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Editorial: What the Pentagon Video Should Have Shown
Signs of the Times
May 18, 2006
Thanks to our friends at Onnouscachetout, we can finally present you with the video the Pentagon should have released... if a Boeing 757 had really hit the Pentagon.
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Editorial: Iran: Russia, China drift toward US
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
May 19, 2006
Asia Times
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned that the current US-led push for United Nations sanctions against Iran could turn out to be a "pretext for war", and yet both Russia and China, long thought to be opponents of any sanctions, are now inching toward the US strategy with regard to Iran.
It is China that has taken the lead, by putting its weight behind the yet-to-be-submitted set of European "conditional incentives" for Iran to give up its uranium-enrichment program, which has had the effect of forcing Moscow to follow suit.
There is, after all, a diplomatic minuet involved here, with Beijing and Moscow carefully crafting every step according to the ebbs and flows of a fluid crisis that features multiple players with distinct, shared, parallel and opposing interests.
The news of China's slow accommodation with the US-EU plan was broken by US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in his May 10 congressional testimony. He assured members that China "has agreed in principle" to play along. This was followed by a similar report by the Los Angeles Times that Tang Jiaxuan, a leading member of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, has called for an Iranian moratorium on all enrichment-related activities.
As expected, this has had the desired effect, from the US point of view, of mollifying Russia, which has been seething at the recent US criticisms of its human-rights and energy policies. Thus at a press conference with his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, Lavrov echoed China's backing of the European Union proposal by stating, "We will suggest this approach and will expect Iran to respond to it in a constructive way. We are firmly convinced that this is the only way to settle the situation."
The pertinent question, of course, is what will Moscow and Beijing do once the EU proposal is formally submitted and rejected by Iran, in light of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's preemptive "don't give a damn" reaction? Are they willing to set aside their opposition to UN sanctions? Another question is: How far are China and Russia willing to go to sacrifice their relations with Iran in order to maintain healthy relations with the United States?
The latter question touches on, among other things, the future of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Unfortunately, contrary to the earlier official announcements, particularly by China's officials, the SCO is now on the verge of changing its mind about expanding its membership and accepting Iran, as well as Pakistan and India, as new members.
"There are no plans to fundamentally enlarge the SCO. I don't think the number of SCO members will greatly increase in the foreseeable future," Lavrov said at a press conference on Tuesday, exactly one month prior to the SCO summit in Shanghai, in reaction to the news that the US government has asked Russia for "explanation" about the news that Ahmadinejad plans to attend the June summit.
In turn, the Iranian press has reacted negatively to Russia's turnabout on Iran's membership in the SCO and has questioned the wisdom of Ahmadinejad's participation in the absence of full membership. Iran has only been given observer status so far. Without doubt, should Moscow keep firm on its present line against Iran's inclusion in SCO, this will be interpreted as a major diplomatic setback for Iran and will negatively influence the course of Iran-Russian relations.
Interestingly, precisely at a time when the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers were holding a joint press conference and implicitly, if not explicitly, criticizing Iran's defiant stance, their respective ambassadors in Tehran were meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, praising Iran's diplomacy and willingness to engage in dialogue with the US on the nuclear issue. Both Russia and China have a history of making deals over Iran with Washington, and naturally one wonders whether we are now witnessing another sad spectacle of trading principles for quid pro quos from Uncle Sam by both countries.
EU's old proposal sold as new
Whereas a top US official has admitted that the EU's "new" package is actually a "dusting off" of the pre-existing proposals "on the table", the Western media have uniformly praised the "new European package of incentives", including the offer of a modern light-water reactor.
In fact, while the final package has yet to be unveiled, and there are reports of serious US misgivings about any EU pledge of nuclear assistance to Iran, awaiting the verdict of the upcoming London meeting of the Permanent Five plus Germany, it is worth remembering that in November 2004, the EU-3 (Germany, France and Britain) signed an agreement in Paris with Iran that called for "cooperation" on "nuclear issues".
The Paris Agreement is dead, long live the Paris Agreement. It stated: "The E3/EU recognize Iran's rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty exercised in conformity with its obligations under the treaty, without discrimination." The agreement called for Iran's suspension of its enrichment-related activities on a temporary basis. There is in fact no ambiguity about this aspect of the document that reads: "The E3/EU recognize that this suspension is a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation."
By all indications, Iran faithfully implemented the terms of the Paris Agreement until January, when it resumed enrichment activities after the EU-3/EU's radical departure from their own agreement by calling for a permanent suspension, after the United States' blunt criticisms of the Paris Agreement. Turning history upside down, Western media pundits have now manufactured a consent about Iran's blameworthy behavior breaking the Paris Agreement, when in reality it was the surrogate Europe that caved in to US pressure and disrespected its own pledge to Iran - to respect Iran's nuclear rights "without discrimination".
Consequently, the EU is about to hurl an old package under new wraps, deemed as "generous" by the German negotiator, Michael Schaffer, in his recent communication to this author, without an iota of guilty conscience or moral qualm about its own pattern of misbehavior toward Iran. The irony that the EU has turned a complete blind eye to Brazil's simultaneous declaration of an ambitious new plan to accelerate its nuclear-fuel program, simply because the world "trusts Brazil" (but don't tell that to Brazil's neighbors!), has simply escaped the attention of Western media.
Jealous of Moscow's monopoly of Iran's nuclear market, the EU's latest proposal is partially aimed at preempting the recent Russian announcement of plans to build two new nuclear reactors in Iran, by potentially luring Iran away from such a deal and toward the more technologically advanced European nuclear market. Russian policymakers would indeed be remiss to overlook the purely self-interest elements of the latest European proposal.
Another clue to the EU's perceived hypocrisy, from Iran's point of view, is the recent joint EU/GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) statement expressing concerns about Iran's nuclear program, coinciding with new, and more energetic, efforts by the GCC with respect to the disputed islands of Abu Mussa, Little Tunb and Big Tunb. The EU's hidden tactic is, in other words, to lend support to the GCC over these Iran-controlled islands, to put additional pressure on the nuclear front.
The SCO historic bloc
Surely the SCO would be hobbled by new headaches caused by a significant expansion of membership that would, in turn, add to its qualitative weight and geopolitical significance. But to assume that the negative side-effects will necessarily outweigh the advantages is to succumb to the seeds of doubt planted by the West, which is wary of the emergence of a formidable anti-North Atlantic Treaty Organization counterweight via the SCO. The SCO, now and in the prospective future, is not so much an anti-NATO coalition as a potential countervailing bloc to the United States' interventionist policies. But surely the time is ripe to take the SCO to the next level.
Certainly, this is not to fall into the naive analyses of an impending "new Cold War" favored by certain Russian politicians, given the complexities of the post-Cold War world order. Taking account of these complexities, including a certain lack of fit between the geo-economic and geopolitical considerations, China and Russia would be well advised to eschew their present drift against the SCO's expansion, which will only appease the US.
One potential advantage of Iran's membership in the SCO is that it would allow China and Russia to influence more positively Iran's foreign policy and, by implication, the Muslim World. The SCO's chief concerns about terrorism can clearly benefit from Iran's inclusion, as this would translate into greater regional cooperation against Islamist extremism in, among others, Russia's and China's Muslim-led regions as well as the entire Central Asia-Caspian basin.
The SCO calls for "force sharing", and this would also translate into enhanced military cooperation among the member states, which, if inclusive of Iran, would have net benefit vis-a-vis the common Russia-China concerns about the undue expansion of NATO in the East.
Concerning the latter, there is talk of a NATO "encirclement of Iran" in Washington these days, championed by certain leading Republican senators, such as Senator John Warner, who have praised NATO's decision to more than double its forces in Afghanistan and to expand ties with some of Iran's other neighbors such as Azerbaijan. This must resonate with Moscow, which has similarly complained of NATO expansion and "encirclement" post-September 11, 2001.
A point of no return
Both China and Russia are on record opposing the Security Council's recourse to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter declaring Iran a threat to peace, in which case the US would be justified, from the prism of international law, in taking unilateral military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. And yet instead of exploring the perfectly viable options of full-scope international monitoring of Iran's limited, contained enrichment program, Russian and Chinese policymakers are slowly but surely adjusting themselves to precisely such a scenario, whose net effect would be detrimental to their own geopolitical vested interests, particularly if war breaks out.
Already, Washington is awash with self-justifying arguments for war against Iran, the main one being that Iran is on the verge of reaching a "point of no return" in terms of nuclear know-how and technology. The other argument is that this situation resembles the pre-World War II period of appeasement, as if 2006 were 1938 again.
Indeed, it is fascinating how many prominent journalists, academics, and present and/or former officials in the US have lent their penmanship to the "never again" 1938 scenario. The long list includes the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. To his credit, Kissinger has, however, nuanced this alarmist view with a prudent call for US-inclusive multilateral talks with Iran.
Unfortunately, in the present debates in the US on Iran, the upper hand belongs to those nay-sayers who have persuaded the administration of President George W Bush to turn down Ahmadinejad's call for direct talks, arguing that the "UN is the best forum". Since when have the same neo-conservatives, who have carved out an inglorious history for themselves for hammering the UN for six consecutive years, become such big fans of the UN?
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, has recently lashed out at International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei for making political statements as the head of only a "technical organization". ElBaradei's latest guilt is that he has played down the news of certain reports by IAEA inspectors regarding traces of highly enriched uranium at a razed military site in Iran.
US nuclear experts have, however, wasted little time putting the right spin on this news, by claiming that this "casts serious doubt" on Iran's declarations on that particular site and the broader issue of alleged military involvement in Iran's civil nuclear program. According to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming, ElBaradei had been misquoted. His main point had been that the analysis of environmental sampling at Lavizan was still ongoing and that it was too early to reach a definitive conclusion. Iran has already flatly rejected Western media's report on this issue as false.
As the heavyweights gear up for the next round, portending more serious initiatives against Iran at the Security Council, both China and Russia need seriously to re-examine the present drift of their policy, which will only strengthen the United States' "unipolar moment" and weaken their hoped-for multilateralist breakout. The stakes in the Iranian nuclear crisis transcend Iran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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Editorial: Martin Van Creveld: Israel the Mad Dog
Wednesday May 17th 2006, 7:42 pm
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
Let's hand it to Martin Van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for speaking the mind of nearly half of all Israelis. "The Palestinians should all be deported," declared Van Creveld in 2003. "The people who strive for this (the Israeli government) are waiting only for the right man and the right time. Two years ago, only 7 or 8 per cent of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two months ago it was 33 per cent, and now, according to a Gallup poll, the figure is 44 percent."
Actually, according to Haaretz and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, "46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country.... In 1991, 38 percent of Israel's Jewish population was in favor of transferring the Palestinians out of the territories [i.e., militarily occupied land] while 24 percent supported transferring Israeli Arabs," or rather ethnically cleansing them.
