Entries from March 2008 ↓

After doing an item yesterday on Kenneth Pollack’s incredible
endurance as an expert in the op-ed pages of the NY Times even after being
dead wrong about Iraq, I went on the Times site and typed in the name
"John Mearsheimer."

The realist scholar at U of Chicago used to be a Times regular.
Starting in the late ’80s, the most important newspaper in the world granted
him status as a sober expert on foreign relations. Quoted in articles,
he was also a frequent contributor to the Op-Ed page, publishing pieces
about partition in the Balkans, in favor of India’s nuclear power as a deterrent (twice on that subject; here: India Needs the Bomb), and pushing the Gulf War in ‘91. (I forgot about that). After Sept. 11, he held forth on the Afghan war. (He was also a presence in the letters column, here condemning antisemitic comments by a scholar with a Nazi past.)

Then in ‘03 Mearsheimer and Harvard prof Stephen Walt published an Op-Ed
in the Times against the Iraq war, in which they argued that the war
party had only produced "slender threads" of evidence to support
preemptive war. The two clairvoyants went on:

In addition to the lives
lost, toppling Saddam Hussein would cost at least $50 billion to $100
billion, at a time when our economy is sluggish and huge budget
deficits are predicted for years. Because the United States would have
to occupy Iraq for years, the actual cost of this war would most likely
be much larger. And because most of the world thinks war is a mistake,
we would get little help from other countries.

And
then: poof, Mearsheimer hasn’t been on the Op-Ed page since. By my
count, he had about 10 Op-Eds in the decade before that Iraq war piece. (I assume some of these were solicited by the Times.) He has had none since. And this in the prime of his career, doing his most important work.

There are two factors at work here. Being against the Iraq war has
hurt a lot of people’s careers; we’re still waiting for our Debacle
Dividend, a payoff for having good judgment, but it hasn’t come, maybe because all the powerful folks who
supported the war don’t want to be reminded of their error (and cause dweebs like me like to rub it in). And of course
Mearsheimer wrote The Israel Lobby. Is the Times part of the lobby? Yes
and no. The lobby must be understood as a Mississippi River of
pro-Israel orthodoxy which pervades political culture– from the
Clintonites to every elected official in New York to the neocon
financiers of thinktanks. Taking on the lobby is the equivalent right
now in media culture of throwing in with the Roswell crowd; the Times
finds you dangerous, even as it supplies straw and ale and stables for
Iraq war supporters Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Bill
Kristol.

I’m not crying for Mearsheimer. He’s a big boy and knew what he was
doing. But it is interesting to consider that the Israel lobby works in
part through the destruction of status. Mearsheimer had elite status
prior to his Iraq argument and Israel lobby book; he has been deprived of (some
of) it since. Again I point to his being censored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, in its lineup of important speakers on an uncertain world.

The damage here isn’t so much to an honest man, it’s to the
political discourse. Consider Mearsheimer’s argument for India getting the bomb. I’d never seen that before, and I’m probably against him on this
one. But the vehemence of his belief in Indian nukes makes his argument
in The Israel Lobby that Iranian nukes won’t be the end of the world
both personally consistent and more compelling intellectually–he sure
is a realist. Think about it: He was allowed to hold forth from the
most prestigious soapbox in the land when India wanted nukes, but not now, when Iran wants them.
Our journalism is broken.

The American Friends Service Committee has helped organize a tour in the U.S. of a Nakba recognition group from Israel/Palestine. Many Jews are involved in this effort, for instance Jewish Voice for Peace. So are many Palestinians.

We all know that material and geographical issues are not enough to make peace in the Middle East–water issues, right of return, land-swaps, etc. This is a spiritual problem; and the recognition of ethnic cleansing is all important in that process.

The group is speaking at DePaul in an hour or so, in Chicago tonight. Then to the west coast, then to New York this weekend. Then on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the guests of a Mennonite church.

Oh my god, America is a great country. Blacks were once three-fifths of a man; next year a black man may be our president. And day by day my country’s heart is opening to the humanity of Palestinians.

First an apology. I can be narrow in spirit; and I think I went overboard yesterday with that poem. Jerry Slater has reminded me that words really do matter, words like genocide. He’s right. Though I would say that many times in the last 60 years, thoughtful people have recoiled from Israeli actions in Palestine, saying they are reminiscent of Nazi actions. For instance, some Israeli soldiers felt this way during ethnic cleansing operations. I don’t think it’s genocide against Palestinians; but it’s oppression. The Israeli right frequently has likened Palestinians to Nazis; and the resonance of the Holocaust reverberates and confuses.

Today Jerry Haber has a simply brilliant post, reading the books on Camp David 2000. As anyone who has read the literature knows, Clinton’s team was almost all Jewish. I think there was one Arab member. I’ve always found this troubling, but am not sure how to address it. Of course there are (many) Jews who are more universalist in their thinking. So maybe Clinton’s team had rays of light in it?

