An Israel-Palestine Peace Plan – D. Hamilton, et al

Posted on March 31, 2008 by RagBlog

The Rag Blog / March 29, 2008
Last updated, April 5, 2008

Our recent debate on Israel/Palestine/Zionism/anti-Semitism seems to have run its regular course without much resolution. While articulate statements were made, I don’t think it was unifying or moved the debate forward much, if at all. Hence, I propose that we take on the project of writing a just, fair and comprehensive peace plan for the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

My motivation is based on two assumptions. One, the basic elements of such a peace plan have been apparent for a long time. Two, we would probably agree much more on a plan for resolution than we do about who is more aggrieved.

I’m working on my plan now. I look forward to a more fruitful discussion.

David Hamilton / The Rag Blog


Israel – Palestine Peace Plan.
Proposed by David Hamilton

Introduction.

My personal preference is a one state solution – one secular country governed by democracy, including Jews, Arabs, Christians and seculars. As one who considers practically all organized religions to be divisive and reactionary, I don’t support any non-secular states, regardless of their particular religious affiliation. Unfortunately, that is not considered possible in this circumstance at this time. Consensus opinion is that a two-state solution is the only viable option. The general framework is “Land for Peace”. This means that Israel gives up land that it currently occupies to the Palestinians in exchange for a guaranteed peace.

This plan assumes the support of a unified Palestinian leadership. The purpose of writing this plan is to demonstrate that the general elements of a just peace plan are and have been apparent for a very long time. It is also hoped that in focusing on solutions the subscribers to this list will find more unity.

Principal provisions.

1. The Palestinian Authority (including Hamas), the bordering states of Lebanon (including Hezbollah), Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, all members of the Arab League, and Iran recognize the government of Israel within borders established by this treaty, establish normal diplomatic relations with Israel and sign an omnibus non-aggression treaty with Israel.

2. Israel withdraws all its military forces and governmental authorities from the West Bank in its entirety, returning to the 1967 “Green Line” and turning over all authority for the region to the Palestinian Authority. If mutual agreement can be reached, border adjustments may be negotiated directly between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority based on the principal of equality. That is, equal land of equal value exchanged by both sides. No Israeli “security corridors” may cross Palestinian territory. Existing Israeli settlements on the West Bank may remain, with individual civil and property rights guaranteed, but under Palestinian authority.

3. The capital of the Palestinian Authority will be located in East Jerusalem.

4. The “right of return” wherein Palestinians have the right to return to property they lost in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel will be relinquished by the Palestinian Authority in return for 50 billion dollars in development aid to be provided over the next 10 years.

5. The Golan Heights will be returned to Syria and completely demilitarized.

6. A separate religious shrine will be established including the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall. This shrine will be autonomous, governed by an equal number of Jewish and Muslim religious leaders and will not be considered part of either Israel or Palestine. It will be designated a “world heritage shrine” and have a police force composed of UN provided personnel under the direction of the governing board of religious leaders. Admittance to the shrine will be guaranteed to all.

7. A modern multi-lane highway will be built between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip across Israeli territory. Israel will have the prerogative to insist that there be no exits on this road. No tolls may be charged and no road blocks established by the Israeli government.

8. Israel will sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby opening its nuclear weapons facilities to IAEA inspection and agree to negotiate with all parties toward the establishment of a nuclear weapons free Middle East.

Your comments on this plan are cordially invited.


Responses

Point One assumes getting Hamas and Hezbollah to the table.

Of course, there was a time when getting Fatah to the table was a pipe dream. It was done by leaning on Fatah’s state sponsors. In this case, the primary state sponsor is Iran. Who will do the leaning? The US has no credibility with Iran as it did with Fatah’s state sponsors.

Who will guarantee the demilitarized status of Golan and, more importantly, who will control the water?

Since a “right of return” for Palestinians combined with democracy would potentially destroy the Jewish state (I do hope your revulsion extends to Islamic states), would you settle for money compensation like we have in the US for property taken by government?

I like the idea of leaning on Israel to sign the nuke treaty but Clinton was the last Prez to lean on Israel about anything and, before him, Carter. The problem is that as long as the US backs anything Israel does with no limitations the Israeli hardliners have no reason to give an inch.

The idea of a superhighway with exits that can be closed is pretty inventive. Probably a good idea to put a weapons checkpoint at each end, too.

Not only is a political solution to the status of Jerusalem necessary, the idea of the UN recognizing the status of the site and guaranteeing access is excellent. Let both sides claim a Jerusalem address as their capital.

In my callow youth, I thought that the Temple Mount should be wired with a nuclear device that could only be triggered by simultaneous use of keys put into the hands of the most radical Muslim, the most radical Jew, and the most radical Christian to be found. With power comes responsibility. Or not.

Steve Russell

David Hamilton’s proposal should be the template for a large segment of the work done on all progressive blogs and salons. Of course, analysis and anecdote and opinion and propaganda and news-reporting are the basic products of this – and related – media. The missing ingredients – almost universally – are policy and program. But this is exactly where we should be headed – to a major extent.

The only objection can be that we’re not smart enough – or motivated enough – to perform this task. (Powerlessness is not a legitimate excuse, because, if we husband this process, we will create the power.) Is this true? Are we all helpless? Are we all victims or victims-to-be? Do we only know how to criticize, how to demonstrate, how to whine? It’s not true, is it? We can construct solutions, and knowing the extent and basic nature of the problems, our solutions should be better than most.

I propose – a la David’s approach – that some segment of your contribution should consist of policy or program formulations to improve our lives and those of our fellow Earthians. Maybe 1 out of every 3 posts by any individual should be an outline of suggested solutions. Don’t like GM food? What should we do? Save seed? Support an organization that does save seed? Create, join, publicize a, say, Sustainability organization that has a policy platform that includes heteroculture?

The Rag Blog has become a potential big-time blog under Richard’s and Thorne’s guidance. How about a subsection devoted to policy and program discussions? Rather than a daily news format, that section would have major categories with ongoing, long-term threads. Each category could have a coordinator, whose main responsibility would be to summarize the past week’s discussions, and who would always be trying to formulate a best-practices position paper on the subject. When enough participants agree on a paper, then it becomes a formal position for this salon.