Such a "final solution" to the fact millions of Arabs live in Palestine-and have for centuries-would be a serious violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols, not that Israel believes in humanitarian law when it comes to Arabs and Muslims. "Israeli-Arabs pose a threat to Israel's security, according to 61 percent of the Jewish population, while around 80 percent are opposed to Israeli-Arabs being involved in important decisions, such as delineating the country's borders, up from 75 percent last year and 67 percent in 2000," Haaretz continues. In other words, a large majority of Israelis believe Arabs should suffer in perpetuity as second class citizens, mere "hew'ers of wood' and draw'ers of wa'ter," as described in the Old Testament (Josh. 9:21).
Moreover, Van Crevel boasted "Israel had the capability of hitting most European capitals with nuclear weapons," a remark especially pertinent now, as the Israelis and Americans claim Iran will do likewise the moment it develops a nuke. "We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets of our air force." Iran has never made such a remark (or threat) and yet we are told the country is a threat to world peace. "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother," Van Crevel explained. "Our armed forces are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under."
Of course, Israel really has no intention of "hitting most European capitals with nuclear weapons," as this would be counterproductive to its real agenda-using its nukes and conventional military (lavished with U.S. tax-payer money) to dominate the Muslim and Arab Middle East. "Abdul Sattar Qassem, a professor of political science and former candidate for President in the Palestinian Authority, said Israel wanted all Arabs and Muslims in this region to remain in a 'perpetual state of strategic and military inferiority....This means they can invade, attack and occupy any rampage through any Arab or Muslim country in this region with impunity,' he said while speaking during a symposium in Dura Tuesday, marking the 58th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the forced usurpation of Palestine by Zionist Jews," the Islamic Republic News Agency reports. According to Qassem, it is "imperative that Muslim states seek to create military and strategic parity with Israel" in order "to prevent Israel from annihilating millions of Muslims.... Just imagine if some crazy Jewish fundamentalists take power in Israel, would it be far-fetched to imagine the possibility that these racists would seek to attack neighboring states with nuclear bombs in order to fulfill their messianic aspirations."
In order to preserve its illegal stockpile of nukes-and thus its trump card against all Muslims in the Middle East-Israel and its collaborators in the corporate media here in America (and Europe) have distorted the words of Iran's leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In order to assure Iran will be unable to protect itself, Ahmadinejad is now being portrayed as Hitler, as Saddam Hussein was before him. Iran will be shock and awed before it can produce one single nuclear bomb. Iran, not unlike like Iraq, will be broken down into mutually antangonistic bantustans.
Our problem is Israel, not Iran. I fear Israel and its 46 percent of ethnic cleansing and Islam hating fanatics-who are essentially racists, no different than troglodytic members of the KKK or the millions of deluded Germans who believed the racial theories of the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg. I am more worried about our bought and sold Congress-almost all prostituted down to the man and woman-on the AIPAC food chain and the neocon leash. I fear the rabid Van Crevel and his fellow citizens more than I fear Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs.
Rosenberg, at least, suffered the noose as a war criminal at Nuremberg.
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All Hail the Homeland!
Bush: 'Alpha Male on the Cruise Ship'
By Robert Parry
May 18, 2006
When future historians scratch their heads and wonder how George W. Bush came to lead the world's most powerful nation at the start of the Twenty-First Century, it might help them to know that many Americans found his type familiar - and thus reassuring. Bush was the alpha male on the cruise ship.
He was like the wise-cracking guy leading a pack of vacationers out of the elevator toward the all-you-can-eat buffet bar, while poking fun at Charlie for getting too much sun on his bald head or at Mildred for putting on a few extra pounds. The others in the group titter with nervous amusement, fearing their ribbing will come next.
Like that dominant male on the cruise ship, Bush exhibits a freedom to mock the appearance of almost anyone, holding up both American citizens and foreign leaders to public ridicule for how they look.
At a joint White House press conference May 16 with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, as the two men stood side by side, Bush slipped in a couple of zingers about Howard's bald head and supposed homeliness.
Bush joshed, "Somebody said, 'You and John Howard appear to be so close, don't you have any differences?' And I said, 'yes, he doesn't have any hair.'"
Getting a round of laughs from reporters, Bush moved on to his next joke: "That's what I like about John Howard," Bush said. "He may not be the prettiest person on the block, but when he tells you something you can take it to the bank."
Howard played the role of gracious guest, smiling and saying nothing in response to the disparaging comments about his physical appearance.
Though many men are very sensitive about losing their hair, Bush seems to find their baldness a source of humor, a way to put them in their place.
At a press conference on Aug. 24, 2001, Bush called on a Texas reporter who had covered Bush as Texas governor. Bush said the young reporter was "a fine lad, fine lad," drawing laughter from the national press corps.
The Texas reporter then began to ask his question, "You talked about the need to maintain technological ..." But Bush interrupted the reporter to deliver his punch line:
"A little short on hair, but a fine lad. Yeah."
As Bush joined in the snickering, the young reporter paused and acknowledged meekly, "I am losing some hair."
Bush exhibits other physical alpha-male tendencies, such as when he greets another man by cupping his hand behind the man's neck, a sign of both affection and control.
Bush also demonstrates who's boss by assigning goofy nicknames, often tied to a person's appearance. Bush called two different tall, male reporters "Stretch" before eventually dubbing the taller one "Super Stretch."
Tart Tongue
Over the years, Bush has regularly poked fun at the looks of both close friends and casual acquaintances. While Texas governor, Bush lined up for one photo and fingered the man next to him. "He's the ugly one!" Bush laughed. [NYT, Aug. 22, 1999]
Other times, Bush goes beyond playful banter and just tongue-lashes people who have gotten on his wrong side.
In 1986, for instance, Bush spotted Wall Street Journal political writer Al Hunt and his wife Judy Woodruff having dinner at a Dallas restaurant with their four-year-old son. Bush was steaming over Hunt's prediction that Jack Kemp - not then-Vice President George H.W. Bush - would win the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.
Bush stormed up to the table and cursed Hunt out. "You [expletive] son of a bitch," Bush yelled. "I saw what you wrote. We're not going to forget this." [Washington Post, July 25, 1999]
In one of Campaign 2000's most memorable moments, Bush uttered an aside to his running mate Dick Cheney about New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. "There's Adam Clymer - major league asshole - from the New York Times," Bush said as he was waving to a campaign crowd from a stage in Naperville, Ill.
"Yeah, big time," responded Cheney. Their voices were picked up on an open microphone.
Bush even seems to take pleasure from holding power over a person's life or death.
In an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson at the start of Campaign 2000, Bush joked about how condemned murderer Carla Faye Tucker pleaded for her life with him as Texas governor. "Please don't kill me," Bush whimpered through pursed lips in an imitation of the woman whom Bush put to death.
Later, during a presidential debate, Bush again made light of people facing the death penalty in Texas. While arguing against the need for hate-crimes laws, Bush said the three men convicted of the racially motivated murder of James Byrd were already facing the death penalty.
"It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they're put to death," Bush said, with an out-of-place smile across his face. Beyond the inaccuracy of his statement - one of the three killers had received life imprisonment - there was that smirk again when discussing people on Death Row.
Quick Temper
Over the years, Bush has gained a reputation, too, for dressing down subordinates.
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum painted a generally flattering portrait of Bush in the 2003 book, The Right Man, but Frum acknowledged Bush's autocratic behavior and harsh humor.
Bush is "impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed," Frum wrote. When referring to environmentalists, Bush would call them "green-green lima beans," according to Frum.
Bush's hot temper also has complicated U.S. foreign policy, including the tense relations with North Korea. During a lectern-pounding tirade before Republican leaders in May 2002, Bush insulted North Korea's diminutive dictator Kim Jong Il by calling him a "pygmy," Newsweek reported. The slur quickly circulated around the globe.
While many Bush backers find his acid tongue and biting humor refreshing - the sign of a "politically incorrect" politician - some critics contend that Bush's off-handed insults fit with a dynastic sense of entitlement toward the presidency and toward those he rules.
Some observers of the Bush Family say George W. inherited this imperious style from his mother, Barbara, more than from his father, George H.W. Bush. Mrs. Bush is known for flashes of prickly humor, such as describing Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 as a word that "rhymes with rich."
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mrs. Bush demonstrated a stunning lack of empathy for the disaster's victims, many of whom had lost homes and family members. While visiting New Orleans evacuees at the Houston Astrodome, she noted how poor they were before the flood and then quipped, "this is working very well for them."
By contrast, George H.W. Bush is generally gracious in social settings, though he has been known to hurl insults at his campaign opponents, such as calling Al Gore "Ozone-Man" in 1992 or dismissing Gore and Bill Clinton as "bozos."
While always ready to deliver insults, the Bush family is famously thin-skinned about receiving them. For instance, George H.W. Bush restricted Newsweek's coverage of his 1988 presidential campaign after the magazine published a cover photo of Bush with the headline, "Fighting the Wimp Factor."
His eldest son, George W. Bush, doesn't even want to take chances with unfriendly audiences. He routinely has his advance teams and Secret Service details weed out people from his speeches who might be inclined to heckle him or ask hostile questions.
Indeed, between his pre-screened crowds and his layers of protectors, Bush has gone through five-plus-years as President with barely a single note-worthy incident of anyone challenging him to his face.
Unlike alpha males in the wild, Bush has managed to mark out his territory knowing that virtually nobody - not another head of state nor a private citizen - is in any position to contest his supremacy.
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Bush terms Republicans "party of the future"
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-18 10:56:00
WASHINGTON, May 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush said the Republican Party controlling both the White House and Congress is "the party of the future," saying that he was confident American voters would reelect the party to the majorities in both chambers of the parliament in November.
Speaking at the Republican National Committee gala in Washington, Bush said candidates of the party would run against "the party of the past," apparently referring to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats, he alluded, "offers no new ideas like the Republican Party...can only offer opposition."
News reports said the gala helped the Republican party raise 17 million U.S. dollars, at a time when both the president and Republican lawmakers had sagging approval ratings for their job performances.
Some 800 people, with some paying more than the 1,500 dollar ticket price, attended the gala, a major fund-raising event for the Republican Party.
All the 435 House seats and one-third of the 100 Senate seats are to be reelected in the midterm elections in November.
Currently, the Republicans, facing a uphill battle to keep control of Congress in November, have 231 seats in the House and 55 seats in the Senate, while the Democrats hold 201 seats in the House and 44 seats in the Senate.
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Democrats take heart as Americans turn their back on Bush policies
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Thursday May 18, 2006
The Guardian
The Republicans could face a substantial electoral defeat later this year, leaving George Bush a lame-duck president, a poll published yesterday suggests. The poll, for the Washington Post and ABC television, confirmed a rapid slide in support for Mr Bush and raised hopes of a Democrat revival by putting the party ahead on all important indicators, from the economy to Iraq and immigration.
Mr Bush is now just hovering above lows reached only by presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman and his father. He has been unable to reverse the slump, despite a series of initiatives that included reshuffling his White House team last month, making a televised address to the nation on Monday night on Mexican immigration, and talking up progress on a new government for Iraq.