Also, I don’t want to blame my people in a blanket way for failure to make any progress on Israel/Palestine. Yes the Israel lobby is to blame, but that is the body of establishment Jewry, not all Jews. And yet as I frequently state on this blog, the construction of Jewish identity in this day and age is so parochial, so particularist, so Is-it-good-for-the-Jews, as Norman Mailer complained, and so wed to the Jewish state as some democratic ideal– that Jewish identity itself is something of an impediment to progress.

Haber agrees with me; he says that Jewishness itself was a hindrance to the effectiveness of the team. He begins by quoting from negotiator Aaron David Miller’s new book:

"Dennis [Ross], like myself, had an inherent tendency to see the
world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather
than from that of the Palestinians. Not that he didn’t understand Arab
or Palestinian sensitivities. But his own strong Jewish identity, and
his commitment to Israel’s security combined with something else: a
deep conviction that if you couldn’t gain Israel’s confidence, you have
zero chance of erecting any kind of peace process. And to Dennis,
achieving this goal required a degree of coordination with the
Israeli’s, sensitivity toward their substantive concerns, and public
defense of their positions. [Bush Sec'y of State Jim] Baker’s good judgment and toughness  balanced and controlled this inclination, which was not the case under Clinton."

In subsequent posts, I will be citing more from the books by [Dan] Kurtzer
and [Scott] Lasensky, and by Aaron Miller. There are must-reads for my readers,
especially for American Jewish liberals who cheered the American
involvement in the peace process… For when you get down to it, the peace-process team under two US
presidents was composed of three talented individuals, all Jews, and
all liberal Zionists.
Now we know — from Kurtzer and from Miller, two-thirds of the
trio — that America, Israel, and the Palestinians would have been
better served by a more diverse team. [emphasis Haber's]

The genius of Haber’s post is that he, a religious intellectual who lives in Israel but is politically shrewd about the U.S., is getting at the Zionist construction of Jewish identity. Even "secular" professional Jews are invested in these structures, and the pity in their case is that it is unconscious; I have heard friends loudly protest about the fairmindedness and evenhandedness in the Clinton team, without examining their investment.

Alas, we are tribal creatures; and as Tony Judt has observed, our age has amplified tribalism, rationalizing a "crippling" degree of identity politics even among intellectuals. That is the promise that so many of us see in Obama. That a mixed-race leader will lift us out of parochialisms. And have a diverse team negotiating in Israel/Palestine….

Mossad Studios, the video arm of MOSSAD–‘by deception shalt thou make war’–is now holding casting calls for an actor to portray one of our best creations, Osama Bin Laden.

The actor must have the ability to seamlessly read script lines, without using his voice, since we at MOSSAD studios will later dub in the sound track.

The physical requirements for the actor are: To be about 55 yo; have the ability to grow a full, shaggy-looking beard and speak Arabic. Height is not that important, since the actor will be filmed sitting at a table next to an AK-47. Note: Beard color is not important, since we at MOSSAD Studios can dye the beard.

Starting salary is 150,000 shekels (NIS) per year, which will be deposited in a Tel Aviv bank that is a front for the MOSSAD. This salary is to be paid upon our receipt of our yearly funding allotment from the US Treasury.

The actor must also be able to scowl and look menacingly, when reading the script, anytime he mouths the words, “Jews”, “9/11″ and “USA.”

Once a contract is offered, it must be signed by the actor. The contract will be in force for one year, or until the U.S. starts bombing Iran or until the untimely death of the actor, which ever comes first.

Acting skills are not as important as the physical ability to look like the Bin Laden portrayed by our numerous media outlets in the USA.

Acting coaches, like Daniel Pipes and Rita Katz, full time employees of MOSSAD, will be on hand to help with the actor’s performance.

If you like working in a fast paced field, in an environment that will test your acting skills, then apply today at the nearest Israeli Embassy or contact in person, MOSSAD HQS located in Herzliya, Israel.

This just added!!!

The Bush/Cheney Junta is pleased to announce their “Shock and Awe” Democracy 2008 Tour, starring AIPAC, the American Enterprise Institute, the Pentagon, Eliot Abrahms, Condi Rice, the MOSSAD and a host of others.

This year’s tour has been upgraded to include tactical nuclear weapons, guaranteeing that the show will end with a BANG.

No need to buy tickets, as this is a traveling circus, with dates in 2008 at Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and two special events in America’s heartland that will bring down the house.. actually, houses.

Be sure not to miss this spectacle, as it may very well be the last thing you see in this life.

Bush/Cheney Junta is a subsidiary of NEOCON, Inc, which is owned by Zionist Enterprises.

