Category Archives: Middle East

Idiots Abroad

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Oblivious to the fact that no one gives a bleep what he does any more, President Bush is whining that people misunderstand him. Dan Froomkin writes,

President Bush’s self-image continues to amaze. Wrapping up an eight-day Middle East trip, the man who has launched two wars and may be hankering for a third told ABC News yesterday that he is terribly misunderstood in the region.

“I mean, my image [is]: ‘Bush wants to fight Muslims.’ And, yeah, I’m concerned about it. Not because of me, personally. I’m concerned because I want most people to understand the great generosity and compassion of Americans,” Bush told Terry Moran.

“But yeah, look, I’m sure people view me as a warmonger and I view myself as peacemaker.”

Bush said he had something to prove on his trip. But, he said, “it’s not so much to prove for my sake. It’s really to prove for peace.”

How does he intend to turn his image around? “You just have to fight through stereotypes by actions,” he said, adding that he intends to let “the results speak for themselves. . . .

… Apparently forgetting his “I’m a war president” motto of the 2004 campaign, Bush said: “I don’t believe democracies, you know, generally lead to war-like governments. You know, ‘Please vote for me, I promise you war.’ It’s not something that tends to win elections.”

You can’t make this up. If Bush were a fictional character — well, let’s just say that most cartoons are more realistic.

Bush is so thoroughly disliked abroad that even our “friends” are badmouthing him. Scott MacLeod writes for Time,

Bush was also harshly criticized — albeit in more circumspect language — in countries with close ties to Washington, including some from the very countries that rolled out the red carpet for the visiting President. Commenting on the two main purposes of the tour, even the most liberal Arab press questioned the sincerity of Bush’s efforts to establish a Palestinian state and criticized his campaign to pressure Iran over its nuclear program. On occasion, senior Arab officials contradicted or disputed Bush’s pronouncements even before he left their countries. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was an editorial in the Saudi Gazette, comparing back-to-back visits by Western leaders to Riyadh this week. “It would be difficult to argue that French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to the Kingdom was not in almost every way a success,” the paper said, adding, with an unmistakable swipe at Bush: “It’s refreshing to see a Western leader come to the Kingdom speaking of peace rather than just issuing warnings on the state of affairs in the region.”

Bush’s efforts to rally an Arab coalition to isolate Iran in the Gulf seemed to fall flat. Only days after he visited Kuwait, liberated in 1991 by a coalition led by the President’s father, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammed Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah was standing beside Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran, declaring: “My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend.”

Seldom has an American President’s visit left the region so underwhelmed, confirming Bush’s huge unpopularity on the street and his sagging credibility among Arab leaders he counts as allies. Part of the problem was the Administration’s increasingly mixed message, amplified by the intense media coverage of his trip. For example, in Dubai he gave what the White House billed as a landmark speech calling for “democratic freedom in the Middle East.” But during his last stop in Sharm el-Sheikh Wednesday, he lauded President Hosni Mubarak as an experienced, valued strategic partner for regional peace and security and made no mention of Cairo’s ongoing crackdown on opponents and critics — and the continuing imprisonment of Mubarak’s main opponent in the 2005 presidential election. “He is saying he supports the presidents and the governments in the Arab countries,” says Ghada Jamsheer, a women’s rights activist in Bahrain. “This is why people are angry. Why is he not putting pressure on these governments to push for human rights?” The fact that Bush rarely ventured beyond the walls of heavily guarded royal palaces, embassies and hotels, though completely understandable given concerns for his security, nonetheless further prevented him from making much connection with the people whose liberty he says he sincerely seeks.

Bush received his warmest welcome in Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud accorded him an honor reserved for special friends by inviting him to his horse farm outside Riyadh. But the Saudis didn’t hesitate when it came to publicly disagreeing with Bush’s views on various Middle East matters. Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, standing beside Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice, pointedly declined to endorse her call for more Arab gestures toward Israel or her relatively rosy assessment of political reconciliation in Iraq. After Bush jawboned the Saudis about increasing oil production to bring down oil prices, the Saudi oil minister shot back, “We will raise production when the market justifies it.”