David Frum, who was responsible for writing Mr Bush's "axis of evil" speech, said yesterday: "It is not clear he has hit bottom yet. My view is that 2006 will not be a good year for Republicans."
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and strategist, echoed Mr Frum, who is now a resident fellow at the rightwing Washington thinktank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "This is not going to be a good year for parties in power, not just in America. There is an anxiety in western democracies right now that has led voters to oust parties in power. There is unease and frustration with the status quo and a desire for change."
The Democrats are hoping that in November's election they can regain control of the House of Representatives, lost after 40 years in a traumatic Republican landslide in 1994, and possibly gain the Senate. Control of either house would see a series of investigations launched that would add to pressure on Mr Bush in the last two years of his administration.
Mr Luntz said: "It is absolutely possible for the Democrats to take one or both [houses]. I was involved in 1994. It feels like a 1994-style election. Voters will come to the ballots for candidates they do not even know [to get the incumbent out]." Mr Frum was less pessimistic: "It is not impossible that Republicans could eke out a hold in both houses."
The Post/ABC poll, consistent with the trend in other polls during the past month, found that 69% of those surveyed thought the country was now off track and 56% would prefer to see Democrats in control of the US Congress. The Democrats recorded majorities over the Republicans on 10 crucial issues: health, education, the federal budget, petrol prices, taxes, phone-tapping and other privacy matters, the economy, Iraq, immigration, and the campaign against terrorism.
Mr Bush's personal approval rating is only 33%, down five points in a month, with the decline sharpest among Republicans. Only 32% of those polled said they approved of the way he is handling Iraq. A toll of soldiers killed in Iraq is listed daily in US papers and on television. Karl Rove, Mr Bush's top election strategist, told an AEI meeting on Monday that Iraq was the issue that soured everything.
But the issue that seems to be hurting the president most among Republicans is immigration. Mr Frum said that the unskilled, white working-class had not seen any rise in their wages since 2000 and blamed this partly on immigration.
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said: "It has been an extraordinary collapse of support for the president and the Republican party. If you look at the poll ratings for the government on a range of issues, all of those are more damning than 94 was for the Democrats." He said people had lost trust in Mr Bush as a result of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. He had given a reasonable speech on immigration,"but no one is listening any more".
Comment: Be sure to read all of the above with a massive dose of skepticism. For the past two U.S. elections, the will of a majority of the American people had nothing to do with the result. Bush stole 2000 and 2004, that much is very clear. If you are unaware of the details, do some research. There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans - both are controlled by the same behind-the-scene forces in American politics: Big business and Israel. There may be a swing towards the Democrats in this year's mid term elections, but only if a suitable Democratic Presidential candidate can be found who will promise to "change everything" but who will simply follow the same downward path that the Bushites have begun.
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Assembly green lights contested immigration law
PARIS, May 17, 2006 (AFP)
The French National Assembly on Wednesday approved a controversial new immigration law which is intended to tilt the system in favour of qualified foreign workers.
Drawn up by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who says he wants France to "choose" rather "undergo" the process of immigration, the law has prompted a strong hostile reaction from the left-wing opposition, rights groups, the Catholic church and some African countries.
After passage in the lower house of parliament, it will be debated in June in the upper house or Senate.
Critics say the law risks creaming off the most talented people from countries where they are badly needed, and will make life harder for ordinary migrants.
"Keeping the best and sending back the worst is not exactly Christian," said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon.
Ivorian reggae singer Alpha Blondy said: "This notion of chosen immigration, this migratory apartheid takes us back to the time of slavery, when the traders chose the strongest or those with the best teeth to take them to the west."
Sarkozy - a frontrunner to become French president after next year's elections - left France Wednesday to visit Mali and Benin, where he faces protests from opponents of the law.
The law creates a new type of residence permit - named a "skills and talents permit" - open to foreigners with qualifications which are judged to be important for the French economy and labour market.
At the same time rules are tightened for migrants moving to France for family reasons, as the vast majority currently do.
Foreigners will be allowed in only if they can be supported not from state hand-outs but earned income; in order to fight convenience marriages foreign spouses will wait longer for residence cards; and migrants will sign an "integration contract" committing them to respect the French way of life.
Sarkozy has said the November riots in France's high-immigration suburbs - where unemployment is rampant among young males - is evidence of the failures of France's current system of immigration.
"The violence which exploded in our suburbs is not unconnected with the shocking failure of our policies of integration and immigration," he told the National Assembly.
"We are closing the doors to those who have a job and opening it for those who don't. This absurd system is an essential ingredient in our malaise."
France's last census figures - for 1999 - showed 4.33 million foreign nationals living in France, and every year a further 140,000 are entering using legal channels.
In addition some 90,000 are believed to enter illegally every year, mainly by overstaying on short-term visas. According to Sarkozy, only five percent of those entering the country legally do so for work reasons.
The government believes there are between 200,000 and 400,000 'sans-papiers' - paperless ones - but it is resisting calls to regularise their situation.
In recent years the number of deportations has shot up, as has the number of people refused asylum. In 2006, the government is banking on making 26,000 repatriations, many on flights run jointly with Britain.
Sarkozy, who is himself the son of a Hungarian father, says his aim is to strike a sensible mid-way path between the immigrants-out rhetoric of the far right and the laissez-faire approach of the left.
In an open letter Wednesday he rebutted the slavery comparison made by reggae singer Blondy, who is a UN "messenger of peace" for the Ivory Coast.
"African slavery was one of the worst tragedies of history and it is essential not to trivialise this crime against humanity by inapt comparisons. Chosen immigration means regulated immigration, organised with reference to the reception capacity of our country," he said.
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Pentagon's intelligence role rising
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - If the recent past is any guide, Thursday's Senate hearing to consider Gen. Michael Hayden for the post of CIA director will spend no small amount of time examining the nominee's military ties.
At any point during the past few decades, the plan to put a military man at the head of America's premier civilian spy agency would probably have caused some controversy. But the nomination of General Hayden comes at a time when the Pentagon is already working to dramatically expand its role in intelligence operations.
For their part, experts widely agree that Hayden is independent and not likely to be bullied by the Department of Defense. But the issue points to how the war on terror is reshaping the US intelligence structure - and whether it is wise for the Pentagon to take more of the nation's spying needs upon itself.
Perhaps more than in past conflicts, success in the war on terror depends upon good intelligence and prompt action, so "it's only natural that the Department of Defense wants to have more control," says Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The issue becomes: Where do you draw the line?"
As in all matters that involve clandestine intelligence gathering, the outlines of who does what are not immediately clear. America's intelligence structure is a tangled bureaucracy of 16 civilian and military agencies.
Yet traditionally, the Pentagon had focused its sensors and satellites mostly on enemy militaries, and some 80 percent of the annual intelligence budget has gone to agencies under the Pentagon's umbrella. Other missions, most notably counterterrorism, have fallen to other agencies such as the CIA.
But current Pentagon officials have put greater emphasis on intelligence. In 2003, for instance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the post of undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and made it the third most senior civilian position.
Moreover, the Pentagon has shown a willingness to make inroads into what was previously CIA territory. Before the US invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary Rumsfeld was reportedly troubled by having to wait on the CIA to make contact with important local warlords. Since then, numerous reports suggest that the Pentagon is sending teams of intelligence specialists abroad to work with special- operations forces in the war on terror.
The apparent goal is not to replace the CIA, but simply to lessen the military's reliance on the CIA for information that directly impacts operations.
Part of this, some say, is simply a product of the nature of the current conflict. "At a time when you are trying to use covert operations for more quick, rapid-response strikes, you have to have better intelligence," says Dr. O'Hanlon.
Other longer-term trends also come into play. The CIA's ability to carry out the sort of paramilitary operations central to the war on terror "atrophied" during the 1990s, says analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org - while the military's capabilities have been on an "upward trajectory" since the Iran hostage crisis.
But he and others worry that the Pentagon may be trying to push too far. In the past, the CIA has been responsible for "covert" operations - actions where United States sponsorship is not detectable. These require congressional authority. The military, meanwhile, has been at liberty to conduct "clandestine" operations - actions that are simply hard to detect, and do not need congressional authority.
The concern is that the Pentagon will broaden - or already has - its definition of clandestine operations to include covert activities. "You wind up provoking [your enemies]," says Mr. Pike. "They regard it as retaliation, but to the American people [who know nothing of the covert operations], it looks like an unprovoked attack."
The Pentagon insists that it has followed the laws for intelligence gathering. But even if it has, say others, there's a risk that the Pentagon and the CIA will knock heads as they both pursue the same types of missions. "[Military leaders] have a legitimate interest in having a strong military- intelligence capability, so it's important that civilian intelligence works closely with defense intelligence," says John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA. "It's important that they not bump into each other."
He suggests a civilian director, outside the CIA, to oversee and coordinate all human intelligence-gathering activity. Nominee Hayden would also play a part. His job, if confirmed, is to implement the vision of the director of national intelligence and carve out a distinct space for the CIA in the US intelligence community. A major part of that could be warding off an exuberant Pentagon.
"He is an intelligence professional first and foremost," says O'Hanlon. "The fact that he comes out of the Department of Defense makes him more likely to stand up to the Department of Defense."
Yet in a post-9/11 world where the needs and uses of intelligence have changed dramatically, deciding which agency should do what will still be a work in progress. "This is going to have to be worked out in practice," says Mr. McLaughlin. "They're still sorting out all the roles and responsibilities."
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Hayden to Lament Politics of Intelligence
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press
May 18, 2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush's CIA director-nominee, Gen. Michael Hayden, is to face what undoubtedly will be the toughest public questioning of his 37- year government career at a Senate confirmation hearing this morning.
Hayden is at the center of the debate over the Bush administration's controversial domestic surveillance programs, which allowed the National Security Agency under Hayden's leadership to eavesdrop without warrants on telephone calls when one party was overseas and suspected of terrorism.
In a statement prepared for delivery, Hayden complained that intelligence-gathering has become "football in American political discourse."
"For the past few years, the intelligence community and the CIA have taken an inordinate number of hits, some of them fair, many of them not," Hayden was expected to say in prepared remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing.
His reception by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was expected to be much different than a year ago, when the panel approved him unanimously to be the nation's first principal deputy director of national intelligence.
"I was actually delighted when you were appointed," the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, told Hayden in April 2005.
This time, Rockefeller wrote Hayden on Wednesday to lay out concerns regarding the general's independence from the administration, given his aggressive defense of the decision to conduct the warrantless monitoring.
"It is of the utmost importance that officials of the intelligence community avoid even the appearance of politicization, and that its senior leaders set an example," wrote Rockefeller, who will miss Hayden's hearing while recovering from back surgery.
He said he hoped Hayden would explain how he planned to repair the CIA, which is struggling to find its footing after a 2004 overhaul law that reorganized the U.S. spy community. Rockefeller wants to be sure the Pentagon and CIA are adequately coordinating their classic spy operations.