Kevin Hogan, an excellent friend of
mine and regular contributor to various Simpleology projects (ok, yes he’s
the guy you see on TV talking about body language all the time - that
Kevin Hogan), released The
Secret Language of Business at amazon.com today. He’s got an unreasonably
nice selection of ethical bribes to induce you to get this book.

Kevin’s had three number two best sellers at Amazon and it’s time for us to get him to number one. The book
simplifies some fairly complex stuff about nonverbal communication and dispels a
few myths along the way. Good thing about Kevin’s work is it’s well researched
(amidst a whoooole lot of nonsense in the business book world). The result is a
tool box of nifty ways for you to make more sales and hear "yes" a lot more.

You know you’re a geek when you are singing "I’ve got a crush on Roboform"
when everyone else is singing about their crush on Barak Obama.

If you don’t have a cyber-crush on Roboform yet, you soon will.  Allow
me to introduce you to one of its features.

1.  Download Roboform (do it - it
will change your life - and it’s free)

2.  Go to a site you search often.  (I am using trademe.co.nz - New
Zealand’s answer to ebay - as an example)

3.  Enter this as your search term:  rfarg

4.  Hold down the alt key and click on the submit button (or whatever
it’s called on the site you want to search)

5.  You’ll be prompted to name and save

6.  Now whenever I want to search Trademe - or any other site I code
this way - all I have to do is type the search term and select the site I want
to search from a drop down menu.  In this case I searched for "booya!" -
obviously you can pop whatever search term in the query box you like.

You can add any other site that has a query box this way - and this is only a
tiny bit of what Roboform has to offer.

Challenge to someone smart reading this:  try a time trial searching
this way and the old way - and then figure out how much time that will save the
average person per year.

The Korean Pine Nut contains pinolenic acid - a fatty acid that stimulates
the production of cholecystokinin (CCK).

CCK is a hormone that stimulates the digestion of fats and proteins, and also
suppresses the appetite.  The American Physiological Society reports that
test subjects experienced a 36% reduction in appetite for 4 hours beginning 30
minutes after eating a few grams of the nuts.

So, should you swing out and buy a bag of Korean Pine Nuts and start munching
away?

Well, the nuts themselves are high-calorie, albeit in healthy fats, but a
calorie is a calorie, so use with caution.

Sprinkle some on your salad - don’t go on a Pine Nut gorge-fest.

Michael Massing (a friend of mine) has a great piece in the Columbia Journalism Review called "The War Expert," marvelling at the fact that Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack still gets called up to opine in editorial pages about what we should be doing in the Middle East after he was so wrong about Iraq.

Massing interviewed Pollack and asked him about his track record as a belligerent.

As for his position on the invasion itself, Pollack maintained that he
had not been a strong advocate for the war but rather a “tortured” one.
“I know I wrote a number of pieces that were very helpful to the Bush
administration in making its case,” he said. “But that’s not why I
wrote them.” In The Threatening Storm, he told me, “I said
that this wasn’t a war we needed to fight right away, that there were
other things we needed to do first, like work on the Middle East peace
process…and run down al Qaeda….I don’t like to characterize myself as a
supporter of the invasion.” Yet his book contains a whole chapter
titled “The Case for an Invasion.” In it, he states flatly that “the
only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States
is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed
forces, depose Saddam’s regime, and rid the country of weapons of mass
destruction.”

I leafed through the book today and Massing is right. There is nothing tortured about
a book that compares Saddam to Hitler and says that the "conservative" course is to "invade as soon as possible."

I am chiefly irritated by Pollack’s claim that "work on the Middle East peace process" had a higher priority to him in that book than invading Iraq. Pardon my Arabic, this is bullsh-t.

It is true that Pollack called for the U.S. to take a more active role in Israel/Palestine issues prior to invading Iraq. But he did so almost reluctantly, stating that in the fervid mind of "the Arab street," there was alas "linkage" between the U.S. role in Israel/Palestine and its activities elsewhere in the region. And so it was necessary to reduce "bedlam" or "violence" in Israel/Palestine before the U.S. invades Iraq. This policy objective doesn’t have a high priority to Pollack. In his "Conclusions," where he bangs the war drum over and over, I see only one line mentioning the peace process, when he states, "it is reasonable for them [Arab states and Turkey] to expect us to take a more active role in attempting to mollify the problems of the region, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian violence."

Let’s be clear. This is never Pollack’s concern; it is always the strange concern of Arab states. Thus Emirates citizens "would have a more favorable view of the United States if it were to apply pressure to ensure the creation of an independent Palestinian state." Similarly, the Saudis would cooperate with the war only if there were "negotiations and a sense of progress" in Israel/Palestine. Though here Pollack reassures us that "a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace" is not necessary before we invade. He emphasizes that we should invade "only during a period of relative calm between Israelis and Palestinians" lest natives elsewhere grow restless.

