diverting the proceeds into a development fund devoted to long-term work-generating infrastructure investment and R&D, or to low-interest loans to entrepreneurs who actually want to invest in productive enterprises.

Now how might that play with the American voters?

This article appeared in the August print edition of IR magazine.

In gods we trust

2011-11-03T16:00:00.003-04:00

Investor Relations Magazine

In gods we trust

3 Oct 2011 | Rating by Ian Williams

But bigger isn’t always better, argues Ian Williams

As a precocious schoolchild, I tried to sketch a family tree for the Greek gods. With the complicated family life of the Olympians, it ended up a tangled diagram of inter-dimensional string theory as divine parents, offspring and siblings mated ad libidinem up, down and across the generations.

The M&A history of Ma Bell and her children reminded me of this abortive family tree as the sundry Bells gropingly sought each other out to undo the original antitrust settlement that had torn them asunder. The new-born Baby Bells almost immediately began mating with each other, and then three of them, joined in unholy matrimony, engulfed their mother company.

Ten years on and this incestuous product of corporate miscegenation is stretching out its all-engulfing pseudopods toward T-Mobile. If corporations really were people, as the law would have us believe, Ma Bell and her offspring would be serving long sentences for incest and related crimes. It certainly makes a mockery of the consent decree that split up the companies.

Gods deal with eternity while corporate law deals in decades. When the Bell anti-trust case began in 1974 it was an era of ‘rediscovering’ competition as the driving force of capitalism. Deregulation, privatization and lifting the burden on business were the catchphrases of the day, and the Department of Justice and Judge Harold Greene, who heard the case, took breaking up monopolies seriously. Government still had a role, however, if only to keep corporations competing.

Later, reviled by telecoms executives and lobbyists, Greene said: ‘We can’t let a huge corporation do whatever it wants – it needs to be approved. The AT&T case may have biased me on antitrust issues but the issue of allowing a monopoly to have a stranglehold on information is still a concern.’ Disgruntled AT&T attorneys later claimed the judge went too far, accusing him of being cynical about big firms and distrustful of those who run them. They claimed the litigation ‘was unnecessary, unproductive and… destructive of a great corporation.’

In today’s climate, some might deem the now-deceased judge prescient. Three years ago a number of big institutions on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail; there are now fewer but bigger finance houses whose sense of impunity has doubtless been enhanced by open checks from federal funds.

In telecoms, the quaint days when Ma Bell monopolized the fixed-telephone system seem as atavistic as a monopoly on speaking tubes. Greene is dead and so is his approach to monopolies. We now see giant corporations with newspapers, television, radio and TV stations, internet services and mobile phones replicating the slogan of News International’s former News of the World: ‘All human life is here.’ And they really mean it – they have their fingers on society’s jugular vein.

Beyond too big to fail, we now have too big to regulate. Under-funded – indeed, defunded – civil servants are no match for cash-rich corporations that can count on reflexive support from politicians who will fight any government interference with how corporations do business. Come back Judge Greene, all is forgiven.

This article appeared in the October print edition of IR magazine.

Obama: Impaled on the Horns of an AIPAC

2011-11-03T14:05:00.000-04:00

United Nations Report December Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Washington Impaling Itself on the Horns of a Diplomatic Dilemma

By Ian Williams
In the twisted chains of events in the Middle East, one set of links is clear. Almost 500 Palestinian prisoners—and Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit—released on Oct. 12, with a second group of 555 Palestinian prisoners to be released later, owe their freedom to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ determination to push the U.N. membership issue. Binyamin Netanyahu could have freed Shalit any time on these same terms—but the Palestinian statehood issue, for psychopathological reasons we have discussed earlier in these columns, rattles the Israeli prime minister and his supporters so much that he was prepared to give Hamas a boost against Fatah with the release. Those of us who savor fine hypocrisies will also relish the irony of long negotiations resulting in a political boost for a movement with which Israel says the rest of the world should have no contact. One almost looks forward to the arrest, indictment and trial of Israeli leaders on their next visit to the U.S., where people are serving long sentences for much less substantial contact and support for Hamas related organizations!
However, back to the main issue, Palestine’s application for U.N. membership is now languishing in a Security Council subcommittee, few of whose members seem eager to bring the issue to a head. No matter what the Obama administration does now, it is cruising for a diplomatic bruising. While U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is not as pugnacious as her predecessor John Bolton, or indeed James Baker, in rounding up votes in the U.N., the Obama administration has been trying hard—despite Washington’s weakened clout—to persuade vulnerable states that it is in their best interests not to vote yes in the Security Council. If the resolution accepting Palestinian membership does not garner nine positive votes, then—in the spirit of the toddler who hides behind the drapes and can’t understand that everyone can see his feet sticking out—the U.S. hopes to escape the contumely it richly merits for vetoing a resolution fulfilling the wishes expressed by the president just a year earlier.

However, back to the main issue, Palestine’s application for U.N. membership is now languishing in a Security Council subcommittee, few of whose members seem eager to bring the issue to a head. No matter what the Obama administration does now, it is cruising for a diplomatic bruising. While U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is not as pugnacious as her predecessor John Bolton, or indeed James Baker, in rounding up votes in the U.N., the Obama administration has been trying hard—despite Washington’s weakened clout—to persuade vulnerable states that it is in their best interests not to vote yes in the Security Council. If the resolution accepting Palestinian membership does not garner nine positive votes, then—in the spirit of the toddler who hides behind the drapes and can’t understand that everyone can see his feet sticking out—the U.S. hopes to escape the contumely it richly merits for vetoing a resolution fulfilling the wishes expressed by the president just a year earlier.
Twenty years ago, the U.S. scarcely felt the need to justify what it wanted. Now, over-extended militarily, wobbling financially, its carrots are stringy and its stick detumescent, so it has to explain why Russia is being unreasonable in blocking the membership of Kosovo, recognized by about half of the U.N., while a White House-threatened veto of membership for Palestine, recognized by more than two-thirds of U.N. members, is statesmanship of a high order.
Indeed, inquiring minds might well compare the Russian and Chinese vetoes against action in Syria to prevent repression, with those by the U.S. against any resolution that even mildly criticizes Israel for documented repression in the occupied territories—as listed by the State Department’s own annual reports on human rights and religious freedom!
And more Israel Lobby-induced mayhem was heading down the turnpike toward Washington, with UNESCO’s scheduled late fall vote on its board’s recommendation for Palestine’s full membership status in the agency’s general council. Forty of the 58 board members backed a Palestinian draft resolution proposing membership, with the U.S. among four voting against, and 14 abstentions—countries which do not really oppose it but don’t want to upset the U.S.
The Vatican Precedent
This has a double significance. Firstly, the Vatican’s convoluted route to acceptance as a non-member observer state at the U.N. began with it being “smuggled” into membership of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) by the devotee who headed the organization at the time. After all, the Vatican had its own stamps—a nice little earner—and its own radio station, which got it into the International Telecommunications (then Telegraph) Union. It was never allowed to join the League of Nations, nor for many decades would Washington countenance U.N. membership—but the Vatican had a long-term strategy, as one would expect, on how a postage stamp state with a population of a few hundred celibates could get more recognition.
The U.N. invited members of the specialized agencies to participate, but not vote, in the General Assembly and, nudged along, gave such entities, which included Switzerland for half a century, a vote in conferences.
Echoing the issue of whether President Abbas represents the PLO, Palestine, or the Palestinian Authority, it is the Vatican City which is a member of the two U.N. agencies. Half a century ago, however, it switched the name of its U.N. observer mission to the Holy See—then separated the Holy See as the Catholic Church from the Holy See as the entity holding sovereignty over the Vatican City!
In a little noticed move in 2004, the General Assembly upgraded the Vatican’s status from an entity—Palestine’s current designation—to a non-member state. The U.S., which opposes such status for the several million Palestinians, did not object.
So, under existing rules, membership in UNESCO would take Palestinian participation out of the special case situation it currently occupies as a result of 20 years of diplomatic war by attrition, and bring it under general rules that the U.S. and Israel would have no chance of overturning.
Renewed Assaults on the U.N.
But there is, of course, more. After some years of the puzzling sound of silence regarding the U.N., some of the Republican right and their Democratic allies whose hearts beat as one with the Likudnik pacemaker have been building up for a renewed assault on the U.N. and all its works. They have passed legislation that would require the U.S. to pull its funding—and membership—from any body that gives “full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.” The legislation is of course weaselly worded to mean Palestine—but not the Vatican—while interestingly leaving Taiwan in limbo.
That would present an interesting quandary for Hillary Clinton, who, visiting UNESCO headquarters in Paris this
year, declared, “I am proud to be the first secretary of state from the United States ever to come to UNESCO, and I come because I believe strongly in your mission.” That dilemma could be resolved immediately, of course, if the president and the State Department determined that in fact Palestine does have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood. After all, Kosovo, under U.S. sponsorship, has joined the World Bank and IMF—which should, if U.N. membership were the determinant, have the U.S. pulling out and defunding those organizations as well. Looking at the damage they have done worldwide, that might not be such a bad idea—but in any case, no one has brought it up hitherto.
The diplomatic dilemma on the horns of which the administration is impaling itself becomes more barbed with each passing denial of reality.
By U.N. custom, once one agency has accepted a member, all other U.N. agencies also accord it full rights, as the Vatican demonstrates. Since the World Bank and IMF are quantum U.N. agencies—in and out at the same time, depending on what suits them—Kosovo cannot yet lever membership there into other U.N. agencies. UNESCO membership, however, like the UPU, opens the doors to all the others.
So the U.S. can either pull out of all the U.N. agencies this administration holds dear—including the U.N. itself—if the General Assembly accepts the Holy See way to Palestinian participation, or it can accept Palestine as a state under international law. Washington could, of course, suggest that the case be referred to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for an advisory opinion. That, however, would then imply accepting other ICJ judgements, such as the one against the U.S. mining of Nicaragua’s harbors—and on Israel’s occupation wall.
A Hard-Hitting Report
The latter, of course, is long overdue. On Sept. 16, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon submitted the report requested by the General Assembly on Israeli settlement activities. Citing instance after instance of violent discriminatory behavior, the hard-hitting report “seeks to underscore the discriminatory nature of the Israeli policy and practice of promoting settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. While illegal settlement expansion continues to take place in the West Bank, restrictions on Palestinian construction and the demolition of Palestinian homes have been on the rise. The report also addresses settlers’ violent
acts against Palestinians and their properties during the reporting period and the discriminatory treatment of Israeli settlers and Palestinians in law enforcement. The involvement of Israel Defense Forces in acts of violence, either through their participation or inaction to prevent the acts, is discussed as a growing concern.”
But perhaps most timely for those expressing shock and horror at the Palestinians undertaking due process to secure the rights as a state that most nations grant them is the report’s conclusion: “The General Assembly and the international community should more actively seek the implementation of their decisions, resolutions and recommendations, as well as those of the Security Council, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations human rights mechanisms, including treaty bodies and special procedure mandate holders, in relation to the situation of human rights and international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
It puts in perspective the U.S. threat to defund all Palestinian activities in retaliation for the statehood bid—as, indeed, does the promise to increase aid to the state that is defying not only the U.N., but U.S. pleas, and continuing to build settlements. ❑

UNESCO Train Wreck -Pres Mesmerized at controls

2011-11-01T15:20:00.001-04:00

Obama will rue his lack of principle on Palestine's Unesco membership

In pulling out of Unesco, Obama gives the right a boost and abandons all pretensions of being an honest peace broker

- Ian Williams
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 November 2011 12.30 EDT
- Article history

Palestine is voted as a new Unesco member state. Photograph: Dou Matar/Unesco

The cheers that rang across the hall of the Unesco meeting when Palestine became a member on Monday are being echoed in surprising quarters.
The Obama administration has perversely given a big boost to the Republican right's antipathy to the UN and all it stands for. Ironically, it was George W Bush who brought the United States back into Unesco 20 years after Reagan withdrew. Equally ironically, driving the engine in this diplomatic train wreck was Barack Obama, whose speeches in Turkey and Egypt during the early months of his presidency had deceptively signalled a new opening to the Muslim world.
By reflexively withdrawing from Unesco in response to Palestine's admission, the Obama-Clinton state department has taken the lunatic fringe and put them centre stage. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the House foreign affairs committee, combines a Likudnik support of Israel with a recidivist hatred of the UN and has been trying to de-fund the UN and its agencies.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who visited Unesco's Paris HQ earlier this year, had announced: "I am proud to be the first secretary of state from the United States ever to come to Unesco, and I come because I believe strongly in your mission." Indeed. So strongly does she believe in it that she is prepared to pull out of the organisation for recognising the Palestinian statehood that Obama had himself called for at the UN general assembly in September 2010.
The voting lineup on Monday was indicative. France, much more diplomatically adroit than the US, and mindful of its global standing, supported Palestinian membership. Even subservient Britain could not bring itself to vote with the US and pusillanimously abstained. The voting suggests that when the security council resolution on Palestinian UN membership comes up next week, it will get the nine affirmative votes needed – which means the US will have to use its veto and risk consequences, such as those threatened by the Saudis.
If the US had put nearly as much pressure on Israel as it had on others to avoid using its threatened veto, it would be a much more credible and creditable world power. As it is, its desperate attempts to avoid a veto by getting others to do its dirty work for it have made the Obama administration look like a toddler who hides his head behind the curtains and cannot understand why everyone can still see him.
The security council vote apart, the Unesco vote presages Palestinian admission to other agencies. One looks forward to US withdrawal from the International Atomic Energy Agency, relieving the pressure in Iran, or from the World Health Organisation, as soon as Palestine is allowed to join.
Compounding the irony, Israel itself has so far not indicated it is pulling out of Unesco, nor indeed any other UN agency. On the contrary, WikiLeaks recently revealed that Israel was angling for a major position in Unesco.
The nature of the US approach is clear. There is a general lack of principle. For example, the route being followed by Palestine in its effort to join multilateral institutions replicates that of the Vatican, whose far more dubious claim to statehood derives from its original membership of the Universal Postal Union, since the postage stamp-sized enclave did indeed issue its own stamps.
The actual legislation the state department invokes is a 1990 prohibition on funding "the United Nations or any specialised agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organisation the same standing as a member state", and another in 1994 banning payments to "any affiliated organisation of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organisation or group that does not have the internationally recognised attributes of statehood".
Any president, as we have seen, has ways to get around congressional mandates like this. For example, there are questions about which manifestation of Palestine is applying: the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The congressional legislation was passed before the Oslo accords – and before the US began funding the Palestinians directly, so an executive decision could have declared that events had overtaken the intent of the law, and, what is more, that it was not the PLO but the Palestinian state that had been admitted.
As for the second part, US diplomats will have fun explaining why the US maintains membership of the World Bank and IMF – which have admitted Kosovo, whose disputed territory and statehood, rightly or wrongly, has far less general recognition than Palestine's.
The White House should listen to the cheers in the hall that followed the Unesco vote – reminiscent of those that greeted the end of another period of diplomatic folly when Beijing took Chiang Kai-Shek's seat in the UN after decades of American pretence that an off-shore island represented China there.
Over-stretched financially and militarily, beset with problems that can only be solved multilaterally, doing Binyamin Netanyahu's bidding will win Obama few votes at home. The American Likudniks will still believe the president is an alien-born Muslim and send their votes and cheques accordingly. Abroad, the US has abandoned all logic, all signs of joined-up diplomacy, and abandoned the last vestiges of pretensions to be an honest broker in the Middle East.
As an epitaph to American diplomacy and illusions of empire, look at the votes for Palestine: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Libya all voted against the US. Any more candidates for liberation?

Keystone Cops in FBI endanger the world

2011-10-19T12:34:00.000-04:00

Iran Assassination Plot Has Earmarks of FBI Care and Feeding

By Ian Williams, October 19, 2011

Last weekend the Martin Luther King memorial was unveiled in Washington, evoking his speech “I have a dream.” I was having a dream too, but mine wandered between nightmare and “déjà vu all over again.” Unlike many on the left in the USA, when I see President Obama I see a fundamentally decent person reading a script written by others -- which in this dream is like Colin Powell reciting his fundamentally flawed brief at the UN about Iraqi weapons.
The taurine faecal evidence of an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi envoy in the US has all the conviction of Hitler describing Polish infiltration into German territory in 1939 -- and all the humiliation of seeing a decent person’s integrity being abused.
The “plot” recalls how much of American governmental behavior evokes the unreformed eighteenth century British polity on which it is based. Apart from the overtly corrupt electoral system gerrymandered into an American version of rotten boroughs and the Gradgrindish attitudes to public welfare, that is no more apparent than in the legal system.
Maybe they no longer hang people for pickpocketing any item worth more than a shilling, but they do execute quite a few on dubiously assembled evidence that relies on paid informants and, especially in the case of the FBI, on paid instigators.
So one does not have to join the Iranian Ayatollah Fan Club to be skeptical of the latest allegations. It is a sad fact that almost every terrorist plot the FBI has unearthed for many years -- even before 9-11 -- has also been planted and nurtured by the FBI. Even in the long-forgotten first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 it was an Egyptian officer who was also a paid FBI informant who seems to have instigated the completely inept plot, for which arch-enemy of the Mubarak regime Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman is still serving a life sentence -- or not, since the actual charges of conspiracy and sedition are reminiscent of days of repression in Britain around the time of the Peterloo massacre that moved Shelley to stirring verses, rarely taught in English Lit classes.
It does not take a close shave with Occam’s razor to question whether Teheran really sent a wire transfer of a $100,000 to the USA to secure the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador. Firstly, every transfer of more than $10,000 has to be registered, and rings alarms bells for money laundering, and secondly, sadly, among Mexican cartels, that sum buys a wholesale massacre, not a retail murder.
Then there is the old question, Cui Bono? Who would benefit? One can never totally discount the stupidity of the Iranian regime, but this goes beyond expectations. Iran would gain little from offing a Saudi diplomat -- but lose lots. The FBI gets itself yet another (contrived) terrorist plot to justify its huge spending and the intrusions into civil liberties it has been allowed under the so-called “war on terror.” Its previous record of getting informants and instigators who are paid and pardoned of other crimes to set up the weak and gullible to be arrested with a fanfare certainly fits the script here: an arrested drug smuggler paid to suborn an Iranian immigrant second hand car salesman struggling under a huge debt load.
But Israel wants an excuse to attack Iran -- and hitherto even a complaisant Washington has warned against that. Obama might not support, but if persuaded by these amateur theatricals, like Colin Powell, he might not oppose an assault very vigorously. And there are many in his administration for whom the question “Is it good for Israel?” outweighs whether it is good for Obama, let alone America.
Even if this were just Keystone Cops stuff from a xenophobically insular FBI, without thought for the international consequences, it could have profound international consequences. Quite apart from the sanguinary consequences to Israel itself, not to mention to Iran and the region, of any solid manifestation of Netanyahu’s bellicosity, a closure of the Gulf and removal of a huge portion of the world’s oil supplies would be all that is needed to bring the whole house of cards, dollar and Euros, tumbling down.
And to return to Martin Luther King, let us remember, despite official American media amnesia. King was a democratic socialist, who was assassinated while being tailed by the FBI, as he supported a strike by a municipal workers’ union. He knew the FBI well -- he would be properly skeptical of any claim they made. And he would be occupying Wall St, not calling for war on Iran.

It's not black and white, nor even red and blue!

2011-09-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

Me dropping on the binary positions on intervention and making digs at Slavic leaders like Milosevic and Putin who rotate presidencies and premierships.

The Unions Made the Labour Party

2011-09-28T09:38:00.001-04:00

My piece in the Labour Party conference issue of Tribune 24 Sept 2011

Attempts in Britain to break the connection between the trade unions and their offspring, the Labour Party, have a strong resonance in the United States, where relations are strained between the unions and the Democratic Party.
There are always tensions. The narrower interests of the unions do not always coincide with the greater good of the society at large. In the US, prison unions lobbied along with private prison providers against the decriminalisation of drugs. Police and warders’ unions have lobbied successfully for sweetheart deals on pensions and pay that are far too costly for local governments. It reminds me of Liverpool in the old days of Militant where the infiltrators gave the municipal unions all they could want in return for support in the district Labour Party.
However, even that was infinitely preferable to the current, much more successful crop of infiltrators in both the Labour Party and the US Democratic Party, whose strategy since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been to slough off the unions so they can give sweetheart deals to financiers. I am all in favour of accepting corporate donations for parties, as long as all they get in return is a receipt and a respectfully sceptical hearing.
But what makes unions different, certainly in Britain and even in the US, is their ideological commitment to the greater public welfare. The much-reviled Auto Workers Union in the US did win better wages, pensions and healthcare than many other weaker groups of workers. But it did so only after failing to get a better national pension and healthcare system. They helped with cash and workers to end segregation in the South, and even now are strong supporters of protecting state-run Social Security and Medicare benefits and support a single payer healthcare system.
For such endeavours, and in reward for their efforts to help Democratic Party elections with volunteers and cash, Clinton dismissed them as “special interests” – to be distinguished, of course, from the Wall Street bankers who also filled his coffers, in return for the deregulation that George W Bush built on and led to the crisis and slump of the past two years.
In the wake of that crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic, unions have rediscovered a new combative spirit. Their members are more responsive to calls for action fuelled by the ever-potent mix of self-interest – after all, they are under attack – and moral indignation at the callow, selfish ideologies propounded by governments.
In Wisconsin, the public unions rallied unprecedented thousands of ordinary citizens against what they correctly saw as the right-wing governor’s ideologically motivated attack on the rights of all workers and the entitlements of all ordinary citizens.
Sadly, Barack Obama’s response was to offer even more than the pound of flesh the Republicans in Washington had asked for. He threw in social security and Medicare and more spending cuts. His motivation is a mystery. Until then, the one sure thing the Democrats had to beat the Republicans was their attack on programmes most Americans hold sacred. Even the Tea Partiers carried placards demanding: “Keep the government’s hands off my Social Security”.
Social Security was always regarded as the “third rail” of American politics, but the Republican budget attacking Medicare added an overhead wire as well. Now Obama has firmly grasped both – and short-circuited the most energetic Democrat campaign item. The President persists in trying to compromise
with ideologues who are, well, uncompromising.
What he needs, like the Labour Party, is an ideology to combat theirs. The unions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are at the core of a communal concern that led to 30 years of unprecedented growth and prosperity in the US, and nearly 60 years in Europe. Some union leaders may be almost as power hungry and greedy as their corporate opponents – but then some business leaders, such as Warren Buffet, are more progressive than New Labour and New Democrats. However, the effort to cut the union ties is on both sides of the Atlantic not only an unprincipled effort to mute the voices of working people in the political process, it is also a self-defeating move that will alienate the very voters and activists the parties need to be elected. Those New Labour apparatchiks might get selected without the unions. They won’t be elected.

Palestinian Stat(us) at UN and the US.