The other duty of a coordinator would be to try elicit responses from other salons which might share an interest. As you may be aware, our fragmentation is a large part of the obstacle to power that we face. Coming together on policy and program may or may not solve the existentialist dilemna, but at least we can debate looking forward, instead of backward.

OK – that was off-thread. As to Israel and Palestine, I don’t know. All that I do know is that the Israelis cannot keep their collective adrenaline levels high forever, which is apparently the chief electoral strategy of Likud and Olmert’s party. Best to make some deals, and soon. Stopping the settlers/settlements would be a good thing, but then they would have to throw the fundamentalists under the bus and re-legitimize Labor. Still – that’s the logical move in terms of the national interest.

Paul Spencer

“As to Israel and Palestine, I don’t know. All that I do know is that the Israelis cannot keep their collective adrenaline levels high forever, which is apparently the chief electoral strategy of Likud and Olmert’s party. Best to make some deals, and soon.”

Paul’s statement above would be all there is to say if the hardliners could not count on some timely terrorism from the other side to keep their electoral troops in line.

Cue the moral equivalency brigade. Yes, there is a sense in which the Israelis are “terrorists” when they use modern tech to fire back. They know non-combatants will get killed. Yes, the US, being a hi tech society, is predisposed to accept low tech warfare as “terrorism.” Nobody who can’t see the flaws in this argument, I predict, will have anything to do with bringing peace to the Middle East.

Steve Russell

Surely no one can challenge David’s chutzpah for tackling head-on one of the most perplexing problems of my lifetime.

I must, however, question two of his points:

1. “Existing Israeli settlements on the West Bank may remain, with individual civil and property rights guaranteed, but under Palestinian authority.”

Were the settlement properties obtained according to rule of law? On whose authority were the settlers’ individual and property rights guaranteed? Was the acquisition of land and the authority under which it was acquired, in fact, legal under international law? If the answer is — as I understand it to be (see links below) — generally “no,” then the settlers on confiscated public and private land must be relocated to pre-occupation Israel, with reparations by the Israeli government to offset financial loss and hardship — and soften the political fallout. This solution may, in fact, be acceptable for the East European immigrants who were lured by cheap real estate subsidies and might not wish to continue to reside in an Arab-controlled environment, but a substantial number of the settlers are Zionist fundamentalists for whom the reestablishment of Eretz Yisrael is considered a historical and religious imperative. Here Israel’s resolve for peace will be tested as dramatically as it was during the shutdown of the Gaza settlements in 2005.

www.fmep.org/analysis/articles/a_settlements_mafia.html

www.fmep.org/analysis/articles/israeli_map_says_west_bank_posts_sit_on_arab_land.html

2. The second issue lurks at the epicenter of the conflict: the confiscation — often at gunpoint — of Arab and Sephardi lands carried out under the directive of Plan D (enacted sixty years ago this month) by the Zionist Haganah paramilitary underground as well as Irgun and Lehi armed gangs. In recent years, actions such as these have been called “ethnic cleansing.”

David suggests that Palestinians should relinquish “right of return” in exchange for 50 billion dollars of development aid. The problem with this solution is that it is a collective answer to many tens of thousands of individual injustices — a million Palestinians uprooted from their homes and more than 450 Palestinian villages bulldozed into rubble.

While I think collective reparations are necessary to build a viable Palestinian nation, I think the underpinnings of a permanent solution must be based on fair compensation to the descendants of the 700,000-800,000 Palestinians who were expelled and another 250,000 displaced and exiled internally within Israeli borders during the Naqba or Catastrophe, as the exodus came to be called in Arab lands.

Today there are 4.4 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations and at least another million who are not registered. International law recognizes the rights of refugees to regain their property or, alternately, to receive compensation and support for voluntary resettlement, and this right was affirmed for the Palestinians by U.N. Resolution 194 in 1948. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians believe refugee rights is the single most important obstacle to enduring peace, and almost 70 percent, according to the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center’s Aug. 2007 poll, believe refugees should be allowed to return to”their original land.”

This sentiment suggests that Israel and its international underwriters should shift course, acknowledge the negative outcome of its leaders’ policies six decades ago, and embark on a pragmatic course toward a two-state solution. I believe Israel should put aside its current “stick and bigger stick” policies and embark on bold reconciliation initiative, sort of a “carrot and bigger carrot” policy:

The carrot: Israel will announce that refugees displaced in 1948 will be allowed to return as Israeli citizens, with Israel offering to pay for rebuilding or replacing confiscated property and destroyed homes and businesses. Citizenship benefits will be the same as Israeli Palestinians — which, it should be noted, come with caveats and provisions not required of Jewish citizens.

The bigger carrot: Alternately, Israel would offer the refugees a “generous” compensation package to pay for relocation within the newly created Palestinian state. Thus the Israel government will wager that most Palestinians are, at the bottom line, realists and, recognizing that old Palestine is no more,will opt for taking the bigger carrot and being part of the creation of a historic new Palestinian nation.

The settlements in the Occupied Territories, presently home to almost a half-million Jews, should be part of the “carrot/big carrot” offer, as the housing, manufacturing and business base, and infrastructure, provide a powerful stimulus for the Palestinian families who for three generations have lived in squalid refugee camps. Israel missed a golden opportunity when it bulldozed the abandoned settlements in Gaza — including a large Israeli organic greenhouse operation employing Palestinian workers — and should not repeat this mistake under a new comprehensive and permanent peace plan. The transfer of property and infrastructure should be entrusted to a trusted international development organization or the U.N. in order to guarantee that the former settlements do not become resorts for corrupt and high-living Palestine Authority apparatchiks.

I maintain that by giving Palestinians the choice of return to Israel or a future in Palestine, most will chose the latter. More important, the dynamic of choice will do more than anything else to signal Israel’s desire to recast its own history in a manner consistent with the currents of humanism and love of peace which run so deep in Jewish culture and thought over millennia.

Jim Retherford

This touching faith in the rule of law as an obstacle to the viability of a Jewish state in the midst of Islamic states of varying degrees of orthodoxy (funny in itself for a religion that professes not to have an orthodoxy) would perhaps be more palatable if it did not come from the U.S.

I hold dual citizenship in the Cherokee Nation.

When you have finished applying to my people the principles you are trying to set up for Palestinians, I will be more disposed to take you seriously.

The standards with which you wish to destroy Israel would also destroy the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand–all very recent settler societies.

