Hiatus

Over the past few months I have been trying to juggle the responsibilities of maintaining a current affairs blog and of writing a book length doctoral thesis. As a result I have not done justice to either (I haven’t even managed to cover the developments in Kashmir, for example). I persisted out of a sense of responsibility. But with deadlines approaching and funding running out the demands of finishing the doctorate takes precedence. Although I had hoped with new contributors the blog would continue, but the way it has worked out I am still having to do as much as I was before. Not all have the same priorities, and maintaining a blog takes a lot of commitment and time. At present, unfortunately, I just don’t have enough of the latter (and I’ll spare you the more mundane reasons). So after today I won’t be updating this blog until at least October (unless it is something particularly pressing) when my friend Ann and I launch our new media project.

For some time Ann and I have been contemplating a joint project that we hope to replace our respective blogs with. It will more than a mere political website; we are hoping to establish an important media platform that not only offers a more substantive alternative to the mainstream, but also holds MSM’s feet to the fire. Ann is someone with an ever higher degree of energy and commitment than myself and she is gifted with a fiercely logical mind and an infectious sense of humor. The prospect of collaborating with her is immensely exciting.

Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?

October comes early? Sen. John McCain and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Let me also point out that this fellow Michael Klare is a third rate hack who has been peddling the oleaginous counterpart to the millenium bug for some years. It is contra-analytical, factually challenged, monocausal analysis like this that has reduced the left to its present irrelevance. Here is Robert Scheer on the neoconservative connection, the kind of details that the ‘left’ would much rather turn a blind eye on, but even he shies away from mentioning the Israel connection.

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

‘Pro-Palestinian’ George Advises Obama

Don’t write off Hollywood just yet. ‘How Clooney offers good friend Obama advice on issues from body language to Iraq,’ report Caroline Graham and Sharon Churcher.

George Clooney once famously declared he could never run for public office because he’d ‘slept with too many women, done too many drugs and been to too many parties’.

But now the Hollywood heart-throb has entered the political arena at
the highest level – by becoming an unofficial adviser to US Presidential front-runner Barack Obama.

Oscar-winner Clooney, 47, is said to be helping the Democratic candidate to polish his image at home and abroad.

But he is also sharing with Obama his strong opinions on Iraq and the Middle East.

America’s Israeli-Occupied Media

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi on US media’s platform for Israeli warmongering.

There should be little doubt that the Israeli government is making every effort to jump-start a war against Iran sooner rather than later. Many Israelis not surprisingly believe it is in their interest to convince the United States to attack Iran so that Israel will not have to do it, and they are hell-bent on bringing that about. Unfortunately, their efforts are being aided and abetted by a U.S. mainstream media that is unwilling to ask any hard questions or challenge the assumptions of the Israeli government.

Israeli intellectuals such as Benny Morris have been provided a platform to argue implausibly that a little war is necessary right now to prevent a larger nuclear conflict. The repeated visits to Washington by Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi to pressure Washington to commit to a military option are generally unreported in the U.S. media, and no one is asking why the United States should be involved in what is clearly a “wag the dog” scenario.

Tel Aviv to Tbilisi

Israelis wave both Georgian and Israeli flags as they chant anti-Russian slogans during a demonstration outside the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv, 11 August. (Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)

Ali Abunimah ofThe Electronic Intifada on Israel’s role in the Russia-Georgia war

From the moment Georgia launched a surprise attack on the tiny breakaway region of South Ossetia last week, prompting a fierce Russian counterattack, Israel has been trying to distance itself from the conflict. This is understandable: with Georgian forces on the retreat, large numbers of civilians killed and injured, and Russia’s fury unabated, Israel’s deep involvement is severely embarrassing.

The collapse of the Georgian offensive represents not only a disaster for that country and its US-backed leaders, but another blow to the myth of Israel’s military prestige and prowess. Worse, Israel fears that Russia could retaliate by stepping up its military assistance to Israel’s adversaries including Iran.

“Israel is following with great concern the developments in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and hopes the violence will end,” its foreign ministry said, adding with uncharacteristic doveishness, “Israel recognizes the territorial integrity of Georgia and calls for a peaceful solution.”

Avoid cliché like the plague? Never

‘We are all guilty’, writes Robert Fisk. ‘To my distress, I find that I thrice used the word ‘iconic’ in my book. Ye Gods!’

Opposite my apartment in Beirut there used to live an American-born English teacher called Marion Lanson. When she departed Lebanon, I inherited her 1949 Random House American College Dictionary, edited by one Clarence L Barnhart “with the Assistance of 355 Authorities and Specialists”. I like “authorities” and “specialists” very much because we have largely abandoned such words.

I was keen to look up Mr Barnhart’s definition of that plague of modern journalism, the cliché. “A trite, stereotyped expression, idea, practice, etc, as ’sadder but wiser’, ’strong as an ox’.” Alas, I fear these are imaginative expressions compared with the stuff we now consume. Mr. Barnhart’s German translation of cliché – “klitsch” or “doughy mass” – seems more appropriate for the assaults on literacy that we commit today.