2011-09-23T10:25:00.000-04:00

United NationsReport

Once Again, in Full View of the World, U.S.Acting for Israel, Against Its Own InterestsBy Ian Williams

The U.N. vote on Palestine is an oddity.No one can be sure what benefit thePalestinians get from it, and there is good reason to believe that its main current motivation is an earnest desire on the part ofPresident Mahmoud Abbas’ administration to show some progress—any progressat all, in fact—from its appeasement to Israel and the U.S.
On one level, the Palestinian move to up-grade its status is the continuation of a longmarch through international institutionsthat developed momentum in the 1990s.That upgraded the Palestinian delegation tothat of a unique observer mission just fractionally short of statehood, and restated andstrengthened resolutions and expressions ofinternational law on the conflict.
But why revive the issue now? ManyPalestinians see it as a diversion and ameans to shore up a corrupt and compro-

mising administration in the PalestinianAuthority—and, contrary to Israelirhetoric, not as a means to kill Oslo, but tomaintain flickers of life in that Zombie-likestructure as it shambles toward the mirageof a two-state solution.
However, whatever Abbas’ motives, andno matter how inadvertently he has hit theright target, the illogical fury of the Israelireaction, and the servile echoing of it bythe Obama administration, should vindicate him.
Not since the British and Canadiansburned the White House in 1813 hasAmerican foreign policy been so publiclyand humiliatingly trashed. And it is allself-inflicted.
As Obama reminded the internationaldelegates, an American president stood atthe podium of the General Assembly inSeptember 2010 and looked forward towelcoming a Palestinian state within theyear—but a year later he was ordering hisdiplomats to join with Israel to take everymeasure, including abusing the U.S. veto to thwart the consummation hehimself had promised the year before.

This year, Obama restated theadministration line: “Peace willnot come through statements andresolutions at the United Nations...Ultimately, it is the Israelisand the Palestinians who must liveside by side. Ultimately, it is theIsraelis and the Palestinians—notus—who must reach agreement onthe issues that divide them: onborders and on security, onrefugees and Jerusalem.” He omitted any direct threats or referencesto the Palestinian application formembership, or even Palestine’sattempt to upgrade its status at theU.N.

The diplomatic silence mighthave avoided irritating the Palestinians, and perhaps slightly camouflaged the humiliation of whatis, after all, still the world’sbiggest military and economicpower, pandering to the crazedideologues of a small rogue state.

The threatened veto rewards a U.S.“ally” which had defied a plea to halt settlement building and had humiliatinglyannounced a round of illegal constructionduring a visit by Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden.
In return, Washington has lost what little trust it had with the newly enfranchised Arab electorates; alienated major re-gional powers like Turkey, Egypt andSaudi Arabia; and lost its credibility withthe two-thirds or more of U.N. memberswho have recognized Palestine or indicatedan intention to do so.on the opposite side of the world.

If Obama does not do enough damage,Congress is likely to cause even more. Inthe heyday of American power, Congressbegan to cut funding for the U.N.—overthe Palestinian issue. The assumption wasthat the U.N. needed the U.S. more thanvice versa. That is no longer quite as true,and congressional threats to defund theU.N. and its agencies if the members of theorganization vote for some form of Palestinian statehood will enhance the damageto American prestige—and leverage—when Washington wants something fromthe U.N., as it increasingly does. With theparlous state of the U.S. economy and itsoverstretched military, Washington will in-deed be going back to the U.N., but willfind it more difficult than ever to get thelegitimation it wants and needs.

On the Israeli side, reports of Israeli“diplomacy” suggest that harangues to foreign ambassadors and ministers by right-wing Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermanare predictably counterproductive. If countries pay any attention, it is to the American dummy, not the Russian-Israeli ventriloquist, since American power, even rapidlyevaporating as it is, is still substantial.
Perhaps the one hint of self-interestedlucidity in the White House and State Department is the realization of just howmuch damage an American veto would doto Washington’s standing in the world.However, the efforts to get other countriesto “help” by not supporting the Palestinian bid in the Security Council presume aglobal public that is all of below averageintelligence. Widely advertised, the U.S.was hoping to squeeze enough weak linksto ensure that the resolution would not getthe nine necessary positive votes.
Do Obama and Clinton really think thatthe rest of the world would not know whohad brought about the defeat? Or thatthose countries dragooned in would not re-sent being forced to share the blame?
Quite apart from any effects on Palestinians, the U.S. maneuvers can hardly helpits professed larger projects in the UnitedNations: democratization, enhancing therule of law, and prevention of crimesagainst humanity. It not only does truth tothe rumors of double standards spread soassiduously by sundry dictators and theirfriends, but if the U.S. were successful insuborning European and other allies, itstrips away Washington’s credibility whenit comes to advocating, for example, theResponsibility to Protect.
In short, not only is there no rationalself-interest for the U.S. in thwarting Pales-tine’s efforts, it actually detracts fromAmerican interest.
However, it is based on the fatally flawedpolicy introduced by Bill Clinton, whichwas to bypass international law and insistthat the road to peace lay through bilateralnegotiations. So a Sumo wrestler steals thetricycle of a diapered toddler, and the solution is put them in the area together fora fair fight to settle the issue.
Which brings us to the Israeli motivation

for combating this. In the words of Macbeth, the Israeli narrative is “a tale, told byan idiot, full of sound and fury, signifyingnothing.” Certainly Lieberman’s haranguesto diplomats seem to be counterproductive,not least because they all remember thatthe Quartet, the U.S. president, the U.N.and even, very grudgingly, Netanyahuhimself, all have accepted that the road topeace is a two-state solution, with boundaries based on the pre-1967 armistice line.
So why should the full force of Israelihasbara, the John Boltons, Eli Wiesels,Alan Dershowitzs and the rest of thecrowd, not to mention the full resources ofthe U.S. State Department, be marshaledagainst the Palestinian resolution?
To begin with, of course, Netanyahu accepts a Palestinian state the way he wouldwelcome a melanoma. He was only kid-ding. Many of those screaming behind himwould not even pay lip service to the idea.They repudiate the whole idea of a Palestinian state and resent any implication ofPalestinian rights in any part of Israel andthe territories it illegally occupies. Manysuch hysterical supporters in the U.S. arealso deniers of Obama’s American nation-ality and have campaigned furiouslyagainst him and the Democrats, whichadds extra poignancy to Obama’s pander-ing to them. They will still hate him.
There is also a rational, albeit cynical, point.A Palestinian state,whether a member ofthe U.N. or not, can andwould be accepted as astate member of the In-ternational CriminalCourt—indeed its appli-cation to sign the Con-vention establishing it isalready under consider-ation. That has pro-found implications forIsraeli civil and militaryleaders. While the coun-try that kidnappedEichmann and broughthim to justice has notsigned the convention,its citizens would be li-able for crimes commit-ted in the West Bankand Gaza if ratificationfollowed statehood.
But there is also anelement in the psycho-politics of extremeZionism which reminds

them that they are indeed people of thelaw. Although the interminable court proceedings about land-grabs and civilianrights invariably lead to ratification of occupation misdeeds, they do go through theprocess!
One is reminded of some of the evasionsof Talmudic exegesis such as the idea that atelephone wire around an area can make itan enclosed part of one’s backyard. Whilethe rest of the world regards the territoriesas occupied, Israel refers to them as “dis-puted,” because, they say, no state had recognized title to them. Of course, a Palestin-ian state would unravel any notional tele-phone wire the courts might hitherto haveaccepted around the boundary.
In the end, one does have to wonderwhat the Palestinians as people get out ofthe U.N. bid. But certainly, the embarrass-ment it has caused to Obama and Clintonhave made them take Palestinian positionsmore seriously than they have in the past,while removing any residual illusions thatsome Palestinian leaders might have thatthe U.S. is an honest broker in the conflict.
Obama, reportedly, shares the detestation that most reasonable people have forNetanyahu, so one can only welcome any-thing that makes the partnership more uncomfortable for him. ❑

THE WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

NOVEMBER 2011

Eyewitness at the Towers

2011-09-09T10:42:00.000-04:00

WTC, 9-11, memories
I wrote this for a London magazine which in the end spiked it, as I remember for a piece by a close friend of the editor who was distressed by the smoke from a vantage point at the opposite end of the island. So here it is. In memoriam, ten years later.

Ian

Osama’s Victory.

September 2001

I moved from midtown to lower Manhattan in late August 2001. South Street Sea Port seemed like home to someone who left Liverpool twelve years before. Indeed in some ways I had hardly left. The plaque on the esplanade mentioned that it built on rubble landfill from blitzed London that returning supply ships used as ballast.. Those ships actually came from bombed Liverpool. I’d used it to illustrate my thesis that American civilian experience of war was vicarious and inaccurate compared with that of Europeans, even younger ones like me brought up playing in bomb sites and listening to tales of evacuations and bomb shelters from older family members.

I had developed a routine in the new apartment. A brisk cycle ride round the southern tip of the island, past Battery Park and up the new bike up the Hudson that begins by running through the dark valley between the World Trade Centre and the World Financial Centre. On the morning of September 11, I began my day as usual by checking my email as I swigged my first mug of tea, sitting, I must confess, in stark naked comfort.

The email brought several promising commissions, and so I decided to postpone my daily ride, even though the blue skies and equable temperature outside promised one of New York’s few sweet spots between its more customary extremes of frigidity and torridity. Instead I began work on an article for Punch, on the underlying wobbliness of the American economy.

I had written “The” was when I heard the bang. It sounded like a building collapsing, so I ran to the window to look out. The fish porters from the Fulton market were standing in the square of Peck Slip staring up as if at the Second Coming. I pulled on clothes and ran down with a cell phone, recorder, binoculars and a camera. If this wa sindeed the second coming, it was the early stages, the arrival of Satan on Earth. The World Trade Centre’s north tower had an exit wound some three quarters of the way up, with flames erupting from the north east corner , and thick black smoke framing the brightness.

“Look there’re people jumping” a woman shouted in anguish. As far as I could see, what she thought were people was in fact metal siding drifting downwards on the wind. However, my reassurance was premature: shortly afterwards, that’s just what people trapped in the upper floors began doing.

I began trying to call various newsrooms on my cell phone, to no avail. Either everyone else in Lower Manhattan was hitting their dial buttons at the same time, or, I suspected, the antennae were on top of the Twin Towers.

I ran inside to call from my desk phone, but Canadian Broadcasting’s Toronto newsroom was already calling. Ducking between my fire escape platform and the phone, I began to tell them what was happening. The other tower exploding at a slightly lower level. Then the apocalyptic crash as it collapsed.

Up the East River Drive, the FDR. I could see along the shore line as ambulances, fire trucks and police cars fought the rush hour traffic to get closer. Then the evacuees began to trudge by. I had seen refugees in war zones before, but to see endless columns of necktied office workers was a new experience. Most of them marched onwards stolidly without a backward glance, perhaps not realizing that this stretch of their route offered a direct view of the disaster they were fleeing.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, the marching files were silhouetted against the sky like a scene from an Eisenstein film. But then, even those who still stood transfixed in the square had no view. A white cloud, like Pliny’s description of Vesuvius spread from the tower. Heavy choking white ash which fell like snow over the area. By then, most of the rubber neckers had joined the majority marching out the city. A few optimistic ones tried to stop yellow cabs, which sensibly wanted nothing to do with them: just to get out.

In the square some young Indian women had lost their shoes in the rush, and were bleeding from head wounds. My girlfriend invited them to wash off in the bathroom and phone relatives before setting off. A young African man, probably illegal since he did not want to give his name, waited anxiously. He’d been taking his three year old son to pre-school and had lost him in the stampede. In one of the day’s happy stories, he found him, intact at the nearby hospital where some passer by had taken him. He stood in the square in front of us, hugging him thankfully and staring at the column of smoke that marked the site.

I’d been describing the scene from my fire escape for CBC in Toronto, who told me to stand by for ninety seconds for “local announcements.” As they did so, the second tower collapsed. It was the first time I lost my calm. I bellowed down the phone, cursing them and telling them what to do with their local announcements, but to no avail. I had to hold the line open as it was transferred from editor to editor, producer to producer, mostly ignoring the call waiting signals which represented the more successful attempts of friends and family to check on our safety. As the news spread, inward circuits were blocked as people across the world tried to do the same.

A second cloud headed across Manhattan, adding more white ash to the dust that drifted like snow across downtown. By now I was recounting the morning’s events for the BBC, while wrestling with an illustrative side issue. I had mentioned to another editor earlier that Mayor Rudy Giuliani had built his $16 million dollar command and control centre for emergencies and disasters in the World Trade Centre. She commissioned an immediate piece.

I thought it was a potent metaphor for the inefficacy of expensive Star Wars defence systems against this type of attack and spent several hours alternating between radio interviews by phone and checking my memories. It was true. The “bunker,” widely derided as a grandiose folly when it was built, was indeed on the 23rd floor of number 7 WTC, already aflame and later to collapse.

I clicked the send button and as the call volume fell, the adrenalin aftershock set in. Coughing and hoarse with dust and talking, I decided I could take it no longer. I had to go to see what was happening closer to the scene.

The Pompeii parallels became more apt outside. On Fulton Street, the local deli’s display of flowers was shrouded in ash. A fish porter’s breakfast lay in its foil tray, similarly coated, and the little mobile hot dog stands stood abandoned, their bagels and buns buried in a drift of grey dust.

Smoke streamed across towards Brooklyn, and the emergency vehicles stirred up dust devils as if on a desert road as they sped through the police lines to the epicentre. Looking straight down Fulton St, I expected to see a stump, a pyramid of rubble. But who’d a thought the old towers had so little substance in them. It was clear that despite the column of smoke, there was nothing to be seen.

I could flee, or carry on working. Firstly I wanted to pay my debts so we went to the downtown hospital to give blood. They were not accepting it, and what’s more, there was what I thought of as a “fee fo fi fum” warning out. The blood of Englishmen smelt of mad cow disease and was not acceptable.

So brandishing a tape recorder I approached Alex MacLain, a junior doctor at NYU hospital. She had been on duty forty hours, recalled just as she was leaving. She described an early rush of burn victims, “glove injuries,” she said, and explained. “Like one woman came in, and all the skin on her arm and shoulder came off.” Then there was a rush of impact injuries and fractures: followed by an ominous hiatus. She had come to the corner of Fulton St to see what was happening.

As we spoke, behind us I could the lighthouse shaped Titanic monument. In front of us the world was ending in fire, not ice. Coughing despite the masks that the local hospital was distributing, I suddenly had a terrible thought. We were breathing people. There was no way that everyone could have escaped. This smoke, these ashes, were from a massive funeral pyre: the Windows on the World had become a peephole into Hell.

Blowing around in the ashes, the memories of the world’s life were flashing by in form of charred and chewed papers. Plans for environmental projects financed by Wall Street bonds, cheques for unimaginable numbers of zeroes, bunkering invoices from Pakistan, Japanese investment reports, and personnel files. I learned from a police deposition that a Ms Watkins earned $500 a day in a massage parlour, charging $40 for a hand job, $80 for oral sex and $150 for full sex. But it had done her little good since her pimp took the lot. Down by Wall St, in front of Federal Hall, where George Washington was proclaimed the first president, his statue overlooked his handiwork, his hair appropriately powdered like a Georgian wig for the first time in two centuries.

The NYPD working press pass says it entitles the bearer to cross police lines. It had never worked before, so I was not surprised to be greeted with customary brusqueness when I probed the police perimeter to get closer. I moved south and discovered a motley Dunkirk style line of tour boats and tug boats at Battery Park, waiting for evacuees. It was a weak link in the cordon and I sidled through.

On the Hudson side of Manhattan, the debris, smashed vehicles and even deeper ashes made for an even more apocalyptic scene. We were closer and the wind blew from the west into the fire, giving a clearer view of the firefighters trying to control the blaze in the surrounding buildings. Next to us, lines of hoses led from the fireboats which normally only seemed to provide water displays for the visiting cruise liners. Now they were pumping thousands of tons of Hudson water into the ruins.

I lent my cell phone to several exhausted firemen, checking on children, wives and friends. Someone had forced open a local Deli, and they were helping themselves to water and snacks. Even though it was technically looting, no one took more than they needed, except one young man, who looked like a local resident. He helped himself to a pack of cigarettes, paused, and then took two more. Tobacco does that to a person, I thought, even as I wondered at an ash covered fireman who came out with a huge lit cheroot in his mouth. How much smoke can you take!

Another fireman came out of the store. Caked in dust and sweat, he was voraciously stuffing a banana into his mouth in between gulps of water. He looked around with a sort of pugnacious puzzlement at the ash, the debris, the mud, and the smoke. “Can you believe it?” he asked me, “I’m looking for a fucking garbage can!” He threw the peel at the ashes on the floor as if it were a demonstration against the lack of civilization in the neighbourhood.

One of the firemen who had used my phone was telling me bitterly “you know, three hundred of guys got caught when they collapsed.” He then said. “I don’t want to offend anyone, but we just gotta go in and nuke the whole fucking Middle East now.” It was timely reminder. It was early days, and no one had fingered the perpetrators, but somehow, I didn’t want to remind him of Timothy MacVeigh and the anti Arab hysteria that the media had perpetrated before it had happened.

It was now eight hours from the first crash. I had enough local colour, and thought that I was in danger of degenerating from a reporter to a rubbernecker, so I decided to make my way back and file. I headed south only to meet a more than usually implacable police cordon on the Hudson River promenade, “Get on the boat, “they said. pointing to a tug whose bow was nudging the sea wall. “No thanks I said politely,” waving my press card. “You have to. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m press- it’s my job to take risks. I’ve been in Beirut and Balkans. No one’s shooting at me here, I told him, brandishing my press card.
“Get on, or we put you on. We already put two of you guys on.” he said with “make my day” relish. The tug took us to New Jersey, and dropped us at a pier with large signs saying “Condemned structure. No trespassing.” I had no idea how to get back into Manhattan to file, or to wash or change for that matter.

The view from the boat was almost worth it. The Sun setting behind us was lighting up the intact windows of lower Manhattan as if they too were on fire, and tingeing the column of smoke with an appropriately bloody hue. All weekend I had been sailing on the Hudson from the Manhattan Yacht Club out of the North Cove in the shadow of the WTC. We had used the two towers as our navigation aids as we practiced tacking up and down the Harbour. Their absence was even more striking. And I remembered, so was that of my fellow crew member, a Brit I had met for the first time, who had just arrived and was working on the 25 floor of one of the towers. He only had an office number. Death moved from wholesale to personal.

In New Jersey, waiting on the pier were police, paramedics, Red Cross, waited for casualties. They had spent hours watching the pyre burn across the Hudson: they wanted desperately to help, but we were disappointments for their eleemosynary instincts, deportees more than evacuees. The lines of ambulances and doctors waiting on the other side, no casualties emerged, except as smoke.

Hours later, a train from New Jersey to midtown, and a long hike down the East River side brought us home. The police manned checkpoints on all the roads, but as so often in New York the bike paths and foot paths are invisible to drivers. The police overlooked the route along the esplanade, and it became my own personal route for several days. At home, the power was gone, so were the phone lines. And a week later they still were.

Downtown reminded me of divided Berlin or Beirut. To the North of the police perimeter, there were bright lights, shops, bars and restaurants open for teeming crowds. To the south the inhabitants stumbled about in the dark. If they trudged North to resupply, they were shaken down at innumerable checkpoints by a motley array of military and police uniforms. I suspect, despite rather than because of them, there was little of the looting or lawlessness that the stereotype of New York City would suggest. The only vehicles moving were official vehicles with flashing lights on top. Looking for light relief, I suggested ”Hey, if aliens were looking on, they’d think it was the lights made them move!”

At the end of the week, the Police commissioner reported that crime was way down. Even the criminal classes rose to the occasion. Radio reports dwelt on the few crimes. A man appropriated a fireman’s jacket, a retired warder stole some watches while someone else broke into Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers! Did he need a suit to start work on Monday? One thing was sure. He would pay some small part of the price for the absent perpetrators when the courts opened.

Our recently stocked refrigerator was thawing rapidly. On the first night, exhausted , dusty and thirsty I made an executive decision was made. There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge still cool. We knocked it back before it could warm and sank into fitful sleep, punctuated by long vigils at the window watching as the first convoys of armoured cars and troops arrived along the FDR, and noting the absence of ambulances among the sporadic bursts of traffic.

We began an ironic tribute to Paris Zoo menu from the siege of 1870. A born again carnivore with a cholesterol problem, I had stocked up on venison, buffalo burgers and ostrich loin. No fricassee of elephant trunk at the back of the freezer, but we ate our way through the rest.

Just around the corner, our problem was writ large, much larger in fact. There was no power for the Fulton Street fish market, where millions of dollars worth of fish waited in freezers without power. Never particularly sweet smelling, I quailed at the thought of their eventual exhumation.

Two days later, the police allowed in generators for them, and trucks to ship some out. I went down to check. “Is this fish being dumped or sol?” “It’s still in ice, it’s fine,” they told me, as I made a mental note to drop fish from my menu for a few weeks. In a way, it was a reassuring sign of the return of the commercial impulse. One bleak reminder of the shock of the tragedy was that no umbrella sellers appeared on the streets to sell their wares when the rain of dust fell. After two days, in China town, a store keeper was selling visitors photo postcards of the explosions at 2 for three dollars. And of course there were flags, a dollar each.

The flags began to appear two days later. CBC wanted a series of interviews for their local stations, so I got up at 6 and went down to the river side so my cell phone could get a strong signal from across the East River in Brooklyn. Half an inch of rain had fallen, and more was bucketing down I shuddered at the thought of the murky slurry that the rescuers would be working in.

In the grey morning light, the low clouds obscured the smoke and the rain even quelled the ubiquitous smell and dust. Under the shelter of the elevated highway, life had returned to normal. Elderly Chinese from nearby Chinatown did their exercises, and one solitary man brandished a sword in an intricate series of balletic movements. He did not pause as a column of a steel workers formed up in bright yellow water proofs and hard hats with their union Local number written on the side. Led by a large stars and stripes they headed south into the inferno.

About a dozen homeless usually live in the vicinity and four of them who seemed to make a virtual family were inspired to mount their own surreal march. Pushing the one in a wheel chair, they paraded with a placard, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall. New York City/The World.” Pausing in between radio interviews, I asked “Why?” “Gotta a ciggy?” one replied in an London accent. “No, sorry!” I apologized as the phone rang, from, of all places, Iquiluit in the Inuit new territories.

I’ve never understood flag fetishism, but I could see why people would want to respond. Over the next few days, the flags proliferated, but in almost reverse proportion to the distance from what the news reports were calling Ground Zero. “Positive patriotism” is all too often sullied with Xenophobia, which is never an exact science. Maronite Churches were firebombed along with Sikh temples. Maronite and Sikh enthusiasm for Islam, let alone Islamic fundamentalism, has been historically someone tenuous, as anyone should know. But few voters in the world’s only superpower ever take time to study the world, which was perhaps precisely why I was standing in a disaster zone.

Another friend called, with semi light relief, but again with a dark side.

His friend Mohammed worked in a restaurant where 11 of the 14 waiters were also called Mohamed. They used their colleges as names. “Hi Princeton! Hi Columbia!” He was earnestly seeking advice on how to change his name. Quickly

You could almost tell how foreign a storekeeper, or a yellow cab driver felt from how many flags they are flying or sticking like talismans on their doors and windows. And the more I spoke to people, I could see solid reasons for the fear. “Someone must be punished,” is a universal cry. I did a radio interview for the left wing station Pacifica in California. The anchorman on the other side of the continent said “We have to punish them.” Inhaling the smoke from what was after all a near miss for me personally, I asked, “ How do you punish eighteen people who have just killed themselves? And if they had accomplices, can you trust the ideologues round this administration, the Cheneys and Rumsfeldts, to identify the real perpetrators rather than use the opportunity to hit at their own perverse enemies’ list?”