Applied with no time limit, those same standards would destroy all civilization, everywhere.

Get real.

Steve (Russell)

Alan , who is on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, says:

Steve is saying that if Palestine is saved for the Palestinians then civilization as we know it is at risk. Hmmm, maybe not so bad considering where our Western “civilization” has placed us. His argument is that all claims by those who were forced off their land are the same for all in all times. So if the Israeli government were forced to give back all the land they stole then so would all imperialistic land grabbers everywhere no matter how ancient the claim.

Hmmm, not so bad an idea. The Native Americans are still being beaten up today, not to mention the not so far in the past rip offs. Similarly the Palestinians are being murdered as we speak. The Klu Klux Klan settlers are taking up every square foot of Palestine that they can, creating more “facts on the ground” that they can use as bargaining chips or simply just own. Allowing these thugs to hide behind bogus religious claims is sickening.

I could not follow Steve’s contradictory non-logic on Native Americans: we should apply the same standard to the Native Americans that we apply to the Palestinians if we are to be considered “serious” but then he says we cannot do this very thing for “his people”. I hope he doesn’t speak with his forked tongue around the Cherokee.

The Native Americans here are united against any uranium mining. Other Native American groups are walking from Alcatraz Island to Washington D.C., The Long March, to protest the continuing rip off of Native Americans. I will met up with them soon. Native American sovereignty has been denied for too long.

Alan Pogue

As I try to explain in my written but not yet published book on the subject, tribal sovereignty is way more complicated than you are making it (since you are speaking post-Westphalia and we predate that) and you perhaps miss my point.

You can’t own land. Land owns you.

All land titles, at all times and places, are only bargaining chips, fictions around which life happens to us while we are making other plans.

In Tejas, a full title search goes back to land grants from the Spanish Crown. What a joke!

You are right that Jewish settlers are consciously trying to affect the final product by creating “facts on the ground.” Those “facts” have whatever import we choose to give them, just like the fact of a 15 year old wearing a bomb.

Steve Russell

Steve,

Please carefully reread my post. I am not advocating a one-state solution or the destruction of Israel, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all “civilizations,” or Oz. I am advocating a revolutionary transformation of all of the above into truly civilized social entities.

The issue, I think, that burns most rancorously in the Palestinian pysche is the Naqba, the theft of home and homeland by armed gangs while the world watched and did nothing. I believe that this contentious matter eventually can (and must) be resolved through Israel’s acknowledgement of past leadership mistakes by Ben-Gurion and Co. and payments of fair (and very large) amounts in reparation and development grants.

The old Palestine no longer exists, and the surviving Palestinians who were adults during the Naqba now are in their 80s — grandparents and great-grandparents of at least three generations who have been born and raised in exile — in the camps, crowded villages, or urban ghettos of Gaza, the West Bank, Golan Heights, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

My proposal dramatizes my belief that most Palestinians, if given the *choice* of return to what no longer exists in Israel and a future in the New Palestine, within the very communities that have developed over the past 60 years, would chose the new Palestinian state. Such a decision, of course, would be eased by infusion of lots and lots of cash.

Put yourself in the place of a 60-something Palestinian in the Occupied Territories: What would you do if your experience of your homeland is your parents’ and grandparents’ faded pictures, nostalgic stories, and bitter anger plus whatever vague memories a five-year-old might have of your family routed out of home and forced into exile? Would you burn to return to the old village, now a rock-strewn pile of rubble — or maybe the site of a new mall or condo project — and to second-class citizenship in a strange land with strange language? Or would you take the money and opt to work with your present community — amidst the people you have come to know and trust — to build a new homeland? I think it’s a no-brainer… IF the money is there.

Your other comments are rather interesting, given how lawyers are known to appreciate conciseness of language and meaning …

1. “… settler societies”?!? What a clever little phrase to whitewash centuries of genocide and cultural devastation under the banner of the Euro-American doctrine of Manifest Destiny!

2. “… all civilizations”?!? For crying out loud, what is civilized about what the United States government did to the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Creek; the Seminoles (my great-great-great grandfather wrote *The Exiles of Florida: The Crimes Committed by Our Government Against the Maroons Who Fled From South Carolina and Other Slave States* in 1858 to expose the government’s dark motives in forcing the Seminoles out of their Everglades homeland); the Great Sioux Nation; the Iroquois Confederacy; the Apache; the Comanche; the Nez Perce; and the list of atrocities goes on and on. (And let’s not forget what the U.S. government continues to do to Leonard Peltier.) What Australia did to the Aboriginal People, New Zealand to the Maori …

Pardon me if I fail to find anything *civilized* about “civilization” as practiced by the so-called “settler societies.” In fact, using language to objectively connote reality — as I believe it must if one is to “get real” — I would argue that so-called Christian Euro-barbarian soldiers sacked indigenous civilizations on every continent where we ventured during the past two millennia — from the peaceful Arab and Sephardic tribespeople of the Levant a thousand years ago to the Cherokees only a little over a century ago.

I would further posit that our American inability to grasp time and history beyond the sound bite or the 48-hour news cycle is one result of our repression of collective guilt over our own crimes of ethnic cleansing.

But I digress. The subject is Israel-Palestine.

3. “… [my] touching faith in rule of law”??? Your Honor, I have no faith in “rule of law” as an end-in-itself. Fascist Germany had rule of law — the law was ruled by the Nazis. The U.S. is moving from a historically revolutionary egalitarian concept of rule of law to law ruled by the corporate and militarist oligarchy. So rule of law really has to do with who rules over the law, and since the early ’60s in Bloomington I have worked not to advocate for rule of law but to demand justice, a principle (in my thinking) that transcends law and its putative rulers.

4. “…destroy Israel … destroy the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand … destroy all civilization, everywhere … ” This idea seems to unravel you. Why? Are you so attached to the trickled-down spoils of Western “civilization” and its investitures?

Spring is a magic time in Bloomington, so I hope you have time to stop and enjoy a walk through Dunn Meadow, carefully avoiding the throngs of making-out couples. If you cross paths with Willis Barnstone, please give him my fondest regards. He is the most decent human being I have ever met. I understand that his health is not good.

