The Obama Puppet

The World’s Least Powerful Man – The Obama Puppet

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so.

The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.”

And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

Continue reading: COUNTER PUNCH

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published in January by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts[a]yahoo[dot]com

Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

Now Pakistan

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations — Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) — may or may not be a conspiracy hatched in Washington D.C., but it is becoming an international reality.  It is no secret that the United States and Europe, with varying degree of mutual cooperation and some make-believe internal discord, superintend the sequential destruction of Muslim nations. This War of Sequential Destruction (WSD), despite Nobel-Laureate Barack Obama’s denials, refuses to go away.

The WSD is multi-frontal. It crosshairs Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Bashir,  Ahmadinejad, Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Many Western policymakers rarely see Muslim nations, including allies, with any inherent respect.  Vice President Dick Cheney described the Muslim world as “brute and nasty.” Obama advisers, though more guarded in their word choices, see Muslim nations no differently. The idea that Islam is inherently violent, openly expressed during the Bush administration, continues to animate foreign policy. The White House holds a new President but Congressional leadership and Washington policymakers are more or less the same. Anti-Islamic policies of warfare and destabilization are intact.

Therefore, the WSD will continue and gather momentum. The picture is not pretty. Palestinians are penned in misery and their territorial cage is constantly shrinking to meet the “natural growth” of vociferous settlers. Oil-rich Iraq is under American occupation and its communities have been torn apart with irreversible harm. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is placed under the boots of Western armies. Thousands of Afghans have been murdered, their houses bombed, their villages devastated. The International Criminal Court headquartered in Holland has indicted the first sitting head of the state, the Muslim President of Sudan. The United States and Europe, themselves armed with thousands of nuclear heads, are strategizing to punish Iran for asserting a treaty-based right to produce nuclear energy, leaving open the option of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

After razing Iraq and Afghanistan, the WSD has now turned to ravage an ally, Muslim Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation that the British, in 1947, carved out of India and that India, in 1971, broke into two, liberating Bangladesh from the murderous clutch of the Pakistani military. Over the past sixty-two years, Pakistan’s military and civilian rulers, one after the other, and without exception, have turned to America for military training, weapons, money, and strategic instructions.  Eager to send their sons and daughters to Western cities for education and employment, Pakistani politicians, generals, and bureaucrats all look for ways, and create the ways, to oblige Western capitals, particularly Washington D.C.  Partly for personal interests and partly out of faulty readings of geopolitical situations, Pakistani rulers, like most rulers in Muslim nations, frequently compromise national sovereignty and public welfare.

The Pakistani orientation for self-destruction serves American interests. Facing a failing campaign in Afghanistan, Obama advisers decided to expand the war into Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan.  The United States desperately solicited the Pakistani military to join the Afghan war. Pakistani rulers, this time a democratically elected government, listened to the American call. They first permitted the CIA to fly drones armed with missiles, which killed a few militants but hundreds of civilians in the tribal areas. The United States later urged Pakistan to invade Swat to kill militants. Pakistan did. Millions of civilians were made homeless.

Source// COUNTERPUNCH

In 1994 Bill Kristol pitched a plan to defeat health care reform that led to 14 years of Conservative Rule in this country. The strategy he proposed: Unrelenting, condescending stupidity.

Project for a Republican Future

December 2, 1993

MEMORANDUM TO: REPUBLICAN LEADERS
FROM: WILLIAM KRISTOL
SUBJECT: Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal

The Torture Sessions

Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

Those who control oil and water will control the world

New superpowers are competing for diminishing resources as Britain becomes a bit-player. The outcome could be deadly

by John Gray

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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday March 30 2008 on p33 of the Comment section. It was last updated at 00:03 on March 30 2008.

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognisably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world’s resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.

It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and imperial geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players were Britain and Russia and the object of the game was control of central Asia’s oil. Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last.

The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China’s rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped.

There is no alternative to continuing growth, but it comes with deadly side-effects. Overused in industry and agriculture, and under threat from the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers, water is becoming a non-renewable resource. Two-thirds of China’s cities face shortages, while deserts are eating up arable land. Breakneck industrialisation is worsening this environmental breakdown, as many more power plants are being built and run on high-polluting coal that accelerates global warming. There is a vicious circle at work here and not only in China. Because ongoing growth requires massive inputs of energy and minerals, Chinese companies are scouring the world for supplies. The result is unstoppable rising demand for resources that are unalterably finite.

Although oil reserves may not have peaked in any literal sense, the days when conventional oil was cheap have gone forever. Countries are reacting by trying to secure the remaining reserves, not least those that are being opened up by climate change. Canada is building bases to counter Russian claims on the melting Arctic icecap, parts of which are also claimed by Norway, Denmark and the US. Britain is staking out claims on areas around the South Pole.

The scramble for energy is shaping many of the conflicts we can expect in the present century. The danger is not just another oil shock that impacts on industrial production, but a threat of famine. Without a drip feed of petroleum to highly mechanised farms, many of the food shelves in the supermarkets would be empty. Far from the world weaning itself off oil, it is more addicted to the stuff than ever. It is hardly surprising that powerful states are gearing up to seize their share.

This new round of the Great Game did not start yesterday. It began with the last big conflict of the 20th century, which was an oil war and nothing else. No one pretended the first Gulf War was fought to combat terrorism or spread democracy. As George Bush Snr and John Major admitted at the time, it was aimed at securing global oil supplies, pure and simple. Despite the denials of a less honest generation of politicians, there can be no doubt that controlling the country’s oil was one of the objectives of the later invasion of Iraq.

Oil remains at the heart of the game and, if anything, it is even more important than before. With their complex logistics and heavy reliance on air power, high-tech armies are extremely energy-intensive. According to a Pentagon report, the amount of petroleum needed for each soldier each day increased four times between the Second World War and the Gulf War and quadrupled again when the US invaded Iraq. Recent estimates suggest the amount used per soldier has jumped again in the five years since the invasion.

