Antony Loewenstein

The new kid on the international block doesn’t seem to be bothering too many people:

Majorities around the world believe that China will catch up with the United States economically. It’s a prospect that leaves most of those polled—even Americans—unperturbed.

A multinational poll by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org finds that in most countries polled, majorities or pluralities believe the Chinese economy will grow to be as large as the US economy. In no country do most people think this would be mostly negative. Majorities in every country polled believe this is either a good thing or equally positive and negative.

“What is particularly striking is that despite the tectonic significance of China catching up with the US, overall the world public’s response is low key—almost philosophical,” said Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org.

This sanguine reaction is not because China is widely trusted. World Publics do not trust China any more than they trust the United States and distinctly less than they trust Japan.

China’s ascendance certainly brings some intriguing responses in Egypt. Many detest US foreign policy in the region and have little faith that China will be any better, but Washington has so badly burnt its bridges over there that any “new” country is seen as a welcome change. And people are willing to at least listen to what Beijing has to say. They no longer even do that with the US.

Military interventionists are still cynically manipulating public opinion, says Matthew Carr

While the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House declares Iraq to be on the point of total collapse, the intellectual architects of pre-emptive war continue to attract surprisingly respectful media attention.

One can be revolted – but not surprised – at the spectacle of Bush and Blair, the Laurel and Hardy of the War on Terror, congratulating each other on their strategic vision from the White House lawn. But whose bright idea was it to let Richard Perle, the US hawk known as the ‘prince of darkness’, make a PBS documentary arguing that the world needs more military ‘interventions’? And what explains the ubiquitous media presence of John Bolton, the troglodyte former US ambassador to the UN?

Only last week Bolton was interviewed by John Humphrys on the Today programme.

Listening to that conversation was a grim experience that was not unlike being trapped with the Kevin Spacey serial killer character from Seven.

It wasn’t just that Bolton’s arguments were bizarre and illogical to the point of insanity, such as his description of Humphrys and the millionaire philanthrophist George Soros as members of the ‘extreme left’. Or his ludicrous assertion that the invasion of Iraq has laid the basis for a more stable and peaceful Middle East. It wasn’t even his fanaticism, his arrogance and his utter contempt for the opinions of the non-American world. What is striking about Bolton is the savagery and homicidal intent that shows through the statesmanlike patter.

In the same week that Bolton was explaining why ‘we’ should act against Iran, the son of Andrew Bacevich was killed serving in Iraq. An ex-US Army colonel and a political conservative, Bacevich has been a passionate and outspoken critic of the Iraq war from the beginning.

Having served in Vietnam, Bacevich knows war at firsthand and wrote a book analysing how the American public has become ‘seduced’ by a fantasy version of cost-free militarism.

This process of seduction is partly due to the tireless efforts of war trolls such as Perle and Bolton. To the imperial mindset of these desktop warriors, foreign policy always boils down to the cathartic killing of America’s enemies, generally of the darker-skinned variety. No matter how great the carnage, they are unrepentant and utterly indifferent, dismissing the destruction of entire societies as strategic victories.

These men are cynical, shameless and without honour. Asked by a distraught young American widow whose husband had died in Iraq why the administration went to war, Perle replied without batting an eyelid that the information on ‘our desks’ kept saying that Saddam had WMD. Perle does not mention that such information was essentially commissioned – a manoeuvre that enables men like him to lie without actually lying.

Perle, Bolton and co often pontificate on the unique moral evil of terrorism. But in their contempt for human life and their appetite for war they are not that different from Osama bin Laden. Unlike Osama, they will not be found in the Hindu Kush carrying a Kalashnikov. They are war trolls, endlessly manipulating the public from TV studios. In this sense they are more like the Roman senators who grew rich and fat while the legions went out to ‘create a wasteland and call it peace’, as Tacitus once put it.

