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Jerome Corsi: How a Racist, Conspiratorial Crank Became a Top GOP Anti-Obama Point Man

August 23, 2008

By Max Blumenthal, The Nation. Posted August 23, 2008.

Corsi’s success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight.

These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers — and millions on radio and TV — just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Corsi told the New York Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Corsi’s success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight. During George W. Bush’s first term, Corsi was a little-known financial services marketing specialist. In 1995, according to the Boston Globe, he coaxed twenty people into a shadowy investment venture in Poland that ultimately lost them a total of $1.2 million. “It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people,” said Bradley Amundson, one of those enlisted into Corsi’s bungled scheme. The FBI opened an investigation but never filed any charges.

Corsi had dabbled off-and-on the fringes of conservative backlash politics for nearly three decades. In his spare time, which he appeared to have lots of, Corsi busied himself at his computer, firing off opinions on the far-right website Free Republic, marked by their sexual and racial obsessions.

In a comment typical of the dozens he posted under the handle “jrlc,” Corsi wrote, “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” In another, he ranted, “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA — oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters — it all goes together.”

Then he composed Unfit For Command, suddenly vaulting into best-sellerdom. Surrounded by the media buzz of talk radio and Fox News, Corsi no longer plied the seamy troll-zones of the right-wing blogosphere. Overnight, he had become a conservative folk hero. But as Bush’s popularity waned during his second term, Corsi’s star dimmed. He tried to reignite it by co-authoring a book with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, calling on the United States and Israel to attack Iran “before it’s too late,” and another, Black Gold Stranglehold, claiming to expose the Big Lie that will “enslave” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Corsi’s conspiracy theories consolidated his cult status, but he did not revive the brightness of his Swiftboating campaign. As another presidential election approached, however, Corsi followed his well-trod path back to renown.

In early 2007, Corsi huddled with an old friend, Howard Phillips, a veteran conservative operative who had attempted to organize the anti-government militia movement into a cohesive political bloc during the 1990s. Corsi emerged from their discussion convinced of his destiny. He would declare his campaign for the presidential nomination of the ultra-right Constitution Party, enthusiastically embrace the party’s call for a complete halt on immigration, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and upholding its official platform that the “U.S. Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than a democracy.” With this momentous announcement, Corsi hoped to cast himself as the last, best hope to save America from the godless, globalist duocracy conspiring to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada into a “North American Union.” (His latest flop, published in 2007, was a screed entitled, The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.)

In July 2007, Corsi spoke before the Texas Constitution Party. At the time, he remained focused on foiling the ambitions of Hillary and Bill Clinton. “I don’t want Bill Clinton anywhere near the White House,” Corsi proclaimed. “We had enough serial rape going on when he was president.” But Corsi didn’t want a Republican in the White House either, especially not Senator John McCain. The war-scarred McCain, Corsi wrote in a column for the far-right webzine WorldNetDaily, is a possible jihadist dupe who “has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs … a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda.” Even George W. Bush was now treasonous. “Bush,” he told the Texas Constitution Party, “is post-America and post-God,” a figure so indebted to foreign interests that he had allowed “communist China” to “run its gunboats up the Mississippi.” In Corsi’s mind, both parties were fronts for the money-masters, the Trilateralists, the plotters of Bohemian Grove — the “elitists who want to destroy the nation-state.”

Continued . . .

See also: A Book Written to Defeat Obama

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Foreign contractors stoking Iraqi violence

August 23, 2008

BAGHDAD, Aug. 22 (UPI) — An Iraqi defense official said Friday security contractors employed by Western nations are recruiting foreign fighters to Iraq, boosting the level of violence.Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari blamed foreign fighters employed by unnamed security firms under contract with U.S.-led forces for a spate of attacks recently, Iraqi daily Azzaman said.

“These people’s access to Europe is facilitated by these firms. Once trained to carry out special violent actions, they are sent to Iraq to execute their plans,” he said.

Without mentioning specific firms, the spokesman suggested many had recruited fighters from North Africa to conduct operations in Iraq.

By his estimate, there are around 2,000 foreign fighters in Iraq. He said some are working for Western security firms, while others are al-Qaida mercenaries.

Askari said his information comes from interrogations of foreign detainees who admitted to training in Europe under the guidance of the security firms.

They were trained, he says, “to kill Iraqis and cause further insecurity.”

© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

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At Least 20 Afghan Civilians Killed in US Air Raid

August 22, 2008

Antiwar.com | August 21, 2008

Early Thursday, the United States reported having killed 30 insurgents in an attack in the Afghan province of Laghman. While it was unclear if the attack was directly related to the killing of 10 French soldiers earlier this week in a nearby ambush, top coalition spokeswoman Lt. Col. Nielson-Green claimed to be certain that they were ‘at a minimum complicit’, though she also insisted that it ‘doesn’t matter if they were or weren’t involved’.

The official story was thrown into disarray, however, when provincial officials began reporting that many of those killed in the air strikes were civilians. While the US denied any knowledge of any non-combatant deaths, al-Jazeera quotes an Afghan politician as saying that at least 20 of the 30 “insurgents” killed were actually civilians. A surgeon reported that 20 others were wounded in the attack, mostly women and children.

The US regularly denies Afghan reports of civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes, as with the bombing of a wedding party last month, in which the US military initially announced killed several insurgents. When reports arose that civilians were killed it was dismissed as “militant propaganda”, but an official Afghan inquiry later showed that the strike killed 47 civilians, 39 of whom were women and children, and not a single one had any links with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. It was only three weeks later that NATO announced its own inquiry into the matter, prefaced with NATO spokesman Mark Laity’s comment “If we don’t drop a bomb, they (the Taliban) win”.

compiled by Jason Ditz

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Do Native Americans Have First Amendment Rights?

August 21, 2008

Wednesday 20 August 2008

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t | Interview

photo
The San Francisco Peaks are visible from many parts of the Southwest’s Four Corners and have been sacred to at least 13 recognized Native American tribes for at least as long as Europeans have been in the country. Northern Arizona University Professor Miguel Vasquez described the argument that only a part of the Peaks are affected by the planned spraying of up to 1.5 million gallons a day of effluent for snowmaking as “equivalent to saying it’s O.K. to piss in St. Peter’s as long as you only do it in one corner.” (Photo: Calvin Johnson / Save the Peaks Coalition)

Ninth Circuit rules effluent does not defile sacred space. Forest Service argued skiing on treated sewage “a compelling government interest.”

The San Francisco Peaks of Northern Arizona “are sacred to at least 13 formally recognized Indian tribes … and this religious significance is of centuries duration.”(1) In February 2005, the US Forest Service issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision approving a proposal to make artificial snow using treated sewage effluent at the Snowbowl Resort located on Humphrey’s Peak, the highest and – to the tribes – most holy of the San Francisco Peaks. That decision was appealed by the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Havasupai Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Yavapai-Apache Nation and the White Mountain Apache Nation. The Circuit Court ruled for the Forest Service. In February 2007, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court unanimously overturned the lower court’s decision. On Friday, August 8, 2008, the en banc majority of the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that “using treated sewage effluent to make artificial snow on the most sacred mountain of southwestern Indian tribes does not violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (‘RFRA’). It also holds that a supposed pleading mistake prevents the tribes from arguing under the National Environmental Act (‘NEPA’) that the Forest Service failed to consider the likelihood that children and others would ingest snow made from the effluent.”(2)

On August 18, Leslie Thatcher, of Truthout, spoke with the Navajo Nation’s lead attorney in the case, Howard Shanker, who is also running in the Democratic primary for Arizona Congressional District One, the seat currently held by retiring Representative Rick Renzi (R-Arizona), presently under indictment for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, and other charges related to an Arizona land deal.

Continued . . .

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POLITICS-US: Anti-Obama Echo Chamber in Full Swing

August 21, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz | Inter Press Service


OAKLAND, California, Aug 20 – Right-wing groups are stepping up their campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with two new books on the best-seller lists, another on the verge of publication, and a full-length documentary that will premiere during the party conventions later this month.

Jerome Corsi, a veteran of the 2004 Swiftboating campaign that helped sink the candidacy of the Democratic Party’s John Kerry, had his book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” debut at No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list on Sunday. Aug. 17 — although the list’s editors noted that some bookstores have reported receiving bulk orders.

“The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate” by David Freddoso is currently ranked at number five. And another Obama-bashing tome, expected sometime next month, is tentatively titled “Obama Unmasked,” and is written by Floyd Brown — the creator of 1988’s infamous Willie Horton television advertisement that helped put the kybosh on the presidential hopes of the Democrat’s Michael Dukakis.