Whereas Western countries dominated the last round of the Great Game, this time they rely on increasingly self-assertive producer countries. Mr Putin’s well-honed contempt for world opinion might grate on European ears, but Europe is heavily dependent on his energy. Hugo Chávez might be an object of hate for George W Bush, but Venezuela still supplies around 10 per cent of America’s imported oil. President Ahmadinejad is seen by some as the devil incarnate, but with oil at more than a $100 a barrel, any Western attempt to topple him would be horrendously risky.

While Western power declines, the rising powers are at odds with each other. China and India are rivals for oil and natural gas in central Asia. Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia have clashed over underwater oil reserves in the South China Sea. Saudi Arabia and Iran are rivals in the Gulf, while Iran and Turkey are eyeing Iraq. Greater international co-operation seems the obvious solution, but the reality is that as the resources crunch bites more deeply, the world is becoming steadily more fragmented and divided.

We are a long way from the fantasy world of only a decade ago, when fashionable gurus were talking sagely of the knowledge economy. Then, we were told material resources did not matter any more – it was ideas that drove economic development. The business cycle had been left behind and an era of endless growth had arrived. Actually, the knowledge economy was an illusion created by cheap oil and cheap money and everlasting booms always end in tears. This is not the end of the world or of global capitalism, just history as usual.

What is different this time is climate change. Rising sea levels reduce food and fresh-water supplies, which may trigger large-scale movements of refugees from Africa and Asia into Europe. Global warming threatens energy supplies. As the fossil fuels of the past become more expensive, others, such as tar sands, are becoming more economically viable, but these alternative fuels are also dirtier than conventional oil.

In this round of the Great Game, energy shortage and global warming are reinforcing each another. The result can only be a growing risk of conflict. There were around 1.65 billion people in the world when the last round was played out. At the start of the 21st century, there are four times as many, struggling to secure their future in a world being changed out of recognition by climate change. It would be wise to plan for some more of history’s rhymes.

· John Gray is author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, published by Allen Lane in paperback on 24 April

//the observer//

The Dumbing Of America

Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their “vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen.” But these zombie-like characteristics “are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.” Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. “With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information,” the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. “A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.”

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible — and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University’s Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping “I’m the decider” may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio “fireside chat” so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, “they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

info@susanjacoby.com

Susan Jacoby’s latest book is “The Age of American Unreason.”

via//Washington Post

The Great Betrayal

The Arizona senator says our jobs are not coming back, the illegals are not going home, and we are going to have more wars.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Offering more “straight talk” on the Sunday before the Florida primary, John McCain made an arresting prediction: “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”

Ike promised to “go to Korea” and ended that war. Nixon pledged to end Vietnam with honor. McCain says we may be in Iraq a hundred years and warns, “there’s going to be other wars.” Take the man at his word.

Mimicking the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” McCain has joked about “Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran” and urged the expulsion of Russia from the G-8. He wants to expand NATO to bring in Georgia and the Ukraine. This could mean confrontation between Russia and the United States over whether South Ossetia and Abkhazia should be free of Georgia or ruled by Tbilisi, a matter of zero vital interest to this country.

 We are forewarned. John McCain intends to be a war president.

Where Bush has lately cleansed his administration of neocons, McCain offers the last best hope for a neocon return and restoration and more wars in the Middle East. And if, as seems probable, Bibi Netanyahu again becomes prime minister of Israel, he and a President McCain will find a pretext for war on Iran.

Year 2008 may prove a defining one for conservatives. For on many of the great issues, McCain has sided as often with the Left and the Big Media as he has with the Right.

Where Bush has been at his best, cutting taxes and nominating conservative judges, McCain has been his nemesis. Not only did he vote twice against the Bush tax cuts, McCain colluded to sell out the most conservative of Bush’s judges

In 1993, McCain voted to confirm the pro-abortion liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But when Bush set out to restore constitutionalism, McCain formed the Gang of 14, seven senators from each party. All agreed to vote to block the GOP Senate from invoking the “nuclear option”—i.e., empowering the GOP to break a filibuster of judicial nominees by majority vote—unless the seven Democrats agreed.

With this record of voting for Clinton justices and joining with Democrats anxious to kill the most conservative Bush’s nominees, what guarantee is there a President McCain would nominate and fight for the fifth jurist who would vote to overturn Roe v Wade?

McCain also colluded with liberals to pass McCain-Feingold, a law that denies to Second Amendment folks and right-to-lifers their First Amendment right to identify friends and foes in TV ads before national elections.

On ANWAR, too, McCain votes with the liberals, and on global warming he has moved toward Gore.

After five record trade deficits have denuded the nation of thousands of factories and 3 million manufacturing jobs, McCain is still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley. “When you study history,” he told a Detroit newspaper, “every time we’ve adopted protectionism, we’ve paid a very heavy price.”

But what history was McCain talking about? From Lincoln through Calvin Coolidge, the GOP was the Party of Protection that put 12 presidents in the White House to two for the Democrats, and the U.S. became the most awesome industrial power and self-reliant nation in the history of mankind, producing 42 percent of the world’s manufactured goods. Even Hillary, whose husband passed NAFTA with McCain’s support, has begun to question the free-trade paradigm and the disastrous results it has produced.

On controlling America’s borders and halting the invasion through Mexico, McCain collaborated with Senate liberals in the McCain-Kennedy amnesty, which was rejected only after a national uprising.

When 190,000 Arizonans petitioned in 2004 to put Prop 200 on the ballot, requiring proof of citizenship before an individual could vote or receive welfare benefits, John McCain led the GOP congressional delegation in opposing it unanimously. Prop 200 passed with the support of 56 percent of all Arizona voters and 46 percent of Hispanics.

Unsurprisingly, Juan Hernandez, the open-borders chatterbox and former adviser to Vicente Fox, has turned up in McCain’s campaign.