The irony is that the Bush Administration is all about being “strong” and imposing its will by force. But Bush is ending his reign of error as the limpest sock to reside in the White House since James Buchanan.

Repression

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As a nation, we seem collectively to be trying to forget that George W. Bush is still POTUS. We’re spending all our time at dealerships looking at new models and ignoring the old, sputtering, oil-leaking junker that’s taking up space in our garage.

Except right now the junker is in the Middle East pretending to be a statesman. This is the sort of trip that would have been covered exhaustively in any other administration. Big headlines, and all that. Now, even news media are nearly ignoring it. Nobody, here or there, expects anything to come of it. Well, except Bush. Michael Abramowitz and Howard Schneider write for the Washington Post:

President Bush, having rumbled by car past Israeli checkpoints to this Palestinian city, said he thought a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty could be signed within the year, setting the stage for a “two-state solution” to decades of conflict.

“I am confident that with proper help, the state of Palestine will emerge. And I’m confident when it emerges, it will be a major step toward peace,” Bush said in a joint news conference Thursday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “I am confident that the status quo is unacceptable, Mr. President, and we want to help you.”

The fact is, Bush’s genius for bringing people together has already had an impact on the Middle East. Apparently he is soundly hated by both pro- and anti-Hamas forces alike. Abramowitz and Schneider continue,

The current state of internal Palestinian affairs only complicates the matter, with governance divided between groups with disparate visions. While Abbas greeted Bush with a traditional embrace and kiss, Hamas-led protesters in Gaza on Wednesday burned the American flag and portrayed Bush as a vampire, and militants fired rockets into Israel. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

And Seth Freedman writes at The Guardian that anti-Hamas Israelis protested Bush also.

I wandered up the hill to see how the rightwing crowd were getting on.

Their dressmakers had really gone to town, kitting dozens of them out in stylish terrorist outfits – namely keffiyehs, toy machine guns and Palestinian flags on sticks. Posing behind a huge poster mocking Bush as the “Founding father of Hamastine” their modus operandi was “to thank Bush and Olmert for releasing us and for backing a terror state next to Israel.”

I fell into conversation with their leader, Meir Indor, who insisted on speaking to me via a microphone, despite me standing face to face with him. “I want everyone in the street to hear our conversation,” he told me, before launching into a well-rehearsed speech about why Palestinians “don’t deserve” their own state until they promise to behave themselves. …

… Our conversation took a bizarre twist when he threatened to sue me for libel on behalf of Baruch Marzel, after I inferred that he was an Israeli version of the very militants Indor was castigating for their crimes. I was more than happy to stand my ground. At least, until one of Indor’s human puppets – dressed in an large American flag and Hamas headscarf – lumbered over and thrust his toy M16 into my chest, cueing my departure for the safer climes of the bar over the road.

Maybe Hamas and anti-Hamas militants should put aside their differences and have an anti-Bush poster contest.

The Middle East is coming together in disgust. Ian Black writes for The Guardian:

Beyond his uncritical support for Israel – still his worst crime for most Arabs – Bush will forever be associated with the invasion of Iraq and its repercussions.

The kings, emirs and the one president hosting him may be rolling out the red carpets, but both the Arab “street” and the “chattering classes” remember him more for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and the errors and excesses of the “global war on terror” than for overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

“Al Qaida threatened to receive him with bombs … but we believe he should be received as a war criminal by hitting him with rotten eggs and tomatoes and staging demonstrations to show the real Arab and Islamic feelings towards him,” commented Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Palestinian-owned newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi.

“The red carpets on which he will step during this visit are … made of the blood of his victims!” thundered Lebanon’s As-Safir.

Jihad al-Khazen in the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat called for Bush to be tried in the International Criminal Court. “Rambo,” sneered the state-run Syrian newspaper Tishrin.

Awesome. Since when has there been that much unanimity of opinion in the Middle East?