Now, on Aug. 24, the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver, “Hype: The Obama Effect” — a full-length documentary that attacks everything about the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee — will be premiering at the Regal Pavilions 15 in the host city. The free showing is being sponsored by Citizens United and Chairman Dick Wadhams of the Colorado Republican Committee.

(The Regal Entertainment Group, which own Regal theaters, is the largest motion picture exhibitor in the world — it operates nearly 20 percent of all indoor screens in the U.S. The chain is owned by Philip Anschutz, an oil magnate, media mogul, and long-time contributor to conservative political causes.)

The film, through interviews with a host of Republican Party supporters, criticises Obama’s political positions, mocks the so-called cult of personality that many critics claim embodies his campaign, casts doubts about his judgment, and questions his character.

“While ‘Hype’ may not generate large box office receipts, it is sure to become another prong in the right-wing attack machine,” Mike Reynolds, a longtime investigative reporter covering politics and religion, told IPS. “[Citizens United head David] Bossie might be hopeful that as the campaign moves forward, some right-wing websites might offer the film as a premium as they have for the books.”

“In order to get regular voters to go see the movie, it will have to garner media buzz on the cable television news networks, like the anti-Obama books have,” Reynolds said. “Looking at both the television advertisement for the film and its five-minute trailer, it’s clear that neither Bossie nor Alan Peterson, the film’s director, have chops; they’re no Michael Moore.”

During the 2004 presidential campaign, one of the earliest attacks against the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Senator John Kerry — predating by several months the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mega-attack on the candidate’s military record — was spearheaded by Floyd Brown’s group, Citizens United, a long-time conservative enterprise.

The ad became one of George W. Bush’s major themes: Based on Mastercard’s famous ad campaign, the spot cataloged the cost of Kerry’s expensive taste in clothes and his ownership of properties worth millions of dollars. It ended with “Another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he’s a man of the people? Priceless.”

The goal of the Citizens United advertisement was to make Kerry look like an elitist; a premise that Bush advisor Karl Rove and the campaign of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has revived again this year. These days, in addition to the Obama-is-an-elitist message, he is also being defined by McCain as an empty suit — a “celebrity” who is out of touch with regular folks.

In June of this year, Rove — now a roving right-wing commentator with the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media platforms — pulled the snob card from the deck. Speaking at a country club, Rove likened Obama, to “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

In other words, Obama, the first African American to run for the presidency, is oddly enough being tagged as an elitist who is out of step with the U.S. public.

Bossie, who co-produced “Hype: The Obama Effect”, which was directed and written by Alan Peterson — who also directed “Fahrenhype 9/11,” a response to Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 911” — recognises that the film will likely have a very limited — if any — run in theaters and he intends to market it via mail-order sales on the Citizen United website, and through other DVD outlets.

“Bossie is a political hatchet man whose career is based on smears and attacking Democrats,” John Stauber, the executive director of the Centre for Media and Democracy, told IPS. “His Obama documentary will provide plenty of footage for use on the internet and in commercials, but I doubt that in and of itself that “Hype” will make much difference in the campaign.”

“I assume that the overall theme of Obama as ‘socialist agent disguised as cult hero’ must be resonating in the political marketing surveys of the Bossie-types and the McCain operatives, or they would switch to something more effective,” Stauber added.

“Going back to the days when he was unremitting in his attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bossie’s forte has never been accuracy,” Reynolds said. “It has been bloodletting. And in that regard, if ‘Hype’ gets any traction at all, it is likely to be viewed as the political counterpart of [the horror movie franchise] Saw V, due to be released just before the election.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

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The Afghan fire looks set to spread, but there is a way out

August 21, 2008
Far from being a noble cause, the occupation of Afghanistan is poisoning the region and will never bring peace or security

The war in Afghanistan is running out of control. The multiple attacks mounted by Taliban guerrillas on Nato occupation troops on Monday and Tuesday – in which 10 newly arrived French soldiers were killed near Kabul and a US base hit by suicide bombers – are the most daring since the US-led invasion of 2001. More than 100 people have been killed in fighting in the past three days, as the war against foreign occupation has spread from the south to the east and the area around the capital.

The assault on the French reinforcements follows the killing of nine US soldiers in a single attack last month, and the freeing of hundreds of Taliban prisoners from Kandahar’s main jail in a night-time raid in June. As Afghanistan experiences its own Iraq-style surge of US and other Nato forces, the death toll is rising inexorably. The number of occupation troops killed in Afghanistan overtook the Iraqi level in May. Attacks on US-led forces are up by 50% on last year, Nato air attacks have increased 40%, and more than 2,500 have already reportedly lost their lives in the conflict since January – getting on for half of them civilians.