On the two issues where Bush has been at his best, taxes and judges, McCain has sided against him. On the three issues that have ravaged the Bush presidency—the misbegotten war in Iraq, the failure to secure America’s borders, and the trade policy that has destroyed the dollar, de-industrialized the country, and left foreigners with $5 trillion to buy up America—McCain has sided with Bush.

Now McCain is running on a platform that says your jobs are not coming back, the illegals are not going home, but we are going to have more wars. If you don’t like it, vote for Hillary.

And this was to be the Year of Change.

via//American Conservative

[Video] Olbermann: Mr Bush, You Are A Fascist

How America Can Be a Superpower the World Respects

By Jason Marsh, Greater Good

An interview with foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter by Jason Marsh.

“World’s only superpower” — that’s the title bestowed on the United States for the last two decades. It has a nice ring to it, but what does it mean today?

“Measured by economic statistics and military might, our power is greater than ever,” writes foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter in her recent book, The Idea That Is America. “But measured by the commonsense measure of whether we can get others to do what we want them to do, we have clearly lost ground since the Cold War.”

For years, foreign policy experts like Slaughter, dean of Princeton University’s eminent Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, have warned that our unrivaled wealth and military power are not enough to tackle the kinds of problems we face today, from terrorism to climate change to the widening gaps between rich and poor around the world.

“These are issues that require the cooperation of, if not all 191 nations, then a good many of them,” Slaughter said. “And for that, you have to be able to mobilize people; you have to be able to inspire them. That means we have to have a set of ideas that will be deeply attractive to other countries and will convince other countries that we are actually pulling together to fight a common threat.”

In The Idea That Is America, Slaughter identifies seven key principles — liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith — that she sees as central to America’s identity. She describes how a U.S. foreign policy grounded in these principles could offer a new model of American power, one that inspires and mobilizes other nations to work with us.

The Idea That Is America has been endorsed by distinguished figures ranging from former Reagan secretary of state George Shultz to former Clinton secretary of state Madeline Albright (who called the book “brilliant … deeply moving, exquisitely timed, authored by one of our country’s leading scholars”). Slaughter herself has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state should the Democrats win the White House.

Slaughter recently spoke with me during a brief trip back to the U.S. from China, where she’s on sabbatical for the year.

Jason Marsh: If you were advising the next American president, how would you recommend he or she act to restore America’s moral and political standing in the world?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: I would start with humility. In my view, we need to start by acknowledging that we have made some real errors — that we were badly frightened after 9/11, and we overreacted in many ways. We’re not alone as a nation in doing that; many nations respond that way. But we have to own up to that. We have to take responsibility for our actions and acknowledge our errors, and acknowledge that in many cases we actually should have been listening to other countries. That kind of humility is needed to give us enough room to start to do some very positive things.

There are four concrete things we need to do right away. The first is to close Guantanamo and declare that we will not engage in torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. We must go back to the standards that we have always set and we continue to set for our military. We must embrace them across the board.

Second, we must withdraw our troops from Iraq in a way that leaves Iraq as stable as possible, while building regional institutions at the same time. It cannot be just a unilateral withdrawal. Rather it must be a declared policy of, “We are now withdrawing our troops and working to make that a safe and stable withdrawal,” rather than figuring out how to stay in.

Third, we need to work on leading a serious global effort to combat climate change. Our current nonchalant posture is probably the most important global symbol of how the United States effectively doesn’t care that the decisions we make affect others. You can’t be a leader if you’re that irresponsible. We’re going to have to ask other countries to make sacrifices, too, so we’re going to have to start. And the fourth is to be really serious about nuclear nonproliferation, which means living up to our part of the bargain. It means cutting our nuclear weapons. In my view it means declaring that our ultimate aim is to go to zero, although it could take decades to get there.

JM: You talk about humility, but “humble superpower” seems like a contradiction in terms. I wonder if you could elaborate on how a humble foreign policy would differ from the Bush administration’s? For instance, when would a humble superpower use force?

AMS: Well, first, you have to define humility. Humility doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be strong; it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be bold; it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proud. The opposite of humility is hubris.

So the biggest changes would be, in making decisions, to genuinely consult and genuinely listen. Not just jump through diplomatic hoops, but genuinely listen to people who understand a particular region. We really need to be consulting with those powers and allowing them to lead in some cases, supporting them, and not always insisting that it’s going to be done our way.

If you’ve got evidence that you are about to be attacked, you can act. That’s consistent with the right of self-defense under the U.N. charter, under international law. The issue is: Can you act when a threat is not imminent, but you think it’s building? And there, I think, humility says there are far too many questions to act unilaterally. That’s exactly, in my view, where you want to have the value of multilateral deliberation, where you want a number of different opinions.

And in my view, that means you would either get UN authorization or you’d at least get authorization from a representative regional body. And if you can’t convince another 10 to 15 nations who would be equally threatened that this threat is imminent and that force is really essential, then I don’t think you should act. But it’s not because of some abstract devotion to multilateral process. It’s because multilateral process is a safeguard that you use precisely when you know that you may see something exactly black, but somebody else may see it exactly white, and you better hear that view.

JM: It’s interesting to hear you describe power in these terms because it resonates with research covered by my co-editor Dacher Keltner in this issue of Greater Good. That research shows when people practice social intelligence, when they’re sensitive to the needs of others and able to empathize with them, they are entrusted with more power and are actually able to wield that power over a longer term, and more successfully, than when they just try to lead by force and coercion.

AMS: Very interesting. That is consistent with the view of John Ikenberry, who is my co-author on the Princeton Project on National Security, that the secret of our success after WWII was that we were willing to constrain ourselves by creating and participating in institutions such as the United Nations. By doing so, we were not only strengthening ourselves by creating alliances against our adversaries. We were reassuring our allies that we would not dominate them — that we would genuinely take their views seriously and that we would accept these constraints in return for their participating in these institutions with us. And the whole point there is that constraint is a source of power.