The war trolls would have us believe that they are the grown-ups, defending us from the coming barbarism. But watch out next time you see them on Newsnight. Behind the oily gravitas of the prince of darkness lies a different kind of barbarism. And look closely at the gleaming eyes of the ex-UN ambassador with his walrus moustache. You might just detect a big kid, living out a fantasy of violence and control, while he operates the PlayStation game that just happens to be the world the rest of us live in.

The next time you hear these people being interviewed, try and keep a mental note of how many lies they use to support their arguments, not to mention the fact that every one of them is benefiting financially from the war state.

US troops are beginning to doubt the worthiness of the cause in Iraq, and who could blame them?

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

No matter how noble the intentions of the troops, there is no avoiding he fact that they are occupiers. Apart from the Iraqi people, the Iraqi security forces they believe they are there to help are always going to resent their country being controlled by an occupying power.

Glenn Greenwald has written yet another superb piece that not only challenges the wisdom behind the apparent dangers of withdrawing from Iraq, but what motivates those who maintain this argument.

Conventional wisdom has led to the acceptance that withdrawing from Iraq would lead to even worse bloodshed that we are witnessing now. The peculiar thing about this position is that it has been, by and large, brought to us by the same people who were wrong about every aspect of the war (pre and post invasion). These are the same people who pre invasion, warned us of the dangers of not invading, while insisting that the setback would be minimal.

It is abundantly evident that these pundits have ulterior motives.

Here are just a handful of quotes:

But these same pundits who dole out lectures about how Seriousness requires an acknowledgment of risks focus — just as they did when advocating the invasion — on only one side of the risk ledger. These Serious War Pundits studiously ignore the risks of keeping 150,000 troops in the middle of that region under the control of George Bush and Dick Cheney. There is virtually no discussion of the risks of that course of action.

—————————————————————————————————————

The most glaring of these risks is the prospect of military conflict with Iran — the by-product not of some deliberative democratic debate over whether to go to war with that country, but rather a natural outgrowth of our occupation of Iraq.

—————————————————————————————————————

Lt. General William Odom argues that the risks of leaving are being exaggerated by withdrawal opponents as a rank fear-mongering device to scare people out of supporting withdrawal — in exactly the same way these same advocates exaggerated the “threat” posed by Saddam in order to scare people into supporting the war.

—————————————————————————————————————

One of the most under-discussed facts with regard to Iraq is that the very people who conceived of the invasion and who are the architects of our current military strategy have always believed, and still believe, that we must go to war with Iran. Our current strategy in Iraq was designed and, to a large degree, implemented with that goal in mind.

—————————————————————————————————————

What they seek — by their own acknowledgment — is a conflict with Iran and Syria, and they want to stay in Iraq because that is how that goal can be achieved. Joe Lieberman published an Op-Ed at the end of last year declaring that America’s real enemy in this “war” is Iran. Charles Krauthammer and John Podhoretz last year both proclaimed — excitedly — that U.S. war with Iran was inevitable, and that (according to Krauthammer) it would be less than a year away.

—————————————————————————————————————

But what if, as appears clearly to be the case, that is not really the goal of the people in charge of what we are doing in Iraq? What if the real goal in staying, as seems to be the case, is to maximize the possibility of war in the Greater Middle East? And/or what if, as Avedon Carol persuasively argues, the real goal is to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq, such that we are never really going to leave, because we don’t actually want to leave?

—————————————————————————————————————

But willful recklessness is no excuse. Purposely shutting one’s eyes to the likely consequences of the course one advocates does not exonerate anyone from responsibility for those consequences. And the severe risks of staying Iraq — beyond the guaranteed loss of thousands of more lives and billions and billions of dollars — have simply been erased from our current debate.

—————————————————————————————————————

And there in lies the rub. When these people insist we support the troops, what they really mean is that we should support their war. Ignoring the fact that the US military is overstretched already, their position is that so long as the US has a military presence in Iraq, the likelihood of an armed confrontation with Iran and Syria is increased.