Some have questioned whether it is appropriate to have someone like Hayden, with his lengthy resume in military intelligence, directing the civilian spies at the CIA at a time when the intelligence community is increasingly dominated by the Pentagon. In closed door meetings with senators, Hayden, 61, indicated a willingness to retire from the Air Force if necessary.
Republicans generally have praised Hayden. "I don't think he'll be under the thumb of the Defense Department," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R- Utah, adding that Hayden brings a tremendous intelligence background to the job.
Much of the hearing was expected to focus on a recent newspaper report that the NSA was able to analyze the calling records of millions of ordinary Americans.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said there were serious privacy concerns. If the government maintains a database of Americans' calls, he said, "that has got to be addressed." Levin and other Democrats have not said publicly yet whether they will support Hayden, waiting to see how he handled himself in Thursday's open and closed committee hearings.
To help smooth Hayden's path, the administration reversed course after five months and decided this week to provide more information to Congress about the ultra-secret NSA's activities. That includes full briefings for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who supports Hayden, said the information was necessary to have a fully informed confirmation hearing.
"This issue will be central to the committee's deliberations on General Hayden's nomination," Roberts said, "and there was no way we could fulfill our collective constitutional responsibilities without that knowledge."
President Bush chose Hayden as CIA director-nominee after consultation with Hayden's current boss, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Outgoing CIA Director Porter Goss announced his retirement earlier this month after disputes with Hayden and Negroponte about the CIA's direction.
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Hayden, if confirmed, to head CIA in "crisis": lawmakers
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-18 13:08:22
BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhuanet) -- Michael Hayden, whose Senate confirmation hearing begins on Thursday, has been nominated to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in "crisis", according to lawmakers.
"Everybody understands that we need to operate quite differently at the CIA," said Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican on the Intelligence Committee. "You need the kind of leadership to give it the direction, to rebuild and revitalize the agency."
Hayden is now deputy director for national intelligence, a post to which he was named in August. He was chosen by President Bush earlier this month to replace Porter Goss as director of the beleaguered CIA.
He headed the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005, and has come under fire in recent months as senators are expected to grill him on the NSA's collection of phone records of millions of Americans and its warrantless eavesdropping on conversations between U.S. residents and suspected foreign terrorists.
USA Today reported last week that three of four major phone companies -- BellSouth , AT&T and Verizon Communications -- provided information on the calling records of millions of Americans.
Snowe said that, while Hayden's chances for confirmation are "obviously very good," the nominee will face tough questions on the NSA surveillance as well as other issues. "We have to make sure all questions are asked and all questions are answered," she said in an interview.
If confirmed by the full Senate, Hayden, 61, will find himself in the middle of one of the most fundamental debates about the agency's mission since Congress created the CIA in 1947.
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The Buck Stops Here
Dow has worst day in 3 years
By Vivianne Rodrigues
Reuters
Wed May 17, 2006
NEW YORK - U.S. stocks plunged on Wednesday, wiping out $64 billion in market value from the 30 companies that make up the Dow and giving the blue-chip average its biggest one-day drop in three years, as investors bet the Federal Reserve will need to keep raising interest rates to fight inflation.
Investors particularly hammered shares of banks, industrial conglomerates and other rate-sensitive companies. An index of bank stocks slid 1.8 percent, while shares of blue-chip Citigroup Inc. dropped 1.4 percent.
The blue-chip Dow dropped more than 200 points, the biggest slide since March 2003. The market's rout left the Nasdaq mired in its longest losing streak in five years.
Stocks fell after economic data showed the pace of inflation accelerated in April, boosting speculation that the Fed will raise rates longer than Wall Street had expected.
"Inflation, which is the principal focus of the Fed, is higher than Chairman Bernanke will feel comfortable with," said Hugh Johnson, chief investment officer at Johnson Illington Advisors. "It adds to the belief the Fed may raise rates further, and that is a problem for both the bond market and the stock market."
The Dow Jones industrial average slid 214.28 points, or 1.88 percent, to end at 11,205.61. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 21.76 points, or 1.68 percent, to finish at 1,270.32. The Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 33.33 points, or 1.50 percent, to close at 2,195.80.
The Nasdaq is now down 0.4 percent for the year.
The Dow has lost more than 500 points this week, paring its advance for 2006 to 4.6 percent. The S&P 500 is up 1.8 percent this year.
NYSE TRADING COLLARS IN EFFECT
The sharp sell-off in stocks was part of a broader market rout, with U.S. Treasuries also tumbling amid signs of accelerating inflation. At 4:30 p.m., the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note was down 12/32 at a price of 99-25/32, while its yield was up 4 basis points at 5.15 percent.
"Stocks that are getting hit the hardest are those that have been the darlings of the Street," said Christopher Zook, chairman and chief investment officer at CAZ Investments in Houston, Texas. He listed industrial companies, raw materials and energy shares.
The New York Stock Exchange imposed limits on index-arbitrage sell orders on the Standard & Poor's 500 index after the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index fell more than 160 points. The index fell 2.24 percent, its biggest daily drop in three years, to close at 8,199.38.
Citigroup shares fell 1.4 percent, or 71 cents, to $48.83 and JPMorgan Chase & Co., another blue chip, lost 2.4 percent, or $1.07, to $43.25 in NYSE trading.
Industrial conglomerates, including 3M Co. and Caterpillar Inc., were among the Dow's biggest decliners. Both stocks were down about 2 percent, with 3M falling $1.88 to $84.42 and Caterpillar dropping $1.43 to $75.91.
THE COLD BREATH OF CPI
Wall Street got the inflation chills before the market's opening bell, when the Labor Department said the
Consumer Price Index rose 0.6 percent in April, above economists' forecast for a rise of 0.5 percent. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy costs, advanced 0.3 percent, also faster than forecast.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other monetary policy-makers said last week the Fed might have to continue to raise rates to control inflation.
Shares of Boeing Co., the biggest drag on the Dow, fell 3 percent, or $2.63, to $83.77. Boeing, a big U.S. defense contractor and jet manufacturer, on Wednesday kept its profit and revenue forecasts unchanged for this year and the next.
HP RISES, BUT APPLIED MATERIALS FALLS
Of the 30 stocks in the Dow average, the only gainer was Hewlett-Packard Co., the No. 2 computer maker, which rose after it reported higher quarterly profit late on Tuesday.
Hewlett-Packard shares gained 3.4 percent, or $1.05, to $32.16.
On the Nasdaq, communication stocks and semiconductors were the top decliners. Qualcomm Inc. fell 2.7 percent, or $1.29, to $46.90 and Applied Materials Inc. slid 5.2 percent, or 92 cents, to $16.93.
Trading was heavy on the NYSE, with about 2.09 billion shares changing hands, above last year's daily average of 1.61 billion, while on Nasdaq, about 2.43 billion shares traded, above last year's daily average of 1.80 billion.
Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones by a ratio of about 14 to 3 on the NYSE and by about 11 to 4 on Nasdaq.
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U.S. inflation higher than expected
Last Updated Wed, 17 May 2006 11:06:33 EDT
CBC News
U.S. consumer prices rose by a higher-than-expected 0.6 per cent last month - boosting the odds that the U.S. Federal Reserve may again increase interest rates to keep a lid on inflation.
Economists had been forecasting the CPI would rise by 0.5 per cent. The core inflation rate, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, jumped 0.3 per cent.
That boosted the year-over-year core inflation rate from 2.1 per cent in March to 2.3 per cent in April - its the highest annual rate in 13 months.
"More importantly, this does suggest that rising energy costs and possibly emerging capacity constraints may be causing inflationary pressures to suddenly start bubbling up from beneath the surface," said TD Bank economist Beata Caranci in a morning commentary.
The growing possibility of a further hike in U.S. interest rates helped to drive U.S. stocks lower on Wednesday. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 115 points to 11305 at 11:05 a.m. EDT.
The Federal Reserve has been on a steady, two-year-long campaign to raise interest rates. It has hiked its key lending rate 16 consecutive times, most recently to 5 per cent, and warned last week that further rate hikes were possible, depending on the economic data.
Canada's inflation report for April is released Thursday.
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New bout of inflation jitters hits markets
By Ralph Atkins in Frankfurt, Jennifer Hughes in New York and Jamie Chisholm in London
FT.com
May 17 2006
Financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic witnessed a fresh and aggressive sell-off on Wednesday, driven by fears over inflation in the US and Europe and heightening worries that the recent correction in asset prices is sharpening rather than ending.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst one-day points drop since March 2003, tumbling 214 to 11205.61, or 1.9 per cent, while Europe's main bourses all suffered falls of about 3 per cent.
In London, the FTSE 100 registered its biggest one-day reversal in more than three years, leaving traders discussing whether the three-year equity bull market was now formally over. The UK's leading equity barometer has lost 400 points, or 6.5 per cent, in a week.
It was the publication of fresh inflation data in the US that triggered the latest wave of selling in New York. The US consumer price index rose 0.6 per cent last month, boosted by high energy prices. But it was a 0.3 per cent acceleration of the closely watched core rate, which excludes volatile energy costs, for the second month in a row that spooked the markets and reinforced expectations that rises in global interest rates would now accelerate.
Financial markets' expectations about higher inflation were a challenge to central bankers' credibility, economists said, pointing to a jump in US Treasury yields as both stocks and commodity prices went into broad retreat.
"This is not welcome news to the US Federal Reserve or the financial markets," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist for PNC Financial Services Group. "We believe the Fed would prefer to take no action at their June meeting but this is precisely the type of inflation data that argues against such a pause."
The dollar rallied as investors hastily retreated to the relative safety of the US, unwinding risky trades involving emerging market currencies.
Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital said: "The numbers will add to volatility across all asset classes."
Meanwhile, in Europe inflation data for the 12-country eurozone showed the core rate, also excluding energy costs, jumped in April to an annualised rate of 1.6 per cent. The acceleration is likely to stoke European Central Bank fears about inflation dangers.
The ECB is expected to raise its main interest rate in June from 2.5 per cent, possibly by half a percentage point.
It became clear on Wednesday that the Bank of England's interest rate-setting body had a three-way split at its meeting this month, pointing to mounting concerns about inflationary pressures and increasing the chances that the UK would also raise borrowing costs this year.
Michael Dicks, economist at Lehman Brothers, said central bankers were "talking the same language" about inflation risks.
"It is almost as if they are looking at each others spread-sheets, and looking at the world in the same way," he added.
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Inflation's rising toll on consumers
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
The US economy is remarkably strong and buoyant, but high energy prices and rising interest rates are starting to take a toll on consumers.
- The pace of home-mortgage applications is down 15 percent, compared with this week a year ago, as "for sale" signs stay up longer in a slowing home market.
- Half of Americans have changed their vacation plans to stay closer to home, according to an Associated Press/Ipsos poll this month.
- Prices beyond the gas pump are also edging up. The "core" consumer price index (CPI), which excludes volatile food and energy costs, surprised analysts by jumping 0.3 percent last month, according to a government report Wednesday.