No wonder then, that so many Arabs look on this presidential progress with hostility or indifference, even though, in the Middle East, like everywhere else on the planet, attention is already focused on the next occupant of the White House.

“With all due respect, Bush might do the region and the entire world a favour by staying home,” suggested the respected Beirut Daily Star commentator Rami Khouri, “if he plans to visit the Middle East only to speed up the same American policy of blindly supporting Israel, sending arms and money to Arab authoritarian regimes, opposing mainstream Islamist groups that enjoy widespread popular legitimacy, ignoring realistic democratic transitions, and actively pressuring governments and movements that defy the US.”

See also Dan Froomkin.

What Feminist Movement?

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Anne Applebaum’s most recent entry to the Jonah Goldberg Brainless Twit Fellowship begins this way:

“A court in country X sentenced a black man who had been severely beaten by white men to six months in jail and 200 lashes.”

How would you react if you read that in a newspaper? Shock, horror, anger at the regime in country X, no doubt. And once you learned that punishing blacks for associating with whites is routine in country X, you might even get angrier. You might call for sanctions, you might insist that country X not participate in the Olympics. You might demand that country X be treated like apartheid-era South Africa.

In fact the sentence is real — almost. When originally published on the CBS News Web site last month, the story concerned a woman, not a black man, and country X was Saudi Arabia.

Here is the real quote:

“A Saudi court sentenced a woman who had been gang raped to six months in jail and 200 lashes.”

Applebaum goes on to admit that there was, in fact, outrage over this incident.

Hillary Clinton led a chorus of Democrats condemning the ruling, and a few editorials condemned it, too. It wasn’t much, but it mattered: Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman.

A “chorus of Democrats” isn’t much to Applebaum, but it seems to have been enough. So what’s her problem?

Her problem is that “the feminist movement” in America was silent.

Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women’s groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women’s Organizations’ most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to pick on that group, but it’s so easy) has space for issues of “non-sexist car insurance” and “network neutrality,” but not the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear a hijab.

NOW is a relic. I suspect young American feminists rank it just above the National Christian Woman’s Temperance Union in relevance to their lives.

The fact is, there is no “feminist movement” in America, and there hasn’t been one since the Equal Rights Amendment crashed and burned in the 1980s. There are splinterings of feminisms, cells of activists working for this or that fragment of women’s issues, but there is no movement, and there is no organization that truly represents American feminists. Including NOW.

Applebaum goes on to criticize “reigning feminist ideology,” as explained by anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. (Sommers is one of those right-wing hacks who makes a living constructing liberal strawpersons to bash; nice work if you can get it.) The truth is that there is no reigning feminist ideology in America today. There are many ideologies and notions and ideas drizzled about here and there that can be called “feminist,” but the only “ideology” that ties most American feminists together is an ideal of equal treatment and respect for women. Beyond that, good luck finding consensus on anything.

A few seconds of googling reveals that feminist bloggers did indeed speak out on the Saudi rape trial: See Jessica at Feministing, Echidne, Elaine Vigneault (who argues that this is not a feminist issue, but a human rights issue), and Melissa McEwan. I found these examples on the first search results page. Someone ought to tell Applebaum about web searches.

Rightie blogger Betsy Newmark took Applebaum’s bait and tsk-tsked “feminists” for not speaking up for Saudi women.

These feminists don’t want to give up the glory days when they could point to real discrimination in civil and economic rights for women so they get all excited about car insurance or protesting Wal-Mart for not selling the morning after pill. Anne Applebaum is absolutely correct. A perusal of the NOW web site doesn’t reveal any concern for the way women in some Islamic countries are treated as true second-class citizens. They’re more worried about whether girls are encouraged enough to study math and science. For shame.