A wonderful example of the shamelessness and delusion of the wingnut fraternity (aka Instapundit) care of Instaputz.

Putz added to his ludicrous “you’d think lefty bloggers would be happy if things were going badly in Iraq” post.

I’m starting to think that they don’t follow the news all that closely. It’s true — as Michael Yon noted in an earlier email — that Anbar isn’t perfectly peaceful. But it’s also true that it’s changed quite drastically since it was being written off last year. That’s news — if you care about reality, rather than just rooting for America Bush to lose.

What, no “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”?

Here’s the problem: Putz has been insisting we’ve been winning in Anbar for three years. Read these posts and decide who it is doesn’t follow the news or care about reality.

10/6/06

Don’t let the media convince you that things are going badly in Iraq. The Anbar tribes are now fighting al Qaeda on their own initiative, and the Shi’ite-dominated government is slowly dismantling al Sadr’s Mahdi Army…Our strategy in Iraq is sound. It’s keeping our own casualties down, and it’s forcing the Iraqis to defend themselves.

Don’t despair. We’re winning.

10/5/06

ED MORRISSEY looks at events in Anbar province, and observes: “The tribal backlash shows why the Zarqawi strategy was always a loser.”

10/2/06

A GROWING INSURGENCY in Iran?
UPDATE: Plus, a look at Anbar tribes vs. Al Qaeda from Bill Roggio.

9/22/06

STRATEGYPAGE OFFERS A RATHER POSITIVE TAKE on what’s going on in Anbar province.

9/21/06

Good work has been and continues to be done in Anbar. The military has a problem with public affairs, plain and simple, and fails to realize that the impact on remaining silent on this report far outweighs the need to keep the information classified.

1/27/06

IRAQ THE MODEL: “Iraqi tribes in Anbar arrest 270 Arab and foreign al-Qaeda members!”

9/04

If the pattern of American casualties shows that most fighting is happening in Al-Anbar it is not because Administration officials are manufacturing the results to camouflage a “widening insurgency”. It is because there is no power vacuum among Kurds and Shi’ias as complete as that in the Sunni triangle. Civil war, if it eventuates, will not be result of military failure but from a lack of commitment to create a replacement Iraqi State. If we build it, it will come.

As Glenn Reynolds demonstrates time and time again, the right wing wasn’t kidding when they say they are creating their own reality.

While life in Iraq for the average Iraqi becomes truly unbearable (this missive is essential to understand what Western journalists simply cannot see) and the Bush administration cares little for the “liberated” people themselves, Dick Cheney is apparently keen to attack Iran with the US military. The Washington Note reports:

The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

The idea that the US military could strike Iran and not expect the most serious blowback is unimaginable. Being here in the Middle East, and speaking to a host of writers, bloggers and intellectuals, it’s clear that even amongst the most Western-friendly of them, the US is truly hated these days. It is as simple as that. For Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and supporting autocratic regimes in the region, literally nobody believes the “democracy” rhetoric coming out of the US. Furthermore, the ability of the US to gather support from anybody other than the corrupt and authoritarian elites is non-existent. This reality is virtually ignored in the Western media, as if these poor oppressed people are just waiting for some good old fashioned US liberation.

Welcome to the new Middle East.

Wael Abbas, Washington Post, May 27:

Last Thursday, I returned to my country, Egypt, after several weeks in the United States on a Freedom House fellowship. I came home full of anxiety. I feared that the authorities would arrest me as soon as I set foot on Egyptian soil.

That didn’t happen. But as I went through the airport arrival procedures, I felt that I was being closely watched and followed. Men using walkie-talkies observed me from a distance. When I joined my family members outside the terminal, they, too, told me that they had been watched while waiting for me.

I could still be arrested. And if I am, it will be because I dared to speak the truth about President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, which continues to receive billions in foreign aid from the U.S. government — including funds ostensibly intended to support democracy. It will be because I dared to expose the actions that have made Mubarak’s administration one of the world’s foremost violators of human rights, according to human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House.