These pocketbook pressures don't signal a return of "stagflation" - the harsh blend of recession and rapid inflation that surfaced three decades ago.
But they do represent an economic climate less friendly to consumers - a gray zone where the pace of economic growth may be slowing even as the threat of inflation remains in the foreground.
"It's finally caught up" to average Americans, says economist Michael Cosgrove, who publishes The Econoclast newsletter in Dallas. "The cost of credit has gotten to a level where it's starting to impact people's decisions negatively."
This represents a reversal from just a few years ago, when gas was cheap, the interest on a fixed-rate mortgage was below 6 percent, and home prices hadn't yet soared to today's peaks.
The new head winds also include a weakening dollar, which eats away at Americans' spending power for imported goods or foreign travel.
In short, prices have gone up for several key items: credit, foreign currency, housing, and the fossil fuels that are a basic cost for virtually every home and business.
All this explains why indexes of consumer confidence have sagged in recent weeks, despite signs of healthy economic growth and a strong labor market.
It's a confusing period even for Federal Reserve policymakers, now weighing whether additional interest-rate hikes are needed to stamp out inflation, or whether the pinch on consumers is already starting to slow the economy to a sustainable pace of growth.
"Clearly we are seeing a slowdown in housing," and autos sales are weak, says Ed Yardeni, chief economist at Oak Associates in Akron, Ohio. Yet "it takes a while for interest rates to get to levels that really bite." Indeed, many forecasters see the economy growing at a still-solid 3 percent pace in the second half of the year, as exports and business investment help make up for possibly weaker consumer spending.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, the Fed may decide to hold off before hiking interest rates further, to see how consumers fare in the months ahead.
But Wednesday's inflation report prompted new concern. Stock prices fell sharply on the expectation that the Fed may need to boost interest rates further at its June meeting to prevent consumer prices from spiraling out of control. Still, some analysts remain hopeful that the Fed can steer a steady course between inflation and downturn: The economy may be less cyclical than in the past, when interest-rate hikes often prompted sharp housing downturns and then recessions.
It's possible that could happen again. Builders this week posted a third straight monthly drop in new-home starts, a key indicator of the current housing slowdown. And home prices in some markets are lower now than at the end of last year.
But bank credit is not drying up as it sometimes has in the past. At 6.6 percent, the interest on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage still makes many homes affordable by historical standards.
The rising cost of housing was one factor behind Wednesday's rise in the consumer price index.
Costs of shelter, clothing, and healthcare all rose in April, pushing the core rate of inflation up 0.3 percent for the month, higher than the 0.2 percent rate expected by forecasters. That means the core rate is now advancing at a 3 percent pace, up from a 2.2 percent rise for last year.
Consumer prices overall, driven by rising energy costs, are heading up at a 5.1 percent annual pace. They rose 3.4 percent last year.
Those energy costs are top of mind for many consumers.
"I would say that it's the biggest thing right now" driving consumer sentiment, says Raghavan Mayur of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence in Oradell, N.J., a pollster who conducts the monthly TIPP survey of economic optimism.
It goes beyond sticker shock at the pump, he says. "They feel that their economic security is threatened" by America's reliance on the world oil market.
Not many people will cancel vacation plans outright due to fuel prices, predicts Sean Comey, a spokesman for AAA of Northern California in San Francisco.
But many are planning shorter trips, and coping with rising airfares by buying night or midweek tickets.
The good news for consumers is that their incomes may be going up, thanks to a tightening labor market. "Thirty percent of [business] owners say there's at least one opening they can't fill," says William Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.
But recent surveys, he adds, show that businesses are starting to pass higher labor costs along in the form of higher prices. "It's not good."
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Venezuela 'may swap oil currency'
BBC News
17/05/2006
Venezuela has hinted it could price its oil exports in euros rather than US dollars, further weakening its links to the US.
President Hugo Chavez said he was considering taking the step following a similar declaration by Iran.
Earlier this month, Iranian authorities gave backing for the launch of an oil exchange that traded solely in euros.
Some reports have suggested Iran's move may be part of a bid to undermine the importance of the dollar.
But in an interview with Channel 4 News in London, Mr Chavez said the move was merely a matter of choice.
"I think the European Union has made a large contribution with the euro," he said.
"So what the president of Iran says ... is recognising the power of Europe - they have succeeded in integrating and have a single currency competing with the dollar, and Venezuela might also consider that - we are free to do that," he added.
Dollar concerns
Experts have suggested that, should Iran demand payment for its exports in euros, central banks could opt to convert some of their dollar reserves to euros and therefore possibly trigger a further decline in the US currency.
The dollar has already come under pressure in foreign exchange markets in recent weeks, triggering nervousness in world stock markets.
Central banks, especially in Asia, who hold large amounts of the US dollar, could find the value of their foreign currency reserves substantially reduced.
Tensions rising
Iran is currently embroiled in a stand-off with the US in a row over its nuclear ambitions.
Iran, the second-largest exporter in oil producing nations group Opec, insists merely wants to build power stations, but the US claims it is building nuclear arms.
Meanwhile, Venezuela - the world's fifth largest oil producer - has been trying to reduce its dependence on the US, as relations have been strained under President Hugo Chavez.
In April it signed a joint venture with Cuba - a long time opponent of the US - to revamp an oil refinery and supply unrefined oil to the country.
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Protesters Arrested at Halliburton Meeting
By SHAUN SCHAFER
Associated Press
May 17, 2006
DUNCAN, Okla. - Sixteen people protesting Halliburton Co.'s role as a military contractor were arrested Wednesday outside a building where shareholders discussed spinning off the subsidiary that provides meals, clean laundry and other services to U.S. troops in Iraq.
One man was accused of vandalism for tearing up a plastic fence holding back protesters, and the rest were accused of trespassing as they left an enclosure and headed toward the meeting.
Halliburton announced plans last month to sell just under 20 percent of KBR, which has diluted the company's financial results and drawn criticism of its multibillion contracts in Iraq.
Dave Lesar, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said Wednesday the company planned to follow the initial offering with either additional public offerings or a sale to a competitor of the remaining 80 percent.
As a standalone company, KBR would have a better opportunity to prosper, Chief Financial Officer Christopher Gaut told about 200 shareholders. He described KBR as Halliburton's nearly lowest margin business and one that has seen contract activity in Iraq decrease.
A spin-off "would unlock the value of KBR for shareholders," Gaut said.
Shareholders of the world's largest provider of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries looked back on a year of record earnings. Halliburton, founded in 1919, earned $2.4 billion in 2005.
Shareholders approved a company request to increase its authorized share count to 2 billion from 1 billion. Lesar said a stock split was planned sometime in the next two months.
Shareholders rejected a request by a group of Texas and Kansas shareholders for adoption of a policy based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Halliburton directors, noting that the company does business in more than 100 countries and refrains from doing business where prohibited by the U.S. government, did not support the proposal.
About 100 people protested outside the meeting. A masked man beat on a large empty jug and protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching," and "Shame on you," while police made the arrests. A designated area had been set up for the protest, and police had told protesters not to leave that area.
One of those arrested was wearing a Dick Cheney mask. The vice president formerly headed Halliburton, which has drawn criticism for its big government contracts, some awarded without competitive bidding. Its KBR unit provides support services for troops stationed in the Middle East.
Lesar said afterward that the protest did not bother him.
"I cannot change the fact that my predecessor is the vice president of the United States," he said.
Protesters carried signs such as "Bush Lied," and "Record Corrupt Blood Soaked Profits." Oklahoma Veterans for Peace lined up 37 pairs of combat boots to represent Oklahoma soldiers killed in Iraq.
"I think many Americans, myself included, are concerned that America is becoming a nation of, for and by corporate profits," said Nathaniel Batchelder, a member of the veterans group.
Jan Gaddis of Duncan held up an "I Support Halliburton" sign.
"It is not some monolithic organization that is devoid of humanity," she said. "They are a very responsible corporate citizen and their employees are involved in the local community and churches."
The Houston-based company said it decided to meet in the southern Oklahoma city of Duncan where it was founded to highlight company operations that remain here.
Critics accused it of seeking a friendly and remote location in an attempt to duck protests. The company is the leading employer in Duncan, which is about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City.
Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann has said potential protests played no role in deciding where to hold this year's meeting. She said the company has done a good job of supporting American troops overseas.
"Halliburton supports the rights of demonstrators, even when they have the facts wrong," she said.
Halliburton shares fell $1.25 to close at $73.76 on the
New York Stock Exchange. The stock has traded from $39.65 to $83.97 over the last year.
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Zionism Everywhere
The "Israel lobby" controversy
May 19, 2006
ERIC RUDER
Socialist Worker
IN MARCH, two academics touched off a firestorm of debate with a paper called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."
In it, they argued that a powerful group of pro-Israel lobbyists made up of Washington insiders has become so dominant that U.S. foreign policy officials pursue Israel's strategic interests over and above the strategic interests of the U.S. itself.
The two authors of the paper--John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean at the prestigious Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University--are highly respected within mainstream circles.
But almost immediately, they came under fierce attack from Israel's defenders.
Eliot Cohen, professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University, used the pages of the Washington Post as a bully pulpit for his diatribe against Mearsheimer and Walt. Cohen called the article "inept" and "kooky," and claimed that it recycled standard anti-Semitic themes--"obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews"; accusations of "disloyalty, subversion or treachery"; and charges of "participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments."
The campaign of criticism led Harvard University's Kennedy School to remove its logo from the article and strengthen its disclaimer that the paper only reflected the views of the authors. In the midst of the furor over the article, Walt announced that he would end his tenure as dean in June, but Harvard officials denied the move was related to the backlash against the article.
Ironically, the uproar proved the existence of the Israel lobby that critics of Mearsheimer and Walt are trying to deny--and underscored the unwillingness of Israel's apologists to allow even faint criticism of this lobby.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BUT DEFENDING Mearsheimer and Walt's description of the Israel lobby from Israel boosters is less critical than pointing out what's wrong with other points they make.
That's because their argument that Israel has become a "strategic liability" to the U.S. is a view shared by some in the pro-Palestinian movement.
Mearsheimer and Walt are on firm ground when they outline the many channels employed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel organizations to influence elected officials, government policy and public opinion.
"The lobby pursues two broad strategies," write the authors. "First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker's own views may be, the lobby tries to make supporting Israel the 'smart' choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena."
There's nothing particularly insightful in these observations, which would apply to every effective lobby in Washington--from the farm lobby to the American Association of Retired Persons.
But according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the Israel lobby is so good at what it does that its influence has swamped any rational assessment of actual U.S. interests. "Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country--in this case, Israel--are essentially identical," they argue.
In their view, the U.S. receives very little in exchange for the $3 billion it annually gives to Israel in direct aid and the unswerving diplomatic support the U.S. provides to Israel. They claim that the U.S. loses out in the deal because its reputation in the Arab world is tarnished by its association with Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights.
