Just when the pundits were predicting all-out pandemonium in Gaza, things seem to be kind of… well… not so chaotic, considering the place is being starved by a maniacal “international community” (i.e. Europe and America) and beaten by the local military hegemon (i.e. Israel). In just a couple of short weeks, Hamas has managed what Fatah couldn’t do in months – free BBC reporter Alan Johnston. They’re cracking down on organized crime, drug trafficking, even celebratory gunfire. Aside from that last item, it’s unclear to me why Bush doesn’t fucking love them, inasmuch as they’re religious conservatives as well. And now reporters and the “experts” who love them (including many who thought the Iraq war was a great idea and are still on television) are finding themselves backed into saying something not entirely disparaging about Hamas, which by their expressions appears to be roughly equivalent to drinking their own urine. Oh my god! Hamas is governing! They’re not acting like crazed chimps with machine guns, like we always said they would!

No question – Hamas has engaged in attacks against civilian and military targets. Name a resistance movement that hasn’t. Fatah has done the same, and yet they seem to have no trouble getting the U.S. and Israel to talk to them, send them money, give them guns, etc. What’s the difference? Don’t say it’s because Fatah renounced violence – not when the U.S. media and political culture have repeatedly linked them to the al Aqsa brigades, one of the most violent Palestinian groups. Besides, Hamas observed a long-term ceasefire with Israel, despite repeated provocations. The difference is this: Fatah follows orders, Hamas does not. Fatah has demonstrated again and again that they will not stand up for even minimal Palestinian rights. Hamas, on the other hand, shows signs of becoming the Israeli political culture’s worst nightmare – a determined popular political organization that cannot be co-opted with promises of privileged trusteeship over the open air prisons that Gaza and the West Bank have become. When Bush and Olmert demand “recognition of Israel,” they’re really saying “recognize Israel’s right to keep building settlements, take what they want, and impose their will on the occupied territories.” That – and that alone – is why Bush and Olmert hate Hamas.

Staying the course. This is the first presidential campaign in my memory that hasn’t featured a contender from the current administration. Not a huge surprise, since the Bush team appears to have the midas touch in reverse (everything they touch turns to shit). In fact, it’s too consistent a pattern to be mere incompetence. Politically, Bush represents some of the most extreme right elements of the G.O.P. Usually the focus is on social “conservatives”, but his true base is corporate America and people with enormous pots of money and no desire to part with any of it. Since 2001, Bush has steadily and methodically trashed the federal government, outsourcing its functions, privatizing its resources, and running what’s left into the ground with his “hekuva job” cronyism. Even his astoundingly well-funded Pentagon is now largely a clearing house for private contracting. When he finally leaves, he will have gone a long way towards fulfilling the desires of his well-heeled supporters, turning the government into a cash cow and undermining public faith in its effectiveness and accountability for probably decades to come.

Do Dubya or Cheney care? Hell, no. They’ve got a job to do, and they’re doing it.

luv u,

jp

A mighty tree has fallen in the Republican foreign policy establishment, senatorial division. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar has publicly broken with Bush’s Iraq policy, signaling what may be the leading edge of a much broader exodus amongst rank-and-file G.O.P. lawmakers. Many of these senators and congresspeople are watching the polls and worrying about their prospects for fending off anti-war challengers if this Iraq business doesn’t roll to a stop before fall of 2008. Others are probably just sick of hearing about dead and grievously wounded constituents. Dubya, for his part, obviously couldn’t care less. In some ways, he’s strikingly similar to his predecessor in the White House, at least with respect to his disregard for the health of his party. Oh sure, Bush, Rove, and Tom Delay tried to rig Washington into a G.O.P.-only club, but look where they have brought the party after six years. Pretty much the only thing they have a firm grip on now is the Supreme Court, which can be relied upon to hand down draconian decisions and maybe decide an election in a pinch. That’s enough to win… but not to govern.

So… if a mighty tree falls and no one in the White House gives a damn, does it make a sound? We already know the answer to that one. We’ve seen generals and low-ranking officers turn against this war. We’ve seen mothers of the slain, conservative “freedom fries” loving congressmen, and the vast majority of the American public turn against it. And yet still it continues, with another 100+ U.S. deaths in June and an appalling number of Iraqis wasted. Absent any willingness on the part of the Congress to use their power of the purse, there is only one locus of power with regard to our overseas military deployment. Bush and Cheney (that hybrid executive-legislative extra-constitutional being) are the only ones who can call it off, and they’re not budging before the moving van arrives on January 20, 2008. Their obstinacy is all they have left.