Putting aside the fact that being denied a “morning after pill” can have genuinely tragic consequences (you know the Rightie Motto: It’s not a problem until it’s my problem) — the NOW web site is not exactly the alpha and omega of feminism, as I’ve said. But there are some interesting little nuggets buried in their archives. I like this one from August 2002:

On the eve of the Congressional vote on whether to take military action in Iraq, the National Organization for Women stands with a diverse coalition of leaders from the religious, academic, business and labor communities to demand peace. Congress must reassert the integrity of our country’s foreign policy by voting down a dangerous resolution that would give the Bush-Cheney administration broad authority for “pre-emptive strikes” against Iraq and any other country they believe may act against U.S. interests. …

… For Iraqi women, the war carries the danger that their nation will degenerate into an even more militarized society. We know all too well how such an extreme militarized culture in Afghanistan gave rise to a life of violence and oppression for women there. A U.S. invasion of Iraq will likely entail similar dangers to the safety and rights of Iraqi women—who currently enjoy more rights and freedoms than women in other Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia.

A news google turned up this story:

IRAQ: “Bad” Women Raped and Killed
By Ali al-Fadhily

BAGHDAD, Dec 18 (IPS) – Women are being killed by militia groups in southern Iraq for not conforming to strict Islamic ways, the police say. And, increased threats from militia groups is driving many women away from their homes.

Basra police chief Gen. Jalil Hannoon has told reporters and Arab TV channels that at least 40 women have been killed during the past five months in the southern city.

“We are sure there are many more victims whose families did not report their killing for fear of scandal,” Gen. Hannoon said.

The militias dominated by the Shia Badr Organisation and the Mehdi Army are leading imposition of strict Islamic rules. The enforcement of these ways comes at a time when British troops have left Basra, the biggest town in the south, to the Iraqi government.

This is from last week’s Guardian:

Freedom lost

After the invasion of Iraq, the US government claimed that women there had ‘new rights and new hopes’. In fact their lives have become immeasurably worse, with rapes, burnings and murders now a daily occurrence. By Mark Lattimer

They lie in the Sulaimaniyah hospital morgue in Iraqi Kurdistan, set out on white-tiled slabs. A few have been shot or strangled, some beaten to death, but most have been burned. One girl, a lock of hair falling across her half-closed eyes, could almost be on the point of falling asleep. Burns have stretched the skin on another young woman’s face into a fixed look of surprise.

These women are not casualties of battle. In fact, the cause of death is generally recorded as “accidental”, although their bodies often lie unclaimed by their families.

“It is getting worse, especially the burnings,” says Khanim Rahim Latif, the manager of Asuda, an Iraqi organisation based in Kurdistan that works to combat violence against women. “Just here in Sulaimaniyah, there were 400 cases of the burning of women last year.” Lack of electricity means that every house has a plentiful supply of oil, and she accepts that some cases may be accidents. But the nature and scale of the injuries suggest that most were deliberate, she says, handing me the morgue photographs of one young woman after another. Many of the bodies bear the unmistakable signs of having been subjected to intense heat.

Read the rest, if you have the stomach for it.

Let me post also a bit of a March 2007 op ed from the Guardian by Haifa Zangana:

Within days of the US troops Operation Law and Order, the “surge” plan announced by the Bush administration on January 10, two courageous Iraqi women, for the first time in the Arab and Muslim world, appeared on TV to speak about their rape by Iraqi troops. The first was 20-year-old Sabrin Al Janabi (the initial alias for Zainab Al-Shummary) and the second was Wajda, a mother of 11 from Tal a’far, the northern city.

The case of Sabrin/Zainab was emblematic of the farce that is Iraqi government. When her tearful statement was aired by al-Jazeera, all media outlets rushed to describe the rape – to fit with the Anglo – American manufactured label of the bloodshed in Iraq – as Sectarian. So the BBC reported the rape saying,

“The 20-year-old married Sunni woman says she was taken from her home in Baghdad to a police station, where she was accused of helping insurgents – and then raped by three policemen.”

Not failing to remind its listeners that, “The Baghdad police are predominantly Shia.”

In no time, Al Maliki – not known for his quick response to Iraqi women’s plight – issued a statement calling the woman a liar and a criminal and claimed that she was not attacked; fired an official who had called for an international investigation and described the rape as a “horrific crime” and ordered rewards for the officers Zainab accused of raping her.