All this came to mind when I learned this week of the coup in Mauretania, where the army took power after President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi unwisely tried to fire some of his senior officers. Would tanks “roll” into the capital, I asked myself? Tanks always “roll”, don’t they? I have never actually seen a tank perform this extraordinary act but, clichés being what they are, my eye sped down the Mauretania story for my friendly “roll”. And sure enough – perhaps because Mauretania doesn’t have a lot of tanks – there it was. The president, said the agency report, “was arrested after military convoys rolled through the capital Nouakchott”.

George vs the Smearmongers

This report by some tool named Michael Savage is interesting in so far as it turns the victim of a vicious smear into the victimiser. Poor character assassins — what would they do if they weren’t accorded the privilege of smearing?

London’s only Jewish community radio station has been forced to cease broadcasting after losing a High Court libel case brought against it by the Respect MP George Galloway.

Jcom, a non-profit station which broadcast online and to a small area in north-west London, was wound up after it was told to pay the MP damages of £15,000.

Mr Galloway sued the station after one of its presenters played a spoof character based on the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and implied he was anti-Semitic. It was also ordered to pay Mr Galloway’s court costs, thought to be £5,000. Mr Galloway said that the judgment had “categorically crushed the slur of anti-Semitism”.

The laureate of all Arabs

‘Mahmoud Darwish is dead, but the voice of the Palestinian resistance will live on in all of us ‘, writes Ahdaf Soueif.

None of us really thought he’d die. Our loss is great, we tell each other. In our minds we think of Edward Said, of Haider Abdel-Shafi, of Faisal Husseini, and even - yes - of Yasser Arafat. The “big men” of Palestine. And now, Mahmoud Darwish.

He was seven when - in the Nakba of 1948 - he fled from Birweh, his village in the Galilee. At the age of 12, living in Deir el-Asad, in what had become Israel, with a reputation as a precocious child poet, he was asked to compose a poem for a public reading. The occasion was the celebration of Israel’s “Independence Day” and the poem he read described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed, tilling his father’s lands. He was summoned to the military governor who told him that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. That incident set the tone, I think, for Darwish’s life.

The American Military Crisis

Andrew Bacevich on Democracy Now:



Despite a few flaws, I found Andrew Bacevich’s last book, The New American Militarism, an extremely well argued, and for a non-fiction book on a rather bleak subject, equally well written. He has just come out with another. I can’t wait to read, but for now, here are some tasters. Here is the first in a two part series adapted from the book for Tom Engelhart’s indispensable TomDispatch.

Illusions of Victory

How the United States Did Not Reinvent War… But Thought It Did
By Andrew Bacevich “War is the great auditor of institutions,” the historian Corelli Barnett once observed. Since 9/11, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. That adverse judgment applies in full to America’s armed forces.

Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.

Two of those fronts — Afghanistan and Iraq — commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America’s military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.

Cold War returns via Georgia

For some time the US has been priming Georgia for a provocative confrontation with Russia. Israeli and US military ‘advisers’ have been training and equipping the Georgian military. The US has been trying to bring it into NATO. Its military expenditures have shot through the roof. It is also the route for the long-in-planning Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. All in all, a useful foothold for the US in the Russian sphere of influence. And then strikes disaster.

Through a miscalculation worthy of Saddam Hussein, Georgia sends troops into the breakaway South Ossetia to reclaim territory. The Russians, who have been waiting for an excuse to dampen Georgian ambitions, send the still formidable remains of the old red army marching in with characteristic brutality. Georgians beat a hasty retreat, and now have Russian tanks advancing on their own territory. Now, Col (ret.) Sam Gardiner reports, tactical nukes have been thrown into the equation. All in all, a situation more explosive than the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gardiner argues.

Besides Gardiner’s report, here are a couple of useful commentaries to bring you up to speed. First is Laura Rozen’s interview with former CIA station chief Milt Bearden:

In Escalating Russian-Georgian Conflict, the Cold War is Back

As Russia stepped up attacks against Georgian moves to reassert control over the breakaway pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, and many civilians were reported killed and thousands displaced, I asked former deputy director of the CIA’s Soviet and East Europe division Milt Bearden why Russia and Georgia had chosen to escalate their long simmering dispute over South Ossetia now.

“As far as Russia goes, it’s easy: They’re baaack!” Bearden said. “And the Russians are doing what comes naturally to them in their new mood. They know the Europeans don’t want a face-off with Russia/Gazprom. They know the U.S. is so preoccupied with its own self inflicted disasters that it can do nothing but wring it hands. So why not now? It also would seem to stop NATO enlargement in its tracks. Just imagine Georgia inside NATO, and protected under Article 5!!”