The Israelis have struck Gaza hard over the past two weeks, killing well over 100 Palestinians (including a substantial number of children), and – predictably – Palestinian militants have struck back, shooting up a seminary in Jerusalem, killing 8. Is anyone surprised by this? Olmert’s policy of “isolating Hamas” (i.e. strangling Gaza to death) has elicited the kind of violent response that Israeli politicians pray for – the kind they can use to justify the very policy that provoked the response in the first place. And as the situation goes septic, what is more appropriate than having Condi Rice stroll through the wreckage of yet another Bush policy? As in the case of the Lebanon war two years ago, this consummate diplomat has refrained from calling for a ceasefire, uttering the usual platitudes about Israel’s right to self-defense and the importance of sparing civilian lives, when possible. Yes, we’ve been here before, and we’ve yet to see a military attack that the Bush administration wouldn’t at least tacitly endorse.

It’s clear who the enemy is… same as it has always been: negotiations. And no, I don’t mean the farce brokered by the U.S. between Olmert’s people and Abbas’s people (essentially two wings of the same organization). I mean actual, good faith negotiations with the people within the Palestinian community who actually resist Israel and its 40-year occupation. The 2006 parliamentary elections that put Hamas in power presented a danger to the Israeli administration… the danger of Hamas’s growing political legitimacy. Unlike the P.L.O., Hamas did not depend on Israel’s remittances for its very survival, and with the Palestinian Authority more closely identified with the interests of the occupier that with those of the occupied, it’s little wonder Hamas won a majority. The Palestinian people are not religious fanatics – they’d merely suffered through the previous six years of Fatah’s serving as the Israelis’ colonial administrators, and so they opted for the organized group that had not been co-opted. Two choices, one lamer than the other, so you pick the less lame one. Sound familiar?

I’ve covered this ground before, I know, but I think it’s worth saying again. Amongst any people denied nationhood, denied basic freedoms, denied livelihood and frequently even life itself by a hostile occupying power, there will always be individuals and groups who will resort to heinous acts such as took place at that Jerusalem seminary. The more pressure is put on that oppressed population, the more a sense of hopelessness is engendered in them, the more likely it is that those incidents will take place. Consider the Israeli government’s consistent line on this. There have been no similar attacks within Israel in what, four years? Olmert and company mostly attribute this to their loathsome apartheid barrier, but it’s clear that no matter how massive a wall you build, you cannot stop a truly determined person. Their considered reaction is to accuse the Palestinian Authority – their Palestinians – of not doing enough to fight extremists. If there are no attacks, as during the past few years, it’s not because of the Palestinians, it’s because of the wall. This is a game the Palestinians know they can never win.

It is another one of those atrocity-producing situations. And the best Bush can manage is a lame soft shoe.

luv u,

jp

Heard a story on public radio this week (here it is) about some Iraqi nationals – educated people – who had worked for the U.S. military and U.S. contractors in Iraq. The ones the reporter spoke to were among the very few who have managed to immigrate to America. Now they are out of work, out of money, and essentially unemployable except at the very bottom of the service economy. One man, speaking of his experience back in Iraq, told of how an American officer once told him that “working for the American government is a future”. Now this unfortunate fellow is contemplating taking another job in Iraq – no small consideration, since doing so could easily cost him his life. Here all he can find is janitorial work at McDonald’s-level wages, though he is a trained engineer. His expectation had been that in return for having served this country, he would be taken care of. All the government seems willing to do for these people is bring them here, get them hooked up with some goofy job counseling agency called “Upwardly Global”, and fuck up their paperwork so that it’s even harder to get a job. Welcome to America.

Can’t blame these folks for being fooled. Our own people lap up the same lies about how we came to Iraq to help the Iraqi people. There are lessons in this for all of us, I suppose. The first is that Iraqis – in fact, any subject peoples within the American empire – do not matter beyond their relative utility at a given moment. Think about it. Our government did not arm and support Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war because they wanted all of those Iraqis to die on the battlefield; they didn’t pursue deadly sanctions for a dozen years for the express purpose of killing half a million children; they didn’t prosecute their unprovoked 2003 invasion to generate a million fatalities and 4 million refugees. No, our government did all of those things because they were a means to an end. The Iraqis simply served the imperial strategy by dying, starving, etc., and that is all. And when Bush’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq (WMDs and Al Qaeda) fell apart like the house of cards that it obviously was, Iraqis served their strategy again by being the oppressed people to whom we would confer the blessings of liberty. Useful, but not important – a status doubly underlined by the fact that our government refuses to realistically estimate the number of people who have died as a result of their war of choice.