In a damning indictment of the impact of Nato’s occupation on Afghanistan, aid agencies reported earlier this month that insecurity was spreading to previously stable areas and the killing of civilians by all sides rising sharply. The US air force seems to have developed a particular habit of attacking wedding parties – last month 47 civilians were killed in one strike – while British troops, who lost 13 soldiers in June alone, killed a woman and two children last weekend, which the high command naturally blamed on the Taliban.

This is the conflict western politicians have convinced themselves is the “good war”, in contrast to the shame of Iraq. Britain’s defence secretary, Des Browne, recently declared it “the noble cause of the 21st century”. Nicolas Sarkozy, who faces a similar level of domestic opposition to the Afghan imbroglio as in Britain, insists that France is fighting for “democracy and freedom”. Barack Obama calls it the “central front” in the war on terror and, like Gordon Brown, is committed to transferring troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to bolster the fight.

That will certainly jack up the killing and suffering still further. As Zbigniew Brzezinski – the former US national security adviser who masterminded the early stages of the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – argues, putting more troops in is not the solution: “We run the risk that our military presence will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us.”

The original aims of the invasion, it will be recalled, were the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the destruction of al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the US and its friends brought back to power an alliance of brutal and corrupt warlords, gave them new identities as democrats with phoney elections, and drove the Taliban and al-Qaida leaderships over the border into Pakistan.

Far from reducing the threat of terrorism, this crucible of the war on terror has simply spread it around the region, bringing forth an increasingly potent campaign of resistance and giving a new lease of life to a revamped Taliban as a champion of Pashtun nationalism. And as mission creep has detached the Afghan war from its original declared target of al-Qaida – let alone the claims made about women’s rights, which have been going into grim reverse again in much of the country under Nato tutelage – it has morphed into the kind of war of “civilisation” evoked by Sarkozy and Browne, a certain recipe for conflict without end. No wonder British politicians have talked about digging in for decades.

Meanwhile, the long-term cost of the west’s shameless support for Pakistan’s military dictatorship as the linchpin of its war on terror, while forever preaching democracy, became clearer this week. General Musharraf’s welcome departure has left the country in political crisis and exposed the contradictions at the heart of the US relationship with the nuclear-armed state.

Even while the Pakistani military has relied on the US alliance to underpin its strategic position with India, its intelligence arm, the ISI, has maintained links with the Taliban as a long-term regional investment – at the same time as the Pakistan army has fought the local Taliban under American pressure. Now the threat of full-scale US incursions against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s border areas risks profoundly destabilising one of the most combustible states in the world.

Afghanistan was supposed to be a demonstration of Nato’s expanded horizons in the post-Soviet new world order. Instead, as with Nato’s disastrous engagement with Georgia, it has underscored the dangers of giving the cold war alliance a new imperial brief. The growing conflict must also be added to the litany of US foreign policy failures that have been overseen by George Bush – from Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon to Latin America and now the Caucasus – and the evident necessity of a new direction.

That is likely to be a mountain to climb, even under an Obama presidency. The Afghan war certainly cannot be won, but the bitterly unpopular 2005 agreement for indefinite bases in the country left no doubt that the US is planning to stay for the long haul. Nato’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington earlier this year that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.

The only way to end the war is the withdrawal of foreign troops as part of a political settlement negotiated with all the significant players in the country, including the Taliban, and guaranteed by the regional powers and neighbouring states. A large majority of Afghans say they back negotiations with the Taliban, even in western-conducted opinion polls. The Taliban themselves insist they will only talk once foreign troops have withdrawn. If that were the only obstacle, it could surely be choreographed as a parallel process. But given the scale of commitments made by the US and Nato, the fire of the Afghan war seems bound to spread further.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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Torture’s Political Invisibility

August 20, 2008

Bangor Daily News (Maine), August 19, 2008

by John Buell

That U.S. military personnel — and their superiors — supported the torture of enemy combatants elicits disturbingly little outrage among most voters. Human beings seldom torture those they regard as like themselves. Humans need and crave community, but throughout history narrow definitions of community and exaggerated claims on its behalf have occasioned grave injustices.

The most widely accepted defense of torture is a limited one: a nation possesses a sovereign right to torture a terrorist who purportedly knows the whereabouts of a ticking time bomb. If authorities had solid reason to know that an individual possessed such knowledge, it would present a serious moral dilemma.