JM: What you’re articulating seems to be social intelligence on a global scale. On the other hand, there’s another body of research showing that once people have power, despite what research shows is the best way to wield it, people are often corrupted by it and abuse power in pursuit of their own self-interest. And I can’t help but wonder whether that might also be the case in the international arena. In other words, perhaps the U.S. should use its power in this socially intelligent, humble way. But do we have any reason to believe that it actually can? Is there any historical precedent for this kind of political humility?

AMS: Well, it’s a great question, and I think you can answer it on multiple levels. One, there’s the basic learning curve on the personal level. In my own experience as dean, and I think many leaders will say this, when you first become a leader, there’s this overwhelming sense that you have to prove your strength and your resolution. And what you’re going to do is just declare something and impose it. And you’re going to act quickly and resolutely and firmly. And virtually all effective leaders then realize, “No, actually moving more slowly and consulting more widely is far more likely to help you reach your objective.” It will be slower, it may be moderated in different ways — you’re not going to get it exactly as you wanted — but it will be legitimate, and it will last.

So if you think about that globally, part of the answer is that there’s a learning curve, right? The United States came out of the Cold War, and in 1995, after 40 years as one of two superpowers, we were only one superpower. And it’s not surprising that it went to our head in various ways. And then we were also, as I said, badly frightened after 9/11. That combination means it’s not at all surprising that at some point we said, “We have all this power and we’re going to use it for what we think is good.” But the lessons of how disastrous that’s been, I think, are quite plain to see.

The other thing I would say is this is the first time ever that you have had a democracy in this role. I write in my book that our democracy does not presume we are better than other people. On the contrary, it presumes that we are totally human, and like all humans, we are corruptible and we are weak. Unlike the British Empire or the Roman Empire or any other country that was once in this position, we are a country where when things go disastrously wrong, we have a system to kick that government out. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be great, just that we have real safeguards against the worst abuses.

And I think we will look back and see we’ve handled this period of being an unquestionable hyperpower quite badly, but that we then recovered and, first, recognized that the period of being a hyperpower was clearly limited. Because if you look 20 years down the road, you can see other powers-China, but also the EU-rising. You can see that the centers of power in the world are reconfiguring. Second, we’ll see that the kinds of problems we faced were not susceptible to the unilateral use of our power, even for the period that we had it.

This has been a grievous learning curve. But I remain optimistic that we actually can come back.

JM: Looking ahead to the next administration and beyond, why are you optimistic that we can and will get back on this right path?

AMS: I am optimistic, although I’m not Pollyannaish. In other words, I really do think this is going to be a four-to-five year effort, because we really have eroded so much of what I think does make us strong.

But with the right administration, and the willingness to put in the work, not to have a quick fix, to accept constraints, and to really have a serious global agenda, not just a national agenda-I am convinced that we can do it, for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is the Churchillian argument about democracy: that we’re the worst possible leader, but we’re better than all the others. I don’t see any other nations that can do this, and I think many nations in the world want leadership. I’m living in China this year, and the Chinese basically say, “We need you to be leading,” at least for the next 20 years. After that, we’ll see. So I think that’s very important.

I’m also optimistic because the United States better represents the peoples of the world than any other nation. If we look at our own changing demographic face, I see a population that will be deeply connected to other countries in the world by blood and by continued travel. And I’m optimistic because I believe, in the end, that there are enough Americans who are plenty self-interested, but who also can’t bear to see us so betray the things we say we stand for.

Reprinted from Greater Good magazine, Volume IV, Issue 3 (Winter 2007-08). For more information, please visit www.greatergoodmag.org.

Jason Marsh is a co-editor of Greater Good Magazine.

via//AlterNet

Palestine in the Mind of America

Talking to a Wall

Palestine in the Mind of America

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

You would think that showing maps clearly delineating the truncated, obviously non-viable area available for a possible Palestinian state and showing pictures that define Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories would have some kind of impact on an audience of astute but, on this issue, generally uninformed Americans. We recently spoke to a small foreign affairs discussion group and devoted much of our presentation to these images of oppression — images that never appear in the U.S. media — in the probably naïve hope of making some kind of dent in the impassive American attitude toward Israel’s 40-year occupation of Palestinian territory.

But our expectations that these people would listen and perhaps learn something were sadly misplaced. Few among the elite seminar-style discussion group seemed concerned about, or even particularly interested in, what is happening on the ground in Palestine-Israel, and the event stands as starkly emblematic of American apathy about the oppressive Israeli regime in the occupied territories that the United States is enabling and in many instances actively encouraging.

The maps that we displayed of the West Bank, prepared by the UN and by Israeli human rights groups, clearly depicted the segmented, disconnected scatter of territorial pieces that would make up the Palestinian state even in the most optimistic of scenarios — Palestinian areas broken up by the separation wall cutting deep into the West Bank; by large Israeli settlements scattered throughout and taking up something like 10 percent of the territory; by the network of roads connecting the settlements, all accessible only to Israeli drivers; and by the Jordan Valley, currently barred to any Palestinian not already living there, making up fully one-quarter of the West Bank, and ultimately destined for annexation by Israel.

The maps make it clear that even the most generous Israeli plan would leave a Palestinian state with only 50-60 percent of the West Bank (constituting 11-12 percent of original Palestine), broken into multiple separated segments and including no part of Jerusalem. The photographs, taken during our several trips to Palestine in recent years, depicted the separation wall, checkpoints and terminals in the wall resembling cages, Palestinian homes demolished and official buildings destroyed, vast Israeli settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land, destroyed Palestinian olive groves, commerce in Palestinian cities shut down because of marauding Israeli settlers or soldiers.