If you ever stop by the Runcible Spoon, ask whether my old compadre Allen Gurevitz is around. A poet and anarcho-communist-mystic, Allen is the ur-source of much movement history in all of its fascinating Heartland contradictions, from the founding of the Bloomington W.E.B. DuBois Club and Sexual Freedom League to Clark Kerr’s Halloween hook-up with dancing robots and the devil himself. You would enjoy knowing him.

Onward through the fog …

James Retherford

PS. I gotta say that I did not follow your thinking on Islamic “orthodoxy” and the Jewish state. Are you describing as Islamic states those countries in which the vast majority of the population is Muslim and as Jewish state Israel where the vast majority is Jewish? Last I looked, the only country I would describe as a theocracy is predominately Shi’ite Iran, a non-Arab nation with a special history at the hands of U.S. and British “nation-builders.” Meanwhile, the same Islamic fundamentalists we are fighting in “the war on terror” are also engaged in overthrowing Arab states considered too secular, even states with dual systems, secular law and Sharia, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

J.R.


I respect David’s attempt at a so called “peace plan” but in my opinion there are major problems. Quite honestly, this plan would be much more difficult to implement than a one-state solution. What is needed and would be much more successful is a non-violent Israeli and Palestinian civil rights movement with clearly stated objectives.

Anyway, I will state my concerns with the proposed peace plan.

1. The events of 1948 and the Palestinian refugees are totally overlooked. This is the major problem with the proposed peace plan. Peace is not going to happen if the refugee problem is not solved, period! Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian refugees is THE root of the conflict. And not just the 4 million refugees in the ghettos of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, but the refugees in camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Let me remind you that 80% of the population in Gaza are refugees! Where did they flee from? Why do they call themselves Palestinian? Not because they are from Gaza but because they are from lands that became Israel in 1948.

Do you seriously think $50 billion in development aid is going to end this conflict?! This is essentially what you are proposing. The refugees must be offered the right to return to Israel AND monetary reparations for the original crime of expulsion. Otherwise they will continue to feel oppressed by the state of Israel. Human rights cannot be negotiated. And yes, the right of a refugee to return is as basic a human right as free speech and freedom of religion, especially when people have been expelled because of their ethnicity, because of their religion.

Furthermore, there is no Palestinian Authority that can sign off on the Palestinian right of return. Whatever solution comes about, it must be implemented between Israel, the UN (as caretaker of Universal Human Rights), and the individual refugees themselves.

They must be offered the explicit right of return OR to remain where they are and receive some sort of equivalent compensation for their loss of property and the crime of expulsion. It is not reasonable to think that any peace can be negotiated between Israel and any sort of Palestinian Authority that does not approach the millions of Palestinian refugees directly and sincerely.

I just can’t believe that the proposed peace plan is any more reasonable than a one-state solution. The State of Israel, as it is held hostage by political Zionism today, would never accept an equal Palestinian state. It will always be seen as a puppet state. It’s not simply a matter of connecting the dots between Hamas, Fatah, Likud, and Labour. That’s not peace.

Additionally, the stated peace plan COMPLETELY ignores Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. What of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in Israel but are still refugees? What of the 1 million Palestinians who live under a state and in a society which explicitly discriminates against them in almost all aspects of their lives? What of the reality that mainstream Israeli opinion holds that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship should be “transferred” to the new Palestinian state?

Peace will not come by negotiating the legitimization of the status quo. Peace will come after an Israeli-Palestinian movement which confronts all aspects of political Zionism’s conflict with the indigenous reaches critical mass. It’s time to start getting creative.

Mishal Al-Johar
Palestine Solidarity Committee

From Michael Eisenstadt —

Mishal Al-Johar writes:

The events of 1948 and the Palestinian refugees are totally overlooked. This is the major problem with the proposed peace plan.

Peace is not going to happen if the refugee problem is not solved,period! Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian refugees is THE root of the conflict. And not just the 4 million refugees in the ghettos of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, but the refugees in camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Let me remind you that 80% of the population in Gaza arerefugees! Where did they flee from? Why do they call themselves Palestinian? Not because they are from Gaza but because they are from lands that became Israel in 1948. Do you seriously think $50 billion in development aid is going to end this conflict?! This is essentially what you are proposing. The refugees must be offered the right to return to Israel AND monetary reparations for the original crime of expulsion. Otherwise they will continue to feel oppressed by the state of Israel. Human rights cannot be negotiated. And yes, the right of a refugee to return is as basic a human right as free speech and freedom of religion, especially when people have been expelled because of their ethnicity, because of their religion.

Eisenstadt:

Mishal Al-Johar is overlooking something. Yes, Israel expelled and appropriated the property of ~750,000 Palestinians in the course of their “War of Independence.” The Israelis were fighting for survival against the Arab armies (not the Palestinian army for they had none) which were attempting to extirpate the Zionist pre-1948 enterprise. Ben Gurion gave the explicit order to the Israeli army to maximize the number of refugees in the course of fighting because not to would have been to not take advantage of a once in a lifetime opportunity. When such a crime is doneby a government it is exculpated as “raison d’etat.”

The Palestinians lost their land in a passage of arms in war. Israelis will NEVER NEVER NEVER accept the right of return for it would be to overturn the present regime’s demographic reality. That is for Israel non-negotiable.

As for the crime of expulsion, I would remind Mishal that all regimes are founded on a crime (Montesquie), every political entity in the whole world is based on the dispossession of the previous inhabitants of that place. The Israeli’s “crime” is to have done it only 60 years ago. If it is a crime for Israel, it is a crime foreveryone else. If you are a U.S. citizen and believe that this is so, I advise you to deed over your property if you have any to the nearest American Indian so as to live up to your principles.

Like the Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after Germany lost the war in 1945 (1 million of them plus died in the course of this operation), like the Croatians expelled from Yugoslavia more recently, and all the others, the Palestinians may if they wish forget their loss and get on with their lives. Or they may undertake another passage of arms (already tried by Nasser).

Michael Eisenstadt

More discussion to come. For those who are not Rag bloggers, please add your ideas as “Comments.”

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We Need to Lead by Example, Not Threats

Posted on March 31, 2008 by RagBlog

Toward a Humanist Foreign Policy
by Carl Coon

President George W. Bush has proved to be as much of a disaster on foreign affairs as on domestic issues. More, if possible. And not just on Iraq. On many other issues, including global warming, missile defense, population growth, and now Iran, he has been just as flagrantly wrong as he was on the supposed weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein. It’s not just that he’s getting bad advice: his narrow worldview is upside-down to begin with. Combine that with his desire to seek advice only from people who will fortify his prejudices, rather than from the ones who know and understand the issues, and you get a dangerous combination.