I could trust Powell, who knows that even gestures have their price, but the others worried me. Each day, the news brought more suggestions of right wing wish lists being tacked across the stable door after the Trojan horse had already exploded. More wire taps, tougher immigration, more defence spending, and calls for action all the more ominous for being so nebulously targeted.

I had seen the best side of New York and America in the long lines of volunteers, the heroism of the rescuers, the donations of food, clothes, and money and the flood of resources available when the will was there. But the urge to do something could be as innocuous as standing on street corners with candles, or it could lead to applause for the incineration of other faraway cities of which they know or care little.

As Sunday drew on, Mayor Giuliani opened the way to Wall St. Back to normalcy. Radio advertisements told Americans that the way to show their patriotism was to show their support for American companies. “Buy Stock,” the broker harangued. I did a double take: it was genuine, not some subversive parody. And within sniffing distance, an army of rescuers used muscle power to sift the still smouldering ruins, looking with almost certain futility for survivors among the five thousand lives snuffed out in less than an hour on bright sunny morning in Manhattan.

Rupert Murdoch, malicious AND trivial

2011-07-22T09:48:00.002-04:00

Me beating up on Rupe when he's down. But then I did when he was up!

Toxteth, Liverpool, 30 years on

2011-07-01T10:58:00.000-04:00

Tribune

It was 30 years ago: Toxteth burned in a riot of its own

Thirty years ago, July 4 did not have much significance for me.

by Ian Williams

Friday, July 1st, 2011

I was still based in Liverpool and was on the executive of what is now the RMT. While the union’s annual general meeting was on, we were stood down and so I was catching up with friends in pubs of what was then known as Liverpool 8, but by the following morning was immortalised as the “Toxteth district of the city” by a police press announcement on the riots.After some earlier scuffles, the police were engaged in a show of force throughout the district, banging provocatively on their riot shields in a neightbourhodd with the largest concentration of African-Caribbean Liverpudlians.
It’s worth noting that most of them were deeply rooted in the city whose economy made immigration a pointless exercise. It’s indicative that in its old established Chinatown, Liverpool was one of the few places where Chinese restaurants often employed locals as waiters. Being long established did not mean integration.
Unemployment was high, along with social problems. I had been engaged in a scheme to make jobs available on British Rail where unsocial hours and low pay meant that railway jobs were always available. But we ran into an immediate problem. “As long as they don’t have a criminal record, there should be no problem”, I reported. The pursed lips and shaking heads of the local community leaders confirmed that this was indeed a problem for local kids. Liverpool had an ill-deserved reputation for racial harmony, but it was mostly based on residential segregation in some, clearly-defined parts of Liverpool 8.
And it was those relatively safe havens the police were now threatening with their provocative phalanxes. In the pubs, locals were plotting. This time they would not get away with it. So when, later that evening, myself and a neighbour were meandering up the hill from the city centre, we walked in on a maelstrom. Those serried ranks of police were scampering down Upper Parliament Street under a hail of bricks and poles and had been driven down towards the Anglican Cathedral.
It was not a “race riot”. While, as canny observers at the time noted, it was true that the police ranks were all white, the opposing side was a model of multicultural rainbow harmony. Everyone hated Merseyside cops, who had inherited from Liverpool City police the reputation of the finest police that money could buy outside Hong Kong. It was the first night that tear gas was used on the British mainland – to little effect apart from the one unfortunate hit in the stomach by a round. After the first choking lungful and crippling reaction, a wet T-shirt across the mouth and nose seemed to work.
Almost the only used building that was set on fire was the Racquets club. Built in the days when the area was inhabited by the mercantile elite this exclusive establishment had few if any local members of any hue and its burning was naked class warfare of the kind that Margaret Thatcher was evoking. The fire inadvertently seeded an outbreak of caring communitarianism that I don’t believe has ever been recorded.
Next door to the Racquets was a nursing home for old ladies, some of whom I believe had been committed for “moral insanity” half a century or more behind. The conflagration next door was threatening the building, and while the police held their ground down the hill, Liverpool black cab drivers hailed on the radio drove into the battle, and with “rioters” evacuated the hospital floor by floor. One visual image that sticks in my mind is one the leaders, a huge black guy with semi-Afro, cradling one of these frail patients in his arms like a baby uttering soothing comments as he raced downstairs.
The riots had a wake-up effect. Michael Heseltine spent a lot of time in the city, Liverpool got a garden festival – but it alsogot Derek Hatton. Now the erstwhile City of Culture is transformed. But 30 years on, with a neo-Thatcherite regime going far beyond her neo-liberal dreams, there is a disturbing sense of déjà vu .
Check out some archives: http:// archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/article/7th-august-1981/5/fighting-forcontrol-of-the-police http://archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/article/10th-july-1981/2/parliamentary-column

Chester Brown and John

2011-07-01T10:55:00.000-04:00

Saturday, 2 July is a different kind of wild life - when Ian will talk to Chester Brown about his autobiographical “comic strip memoir about being a John, “Paying For It,” on WJFF's Catskill Review of Books, at 7pm WJFF 90.5 FM and streaming on http://wjffradio.org

With Paul De Rienzo

2011-06-09T11:20:00.000-04:00

Thoughtcrime on Leftist attitudes to "anti-imperialist" thugs and murderers

Ban again, and again!

2011-06-06T07:56:00.000-04:00

Ban shoots for the stars
By Ian Williams
Asia Times
June 7th 2011

WASHINGTON - It is very Asian, or at least Confucian, that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his team have kept so close-mouthed about his decision to run for a second five-year term, which was announced on Monday.

Ban's first term expires at the end of this year, and the vote for the next UN head could take place by the end of June at a General Assembly session. No other candidates are in the running so far.

It would imply a tremendous loss of face for Ban, South Korea and even to some extent Asia, if he had overtly indicated interest without being sure that that he had all the ducks in a row. In itself, it suggests some serious diplomatic skills to get member states united behind his candidacy, not least Japan and China, but he has clearly done so. There has not been a serious voice raised in

opposition, unless there is a serious misstep, and the reappointment will soon be confirmed by the Security Council and General Assembly.

It is possible that the last one in the convoy was indeed a Peking, or Beijing, duck, since he met the Chinese vice president last week. Human Rights Watch criticized Ban for not being more vociferous about human rights in China, and it would have been a great gesture if he had. But this would have been the diplomatic equivalent of seppuku (ritual suicide).

Ironically, John Bolton, the rebarbative former acting US ambassador to the UN, has endorsed a second term for Ban on the grounds that he did not regard himself as a "secular pope". Bolton is not known for nuance, and he was a strong supporter of Ban's original nomination.

Ban is South Korean, and thus reliably anti-communist, and Bolton and others saw a grey self-effacing bureaucrat who would not rock the boat. But perhaps they should have listened. Even on the hustings, Ban declared himself a strong supporter of, for example, the International Criminal Court, whose destruction was Bolton's great, and unsuccessful, crusade.

On issues like climate change, the financial crisis and certainly on human-rights issues and the Responsibility to Protect (the latter loved no more by Bolton than by Beijing) he has been far more outspoken than his predecessors.

To begin with, he spoke strongly about particulars in private, but in public expressed general principles. In Myanmar (Burma) he told off the junta, but kept lines of communication open publicly. However, as he gained confidence, on issue after issue he has become more open, more precise in his delineation of principles and their application.

On the Middle East, calling for a Palestinian state, an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and other UN positions forcibly has not prevented his office being the first port of call for Israeli politicians in New York.

Cynically, one can wonder if they are not using it to claim government expenses for fundraising trips to the diaspora's capital, but for whatever reason, it takes the UN out of the Israel Lobby's firing line in the US. This no bad thing for the beleaguered UN since the lobby in the US unites both conservatives and the liberal politicians who in many other countries provide the backstop for the UN's local support.

But that illustrates the dilemma. Bolton is of the ilk that finds it difficult to admit error, so he would not go out of his way to find fault with Ban. Even so, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week he called for the US Congress to again cut funding to the UN to force it to bow to Washington's and Israel's positions on Palestinian statehood - without mentioning Ban or his position. In times past conservative critics like him could be relied upon to personalize battles with the UN by belittling its secretary general.

It does suggest that Ban's outspokenness has been attenuated by his earlier self-effacement. He has pushed the boundaries of the sayable for the UN. Indeed even human-rights organizations who criticize him for not raising human-rights issues with China, have admitted that Ban has been outspoken on other human-rights issues, and indeed, during the Arab Spring, he has singled out heads of state like former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for criticism in a very public way, before self-professed human-rights champions like the US, whose recent statements on such issues have been extremely expedient.

Indeed, he has broken quite sharply with long standing UN practice of servile deference to any head of state, no matter how cruel or corrupt. One only has to contrast the respect the organization and its emissaries offered former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for example.

In that context, it is perhaps understandable that he demurred on public criticism of Chinese human rights. It would be somewhat Quixotic for the secretary general of the United Nations, with, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali once complained, no army nor police force, to take a tougher stand than the member states who appoint and give him orders.

Not least if it knocked him out of office to be replaced by someone else hand picked to be even more complaisant. In the absence of the Madeleine Albright and Senator Jesse Helms team that knocked out Boutros Ghali, the Chinese are the only ones to have nixed the reappointment of other secretaries general - such as Kurt Waldheim.

But the dilemma of his second term is inherent in such contradictions of office. Sixty-five years after its founding, there has never been such a concatenation of problems demanding a global response that only the United Nations is equipped to mediate. Climate change, food security, energy shortages, financial crisis, pandemic diseases, uneven development and a host of other issues cannot be solved by any one country, as even the indebted energy poor US is now discovering. They demand global solutions which entail a revived, re-energized and modernized United Nations.

Once confirmed, there are strong reasons to hope that, on his present trajectory, Ban will be able not just to say the right things, but also to inspire others, his staff, the member states and the peoples of the world, to do what is needed. He has shown strong principles so far. Now he needs to inject charisma-building steroids to ensure those principles are heard.

Having secured reappointment, he now has to draw up an agenda for his second term that will inspire a jaded world to unite against the common enemies and for Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms that originally inspired the UN: Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Once he does not have to look over his shoulder at Beijing and Washington about a second term, he will have the freedom not only to articulate positions that they would prefer unsaid, but to marshal others as well. Even so, one can be sure that while he will try to steer boats, he won't try to rock them. He is a diplomat above all, even if some might hope that he will indeed become the secular pope that Bolton did want!

Bank on Ban Ki Moon for term two

2011-06-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

Tribune
Bank on Ban Ki Moon for term two
by Ian Williams
Sunday, June 5th, 2011

Sometime soon, Ban Ki Moon is almost certainly going to announce his willingness to accept a second term as United Nations Secretary General. He is unlikely to meet any serious opposition. In part that is because it would be rude not to reappoint him. After all the only other SG denied a second term was Boutros Ghali, because Madeleine Albright offered his head on a platter to Senator Jesse Helms as the price for her confirmation as Secretary of State.

But courtesy apart, there are good reasons to offer Ban a second term. Like his predecessor Dag Hammarskjold, who died fifty years ago, this year, Ban has been growing into the position and becoming increasingly effective. When Hammarskjold was appointed UN Secretary General, the eminently forgettable Trygve Lie, the first to hold the position, dismissed him as a colourless bureaucrat. Hammarskjold is now widely regarded as the very model for a UN Secretary General.

When first elected, Ban Ki Moon light-heartedly delighted in the title the Korean press corp had given him, “the Slippery Eel” for dodging questions and for his self-effacing diplomacy. With the lazy conservatism of the media, his image is still shaded by those first impressions. It did not help that his instinct in the first few years was to work behind the scenes rather than on the public stage, so much of his good work was unrecognised. US acting ambassador John Bolton and the Bush administration nominated him precisely because they wanted a gray apparatchik who would keep the UN its proper place – in the closet until wanted on occasion by the White House.

However, neither the White House nor much of the media checked the reality behind their presuppositions. Even before his election, for example, Ban was publically declaring his support for the International Criminal Court that Bolton had made his life’s work destroying. As soon as he had he taken office he was pushing positions on climate change calculated to get right up the nostrils of the Republican right.

When he first took office, he combined diplomatic delivery in public with strong words in private to national leaders. There was a notable change as he gained confidence and realised that the post of UN Secretary General demanded a public, pulpit role. For example, in the Arab spring, he has been outspoken about naming and shaming the leaders who have used force against demonstrators, which marks a break from the UN tradition of slavish respect for heads of member states.

While he has consistently displayed his principles in a similar way since, he has also been a quick learner. That has been most visible on Middle Eastern issues, where he started off with an almost reflexively pro-Israeli position adopted from his American friends. Now he is now far more outspoken than his predecessors – but as a testament to his diplomatic skills, his office is still the first port of call for Israeli politicians coming to New York. It was little remarked, but he actually made history by getting the Israelis to pay compensation for destroying UN premises in Gaza, and he has consistently condemned the Israeli blockade of the enclave.

It is true that the UN no longer inspires the hopes it did at its founding, but it is a body whose relevance has been renewed by the demands of the era. From finance, to development to human rights and global warming, the world’s problems demand multilateral, global solutions and Ban shows every sign of appreciating that.

His first term has coincided with circumstances that have persuaded even Americans that they cannot singlehandedly run the world. Most of us noticed they weren’t very good at it anyway.

Ban’s approaching second term offers an opportunity for the world to reappreciate the role of the United Nations and its collective approach to the world’s problems and a revival of some of the idealism of its early days and the battle for the Four Freedoms seems appropriate when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to be hovering the on horizon of an overpopulated, financially precarious yet overarmed world.

Obama's Sound of Silence

2011-05-22T14:20:00.004-04:00

Like many people, I expected little from Obama’s performance at AIPAC. He has to straddle parallel universes: the real one, in which most countries recognize Israel as tantamount to an international scofflaw, and the American domestic political universe in which Israel is always right. The US’s real allies and the rest of the world have long wearily resigned themselves to how, as with his speech at the State Department, the President has to pander to pro-Israeli organizations and the Congress members whose support he needs on domestic issues.

Obama congratulated himself, deservedly, for continuing to raise unpalatable issues with elections in the air, and while pandering in a traditionally nauseous way, but there was some reassurance from the sound of silence in his speech.

AIPAC’s conference is a mind-numbing experience. “My country right or wrong” is a rightly derided principle. But at AIPAC ten thousand people are assembled dedicated to the proposition that someone else’s country should be supported, right or wrong, even if it flouts every principle they support at home - and even if its civil laws on marriage and conversion deny the branches of Judaism to which most practicing American Jews adhere.

The organizations tend to be donor-driven rather than grass roots motivated. American Jews, true to their liberal roots, voted for Obama in higher proportions than any other ethnic group - even as a raucous minority of the community questioned Obama’s citizenship and Christianity. That minority is disproportionately represented in the counsels of AIPAC and many of the “official” organizations and tends to Republican, Likudnik hawkishness.

But they tend to think in slogans and catchphrases, without comparing them to reality, let alone with Robert Burn’s “giftie to see oursel’s as others see us.” They have been helped to remain in their parallel universe because Presidents and secretaries of state have pandered (with the notable exception of James Baker) for decades to AIPAC - and no one notices, As is customary, dogs are biting men.

The media attention to President Obama’s address is significant since for the first time in twenty years, there is visible crack showing between the White House and AIPAC - and Israel. It is going too far to say that Obama is biting the dog - but he is sinking his gums into the Lobby and Netanyahu. He is doing so to the background of an American Jewish community that is split more than ever before, and certainly more so than the “official” spokesmen and organizations reveal.

While admitting there are problems with a unity Palestinian government, “We will continue to demand that Hamas accept the basic responsibilities of peace: recognizing Israel’s right to exist, rejecting violence, and adhering to all existing agreements,” he did not exclude negotiations, but in effect put conditions, which Hamas has, in reality, already gone a long way to meet and is on the way to go further.

One hopes that he realizes that the key phrases he used such as the need to accept Israel’s “right to exist” were introduced by Israeli leaders precisely because they were unacceptable to Palestinians. He might even have noticed how quickly Israel switched from refusing to negotiate because the authority was divided, to refusing because it is united! It is like demanding that American Indian tribes accept that their dispossession was right and goes beyond acceptance of the obvious fact of Israel’s existence and its now nearly universal acceptance as an established state.

Such phrases have traditionally been used to in the Levantine blame game in which the purpose of negotiations is not to reach a solution but to blame the other side for failure. But there is always a way to wiggle - a phrase that would irk some Israelis would be for the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s “right to exist under UN Decisions!”

One hopes that the President is now playing this game with Netanyahu. One also hopes he harbors grudges. For the world’s most benefitted welfare queen to publicly dress down the President of its benefactor at the White House should give most Americans some frisson of indignation.

While in the real world, Obama’s insistence on the 1967 boundaries as a basis for negotiation for land swaps has been generally accepted, Palestinians irate at this admitted denial of the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,” may have missed, along with nuance-free AIPACers his endorsement of a The Palestinian people’s “right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state,” which presumably implies that in return for giving up some of the settled area, the Palestinian state will have a land bridge between Gaza and the West Bank. One can see why he might not have chosen to spell that out for AIPAC!

While he stated a fact, “No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state,” he did not state a principle. He said, “The United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the UN or in any international forum. Because Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate.” He did not say that the US would veto a UN acceptance of Palestine as a member state.

Indeed, he challenged the sloganeers with reality, “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder – without a peace deal – to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.” Secondly he pointed to how atavistic the old obsession with territory as security is since “technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself in the absence of a genuine peace,” and finally, he pointed to the changes in Israel’s neighbours, so peace can no longer be bought with few local kleptocrats, “Going forward, millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained.”

If the US is retain influence in the region, it can no longer pay exclusive attention to Israeli public opinion while sending a few billion to local rulers. It, and Israel, have to show ordinary Arab citizens that they are serious about peace. Obama cannot regret the consequences to Palestinians of occupation while carrying on passing the ammunition to Israel.

It is unlikely that Netanyahu will voluntarily relinquish the not so secret Likud desire for an Arab-free state all the way to the Jordan. Obama has, perhaps deliberately and adroitly, maneuvered the Israeli Prime Minister into insulting the President of the US. He now has to follow up and show that their are consequences for Israel.

Obama baulked at his best opportunity, which was the UN resolution on the settlements. He should stop equivocating and come out plainly with a declaration that if Netanyahu continues to refuse to come to terms with reality in the region, then he cannot take a US veto in the Security Council against Palestinian membership for granted nor even a nay vote in the General Assembly against a declaration of statehood. Indeed, if he really wanted to play for high stakes, he could suggest that embattled US tax payers will no longer continue to pay for free Israeli health care and higher education when they cannot afford it at home for themselves. It would almost be worth it to watch the Tea Partiers squirm, but it would show Israeli voters that there are indeed consequences from their choices.

Catskills up High

2011-05-06T17:20:00.000-04:00

7 pm Saturday 7 May, on WJFF’s Catskill Review of Books, on 90.5 FM and streaming http:wjffradio.org this week Ian Williams talks to CNBC anchor Trish Regan about her book
Joint Ventures: Inside America’s Almost Legal Marijuana Industry.

Legalize it? Tax it? Could it put the Catskills and similar depressed areas on an economic high?

7 pm Saturday 14th May
Ian talks to the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach about his book
The Hole At the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher, just over a year after the oil hit the Gulf.

7 pm Saturday 21 May Ian talks to Internationally acclaimed Italian author Sandro Veronesi about his novel.

Quiet Chaos newly translated into English

Ryan, Royal Rogaine, and the Republican birthright.

2011-05-06T17:04:00.000-04:00

The importance of birth, from Ryan, Royals & Rogaine to Republicans.
Ian Williams
Tribune 6 May 2011

Okay: get over it. The Royal Wedding was an embarrassment, but it is nothing compared with the circus that passes for politics here in the Land of Free. On the whole, I’d rather tolerate a monarchy.

As the vows were exchanged, President Obama released his full birth certificate in an attempt to buy off the baying packs of conservatives, a majority of Republicans, who do not believe he was born in the US. Within hours, he predictable response was that the certificate was a forgery! Republican controlled states are busily introducing “Birther bills” purporting to ensure that presidential candidates produce full documentation of their births.

All of this is just commentary. The real issue is that the President is black, not to mention not Republican, and this is anathema for a significant minority. While it embarrasses some of the Republican leadership, it serves them because it reminds a significant minority of voters of the real issue: there’s a black man in the White House.

And all of those in the UK who look longingly at primary elections should note that the issue of Obama’s birthplace was originally raised by the Hillary Clinton campaign during the primary, with precisely the same cynical intention of raising the race issue.

It is not just a passing aberration, Donald Trump, whose name in older English appropriately means “fart” has led business after business into bankruptcy (he even managed to lose money with a casino!) is the favoured candidate of Republicans perhaps because he calls other countries, like those whose money bankrolls the US deficit, “Motherfuckers” and believes that the US should just go and take “our” oil from the Middle East. He was of course one of the leading “birthers,” and is now demanding Obama’s school records, hinting of course that the President, an ace scholar at Harvard only got in through positive discrimination.
But the Republican Party is inclusive in its lunacy. With wildfires sweeping across drought-stricken Texas, its Republican Governor declared three “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,” while governors in several Republican states, who must have had nightmares about Thomas the Tank Engine when they were kids, have turned down billions of dollars to build high speed rail networks.

Crowning it all was the “budget” for 2012 moved by Republican congressman Paul Ryan. Faced with a huge budget deficit, the Republican majority voted for an alleged deficit reduction plan that reduced taxes - on the rich - maintained military spending, but does cut out the few traces of civilization the United States has maintained - public health care provision for the elderly.

Almost all its budget cuts come from programmes that helped the poor and elderly - in a country with an already far from generous safety net.

However, what is refreshing is that for once ideology has trumped political expediency. Reducing taxes on rich people who have just rewarded themselves with huge bonuses for masterminding a global financial crisis is, shall we say, brave. So is attacking Medicare, a very popular government programme for the section of the population most likely to vote. In the land of cognitive dissonance, Republicans actually attacked Obama’s healthcare plan for making savings in Medicare, leading to, in the land of cognitive dissonance,Tea Party demonstrators saying “Keep government hands off my Medicare.”

There are already signs of a backlash against the budget plans, just as in Wisconsin the governors anti-labour agenda provoked a long belated upsurge from the unions and workers with recall petitions against many of the Republicans who voted for it. And not so covert attacks on immigrants and minorities might not be the best strategy when the census shows that the “minorities” are becoming the majority!

However, sadly, Obama and the Democrats are so closely tied to the business donors that polls suggest that they are far to the right of voters on on many issues and are failing to articulate the policies that would allow them to break the Republican majority. It all makes pondering why there is no royal Rogaine for the balding princeling seem a productive exercise.

Will Osama's Going Allow Obama new life?

2011-05-03T18:14:00.001-04:00

Ian Williams 3 May 2011

Will the death of Bin Laden allow Obama with a leap and bound to declare an end to the “War on Terror,” pull out of Afghanistan, save Medicare, and make friends in the Middle East. Well it could, but it probably won’t.

But apart from that cynical thought, let us be straight about one thing. Bin Laden was killed this Sunday, and it does offer serious possibilities.