I am an Egyptian blogger. And the Mubarak regime is out to get me and others like me.

It is engaged in an all-out campaign against those of us who use the Internet to report the truth about what is happening in Egypt. It is spreading rumors about us and targeting us for character assassination. Judges allied with the government have filed lawsuits against more than 50 bloggers, accusing them of blackmail and of defaming Egypt and demanding that their blogs be shut down. Meanwhile, security officials appear on television to claim that the bloggers are violating media and communications laws.

Is this the kind of regime you want your tax money to support?

Illegality has never stopped Israel’s behaviour before, but this is certainly a blow from inside the belly of the beast:

A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser at the time and today one of the world’s leading international jurists, is a serious blow to Israel’s persistent argument that the settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was marked “Top Secret” and “Extremely Urgent” and reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author’s summary, “that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank – one of the main problems to be solved in any peace deal: “I believe that I would have given the same opinion today.”

Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor, also sheds new light on the aftermath of the 1967 war by disclosing that the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, was “sympathetic” to his view that civilian settlement would directly conflict with the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.

Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet progressively sanctioned settlements. This paved the way to growth which has resulted in at least 240,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank today.

After decades of furious and determined settlement building, Israel has created a monster that seems to know few bounds. I have long argued that a type of civil war is quite likely when, and if, the international community finally pressures Israel to give up its colonial addiction to land. A small but violent minority of settlers will resist, and Israel will only have itself to blame.

The mantra that we are fighting them over there so as not to fight them here has just been sunk

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.

The Bush administration has turned Iraq into a terrorist academy. Bin Laden couldn’t have asked for more.

You’re doin a heck of a job Dubya.

The western media have been quick to seize on the demonstrations in Venezuela protesting the decision not to renew the broadcast license of one of the country’s TV stations.

Of course, this has provided grist for those determined to portray Chavez as a dictator with fascistic aspirations.

What is ironic is the fact that RCTV is portraying this as an act of censorship and assault on freedom. It is ironic because the station played a significant role during the failed 2002 coup against Chavez. Unfortunately, for RCTV, their role is pretty hard to dispute.

RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez’s democratically elected government. During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks. “I must thank Venevisión and RCTV,” one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film documents the networks’ participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup—hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

RCTV’s management is predictably playing the victim card.

RCTV’s General Manager Marcel Granier said on Sunday that Mr Chavez was acting illegally.

“We haven’t lost hope that before midnight the president will react sensibly… he still has the opportunity to correct this abusive, arbitrary and illegal behaviour,” he said.

After midnight, he said, “the fight continues, freedom is something you have to fight for permanently”.

And how legal is supporting a coup against the democratically elected leader?

How many governments would renew the broadcasting license of a station that was actively involved in an anti-government coup? Try to imagine what would become of any television station in the US or Great Britain. It’s unlikely they would have been allowed to continue to operate at all, much less, live out their contract.

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, May 27:

Once again we are being hit by a wave of desire for “a strong man.” From every direction, from the left and right, voices that miss former prime minister Ariel Sharon are being heard, like voices of longing for a father who has departed. “If Sharon were here the war in Lebanon would have ended differently,” and “Sharon would have put an end to the Qassams a long time ago.”

During his six years as prime minister Sharon wiped out the last chance for the existence of a Palestinian partner. Sharon’s Israel waged war on the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and instead of a secular movement that believes in compromises we received a fanatical Islamic leadership, just as the first Lebanon war gave rise to Hezbollah. Whom do we have to thank for this? Sharon.

Former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, explains why when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the outlandish assortment of plots and crimes under torture, his captivity played right into his hands and undermined their own credibility.

The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals–that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

The huge irony is that even if Mohammed was indeed a major player in the 9/11 attacks, it’s likely we’ll never know because anything that he confesses to could well be another effort to muddy the waters. If ever there was a clear argument for why torture does not work, this must surely be it.