Betsy: NOW was right.

We can all play these “I am more concerned about the rights of women than you are” games, but it’s all just games. We now have little leverage to help the women of the Middle East. The White House pays lip service to women’s rights when it serves some Bushie interest, then turns a blind eye to crimes against women when it doesn’t.

And we can’t very well point fingers at other peoples’ messes when we don’t clean up our own. Molly Ivors writes,

I have no problem adding my voice to the cacophony of those calling the original Saudi ruling appalling. I also decry the treatment of gang-rape and corporate-imprisonment victim Jamie Leigh Jones, who Ace of Spades and Rusty Shackleford have called a liar whose story is “too perfect.” (Wow, imagine if there had been inconsistencies! That would have convinced ol’ Rusty!) NOW also does not mention her on their site, but I do not blame them for her rape and subsequent abuse by a system more interested in keeping Vice-President Meisterburger in fresh colostomy bags than meting out justice.

See also Susie.

Asking for Trouble

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This week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was denied a visit to Ground Zero. Ahmadinejad asked that he be allowed to lay a wreath at the site while he visits New York next week. Today ABC News reports that Ahmadinejad may go anyway, permission or no permission, and has even announced when. I can see all kinds of ways this would turn out badly, and I hope someone talks some sense into Ahmadinejad before then.

But Ahmadinejad is not the only one who needs to chill. The ever irresponsible Michelle Malkin is fanning the flames and trying to organize a “welcoming party.” And if she incites enough rage and recklessness to get someone killed, she will be equally outraged if anyone says it is her fault.

When the Good Lord was handing out common sense, Malkin was out hunting down exclamation marks.

No sooner had word gotten out last week that New York City was considering the request than politicians of both parties went into spasms of outrage. There was such a piling on of outrage you’d have thought Ahmadinejad had proposed offering a human sacrifice or, worse, memorializing Muhammad Atta. As BooMan says, the piling on turned into a game of one-upmanship, with pols bragging that they were not only outraged, they were more outraged than their political opponents. (See also the Anonymous Liberal.)

At this point in the post I have to stop and declare how much I don’t like Ahmadinejad. And I really don’t, but I resent having to say it. I am, however, obliged to make it clear that I don’t like Ahmadinejad so that righties don’t show up and accuse me of being a Mahmoud lover. What I will not do is enter into a competition to prove how much I dislike Ahmadinejad or if my dislike is sufficient dislike, because insufficient dislike is tantamount to siding with the terrorists.

Please note: I dislike groupthink a lot more than I dislike Ahmadinejad.

Here’s where we go from dumb to dumber — Scott Johnson of Power Tools says that Ahmadinejad is in New York he will participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students at Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum. Johnson thinks this is a disgrace.

Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.

It’s true America is plagued by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Most of the Bush Administration comes to mind. But Columbia U. President Bollinger makes it clear he’s not inviting the Iranian leader over for tea and cookies. Bollinger intends to challenge Ahmadinejad on matters of terrorism, nuclear weapons, Holocaust denial, women’s rights, and other thorny issues, which I would think would be educational.

See, Scott, this is a World Leaders Forum, which I assume includes world-leaders-in-training. What World Leaders normally do is deal with other World Leaders of all stripes, and it’s good to have some laboratory experience with such things before you go out and practice World Leadership for real. Among other things, real World Leaders are not cartoons and do not go about with “Good” or “Evil” stamped on their foreheads. Real World Leaders are complicated people who probably got to be World Leaders because they are very good at handling other people. Even evil World Leaders can be charming. Back in the 1930s lots of people — right wingers, mostly — thought Hitler was a reasonable fellow. I remember reading that the first time Harry Truman met Joseph Stalin, Truman thought Stalin was an OK guy. This World Leadership thing isn’t as easy as it looks.

But righties have always been advocates for premeditated ignorance. I recall back in the 1950s and 1960s American conservatives would, from time to time, erupt into outrage mode upon learning that American colleges required students to learn something about Communism. Since Communism was the major threat to the planet at the time, one would think knowing something about it would be useful. But no; teaching students about Communism is teaching Communism. And Communism was, apparently, so inherently evil that merely learning about it was corrupting. Better to stay ignorant.