It was a national tragedy that we had this kind of person at the helm when the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001. Bush used the attack to justify a foreign policy aimed at world domination, accompanied by an even more systematic and thorough attack on our civil liberties, all in the name of “protecting” us against further terrorist assaults. As a result we are no longer admired abroad–we are feared and hated–while on the home front we face an erosion of our rights, an extraordinary accession of executive power, and an assault on the wall separating church and state.

I think it was Henry Kissinger who once observed that absolute security for any one country meant absolute insecurity for its neighbors. The Bush response to a serious, but not existential terrorist threat, has been entirely disproportionate. We built up our conventional military forces and then used them against Iraq, a country that wasn’t even threatening us. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda continues to regroup in the frontier regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan while we stride across the globe like some modern colossus, threatening anyone who disagrees with us, turning a deaf ear to their arguments.

There has to be a better way, and of course there is. We need to lead by example, not threats. We need to listen to others, learn what their problems are, and exercise our talents and ingenuity toward finding solutions that help everyone to the extent possible. We need to take the dawning environmental crisis seriously and show that we’re willing to make our share of needed sacrifices. Above all, we need to recognize that we have to sacrifice some of our national sovereignty if we are to cooperate effectively on global problems with the rest of the world.

This last point is critical and is least understood, not only by Bush and his accomplices, but by many, if not most, Americans. The fact of the matter is that we can’t have it both ways. We can’t insist on total security for us and us alone, and expect full cooperation from everyone else. Cooperation requires some sacrifices, some concessions, from each of the partners.

LIBERTY VS. SECURITY

The tradeoff between liberty and security is as old as humanity itself. Any human society that endures has rules that constrain its members in ways that make cooperation possible. So we prize liberty but fear anarchy. We are all for free choice but insist that everyone should respect the law of the land. We recognize that there’s a contradiction, or at least a tradeoff, between our yearning for as much individual freedom as possible, and the maintenance of public order, but we also believe that a just society can have its cake and eat it too. We admire societies, including our own, to the extent they have worked out institutions and attitudes and principles that maintain order while maximizing freedom. We deplore both failed states, where chaos reigns, and dictatorships, where order is maintained only by force. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?

Until now, there has been no such thing as a global society. The most complex societies have been nation-states. There is a global authority, the United Nations, but it has no teeth. On the most important issues, a sovereign nation can ignore any UN attempt to constrain or control its behavior. It’s true that many international and regional organizations, buttressed by treaties and conventions, bring a modicum of law and order into specific areas of international relations. They are useful and respond to real needs. But on the most important issues, any member of the UN can defy its authority, and the only recourse the UN has is to try to persuade other nations to put pressure on the miscreant. This sometimes works with small and powerless countries, but the big ones can behave as they please. When the chips are down, the current global society resembles Dodge City from the mythology of the cowboy movie, where victory goes to the fastest draw.

EVOLUTION OF A GLOBAL SOCIETY

Humanity is now in a transitional phase, moving reluctantly from Dodge City to a global society ruled by law. We’ve seen this kind of transition before, on more limited scales. Some combination of circumstances alters the environment and the existing social order comes under great stress. People get desperate enough to commit to a substantially different order that involves cooperating with former competitors, even enemies, in a larger society. There are problems of adjustment but eventually almost everyone is integrated into the new order and few want to go back to the old one. Our own nation’s history tells the story: thirteen colonies, each of them filled with pride at its particular history and character, hesitantly agreed to form a confederation. From that, the tighter bonds of a federal republic were created and now here we are. Who wants to go back?

Our history of morphing from thirteen small societies into a subcontinental giant was extraordinary. Usually the process involves more trauma, more false steps (I say this even while acknowledging that our civil war was a thoroughly traumatic affair). European history is more typical in that respect. How many wars have been fought on European soil since the Roman Empire collapsed? And how difficult is it still, when all the disadvantages of narrow nationalism have been revealed, and all the blessings of union are being unveiled, for the several national parties to agree on the institutions and modalities of union?

All this suggests that creating some kind of law and order that will include the whole globe will be an enormously complicated task, one that certainly will not be fully accomplished during the lifetime of anyone alive today. But it’s equally plausible that some such order will evolve eventually, if humanity is to survive at all. Right now we are living in a fool’s paradise, based on an uneasy equilibrium backed up not by an effective international rule of law but by a balance of terror, known as mutually assured destruction. No nation-state is mad enough to use nuclear weapons first, not so far at least, and all are concerned lest some of those weapons fall into terrorist hands. But is this the best guarantee of stability that we can leave to our grandchildren? If this is the best we can do, will there be that many grandchildren left to receive our inheritance?

Read all of it here.

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Analysing the Conflict in Southern Iraq

Posted on March 30, 2008 by RagBlog

Read the LA Times headline! This wouldn’t be happening if BushCo could have stayed the hell out of the Middle East. And the MSM doesn’t help by pushing buttons that make it sound like the US is always the “good guy.” It ain’t so. Juan Cole recommends this as a decent analysis of the Shiite rivalries.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

In Iraq, U.S. caught in middle of Shiite rivalry
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 30, 2008

Graves are prepared for Mahdi Army fighters near the city of Najaf.

BAGHDAD — The biggest surprise about the raging battles that erupted last week in southern Iraq was not that the combatants were fellow Shiites, but that it took this long.

Enmity has long festered between the two sides: one a ruling party that has struggled against the widespread perception that it gained power on the back of the U.S. occupation, the other a populist movement that has positioned itself as a critic of the U.S.-backed new order.

As they vie for power before October provincial elections that will determine who controls the oil-rich south, the stakes are high not only for the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest Shiite faction in the Iraqi coalition government, and the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to cleric Muqtada Sadr.

The conflict also poses great difficulties for the Americans, who are widely seen as siding with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party against Sadr.

The Iraqi government’s offensive in Basra has spelled the end to a seven-month cease-fire by Sadr’s militia in all but name.

In an ominous sign Saturday, Sadr in a rare TV interview praised armed resistance. Separately, he urged his followers to defy Maliki’s ultimatum to surrender their weapons.