Gullibility and skepticism seem joined at the hip. People who would take their umbrellas if the Obama administration told them it was sunny outside are quite willing to believe and quote any deranged website with a conspiracy theory. It is interesting to note the convergence of left and right - Osama’s death was faked, Obama’s birth certificate was forged.

Occam’s razor compels me think that neither is true. And by the way, I was living close to the World Trade Center, saw and heard the planes, and commented at the time on Rudi Giuliani’s spectacular incompetence at putting his emergency headquarters in Number 7 World Trade Center and stocking it with tanks containing thousands of gallons of fuel in defiance of his own city Fire Department regulations.

That consistent incompetence is a factor has fueled a thousand conspiracy theories. Going after Saddam Hussein and downplaying Afghanistan allowed Bin Laden to get away. Trusting the Pakistani ISI, former CIA surrogates in the region, allowed him to stay away. The war in Afghanistan was consistently under-resourced so the Bush White House could exorcise its own familial ghosts in Baghdad.

But strategic incompetence has not obviated flashes of tactical brilliance on the part of conservatives. As I said at the time, the perennial TV news backdrop of the triptych of the burning World Trade Center flanked by Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein helped provide the emotional strength for the war on Iraq, despite it having nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the 9-11 attack. It occurred to me that some of the exultation on those young faces in the flash mob with their unseemly celebration of Bin Laden’s death could have derived from subliminal childhood exposure to those images. It is also that image which has given some metaphysical substance to the absurdity of a war on an abstraction, the “War on Terror.”
 Which comes back to the death of Bin Laden. It was a very risky move for Obama. “Liberals” and democrats are not allowed the luxury of spectacular failure. Jimmy Carter’s abortive attempt to rescue the hostages from Teheran haunted his career. A similar helicopter crash in Pakistan could have sealed the fate for the Obama White House.

Of course an assassination on the territory of a foreign and allegedly friendly state could also have caused problems. It is indeed illegal in a prima facie way, but Bin Laden’s presence in a major Pakistani metropolis certainly embarrasses the government there. It was in everybody’s interest not to inform the local authorities. The Pakistan government could disclaim knowledge, and the US could be certain that any information they passed on would go straight to warn Bin Laden. Indeed, such is the climate of rancor among American conservatives one would almost wonder if one of the worries in Washington was a risk of leaks or sabotage from insiders there. But internationally, while, say Beijing and Moscow might tut tut about it, the heirs of the KGB are hardly in a secure pulpit to sermonize, and their real feelings are more likely to be admiration than admonition.

Even the burial at sea is, shall we say, a red herring. Few of his victims got to choose their funeral rights, and the Sunni Wahabi tradition is spartan in the extreme.

In any case the action has given Obama a big boost domestically at a time that he needed it. It would be ironic if healthcare for elderly Americans were protected because the President has overseen the assassination of an elderly Saudi, but that’s politics!

Internationally, it will not necessarily have that much effect. Bin Laden was no Lenin overseeing an Islamist international. Al Qaeda was a state of mind more than an organized conspiracy. He was no Old Man of the Mountains sending out his assassins, but his example inspired the varying spontaneous degrees of psychopathology among the disaffected.

But his rallying cause for jihad still holds: US support for Israel is as strong now as ever. Obama would have had more beneficial international results taking out Netanyahu politically than eliminating Bin Laden physically, since it would address that genuine cause. Recent poll results from Iran and Egypt suggest that the US still provides plenty of room for suspicion in the region.

One possible consequence is that Obama might be tempted to declare victory and pull out of Afghanistan. He could even claim budget savings to protect Medicare! However, the Taliban were not controlled by Al Qaeda and his death is unlikely to affect their belligerence. His elimination at least allows the US to get over its prejudices and get into serious talks with the Pushtoon communities for a negotiated settlement of some kind.

Indeed the exorcism of the Bin Laden ghost could even provide political cover for talks with Hamas and Hizbollah. Of course anyone except Fox news pundits knows that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with them at all, but with his shade out of the way, an emboldened Obama could do it.

But it comes back to the same core problem. At the core of America’s fractious relationship with most of the world, and particularly the Middle East, is Washington’s relationship with Israel - and he is unlikely to get Netanyahu’s “permission,” for it. Would he go ahead anyway? How about being tough on terror - and on the excuses for terror as well? It is possible and desirable, but is it likely?

Orwell's Take on Libya

2011-04-12T14:38:00.000-04:00

Tribune, 8th April 2011

Ian Williams
Support the Good Deed, Not the Doer of It!
Orwell's Take on Libya

“What would George Orwell have said?” is an old game that is nonetheless relevant for Tribune, whose pages the grumpy “lower upper middle class” columnist graced for so many years. On Libya, there is little doubt that he would have supported intervention. Just as, almost certainly, the ranks of opposition to intervention include many of those who saw Orwell as a traitor to socialism for telling the truth about Soviet tyranny and exposing the eccentricities of some true believers on the Left, among whom, we can be sure he would pilloried some of anti-imperialist tourists who have made the trip to Tripoli to learn from the “Libyan revolution.”

Orwell, with his pragmatic realization that the world was not divided into saints and sinners, would certainly have supported intervention. “There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction,” he wrote after he returned from Spain, where, let us remember, he was on the liquidation list of the Soviet agents whose supporters were and are so quick to denounce Orwell as a traitor to the left.

He was well aware of the imperfection of the side he was fighting for. Of course, if the Spanish Republicans were to apply the same high ethical standards demanded by some on the Left of those now intervening in Libya, they would have scorned Moscow’s help. The famine, the purges and the camps were all in operation and at the time Stalin had far more blood on his hands than either Hitler or Mussolini. But nobody else was offering. It would indeed have been much better for France and Britain to have lent support to Madrid’s democracy, but as we know, in London at least there was a tendency to think Franco could be a force for stability. Who knew what would happen if the Republicans had won? After all, there were provably more Anarchists among the Republicans than Al-Qaeda among the Libyan opposition. And possibly some of the Left would have opposed such imperialist ventures - they did after all oppose intervention on behalf of Poland.

There are, of course, those who can greet with equanimity atrocities perpetrated under the guise of anti-imperialism, either by denying or ignoring them. The Slobodan Milosevic fan club that ignores the stench of Bosnian mass graves from Srebrenica, or of rotting Kosovo cadavers discovered under police stations in Serbia, is made of strong enough stuff to regard a few dead Libyans as a small price to pay to fight imperialism.

In contrast, this intervention is mandated by the United Nations Security Council and was response to the threat by the Libyan regime to massacre its own citizenry in Benghazi and Tobruk. The intended victims pleaded with the world to help them. So the real question to pose to those who oppose intervention is “What would you do about it?”

The dilemma is most manifest in Moscow. Russia could have vetoed Resolution 1973. It could have supported it, amended it, and insisted on a share of command and control. It did not. It recognised that even by its own relaxed Chechnyan standards, what Gaddafi was doing was insupportable. So it adopted the harlot’s prerogative of power without responsibility. It let the intervention go ahead and now carps from the sidelines to preserve its own purity.

Ideally of course, it would be better if the intervention had been conducted by countries without imperialist pasts, or oil interests. But Timor Leste, or Ireland, or Jamaica, do not have the wherewithal for such operations, and generally have their own problems. When the Good Samaritan crosses the road to help, we do not question whether he was point scoring over those bloody Pharisees, or checking the victim’s pouch to see if there was anything left, or even whether he treated his servants and wife well. We support the deed, not the person, or the country.

Goldstone yet again

2011-04-06T09:09:00.000-04:00

It is still a mystery why he wrote the Washington Post article or what it was meant to achieve, but Goldstone sets the record straight - and if possible has made even worse enemies in Israel. I wonder if the invitation still stands?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110406/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_un_report_5

Debating Intervention

2011-04-05T16:39:00.000-04:00

Strategic Dialogue: Libya War

By Robert Naiman and Ian Williams, April 5, 2011

In the second part of our strategic dialogue on the Libya War, Robert Naiman and Ian Williams respond to their initial essays. You can read the original essays here: Naiman’s anti-intervention essay Surprise War for Regime Change in Libya is the Wrong Path and Ian Williams’ pro-intervention essay Armchair Anti-Imperialists and Libya.
Ian Williams

Robert Naiman makes many excellent points, which tend however to prove my major point. Like many peers he looks at intervention in Libya from a narcissistic Americo-centric point of view, evading the key question. When a group of people who are about to be massacred ask for help, what do you do?

Instead, Naiman presents a survey of constitutional positions and American attitudes to the war which essentially replicates the lessons of 1939. The default American position is usually isolationist, and the Good Samaritan is not a popular parable in American political discourse.

It was not the White House that started the operation. The Libyan plea went to the Security Council of the United Nations – with the support of much of the Libyan diplomatic corps, one might point out. The UN resolution does not call for a no-fly zone. It called directly for military intervention to protect civilians – and to assuage those justifiably wary of US involvement in the region after Iraq, or indeed Susan Rice’s veto of the resolution against Israeli settlements, it precluded occupying forces.

It is not unilateral, or even mainly U.S. military intervention, and all the evidence is that Washington was chivvied into helping by its Middle Eastern and European allies. Washington, as we have seen, has been happily buying oil from Gaddafi and has a high tolerance for atrocities by its allies.

In fact, one would never guess that from news reports most of the close-up air sorties are being flown not by Americans but by French and other air forces, who, one hopes, would have proceeded regardless of the U.S,Congress.

Frankly, I wish the United States had stayed out of it and simply blessed and assisted the Europeans and Arabs. But having by far the world’s biggest military occasionally entails obligations as well opportunities for aggression.

It is indeed entirely possible that the respite awarded the rebels will result in regime change. And why is that a bad thing? This regime responded to peaceful demonstrations demanding popular power by gunning down its own people. This regime accepted the validity of the UN resolution and immediately declared a ceasefire, just before launching indiscriminate air and artillery attacks on its own cities.

If Hugo Chavez’s negotiations had delayed the attacks on Gaddafi’s tanks, Benghazi and its citizenry would today be a smoldering pile. The International Criminal Court referral was intended to send a message to Gaddafi that there would be consequences, that he had no impunity. He ignored that message. Is there a way to protect civilians that leaves intact a dictatorial regime that has pledged bloody vengeance against its own citizenry?

In the end, those who oppose the intervention would do so whether or not Congress approved it, just as those who opposed intervention in Iraq because it had no UN mandate, even though Congress shamefully approved, now oppose this one even though the UN voted for it – and Congress has not said anything either way.

When people cry for help you do what you can. And yes, what happened in Bahrain is shameful, even though the regime has yet to use airpower and artillery against its own city. So rather than opposing intervention in Libya, it would be much more constructive to call on the United States to cut off relations with Bahrain, or indeed Saudi Arabia, until the repression stops. But opposition is always easy, while calling for action involves taking responsibility for the results.
Robert Naiman

Ian Williams's initial tone is disturbing but perhaps revealing. He begins with an assault on progressive critics of the Western military intervention as "comfortable Western leftists" engaged in "cultural imperialism." The thrust of his argument here seems to be that if you criticize the Western military intervention, you must be a Gaddafi-lover.

Such insults are depressingly familiar. When we opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we were called Saddam lovers. When we questioned the indefinite U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan, we were accused of supporting the Taliban.

Some may find such "arguments" convincing. On me, they have the opposite effect. If critics of military intervention are being accused of devotion to a foreign political force, probably the intervention is a rotten enterprise. After all, if supporters of military intervention had good arguments, presumably they would lead with those.

Williams suggests that "Libyans" support the current Western military intervention. Indeed, some Libyans do support it. Other Libyans do not. Clearly, many Libyans in Benghazi support the current Western military intervention. Just as clearly, many Libyans in Tripoli and Sirte don't support the current Western military intervention. If we care about the opinions of "Libyans," it's not obvious why the opinions of these Libyans in Tripoli and Sirte should count for zero.

Anytime the United States intervenes militarily on one side of a civil conflict there will be people in the country - and exiles - in favor. There were Iraqis who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There are Afghans who would like U.S. troops to stay indefinitely. Is the fact that this is so the end of discussion? We have to support a foreign military intervention if a group of Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans support it? These views should certainly be considered, but are we not allowed to consider anything else? Should the fact that a group of people support a Western military intervention automatically trump all other concerns? This argument does not seem serious to me.

Williams appears to be unconcerned by, and indeed to welcome, the morphing of the military intervention from "protecting civilians" to "regime change." But indifference to or support of this transformation would make a mockery of any kind of accountability for Western military operations. You could sell public opinion on one thing, obtain a UN Security Council resolution, and then do something else entirely. This would mean that "Responsibility to Protect" would become "unlimited license to do anything." One might think those who support the principle of "Responsibility to Protect" would see this as a threat to the invocation of this principle in the future. I was more sympathetic to "Responsibility to Protect" before I saw how it was used in this case; if the conclusion of the current military operation is military regime change rather than a negotiated solution, I will hold that against future invocations of "Responsibility to Protect."

Williams dismisses concerns of critics of the military intervention as "ad hoc." But many of these concerns are longstanding. We are concerned about the exclusion of Congress and the pubic, as before. As I argued, this is not a side issue to those working against U.S. wars. Rather, it is crucial to future efforts. We are concerned about the expense of foreign military intervention at a time of domestic cuts, as before. We are concerned about proposals that the United States arm people who may have been involved in terrorism in the past and may be involved in terrorism in the future, as before. We are concerned about selective focus on abuses of a U.S. "enemy," while the abuses of U.S. "allies" are ignored and even encouraged, as before. And, as I argued in my piece, this is not merely a question of "hypocrisy" and "double-standards." In general, selective focus contributes to indifference and support of abuses by allies. In the present case, there is considerable evidence that the military intervention in Libya is directly related to effective U.S. support for the crackdown in Bahrain.

Williams does acknowledge problems going forward, when he suggests Russia (and presumably others) could be a better watchdog. Here we agree. But for this to happen, some things must change. It's hard to be an effective watchdog if those you're monitoring have carte blanche. This means we must insist that Security Council resolutions not give carte blanche in theory or practice and that sharp distinctions be maintained between "protecting civilians" and other measures undertaken and considered, such as supporting rebel military advances with air strikes, attacking military forces not engaged in attacking civilians or poised to do so, arming rebels, and military regime change.
Ian Williams

There is no doubt that some of the opposition to intervention does indeed come from Gaddafi lovers. As we saw with Saddam Hussein and see with Hugo Chavez now, an anti-U.S. posture seems to give sundry authoritarian thugs a lot of leeway in some sections of the left. But I did not once suggest that equation.

However the key issue is not affection for Gaddafi but rather indifference to suffering and injustice elsewhere. It is indeed possible that there was a cynical trade-off between Bahrain and Libya. But is anyone suggesting that if there had been no action in Libya, the United States would have swooped to the defense of Bahraini dissidents?

The issue is irrelevant to the core question. Did the intervention stop massacres of Libyans? The answer is, irrefutably, yes. The question now is: will it continue to improve their lot? The answer to that is probably yes, but naturally we cannot be entirely sure.

The simple test of Gaddafi’s popularity would of course be an election – which he refuses to allow, suggesting that whatever his eccentricities, deep down he is in touch with reality. I am all in favor of changing regimes that are oppressive and murderous, even though the principle, especially with foreign interference, is to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease. That was certainly the case in Iraq, despite Blair’s attempt to mask it as a humanitarian intervention. It is not the case in Libya, as many living citizens of Tobruk and Benghazi can now testify.

As for the carte blanche, any reading of Resolution 1973 would show that far from carte blanche, it hemmed the operation in with many provisos, including a ban on occupying forces. Some of those restrictions actually increase the risk of civilian casualties but were understandable in the context of previous U.S. abuse of UN resolutions. But the apparatus for monitoring is clearly laid out in the resolution, more strongly than in previous Chapter VII resolutions. If the Russians had eschewed posturing for a domestic and international audience they could have refined those provisions and involved themselves more closely.
Robert Naiman

Again Ian Williams comes with the gratuitous insults: "narcissistic," "Americo-centric," etc. And again I say: among fair-minded people, those who engage in gratuitous ad hominem attacks weaken rather than strengthen their argument.

I see Williams’ argument as amounting to a classic bait-and-switch. On the one hand, all of us must declare whether we would support Western military intervention to block the Libyan government's assault on Benghazi, and we must answer this question in isolation. In answering this question, we are not allowed to consider anything outside of this. Most importantly, we are not allowed to consider where the Western military intervention would lead and what other consequences it would have.

But once we say yes to this hypothetical - hypothetical because the event does not exist in isolation - then it's made clear that what we have agreed to is not something that we can purchase a la carte. Rather, it is part of a package deal, "terms subject to change without notice," which may, among other things, include: bombing Libyan soldiers who are not attacking or menacing civilians, arming rebels, overthrowing the Libyan government with foreign military power; and increased likelihood of U.S. military interventions in the future.

Let's sharpen the hypothetical. Suppose that on the Saturday morning that the United States began bombing, President Obama called me on the phone and said, "Now, I realize that until now I haven't allowed you to have any effective input into this decision. But now I'm letting you decide. If you say yes, I go forward. If you say no, the military operation is called off. It's all up to you. But let me make one thing clear: this is the last time I will ever consider your opinion. If you say yes, you agree to everything that happens afterwards, in which you will have no say whatsoever."

At its root, this is the question I understand Williams to be asking.

And my answer is that I emphatically reject the premise. The central organizing principle of my political work on this front since 1983 is to reject the premise that I and my fellow members of the general U.S. public have no say in U.S. foreign policy, except perhaps to ratify wars that other people have already decided to embrace. If that will be called "narcissistic" and "Americo-centric," so be it. I take responsibility for living in the United States. Others should too.

Robert Naiman is the policy director at Just Foreign Policy and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. Ian Williams, senior analyst and long time contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, is a New York-based author and journalist. He is currently working on a new edition of his book, The UN For Beginners.

Stoning Goldstone

2011-04-05T10:00:00.003-04:00

Why Did Richard Goldstone Throw the Goldstone Report Under the Bus?
Foreign Policy in Focus
By Ian Williams, April 5, 2011

GoldstoneI spoke to Richard Goldstone several times after his eponymous Report came out, and it was obvious that the personal slander and vilification from so many in his own community was wearing him down. He was certainly naive and did not expect the excreta storm that would head his way.

He had always been a person of integrity and his editorial in the Washington Post, allegedly “retracting” the Report named after him is saddening. If it had appeared the day before, one would almost suspect it of being an April Fool’s parody.

Indeed, the wording of the editorial, while confused and evasive, was eloquently indicative of heavy pressure -- not least since only two days before at a debate at Stanford University, he is reported as maintaining that “all the investigations showed that, thus far, the facts were as they were reported.”

One cannot help wondering what happened in the next two days to change his mind. Did his daughter, ex IDF and self-confessed Israeli patriot, pull the family chains? It certainly betokens a personal tragedy, since it will detract from his reputation and integrity in the human rights and international law field, with no chance at all of earning the forgiveness of the rabid and vindictive Zionists who have been hounding him mercilessly for two years.

Indeed, reading the editorial reminded me of Comrade Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness At Noon” -- a true believer doing one last duty for the group he had lived with for so many years. It reads like a “confession” rung out from someone trying to free hostages near and dear to him by giving the kidnappers what they want while trying to hold on to one’s own integrity and dignity. Sadly, of course, those who attacked his morals and probity before, will never, ever forgive him for telling the truth originally -- and like Rubashov, he will be shown no mercy once his confession has served its purpose for the cause.

It suited the Lobby to highlight Goldstone, a Zionist and judge whose international reputation made it even more difficult than usual to bury the message especially among Jews. However, those other members are distinguished jurists in their own right who were commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and whose report became the property of the UN General Assembly, neither of whom are likely to drop the report just because complicit Israeli ministers misinterpret Goldstone’s editorial with the same liberty that they misinterpreted the original report -- which after all simply asked the parties to conduct credible investigations.

The core “retraction” in the editorial is the sentence, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” which is about as retractable as a rubber band. It certainly does not substantiate Netanyahu’s reaction “Everything we said was proved true,” although it does raise suspicions that Avigdor Lieberman’s attribution of the editorial to “diplomatic efforts on behalf of Israel,” might conceal some heavy advocacy conveying difficult-to-refuse offers.

Goldstone is a lawyer, and this imprecisely flexibly wording of “different document,” could mean almost anything. If he knew about the ferocity of the tribal scapegoating that was to follow? If he knew that the report was going to spur Israel into mounting a series of pseudo-independent investigations into events that they refused to look into earlier? It certainly is far from an unequivocal retraction of the original, which is not “his” to retract since it was, after all, the product of a team including three others, commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

His claim that Israeli investigations “also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy,” does not contradict his early report, which never suggested that. The My Lai massacre, for example, was no less a war crime because the Pentagon did not directly order it.

His most wrenching default is when he says “the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently (my italics) the consequence of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.”

Looking at the abysmal track record of Israeli investigations -- and bearing in mind that it was the original Goldstone Report that brought about the apology for an investigation he refers to here, Judge Goldstone really has to explain to his own conscience on what grounds he is “confident” of an appropriate response, let alone how the finding of “negligence” came about.

Throughout, he is upsettingly equivocal. “While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn't negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.”

But then later he says “McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree.” How significant is “significant” if after two years, “few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded” and if the proceedings, conducted by the same military body that defends the military, are carried out in private?

In the face of that, his second thoughts about calling upon Hamas calling for its own inquiry are totally gratuitous. Surely he never expected them to. But they did let him and his colleagues in to investigate themselves, which Israel did not, and which, as he reiterates, refused to present evidence to his committee.

Even though it is unlikely that the UN bodies will drop the report, Goldstone’s pseudo-retraction has provided the opportunity for Israeli “Hasbara” to trumpet its misinterpretations. It does a disservice to international justice and humanitarian law and tries to accord to Israeli leaders the impunity which he had spent his career fighting, in South Africa, Rwanda, the Balkans and Central America.

It is a tragedy that such a career should end this way, generating as much sorrow as anger. Sorrow for the damage it has done to the universality of justice, and anger at the unscrupulous manipulation of familial and tribal loyalties that likely brought it about.

For more by Ian Williams visit Deadline Pundit.

Armchair Anti-Imperialism

2011-04-04T14:31:00.000-04:00

Armchair Anti-Imperialism and Libya

Foreign Policy in Focus
By Ian Williams, April 4, 2011

In the first part of a new FPIF Strategic Dialogue on the Libyan War, Ian Williams argues that the choice is clear: to support the popular uprising and not the unpopular tyrant. See Robert Naiman's anti-intervention argument here.

Ian WilliamsIt is a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism for comfortable Western leftists to disregard what the actual Tunisians, Libyans, Kosovars, or Bosnians themselves have asked for - intervention to stop “their” rulers killing them. This setting aside of the wishes of people threatened with massacre in favor of Western armchair anti-imperialism is all the more remarkable coming from the left, which once swore by internationalism.

The calls to respect national sovereignty echo those of the despots of Africa and other regimes around the world who believe that it’s nobody’s business what a ruler does in his “own” country. Or even worse, such calls emulate the know-nothing isolationists on the right who do not care what happens to foreigners.

The ad-hoc arguments marshaled against the intervention in Libya have included:

The unconstitutionality of the president ordering military action
The expense of military action at a time of cuts
The invalidity of a UN resolution passed with abstentions
The Security Council exceeding its authority by violating Libyan sovereignty
The self-interested motives of those intervening
The “discovery” of ex-al-Qaeda supporters among the rebels
The failure of the West to intervene in other places where civilians face potential massacres such as Bahrain, Gaza, Ivory Coast, and Yemen

Many of these arguments are deployed to flesh out an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative that evades the crucial question: should the world let Libyan civilians die at the hands of a tyrant?