Iraqi expatriates like the ones NPR spoke to have learned this the hard way – by risking their lives to serve the U.S., only to be dropped like an apple core when their utility expires. (Our own G.I.s get similar treatment, but that’s another column.) Fact is, this is a world run by pirates, and America is Long John Silver. Ours is a fully bipartisan pirate ship, it bears remembering. Aside from style, there is little that separates the foreign policy establishment in the Republican and Democratic parties. The G.O.P. is mostly a scurvy crew of unabashed cutthroat privateers, ready to burn and plunder at will. The Democrats, well… they put a nice tie on it, dress it up a little bit, tone down the rhetoric, but it’s essentially the same set of rules: We own the world, and what we say goes. The first half of that is obvious from our behavior, the second and explicit declaration by Bush the First (a.k.a. “Pappy”).

Now, if that isn’t a pirate’s creed, I don’t know what is. ARRRrrrrrrrrrr…..

luv u,

jp

The U.S. military shot down one of its own spy satellites this week. The satellite (like our military policy itself) was dysfunctional and the Pentagon’s originally-stated reason for the shoot-down was the fear that its fuel supply would survive re-entry, land in a populated area, and possibly expose people to lethal chemicals. Once the deed was done, however, that rationale started breaking down, at least judging by what I heard of the coverage (from NPR’s Pentagon reporters, who are pretty close to being official spokespersons). The next day the military was suggesting, though its press surrogates, that the fuel wasn’t all that dangerous and that, in any case, chances of its falling near civilization were around 3 out of 100. (Good thing, too, since as of Thursday morning they couldn’t be certain they had destroyed the fuel tank.) Of greater concern to them at that juncture was the possibility that components of the satellite’s surveillance technology would fall into the “wrong hands”, such as those of the Russians and the Chinese. (You heard right – the Russians and the Chinese. Apparently it’s 1960 again.)

Okay, so… Russia and China are our adversaries again. Good to know. And it appears that this is where the Pentagon sees a significant threat of war, at least according to what their officials were feeding NPR the other day. Per that report, they are worried about the integrity of our satellites and how vulnerable they are to attack. I will admit to being somewhat taken aback when one “senior official” the NPR reporter had dinner with is reported to have asked rhetorically, “How do we care for our satellites? How do we protect them?” W.T.F. – if war breaks out with the Russians or the Chinese, the last thing I’m thinking about is their fucking satellites. Here we’re threatened with nuclear obliteration, and these guys are obsessing over whether Russia can take down our Blackberries and ATM machines! Glad they’ve got their priorities straight. (Being burned to a cinder is bad enough, but what if I don’t get that important e-mail on my PDA???)

Anyway… no reason to be surprised that they’re more concerned with caring for their satellites than for the human race. By Friday of this past week, the newspapers were running stories about how this shoot-down was a crucial test of our “missile defense” capability. Missile defense is, as you likely know, that amazing system we’ve been spending tens of billions of dollars developing and deploying that, while not so good at shooting down incoming missiles, provides excellent protection for favored military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The satellite story morphed into basically a P.R. bonanza for Raytheon, inventor of the famously ineffective Patriot missile (much touted during the Gulf war as a tremendous success, the Patriot was later shown to have failed consistently and even to have erroneously targeted one of our own planes). Assuming the Pentagon is telling us the truth when they say the missile struck its target (i.e. assuming a lot), the system may be marginally useful if our adversaries start lobbing broken-down spy satellites at us with more than a week’s notice.

Lawd-o-mighty. How will we care for our poor ATM satellites then?

luv u,

jp

When has there been a weirder election, I ask you? It’s like upside-down land, or that planet on the far side of the sun that is an exact mirror image of the Earth, except that everyone eats corn on the cob up-and-down instead of side-to-side (apologies to Father Sarducci). On one side, a field of mostly white guys has narrowed to a woman and a brother; on the other, a 71-year-old “maverick” is winning out against religious and social conservatives. It took eight years of Dubya/Cheney to make this field look good to two historically cautious institutional parties. The Democrats haven’t even half-seriously advanced an African-American or female candidate for national office since 1984-88 – now it’s as if they figure, what the hell? And not choosing someone broadly approved by the Christian right is a very different kettle of fish for the G.O.P. Amazing. And yet, from a policy standpoint, we’re not looking at any radical departures here. The general election will be a clash of two orthodoxies – a choice between basically what we have now and a slightly more managed version of empire, with the winner building his/her administration from that same pool of a few hundred players they always draw on.