But Mearsheimer and Walt don't stop there. They assert that the influence of the Israel lobby was a "critical" reason for the U.S. war on Iraq. "Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim," they write. "Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN REALITY, Mearsheimer and Walt have the causal connection between U.S. support for Israel and the Israel lobby backwards. Support for Israel as a centerpiece of U.S. strategy to dominate the oil-rich Middle East largely explains the power and influence of the Israel lobby, not the other way around.
U.S. support for Israel took on central importance in 1967--at a time when there was no Israel lobby and when most American Jews in fact had little interest in Israel. That year was when Israel proved its effectiveness as an ally--by waging war on Egypt and neutralizing the growing influence of secular Arab nationalism.
In subsequent years, Israel could be relied on to strike out at Arab regimes that fell afoul of Washington (such as its 1981 destruction of Iraq's nuclear reactor) and to serve as a conduit for sending arms to forces that the U.S. was legally barred from or too embarrassed to support directly (such as apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia and the Nicaraguan contras).
Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper once compared the U.S. to the Godfather, and Israel to the "Godfather's messenger"--since Israel "undertakes the dirty work of the Godfather, who always tries to appear to be the owner of some large, respectable business."
The danger in Mearsheimer and Walt's reversal of cause and effect is the confusion that follows from saying, in the words of Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, that "absent the pro-Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians, and at best would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend.
"What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side, instead of on the side of their enemies."
In denying the role of Middle East oil in the U.S. decision to wage war on Iraq, Mearsheimer and Walt echo both the Bush administration as well as some in the Israel lobby.
Oil "has barely been on the administration's horizon in considering Iraq policy," said Patrick Clawson, an oil and policy analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in 2003.
But in 1999, Clawson--whose think tank was founded by a former deputy director of research at AIPAC--Clawson was reading from a different script at a Capitol Hill forum on a post-Saddam Iraq. "U.S. oil companies would have an opportunity to make significant profits," he said. "We should not be embarrassed about the commercial advantages that would come from a reintegration of Iraq into the world economy."
But even if oil played a bigger part in the decision to go to war, Mearsheimer and Walt believe they have an airtight argument about why Israel serves no useful purpose for the U.S. During the 1991 and 2003 wars on Iraq, far from drawing on Israel's regional military superiority to help subdue Saddam Hussein, the U.S. had to restrain Israel from becoming involved militarily.
However, to conclude from this, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that Israel is therefore a "strategic liability" is absurd. The U.S. relies on its strategic relationship with Israel first and foremost, but it also has firm supporters among several other Middle Eastern countries--most notably, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others.
The very existence of Israel--and its stability as a U.S. foothold in the region--greatly enhances the ability of the U.S. to force Arab regimes to make agreements at the negotiating table. After all, if Israel has already assured the U.S. a secure grip on the region, why shouldn't Arab leaders derive benefits from making their own deals with the U.S.?
If the U.S. can wage war on Iraq with the help of its Arab allies, then the U.S. is happy to restrain Israel. But the U.S. knows that it's dangerous to become too dependent on any given Middle Eastern country, because the populations of those countries resent their own leaders' collaboration with the U.S. Israel's population, on the other hand, overwhelmingly supports the U.S., making Israel a far more predictable and stable ally.
And in any case, even if the U.S. had to restrain Israel during its war on Iraq, Israel nevertheless can act on behalf of the U.S. when the U.S. wants it to--such as Israel's 2003 air strikes deep in Syrian territory.
Though the billions that the U.S. gives to Israel seem exorbitant, the U.S. spends far more annually to maintain its military bases throughout the Arab world, not to mention its many military installations throughout Europe and Asia. In that sense, U.S. support of Israel is a bargain--and the Israel lobby serves the useful purpose of protecting the U.S. government's investment.
But even without an Israel lobby, the U.S. would support Israel, just as it supports Colombia and Egypt--the second- and third-largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid--even though those countries don't have lobbies with anything near the clout of the Israel lobby.
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IT SHOULDN'T come as a surprise that liberal critics of U.S. foreign policy, like Mearsheimer and Walt, would conclude that lobbying has blown U.S. war planning off course.
But the truth is that the misadventures of U.S. imperialism can't be corrected by curtailing the influence of a "lobby." The U.S. has opposed national liberation movements and backed nasty dictatorships all over the world, not just in the Middle East.
And as Middle East expert Stephen Zunes points out, "There are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC--such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races."
There are no shortcuts in the fight for justice for Palestinians, for Iraqis and for all peoples oppressed by U.S. imperialism. An anti-imperialist movement--built right here in the belly of the beast--is the essential ingredient for bringing an end to U.S. crimes around the world.
Comment from Jeff Blankfort: "U.S. support for Israel took on central importance in 1967--at a time when there was no Israel lobby and when most American Jews in fact had little interest in Israel. That year was when Israel proved its effectiveness as an ally--by waging war on Egypt and neutralizing the growing influence of secular Arab nationalism."
Here is another attack on the Mearsheimer-Walt paper by the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization which has become very influential among certain Palestinian campus groups. In this one paragraph, selected at random, the author repeats the "conventional wisdom" regarding the 1967 war when, in fact, US support for Israel was minimal and France was its major arms supplier. The Israel lobby not only existed at the time and in less organized form had existed since before 1948, but in the early 60s, when it had become more organized, Senator Fulbright held hearings to investigate its lobbying activities and exposed the fact that money being sent to Israel was being recycled to pay for pro-Israel propaganda in the US.
What this article reveals about the author and the Palestine "liquidarity" movement, in general, is a real lack of knowledge about the history of the lobby, what it consists of, how it operates and a lack of interest in filling that void . That most of those from the Left who have criticized the Mearsheimer-Walt paper happen to be Jewish is not an accident. They have been conditioned from childhood to automatically resist anything that appears to be "blaming the Jews" even when the accusation applies to only a certain segment of the Jewish population. That their influence in the Palestine support movement has been pervasive is one of the major reasons for its utter failure to date.
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The NYT Confronts Mearsheimer and Walt--Not Quite Head On
By LENNI BRENNER
May 17, 2006
I've been a political activist for 54 years. During that time I've had plenty of chances to do stupid things and I've taken full advantage of the opportunities. But I've developed only one perversion: I not only read New York Times editorials, I collect them.
One thing is for certain. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has made the big time. It's been discussed in the Times, read by the city's intellectuals and many others worldwide via its website, which 1.9 million individuals hit daily.
'Out of town' born residents may have wondered why "Essay Stirs Debate About Influence of a Jewish Lobby" was placed in the paper's 4/12 Metro section, reserved for stories about corruption trials of Brooklyn Democrats. But, while Jews are only ca. 2% of Americans, there is nothing more local than an attack on Zionism in a city where 8% of the total population, and 30% of all whites, are Jews.
Alan Finder told us that other "opinion journals" attacked the professors, "part of a group of foreign policy analysts, known as realists, who believe that international politics is fundamentally about the pursuit of power," as anti-Semitic. But he took no position on the contents of their critique.
The Times hasn't taken a stand on the merits of their arguments for two reasons: Its record on Jewish issues before the creation of Israel in 1948 was shameful and got worse afterwards. A former executive editor spoke for it in the 11/14/01 issue. It's willful blindness to the holocaust was "surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure."
Forbes Magazine laughingly calls itself a "capitalist tool," but today's Times is convinced that it is capitalism's official organ. Indeed if control still rests tightly in the hands of the Ochs and Sulzberger families, publishers since 1896, now worth well over half a billion dollars, a former Federal Communications Commission Chair is on its board of directors and Bear Stern Securities, Brown Brothers Harriman, Charles Schwalb, Citibank, Goldman, Sachs & Co., JP Morgan Chase Bank and Merill Lynch are major stockholders.
Originally from Germany, the Ochs and Sulzbergers started as members of the "Reform" Jewish sect, which preached Tory American patriotism. When the Times defended Atlanta Jew Leo Frank, lynched in 1916 after false rape and murder charges, death threats put Adolph Ochs under "neurological" treatment. He recovered, but thereafter it deliberately fled from fights against anti-Semitism and spiraled right. In 1922 it hailed Mussolini's Fascism as "the most interesting governmental experiment of the day .... We should all be glad that he is going at it vigorously."
Of course, when Hitler came to power in 1933, even it admitted to "qualms which the news from Berlin must cause to all friends of Germany." But
"It is announced that the national finances will be kept in strong and conservative hands .... There is thus no warrant for immediate alarm. It may be that we shall see the 'tamed Hitler' of whom some Germans are hopefully speaking. Always we may look for some such transformation when a radical or demagogue fights his way into responsible office."
Tame Hitler quickly vanished from editorials. But wherever possible the paper evaded dealing with Nazi anti-Semitism. By 1942 it buried Washington's 1st announcement of the Holocaust on page 10.
Of course the present publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., bears no responsibility for his kin's Hitler era infamies. But he knows that if the Times prints an editorial word in favor of any Mearsheimer/Walt thesis, Zionists would fight back, exposing its morbid role in the Hitler era. That can't do it any good. But there is a more important reason why it can't accept their line.
The Ochs and Sulzbergers privately dismissed pre-state Zionism as utopian and sectarian, raising questions as to Jews' loyalty to the US. In 1946, Arthur Hays Sulzberger gave a synagogue speech denouncing Zionist attacks on calls for liberalizing America's immigration laws, passed in 1924 to keep down the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. These Zionists wanted Jews in Displaced Persons camps in Germany to have no choice but to go to Palestine. They retaliated by getting the city's Jewish department stores to pull ads from the paper.
Zionism was an offstage noise in 1933-39 Jewish New York. The important political players were the reformist socialists who led the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They quit the Socialist Party to support Roosevelt. Their major rival were the Communist Party's Jews. Both despised Zionism for seeking charity donations from Jewish capitalists who should have given the money to their Jewish and other workers. They condemned the World Zionist Organization for its "Transfer" Agreement with Hitler. To get Jewish money out of Germany, the WZO sold Nazi goods in the Middle East and shipped it oranges to Europe via Nazi boats. But the holocaust stunned them. Both left elements regressed into nationalism.
Most capitalists mobilized by the Zionists had shared the broad community indifference to Zionism. Most knew little to nothing about Zionism's Hitler era record. But the slaughter had the same effect on them as on 90% of the Jews, who suddenly supported the creation of a Jewish state as a refuge for survivors.
Then Joseph Stalin decided to back Israel's creation. The cold war on, he wanted the British out of the Middle East. He reasoned that if the Zionists ran them out of Palestine, London's Arab puppets would finally start kicking them out of the region. Stalin's line allowed the CPUSA's ranks to do what they wanted to do, and the emotional wave generated by this singular cross-class unity inundated the Times. Thousands of Jews joined hundreds of young Communists, Jew and gentile, black and white, in dancing the hora, the Israeli folk dance, around the Times Tower as its electric sign announced the creation of Israel and its recognition by Stalin and the US.
Sulzberger surrendered. The 5/16/48 editorial after Israel's independence declaration even insisted that "The decision by the Government of the United States to recognize Israel calls logically for a corollary decision by the same Government to lift its present arms embargo."