And it’s better not to get too close to whackjob World Leaders, even in a classroom, so that when the time comes that you actually have to deal with whackjob World Leaders you won’t know what you are doing and will have no recourse but to bomb them.

See how that works?

But back to the Ground Zero visit — I’m reminded of a story. Back in 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev toured America and expressed a desire to visit Disneyland. He was denied entrance to the Magic Kingdom, probably for security reasons, or maybe the Seven Dwarfs threatened a protest strike. In any event, Khrushchev’s disappointment became an international, big-bleeping-deal Issue with the bulk of global sympathy siding with Khrushchev. And some American editorialists suggested the experience might have taught the Communist dictator something about the superiority of capitalism and the American way of life.

Here I have to enter another disclaimer, that I am not comparing Ground Zero to a theme park. I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and am, therefore, better acquainted with what happened there than Michelle Malkin or anyone else who merely watched on television. I’ve seen Ground Zero many times since. It doesn’t look quite as sad as it used to, since they’ve finally started building stuff. Still, seeing the place might have given Ahmadinejad a sense of the scale of the disaster that photographs cannot provide. Maybe someone could fly him over the site in an unmarked helicopter. It might give him a glimmer of an idea why Americans are hostile about terrorism. Just don’t put out a press release this is happening, or some whackjob rightie will show up in Manhattan to shoot down helicopters.

Iraq is Just a Comma

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When the final history is written on Iraq, it will look just like a comma.

– George W. Bush

You can hear it among the troops. The following email is from the political humor site BartCop, with the not-very-funny title We Are Going To Hit Iran…Bigtime:

[Update from maha: Per commenter PB, this was crossposted on Daily Kos and then taken down after its authenticity was questioned. I don’t know about its authenticity, but I confirmed that it was taken off DK. Read with a big grain of salt.]

I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.

I asked her why she is telling me this. Her answer was really amazing…

She started in the Marines and after 8 years her term was up… She…successfully changed from the Marines to the Navy. Her role is still aligned with the Marines since she generally is assigned to liaison with the Marine units deploying off her carrier group.

Like most Marines and former Marines, she is largely apolitical. The fact is, most Marines are trigger pullers and most trigger pullers couldn’t care less who the President is. They simply want to be the tip of the sword when it comes to defending the country. She voted once in her life and otherwise was always in some forward post on the water during election season.

Something is wrong with the Navy and the Marines in her view. Always ready to go in harms way, Marines rarely ever question unless it’s a matter of tactics or honor. But something seems awry. Junior and senior officers are starting to grumble, roll their eyes in the hallways. The strain of deployments is beginning to hit every jot and tittle of the Marines and it’s beginning to seep into the daily conversation of Marines and Naval officers in command decision.

"I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer", she said. "But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran."

"We’re not stupid. Most of the members of the fleet read well enough to know what is going on world-wise. We also realize that anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them. Keep in mind that most of the people I serve with are happy to be a part of the global war on terror. It’s just that the touch points are what we see since we are the ones out here who are supposedly implementing this grand strategy. But when you liaison with administration officials who don’t know that Iranians don’t speak Arabic and have no idea what Iranians live like, then you start having second thoughts about whether these Administration officials are even competent."

I asked her about the attack, how limited and so forth.

"I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens. And the consequences… whatever the consequences… they will have to be lived with. Something inside me tells me to tell it anyway."

I asked her why she was suddenly so cynical.

"I have become cynical only recently. I also don’t believe anyone will be able to stop this. Bush has become something of an Emperor. He will give the command, and cruise missiles will fly and aircraft will fly and people will die, and yet few of us here are really able to cobble together a great explanation of why this is a good idea….

"That’s what’s missing. A real sense of purpose. What’s missing is the answer to what the hell are we doing out here threatening this country with all this power? Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work."