Months ago in this blog I noted that Pollack never used the word "occupation" in his book, never described the hateful treatment of the Palestinians, which as Mohamed ElBaradei has said is a "red flag" of injustice across the Arab world. I have suggested that he was blinded by the fact that he is supported by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American who supports the center at which Pollack works. In that sense, Pollack was like many other war-drum-bangers: he completely overlooked the Israel/Palestine issue, and deluded himself about how much the Arab world hates us for that injustice, even as he said that the Arab world would come to love us for building a democratic Iraq.

Being wrong is one thing, misrepresenting your record another. His book is full of moral assertions about the necessity of toppling Saddam. There is no moral imperative at all to his statements about working on peace in Israel/Palestine. No, doing so is merely an instrument of making war in Iraq. Now he claims that this had moral priority for him.

Pollack’s misrepresentation is, happily, a reflection of the turn in the conventional wisdom in this country. Now that Condi Rice is putting all her efforts into the peace process with the blessing of President Bush (and godspeed their efforts), Pollack wants to say that he was for this a long time ago. Next he’ll be telling us he  wrote The Israel Lobby.

I generally don’t mention Joachim Martillo’s stuff because it’s too out there for me, too crazily brilliant,  too much racialism. True, I am constantly dipping into the racial bucket in my analysis here, but Joachim’s too pure in his thinking on these questions, and besides I feel a need to love elite Ashkenazi Jews, my folks, while I criticize them.

Anyway, today Joachim has a poem written a month ago by a Robert Green that is beautiful. This poem is possibly completely wrong and inaccurate or possibly entirely accurate, I have no idea and don’t care; I don’t read poems for facts. I read them for the emotion and deeper truth. The emotions of this poem are the emotions I feel as an American contemplating the Nakba and the abuse of the Palestinians in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Says it all.

And guess what, young kids are feeling this way too. Jewish kids, non-Jewish kids, Palestinian kids, white kids, black kids, green kids.

      Poem by Robert Green, former Board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and distant relative of David Ben Gurion

Tim Russert has a politics show on MSNBC after Meet the Press and just now I heard him and guests Tucker Carlson and Ryan Lizza analyze the living hell out of Rev. Wright in Chicago and his black church and the political strains in the black community. Then touch-on/avoid the subject of Jews in politics.

Carlson was the most creditable of the speakers. He said that Obama’s refusal to meet with Hamas when he will meet with Iranian and North Korean leaders is a contradiction only explicable by "political considerations." The three of them then avoided where that was going by changin the subjeck to the Cuba Lobby and our immigration policy. Lizza offered the possibility that Democrats may soon stop "pandering" to the Cuban bloc vote, which he said was dominated by older conservative Cubans, because Florida was more and more safely Republican.

I don’t think immigration is as important an issue as whether the Arabs/the world hates us. Lizza was saying–and maybe reflecting his New Republic indoctrination on this score–that North Korea is a state and so is Iran; since when is Hamas at that level!

The issue of statelessness is of course key. At the same time that India and Pakistan became independent states, Palestinian Partition in ‘47 called for two states, Arab and Jewish, on roughly equal portions of the land. The most distant observer–and this is what U.S. politics needs now, more and more detached observers–understands that for 60 years there has been a Jewish one on far more of that land than the U.N. apportioned to it, but no Arab one. The reasons for this are manifold, and no doubt the Arab world has played its part.  But certainly for the last 40 years the Israeli occupation has been the largest factor in Palestinian statelessness. And for the last 6 the Arab world has called for Partition along newer lines. Still no state.

Conservative American Jewry has obviously been one of the most important obstacles to the formation of that state. But our politics can’t deal with this. And neither can our journalism. Just ask Russert.

I have a Jewish journalist friend who meets my statement that Jews are members of the American establishment always with the condescending comment, "Yes but are they acting as Jews qua Jews. No." He means with that qua that we are simply Americans like other diverse Americans, we’re not behaving Jewish. As I’ve said here before, I find this attitude highly incurious for a journalist. I am fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of my people (and other tribes too), never moreso than now that we have a seat in the cockpit, funding the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Steve Walt’s seat at Harvard and Freedom’s Watch, too.

Which would be chiefly of sociological interest were it not for the issue of the Israel lobby. Per Lizza’s analysis of the Cubans, the Israel lobby is dominated by the older conservative component of Jewish life; and that group needs to be scrutinized and understood by journalists. But it’s not. I feel for myself that it still has a hold on the body of the Jewish community. So good journalists are simply afraid to talk about central facts in our political life. Though maybe Carlson is intrigued/titillated because his daddy done got largessed by the Israel lobby.

Oh–but let us talk about Obama’s "very radical" (I think those were Lizza’s words) black preacher all day and night. Qua qua qua. Quack quack quack.