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

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

 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.

United Nations Report

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

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The U.N. vote on Palestine is an oddity. No one can be sure what benefit the Palestinians get from it, and there is good reason to believe that its main current motivation is an earnest desire on the part of President Mahmoud Abbas’ administration to show some progress—any progress at 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 long march through international institutions that developed momentum in the 1990s. That upgraded the Palestinian delegation to that of a unique observer mission just fractionally short of statehood, and restated and strengthened resolutions and expressions of international law on the conflict.
But why revive the issue now? Many Palestinians see it as a diversion and a means to shore up a corrupt and compro-

mising administration in the Palestinian Authority—and, contrary to Israeli rhetoric, not as a means to kill Oslo, but to maintain flickers of life in that Zombie-like structure as it shambles toward the mirage of a two-state solution.
However, whatever Abbas’ motives, and no matter how inadvertently he has hit the right target, the illogical fury of the Israeli reaction, and the servile echoing of it by the Obama administration, should vindicate him.
Not since the British and Canadians burned the White House in 1813 has American foreign policy been so publicly and humiliatingly trashed. And it is all self-inflicted.
As Obama reminded the international delegates, an American president stood at the podium of the General Assembly in September 2010 and looked forward to welcoming a Palestinian state within the year—but a year later he was ordering his diplomats to join with Israel to take every measure, including abusing the U.S. veto to thwart the consummation he himself had promised the year before.

This year, Obama restated the administration line: “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations...Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians—not us—who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and on security, on refugees and Jerusalem.” He omitted any direct threats or references to the Palestinian application for membership, or even Palestine’s attempt to upgrade its status at the U.N. 

The diplomatic silence might have avoided irritating the Palestinians, and perhaps slightly camouflaged the humiliation of what is, after all, still the world’s biggest military and economic power, pandering to the crazed ideologues of a small rogue state.

The threatened veto rewards a U.S. “ally” which had defied a plea to halt settlement building and had humiliatingly announced a round of illegal construction during 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 and Saudi Arabia; and lost its credibility with the two-thirds or more of U.N. members who have recognized Palestine or indicated an 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. In the heyday of American power, Congress began to cut funding for the U.N.—over the Palestinian issue. The assumption was that the U.N. needed the U.S. more than vice versa. That is no longer quite as true, and congressional threats to defund the U.N. and its agencies if the members of the organization vote for some form of Palestinian statehood will enhance the damage to American prestige—and leverage— when Washington wants something from the U.N., as it increasingly does. With the parlous state of the U.S. economy and its overstretched military, Washington will in- deed be going back to the U.N., but will find it more difficult than ever to get the legitimation 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 Lieberman are predictably counterproductive. If countries pay any attention, it is to the American dummy, not the Russian-Israeli ventriloquist, since American power, even rapidly evaporating as it is, is still substantial.
Perhaps the one hint of self-interested lucidity in the White House and State Department is the realization of just how much damage an American veto would do to Washington’s standing in the world. However, the efforts to get other countries to “help” by not supporting the Palestinian bid in the Security Council presume a global public that is all of below average intelligence. Widely advertised, the U.S. was hoping to squeeze enough weak links to ensure that the resolution would not get the nine necessary positive votes.
Do Obama and Clinton really think that the rest of the world would not know who had brought about the defeat? Or that those 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 help its professed larger projects in the United Nations: democratization, enhancing the rule of law, and prevention of crimes against humanity. It not only does truth to the rumors of double standards spread so assiduously by sundry dictators and their friends, but if the U.S. were successful in suborning European and other allies, it strips away Washington’s credibility when it comes to advocating, for example, the Responsibility to Protect.
In short, not only is there no rational self-interest for the U.S. in thwarting Pales- tine’s efforts, it actually detracts from American interest.
However, it is based on the fatally flawed policy introduced by Bill Clinton, which was to bypass international law and insist that the road to peace lay through bilateral negotiations. So a Sumo wrestler steals the tricycle of a diapered toddler, and the solution is put them in the area together for a 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 by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Certainly Lieberman’s harangues to diplomats seem to be counterproductive, not least because they all remember that the Quartet, the U.S. president, the U.N. and even, very grudgingly, Netanyahu himself, all have accepted that the road to peace is a two-state solution, with boundaries based on the pre-1967 armistice line.
So why should the full force of Israeli hasbara, the John Boltons, Eli Wiesels, Alan Dershowitzs and the rest of the crowd, not to mention the full resources of the U.S. State Department, be marshaled against the Palestinian resolution?
To begin with, of course, Netanyahu ac cepts a Palestinian state the way he would welcome a melanoma. He was only kid- ding. Many of those screaming behind him would not even pay lip service to the idea. They repudiate the whole idea of a Palestinian state and resent any implication of Palestinian rights in any part of Israel and the territories it illegally occupies. Many such hysterical supporters in the U.S. are also deniers of Obama’s American nation- ality and have campaigned furiously against him and the Democrats, which adds 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 of the U.N. or not, can and would be accepted as a state member of the In- ternational Criminal Court—indeed its appli- cation to sign the Con- vention establishing it is already under consider- ation. That has pro- found implications for Israeli civil and military leaders. While the coun- try that kidnapped Eichmann and brought him to justice has not signed the convention, its citizens would be li- able for crimes commit- ted in the West Bank and Gaza if ratification followed statehood.
But there is also an element in the psycho- politics of extreme Zionism which reminds

them that they are indeed people of the law. Although the interminable court proceedings about land-grabs and civilian rights invariably lead to ratification of occupation misdeeds, they do go through the process!
One is reminded of some of the evasions of Talmudic exegesis such as the idea that a telephone wire around an area can make it an enclosed part of one’s backyard. While the rest of the world regards the territories as 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 have accepted around the boundary.
In the end, one does have to wonder what the Palestinians as people get out of the U.N. bid. But certainly, the embarrass- ment it has caused to Obama and Clinton have made them take Palestinian positions more seriously than they have in the past, while removing any residual illusions that some Palestinian leaders might have that the U.S. is an honest broker in the conflict.
Obama, reportedly, shares the detestation that most reasonable people have for Netanyahu, so one can only welcome any- thing that makes the partnership more uncomfortable for him. ❑

THE WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

NOVEMBER 2011

Topless Towers

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

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

Toxteth, Liverpool, 30 years on

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

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

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

Ban again, and again!

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

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

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

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.

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?

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?