Gaddafi’s heavily armed forces were headed to Benghazi, in defiance of Security Council resolutions, to carry out acts against international humanitarian law. In fact, they had already started bombing and shelling the city indiscriminately and had a track record of massacres, mass arrests, and brutality in cities they had already occupied.
Intervention: Always Wrong?

Opposition to interventionism has sometimes been muted in other circumstances, for instance Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and Laos, Tanzanian intervention in Uganda, or indeed India's military incursion that gave birth to Bangladesh. In none of these cases was the result utopian, but in each case it certainly improved the situation. Indeed Cuban intervention in Africa and Che’s disastrous guerrilla escapades in Latin America are the subject of reverent leftist legend rather than calumny.

Perhaps the archetypal case, in leftist lore, is the Spanish Civil War. Few of those opposing intervention in Libya are likely fans of George Orwell who, after returning from Spain, commented that “there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.” Orwell and many others went to Spain to fight Franco and supported calls for intervention by the Western powers to help the Republic.

Orwell was also well aware of the imperfection of the side he was fighting for, since he not only witnessed the repression of dissidents on the Republican side but barely escaped with his life from KGB agents. Of course, the Spanish Republicans should have refused aid and weapons from the Soviet regime, which was already killing people in quantities that at the time exceeded what the Nazis were accomplishing. But nobody else was offering.

However, all the bluster notwithstanding, intervention, as now enshrined in the “Responsibility to Protect,” is now an established part of international law. The intervention in Libya is legal. Whether it was the right thing to do, or whether the United States should be involved, is a separate issue, as indeed is the permanently debatable but entirely domestic issue of presidential versus congressional prerogatives on the matter of war powers.

A British or European might want to point out, however, that many of us are glad that Franklin Roosevelt did an end run round Congress in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, even if his clear aim was to grab the British Empire before it fell into Axis hands. Indeed, the non-intervention rule is particularly ironic for the United States, which owes its independence to the timely intervention of a reactionary French Royalist regime.

There would be more consistency, and indeed humanity, if protestors refined their arguments so they did not oppose intervention in general, but specified why they opposed intervention by particular countries, which in this case means the United States.
Should We Oppose the U.S. Involvement?

As a rule of thumb, one should always be wary of U.S. intervention, and it is indeed always worth questioning both Washington’s motives and its methods.

But the positions of many of those who have reflexively opposed the implementation of the UN resolution on Libya do not really involve questioning. Rather they consist of a series of dogmatic assertions, which tend to distill down to the assertion that the United States is always wrong. Even a stopped clock is right occasionally, and their assertion of perpetual American malice and greed is a form of metaphysical mirror image of the equally untenable premise that the United States is always virtuous and right.

In the case of Libya, as in Kosovo, the United States was dragged unwillingly into its role by the Europeans and others and by the events on the ground, namely Gaddafi’s murderous threats and actual behavior. The United States had developed cynically good relations with Gaddafi. The West had no problems gaining access to Libyan oil. Regime change puts these relationships at risk.

Above all, the Security Council mandated this intervention, fulfilling its mandate to preserve peace and security, as interpreted by the General Assembly, which decided that that remit includes the failure of governments to protect their own people - or their persistence in attacking them.
The UN Resolution

UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was the classic smorgasbord that comes out of negotiations, with potential vetoes lurking in the background. To assuage the fears of those opposed to U.S. imperialism rightly concerned about what happened in Iraq (without a UN mandate), the resolution precluded troops on the ground. Sadly that left air operations as the only weapon. U.S. affection for massive fire power and force protection perhaps led to the unnecessarily massive bombardment of the first days. But on the other hand there has been no significant anti-aircraft action from Libya. Libyan geography has also lent itself to attacks on military columns strung out along the few roads with less risk of civilian casualties.

The mandate to protect civilians is at once limited - and flexible. If a regime shows no intention of stopping its repression and bloodshed, the mandate can't be fulfilled without getting rid of him.

Frankly, Libya and the world would not suffer from Gaddafi's departure.
Why Libya?

Frequently, opposition to intervention has depended, oddly, on the traditional “Israeli defense” at the UN. Israeli diplomats often argue that no one should criticize Israel when there are so many Arab states guilty of similar or worse atrocities. In this context, the West's silence and inaction – indeed, the complicity in the repression in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria – preclude any action in Libya.

In the real world, of course, such an all-or-nothing approach translates into “nothing.” In Libya, the deployment of aircraft, tanks, and artillery against civilians certainly goes a stage beyond the admittedly pernicious use of small arms in those other countries - not of course in Gaza, but we know the circumstances there.

In fact, the UN-sanctioned intervention in Libya seems so far to have fulfilled the promise of the Responsibility to Protect. It averted the threatened massacre of the citizens of Benghazi by Gaddafi’s supporters. It has so far crippled the regime’s main strength, its heavy weaponry, so that the local Libyan opposition has been driving the former government forces out of city after city. So far, unless you take the word of the mendacious Gaddafi regime, there have also been minimum civilian casualties.
Endgame?

Humanitarian intervention under the auspices of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is indeed a dangerous tool, subject to expedient abuse. Which is why its proponents insisted it needed a UN mandate. The Libyan intervention has that. The Security Council needs to monitor its execution carefully, and it could do that much more effectively if Moscow, in particular, would stop flip-flopping.

Behind Russian discomfort over R2P is its all-too-apparent relevance to Chechnya. But Moscow could have vetoed the resolution. Its abstention implicitly went along with the wording of the resolution, and its experience of the Gulf War resolutions taught it what to watch out for in terms of mission creep. If it stopped grandstanding and got more actively involved, it would be a better watchdog.

Gaddafi’s is clearly a failed regime. Its collapse in almost every population center when challenged demonstrates a lack of popular and institutional support. The provisional government in Benghazi has claimed democratic principles and has so far lived up to them. There are some strange stirrings of Islamophobia among anti-interventionists who claim either that intervention is anti-Islamic or that the new government will be fundamentalist Islamic.

In any case, the rebels seem to have popular support. Those who respect popular sovereignty, as opposed to state sovereignty, should really let the Libyans decide whether it is better to die in a flood of tanks and rockets, or overcome them by calling for international aid.

Libya and R2P

2011-03-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

I had drafted this before the vote, and am pleased that many of the worries I had were dealt with in the Resolution, not least the exclusion of foreign occupation. I would also like to think that if my points on command and control were included, it might just have reduced the number of abstentions.

Deadlinepundit

We can accept that a patient with a brain tumour might desperately need surgery, but there is still cause for alarm if Jack the Ripper offers to operate. Both method and motive are open to question.

So while no person with a conscience wants Gaddafi to win his sanguinary battle of repression against his own people, there are more than enough doubts that the US is the appropriate specialist to call. However, like Jack the Ripper - they do have the knives. We should avoid the reflexive binary positions both of those who support any intervention in an Arab country and those who equally obdurately oppose any intervention by any Western power, anywhere.

In fact, ever since the 2005 General Assembly when Kofi Annan steered the UN General Assembly into accepting that that the Security Council’s remit over threats to peace and security extended to what was happening inside sovereign nations, there is legal grounds for Security Council intervention.

There is clearly present need, unless the world is prepared to stand by and watch massacres of disloyal Libyans. And of course, one of the problems with the US as a self-appointed instrument in this case is that Washington seems neutral about not dissimilar events in Bahrain, Yemen or even in Gaza, preferring to arm the perpetrators and provide some measure of diplomatic protection. The sudden US rediscovery of Libyan tyranny is also somewhat problematic, as indeed are its previous military attacks on Libya.

Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN spoke eloquently, and from her previous record, probably sincerely, about the need for intervention. However, a few weeks before she had with deep insincerity cast a veto expressing her own and American opinion on Israel’s repression and breaches of international law in the West Bank!

Even accepting the motive, method is a problem. Consistently in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the US has shown a predilection for high technology ariel warfare and shown a propensity to risk civilian life rather put its own military at risk. Even in Kosovo, which most of the locals consider gratefully to have been a “good” war, President Clinton’s refusal to countenance ground forces or risk American casualties by bombing from below 15,000 feet incurred unnecessary casualties and eroded international support, while not frightening Serb leader Milosevic in the slightest.

In Libya, it might be different. Clearly identifiable columns of government forces trailing along the few passable roads along the coast would make an easily identifiable targets. But US over-caution, in wanting to take out Libya’s negligible air defences before acting could easily involve serious mistakes and casualties. No one who saw the WikiLeaks video of the helicopter gunning down journalists in Baghdad is going take the sensitivity of the US military for granted. We do not want Benghazi destroyed to save it.

On the positive side, decisive intervention would send a clear message to Gaddafi’s forces, largely one might presume motivated by fear of reprisals from the regime that there were speedier and worse consequences than that, or indeed an eventual trip to International Criminal Court in The Hague.

As to motive, one of the reasons that Russia has been reluctant to consider a military option, apart from its own bugbears like Chechnya, has been Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s personal experience of American arrogance in times past. Moscow supported intervention against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and then as UN Ambassador he was consistently snubbed and humiliated by the US and UK as they pursued the resolutions, the sanctions, the air strikes and the rest, far beyond the intention of the resolutions or the will of the majority of the Security Council.

So, immediate surgery is needed. It would be best to find a more trusted surgeon, but if Jack the Ripper has the only scalpels, what do you do? There are two elements that could be considered in a UN resolution, both to get Russian and maybe even Chinese support, and to reassure many others around the world.

The first is to ensure a sunset clause. Any mandate for military action should have precise limitations both about the nature of operations and a time limit. It should return to the Council within days or weeks for a renewal of authority. Secondly, there is a need to ensure that there is some element of shared control over operations. After the Rwanda and Srebrenica debacles no one, including the UN Secretariat itself, would or should entrust this task to international civil servants. But a subcommittee of the Security Council, or even a revival of the long somnolent UN Military Staff Committee, of representatives of the Permanent Five members should provide some reassurance against irrational exuberance on the part of the Pentagon. The machinery is there just waiting reactivation. Indeed the Pentagon has a Military Staff Committee whose purpose is to liaise with the UN body. usun.state.gov/about/c31791.htm

Those who are opposed to intervention on principle will of course continue to do so. But the Libyan opposition, who have asked for help, are the ones who will pay the price for others’ high-mindedness. Pragmatic mandates could help.

Israel Unwilling to Apply the Same Law to Itself That It Demands Be Applied to Others

2011-03-16T16:46:00.000-04:00

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

March 2011, Pages, 28-29, 32
United Nations
Israel Unwilling to Apply the Same Law to Itself That It Demands Be Applied to Others
By Ian Williams
(http://www.mideastweb.org/unpartition.htm)
"O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!" wrote Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. For those who need a translation, he prays for the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us after seeing a louse crawl out of a young lady's hair in church.
Observers of the Middle East have long noticed Israeli insouciance to the lice swarming in that country's head.
According to the commentary from pro-Israel government sources, it is unthinkable, provocative and anti-Semitic for states like almost the whole of Latin America to recognize Palestine—until they do, of course, in which case it immediately becomes a futile and wasted gesture. Israeli hasbara (propaganda) is indeed capable of believing three impossible, and contradictory, things before breakfast. Fortunately, Israel is not trying to agitate an American attack on Latin America, so countries there have some leeway.
In particular, the polemics from some Israeli think tanks against the idea of the U.N. recognizing a Palestinian State would surely benefit from Jehovah's largesse in this matter.
Alan Baker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, for example, solemnly intoned for the benefit of foreign diplomats and press that the recognition of a Palestinian state was illegal "as set out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, relating to a capability of governance, permanent population, defined territory, and capacity to enter into relations with other states." From 1985-89, before becoming Israel's ambassador to Canada, Baker was seconded by the Israeli government to the U.N.'s Department of Legal Affairs, where he seems to have survived despite his interpretation of international law being so notably at variance with that of everyone but Israel and its supporters.
Nothwithstanding his insistence on "permanent population, defined territory, and capacity to enter into relations with other states" for Palestinian recognition, Baker's time at the U.N. clearly was not spent in the archives. When Israel was admitted to the world body in 1949, if it had any recognized frontier at all it was the boundaries of the Jewish State demarcated by the commission that recommended partition, and explicitly excluded both parts of Jerusalem. This is why, of course, not one single member state now has an embassy to Israel in that city.
Israel's admission was delayed until the conclusion of armistice agreements with its neighbors, which came at heavy cost: the assassination of U.N. representative Count Folke Bernadotte by the party led by Yitzhak Shamir, which now, of course, rules Israel.
And that state at the time had a temporarily permanent population that included a majority of Arabs, but a much less permanent population of outsiders who were deemed to be automatic citizens. It is a little too late to call for nullification of Israel's accession to the U.N., although perhaps less tardy to remind the state of the promises it made on that accession to abide by U.N. decisions.
Baker also solemnly said that any attempt to secure recognition of Palestine was a violation of Palestinian commitments under the Oslo agreements. Of course, one would have to look hard in the Oslo agreements to see where they countenanced repeated Israeli military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, assassinations and arrests of elected PA officials, blockading Gaza, and blowing up U.N. facilities.
And with hallmark chutzpah he solemnly accused the Palestinians of violating undertakings under "Article XXXI, para. 7, not to initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations." Unlike, of course, doubling the settler population since the agreements were signed. Indeed, so damning was a recent EU report on Israeli activities that European foreign ministers vetoed its publication—fruitlessly in the age of WikiLeaks since The Independent newspaper in Britain promptly leaked it. The report accused Israel of "restrictive zoning and planning, ongoing demolitions and evictions, an inequitable education policy, difficult access to health care, the inadequate provision of resources and investment," policies which it concluded had a demographic intent.
Describing the political consequences of Israeli policy in Jerusalem, the document added: "Over the past few years the changes to the city have run counter to the peace process. Attempts to exclusively emphasize the Jewish identity of the city threaten its religious diversity and radicalize the conflict, with potential regional and global repercussions."
In the face of this accurately depicted reality, Baker's breathtaking audacity, indeed mendacity, should be beyond satire. But across the world, some politicians, headline-writers and letter-writers will repeat it—and do so sincerely. After all, if one's worldview is that Israel is never wrong, then clearly reality must be ignored or adjusted accordingly.
In fact, it has been some years since I pointed out in this column that the status of Jerusalem can indeed be negotiated between the parties—but that their agreement has no validity until and unless the U.N. rescinds that partition resolution which made Jerusalem an international city under U.N. jurisdiction. It is indeed unfair and anomalous that the world's diplomats, by refusing to base embassies in Jerusalem, respect the residual authority of that resolution over the city, but forget the only legally sanctioned boundary between the Jewish and Arab states.
Baker invoked Brazil's words in the Security Council in 1967 to decry the Latin American states' recognition of Palestine "within the 1967 boundaries." He quotes them as saying, "Its acceptance does not imply that borderlines cannot be rectified as a result of an agreement freely concluded among the interested States. We keep constantly in mind that a just and lasting peace in the Middle East has necessarily to be based on secure permanent boundaries freely agreed upon and negotiated by the neighboring States."
Indeed, the pre-1967 boundaries were armistice lines without permanent legal foundation, and the Latin Americans, like the Palestinians, often invoke international law, since it is one of their defenses against neighboring bullies, notably the U.S. Everyone agrees that the 1967 boundaries are negotiable—but international law and the U.N. Charter also outlaw the acquisition of territory by force, which is why not one single country in the world has recognized Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, its legal title to the West Bank and Gaza, or even the Golan Heights.
But there is no rule saying Israel is entitled to keep the 1967 boundaries and then add more territory. Indeed, the Palestinians would be legally and morally justified (albeit at the risk of some questioning of their grip on reality) in demanding in negotiations a return to the original U.N. partition lines of 1947.
The Lake of Tiberias Strip
Also, to return to a theme the Palestinians seem to have forgotten, while the Golan Heights are indisputably occupied Syrian territory, the strip along the Lake of Tiberias is, under the Mandate boundaries, equally indisputably occupied Palestinian territory. The British and French had drawn up the boundaries and left a 10-meter strip—the beach, effectively—as part of Palestine to ensure what was then British control of the lake and the headwaters of the Jordan.
That strip was indeed allocated to the Jewish state in the U.N. partition plan, but one suspects that the Israelis would not be eager to cite that plan as definitive on the boundary front, since it would imply that their boundaries would shrink way behind the 1949 Armistice Line. In fact, to the south of Lake Tiberias the Syrians controlled more extensive Palestinian territory that was later designated a demilitarized zone. The IDF continually encroached on it, of course, but in 1949 Ralph Bunche sent a letter to Israel and Syria denying Israel's claims of sovereignty over the area to be included in the Armistice Agreement. In language that ironically foreshadowed current Israeli diplomacy he declared, "Questions of permanent boundaries, territorial sovereignty, customs, trade relations and the like must be dealt with in the ultimate peace agreement and not in the armistice agreement."
In 1967, the Israelis took the lot, and subsequently annexed the whole of the Golan Heights. But since Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, that presumably includes the Golan, and the strip of Mandatory Palestine and the DMZ, which should fall to the Palestinian State. At the very least, if the 1967 boundaries are to be negotiated, then these territories should be Palestine's to regain—or at least to be countered with equivalent concessions from the other side.
Over on the other coast, Lebanon raised the issue of U.N. help in demarcating the maritime boundary in the Mediterranean, where Beirut considers that it has claims to some of the natural gas fields Israel is claiming as its own. Indeed, a quick glance at a map suggests that the Lebanese do indeed have a point. However, the U.N. spokesman said—correctly—that Resolution 1701 only covered the U.N. delineating the land boundary between the two countries. Now Israel has become very upset because the U.N. Special Representative for Lebanon, Michael Williams has said—equally correctly—that the U.N. could help clarify the boundary.
In fact, not only are there clear legal principles, not least under the International Treaty on the Law of the Sea, for marking maritime boundaries, but there are fora, such as the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, and the International Court of Justice itself, where interpretations of those principles could be argued. Israel's distress at this suggests that it does indeed have some doubts about its legal claim to the full extent of the gas fields. As the American poet Robert Frost noted, "good fences make good neighbors." On land and at sea, it is in everyone's long term interest to agree upon boundaries—unless a party has designs to move the posts permanently.
Bringing together these issues, the Palestinians have been threatening to take two issues to the U.N. Firstly, to recognize Palestine as a state, as well over 100 U.N. members already have and secondly to condemn the illegal settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
It is a sad epithet on Obama's initial enthusiasm for building relations with the Muslim world that Washington seems to have promised Netanyahu to veto both. Perhaps in gratitude for the prime minister's compliance with oft-repeated and humiliating U.S. pleas for a mere settlement freeze?
It is a great opportunity missed. Despite its bluster, the Israeli government is worried about U.N. resolutions and not vetoing them would be a painless way for the U.S. to exercise some leverage on the recalcitrant Likudniks. If Hilary Clinton can condemn settlements, then why veto the U.N. Security Council doing the same? If President Obama can look forward to a Palestinian state, then why shouldn't the U.N. follow the wishes of a clear majority of its members?
Sadly, like Israeli legal exegesis, these are mysteries beyond understanding.

Why No Go for US No Fly

2011-03-13T18:10:00.000-04:00

Tribune 11 March 2011

Ian Williams on Libyan intervention

Some people would have picketed the Normandy Landings as imperialist intervention. (The Communist Party of the USA did actually condemn the British blockade of Nazi Germany as an imperialist attempt to starve German workers!) On the other hand, when I went to the UN legal department at the time of the belated attempts to help the Kurds after the first Gulf War, they shuffled their feet, and admitted that one of the few modern precedents they could find for “humanitarian intervention,” was Hitler’s land grabs in Czechoslovakia when he claimed to be rescuing Sudeten Germans from persecution.

When Kofi Annan persuaded the governments of the world to reinterpret the UN Charter to encompass “The Responsibility to Protect,” even supporters of intervention invoked the maxim “First do no harm,” and warned of the need to consider carefully the motives, intentions and methods of those intervening. Beware of brain surgeons with grudges and hatchets.

So, even though there are good ethical reasons to help the rebels in Libya, sadly there are few candidates qualified to do it. Obama has certainly blown it with his recent veto, which regresses US standing back to the inglory days of George W. Bush. (By the way, the UK went against the Blairite tradition and supported the resolution.)

In the face of Netanyahu’s refusal even to pause building settlements which the US coyly calls “illegitimate” but which the rest of the world unequivocally condemns as “illegal,” the US stood firm - and threatened to withdraw aid to the Palestinian victims unless they withdrew the embarrassing resolution!

One consequence is that this effectively rules out any attempt at international intervention in Libya, even to enforce a no-fly zone - at least if it involves US or NATO forces. There would be too many questions in the region about whether the jets flew for democracy or Israel, which was after all invoked by Mubarak’s security forces and the Yemeni president against protestors.

Gaddafi is still in some parallel universe where he thinks invoking Al-Qaeda gets him a free pass in Washington. This sounds like he is not quite hundred dirhams to the dinar, but put in the regional context of US support for any murderous autocrat who signs on for the anti-terrorist crusade and it is not that stupid. It might work yet, but if it doesn’t and there is any Western intervention, you can guarantee that he will invoke Israeli interference.

It is an interesting exercise to compare Obama’s recent stands, (or in some cases “prones,” might be a better word) on events in the region with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has categorically condemned settlements as illegal, and called for Mubarak to step down long before the leaders of the free world screwed their courage to the sticking place. After making the call, he returned to New York to fierce protests from the Egyptian mission to the UN, which have one gathers, been replaced with thanks and plaudits from the new regime in Cairo.

In Libya Ban called for "an immediate halt to the government's disproportionate use of force and indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets". This is welcome change from the UN’s traditional inability to distinguish between victim and perpetrator in conflicts and reflects Ban’s unprecedentedly forthright condemnations of member governments committing crimes - and, it is worth remembering, his public support for the International Criminal Career when he was running for the office with the support of the Bush administration.

Of course, Ban has no troops of his own, even if he wanted to deploy them. The UN is now sending a fact-finding mission which could restrain regime excesses in Tripoli, and one also suspects that other countries are sending less public missions to help the rebels, which one hopes are more circumspect than the arrested British SAS team. Any help has to be hands off to be successful. And the ironic result of democracy in Libya, like in Egypt, will be an elected government more anti-Imperialist than its paid-for predecessor.

Pity the Poor Shareholder!

2011-03-13T17:34:00.000-04:00

Comment: The Case For Dividends Over Buybacks
Ian Williams, Speculator Column
Inside Investor Relations | Mar. 7, 2011,

Corporate cash reserves are swelling, leading to decisions about what to do with them. The order of priorities seems to be: give executive bonuses, buy back shares, do some M&A, invest in the business and last – and least – pay dividends. Well, not quite last: repaying debt seems an even lower priority.

Are buybacks good for shareholders? Perhaps, up to a point, except there is so often an uncanny relationship between the number of shares bought back and the number distributed in stock options. We are assured – usually by people who have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid expensing stock options on their books – that buybacks are a tax-efficient way of distributing cash to shareholders. There is indeed a tax on dividends, but there is also a tax on capital gains, so if there is any water in the argument that continuous buybacks raise stock prices, then those who seek to cash in will be paying capital gains tax on this reputed increase in value.