We have shown maps and pictures like these myriad times before, but have never been received with quite such disinterest. Here was a group of mostly retired U.S. government officials, academics, journalists, and business executives, as well as a few still-working professionals — all ranging in political orientation from center right to center left, the cream of informed, educated America, the exemplar of elite mainstream opinion in the United States. Their lack of concern about what Israel and, because of its enabling role, the U.S. are doing to destroy an entire people and their national aspirations could not have been more evident.

The first person to comment when our presentation concluded, identifying herself as Jewish, said she had “never heard a more one-sided presentation” and labeled us “beyond anti-Semitic” — which presumably is somewhat worse than plain-and-simple anti-Semitic. This is always a somewhat upsetting charge, although it is so common and so expected as to be of little note anymore. What was more noteworthy was the reaction, or lack of it, among the rest of the assembled, who never disputed her charge but spent most of the discussion period either disputing our presentation or trying to find ways to accommodate “Jewish pain.”

Our brief conversation with this woman progressed in an interesting fashion. We tried to engage her in a discussion about what exactly was one-sided in our depiction of the situation on the ground and what she would have liked to see to make it “two-sided.” She did not answer but indicated that she thought whatever Israel did must be justified by Palestinian actions. “Someone had to have started it,” she said. We laid out a little history for her, noting that the first action, the “who-started-it” part, could be traced back to Britain’s Balfour Declaration pledge in 1917 to promote the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, at a time when Jews made up no more than 10 percent of the population of Palestine. Then we came up to the 1947 UN partition resolution, which allotted 55 percent of Palestine for a Jewish state at a time when Jews owned only seven percent of the land and made up slightly less than one-third of the population.

Her answer was, “Well, but it wasn’t Jews who did this.” We disabused her of this and briefly detailed the deliberate Zionist program of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian population conducted during 1947-48 war, as described by several Israeli historians, including particularly Ilan Pappe, whose The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is based on Israeli military archives. Her eyes actually began to bulge, but she held her tongue. Apparently deciding that she had no way of refuting these facts, she finally decided that going back in history was of no utility — a common Zionist dodge — and that Israel had not been established in any case to be a democracy but was a haven for persecuted Jews and as such has every right to organize itself in any way it sees fit. The moderator finally called on others who wanted to speak, and the discussion moved on.

But not very far. The talk now circled, for over an hour, around what passed for profound discussion: around someone’s curious remarks about Zeitgeist, someone else’s equally curious insistence that there was “something out there that no one would talk about” that was influencing the situation, a few remarks about Palestinians as terrorists and how even if Israel made peace with the Palestinians Hamas would still try to destroy it, a lot of talk about how to accommodate Jewish pain and, taking off from this, a psychologist’s attempt to draw an analogy between Jews who live in fear of persecution and the rape victims she counsels who live in constant fear that they will be raped again or worse.

A few people did ask interested questions about the situation on the ground and about various aspects of Israeli policy. After the discussion had centered for quite a while on Jewish pain, one person pointed out that Palestinians too feel pain and live in fear, but no one else picked up on this. No one challenged the first speaker’s personal charge of anti-Semitism against us, and in the end there was almost no mention of the destructive Israeli practices that had been the subject of our presentation.

We had occasion to email several of the participants the next day. In one message, we lodged a mild complaint with the three group organizers about the fact that the charge of anti-Semitism was allowed not only to stand but to set the tone for much of the discussion, with no refutation of the substance of the charge by anyone except us. In another message, sent to a man who had expressed puzzlement over why the Jewish vote was thought to be important in U.S. elections, we forwarded without comment an article from Mother Jones about Barack Obama’s difficulties with the Jewish community and his concerted effort to demonstrate his bona fides by pledging fealty to Israel and justifying Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Finally, to the psychologist, we wrote a comment on her analogy between Jews and rape victims, observing that as a psychologist she undoubtedly did not encourage her rape victim clients to perpetuate their fear or adopt an aggressive attitude toward other people, but most likely gave them tools to help them regain trust and move beyond fears for their personal safety. This kind of restorative therapy for Jews has never been employed, we noted, but on the contrary Israeli leaders and American Jewish leaders have encouraged Jewish fears, along with an aggressive, militaristic Israeli policy toward its neighbors.

These were all gratuitous overtures by us, but they were not inappropriate or uncivil. Yet not one of these people saw fit to answer our missives or even acknowledge their receipt — indicating, we can only assume, the general level of unconcern among Americans about the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, including the siege and starvation imposed on Gazans. Then, too, the lack of response probably reflects feelings on the part of most attendees that we are somehow responsible for having involved them in a discussion that turned out to be fairly unpleasant for them.

Why is this interesting to anyone but us? Because this in-depth discussion with a small but representative group of intelligent, thinking Americans is indicative of a broad range of U.S. public opinion on foreign policy issues, and their level of disinterest in the consequences of U.S. policies is quite disturbing. The self-absorption evident during this meeting, the general “don’t-rock-the-boat” posture, the overwhelming lack of concern for the victims of Israeli and U.S. power amount to a license to kill for the U.S. and its allies. The same unconcern allowed the United States to get away with killing millions of Vietnamese decades ago; it gives license to mass U.S. killing in Iraq and Afghanistan; it is the reason Democrats still, after seven years of Bush administration torture and killing around the world, cannot fully separate themselves from Republican militarism. It gives Israel license to kill and ethnically cleanse the entire nation of Palestine.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence officer and as director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

They can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.

via//CounterPunch

Cuban: Why Yahoo should say yes to Microsoft

Cuban: If it’s really about the customer, Yahoo has no other option

By Mark Cuban

One thing about Jerry Yang that I always have admired is that he cares. He cares about his employees. He cares about his products. He cares about his shareholders. Most of all, he cares about building a world-class company that can be great at what it does.

If you look at Yahoo singularly, it is a great company. For Yang and David Filo to build a company with more than $6 billion in sales and more than $25 billion in market cap is an astounding feat. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it has had to weather both the Internet bubble bursting and the emergence of Google as a force in search and online advertising.