It is remarkable, though, the extent to which they’ve discredited not only military adventurism (resuscitated temporarily by the Gulf War) but, more generally, the U.S.’s capacity for getting its way in the world. We still have plenty of weight to throw around, make no mistake – both economic and military – but that easy way we had of getting ordinarily compliant governments to line up behind us (or in front of us) is not what it once was. Just this week it was reported that African nations are bridling at the prospect of hosting permanent U.S. bases on the continent to support the Pentagon’s new “Africa Command”. Even notoriously corrupt western-oriented (i.e. able to be bribed) leaders are afraid that any movement in that direction will provoke an awful backlash from the populace, which trusts neither American power nor the motives behind its application. (Recall that Africa is now a substantial source of petroleum for the U.S.) Russia is off the reservation and Latin America is in open revolt (both are committing the mortal affront of putting their national and regional interests ahead of our own).

So what remains for us, as our congressional leadership sits on its hand, but to watch the empire crumble? I’m sure there are many in the world who feel it’s about time.

luv u,

jp

The “new” Middle East is emerging, and it isn’t at all pretty – a child, in fact, that only its mother (the Bush administration) could love. When a massive military presence on main street Ramadi is considered freedom, you know something is dreadfully wrong with this picture. But then freedom is a very malleable word, one that enables scoundrels to sound high-minded while in fact speaking a portion of the grisly truth. “Freedom” may sound like human rights, but what they’re really talking about is the freedom to apply power at will. Pirates’ freedom, or perhaps more accurately, the freedom of the mafia don. Our standard is clear: a regime loves freedom if it is compliant with our directives. If not, it is radical, dictatorial, extreme. Uri Avnery, the great Israeli peace activist, sums it up quite neatly in a recent column. Palestinians are “moderate” if they follow U.S. orders and “pragmatic” if they follow Israel’s orders.

Clearly Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is both “moderate” and “pragmatic”, joining Bush and Olmert in roundly condemning Hamas (which is neither). Rather than criticize Israel and the “Quartet” for systematically strangling Gaza while allowing the expansion of settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank, Abbas is working in coordination with the powers that have denied his people their most basic national and human rights for the last four decades. These are, of course, the same powers that sign his paycheck and provide his security forces with arms, so how can Abbas not be compromised in the eyes of most Palestinians, who have nothing… not even a national identity. They see the Palestinian Authority living relatively affluent lives, eating well amid screaming poverty, bowing to their occupiers… and so they vote for Hamas, not just in Gaza, mind you, but throughout the West Bank, as well. They exercised their right to choose their own leaders late last year, and now they are being punished for not having legitimized the “leaders” we chose for them. There’s Bush’s democracy.

If it weren’t so grim, it would be almost laughable to hear Dubya clumsily working his rhetoric around this situation when he and Olmert have so obviously undermined the very principles the claim to champion. Pundits in the U.S. media – those critical of Bush – fault him for being “disengaged” from the Israel / Palestine issue, but the problem is just the opposite. That lack of progress in reaching a comprehensive peace agreement? That’s what they’ve accomplished, with the full cooperation of the Israeli government. Bush has involved himself deeply, pouring money and arms into one Palestinian side, strangling the other (and 1.5 million civilians along with it), and fomenting this conflict under the watchful eye of their Middle East point person, Elliot Abrams, who by rights should be spooning gruel in a Nicaraguan prison right now. The result is quite typical for this administration – a total disaster, people at one another’s throats, that sort of thing. More birth pangs, and with a midwife like Abrams, you can see what this sucker is going to look like when it grows up.

The new Middle East – slouching soon towards a Bethlehem near you.

luv u,

jp

The Palestinian’s two main political factions are on the brink of all-out civil war – the first such fratricidal conflict in that unfortunate people’s modern history. How the Israeli leadership must be chortling right now. To them, this is a dream come true – at long last, Palestinians are killing one another. Forty years into the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (not to mention the Syrian Golan, still illegally occupied), the imperial tactic of divide and conquer is finally paying dividends. Back in the 1980s, when the first intifada was brewing, Israeli intelligence made an investment in the then-nascent Hamas movement, hoping that it would undercut Fatah in the occupied territories. Of course, the intifada made Arafat’s organization, then in exile in Tunis, far less relevant, as resistance was driven by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, not in the diaspora. That was when Hamas began to take hold as a political force, providing social services while the territories were under siege.

Few will remember that in the late 80s, when Israeli leaders were saying they would never talk to the PLO, they were preparing to do just that. As the post Gulf War peace negotiations began – brokered by papa Bush – Israel took the opportunity to conduct separate negotiations with Arafat, whose witless, mapless, and self-serving representatives were more than happy to give away the store in exchange for an exclusive franchise (to wit, the Palestinian Authority) and the power/graft potential it offered. From that point on, Israel would only talk to the PLO, and not the Palestinians from inside the territories, having effectively co-opted Arafat and his organization into the native colonial administration they had always sought, with little success, since the occupation began. “President” Arafat’s cooperation allowed Israel, in essence, to expand the infrastructure of colonialism in the territories without organized harassment throughout the 1990s, until the inevitable explosion occurred in 2000, provoked by Barak and Sharon.