Milo Mindbender in Catch 22 used to appropriate his comrades’ parachutes and replace them with ‘A share’. Many retirees must have felt the same falling feeling recently when they tried to draw down the shareholder value for which they forwent dividends.

It is, ultimately, all about power. When the Banks fell off Wall St, all the presidents’ men did indeed put them back together again, and bonuses at publicly traded banks hit $135 bn in 2010. The shareholders who had been told their stock would rise in value because of all those buybacks saw their dividends going to the people who crashed their portfolios almost to penny stock levels at one point.

Indeed, I was amazed at the naivety of some bankers to whom I extended therapy for not diversifying, when I discovered how many of them had kept all of their stock in, for example, CitiBank, as it performed Humpty Dumpty imitations. Cisco is a good example: it has never paid any dividends, but its share-purchase program has bought back a third of its stock – which has blipped recently, but is down some 70 percent over a decade of buybacks.

Unlike many of the companies that suffered then, Cisco makes essential products and delivered profits. It has some $25 bn net cash in its back pocket, and it is only now thinking of doling out a meager dividend – mostly, one suspects, because more portfolio managers now demand dividends from stock they hold.

So what’s in it for the corporate managements? It’s back to being all about power. Not only do buybacks conceal stock options, but they also reduce the number of stockholders, perhaps gently guiding unhappy stockholders toward the exit, consolidating control in executive-appointed boards.

But apart from votes for boards on emoluments and other decisions that the Business Roundtable has fought against tenaciously and bitterly, the buybacks disenfranchise shareholders from decisions on the most basic issue: what happens to their money. Dividends enfranchise shareholders and allow them to take the cash, spend or reinvest in the same company or elsewhere. It is, as it should be, their decision – not a CEO’s.

Wisconsin's Winning Ways

2011-03-04T08:13:00.000-05:00

Now the spirit of protest has gripped Wisconsin

As protests swept Europe and the Middle East, there was a growing feeling that Americans, in their traditional isolation, would accept anything forced down their throats. But the revolt began, and in the least expected place, in the heartland state of Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of union members occupied the state capitol to protest [...]
by Ian Williams
Tribune Friday, March 4th, 2011

As protests swept Europe and the Middle East, there was a growing feeling that Americans, in their traditional isolation, would accept anything forced down their throats. But the revolt began, and in the least expected place, in the heartland state of Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of union members occupied the state capitol to protest against and try to thwart the Republican governor’s plans to use the financial crisis to end collective bargaining.

Ironically, the protestors invoked Egypt and, in an example of international solidarity, Egyptians and many others from around the world have been calling in orders to the nearby pizzeria to feed the protestors.

Governor Scott Walker is a conservative ideologue at the sharp end of a cabal of like-minded right-wing governors. Bankers caused the overall financial crisis, but they blame the unions. Governors such as Mr Walker exacerbated financial woes by railroading through tax cuts, benefitting mostly business, which in the case of Wisconsin almost exactly match the current deficit.

Across the United States, Republican governors have made public employees and their unions a scapegoat. In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, the public employee unions offered concessions under duress, but Governor Walker made it an ideological grudge fight by trying to end all collective bargaining rights – in response to which Democratic state senators fled the state to ensure there was no quorum while unions began their occupation and protest. The governor ordered state troopers to their homes to bring them forcibly to senate session.

Mr Walker’s proposal allows the traditionally powerful and well-paid police and warders’ unions to retain their union privileges, not least since they endorsed his candidacy, but even they know that the writing is on the wall and hundreds of them joined the protest last week. It is not against public employees but workers and unions in general. Private employers in the US spend millions fighting unionisation and, for decades, laws that protect labour rights have been ignored or scaled back by successive governments.

The ideological battle lines were drawn when a journalist recorded a spoof phone call he had made to Governor Walker while posing as one of the Koch brothers – multibillionaires whose dollars have financed initiatives ranging from the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry to Tea Party protests – and are behind the current ferocious anti-union campaign. On the call, Mr Walker calmly weighs sending agents provocateur to the protest to instigate violence.

The revolt in Wisconsin has evoked unprecedented solidarity across the US. One of the most telling details to emerge is that the four conservative states which do not allow teachers to join a union have the worst education levels in the country.

No Go for No Fly..

2011-03-04T08:11:00.000-05:00

Middle East
Mar 5, 2011
Asia Times

To fly or not to fly?
By Ian Williams

So, there is an eccentric dictator, disliked by all his neighbors. When the chips came down with demonstrations across Libya, his only friends are similar arch-bombasts, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega and Cuban strongman Fidel Castro, and even their friendship seems based on a safe physical distance, a steady supply of cash and a presumed shared enemy in Washington.

With the Arab League, Organization of Islamic States, the African Union, the European Union and now even the full United Nations Security Council - including China, Russia and India - on your side against Muammar Gaddafi, surely this is a time where the

UN doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) adopted five years ago and American declarations of humanitarian intent should form a vector of forces all heading in the same direction?

Sudan is still sitting pretty after far more bloodshed in Darfur, showing the power of friendship and diplomacy, with the Arab League and African Union trying to pull the leash back on the International Criminal Court, while even Security Council members who do not accept ICC jurisdiction, like the US and India, voted to refer Libya's rulers.

And yet, despite, dare we say, bombast from Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Barack Obama administration is correctly hesitant about letting loose the dogs of war on Gaddafi, not even to enforce a no-fly zone.

The framers of the R2P principles at the UN made a bedrock principle of "First Do No Harm", and US intervention would clearly fail that test spectacularly. This is sad. Yet the resistance in Libya deserves, and might even need support. Indeed rather than physical intervention, a clear threat that it was possible and likely would give second thoughts to small groups of Gaddafi loyalists who must already have that sinking feeling of going down with a mad captain heading straight for the White Whale.

Although the present juncture of events in the Arab world was then unthinkable, or at least unforeseen, a year ago, Obama might have been able to get away with it then. His outreach to Muslims with speeches in Cairo and Istanbul added to the general feeling of euphoria that a black American with a Muslim middle name and an African surname had been elected president was enough, and what is more, his seemed to be the first administration since George H W Bush to confront Israel on settlements and peace.

Since then a lot of water has flowed - backwards - under the bridge. While he maintained some pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about settlements, he had a chance, but the revelation that the only sanctions threatened were a cut off of aid to the victim - the Palestinians, unless they knuckled under, showed a reversion to Clintonian, indeed Bush politics.

The first veto, of a resolution actually stating US views on Israeli settlements (if we elide the weaselly distinction between "Illegitimate" and "illegal"), starkly revealed US isolation and choices. It had 130 sponsors and every US ally on the Security Council voted for it. The fervor with which Washington tried to head off the vote shows they knew the risks they were taking, but nothing explains why they thought it was worthwhile.

We can see the potential as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh refers to the protesters in his country as American and Israeli agents. It is nonsense, but he knows that it would be a potent objection if he could make it stick. The riots across the Arab world are not about Israel and Palestine, they are about food, democracy and many other pressing domestic issues.

But polls have shown that Arabs do feel strongly about the humiliation of their Palestinian brethren by Israel. And instead of biddable and buyable kleptocrats, Washington now has to worry about the views of the Arab electorate for the first time. They might not want to go to war against Israel: but they certainly will not countenance being bases for a war for Israel, or even the US, against yet another Arab country.

Even more broadly, after Iraq, for which British premier Tony Blair claimed humanitarian reasons when the weapons of mass destruction went missing, there is no way that the US could repeat a Kosovo operation without a UN mandate - which the US is almost certainly not going to get.

In addition to traditional Russian suspicion of US motives, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has memories. He was UN ambassador when Moscow extended the hand of cooperation over the first Iraq war in 1991 - and he feels quite rightly betrayed. Russia voted for sanctions - and saw them maintained for a decade after their declared original purpose of liberating Kuwait had been achieved. He saw UN measures to help the Kurds against the Ba'athist regime expanded to include a no-fly zone over the whole country, and once again maintained for a decade with no explicit UN authorization.

Now that the US is looking and sounding like the old-style US administrations, he is not cutting them any slack. There was a sound "nyet" to any suggestion of military action in the resolution.

In fact, he is saving the US from itself. After Obama's first veto he has reverted to being just another US commander-in-chief, and there are many people in the region who would ask whether those jets were flying for democracy or Israel - a question with extra force since many of those who are advocating it were much less keen to lend support to Egyptians ousting Hosni Mubarak, let alone the king of Bahrain.

Even Gaddafi, who eccentrically blames al-Qaeda as if this will win him support from Washington, is likely to raise the Israel specter if the US Air Force flies in. Even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a clear US surrogate is incompatible.

However, rather than the US, a threat of Turkish, or Egyptian intervention or interdiction of the Libyan military might overcome many of the legitimate actions, and indeed would encourage the rebels while stripping Gaddafi of the last of his crew so he could go down without taking the ship with him.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

The end of the end of history
Mar 4

Goldstone again

2011-03-01T12:36:00.000-05:00

This week’s Catskill Review of Books, on WJFF 90.5 FM or streaming on http://www.WJFFradio.org/, features Ian Williams talking to Lizzy Ratner, one of the editors of Nation Book’s edition of the Goldstone Report, about how the book shows the effect of Justice Goldstone’s report on him personally, as well how people worldwide see Operation Cast Lead, the attack on Gaza.

http://www.wjffradio.org/parchive/xml/bookreview.xml 

Ending with a Whimper

2011-03-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

Obama Surrenders on Settlements

By Ian Williams, March 1, 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus

The recent U.S. veto of a UN Security Council resolution denouncing Israel's settlement policy is a tragicomic way for the Obama administration to abandon its claim to global leadership. But that is what Ambassador Susan Rice’s “nay” vote on February 18 signifies. The battle for a rational foreign policy in Washington has been over for some time. This veto represents surrender.

In George W. Bush’s days, such a veto would have been much less fraught. No one would have expected any better from that administration. And the erosion of U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic leverage, although underway, had not been made manifest. In those days, the United States did not pretend to care what the rest of the world thought, and there was even less that anyone else could do about it.

How things have changed! The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might not represent defeat but they are Pyrrhic victories at best, with huge military, financial, and political costs. At the same time, the self-inflicted financial disaster has certainly dulled the luster of the U.S. economic model as the U.S. global position is crumbling BRIC by BRIC.

Across the Middle East, popular uprisings are removing the kleptocrats whose compliance with U.S. policy could be bought. They are also empowering a citizenry whose visceral reaction to U.S. support of Israel is on a par with African reaction to U.S. backing of South Africa’s former Apartheid regime. Indeed, the ouster of Mubarak removed one of the main U.S. levers on the Palestinians. Although Obama did not go to the aid of his ally, his hesitation, influenced by pro-Israeli interests, hardly garnered much street credibility in the region.

This veto also dramatically overturns the pledges that Obama made in his Cairo and Istanbul speeches about a renewed relationship with the Arabs and Muslims in the region. It not only abandons the Palestinians, it also abandons those Israelis who had been fighting for a peace settlement and the growing number of American Jews who have been combating Likudnik belligerence.
U.S. and Israel Isolated

The United States defied no fewer than 130 nations who had sponsored the resolution. Those voting for it included France, India, Germany, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and even Colombia. Given its desperate attempts to avert the resolution, the administration cannot claim ignorance of the significance of the vote or, indeed, the consequences of the veto.

The force with which UN Ambassador Rice attacked the Israeli settlement policy in her explanation of the U.S. vote was perhaps designed to mitigate the international effect of the veto. But it did nothing for U.S. standing, since it simply highlighted the surrender to Netanyahu, who ignored Rice’s stern admonitory statement with the same insouciance that he has brushed off Obama’s pleas. For U.S. friends and allies, the veto sent a strong message that Washington would ignore their wishes and interests when tweaked by a powerful domestic lobby – and that U.S. concern for democracy and international law does not extend to itself or Israel.

The veto also reveals how much the Obama administration's Middle Eastern policy reflects the influence of the former Clinton administration. At that time, the United States shifted from considering settlements “illegal” to labeling them “unhelpful.” Also under Clinton, the United States abandoned support of international law to state that the way forward for Israeli-Palestinian peace must be by “bilateral negotiations.” After such negotiations in Oslo, Israel achieved the normalization of relations with much of the Arab, Islamic, and non-aligned world, and built settlements regardless. Palestinians gave up tangible international diplomatic leverage in return for an interminable process, a road map folded into a Mobius strip that circled around endlessly.

With most Palestinians realizing the inefficacy of armed resistance, the PLO began to build its last line of defense: international law. The Palestinian mission to the UN emphasized the corpus of UN decisions and international conventions against the occupation and the settlements. The parties to the Fourth Geneva convention, the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, all venues where the United States had no veto, reaffirmed the Palestinian position.

Israel was deeply concerned by such moves. That is why, prodded by Israel, the Clinton administration composed the mantra now being recited by Obama’s team, that in effect, international law could and should be disregarded, and the Palestinians should cut a deal. Palestinian leaders have consistently pretended that the United States was an honest broker, even as Washington kept strong-arming them into more and more concessions. Between the veto and the WikiLeaks revelations, they can no longer pretend that this is so.
Wider Consequences

In the wake of the UN vote, the Palestinians will likely mount a more vigorous campaign for world public opinion, which will throw Washington’s subservience to Israeli interests into greater relief. At the UN, speaker after speaker, even the British, looked forward to welcoming Palestine as a member state by this September. In a polite way, U.S. allies were throwing down the gauntlet for another confrontation with Washington.

Israel, meanwhile, finds itself in a more fragile position. If it rejects the new Palestinian state, it will be much more vulnerable to calls for international sanctions, boycotts, and divestments. Significantly, the EU is a much more significant trading partner than the United States, and European publics are significantly more inclined to such measures. So, European politicians will find themselves squeezed between pressure from the public to further isolate Israel and pressure from the United States to back off. After the flotilla conflict with Turkey, Israel has lost whatever friends it has in the Muslim world. There is little prospect of Arab forces marching on Tel Aviv, but clearly the peace is about to get even colder, with less cooperation on policing the border between Gaza and Egypt and even more pressure for a regional nuclear free zone.

The Palestinians can, and very likely will, take up other options to isolate the United States and Israel. It could reconvene the meeting of signatories to the Geneva Convention, or more tellingly, it could reconvene the Emergency General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution that the United States moved to bypass the Soviet veto during the Korean War. That session is currently adjourned, but it would once again emphasize the U.S. isolation.

The more the United States is isolated in its unqualified defense of Israel, the less amenable governments in the region will be to cooperation with Washington, except when it clearly meets their own interests. The future of U.S. military bases in the region – in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait – will for instance become more tenuous. On a wider level, Obama has lost much of the ground for public diplomacy he had seized when he replaced George W. Bush.

The veto – combined with the tepid and belated response to Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain – has also complicated U.S. response to the emerging civil war in Libya. Gaddafi’s regional unpopularity would likely ensure some local cooperation in enforcing a no-fly zone, for instance. But even if it went ahead, it would leave the world with the big question: why does the United States fly to stop hundreds of Libyans being killed from the air, but supplies the planes, drones, bombs, and shells for Israel to kill a thousand Palestinians? Regional public opinion, now politically important, is as likely to assume that U.S. sorties against Libya were flown on behalf of Israel as much as to support Libyan protestors.

Fallen Figleaf- the US veto of its own policy.

2011-02-18T16:37:00.004-05:00

Washington Draws a Line in the Sand on Settlements -- With Palestine
By Ian Williams, February 18, 2011 FPIF

It’s tough being a naked superpower when the caterpillars munch away your fig leaf.

In real terms it makes Chamberlain at Munich look like a stickler for principle. The President and Secretary of State of the United States have been pleading and pressuring over Israeli settlements, which Washington opposes.

But who are they pleading with? Who are they cajoling and pressuring? Not the Israeli president building the settlements, but President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, to withdraw the Security Council resolution which expresses the sentiment of the entire world -- including the US -- that the settlements are illegal. In real terms it makes Chamberlain at Munich look like a stickler for principle.

To head off this disastrous dilemma heading to impale its Middle Eastern policy, the US had drafted an ineffectual and in any case non-binding statement that admitted to the “illegitimacy” of settlements in the West Bank, but spent more space condemning ineffectual rocket attacks from Gaza.

But Abbas had no option but to go ahead and put the resolution to the vote. It won 14 to one, with US Ambassador Susan Rice casting a veto.

The administration was scared that it would either be forced to support its own policy in the Security Council and thus risk an excreta tempest from AIPAC -- or that it would veto a resolution that it agrees with and humiliate itself in front of the rest of world, including its real allies in NATO.

“We reject in the strongest terms possible the legitimacy of the continued settlement building,” inveighed Rice, while ferociously condemning them as “folly,” bad for Israel as well. However that just reinforced the international message that the Israeli tail was wagging the American dog to vote against its own policy.

A positive vote would have sent a serious signal to Netanyahu not to trifle with his only protector and major paymaster. However, all Netanyahu has had to do is to refer to the even more crazed ideologues who surround him, who will not hear of “concessions” on settlements. But poor Abbas, beleaguered by WikiLeaks showing him trying to kill the Goldstone Report under US pressure and showing what most Palestinians regard as an overflexible, indeed supine, negotiating posture in the peace talks, is assumed not to have a domestic constituency he has to care for.

One would have thought that after Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain, this administration would have picked up some hints about diplomacy, not least that diktats and dollars to proxy dictators does not make for stable relationships. But the world’s rapidly attenuating super power was reduced to covering for a coalition of deranged rabbis, likudnik-inclined millionaires, Neocons and evangelical Christian Zionists in the UN Security Council.

It did so in front of a Security Council packed with most of the General Assembly members who have expressed their negative views on settlement over and over again to vote on a resolution sponsored by a wide geographical and ideological range of states -- including many EU and NATO members. The resolution was moved by Lebanon, whose ambassador eschewed inflammatory rhetoric and merely cited successive Security Council resolutions, World Court opinions and Geneva Conventions on the issue not to mention Israel’s own commitments under the Quartet’s “Road Map.”

Tip O’Neill’s dictum “All politics is local” is not always true. For a start, polls show that most American Jews oppose Netanyahu and his settlement policy. But more cogently, the masses of Arab citizens on the streets of their rapidly reforming countries bitterly oppose the settlements, and will draw their own conclusions from the Obama policy.

To stop AIPAC huffing and puffing, the Obama administration is about to lose Egypt, Tunisia and much of the rest of the Middle East and erase the last faint hopes of the region that the US can in any way give genuine support to democracy or international law. The disillusionment is going to be all the more profound because of the betrayal of the spirit of Obama’s early speeches in Istanbul and Cairo. Instead of sending serious signal to Netanyahu not to trifle with your only protector, he is now confirmed in his obduracy. And Arabs and other world citizens are even more convinced of US duplicity.

Obama also has yet another crisis coming. The UK, on behalf of France and Germany as well, promised to do all it could to welcome Palestine as a UN member by this September, thereby pushing yet another hot button for AIPAC -- and thus the administration.

Centenary of Bonzo's Co-Star

2011-02-14T09:56:00.000-05:00

Ian Williams

Not just gonzos still carry a torch for Bonzo star
by Ian Williams
Tribune, February 11th, 2011

Not since Lenin has there been such a cult. They named Washington’s national airport after Ronald Reagan even while he was alive, but at least there isn’t a Capitol Hill mausoleum enshrining the pickled president. But then, looking at him while he was alive, one sometimes suspected that the embalmers began their work in vivo. As for the airport, there is a macabre synergy in naming an airport after a third-rate actor who hated government and had striking air traffic controllers arrested and manacled.

For many, an unsurprising news announcement was the one that, in American media at least, solemnly shared the news that Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s four years after he left the White House. One of his sons shares the more general apprehension that the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger was already suffering from it during his first term.

Nonetheless, across the United States this week, distinguished mainstream commentators, including, sadly, Barack Obama, are celebrating the centenary of the man whose presidency killed the rising prosperity of the post-war years, and whose ideologically-based extravagances are still unwinding in record deficits and the steady collapse of US power and prestige.

One only has to look at two American industries whose growth is in inverse proportion to American industry. The first is the prison complex. When he took office, the incarceration rate was 246 per 100,000 people. When he finished his second term it was on the way to doubling to 435. But like much of his baleful legacy, the trends that he started continue: the United States now has the highest rate in the world, at 751.

His other contribution to growth was to the military industrial complex his predecessor Dwight D Eisenhower identified. He doubled defence spending while in office, from $167 million to $343 billion and the trajectory he launched continues with over $930 billion this year budget. The other graphs to watch are those of average earnings of poor and working Americans, which have been effectively static since his election, and those of the richest Americans which have been steadily soaring ever since, as have the personal debts of working people. Pledged to reduce taxes, he paid the for arms bills and the tax cuts with massive borrowing that ran the national debt up to 50 per cent of gross domestic product. At the same time, Reagan espoused a visceral anti-government ideology (that did not apply to prisons, the police or the military) which famously deemed ketchup to count as a vegetable for school meals.

His policies crashed the US economy the way Margaret Thatcher did to Britain’s. And after the lean years of contraction, the recovery was counted as vindication of the policies that caused the original disaster. The deregulation over which he presided gave the US what was at the time the world’s biggest financial scandal, the $160 billion Savings & Loans debacle. It then went on, ever onwards and upwards, to our current derivatives armageddon. After his departure, Americans were in no doubt about his record. In 1992, fewer than a quarter of Americans thought they were better off after his two terms, while 48 per cent of them viewed him unfavorably, compared with 40 per who were prepared to give him a break.

It is unfair to blame Reagan himself. He was an affable duffer, who sincerely believed in the lines that the cabal around him wrote. That script tapped deep into the national ethos, in the same way that the Tea Party does. Sarah Palin, who does not have the excuse of Alzheimer’s for her ignorance, showed what a deep reservoir of simplicity and reflexive conservative stupidity there is to tap. But if any Brits feel superior, please explain the statue of the co-star of Bedtime for Bonzo now standing in Grosvenor Square.

Word from the Sphinx

2011-02-11T16:51:00.001-05:00

FPIF - 13 February 2010
Ordinary Egyptians Have Little to Show for U.S. Military Aid to Egypt
Ian Williams

It was fairly clear that the military would act after Mubarak’s and Suleiman’s ineptly provocative speeches. The motives for forcing him out were almost certainly multi-faceted - and indeed confused. Certainly the gnomic communiques from the Supreme Army Council could have been drafted by the Sphinx for their calculated obscurity.

On the side of pragmatic self-interest, the senior commanders of the military have had a good deal out of the regime, with profits and jobs in all the military-related and controlled industries, not to mention the prestige and other perquisites of power. The senior commanders seem to have calculated that their only chance of keeping their position and privileges was to go with the flow and tell Mubarak to leave.

If they had ordered the army against the protestors they faced a real problem. Would the conscripts and junior officers follow orders and move against their fellow citizens? Mubarak’s announcement of his departure by September and his other concessions profoundly reduced the chances of the military personnel risking their lives, not to mention their honor, for a self-admitted lost cause.

So now the issue is one for delicate compromises. The opposition leaders and the military have to negotiate the proportions of power sharing. The high command will be trying to maintain its power, but their position is weakened: if they are too greedy, then they have to think of the tens of millions who took to the streets and are now confirmed in their potential power. In addition, much of the military does indeed share the sentiments of the protestors, and so their commanders are playing with a weak hand.