Iraqi forces battling the Mahdi Army called in U.S. airstrikes Saturday in Basra, and two American soldiers were killed in a mostly Shiite area of east Baghdad.

Sadr’s cease-fire, which he imposed in August after his loyalists clashed with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s militia in the southern city of Karbala, was widely credited with helping calm Baghdad.

The U.S. military now risks forfeiting gains with the Sadr group, arguably the most popular Shiite political movement across Iraq. Already, U.S. officers have reported an increase in the number of attacks against them in Baghdad, where soldiers had benefited from the Mahdi Army’s tacit cooperation.

Read all of it here.

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Could Collider Produce Black Hole? Well, Maybe Just a Little One…

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Part of a detector to study results of proton collisions by a particle accelerator that a federal lawsuit filed in Hawaii seeks to stop. Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti / NYT.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More
By Dennis Overby /New York Times / March 29, 2008

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe..

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,”

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Read all of it here.

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Group Protests Autonomous Military Robots

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute.

Anti-landmine campaigners to protest against war robots

London, March 29, 2008 (ANI) — Reports indicate that an anti-landmine pressure group is going to campaign against military use of armed robots that make their own decisions about when to kill.

According to a report in New Scientist, the concerned group is known as Landmine Action, and is based in London.

This non-governmental organisation wants autonomous robots capable of killing people banned under the same kind of treaty that has outlawed landmines in over 150 countries.

They take the case of m achine-gun wielding military robots, which are currently remotely controlled by soldiers.

But the US Department of Defence wants them in future to work without supervision, meaning they would have to make their own decisions about when to pull the trigger.

Such robots are technologically similar to the latest generation of cluster bombs, against which Landmine Action and others are already campaigning, said Richard Moyes, Landmine Actions director of policy and research.

Those explode in the air, releasing tens of bomblets that descend by parachute.

Each bomblet uses infrared sensors to scan the ground below for heat sources and only detonates on landing if it finds any. If no heat sources are detected, the bomblet explodes high in the air to avoid creating a post-conflict hazard on the ground.

But that decision to detonate is still in the hands of an electronic sensor rather than a person, said Moyes. Our concern is that humans, not sensors, should make targeting decisions. So similarly, we dont want to move towards robots that make decisions about combatants and noncombatants, he added.

We should not use autonomous armed robots unless they can discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. And that will be never, said Noel Sharkey, a roboticist at Sheffield University, UK.

Other experts agree with Sharkey.

According to Peter Kahn, a researcher on social robots from the University of Washington, in Seattle, roboticists should stop taking research funds from the military.

We can say no, he told delegates at a conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, earlier this month. And if enough of us say it, we can ensure robots are used for peaceful purposes, he added. (ANI)

Source.

Military robots are a threat to humanity.
Military robots violate Asimov’s first law.

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Bringing Iran to Its Knees at Minimal Cost

Posted on March 30, 2008 by RagBlog

Russian Intelligence Sees U.S. Military Buildup on Iran Border
By RIA Novosti / March 27, 2008

Moscow – Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.”

He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.

A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.

The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006.

The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.

Source

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Even If You Die, They Pretend You Were Straight

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

Majour Alan Rogers

Media and military closets gay soldier killed in Iraq
By Pam Spaulding / March 28, 2008

This should present an interesting opportunity for discussion. Maj. Alan Rogers, 40, died in January from wounds from an IED while he was on patrol. He was an intelligence office there to train Iraqi soldiers. The Army posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a second Bronze Star to Rogers.

He was also gay. How did the media handle it? (Washington Blade):

Mainstream media coverage of Rogers’ death coincided with the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. service members killed in Iraq and the five-year anniversary of the invasion. But the media reports about Rogers’ death omitted any mention of his sexual orientation. The Washington Post, National Public Radio and the Gainesville Sun, the local newspaper in his hometown of Hampton, Fla., made no mention of his sexual orientation or his involvement with a group that works to overturn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Lynn Medford, Metro editor for the Post, said the newspaper debated whether or not to disclose Rogers’ sexual orientation and ultimately decided not to include such information as a matter of ethics. Rogers to some degree “kept his orientation private” and outing him after his death would “take a decision out of his hands,” she said. Rogers had no partner and no immediate family to consult with to determine what his wishes would be, Medford noted.

Tony Smith, a friend of Rogers’, described him as “very positive” and “very outgoing.” Smith and Rogers worked together in the D.C. chapter of American Veterans for Equal Rights, a group that works to change military policy toward gays. Rogers was out to friends in the Washington area, but “had to obviously be careful [about being out] to too many people because he was active duty military,” Smith said.

Rogers wasn’t exactly closeted, as he went out to public clubs in DC with friends, and even served for a time as treasurer for American Veterans for Equal Rights. Chris Johnson of the Washington Blade contacted several reporters and officials and the replies were interesting.

* Shari Lawrence, spokesperson for Army human resources: did not return calls seeking comment.

* Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio: did not return calls seeking comment.

* Ombudsman for the WaPo, Deborah Howell: editors decided there was no proof Rogers was gay and no evidence Rogers would want to be publicly known as gay after death. Ironically, the WaPo’s official policy on “outing” is that it isn’t done “unless it is germane to the story.” Wait. Isn’t DADT, and the fact that Rogers could have been discharged — something he was actively working to change — relevant to a story about the military?

* I love this one — Donna St. George of the WaPo received an e-mail from an Army casualty officer describing that the deceased’s family was “nervous” about how Rogers’ life was going to be reported — not mention the word “gay” or the phrase “sexual orientation” in the e-mail.

Rogers had no immediate family members to ostensibly be embarrassed by an outing (both of his parents are deceased).

Source

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Forfeiting His Integrity for His Ambition

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

A disclaimer, lest any moron out there think this is somehow an endorsement for Hillary Clinton, or any other criminal running for US president. I do not support any mainstream candidate as they are inconsistent with my beliefs, they accept bribes from corporate Amerikkka, and they will not provide anything meaningful for the people of the US (such as single-payer health care insurance). Barack Obama is no exception. Salaita provides a few good reasons why that is true.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Why I Won’t Vote for Barack Obama
by Steven Salaita / March 27, 2008

I would like to start by noting that although this will not be an essay about why one should vote for Ralph Nader, I am remarkably weary of liberals wagging their fingers at those unmoved by the Democratic Party and lecturing to us about who we should—nay, must—support. In typically self-righteous fashion, they want to limit our choices because they know what’s best for us (which just so happens to be better for them). These folks love to blame Nader for all the injustices that the Democrats have actively pursued or refused to prevent since 2000. They usually cite pragmatic rather than ethical factors to justify their support of the mendacious Democratic Party: electability, lesser-evilism, the necessary beginning of genuine progressivism, and so forth.