She had to hang up. She left by telling me that she believes the attack is a done deal. "It’s only a matter of time before their orders come and they will be sent to station and told to go to Red Alert. She said they were already practicing traps, FARP and FAST." (Trapping is the act of catching the tension wires when landing on the carrier, FARP is Fleet Air Combat Maneuvering Readiness Program- practice dogfighting- and FAST is Fleet Air Superiority Training).

She seemed lost. The first time in my life I have ever heard her sound off rhythm, or unsure of why she is doing something. She knows that there is something rotten in the Naval Command and she, like many of her associates are just hoping that the election brings in someone new, some new situation, or something.

"Yes. We’re gong to hit Iran, bigtime. Whatever political discussions that are going on is window dressing and perhaps even a red herring. I see what’s going on below deck here in the hangars and weapons bays. And I have a sick feeling about how it’s all going to turn out."

You can hear it among the intelligentsia. From Chris Floyd’s Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock: Countdown to Midnight in Persia:

…Juan Cole points us to the story by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane, who reported on the study by two respected British academics on the likely course of the coming war. According to Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, former Director of the British American Security Information Council, the war preparations now being made by the Bush Administration bespeak something far beyond a quick punitive strike on Iranian Guards positions or lightning raid on Iran’s nuclear power facilities. Instead, what the Bush-Cheney junta envision is the complete destruction of the Iranian state in an aerial blitzkrieg aimed at up to 10,000 targets inside Iran.

The goal, says Plesch and Butcher, is to:

"destroy Iran’s WMD [capabilities], nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order…Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact. US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours. US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice."

Chris continues:

The assault will most likely be made with conventional weapons, the authors say, as the political and environmental effects of a nuclear strike on Iran would not be worth the limited military value of such an attack. After all, the Bushists want to control Iran and milk it dry after they destroy the regime and slaughter a vast number of innocent people. Halliburton and Exxon wouldn’t be able to move right in and start gobbling up loot in a radiated land.

This is what is coming. This is what the Bushists will be selling to us soon. (Glenn Greenwald has a useful roundup of the growing madness here.) One sees comments here and there to the effect that "the American people will never accept this," that "Bush can’t get away with this kind of thing after Iraq," or that "this isn’t 2002, with everyone still raw and dazed after 9/11," etc., etc. But such declarations are pipe-dreams, foolish hopes. As we have pointed out here many times, Bush and Cheney are not interested in obtaining the "consent of the governed" for their militarist agenda — nor do they need it.

Congress has already given its overwhelming approval to the specious reasons for war that Bush and his minions have advanced. The corporate media is doing its part again too…..

Earlier this summer, I highlighted Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, which details how Nazism slowly took over Germany in the 30s and 40s. It came up so slowly that the masses of people simply adapted, and life went on. We Americans have been going through something very similar under Bush. All of us have been watching our country, as we knew it, slowly slip away.

There comes a point in this process where a discontinuity appears, where it becomes unmistakably clear to everyone that Things Have Irreversibly Changed and There is No Going Back. For Nazi Germany, this point of no return probably happened when it invaded Poland, and the Allies declared war. Attacking Iran, if it happens as described, IMO will be this point of no return for America. It will unleash unprecedented consequences both at home and abroad. Bush will be proven correct: Iraq was just a comma, a stop on the way to what they were really after.

Countdown to Midnight in Persia concludes:

But let us bear witness to the truth while we can still speak the truth: This is murder. And all those who do not speak out against it — and against all those in high places who do nothing to stop it — are fully complicit in this abomination. No excuses, no mitigation, not this time. Speak out — or be damned with the criminals who thrive on your silence.

The War on Science

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In Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis, who explains why science in Muslim countries is stuck in the past. For example, “A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.” And this is remarkable considering that, centuries ago, the Middle East was light years ahead of Europe in science.

What’s so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe’s Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

Note also that Copernicus used the mathematical work of Iranian astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system.