The transition will be difficult. Washington has seen it in terms of a move from one amenable strong leader to another more acceptable but equally amenable one. The EU and US preference for Omar Suleiman, a secret policeman in cahoots with what most Egyptians regard as inimical powers, demonstrates how out of touch they are. They have looked at opposition leaders such as Mohammed El-Baradei as potential strongmen and found them wanting.

But that is precisely their attraction. El-Baradei, or retiring Arab League ambassador Amr ElMousa, should be considered as conveners, whose absence from domestic politics and wrangling could make them impartial and consensual spokesmen. El-Baradei showed his integrity under pressure from the UN and others and gained stature, which is perhaps why some of the chattering classes in Washington, who have never forgiven him for that, have been so eager to suggest his unpopularity.

The last thing Egypt wants is a presidential system concentrating power in one person. To replace decades of autocracy will take a parliamentary consensual system that reflects the views of the disparate masses and interests who rallied to overthrow the President - and as they showed the last two days - the regime.

Anyone who knows Egyptians knows their deep interest in politics and international affairs and the evidence of the last weeks certainly indicates they will not revert to becoming passive subjects again.

What are the international repercussions? Washington and the West will now have to take account of the wishes of the Egyptian people rather than rely upon a bribed autocracy. That certainly should reduce the perennial tendency to see the region through Israeli eyes.

It is unlikely that anyone wants to rip up the peace treaty with Israel. There will be no military assault on Israel. But a government in Cairo looking over its shoulder at a newly enfranchised and staunchly patriotic people is unlikely to enforce the blockade against Gaza, or to help Western efforts to frustrate Hamas/Fateh reconciliation. That degree of security cooperation is almost certainly over and the unpopular sales of Egyptian natural gas to Israel will likely be called into question.

But even the US-Egyptian alliance will need much more work and attention than sending a large annual check to the army. Ordinary Egyptians have seen little practical benefit from alleged American friendship, which has taken the form of supporting their oppressors and to some extent impinging on their patriotism by enforcing cooperation with Israel.

In a situation of diminished American power, Washington’s best bet is to sit on the sidelines and applaud, unless it makes it clear that the money to the military stops immediately if it does not reflect the legitimacy established by the street.

One significant and practical gesture would be cooperation in tracking down and returning to the new government the money that Mubarak and his colleagues have looted over the decades.

For the future, Obama needs some more public diplomacy. In the long term, the military aid has to be diverted to civilian uses, and even expanded. But an Obama who does stand up to Netanyahu over settlements is unlikely to have much standing in front of the Arab street - as will be reinforced in the other autocratic dominoes that might topple.

Any suggestion that the US will only welcome a democratically elected regime if it hews to American preconceptions about Israel, or that its welcome will be tempered if Islamic parties are represented in the new government, is guaranteed to be counterproductive.

Voluntary Slavery

2011-02-09T12:21:00.001-05:00

The Huffington Post is emblematic of the British Conservative Party's
Big Society project. You do the work for free, and we will rake in the money.
Arianna Huffington and her partners are selling the title for $315 million.

I was asked a long time ago if I'd like to write for the Huffington Post, and lost interest as soon as my enquiries about the rates paid produced the answer that it was all done for the cause.

The numerous, and often accomplished, contributors were paid nothing. And nor will they get any share of that $315 million value that they created. I do hope they will switch off their word processors together, at once.

I remember Arianna Stassinopolopous when she was a social climbing Cambridge graduate who rode to talk show fame on the back of close relationship with rebarbative commentator Bernard Levin. And then she disappeared without trace only to resurface in California as devoted spouse and soulmate of Michael Huffington, the eccentric super-rich, super-conservative who after the divorce admitted to being bisexual. His one good deed was to demonstrate that the USA was not a completely locked down plutocracy, since his Senate bid failed despite massive expenditures on his (and her part).

I next came across her at, of all things, a Nation, alleged teach-in on Kosovo intervention in 1999. As I elaborated later, I could not help wondering to what extent the battles were tribal for her. Serbs, like Greeks, were Orthodox and good, while Kosovars were Muslim and hence bad (a view expressed with even more overt Islamophobic tendencies by Tom Hayden at the event.) She continued in her Milosevic apologist role for some time afterwards, but it was still difficult to sort out her politics, since after all people from the Chetniks and Cato Institute to Noam Chomsky acolytes (and the Nation ) agreed with her.

But then she seemed to be doing good work for a decade or so, despite almost pioneering a new literary form, the blook a bound and printed collection of blogs. I must confess to some doubts re-emerging when Rupert Murdoch turned up at her blook launch party in New York later.

And now we have AOL, whose shares are heading to the buggy whip industry level paying inflated sums in the hope that her name will bring back glory and readers.
But will the liberally inclined readership who were desperate for lively non-Fox news still come. Will those contributors keep lending their free labour for the sake of AOL executive bonuses and Arianna's glory, not least since in her public pronouncements, she seems to be regretting her leftist flirtations. Almost simultaneously, the snotty nosed supercilious editorialists at the Economists were marveling that British middle class volunteers in the national forests expressed unwillingness to carry on volunteering if the Tory government privatized them. They could not see that working for free to make someone else rich is a form of voluntary servitude, an historically rare condition - except for the Huffington Post

Somehow, I cannot help but think that this necrophiliac coupling will see both participants shuffling off this mortal coil.

"http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/17/kosovo"

Pray for Democracy - But Not Just Yet...

2011-02-03T11:09:00.000-05:00

Fear of the Muslim Brotherhood Trumps Western Wishes for Democracy in Egypt

By Ian Williams, February 3, 2011 FPIF

Muslim Brotherhood(Pictured: The Muslim Brotherhood.)

It might suit such pundits as Blair, Bolton and Netanyahu to pretend that Egyptians are too uneducated and ignorant to be trusted with democracy, but I would put my money on the political literacy of the Egyptians en masse over Americans any day.

One cannot help but suspect that what they mean by “ignorant” is that they support the Palestinians. That is not to say that they necessarily want to rush to war, but certainly the unholy tradeoffs in enforcing the blockade on Gaza are deeply unpopular. The rising was certainly inspired by domestic concerns, economic and democratic, but the delegitimizing effect of pro-Israeli support for the regime should not be underestimated, not least inside the Army, which after all has fought Israel repeatedly.

That is not to say a future regime would declare war or rip up Camp David. Rather it would probably emulate Turkey, and maintain polite but chilly relations with Israel. Cairo will be less biddable, whether from Israel or the US. While Bolton, a deep harborer of grudges, reviles Mohamed El Baradei, it is worth remembering that the present government, along with him, and indeed putative rival Amr Al-Moussa, are all on the record as wanting Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Who can oppose a call for democracy? Well, John Bolton, Peres and Netanyahu can, not to mention Tony Blair, who described Mubarak as “immensely courageous, and a force for good,” even as his mercenary thugs brought blood and mayhem to the streets of Cairo. And of course the time-expired President of Palestine, Mohamed Abbas.

The outright support of Netanyahu and his friends for the alleged stability of the Mubarak regime certainly tempers the enthusiasm of many others in the chattering classes in the US, for toppling the regime in Cairo, including the Obama administration. Ironically their various pronouncements in favor of Mubarak and his anointed deputy Omar Suleiman are very effective stakes through the heart of the regime.

However, Netanyahu, Peres and Blair are following a long tradition of American policy towards Egypt that has for long time been effectively amoral, with no ethical dimension at all. It did not care what happened to Egyptians as long their government did what it was told.

Consistently, from Sandy Berger and Clinton and even before, democracy has been sidelined as a US policy in the Arab world. Originally, any Arab regime that did not threaten Israel had a free pass for torture and repression, but after 9-11, Muslims, Arabs, terrorists all became blurred in the popular mind – and even in Washington policy-making circles.

So for Egypt, democracy would all be fine, if there weren’t a strong chance that the Muslim Brothers would be elected and at least share power. People who are quite happy to respect Catholic dominated Christian Democrats across Europe, rabbi-led parties in Israel, and dare one add, Evangelical dominated Republicans in the US, confess to frissons of fear at the thought that the Muslim Brotherhood will play a large part in a new reformed Egyptian administration.

Just as everybody knows that every Catholic is an inquisitor waiting with a box of matches next to the stake, viscerally, Americans know every Muslim is a terrorist. Fortunately, the images of the peaceful, articulate and passionate demonstrators in Tahrir Square belied that.

It is an ironic comment on consistently failed US policy that if Washington had not stopped the funding for the Aswan Dam under Nasser, the total of $35 billion in military aid, which began as a bribe to wean Cairo away from the Soviets, might have been unnecessary, let alone if the US had maintained its principles. Remember, back in 1956, the US had threatened to crash the currencies of its two biggest allies, Britain and France, and Israel if the three conspirators did not pull out from the Sinai they had just occupied.

Of course the US could withhold aid to Egypt if it elected a new government that was, shall we say, less amenable to Israeli wishes. However, since most of this money is immediately recycled to American weapons makers and does not impinge on ordinary citizens, it is hardly a potent threat to the nation. But if Obama is serious about democratization, he could mention the possibility of stopping the dollars flowing to the Egyptian high command who along with Mubarak, are the major beneficiaries of this largesse.

In fact, there is some doubt whether the bulk of the Army would actually obey orders to move against the demonstrators. Its popular legitimacy derives from its wars against invaders, which is somewhat challenged when the President is endorsed by those who most Egyptians, military and civilian see as the enemy. Perhaps the most potent images which demoralized the police and security forces and deprived them and the regime of legitimacy were the water cannons deployed against praying demonstrators.

The absence of the uniformed security forces and indeed their visible reluctance to stand their ground against demonstrators suggests that demoralization has already set in, while the unleashing of paid thugs that we have seen is reminiscent of the last days of the Indonesians in East Timor, Ceausescu in Romania and other crumbling regimes.

Indeed Mubarak might want to check over the reports of the downfall of the Romanian dictator, where it was the army that decided, under cover of popular protest, the best way to calm things down was to put him in front of kangaroo court and shoot him.

Obama cannot claim non-interference. Washington’s financial, military and diplomatic support for Mubarak are already an intervention. A clear signal that it was all ending could motivate the armed forces leaders to seek a Mubarak-free accommodation with the opposition and ensure an orderly transition to democracy.

Do Unto Others..

2011-02-01T10:39:00.000-05:00

United Nations Report: From Palestine to Western Sahara, Double Standards and Hypocrisies

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
January/February 2011, Pages 27-28

United Nations Report
From Palestine to Western Sahara, Double Standards and Hypocrisies
By Ian Williams

It's time for the annual sorting out of the sheep from the goats at the United Nations, and even without the benefit of WikiLeaks we can see on whom the U.S. and Israel have been leaning. In the yearly series of votes on Middle Eastern issues the "nay" votes have come from the U.S, Israel and Canada—which is torn between being a province of Israel or the U.S. on this issue—and a slightly variant assortment of Pacific Islands, helped along by the biggest Pacific Island of all, Australia, whose Labor government has mostly maintained the pro-Israel stance of its Conservative predecessor.

But then, Australia abstained on illegal Jerusalem settlements with Canada voting to express "grave concern"—but then again, Canada voted against the main resolution on the two-state solution with Australia abstaining, so maybe they are colluding in some bad cop, not-so-bad cop routine. Perhaps it's time for those Middle Eastern countries who buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Australian mutton to reconsider their purchases and persuade voters Down Under that their government's policy does in fact have a price.

The UK seems to have maintained some principles and supported the resolutions in defiance of Big Brother in Washington, except where the consensual EU position—enabling a few Israel and U.S. acolytes to hold the whole group hostage—led the 50-plus EU states and hangers on to abstain on issues like the Golan Heights.

Interestingly, in this minor epidemic of pandering, not one country spoke to defend Israeli annexations or settlement building. Typically, for example, "Canada remained concerned about the number of resolutions that singled out Israel, as well as the disproportionate focus placed on the Middle East."

Bearing in mind the disproportionate amount of effort Ottawa spends genuflecting to Canada's Israel lobby, this is almost amusing, but the various abstainers and naysayers used such excuses to explain away their betrayal of the principles of international law, when what they really meant was that they did not want to upset the American dog and its wagging Israeli tail.

The U.S. for its part was "disheartened to see unbalanced resolutions that failed to ask for the difficult steps required by both sides." Between the lines, that echoed the call from the Israeli delegate Meron Reuben, who complained that the resolutions' effect was that "instead of working to bring the parties together in meaningful negotiations and preparing the Palestinians to make the tough choices that will be required to reach an agreement, this distinguished forum engages in the same ritual condemnation of Israel, feeding Palestinian notions of victimhood."

"Balance," of course, depends on where the pivot is placed. One suspects that Reuben would not be happy with a Palestinian offer to withdraw its forces from Israeli territory in return for a similar Israeli withdrawal.

Those coded phrases of "difficult steps" and "tough choices" are diplo-speak for the victim paying blackmail to the thief in order to get a tiny portion of the loot back.

Admittedly, one U.S. delegate claimed that Washington was "committed to working with parties to achieve Arab-Israeli peace, including a two-state solution to the conflict. Through good faith negotiations, the Palestinian goal of an independent state along 1967 lines, and a Jewish state with secure borders, could be realized." One wonders how much devil there is in the details of "along 1967 lines," and whether the Obama administration has bothered to parse the phrase with the Israeli government.

Equally disingenuously, "The United States saw no contradiction between support of the Palestinians and support for Israelis. The United States had given an additional $150 million to the Palestinian Authority, for a total of $225 million for the year. In addition, the United States was the single largest donor to UNRWA, with $237.8 million to date in 2010," according to the American diplomat.

Once again balance reared its ugly pivot. Any objective observer would notice some discrepancy between around half a billion for an impoverished and repressed people, weigh it in the balance and find it wanting when compared with the billions of dollars of direct aid and 40 years of veto protection from international action for the high-tech, prosperous military power doing the repressing.

For a more balanced approach one can look at the report of the Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry into the Gaza Flotilla which hopes for "swift action" by the government of Israel, because, it concludes, "this will go a long way to reversing the regrettable reputation which that country has for impunity and intransigence in international affairs. It will also assist those who genuinely sympathize with their situation to support them without being stigmatized."

That is also an oblique message to the U.S., Canada, Australia and the assorted Pacific atolls who uncritically support Israel, when, the fact-finding mission concludes, "the conduct of the Israeli military and other personnel toward the flotilla passengers was not only disproportionate to the occasion but demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted a grave violation of human rights law and international humanitarian law."

The mission based its findings in part on the autopsy reports on the slain Turks—and, lest it be forgotten, one American, who showed clear signs of being shot dead at close range when already wounded and incapacitated. The problem is disproportionate violence from the Israeli military, not disproportionate attention from the United Nations.
Double Standards

There is indeed a point to be made about double standards, however. The Western Sahara issue remains bogged down in the sand, with France vigorously backing Morocco, and London and Washington in varying degrees going along with it. At the U.N. Decolonization Committee in New York, pro-Moroccan petitioners expressed their concern about the Polisario Front's lack of commitment to human rights. They rather had their case spoiled, however, by the Moroccan police assault on 20,000 encamped protesters near Layoune, the territory's capital. Former American diplomat Christopher Ross, the U.N.'s special representative, hosted talks in New York which ended in their customarily inconclusive way.

Although the local partners are different, the Palestinian and Western Sahara issues are essentially similar. There is a body of international law and resolutions which clearly state that the occupying power should stop occupying and allow self-determination in the territories in question. In the case of Western Sahara, the U.N. set up under Security Council mandate an operation to hold a referendum of the Sahrawi population and Morocco refused to allow it to go ahead, even though it had originally agreed.

Indeed, one could almost suspect that Israel's inspiration for its separation wall, ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice, was the great Sand Berm that Morocco built across Western Sahara.

There might well be arguments about the democratic credentials of Polisario, as indeed there are about Moroccan behavior in its own territory and the occupied territory. But the core of the issue is the referendum that Rabat refuses to allow. All else is, as they say, commentary—although the French-initiated refusal to countenance a human rights monitoring component of MINURSO, the U.N. mission, is as eloquent as it is shameful for France as it is for the U.S. and UK for their connivance.

In the end, neither Morocco nor Israel is going to move without significant external pressure—which, as we know all too well, has not been forthcoming. Indeed, many of those countries so vigorous in defense of international law and U.N. resolutions against Israel are tacitly supporting Morocco, and thus giving moral support to cries of double standards by Israel supporters. Perhaps fortunately, since Israel and Morocco enjoy a long-standing relationship apart from the kingdom's occasional pan-Arab posturing, Israel's supporters do not exploit the analogy more.

Another indication that supporting Palestine in votes is not necessarily a qualification for saintliness is the vote on "Vilification of Religions," which for once the West is right to oppose. Previously about "Defamation" of religions, and conceived to pander to Islamist sentiments at home, this resolution ignores freedom of speech and thought, and also a basic point of theology. Drafted by, of course, Morocco, it calls for "adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from vilification of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general."

Where human rights advocates have problems is that many of the countries that fail to guarantee human rights to individuals are pushing for legal protections for abstractions—i.e., religions. Jews, Muslims and Christians each have different interpretations of their prophets. Is a Muslim in a European country "defaming" Christianity by denying the divinity of Christ? Are Jews and Christians "defaming" Islam by denying the role of the Prophet? Indeed are Protestants defaming Catholicism by refusing to accept the infallibility of the pope? These are dangerous questions, not easily answered by either legislation or U.N. resolutions.

Existing laws and resolutions already offer protection to people who hold those beliefs, no matter how absurd they might appear to others who do not share them, but the form of the "Vilification" resolution certainly does more to fan the flames of the very real Islamophobia in the West by implying Islamic intolerance. The committee vote of 76 countries in favor, 64 against and 42 abstentions is narrowing—with, of course, hypocrisy all around. China, Russia and North Korea all voted for it, presumably with their fingers crossed behind their backs, while Israel, on the way to being a rabbinocracy, voted against. Canada and other Western countries voted against, even though they have laws on their books against blasphemy—which, of course, tend to be devoted to protecting Christianity rather than Islam, which allows Islamic countries to score points.

Looking at this round up of hypocrisy and double standards returns one to the basic and much ignored principle of human affairs: "Do unto others as you would have them to do you." It should be in the U.N. Charter.

UN Again in the Crosshairs

2011-01-28T11:30:00.000-05:00

UN Again in the Crosshairs
Foreign Policy in Focus

By Ian Williams, January 28, 2011
The UN’s mythical black helicopters are back. The triumphant, reality-challenged new Republican majority in the House of Representatives imagine that they are flying in formation up the Potomac in a bid to take over the United States.

Until recently, the people who used to get so upset about the UN’s alleged plans to use their helicopters to take over America had been hunting other snarks, like the president’s birth certificate or illegal immigrants taking our jobs and going on welfare, or they'd been dressing up in 18th-century costumes at Tea Party rallies. Obama’s other sins were so absorbing that they hardly noticed when he fulfilled his predecessor’s promise and paid the UN dues on time.

But with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in charge of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a change is in the air. She has already declared her ambition to control the UN by cutting off its money supply. She said in her prepared remarks that she wants “reforms first, pay later” and plans to push legislation that “conditions our contributions - our strongest leverage - on real, sweeping reform, including moving the UN regular budget to a voluntary funding basis. That way, U.S. taxpayers can pay for the UN programs and activities that advance our interests and values, and if other countries want different things to be funded, they can pay for it themselves.” In reality, most of the $6 billion she cites goes to peacekeeping operations supported and indeed proposed by the United States, and only the tiniest proportion goes to any items that the United States has opposed.
Audience for UN-bashing

In addition to the Tea Party movement and the know-nothing movement, Ros-Lehtinen appeals to two vociferous and powerful constituencies. There’s the Cuban American lobby, which opposes the UN because Cuba is a member and because it allowed Fidel Castro, in healthier times, to come to New York to address it. Then there are the diehard Likudnik Israel supporters who think that the UN, after having partitioned Palestine and admitted Israel, is now anti-Israel. The Jerusalem Post, for example, explicitly linked payment of UN dues to the treatment of Israel.

Ros-Lehtinen actually takes positions that are often worse than those of the Israeli government. One of her donors is Irving Moskovitz, the gambling magnate who finances settlements in East Jerusalem, and she has called for the United States to defund the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, which successive Israeli governments have appreciated because, in effect, it has shifted much of the financial burden in the Occupied Territories to the international community.

Ros-Lehtinen’s actions, in opposing multilateralism, will not likely result in a political disadvantage for the Republicans. The Obama administration pays lip service to the UN and multilateral obligations. But the failure of the Democrats after two years control of the White House and Capitol Hill to ratify crucial multilateral instruments on child soldiers, land mines, or the Law of the Sea suggests that the administration’s heart was not really in it. Certainly the chances of any of these treaties passing in the balance of this presidential term are somewhat minimal.
The Broader Attack

In the past, critics have rounded on the secretary general as the symbol of the UN. Much of the fury directed at Kofi Annan followed his admission, when backed into a corner by a BBC reporter, that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. Kofi Annan was African and radiated numinous trustworthiness, which is of course why UN opponents went to such efforts to go after him personally during the “Oil For Food” imbroglio. Significantly, Ros-Lehtinen called one of the attorneys involved in the commission investigating these allegations, Robert Appleton, as a “prosecution witness” this week in her hearing on the UN.

The latest attacks on the secretary general come from Inga Brit Ahlenius, the Swedish former head of the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). Last year, Ahlenius sent a scathing but disjointed attack on Ban Ki Moon that focused largely on his refusal to authorize the appointment of Appleton as head of investigations in her office. Ban’s official reason was that Ahlenius refused to abide by UN rules designed to ensure gender balance by submitting a shortlist that included any women. Appleton’s appearance for Ros-Lehtinen certainly lends Ban’s refusal additional retrospective legitimacy. Appleton was under suspicion of being a consistent source of leaks of half-digested and ill-substantiated inquiries of the type that OIOS was notorious for.

This week in Sweden, Ahlenius released her memoirs in what appears to be an attempt to capitalize on Capitol Hill’s revived anti-UN mood and the appearance of her would-be protégé there. However, in Sweden, where she had been previously fired from a similar job in the government, Ahlenius attracted little interest from the Swedish media, and her crusading image was almost simultaneously tarnished with a report that she had stifled whistleblowers herself.
Reform Redux

Given the new climate of UN-phobia on Capitol Hill, some of Ahlenius’s accusations will be recycled as part of Ros-Lehtinen’s repetition of the perennial call for UN “reform.” Such calls are usually accompanied by the mantra of alleged “waste, mismanagement, and corruption” at the UN.

U.S. critics of the organization seem to blithely ignore the beam in their own eye to concentrate on the mote in the UN’s. Certainly over the years, the UN has wasted millions of dollars. But the United States has wasted tens of billions of dollars. The United States, for instance, admits that it cannot account for $10 billion dollars in surpluses from the UN Oil For Food Program. Calls for UN “reform” are tendentious. There is little doubt that the organization needs modernization, but that would involve revision of the Charter and the consent of other members. The critics’ definition of waste is money spent on projects that they disagree with, even if, for example, they are peacekeeping missions that the U.S. delegation has suggested or supported.

As this campaign revs up, Ros-Lehtinen and her colleagues should be challenged from the beginning on their premises. They do not want to reform the organization: they want to control it or, barring that, starve it to death.