Support for US taxpayers arming Israel to the teeth remains unquestioned dogma, even though Sulzberger is aware of Zionist bigotry. His assimilationist father married a Christian and she raised him. In 1969 he visited Israel. "The Family," a 4/19/99 New Yorker article, told of his
"challenging a senior official of the Israeli government who suggested that, no matter what happened in the world, everyone around the table would always have a homeland in Israel. 'Excuse me, but I'm an Episcopalian! Is this still my country?' Arthur, Jr. said loudly. Thirty years later, he continues to regard the Israeli's comment as racist."
Can we reasonably hypothesize that Sulzberger sees much of what we see, whatever Times editorials say and don't say? Lefts and Zionists argue with Mearsheimer and Walt re the degree of pro-Zionist neo-con responsibility for the Iraq invasion, but no one doubts that the lobby played a major role in building public support for what the paper now knows is a disastrous war, won or lost. However Sulzberger's national Democratic electoral commitment makes it very difficult for his paper to editorially denounce the lobby.
The Democrats are more crucially dependent on Zionist campaign contributions than the Republicans. If the paper put the lobby under a critical editorial microscope, they would still hustle rich Zionists for bucks. And it knows it can't go over to McCain or any 'moderate' national Republican candidate and hold the allegiance of its educated readers, who cynically see the Democrats as lesser evils, domestically, or share its support for them as rational imperialists.
Unfortunately for the Times, sooner or later it will have to take an editorial position on the lobby. It can't evade what is being discussed in its pages. As soon as Finder's reportage appeared, the Council for the National Interest put an ad in its 4/16 issue:
"What happens in Palestine deeply influences what will happen in Iraq and in the war on terror. As a recent study by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago concludes, 'Saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: rather the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.'"
Paul Findley of CNI was driven out of Congress by the lobby when he questioned US ties to Israel. We have met. His anti-Zionism started from conservative premises similar to Mearsheimer/Walt but he is now genuinely devoted to justice for the Palestinians.
The issue got hotter with a 4/19 op-ed by Tony Judt, an ex-editor of the New Republic who broke with Zionism in 2003:
"Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, 'a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?' I think it is, but that too is an issue for legitimate debate."
Judt gave us the classic right-wing argument against concern that anti-Semites cheer on Mearsheimer/Walt.
"The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is .... bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences."
Dialectically, the Times' dilemma also exposes Mearsheimer/Walt's and Judt's contradictions. In the tale, the mice decided that if the cat had a bell around its neck, they would hear it and hide. Unfortunately, they had no answer to an old mouse's "But how do you bell the cat?" Mearsheimer and Walt were cofounders of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Its prime organizers were Cato Institute conservatives with 1980s Democratic presidential wannabe Gary Hart providing 'center' cover. To all observers' amazement, they proclaimed to be "united by our opposition to an American empire."
They claim a 'libertarian' vision of what American capitalism should be like. The US is on top of the world economically. It should relax. Constantly expanding militarily imperialism is too statist for them. They want someone in capitalist Washington to make Israel 'make nice' to the Palestinians so that rich Muslims can make nice to America. But who do they think is going to do this? Bush? Rebellious Republicans? The Democrats?
The Democrats and Republicans have been imperialists since before the Spanish-American war. Opposing Bush and neo-con imperialism but not opposing both parties isn't anti-imperialism. De facto it's a call for a new emperor with smarter advisers, i.e., themselves. Sociologist C. Wright Mills encountered their type in academia during the Vietnam war. 'We have to be realistic' was the pro-war professors' national anthem as they and Washington marched to defeat. His "crackpot realist" description of them perfectly fits Mearsheimer and Walt.
Judt broke with Zionism but he also has realpolitik concerns for "the imperial might and international reputation of the United States." Alas, Washington has "chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue."
Bush and the neo-cons are so close-linked that its hard to envision a scenario where he breaks with them and retains credibility with anyone. Some Republicans are beginning to wonder where he is leading them. However its his ties to Islamic fanatics, not his hyper-Zionism or Christian zealotry, that upset most of them. Rank and file Republicans were scandalized by pictures of two happy guys, Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, holding hands at the ranch. Then Bush's Iraqi Shia clients responded to Sunni terror with their own. Then came the Afghan Abdur Rahman infamy.
Bush was ahead there. Al-Qaada and the Taliban were on the run. Suddenly his native satraps' prosecution of a Christian convert outraged them. They can't justify Christian military dying to establish 'friendly' Islamic states with laws calling for executing converts to their religion. Their critique of Bush has little in common with the profs' or Judt's.
That leaves conservative anti-Zionists with the Democrats, exactly as with the Times. Except that Hillary Clinton still stands by her vote for funding the invasion. And now she constantly makes the rounds of New York's sex-segregated Orthodox synagogues, seeking support from rabbis and male congregants who begin every day with a prayer to God: "Thank you for making me a man, not a woman."
The 1/11/06 Village Voice described her ties to Brooklyn State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, Zionism's David Duke. The Klansman mainstreamed into the Republicans. Hikind went from Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, listed by the US and Israel as terrorists, to the Democrats. He is against giving even an inch of the West Bank back to the Palestinians. He opposed her 2000 campaign until she went to him. Now he's in and out of her office. "'Are you going to endorse Hillary Clinton?'.... Hikind said yes, stressing how great a friend she is."
THE GREAT PROTESTANT CRUSADER
The Zionist response to the profs started with 'Duke praises Mearsheimer and Walt.' That didn't work. So Martin Peretz pointed out, in the 4/10 New Republic, that their working paper is nearly 35,000 words, with 210 footnotes, yet
"The word 'oil,' however, appears in the document exactly seven times -- all of them generic or trivial. None of the references relate to the systematic U.S. dependence on foreign crude or ... to the truly powerful lobby that has worked for many decades to satisfy it through arranging that the producer governments get what they want: mainly protection against radical Muslims."
That a denunciation of the Zionists around Bush has gotten so much media attention is certain evidence that Bush has lost his home-front. But Zionists insisting that the US truthfully is the Marxists' oil-greedy imperialist ogre, is just as sure a sign that Israel is likewise losing the propaganda war here. Un fortunately neither realists nor Zionists completely describe the Bush/neo-con relationship that produced the Iraq debacle.
Modern history is full of governments rushing into disastrous wars. However we have to go back to Portugal's 1578 invasion of Morocco for the closest analog to Bush invading Iraq. King Sebastian was three when he came to the throne. Educated by fanatic Jesuits, he grew up with a passion for a crusade against Morocco. Advisors inherited from his father opposed him. Portugal had a lot on its hands in Brazil and the East Indies. But the more they argued against it, the more he surrounded himself with mad monks who thought a crusade was a terrific idea.
Sebastian and 40,000 troops sailed away. Six, not 6,000, came back, none named Sebastian. The kingdom collapsed. In 1580 Spain marched in. Portugal literally disappeared from the map until 1640 when a nobles' revolt regained independence. The Jesuits and monks were Sebastian's neo-cons. Without them, no crusade. But he was king. He went to war, not them. If he wasn't crazy, he would have listened to dad's staff.
"Over-determined" is the historians' term for such phenomena. The neo-cons are Bush's monks. But he was President. If he wasn't as demented as Sebastian he wouldn't have listen to them.
It is also possible to blame oil imperialism for Iraq and apparently explain it. And Bush does have God's unlisted phone number and chats with him at least once a day. Each theory seems to cover the facts. But neither oil, the lobby nor born-again fanaticism, alone, explain our Sebastian. He is simultaneously ex-governor of the epicenter of America's oil industry and a Jesus freak who surrounds himself with Jewish nationalists. Yet, when he got up after 9/11 to announce a "crusade" against Al-Qaada, Jesus, the oil industry and the Zionists were equally stunned when he used the worst possible word under those circumstances.
'MONEY DOESN'T JUST TALK. IT SHOUTS!
Naturally the lobby had to respond to the Times' discussion of itself with 4/22 letters. Seymour Reich of the Israel Policy Forum insisted that Washington is only pro-Zionist because, "beginning with President Harry S. Truman's, every American administration has viewed Israel as an important strategic ally."
Except that we know, from his daughter, Margaret, exactly why he backed creation of a Zionist state. In her book, Harry S. Truman, she describes how
"More than once, the Palestine question was put to Dad in terms of American politics. At a cabinet luncheon on October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan almost made a speech, pointing out how many Jews were major contributors to the Democratic Party's campaign fund and were expecting the United States to support the Zionists' position on Palestine."
Reich invented Truman viewing Israel as an important Middle Eastern ally. His State Department had pointed out that, strategically, it was the Arabs who had the oil. But Hannegan was Truman's Postmaster General. In those good ol' days, that meant Graftmaster General. He convinced Truman that unless these newly agitated Jewish rich funded him, he would lose the 1948 election. Like Richard Wagner presenting lead-motives in overtures to his operas and then dramatically repeating them throughout the shows, from that day to this, pandering to rich Zionists for campaign money is the 1st consideration in the Democratic Party's "strategic" thinking concerning the Middle East.
Later, after Israel pulverized the Arab armies in 1967, Washington realized that those armies would fold if the Soviets invaded the Middle East. From then until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel was a standby military ally. But this didn't negate the party's central concern re campaign funding.
Naturally Mearsheimer and Walt point to this. Jews "make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 percent of the money.'" But they present no notion of how to stop this. As old-cons, they don't call for abolition of private election funding.
This is a basic difference between "realism" and leftism. But this is also the core distinction between the Times and radicalism. In 1999, New York's other Senator, Charles Schumer, made a Senate speech:
"We have a tremendously serious problem. We have a poison that is in the roots of this great tree of democracy.... That poison is cynicism. That poison is a view of the average citizen, rightly or wrongly -- and in many cases, it is right -- that the average person doesn't have the influence of a person or a company or a group of great wealth.... [I]f we can no longer have the citizens believe, when this body debates an issue, that the debates are being divided by firmly held beliefs rather than by who is manipulating, controlling, or contributing to whom, then we can't survive as a democracy. That fatal distance between people and their government will get larger and larger and larger."
With readers sharply aware of local and national corruption, Times chief editorialist Gail Collins constantly takes up reform. On 5/6, she warned us yet again re congress: "There's also no reason to believe that the average lawmaker has any real intention of following even the extremely modest ethics improvements that do make it into law."
But she never mentions Zionist contributions. These aren't a state secret. Major pro-Zionist 'Jewish community' journals, Forward and Jewish Week, run detailed accounts of them. Jews are only two percent of Americans. Zionists admit that they are an ever shrinking minority of that two percent, and the rich who put money into the hacks' pockets are a minority among Zionists. How serious can the Times be about campaign reform if it never editorially confronts this egregious example of a moneyed minority of a minority of a minority corrupting both parties?
Indeed, this is in keeping with Times general hypocrisy about money in politics. For all of Collins' wearisome sarcasm re politicians, at election time the Times lists the local Democrats and occasional Republicans it wants readers to vote for. The winners among them are a huge percentage of those crooked average lawmakers Collins whines about.