Nothing makes this class of politico so hysterical as somebody choosing to exercise the right to vote for a candidate who best represents his or her own positions. That hysteria exposes the carefully-unexamined assumption that the purpose of voting is to fortify institutional Democratic agendas. The use of pragmatism to justify this pandering is meant to suggest a political reasonableness, but it actually functions to reinforce complicity in the same centers of power these liberals claim to challenge.

These matters illustrate another reason why voting in the United States is mostly disport, a way for the unwitting enablers of imperial neoliberalism to feel like they are participating in a civic and economic system in which they are political surplus, useful only insofar as they spend and consume. Whether or not they vote, the system will continue to operate unabated, its managers welcoming voting because it convinces would-be agitators that they are actually effecting change.

Now that these qualifications are out of the way, let’s focus on what this essay will be about: why I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I hope others will likewise eschew Obama, but I welcome them to vote their conscience. Or, I welcome them to not vote at all. There are better ways to procure a right to complain.

I won’t vote for Obama because he once was promising but has morphed into an unusually charismatic but typically mediocre politician. A man once known for engaging the issue of Palestinian liberation in Chicago’s Arab American community now can be found sharing his message of Israel-love to anybody who will listen. This change of opinion intimates a lack of integrity. Obama’s supporters will argue that he is simply doing what allows him to become a viable contender for president, to which I would respond: if one wishes to keep his or her integrity intact, then that person shouldn’t seek national office as a Democrat. Obama is willingly forfeiting his integrity for his ambition. That is his choice and it isn’t my place to make the decision on his behalf. However, it is my place to decide not to vote for him based on that choice.

Read all of it here.

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BushCo – Continuing to Punish Fallujah

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

Classified Memo Reveals Iraqi Prisoners as “Starving”
by Jason Leopold / March 28, 2008

A classified memo written by a top military official stationed in Western Iraq reveals that a prison in downtown Fallujah is so overcrowded and dirty that it does not even meet basic “minimal levels of hygiene for human beings.”

“The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them,” says the memo, written late last month by Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S forces in western Iraq.

The classified document, leaked to the website Wikileaks, a website where whistleblowers can “reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations,” was authenticated by the organization.

The memo contains other shocking revelations about conditions at the jail, including a massive shortage of food and water. The prison is said to be run by Iraqi officials. US Marines oversee operation of the facility.

“I found the conditions there to be exactly (unbelivable [sic] over crowding, total lack of anything approaching even minimal levels of hygiene for human beings, no food, little water, no ventilation) to those described in the recent (18 February) FOX news artickle [sic] by Michael Totten entitled the “Dungeon of Fallujah.,” says Kelly’s memo. “We need to go to general quarters on this issue right now… To state that the current system is broken would erroneously imply that there is a system in place to be broken.” [click here for the full memo. rdj]

Totten, an independent journalist, said the prison can house a maximum of 110 prisoners but he discovered that there were more then 900 cramped into the facility. US contractors built the prison in 2005 which is located next to the US Joint Communications Center is

It is unknown who Kelly, the military commander in Iraq, sent the memo to. A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment late Wednesday.

Kelly wrote that when he inspected the prison “iraqis [sic] and marines present throughout my inspection as to why these conditions existed, three conditions were universaly [sic] cited as problems in Fallujah as well as the rest of Anbar,” the commander’s memo says.

“First, there is zero support from the government for any of the jails in Anbar. No funds, food or medical support has been provided from any ministry,” Kelly added. “Second, the police that run Anbar’s jails are the same personnel responsable [sic] for investigating crimes. These jailer/investigators are undermanned and more often than not spend most of their time out begging and scavenging for food than investigating crimes. (It is unlikely the prisoners will eat today)…I believe the Iraqi police are doing the best they can, and they literally begged me on humanitarian, moral and religious grounds to help them help the prisoners by somehow moving the government to action.”

Read the rest here.

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A Good Show from the Cheap Seats

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

From Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation.

Black Swans Everywhere

After a one-day reprieve from total meltdown in the financial markets, news media cheerleaders for the most reckless gang of bankers in world history declared the crisis over on Good Friday (with the markets safely closed). Whew, that’s a relief. Problem solved. And just in time for baseball season, too, so none of the Banker Boyz have to sell their sky box leases.

Commodities Drop, Rally in Dollar, Stocks Vindicate Bernanke

What is meant by “meltdown,” by the way, since the word is used so promiscuously by myself and others. I’d define it as the shock of recognition that many big institutions are worse than flat broke and are therefore powerless to conduct normal operations. By “worse than flat broke” I mean they are so deep in hock that all the accountants who ever lived, in the life of this universe and several others like it, using the fastest parallel processing computers ever built, could not keep up with their compounding accelerating losses (now approaching the speed of light).

The current vacation from reality on Wall Street may last a few more days, or even a couple weeks, but it seems as though a whole flock of black swan events is circling the sky over Financial-land and is about to blot out the sun. By black swan, I refer to the concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his recent book of that name, namely unexpected events of great power that tend to change the course of history.

For the moment, with the crisis “contained,” and the Boyz getting ready to air out their Hampton villas for the coming season, we are once again primed to be blindsided by potent random events that nobody saw coming. The trouble is, there are enough potent potential fiascos already visible on the horizon.

The mortgage fiasco is still just gathering steam as it moves from the non-payment stage to the default and repossession level on the grand scale. Even the political wish to bail out feckless mortgage holders will stumble on the mammoth clerical task of administrating the process, especially since we’ve barely begun to sort out who actually holds the mortgages after they’ve been minced into a fine mirepoix of securities off-loaded onto countless dupe “investors” ranging from municipal funds in obscure corners of foreign nations to countless public employee retirement plans.

No matter how the authorities try to “nationalize” the sucking chest wound of bad mortgages, the body of finance will flat-line — and the American public will get stuck with the bill from the intensive care unit. Those who, for some weird reason, continue to pay their way and meet their obligations, will be none too pleased to pay for misdeeds of the deadbeats and their banker-lenders. This portends a taxpayer rebellion, which may translate into a voter rebellion.

It’s too bad the current presidential candidates have been unable to address the unfolding economic nightmare. Their collective silence on the matter suggests that they don’t have a clue what to say about it. As the nightmare plays out and black swans flock in to blot out the sun, and the hedge funds come a’tumbling down, and more big banks blunder into black holes, and businesses big and small across the land shutter up their operations, and the unemployment rolls swell, and families are thrown out of their houses even when bailouts are supposed to be saving them (but the bureaucracy can’t get the paperwork done in time) — well now, they are going to be one pissed off bunch of people. What will they do at the conventions? Or outside the conventions?

Read all of it here.

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Another Episode of Daily Life in Iraq

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

From Juan Cole’s Informed Comment

Mahdi Army Militiamen, courtesy Al-Zaman of Baghdad

Police Mutiny, Refuse to attack Sadrists;
Clashes continue in Basra;
Sadrists open New fronts throughout Shiite South
By Juan Cole / March 29, 2008

The Times of Baghdad reports in Arabic that clashes continued on Friday between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and the provinces of the middle Euphrates and the south, causing hundreds of casualties, including among women, children and the elderly. The fighting also did damage to Iraq’s infrastructure, as well as to oil facilities and pipelines, damage that might run into the billions of dollars.

The US got drawn into the fighting on Friday. US planes bombed alleged Mahdi Army positions both in Basra and in Sadr City in Baghdad (as well as in Kadhimiya). Kadhimiya is a major Shiite shrine neighborhood in northwest Baghdad, and the spectacle of the US bombing it is very unlikely to win Washington any friends among Iraqi Shiites.

Despite the US intervention, government troops were unable to pierce Mahdi Army defenses or over-run their positions.

Al-Zaman says that the police force in Basra suffered numerous mutinies and instances of insubordination, with policemen refusing to fire on the Mahdi Army. The government response was to undertake a widespread purge of disloyal elements.

[Hmm. I wonder where fired policemen with combat training and guns could find another job . . . Maybe with the Mahdi Army?]

The Mahdi Army opened a number of new fronts in the fighting, in Nasiriya, Karbala, Hilla, and Diwaniya, as a means of reducing the pressure on its fighters in the holy city of Karbala. Local medical officials reported 36 dead in the fighting in Nasiriya.

The Mahdi Army used its position near Nasiriya to attack government troops attempting to go south to join the effort in Basra, and is said to have inflicted substantial casualties on them.

In Baghdad, Mahdi Army fighters clashed with government forces in 31 districts.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a decisive military victory and rejected calls by southern tribal sheikhs and a large number of Shiite ayatollahs for him to engage in dialogue and negotiation in order to reach a ceasefire and to save civilians who are threatened with a humanitarian catastrophe from shortages of water and food, as well as lack of medical care.

At the same time, Al-Zaman maintains, the Sadrists stipulated that al-Maliki and his brother-in-law, who heads the emergency forces that have been sent down to Basra from Baghdad and Basra, must withdraw.

The Iraqi minister of defense, Abdul Qadir Jasim, admitted in a news conference in Basra that the militiamen had taken the Iraqi security forces off guard. He added that the Iraqi government had expected this operation to be routine, but was surprised at the level of resistance, and was forced to change its plans and tactics.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshyar Zebari said that the government intends to defeat the Sadrists, but said he did not know how long the endeavor would take.

The attempt of parliament to meet and take up the issue of the battle with the Mahdi Army failed when the federal legislature could not muster a quorum. The session then turned into a mere discussion session. Al-Hayat, writing in Arabic, says that one reason that parliament could not get a quorum was that the Kurdistan Alliance and the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite) support al-Maliki and boycotted the session.

The tableau above is tragicomic. The Iraqi security forces haven’t even begun to take key Mahdi Army territory in Basra, and in fact have been rebuffed. The Mahdi Army claims to have captured heavy arms and even Iraqi soldiers from the government. The minister of defense admits that Baghdad was surprised at the level of resistance to the campaign. (After the spring of 2004? Why?) The British contingent of 4,000 troops out at the airport is not getting involved, raising questions as to what they are doing there.

Source, with links

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Terrorist Tits in Texas

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

As her attorney Gloria Allred looks on during a news conference in L.A., Mandi Hamlin, (right), demonstrates what she was asked to do by a TSA agent in order to board a plane. Photo by Nick Ut /AP

Nipple rings fall foul of airport check
By Dan Whitcomb / Reuters / March 28, 2008

LOS ANGELES – A woman who claims she was ordered by federal airport screeners to remove her nipple rings with pliers demanded an apology from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration on Thursday.

Mandi Hamlin, 37, also called for an investigation into the February 24 incident in Lubbock, Texas, saying that snickering male agents violated TSA policy by forcing her to remove the jewelry.

“I felt surprised, embarrassed, humiliated, scared and angry,” Hamlin told reporters at the offices of her Los Angeles attorney, Gloria Allred.

“This situation was totally out of control. I will not sit quietly. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

The TSA, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security that was set up after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, said it was investigating the incident but that agents were trained to search people with piercings in “sensitive areas” with dignity and respect.

“TSA is well aware of terrorists’ interest in hiding dangerous items in sensitive areas of the body, therefore we have a duty to the American public to resolve any alarm we discover,” the agency said in a written statement.

The TSA said incidents of female terrorists hiding explosives in “sensitive areas” were on the rise and provided a picture of a “bra bomb” that was used in training its agents.

Allred said the incident began when Hamlin, who has a number of piercings, set off a hand-held metal detector and told a TSA officer that her nipple rings were the problem.

A small group of TSA officers gathered around Hamlin, Allred said, and told her she would have to remove the jewelry from her nipples if she wanted to board her flight.

Hamlin went behind a curtain and removed one of her nipple piercings but could not budge the other, tearfully telling the officers it could not be taken out without pliers, Allred said.

“As Ms. Hamlin struggled to remove the piercing behind the curtain, she could hear a growing number of predominantly male TSA officers snickering in the background,” the attorney said.

Allred said TSA policy called for a pat-down under such circumstances but did not require the piercings to be removed.

Source.
From Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog

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