Ian Williams, senior analyst and long time contributor to FPIF, is a New York-based author and journalist. He is currently working on a new edition of his book, The UN For Beginners.

Deadline pundit punditing on Obama's SOTU on Press TV

2011-01-27T11:29:00.000-05:00

To learn more about the issues that Obama addressed in his annual speech, Press TV conducted a phone interview with Ian Williams from Foreign Policy in Focus. Following is the transcript of the interview:

Press TV: Obama mentioned, indirectly, about the US economic decline but all the indications are that the US is currently on the decline as an economic powerhouse worldwide and that became very clear by [Chinese] President Hu Jintao's recent visit there. Do you think that he did good enough job in the speech of not only realizing this fact but relaying it to the American public?

Williams: That was a very carefully crafted speech because he was, on the one hand, playing to the old American gallery of exceptionalism: we are wonderful people, we can do it, we have potential, we can rise to the occasion and on the other hand, he was warning that decline is heading up so they have to turn around and do something about it because although the US obviously is in a far more powerless economic state that it was four or five years ago, it is still the biggest economy in the world and people still do use the dollar so it is not exactly broken yet even if it is breaking.

Otherwise, he was very careful on the issues that he missed out on. He didn't mention foreclosures; he certainly didn't mention the Israel/Palestine issue. I think a lot of what he was saying was really a careful case of entrapment for Republicans because he was taking them on the face value and very often when Americans say they want cuts in spending, they mean they want cuts in spending in things other than what I want. If cuts in spending means defense, then they are not going to like it, if cut means in their own district, they don't like they either. He was very careful in what he said and what he offered as well, he invoked the role of lobbyists and both parties are almost run by lobbyists but the Republicans far more so and has thrown the gauntlet down to them, let's simplify tax. You say you want to reduce cooperation tax, let's have a low rate of cooperation tax but make sure everybody pays it and stop exemptions into it.

So a lot of what he was saying was really a careful trap. He said let's reform Health care, but you'd better not take away people's coverage who have got cancer and all of this is a very nuance response to the slogans from the other side [Republicans].

Press TV: Moving on to the foreign policy front, he said that the Iraq war is coming to an end, but of course we have reports that say some American bases may remain in Iraq and many forces will remain in Iraq to train Iraqi forces. How accurate was what he said, especially on foreign policy front?

Williams: A lot of what he was saying was quite true, but let's say he told the truth but not the whole truth. He never said that he was against the war in Afghanistan; he said he would withdraw troops from Iraq and that he would make sure that the Taliban are beaten in Afghanistan. So, he is not breaking any promises there. The fact that it is taking so long is making it very unpopular with the American public and he has to do something about that. But there he was saying it to the Republicans because no Republican administration is going to turn around and say the war that President Bush started was wrong and you should pull out so he is on fairly safe ground. We have to remember everything, especially at this juncture, was addressing the domestic audience, it was not addressing the world at large.

Press TV: On the issue of Tunisia, he said that the US stands with the people of Tunisia. With protests being seen yesterday in Egypt as well, and we can only imagine that Mubarak's knees are now shaking in his palace, and these are all of course US allies, is it not a bit hypocritical then for him to say that the US stands with the people of Tunisia when the US for decades has stood not in fact with people of Tunisia but with the leaders of Tunisia?

Williams: Well, now it stands with the people of Tunisia. It is true as I said he was telling the truth but not the whole truth. The fact that until the day the dictator disappeared, the US was one of its most staunch supporters, he chose not to mention that and he chose not to mention Egypt and the democracy protests there. So it is usual for them mentioning items they look upon favorably and ignoring those that they don't.

In general, his foreign policy is not going to go well in the State of the Union. For example he talked about the cuts in defense budget, and I think if you examine that, he is not actually cutting the defense budget, what they are offering to do is to cut the rate of increase in the defense budget, which is a play with mathematics, which means the defense budget is still going to grow, is still far too large but they are going to trim some parts of it off, they plan for spending on useless dinosaurian defense systems that only benefit the lobbyists in the aerospace industry.

Everything he says has a different interpretation but by most standards what he has been doing is to challenge the Republicans to meet on their own grounds. You want to repeal the Healthcare bill, hey, come on then, take the insurance off those people who just got it under this bill, make sure you have the money to pay for all of the extra things that they are involved, the 130 trillion dollar extra costs. He is saying about the government, he said you are attacking the government, look at what the government has done for this country, do you really want the government to stop building roads and bridges; you really want to stop developing the science that made transistors, the Internet and all of the other things. In that sense, in the good social democratic way, he is challenging the basic neo-liberal instincts of the Republicans and the Tea party people, really showing them to be hypocrites. He says you want to be bipartisan, stop shouting silly slogans and come and work to solve these problems and this is the way to do it.

Press TV: On the issue of jobs that a lot of people say was the main focus of his speech, considering the fact it was the number one domestic issue within the US, he said that the US is at risk of losing out to rapidly developing economy in south Asia, specially China and India, etc. Do you think that he was able to say anything of significant in his speech concerning that issue?

Williams: This speech was broad and he didn't get into particulars. However, he is talking about improving American education system using federal money which Republicans...they want to reduce government spending, so there is the challenge. He is talking about developing infrastructure, he is talking about developing green technology, he has been talking about using government money for basic research and for grants for cutting-edge technologies in energy saving etc. And some of the things he said were, by his standards, pretty bold. He said he wants to end tax concessions to oil companies because they are making quite enough money as it is that is a direct challenge to Republicans who are bankrolled by the oil companies even if their Tea party demonstrators denounce them.

Interestingly he has restated that he wants to take back the tax cuts on the richest percentage, that is quite surprising. He didn't hedge there, that is what he wants to do and this is unconscionable that you give money to the richest people in the society.

MN/PKH

The smouldering Hamlet on the White House battlements

2011-01-21T09:28:00.000-05:00

Obama must call Israeli settlements illegal

US support for a UN resolution on the settlements would remind Netanyahu that there are consequences for breaking the law

*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 January 2011 11.59 GMT

"To veto or not to veto?" That is the agonising question that has President Barack Obama pacing the battlements of the White House waiting to dodge the slings and arrows of outraged Aipac. Provoked by the latest demolition in East Jerusalem, no fewer than 120 countries have sponsored a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity. Hillary Clinton has also condemned it as "illegitimate", but the resolution introduces precision by terming the settlements as "illegal".

In a country where "all politics is local", and in the face of the economic crisis, Obama could almost be forgiven for dropping the ball in the Middle East game. But his response to the current resolution could well determine whether there is any wind left in the sails of the peace flotilla he launched with his speeches in Egypt and Turkey directed at the Muslim world.

Every other member of the UN security council agrees that settlements are illegal, including Britain and France. The international court of justice has affirmed their illegality. The US once called them illegal, then termed them unhelpful, and currently regards them as "unhelpful" and "illegitimate". Under the road map of 2003, Israel agreed to stop them, but it has ignored the rest of the world and its best friend, the US, and continued to build. Even President Bill Clinton officially reduced the amount of US loan guarantees by the sum spent on settlements.

In the face of Binyamin Netanyahu's defiance, so far the US response, engineered by Dennis Ross – who seems to have frozen out the official peace negotiator, George Mitchell – has been to attempt to bribe Israel with billions of dollars, free jet fighters and a free "get out of the security council" card in the form of a veto. The handsome offer was for a temporary moratorium.

Washington's line is to ignore UN decisions and international law and say that it is up to the parties to negotiate such "permanent-status issues". The state department itself is clearer on the issues. After years of congressional votes, it still balks at moving the US embassy to Jerusalem (which hosts not a single foreign embassy) because, regardless of eventual negotiations, Israel does not have internationally recognised title to the city.

It is as if you have caught someone stealing your car and the police decide to overlook technical issues like the law and ownership and instead tell you to negotiate with the thief to get occasional access to the back seat.

In this week's security council debate on the resolution, deputy US ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo used theological nicety to explain Washington's difficulty in supporting a resolution that, on the face of it, reflects US official policy. "We believe that continued settlement expansion is corrosive – not only to peace efforts and the two-state solution – but to Israel's future itself. The fate of existing settlements is an issue that must be dealt with by the parties, along with the other permanent-status issues – but, like every US administration for decades, we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity."

However, she added: "Permanent-status issues can be resolved only through negotiations between the parties – and not by recourse to the security council. We therefore consistently oppose attempts to take these issues to this council and will continue to do so."

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, is usually tactfully absent during such debates, keeping her credibility by allowing deputies to intone the weaselly formulas that disguise the stark truth. Annexation and settlement building are illegal.

Of course, Obama has other problems, such as the economy and healthcare, and on the Middle East must face not only a rabidly pro-Israeli Republican party but also a majority of his own party that would sign up to a resolution declaring the moon to be made of blue cheese if the Israeli lobby demanded it.

Nonetheless, his credibility as president is at stake here. The Republicans do control the House of Representatives, and indeed the chair of the foreign affairs committee is now Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who outflanks the Israeli government on the right. (She has been trying to de-fund UNRWA, the UN's agency that provides basic services in the occupied territories, even though the Israeli government, which would have to pay if the UN didn't, opposes her.) But Congress cannot control the US delegation to the UN.

It is surely time for Obama "to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them". This week, a letter landed on the White House doormat from a phalanx of foreign policy and government professionals urging him to support the resolution. He should take their advice.

The public exasperation implied by support for the security council resolution sends a signal to Netanyahu that there are indeed consequences for ignoring the advice of your best friend, let alone breaking the law. It might make the Israeli prime minister more amenable, and it would certainly send a signal to the Israeli electorate that Netanyahu had terminally alienated the White House.

It would not alienate the American electorate, not even American Jews. Those who support Netanyahu tend to be those who think the president is a foreign-born crypto-Muslim anyway. It would bring cheer to the J-Street movement, whose peacenik views more closely reflect those of most American Jews than Likud does.

And it would do more than any other single act to demonstrate respect for international law and restore the credibility of American diplomacy.

Indeed, Obama could follow up and demand the IRS check on the tax deductibility of American "charities" and foundations that bankroll settlement building, including Irving Moskowitz, who recycles the proceeds of inner-city gambling in the US to buy and demolish property in East Jerusalem, such as the Shepherd Hotel, with the conscious aim of frustrating the declared policy of every US government since 1967. Some of the money, however, he sends as donations to politicians like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Dregs of Empire!

2011-01-14T09:29:00.000-05:00

http://www.rumpundit.com/2011/01/14/pussers-pride/

Charles Tobias, the toast of all rumlovers, has just been made an MBE, Member of the order of the British Empire, in the New Year’s honour’s list.

Charles, who rescued Navy Rum from the bottom of the Admiralty’s Davey Jones filing cabinet to which it was consigned after Black Tot day in 1970, was honoured for his work for the Royal Navy, whose welfare fund gets dibs on each bottle of Pusser’s sold, and for his work for the BVI.

He should be honoured also, of course, for his work for rum – but it is somehow fitting that his residence on one of the last pocket handkerchief remnants of the empire that was in some measure built on Navy Rum should be recognised.

A toast to him and all who make and drink his product!

Rumpundit. (Deadlinepundit's Alter Ego)

Bullets Beat Ballots

2011-01-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ian Williams

American democracy is caught in the crosshairs
by Ian Williams
Friday, January 14th, 2011

If his YouTube ramblings are anything to go by, the young man who shot United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona clearly had big issues with reality. But Jared Loughner’s thoughts were scarcely less coherent than many on the conservative right. He could have intoned his comments on the Congressional Record and it is unlikely that the media, let alone the Republicans, would have called him on it. On “big government”, he is almost in the mainstream. He was innovative in his use of grammar, although like those who put up misspelt roadside posters about English-only legislation, he was more advanced in theory than in practice.

Sadly less innovative was his pointing a gun at the congresswoman. For a few hours after the shooting, Sarah Palin’s website still featured the crosshairs of a gun site pointing at Giffords’ district with an invocation “Don’t retreat! Instead – RELOAD!” that her staff had posted during the election.

It is no surprise that Loughner should have picked up such ideas. Arizona is a state whose Republicans have tried to round-up suspected Mexicans before the courts over-ruled it as unconstitutional and whose gun control laws are so lax that is reputedly the source of most of the weaponry used in the cartel carnage south of the border.

Exercising his alleged rights under the second amendment, a palpably deranged guy was able buy the Glock he used to shoot the congresswoman, a judge, a nine-year-old girl and four others. But then the example of the Tea Party candidate who almost beat Giffords, in having a campaign event inviting supporters to fire machine guns, is hardly one to calm as fevered a brow as Loughner’s.

In his schizophrenic way, Loughner was channelling the zeitgeist of the era. Shades of paranoia, half-baked theories about the currency and mind control are common enough, along with the assumption that anything you disapprove of must be unconstitutional. That moves beyond eccentricity when combined with a presumed second amendment right to keep and bear arms and an implied right – even duty – to overturn laws and elections that allegedly violate the “constitution” and self-defined American-ness.

As common as detachment from reality is his apparent inability to respect the decision of the ballot box. One of the elementary tests of democracy is the concept of a “loyal opposition”, which is perhaps a more important British innovation than even the railway train. The idea that people can disagree and not be accused of treachery and subversion is essential to a functioning parliamentary system. It has never gained universal acceptance in the United States, as the House Un-American Activities Committee followed a two-centuries-old tradition of loyalty oaths and lynchings for dissidents. The past two decades have seen it eroded even further.

Since they disagree with Obama, therefore he must be foreign-born, alien, not really American, is a view still held by a frightening number of registered Republicans – quite apart from the many who are just looking for excuses to rail against a black President.

Giffords herself walked a political tightrope. She was a self-proclaimed “Blue Dog” Democrat, but wanted a public option in healthcare – unlike many of her colleagues in the group who tend to be old-fashioned conservative Southern Democrats. In order to be elected, this group assumes it has to pass itself off as not really Democrat, implicitly accepting the view that to hold liberal views is inherently unacceptable and un-American.

However, it is not just the Blue Dogs who think like this. For years, the leadership of the Democratic Party in Washington has been in the hands of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose “leadership” is based on the ability to marshal huge tranches of corporate cash. While it might have been permissible to accept that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher occasionally had a point, like New Labour, the DLC has accepted neo-liberalism in its entirety. The DLC accepted the stigmatisation of their own party as “tax and spend” liberals, never challenging the huge deficits run up by Reagan and George W Bush.

It is a sad mark of the ideological triumph of Reaganism that its axioms are still received wisdom, even though they have been conclusively rebutted by reality, most notably over the past two years. Senior Democrats have been so eager to appear pro-business and to keep the cheques rolling in that they do not challenge the economic orthodoxy. So it is outrageous that, with overtime, a city employee might make $100,000 a year, but it is anti-business and un-American to question a banker making the same amount in a day in bonuses. As local government across America teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, we are told it is municipal unions at fault – not the bankers, whose price for bringing the world to ruin has been a relatively unchallenged record payout.

Friends of Giffords have reported the strain on her of raising $4 million to fight the last election against a deranged opponent bankrolled by a few secretive billionaires and their foundations, who are prepared to encourage anti-plutocratic rhetoric as long as the reality is union-bashing and tax cuts.

Quite apart from the guns, it is a sad country where politics is reduced to mortal combat between greedy but sane rich people and ideologically motivated rich but insane people.

Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric a Rich American Tradition

2011-01-12T15:33:00.003-05:00

This week’s Catskill Review of Books, 2:30 Saturday 15 Jan, on WJFF, broadcast on 90.5 and 94.5 and streaming at http://Wjffradio.org

Ian Williams talks to award-winning author Brian Leung about his novel “Take Me Home,” a gripping, inspiring, and informative tale of survival and affection set during the now-forgotten anti-Chinese pogroms in the coal mines of Wyoming Territory in 1885.

She's Back! Helen Thomas's New Gig.

2011-01-07T14:09:00.000-05:00

An editor with courage and integrity! Well done Nicholas Benton.

Editorial: Welcome Back, Helen Thomas Print E-mail
Thursday, January 06 2011 08:00:00 AM

The following is a statement by Falls Church News-Press founder, owner and editor Nicholas F. Benton:

The Falls Church News-Press is proud and honored to announce that veteran American journalist and national treasure Helen Thomas is coming out of a seven month self-imposed retirement to resume her weekly column exclusively in the News-Press beginning with this edition, both in print and online.

Ms. Thomas, who turned age 90 in August, has been covering Washington politics since 1942, and has been a White House correspondent covering every U.S. president on a day-to-day basis since the administration of John F. Kennedy.

Since 2000, she has written a weekly column based on attending daily White House press briefings to ask the kind of penetrating, truth-seeking questions that had become her hallmark. The Falls Church News-Press carried that column in print on a weekly basis beginning January 2004 until early June 2010, when it abruptly ceased.

On June 8, Ms. Thomas declared herself retired following a torrent of angry criticism reacting to a spontaneous verbal comment she made that was taped the day before. Ms. Thomas' comments were intemperate and inappropriate, as she conceded afterward. They reflected her personal anger arising from the news that Israeli commandos had boarded a ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza and had killed over a dozen volunteers.

Ms. Thomas' views on a variety of subjects often differ from prevailing White House or other policies and positions. One of nine children born to Lebanese-Syrian immigrant parents, she has held to opinions different from many on U.S. policy toward the Middle East since the 1940s.

But her personal views have not tainted her highly-professional work for 50 years as a White House correspondent, except perhaps to inform the kinds of questions that she's never shied away from asking.

I have known Ms. Thomas since the founding of the News-Press in 1991. She visited our offices twice to meet readers and admirers. We share an appreciation for Eleanor Roosevelt and her work on behalf of the International Declaration of the Rights of Man.

She is progressive, and following my more than eight hours of direct, one-on-one talks with her since the events of last June, I remain firmly convinced that she is neither bigoted, nor racist, nor anti-Semitic.

Her remarks in June were in response to a question about Israel, not Jews, and were intended to mean that in these times, Jewish people are free to live wherever they wish, because the era of anti-Jewish persecution is ended. That was not adequately expressed because of the impromptu nature of the incident.

As one who has championed the cause of inclusion in my newspaper for 20 years, who founded the Diversity Affirmation Education Fund for the Falls Church School System, I am proud that a journalist of the stature and professionalism of Helen Thomas is relaunching her career in my newspaper. She more than deserves, and I am honored to help provide her, the proverbial "second chance."

Words are important...

2011-01-07T14:03:00.000-05:00

Think before you speak to newspapers. In today's Wall Street Journal, microbiologist Samantha Joye says of microbes that allegedly ate the methane from Deepwater Horizon, "It would take a Superhuman microbe to do what they are claiming." Does she believe in devolution, that advanced humans will ingest farts, or does she just not think before using words?

Caucasians in the Catskills

2011-01-07T12:31:00.000-05:00

How many Americans think Caucasian is a fancy term for "white" on application forms, or that Georgia is where Jimmy Carter grew peanuts? This week's Catskill Review of Books on WJFF, 90.5 FM Saturday at 2:30, streaming at http:/www.wjffradio.org features Thomas de Waal, setting the record straight, talking to Ian Williams about his book "The Caucasus: an Introduction," about small, far away countries of which we know little. But should, since a year ago we almost risked World War III over Georgia and Ossetia, and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is smoldering dangerously. And they are just the big ones, in a region where every valley has its own language and an underlying principle "Why should I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?"

Why there must be rich poker players in Chicago

2010-12-19T10:38:00.000-05:00

In this political poker game, Barack Obama always folds
by Ian Williams
Saturday, December 18th, 2010

In the United States Senate last week, its sole avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders, who I have occasionally interviewed for Tribune, showed that there is still reason to believe in evolution on Capitol Hill. There are still some vertebrates there. On Friday December 10, for eight hours, he actually did what the Republicans have threatened to do since Barack Obama was elected President. He filibustered.

His eight-hour oration was no time-consuming recital of the phone book but, rather, a concentrated point-by-point rundown of all the crimes committed by the wealthy against the American people, culminating in the current trade-off, sponsored by Obama, of the extension of unemployment benefits for millions thrown out of work by the crisis in exchange for continuing tax cuts to the billionaires who caused the crisis in the first place.

Essentially, Obama had inherited a previous compromise, whereby the Democrats agreed to George W Bush’s deficit-building package of tax cuts which were heavily loaded towards the rich. They expire at the end of this year, and Obama and the Democrats wanted to keep the cuts for the more modestly paid, but abolish them for the rich.

In the meantime, the emergency two-year extension of unemployment benefits for the millions made jobless by the plutocrat-induced crisis was also expiring. Obama’s administration has been wrestling with conservatives to extend that limit. However, in the full spirit of Christian Conservative charity, Republicans were happy to see the benefits expire just before Christmas and for everyone, no matter how poor, to pay more taxes if there aren’t breaks for billionaires.

Obama negotiated more out of them than many expected, but that is because expectations have been diminishing. The estate tax was retained – for 3,500 of the richest halfwits who can’t afford estate-planning attorneys, and the unemployment benefit was retained for 13 months – but the tax cuts stay for two years. Just in time for the next presidential election.

If the economy improves because of the rescue package Obama forced past the Republicans, they will take the credit. If it falters, they will blame “his” deficit spending, not their tax cuts.

I used to berate Bill Clinton for his signature “triangulation”, in which he rode to victory by stealing conservative policies while persuading his base he was really on their side.

Obama has it all base over apex. He is alienating his base while folding to Republican demands and actually leading his party to massive electoral defeat. Whether on the Middle East, healthcare or now tax cuts and unemployment, he starts the bidding low and then goes lower.

The whole American system is designed to make fudging, lobbying, backroom dealing and sordid compromise almost inevitable. It is a bit like American football, with lots of huddling and heaving and running around to gain a few yards.

Before going any further, let’s put on the record that I am happy it is Barack Obama and not Sarah Palin or John McCain in the White House, even though I never thought he was the paragon of progressiveness some of his more naive protagonists presumed he was.

Obama does have to appear as reasonable as possible for the sake of the millions of voters disenchanted with the bitter partisanship in Washington. But if he showed a fraction of the toughness to the Republicans that he has to his liberal backers, he would be much more successful.

The President is reputedly a keen poker player. His performance in Washington has led many to suppose that he made a lot of money for his fellow players back in Chicago. He has yet to call someone’s bluff. He always pushes the pot across to his opponents when they hang tough.

In the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu announces his intention to keep stealing land and houses in the occupied territories, and the American President offers billions of dollars and flights of free fighter aircraft, and the veto equivalent of a get-out-jail-free card in the United Nations in return for a temporary suspension of settlement building. It was a bit like bribing a rapist to take a breather.

In the Senate, the Republicans have threatened filibuster after filibuster to thwart the view of the majority. But they have not had to act on their threats once. On this occasion, they would have had to have stood there, in the run-up to Christmas, holding millions of unemployed to ransom so that the billionaires who trashed their jobs could keep tax breaks that were a major reason the deficit was running so high. Sanders filibustered. Obama folded.

Obama’s basic problem is his assumption of good will on the part of his opponents for which there is little or no evidence. Conservatives everywhere believe in sacrifice for the greater good – as long as it is poor and working people on the altar.

The Republicans’ main aim is control of the White House in two years’ time. And if they have to trash the economy even more to get it, they will. Their supporters contrived the biggest ever post-war recession – and made more money than ever before. Vultures thrive on casualties.