Torture, however, has been employed well beyond those extreme parameters. Jane Mayer argues in her new book “The Dark Side” that after 9-11 the government emphasized “interrogation over due process to pre-empt future attacks” even before any ticking bombs were even being made.

In Portland Phoenix articles, Lance Tapley points out that about 35,000 U.S. citizens are held in solitary confinement at “Supermaxes” (including Maine’s). Many are subjected to torture in the form of beating, sleep deprivation and mental abuse that rival practices at Guantanamo, according to Tapley.

Torture’s political invisibility is remarkable given its counterproductive consequences. Tapley points out that the torture of Supermax prisoners, most of whom are mentally ill, leads to high rates of recidivism and poses great public risk.

Frank Rich, commenting on Mayer, suggests: “torture may well be enabling future attacks… false confessions and [an] avalanche of misinformation since 9-11… compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases.”

Some Americans do oppose torture, but even many who are opposed won’t acknowledge that “we” torture individuals not privy to secret bomb information. For example, prison authorities, major media and political leaders have not challenged Tapley’s specific factual assertions. Nonetheless, none have acted on his findings. Many national leaders even engage in tortuous redefinitions of torture.

These responses may have deep origins. Our world now presents shrinking employment options, rapid changes in neighborhoods and complex interdependence. Social turmoil leads many Americans, steeped in traditional notions of the U.S. as “a city upon a hill” in possession of unique truth, to embrace a problematic conviction: individuals whose differences in religion, lifestyle or ethnicity pose no direct threat really are dangerous.

The world is seen as irrevocably divided between a virtuous “us” and a dangerous “them.” We would never torture or would do so only for overwhelming reasons. When victims of our torture attack or murder us, their actions merely confirm our conviction that they are “basically evil.”

Greater equality and adequate security might blunt xenophobic responses to economic crisis. Nonetheless, especially in a world becoming ever more multicultural, achieving progressive reforms is unlikely without also challenging some prevalent forms of fundamentalism. These dogmatic and exclusionary creeds blind us to the limits of our own intelligence, deny opportunities for full self-development, and preclude social justice movements across racial and religious lines.

For the sake of others and ourselves, we need dialogues to explore sympathetically the deeper — and inherently contestable — assertions about God, truth and morality that underlie major religious, national and ethnic communities. Nations also must acknowledge that they can no longer manage all that goes on even within their own borders. “Multinational” corporations constrain national governments.

Nations should acknowledge the contributions that transnational labor and environmental activists can make by adding labor and environmental standards to the corporate protections in trade agreements. Our willingness to articulate, collectively revise and live by international civil liberties standards would also lead more of the world’s people to disclose terrorist criminal conspiracies.

What if, as James Der Derian, director of the Global Security Program at Brown University, has argued, “border guards, concrete barriers and earthen levees not only prove inadequate but act as force multipliers, producing automated bungling that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters.” We must, he argues, “ask if such mega-catastrophes are no longer an exception but part of densely networked systems that defy national management.”

Our support of torture and our desperate efforts to deny its prevalence — like defenses of slavery — bespeak an arrogant disregard of humans who may be different but are no less worthy. They also emanate from and intensify a false sense of security that poses increased risks to us all.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net.

© 2008 The Bangor Daily News

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In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe

August 20, 2008
This outdated military alliance is playing with fire in Russia. In Pakistan and Afghanistan it is playing with dynamite

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west’s postwar resistance to the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats’ Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday’s Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia’s frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia’s defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato’s intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that “the age of spheres of influence is over”. In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush’s neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?

The US’s two greatest bugbears at present, Russia and Iran, both have grounds for feeling encircled by hostile forces. However badly they behave, they too are vulnerable to the politics of irrational fear. Both countries display the rudiments of democratic activity, with paranoia playing on pluralism.

The glib response of Nato’s leaders has been hawkish, that the only thing “these people” understand is tough talk and big sticks. But that just apes Russia’s attitude towards Georgia and Ukraine, which at least Russia has the power to enforce.

The west is not threatened by Russia. Turning its border into a zone of bluff and counter-bluff, so Nato can boast 10 extra flags outside its headquarters, has proved destabilising and provocative. Intelligence, like morality, is supposedly the tribute power should pay to reason. Russia is boorish and belligerent enough already. Why encourage it?