These are both issues because Wall Street has made them issues. The bubble speaks for itself. Google is a Wall Street issue for Yahoo because Wall Street wants Yahoo to keep up with the Googles.

That’s a problem for Jerry. Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock competition.

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to Microsoft.

If there is one thing Microsoft does well, it’s to ignore Wall Street and invest in its corporate strategies. It has so many huge lines of business that Wall Street has learned to just let those that need to germinate do so. Xbox. MSN. Online. Microsoft gets more leash from Wall Street to develop businesses than any company on the planet.

So the question isn’t whether Yahoo should sell. It should. The only question is what the structure of the deal should look like so that Jerry and David can achieve many of the goals they set out to accomplish on the Internet under the Microsoft umbrella. Jerry definitely is about customers first. This is his chance to show it. This deal accelerates his opportunity to get customers where he wants to take them if he negotiates it right. Something I didn’t think would be that hard. There is too much upside for Microsoft to nit-pick the non-financial deal points.

What about Google?

Google also is a company that wants to put its strategic goals ahead of what Wall Street wants. When the stock is trending up, that’s easy to do. If we are in the middle of a market correction of any severity at all, then Google could get hit with its own Wall Street “double whammy.”

First the downward pressure on its stock price. After several days of seeing the stock down $50 during the trading day, Google is feeling exactly what Yahoo felt when the bubble burst. That queasy sense of fear around the company. The questioning of what could possibly happen to the stock, the impact on employee options and the inevitable questioning of Google traditions. Ten to 20 percent of your time on other projects? Not when the stock price is down $200 in the past three months. Again.

The second whammy would happen if Yahoo was no longer a stand-alone stock. Even if the Google stock price suffered, there was always the comfort of outperforming Yahoo. Wall Street, employees, small stock owners always had the Yahoo stock comparison to give it confidence. If it’s not there, all the eyes are staring right at Google evaluating and questioning every number and corporate action.

It’s a level of scrutiny and pressure that can and will change the corporate culture of any company going through a maturation phase.

So Yahoo should say yes. Its less about the money than about finally achieving the corporate goals set out more than a decade ago.

One time Jerry told me that Yahoo stood for You Always Have Other Options. This time, Yahoo doesn’t. But their customers’ options could improve exponentially if Yahoo says yes.

Mark Cuban is owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and chairman of HDNet, a television network.

via//MSNBC

related//Information Week: Microsoft ‘moving forward’ With Yahoo Bid Despite Rejection

Why I Support Ron Paul

by Heath Calvert

I’d been walking around sharing the phrase “fire it up” for about three weeks, borrowing glittery talking points about the exciting race between the first possible female and the first possible African-American president, but I still felt like I didn’t understand what changes these candidates were positing other than a replacement nameplate on the oval office desk. If you’d told me at the start of this presidential primary that I’d take off work and roadtrip to New Hampshire and South Carolina for the campaign of a pro-life republican from Texas, I’d have probably jump kicked you in the chest. In his defense, he’s from Pittsburgh.

Who is this man, and how did I find him since you can’t find him anywhere in television or print? I was sweeping my bedroom passively watching the Republican debates, when, somewhere between Romney’s “I’d double the size of Guantanamo” and Guiliani’s 37th invocation of 9-11, a soft spoken man you’d only know from C-SPAN2 started talking about the Constitution. He continued stating that we had armed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, that we’ve been bombing Iraq since the end of the 1st Persian Gulf War, to remember that the CIA had overthrown Iran in the fifties, and that if we had followed the aforementioned Constitution perhaps we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves into so much “mischief.” I blurted out something that sounded like “wrudafuk.” What presidential candidate uses CIA and the word “mischief” in the same sentence? Then he offers to give Rudy Guiliani a reading list, and “blowback” becomes a familiar word to a lot more people than those who read Chalmers Johnson or the latest National Intelligence Estimates. I become a fan of Dr. Ron Paul.

I began internet researching in my obsessive fashion and eventually discovered some Ron Paul videos on YouTube from rallies around the country. He talked about things like eliminating the IRS, our history of meddling in foreign governments, dissolving the Federal Reserve, ending the war on drugs, and pardoning all non-violent drug offenders. I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither does America.

Ron Paul is a paradox. He is a ten-term Texas congressman who voted against the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the Real ID Act, internet regulation, those acts last year that stripped Habeas Corpus and Posse Commitatis, plus this week’s Democrat sponsored Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (a precursor to internet filtering and University monitoring by the Department of Homeland Security). Democrats shutdown when they see the letter “R” next to the word Texas, and Republicans can’t say “he’s not a republican” enough. He will quickly remind you that Republicans used to be the antiwar party, and in fact George Bush had been elected on a promise to stop policing the world. Republicans used to be the party of small government, fiscal responsibility, and sound money. Now sound money isn’t a sexy topic, but those listening to Ron Paul are starting to wake up to the gravity of what threats can be brought by a steeply declining currency, ballooning debt, excessive militarism combined with over extension, and a government that seems more interested in collecting data on it’s own citizenry and protecting corporate marketshare than preventing future attacks.

We can fundamentally change our idea of what our government should be, and return to constitutional principles. Ron Paul’s position is that the government shouldn’t coddle us from cradle to grave. Central bankers like the Federal Reserve, which isn’t part of the federal government, shouldn’t have the power to manipulate the worth of our currency and thus our way of life. His position is that we shouldn’t police the world or unconstitutionally interfere through bureaucracies like the CIA. Only Congress has the power to declare war. Plus, we can’t afford it anyway. We don’t need the IRS harassing American citizens and taking our hard earned money and sending it out for destinations unknown. In fact, let’s eliminate it. We’ll pay for it by bringing home our soldiers from around the world, saving over a trillion dollars. While you’re giving us our taxed dollars back, we’d also like you to return those civil liberties you’ve been whittling away at so you can give lucrative contracts to the homeland security/military industrial sector company you’re going to quit the government to start, run, or lobby for.