What happened, in brief, was the European “scientific revolution.” Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans went through a shift in consciousness about how to understand and study the natural world. As a result, religion and science were separated into two entirely separate spheres of knowledge. Plus, as Edis says, this separation, with its promise of infinite new inventions and technologies, became complete just in time to plug into emerging capitalism. But in Muslim countries the critical separation of science from religion never occurred. Thus, scientific inquiry in the Middle East never matured into true science as it did in Europe.

And now, there’s Islamic creationism.

In many Muslim countries, you don’t have much creationism, but only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen creationism appearing in Turkey’s official science textbooks that are taught in high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world.

But before we feel pity for Middle Eastern scientists, let us consider what we’re dealing with here in the U.S. Namely, wingnuts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ace of Spades. Never mind that the Ace’s, um, interpretation of the article bears no resemblance whatsoever to what the article says. Wingnuts generally have reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to that of spinach. Just take a look at this conclusion —

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God — or, rather, Allah — created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

Somewhere in there is a clue to why one cannot have a sensible conversation with an American right winger.

To his credit, the Ace is not a creationist himself. However, he dismisses global climate change as a “cult.” I’d say we’d best not point fingers at the Muslim world for being hostile to science. And we shouldn’t be too proud about logic or literacy, either.

See also: Sadly, No.

Update: Why some say we liberals should support righties in their fight to save the liberal values of the Enlightenment. No, serously.

What Jesus Said

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Consider this an update to the previous post, The Wisdom of Doubt IX. Karen Armstrong wrote an op ed for yesterday’s Guardian in which she argued that “An inability to tolerate Islam contradicts western values.” Here’s just a snip:

On both sides, however, there are double standards and the kind of contradiction evident in Khomeini’s violation of the essential principles of his mentor, Mulla Sadra. For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonists’ depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity on London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity.

But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as any other form of prejudice. When 255,000 members of the so-called “Christian community” signed a petition to prevent the building of a large mosque in Abbey Mills, east London, they sent a grim message to the Muslim world: western freedom of worship did not, apparently, apply to Islam. There were similar protests by some in the Jewish community, who, as Seth Freedman pointed out in his Commentisfree piece, should be the first to protest against discrimination.

Naturally, the usual knee-jerk reactions commenced. Short version: Because there is Muslim terrorism, and because there are Muslims who commit unspeakable atrocities, we are justified in hating all Muslims and denying them the same degree of tolerance and respect we want them to give us.

From Marc at U.S.S. Neverdock:

Tell that to the Christians persecuted and murdered in Muslim countries. Tell that to the gays who are hung in Muslim lands. Tell that to Muslim women who are raped and killed in so called “honour” attacks. In their attempts to portray Muslims as victims, the left completely ignore Islam’s intolerance to Western values.

It’s always heartening when right-wingers embrace liberal values and express outrage at injustices perpetrated against religious minorities, gays, and women. However, I would like to point out that Jesus set a higher standard:

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, New International Version]

I looked around in Matthew for a qualifier — that it’s OK to hate and discriminate against all members of a group if some among them are really bad — but couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s in some other Gospel. Or else they’re confusing the Bible with the script of The Godfather, and they think the Golden Rule is what Sonny Corleone said: “They hit us so — we hit ’em back.”

I don’t think Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) necessarily means that a righteous person may not defend himself or others from physical assault. I think the “cheek” business is about not allowing hate to escalate. Just because someone hates you doesn’t mean you have to hate them back. You don’t even have to hate them if you must use force to defend yourself from them. Just defend yourself. Hate is superfluous and may even be a hindrance to self-defense. Any martial arts master will tell you the same thing.

What Jesus — and Karen Armstrong — are saying is that tit-for-tat hatred takes the haters down a very dark road. The righteous person, Jesus said, is the one who refuses to feed the hate cycle.

The Buddha said:

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” in those who harbour such thoughts hatred is not appeased.

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred is appeased.

Hate is not overcome by hate; by Love (Metta) alone is hate appeased. This is an eternal law. [Dhammapada 1:3-5)

I’m just sayin’ that when a couple of heavy hitters like Jesus and the Buddha agree on something, we would do well to pay attention.