With Russia, Nato is playing with fire. In Afghanistan/Pakistan – which should always be yoked together – it is playing with dynamite. Here Osama bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld must be laughing in unison: the former because Nato’s conduct of the war against the Taliban has been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida in Pakistan; the latter because everything he said about nation-building has proved true. “Get in fast and get out fast” was his strategy, and he was right.

The fall of Pervez Musharraf might be good news for Pakistan’s democrats. It is dreadful news for Nato’s proconsuls in their fortified enclaves in Kabul. The likelihood of political turbulence in Pakistan can only increase the hold that pro-Taliban tribes have over the long frontier with Afghanistan and, with it, the certainty of an escalating war.

Nato’s performance here has been dreadful. A half-hearted peacekeeper, it had displayed divided counsels, divided leadership and divided rules of engagement. It has reflected the view of the US general in Kosovo, Wesley Clark, that US units should never again be placed under international command. International command means no command at all.

A Pentagon report by General Barry McCaffrey, revealed last week, criticises the lack of command unity in Kabul. “Afghanistan is in misery,” it says. “A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the Afghan theatre of operation does not exist.”

There is said to be a plan for a 12,000-strong reinforcement of US troops to stage a Baghdad-style “surge”, outside the remit of Nato. The idea that the rural Taliban might be susceptible to the same handling as Iraq’s urban militias may be senseless, but is on the cards. Such a surge would mean three rival armies – Afghan, Nato and American – roaming this troubled land, a gift to any enemy.

The newly triumphant coalition in Islamabad must long for the days when its Afghan backyard was quiet. The Taliban regime was funded by opium and the Saudis, and of no strategic (as opposed to terrorist) concern to the west. There were no US Predators bombing villages, no CIA phone-tapping, no suborned Pakistan intelligence officers, no outside interference. Pakistan’s sphere of influence might not be to every taste, but it was roughly stable.

We shall now have the world’s sixth largest country, and with an active nuclear arsenal, in internal turmoil because of a doomed Nato adventure on its border. Taliban units are operating freely throughout the south and east of Afghanistan and within miles of the capital, Kabul, flatly contradicting the mendacious spin of Nato spokesmen over the past two years.

Western governments seem never to learn. Counter-insurgency wars of this sort never work if they become drawn out. At best they leave broken, corrupted, failed states such as Lebanon and Kosovo – and, soon, Iraq. At worst they mean defeat. If ever America were walking into another Vietnam, it is now in Afghanistan, fast replacing Iraq as the mecca for every anti-western fanatic on earth.

Peace in Afghanistan might not matter over much. But its absence will grossly destabilise Pakistan, and that matters greatly. Is this to be another feather in Nato’s cap?

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

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Christians United for Israel and Attacking Iran

August 19, 2008

Dedrick Muhammad and Farrah Hassen | Foreign Policy In Focus, August 18,

2008Though the national sentiment favors wrapping up the Iraq War, there exists a small but powerful movement for starting a new military conflict with Iran. The bipartisan drumbeats for aggression reverberate throughout the corridors of Congress. House Resolution 362 and Senate Resolution 580, for example, call on the United States to prevent Iran from “acquiring a nuclear weapons capability through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means.”

Christians United
Photo by Dedrick Muhammad.

The House’s Iran resolution, sponsored by Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), demands the president impose “stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran.” This legislation effectively requires a blockade on Iran which is considered by international law as an act of war. The Senate’s Iran resolution, sponsored by Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), would require a ban on “the importation of refined petroleum products to Iran.” Neither resolution offers evidence on Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Both neglect to mention any sanctions against the only country known to actually have developed nuclear weapons in the Middle East: Israel.

Evoking Orwellian 2+2=5 logic, both Congressmen have offered sanctions as the means to avoid war by applying economic pressure on Iran. Yet sanctions rarely achieve their intended objective. For instance, unilateral U.S. sanctions failed to topple the Cuban, Iraqi and Libyan governments. They punished (and in Cuba’s case, continue to punish) civilians instead.

Washington-Israel Summit

The “squeeze Iran” and “confront Iran” positions are strongly encouraged by the increasingly powerful Zionist Christian Fundamentalist community. About 5,000 people from across the United States attended the third annual Washington-Israel Summit, organized by Christians United for Israel (CUFI). There, the “Iranian threat” loomed as a pervasive theme.