What about Obama? Painfully cautious man. Either that, or he really is a passionate centrist. I’m not sure it matters. To the extent that I want to invest any serious thought into the matter, I do mildly prefer him to the other people running, but it’s a kind of grudging preference. He does get people fired up and motivated to vote, and it would be at least nominally a new administration, if built from remnants of past administrations. Thing is, Obama could use his current standing to advance some badly needed political causes, but he won’t, either because he doesn’t agree with them or he feels they would cost him votes. The trouble with politicians on the center-left is that they’re always trying to take their half out of the middle of the electorate. Likely this is because they get most of their money from industry sources that reside there politically. If money wasn’t driving them, if they truly were a party of the poor and working class, they could win by taking bold positions. There is majority support in the U.S. for trading our current private health insurance casino in for a single-payer coverage system. They only thing lacking is a major party willing to take up that issue and that challenge. Obama, for instance, could but doesn’t. The reason may be money. (Just a guess.)

Then there’s Huckabee, Steven Colbert’s friend and invention (perhaps the candidate’s best attribute, aside from a television-friendly persona). Now he’s probably the friendliest guy who ever threatened to force millions of women to carry their pregnancies to term against their will. But hell, I’m sure if you met enough members of them, you’d find at least one Taliban who seemed likeable. I think the thing that gets me the most about Huck is not so much that he, for instance, doesn’t believe in evolution, but that he tends to adopt hare-brained policy positions like the national sales tax (known by its proponents as the “Fair Tax”). Aside from being massively regressive and favorable to the very wealthy, the “Fair Tax” promoters actually mask its true impact by claiming it’s a 23% tax (!!) when it’s actually more like a 30% tax (!!!!). (They do that by including the tax amount in the total – so for every dollar you spend, you add 30 cents… but that 30 cents is just 23% of the total $1.30 you just spent. Pretty tricky, huh?) But Huck has adopted it, so that must mean God wills it to be. Maybe they should just call it the “Jesus Tax”.

Still burning. Just in case anyone has forgotten, we’re still dropping enormous amounts of ordinance on Iraq – recently 19,000 pounds worth in Arab Jabour, south of the capital. Whoever you support for president, just make sure you hold their feet to the fire on this wretched enterprise.

luv u,

jp

Choosing who to vote for in the presidential election is always a question of one or the other of two people you’re not so crazy about (or downright detest). That’s probably one reason why so many people don’t bother to vote at all. Myself, I always make it to the booth for major elections – seems only right since so many people died to gain the franchise back in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s-60s. I’m usually not at all happy with the options, as some of you know, and the prospect of a McCain vs. Clinton general election is a depressing one for me. Not that I invest all that much stomach lining into the question of who will occupy the White House. (Far be it from me to suggest that a vote every four years is all you should expect to have to do to make the world a better place.) But honestly, both of these people will make abysmal presidents. And while I would prefer not to lock-in another eight years of Republican party ascendancy, particularly the virulent strain of right-wing conservatism that has taken hold in recent decades, I can see that in a race such as that, we’re fucked one way or the other.

Take Clinton, for instance. Her victory would result in Clinton II – The Vengeance… a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of political regeneration, stitched together from the remains of the last three miserable presidencies. Yes, including the current one. Everything an administration does sets a precedent for its successors. High sounding rhetoric aside, Bush has expanded the power of the presidency to a degree that will redound to the president that follows him, whatever party that person may belong to. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton will make use of the prerogatives of the unitary executive in a way that will make the previous Clinton incarnation seem tame by comparison. And for those who think peace and plenty are on the way, recall the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war. With Kosovo on the brink of declaring independence (Feb. 18), we may be facing the prospect of renewed conflict in the Balkans; something the Clinton team, driven by the same foreign policy players, will be only too eager to engage with. Three wars, anyone?

Speaking of multiple wars, let’s talk about McCain, the presumptive G.O.P. nominee. There are two things I hear about McCain over and over again – one, that he is honest and firm in his beliefs, and two, that he (along with all reactionary Republicans) has great defense / national security credentials. My reaction to the first point if fairly simple – what the hell does it matter that he’s honest and consistent (questionable premise, but nevertheless) when he is dead wrong nearly all of the time, like when he thought the Iraq war was such a great idea (an opinion he still clings to)? We’ve got “strong” and wrong already, and it’s not working so well. On the second point, it beats the hell out of me why he or any of his fellow Iraq war enthusiasts would retain national security credibility when their historic disaster in the middle east has made us all more vulnerable to terrorist attack by any reasonable measure. What the hell does it take to discredit these fuckers, anyway? The man is an ass who flag-waved us into the Iraq catastrophe, costing many thousands of lives and setting us up for decades of negative consequences. He would make a miserable president. (Yeah, but how do I really feel?)

McCain would be Bush III – he’d be calling the tunes, but Dubya’s severed hand would still be playing the piano.

luv u,

jp

[Next week: Obama and Huckabee]