Much is said about the national constituency of Ron Paul, more often than not describing them as “young 9-11 truthers,” or “hillbilly Libertarian whackos,” but the campaign that Ron Paul has built is a revolution, and it is growing. Ron Paul, despite being ignored by mainstream press, trounced republican opponents with over 18 million in grassroots fundraising last quarter alone. Rudy Guiliani could drop out after coming in third in Florida. Mike Huckabee doesn’t have the funds to finish. John McCain, despite a voting record similar to Clinton, will most likely lead the delegate count with Romney trailing close behind. What will be the interesting story is Ron Paul staying in the race (he leads in fundraising, he also leads in contributions from active military personnel), bringing a significant enough number of delegates to the convention to possibly decide who becomes nominee. After canvassing in New Hampshire and South Carolina, I’ll tell you that most people are undecided and will vote for whomever the tv tells them to. Ask Ron Paul supporters and they’ll tell you that Ron Paul’s success may not be seen by him gaining the most votes in this election, but his ability to positively influence the Republican party’s platform now and in the future.

Doctor Paul is indeed curing apathy. In fact, listening to him speak, at times, can be like receiving a medical diagnosis. I had never been active in the political process. Nor had most the people I’d met for that matter. They were all just curious to hear this man with so many seemingly common sense ideas that the establishment branded radical. What’s so radical about our Constitution? The Constitution was written to restrict the government, not the people. Give me a choice between three lawyers and an ex-Air Force flight surgeon that’s delivered four thousand babies. I’ll take the doctor anyday.

via//Huffington Post

Obama’s not a Muslim, but why should it matter?

Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

We know this because he has told us so.

We know it because there is no credible evidence to suggest otherwise.

We know it despite a campaign of lies and whispers from various bloggers, pundits and head cases.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim. But, what if he were?

Same guy, same charisma, same inspirational idealism. But also, a Muslim. Not a crazy Muslim. Not a guy prone to strapping bombs to his chest in hopes of meeting virgins in heaven. A Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-type Muslim. A Dave Chappelle, Ahmad Rashad, Shaquille O’Neal-type Muslim. A guy you like and admire who just happened to be, you know … Muslim.

Would it matter? Should it?

The question bears answering because of the creepy, are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been attitude toward Islam that seems to be seeping into the public dialogue lately. As in that campaign of lies and whispers that keeps showing up in my inbox — claims that Obama won’t salute the flag, took his oath of office on a Quran, belongs to a terror cell and other assorted idiocy.

NBC News anchor Brian Williams has apparently been getting the same e-mails. In moderating a recent Democratic debate, he asked Obama about rumors “that you are trying to hide the fact that you’re a Muslim … “

The senator laughed a heard-that-a-few-times-before laugh. Then he replied that he is a Christian, that he is a victim of Internet rumor, and that he trusts the American people to “sort out the lies from the truth.”

What bothered me is that, by its phrasing, Williams’ question presupposed there is something wrong with being a Muslim. And Obama’s answer left the presupposition unaddressed.

What if he were a Muslim? What then?

A 2007 Pew Research Center survey found that 43 percent of us have a favorable opinion of Muslims (make it Muslim Americans and the number rises to 53 percent). Which may sound not so bad, except when you compare it with favorable ratings of other religious groups. Jews, for instance, are at 76 percent. Even evangelical Christians manage 60. And that ranking for Muslims represents a 5-point drop since 2004.

It’s no mystery why the nation’s opinion of Muslims is becoming less favorable. In a word, terrorism. And, frankly, Americans are right to fear Muslim fanatics who embrace violence as a means of getting what they want.

But see, the key word there is not Muslim. It’s fanatic. Yet some of us still think Muslim is the brand name for crazy. Me, I think the only difference between religious fanatics here and in the Middle East is that Middle Eastern nations tend to be theocratic (i.e., the word of the holy book has the force of law) and to be intolerant — sometimes, violently so — of dissent. So no one dares tell them no.

But if Pat Robertson, to name an American Christian fanatic not quite at random, had the force of law behind him and the ability to silence those who disagree, don’t you think he would be as scary as the scariest ayatollah in Iran?

I do. That’s why I would never want him to be president. Which is not quite the same as saying I’d never want a Christian to be president. I just prefer my presidents — regardless of their religion — reasonable. And sane. That seems a fair standard.

Yet it’s a standard some of us now discard. The ongoing whisper campaign against Barack Obama, against his very American-ness, is a shameful appeal to ignorance and fear. Against that, I offer a simple statement the world’s most famous and well-loved follower of Islam made just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I am a Muslim,” said Muhammad Ali. “I am an American.”

That says it all. Or at least, it should.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.’s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

via//Seattle Times

Would a world without Islam be peaceful?

Up until World War II most of the Third World and all the Muslim lands were colonized by the then superpowers of the west. These colonizing nations not only dominated the resources, labor and markets of the colonial territory, they also imposed socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population claiming that these aggressive nations had superior morals and values than those of the colonized, but also demonized the indigenous cultures.After WWII, the colonies were granted political independence but not only they are still economically dominated but are also politically controlled through hand picked thugs and dictators who are ruling those unfortunate nations.

These days specially post 9/11 Islam is constantly being demonized and blamed for all the ills of the world. In an essay in the January 2008 edition of Foreign Policy, entitled: “A World Without Islam” Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting and currently a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), poses a question “is Islam the source of the problem or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors?”

“What if Islam had never arisen in the Middle East? What if there had never been a Prophet Mohammed? Would there still be violent clashes between the West and that part of the world?” asks Fuller

And then Fuller ponders a litany of history’s major battles and events to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient scapegoat, but global strife, past and present, can’t be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades albeit under a different banner.