“What do you do with a maniac like Ahmadinejad? I’m not sure diplomacy works,” Gary Bauer, President of American Values and a CUFI executive board member, told the crowd during the July 22 “Middle East Intelligence Briefing.” Another panelist, Representative Mike Pence (R-IN), urged the attendees to make their support for HR 362 known to their members of Congress.

We attended this “the Rapture” meets “Clash of Civilizations” session – on the only day open to the press. We listened to the never-ending chorus from Bauer, Pence, Representative Elliot Engel (D-NY), and The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol who kept telling the assembled crowd why Americans must fear “Islamo-fascists”/”Islamo-radicals”/”death worshippers,” and their other scary names for Muslims. Panels curiously closed to the press at the three-day conference included “Iran: Eye of the Storm,” “Radical Islam: In Their Own Words” and “How to Stop Funding the Enemy: Divestment, Sanctions and Boycotts.”

As Muslims, we attended the summit to learn more about CUFI. What we found was disturbing. Being well-received and courteously treated by the pleasant staff of a conference that talks of Muslims as “death worshippers” was a truly paradoxical experience. We also found it ironic that the organization’s acronym, CUFI, is pronounced like kufi, an Arabic word for the short, rounded prayer cap worn by devout Muslim men.

Continued . . .

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John McCain’s Party of Hate

August 18, 2008

Brent Budowsky | Consortiumnews.com, August 16, 2008

Editor’s Note: To many Americans who expected better from John McCain, the surprise of Campaign 2008 is that the Republicans are operating almost exactly the same as they have in previous presidential election cycles — relying on personal attacks, wedge issues, tough-guy talk, and media complacency.

In this essay, former Democratic congressional aide Brent Budowsky ponders this disturbing reality:

As Campaign 2008 unfolds, it is increasingly clear that the Republicans are a party with little left but hate, anger and the politics of slandering their opponent.

John McCain has become a candidate reduced to doing a Karl Rove imitation as a sleazy, divisive campaigner, while making bellicose pronouncements about war reminiscent of the childish Confederates at the beginning of “Gone With the Wind,” drinking their brandy and smoking their cigars with fantasies about the glorious war that they hunger to fight.

Now, right on cue, comes the latest Swift Boat attack book from one Jerome Corsi, the great white hope of modern Republicanism who has published a new book tearing down Barack Obama, much like he did four years ago in producing the thoroughly discredited Unfit for Command to demean John Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam.

In other writings, Corsi also called Pope Paul II “senile” and referred to Hillary Clinton as a “lesbo.” So enough of Corsi. He deserves no more camera, ink or bandwidth than noting his history of slanders.

There is a much larger issue than a punk like Corsi. It is that John McCain, who promised to run a civil campaign, has become an embarrassment to the notion of civil discourse in public life.

As the campaign has worn on, John McCain speaks less and less about himself and his policies and more and more about Obama, attacking his Democratic opponent in the most personal, derogatory and often slanderous ways.

For instance, McCain said Obama wanted to bring reporters on his proposed visit to wounded troops in Germany. A lie. He said Obama wanted to bring television cameras to the wounded troops visit. A lie. He said Obama wanted to bring political staff on the visit. A lie. McCain’s campaign accused Obama of refusing to see wounded troops in order to play basketball. A lie.

These are not philosophical differences or public relations spin. These are outright lies, spoken or approved by John McCain, incorporated into his television commercials, repeated endlessly by a compliant news media when the truth was immediately known to the journalists on Obama’s Germany trip who raised little objection in the first key days when the lies did their damage.

Indeed, much of the mainstream media continues to give aid, comfort and protection to McCain by repeating and perpetuating his phony image as an independent and a maverick. The mainstream media also reruns McCain’s attack ads ad nauseum, for free, only spreading the damage of the lies further.

When the news media isn’t recycling McCain false accusations, it often creates its own, reinforcing McCain’s negative campaign narratives about Obama.

The newspaper that used to be the Washington Post ran a derisive and demeaning attack on Obama by “reporter” Dana Milbank, who relied on a bogus quote by one unnamed source that no reporter at the Post, including Milbank, even talked to.

Without checking the accuracy of the quote or trying to ascertain its context, Milbank made it the centerpiece of a column portraying Obama as a megalomaniac claiming credit for the international reaction to his overseas trip, when he actually had said he could take no credit for the crowd in Berlin, that it was really about the world’s high regard for America.

So, a comment that represented modesty and patriotism was turned into its opposite, supposed proof of Obama’s arrogance and hubris.

Continued . . .

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