It’s not hard to understand why Hamas won a plurality in last year’s elections. It’s not because the Palestinians are mostly hard-line Islamists; it’s because, despite their Mossad-funded beginnings, Hamas is definitely not in the pocket of the Israelis. Abbas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority is funded, trained, and dog-whipped by Israel and the United States. We Americans may be ignorant of this, but it’s only too clear to the people living in the territories. And since the election, Palestinian society has been strangled by an act of collective punishment (shamelessly supported by the Europeans) that would be condemned bitterly in any other context, touching off this fratricidal struggle. This fulfills the fervent wish of an Israeli leader decades ago who envisioned Palestinians in the territories being contained like “drugged roaches in a bottle.” Quite so, and the world looks on. Our own indifference is fueled by a mainstream media that almost never goes out on a political limb, even when ex-presidents give them cover. I just heard NPR’s Steve Inskeep talking to Brookings’ Bruce Reidel about weapons going to Hamas and Fatah, the operative question being, “where is Hamas getting guns?” Answer? Wait for it…. Hezbollah and Iran, of course, the sources of all evil, able to defy geography itself by smuggling arms into Gaza via its border with, what, Lebanon?? Crikey. (Though to their credit, NPR did talk to Rashid Khalidi the next day.)

When you look at this conflict, just remind yourself – this is the result of a 40-year illegal (and quite brutal) occupation, underwritten by us.

luv u,

jp

It’s only June and we’re deep into presidential debate season. Did I get my years wrong? I thought this was 2007, not 2008. Fuck a duck, we’ve already got close to 20 presidential contenders hurling platitudes at us and competing over who can be the biggest caveman on camera. I think this week’s prize might have to go to G.O.P. longshot congressman Duncan Hunter, who advocated using “tactical nuclear missiles” to destroy Iranian centrifuges. (There’s a man of conviction!) That’ll teach those Iranians to threaten … people with… nuclear … weapons…. (irony). Christ, they’ll probably kick up their uranium enrichment just on the basis of his little demagogic tirade. Then there’s the god-stakes, which was a bit more of a laugh than usual since the very same day I heard a political commentator on NPR opining that the Republican candidates were shying away from openly religious rhetoric to distance themselves from Dubya. Right on the money once again, NPR! What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? (How about today?) For chrissake, that Huckabee jerk started one of his answers quoting from Genesis (and I don’t mean The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway).

Where do we find these losers? Well… as a grizzly bearded android fabricator from Lost In Space once remarked, “They are non-personalities. We make them.” It’s not hard to figure out why our politicians, for the most part, act like dicks….I mean… act in ways that seem antithetical to our interests. For them, politics is the art of getting elected. They tell us what they think most of us want to hear. The fact is, most of us don’t want bad news… so we vote for politicians that don’t give us any. Most of us don’t want to think of our nation as having been responsible for death and despair overseas… so we vote for politicians who tell us pleasing lies about our history. When Wolf Blitzer asks presidential candidates – Democrats – what they would do about Iran, they’ll all imply that Iran poses some kind of substantial threat to the U.S. No one will provide any background to our relationship with Iran that goes beyond the 1979-81 hostage crisis – no mention of our long history of establishing and supporting dictatorship within their country and, later, our support for a neighboring dictator (initials S.H.) who attacked their country… with WMD’s.

It’s the same phenomenon that keeps international and national news off the front page of my hometown newspaper. The publishers – like the politicians – assume that we don’t really care that much about what’s happening in, say, Iraq, because 1) we don’t have to go and fight there, 2) we don’t pay for the war via added taxation, and 3) we re-elected George W. Bush, who can’t tell the ceiling from the floor, as our commander-in-chief. We’re insulated from the effects from our own wars, so why should anyone assume we want to know about them? That insulation is the product of our own gullibility. While a good many of us wanted the Iraq war, no one wants higher taxes… so our “leaders” came up with this “invade now, pay later” imperial strategy. Similarly, no one wants the draft, so our politicians lean more and more heavily on the volunteer force, making them go back again and again, perpetually raising the bar like Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22. Bush and our congressional leaders told us we could have a world war without having to fight or pay, and we, for the most part, bought it.

What’s the solution to this conundrum? We need to grow up as a nation. We need to face the bad stuff that we’ve done over the decades, and try to do better. There’s no leader who can do that for us… It’s entirely up to us. Till then, we’ll get the jerks we deserve.

luv u,

jp