After all, what were the Crusades if not a Western adventure driven primarily by political, social, and economic needs? The banner of Christianity was little more than a potent symbol, a rallying cry to bless the more secular urges of powerful Europeans. In fact, the particular religion of the natives never figured highly in the West’s imperial push across the globe. Europe may have spoken upliftingly about bringing “Christian values to the natives,” but the patent goal was to establish colonial outposts as sources of wealth for the metropole and bases for Western power projection.”

And so it’s unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns, he says adding that Imperialism would have prospered in the region’s complex ethnic mosaic – the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule. And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs. We doublespeak about promoting democracy in the Middle East as we back autocratic, despotic and undemocratic client regimes there.

On the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he says that it would not have been welcome by Iraqis even if they were Christian.

On blaming Islam for current violence and terrorism, Fuller echoes Robert Pape’s argument about the strategic, social and personal motivations work together to encourage suicide terrorism. Pape, in his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” argues that nationalism and religious difference between the rebels and a dominant democratic state are the main conditions under which the “alien” occupation of a community’s homeland is likely to lead to a campaign of suicide terrorism. He finds that religion plays a smaller part than thought.

Fuller reminds that the West’s memories are short when it focuses on terrorism in the name of Islam.

He recalls: “Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil ‘Tigers’ invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings – including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.”

Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada , and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I. Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American “anarchists,” sowing collective fear.

The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya – the list goes on. It doesn’t take a Muslim to commit terrorism.

Fuller points out that even the recent history of terrorist activity doesn’t look much different.

“According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in 2006,” Fuller writes. “Of these, 424 were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only one was carried out by Islamists.”

He also reminds us that virtually every one of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their “world wars” twice upon the rest of the world-two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.

Some today might wish for a “world without Islam” in which these problems presumably had never come to be. But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises of such a world might not look so vastly different than the ones we know today, Fuller concludes.

In short, Fuller has done a great job in spelling out the real root of the contemporary problems which lie in imperialism/colonialism, more than religion, although certainly religion is a part. His paradigm repudiates biased pundits and neoconservatives who condemn Islam as the root of all conflict.”

- Khalid Saeed is a resident of Woodland and currently national President of “American Muslim Voice.”

via//Daily Democrat

An Untimely Death

Heath Ledger refused to take the pretty boy’s path to Hollywood success

The first time I talked to Heath Ledger was in the summer of 2002, and he dropped the F-word so many times I wasn’t sure if I could publish a word of the interview. “I couldn’t care f­­­—ing less about money,” he said. “I never had it before in my life.” He didn’t care about auditions either. “I hate them,” he said. “It just f­­­—ing sucks.” What about the critics? “I generally don’t give a s–t what people think, particularly about the movie,” he said. “I’ve seen it. I like it.” He was referring to Shekhar Kapur’s “Four Feathers,” a movie that—for the record—no one else liked much. But Heath Ledger, 23 at the time, was making one thing clear: he wasn’t going to play the role of the pouty heartthrob. He was a renegade Australian actor, wanting to be taken seriously, trying to find his own way in Hollywood. The last time I interviewed him on the phone, in February 2007, he seemed to be on better ground. He was sweet and amiable, standing on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles where Michelle Williams, his partner at the time, had just dropped him off so he could meet with a friend. Wasn’t he getting mobbed by the paparazzi? “That’s the funny thing,” he said. “If you stand in the middle of the street, no one looks twice at you. I kind of walk through life with that kind of attitude. A hat doesn’t hurt. But I only wear a hat if it’s sunny.”

Ledger was found dead today in a Manhattan apartment. He was 28. While the cause of his death is not yet known—authorities said it might be drug-related—he will now almost certainly become a sort of James Dean for his generation. Ledger made his first impression on Hollywood in the 1999 teen comedy “10 Things I Hate About You,” based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and by the summer of 2000, with Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” he was as OMG! swoon-worthy as Justin Timberlake or Leonardo DiCaprio. But rather than mount his career around his good looks, he went in the opposite direction, uglying himself up in the independent films “Monster’s Ball” (2001)—in which his character killed himself—and “Lords of Dogtown” (2005). That was also the year of his best performance, as Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain,” a movie that earned him an Oscar nomination as a tragically closeted gay cowboy in love with Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist. The movie’s elegiac ending, where Ennis hugs the shirt of his dead lover, will now take on an even more bittersweet aftertaste.

Ledger met Williams, the mother of his two-year-old daughter Matilda, on the set of “Brokeback,” and for a time he seemed to be less restless. “She’s a great mom,” he said to me last year. “As a dad, I’ve been trying to work as little as possible to devote myself to Michelle and Matilda. All you can do is give your child an infinite amount of love and space and creativity and defend her from pains and keep her fearless.” He said he would wake up every morning between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., depending on when their daughter started crying, where the two lived in Brooklyn. “We make coffee or walk to our local coffee shop and drink with our parents and friends on the block,” he said. “It’s the usual stuff, very simple things. If we need laundry, we pay the laundromat. If the house needs food, I go get groceries. At the end of the day we put her down and it’s mom or dad time. We’ll watch a movie or go and have a date.”

But Ledger and Williams split in September, while they were both preparing to do press for their second film together, the Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There.” Ledger’s final completed film role is in “The Dark Knight,” which will be released this summer, in which he plays the most demonic version of the Joker yet, which may not be easy to watch in the wake of his death. “I’ve been bouncing around like a lunatic for the last four months,” he said when we last talked. “It’s a little premature to say how different it’s going to be, because it’s still churning. I tend not to commit myself 100 percent to one mold until I’m in makeup and I’ve been lit. But I definitely have a different take on him.” Then he had to go. “Sorry, I got distracted. Can you hold on a second?” he said. “My friend is calling me”—the two were collaborating on a newly formed music label together. But Ledger himself didn’t have any musical aspirations. “My singing is strictly restricted to the showers, the bathroom and to my ears only, thank God.”

via//Newsweek