The wide discussion of Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's policy paper, including the gingerly Times take, tells us that most pro-capitalist intellectuals see Bush in deepening trouble throughout the Middle East. So they debate who to blame for getting us into these wars, without making the slightest effort to build a movement to get the US out of them.
Still, we thank the profs, Zionists and the Times. The academics succeeded in mainstreaming critical discussion of the lobby. But their approach is so narrow that it almost forced Zionists to respond by shouting about how, well and truly, the US is imperialist. And the Times' failure to editorially draw even one conclusion from a discussion in its own pages, much less call for a new policy towards Zionism, focuses us on cleaning up the antiwar movement's own act.
We have yet to set up an educational program, giving a rounded explanation of Washington's wars, clearly identifying the sins, crimes and follies of all the players on the stage, foreign and domestic. With that in place, we can organize Americans to defeat the bipartisan demagogues and imperialists in the streets and electorally, once and for all and forever.
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Aipac Case Impacting Security Clearance
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 17, 2006
The Pentagon is invoking the prosecution of two pro-Israel lobbyists and a Defense Department analyst for illegal use of classified information as a basis for stripping security clearances from government contractor employees who have dual citizenship in America and Israel or family members living in the Jewish state.
In at least three instances, Defense Department attorneys have used or attempted to use the case involving the former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to justify withdrawing a security clearance or denying one in the first place, according to a Virginia lawyer who closely tracks such disputes, Sheldon Cohen.
"In my personal experience, I know of at least three cases," Mr. Cohen told The New York Sun yesterday. "I assume they're raising it in every Israel case."
Asked why government lawyers were invoking the Aipac case in security clearance disputes with no known connection to the pro-Israel group, Mr. Cohen said, "The only reason to possibly use it is to implicate anybody with a connection to Israel, to imply they cannot be trusted. There is no other conceivable reason to bring it up."
The two former Aipac staffers, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, and the Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, were indicted in August 2005 on charges they conspired to pass classified information to persons not entitled to receive it, including Israeli officials and members of the press.
Franklin pleaded guilty in October. Messrs. Rosen and Weissman, who were fired by Aipac last year, have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Alexandria, Va. in August. However, a judge is considering their motion to throw out the case on the grounds that they were not government employees and had no legal obligation to protect any secrets Franklin may have provided.
Lawyers familiar with the security clearance review process said it is impossible to determine the full impact of the Aipac case on clearances because large swaths of the clearance process take place out of public view, including nearly all cases involving government employees. Only a few hundred cases involving government contractor employees are made public each year by the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals, a quasi-judicial body which is overseen by the defense department's general counsel. The most recent cases on the Pentagon's Web site are from 2005.
Mr. Cohen, who recently completed a study of the Israel-related security clearance cases, found that "an unusually large number" of the public cases involving concerns about foreign influence appear to relate to Israel. The names are deleted from cases made public by the Pentagon and most of those involved in clearance disputes do not wish to be identified, Mr. Cohen said.
One of the pending clearance cases where government lawyers have sought to rely on the Aipac prosecution involves an Israeli-born mechanical engineer who has worked at a major defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, for more than two decades, the employee's attorney, David Schoen, told the Sun.
"There was some basis for McCarthyism. Here there's nothing, just this dual loyalty business," Mr. Schoen said. "It really strikes me as un-American."
The Lockheed employee, whom Mr. Schoen declined to name, was born in Israel but emigrated to America 25 years ago. "His wife is American. His kids are American," the lawyer said. "He has never had a problem at Lockheed."
More than 7 years ago, the engineer was assigned to the F-22 fighter jet project and granted a "secret" clearance, Mr. Schoen said. A few months ago, defense department officials moved to revoke the employee's clearance, citing his dual Israeli citizenship, his possession of an Israeli passport, and the fact that his mother and siblings live in Israel.
Mr. Schoen said his client fully disclosed the citizenship, the passport, and the family ties when he was first granted the clearance and was puzzled by the sudden claim that he was a security risk.
At a hearing a few weeks ago on the Lockheed engineer's case, Mr. Schoen said, a government attorney sought to file the indictment of Messrs. Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman as an exhibit. The government argued that the indictment showed Israel was actively spying on America, Mr. Schoen said.
Mr. Schoen said he strenuously objected that the indictment was irrelevant to his client's case and, as a charging document, no proof of anything. "The only relevance can be is here are two Jews in Washington who are accused of spying for Israel so now any Jew is suspect for that," he said.
Mr. Schoen said the government argued that Franklin's guilty plea confirmed the validity of the charges, but the administrative judge conducting the clearance review hearing declined to admit the exhibit.
Mr. Schoen said his client, whose hearing was continued to June, was recently laid off by Lockheed.
The Defense Department public affairs office initially referred the Sun's questions about these issues to the Defense Security Service, which said it could not respond. A Pentagon spokesman later referred the questions to the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals. An official there, Peregrine Russell-Hunter, said no one in the office was authorized to speak with the press. "We haven't had a press inquiry here in a very long time," he said.
After courts ruled that dual citizenship alone was insufficient to deny a clearance, in 2002, the defense department adopted a policy that denied clearances to most people who hold foreign passports. Mr. Schoen said his client offered to give up his Israeli passport if the government would agree to grant him a clearance, but the government declined.
A law professor who studies issues of dual nationality, Peter Spiro, said he saw no legitimate connection between the Aipac prosecution and the security clearance cases involving dual citizens. The professor, who teaches at the University of Georgia, noted that Messrs. Franklin and Weissman are not Israeli citizens. "All it says then is that somebody of a certain ethnicity may be more amenable to do the bidding of a foreign government," Mr. Spiro said. "These folks are being picked out for their national association which in this case is a proxy for their ethnic identity.... It's sort of like corruption of the extended blood."
The professor said there have been no major espionage cases involving dual nationals and intelligence agencies would be foolish to enlist people with such obvious ties.
A Jewish leader in Washington, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, said he was disturbed by the challenges to security clearances. "This is terrible," he said. "People around the country are turning to use and telling us of ongoing cases where people are stripped of their livelihoods just because they're Jewish."
Mr. Cohen said he has not seen evidence the Pentagon is hostile to Jews. Rather, he said, people with ties to Israel have been casualties of a general tightening of the clearance process since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "There is an intensification of government interest in people who have ties to any country in the Middle East," he said. "Aipac may just have added fuel to the fire."
In 2000, an attorney for the CIA, Adam Ciralsky, made headlines when he charged that the agency fired him because he is Jewish, studied Hebrew, and traveled to Israel. The agency denied that anti-Semitism played any role in his firing, but acknowledged that some memos written by investigators were offensive and inappropriate.
Nearly six years after Mr. Ciralsky filed suit over his firing, his case against the CIA is still pending before a federal court in Washington.
Comment from Jeff Blankfort: "There was some basis for McCarthyism. Here there's nothing, just this dual loyalty business," Mr. Schoen said. "It really strikes me as un-American."
"Just this dual loyalty business?" Unintentional satire from the NY Sun. Contrary to what is written here, I am not aware that there is any charge that the AIPAC spies gave any information to the media.
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Fmr. US Pres. Carter Called Convergence Plan "Illegal"
May 17, 2006
Arutz Sheva
Former US President Jimmy Carter has called Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unilateral Convergence Plan "illegal" and a violation of the Camp David Accords he brokered between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. Carter further characterized the plan to retain large Jewish communities under Israeli sovereignty as a "confiscation of land".
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The convergence bluff
opendemocracy.net
17/05/2006
The new Israeli prime minister's "convergence plan" is a Trojan horse, Ehud Olmert's record in office shows that he is not preparing for peace.
The Kadima party's victory in Israel's elections last month reveals the deep shift that has taken place in Israeli politics. By bringing Ehud Olmert into power with a solid leftwing majority in the Knesset, the Israeli public has made it clear to its politicians that it is ready to give up the dream of a Greater Israel. A leading hawk and life-long revisionist until only recently, Olmert based his electoral campaign on a promise to carry out his "convergence plan" (which in Hebrew rhymes with and evokes Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan") to evacuate settlers from the West Bank.
However, Olmert's actions since being elected suggest that he does not intend to act in accordance with the mandate given to him by the public. Olmert rejected talks with the Israeli Arab parties and has shown little enthusiasm for Meretz, despite the fact that these parties have been calling for the evacuation of settlements for years, making them the most natural partners for a government sincere about ending the settlement enterprise.
Instead Olmert began by courting the hardline nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose leader recently said that certain Israeli Arab members of the Knesset should be executed. He eventually brought the rightwing Shas party into his government, and may yet recruit another anti-pullout party for his coalition, in addition to the Labour Party and the Pensioners, to the left of Kadima. In light of this unexpected coalition, a closer look at the details of the convergence plan is in order.
Between the lines
The stated aim of the convergence plan is to evacuate approximately seventy thousand Jewish settlers from their homes on the other side of the fence separating Israel from the Palestinians. (Lately, Kadima members have been saying that the number of evacuated settlers will actually be lower). Even if Olmert keeps his promise, this figure represents less than a third of the Jewish settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan, not counting another 184,000 Jewish residents of East Jerusalem who also live over the Green Line, and are considered settlers by the Palestinians and much of the international community. Thus the convergence plan will not spell the end of the Jewish settlement enterprise in the West Bank.
Nor will the convergence plan end Israel's military occupation of the West Bank. Olmert has assured the public on several occasions that unlike in Gaza, where the army was pulled back to the Green Line, in the West Bank the army will remain even in those areas where settlements are to be evacuated. Thus Palestinian life will continue to be disrupted by military checkpoints; Israeli soldiers serving in the West Bank will continue to be exposed to attacks by Palestinian militants; and Israel's military front lines will not be shortened (a step widely seen as a means to free up funds for education, health and other social spending).
Olmert's promise finally to determine permanent and recognised borders for Israel also appears doubtful. Recognised borders by definition must be agreed in negotiations with the Palestinians. Olmert has promised to hold an internal dialogue with the settler movement, and to coordinate his positions with the Bush Administration in Washington later this month, but he seems to have no intention of negotiating in good faith with the Palestinians.
In fact, the prime minister has stated on many occasions that he sees no partner for negotiations on the Palestinian side unless several preconditions are fulfilled, including a change in the democratically elected Hamas government. He has made it clear that he will implement his plan unilaterally if negotiations fail, despite the fact that its outlines have already been rejected by the Palestinians in past negotiations. They are roughly the same lines that Ehud Barak brought to Camp David in 2000, which the Palestinian leadership rejected out of hand. Barak's map was later reincarnated as the approximate route of Sharon's separation wall, and is now to form the basis of Olmert's proposed permanent eastern border.
For their part, the Palestinians have called on the new Israeli government to sit down for talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Neighbouring Arab countries have also called for negotiations rather than unilateral actions. The Hamas government has made it clear that it views Olmert's unilateralism as "a declaration of war", and experienced Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has stated that "peace and settlements cannot go together".
Maps produced in recent unofficial negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders