The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.

Yahweh Sabaoth Would Like a Word

While I was reading right-wing Christians fuming that the Pope should stay out of politics, it occurred to me that such people usually insist that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that we need more voices of faith in the public square.  It wouldn't be fair to say that they've changed their minds, exactly, because the inconsistency would never occur to them.  They want what they want, and that's all that matters.

Still, it's clear that Trump's antics have made them uneasy, especially the Catholics among them. I happened on a Facebook comment thread this afternoon where the contradictions were heightened: I've been a Catholic all my life, but Pope Leo isn't my Pope!  He's a Communist and should be minding his own business! ... and so on.  I don't know how representative these people are. It does seem that there are some deep divisions among Roman Catholics at all levels, from the laity up to reactionary clergy.  Some of the latter have been disciplined.  They forget that the Church is not a democracy, it's a hierarchy.

On the other hand, liberals and even leftists -- Catholic and non-Catholic, theist and non-theist -- are reveling in that hierarchy, though they're confused about it too. Celebrity right-wing Catholics like J.D. Vance are being mocked for daring to criticize the Pope, especially when they're recent converts like Vance.  And it is funny that Vance would be so unself-conscious about it.  Luckily for him, he's not likely to have a date with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and even if he does he's not going to be tortured or executed. As the 19th-centurhy composer Hector Berlioz wrote, "Now that She [i.e., the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, Her creeds are charming."  I suppose Vance is aware of this somewhere in what's left of his mind.  I suppose his liberal mockers are too, but it feels to me like they actually believe that a mere layman has no business disagreeing with the head of 1.2 billion Catholics.  It's nicely summed up in this meme:

(If you'd like to see a buttload of baboon screeching and feces-throwing, here's the thread where I found the meme.)  If you think that religion is just a matter of book-learning, this makes sense.  But it isn't, and believers will be the first to insist that it isn't when it suits them. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of intellectual capital built up over two thousand years, and as a subject of that church, who joined it as an adult, Vance know that and should at least pretend to respect it.  It's his problem, not mine.

Derek Guy, whose timeline inspired that meme and that screeching, had a much more measured take.

Truly remarkable how many people have told the Pope, in some way or another, to "shut up and dribble." Or corrected him on the Bible, despite their thin education on theology. Or told him to stay out of US affairs, despite him being a US citizen. The hubris is amazing.

It's not just the Pope. I would never dream of correcting an Imam or a Harvard law professor about their fields of study using some bullshit I read using ChatGPT. Some people lack an appreciation for the depth of their own ignorance because they don't have expertise in anything.

I agree to an extent; after all, the same people who are telling Leo to shut up are telling him to defer to the political wisdom of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio - a bunch of clowns who have no wisdom at all, whose incompetence is plain to see every day. Or they tell him to focus on morality instead of politics, as if they were mutually irrelevant spheres, as if an illegal war and terror against civilians had nothing to do with morality.  And, as Derek mentions, Leo is an American citizen, though he doesn't need to be one to criticize the US or any other country. He's also a head of state, of the Vatican City, and as such is a politician as well as a cleric.

I'm an atheist, though, and while I'll acknowledge Leo's learning, I'm not bound to defer to it.  His claims about his god and war are simply absurd.  The Bible contains many instances where Yahweh orders war, orders the massacre of entire populations and the enslavement of others.  But Leo doesn't care about that any more than Trump cares about his own falsehood.  He's laying down doctrine on his authority. (He's not declaring it ex cathedra, so he's not even claiming to be infallible - not that he would be.)  But only Catholics are bound by his authority.  Derek's reference to Harvard law professors is unfortunate too, since prominent Harvard law professors have made wildly false claims about the law.  I'm thinking, for example, of Obama's "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Nor do I feel any obligation, or even temptation, to defer to Leo's positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, women in the clergy, or other matters. I know that the Pope, or any other learned Catholic, can churn up a flurry of learned arguments to support those positions; I don't care.  These are not matters to be settled by scholastic discourse, and the justifications for them change as the church's positions change. Think of slavery, which the church not only used to justify but practiced.

Another response to Vance's insubordination has been some version of this:

QuoProQuid is a queer Catholic game designer whose posts I read regularly.  Mason Mennenga is a nice liberal Christian whose posts I see only intermittently.  His picture of lifelong Latin American Catholics is as much of a caricature as his picture of adult American converts. Most of not all of the worst right-wing Latin American dictators were lifelong Catholics; it didn't keep them from killing and raping and torturing - nor did it keep previous Popes (and American presidents) from being good buddies with them.  

I'm glad that Leo is opposing Trump and the war, but that means he's on my side (and the side of many other non-Catholics), not that I'm on his.  It's certainly a PR problem for Trump, and will further erode his already slipping support.  His base will stand fanatically firm, but not everyone who voted for him is in his base. I'm not indignant, as many atheists are, that Trump is attacking "an American Pope," as NPR's anchor people keep putting it - his nationality makes no more difference than his religion.  These details make it harder for Trump's insults to land. I don't mind Vance's insubordination against his religious superior, only that his criticisms are so inept; but who would expect any better from him?  Leo's low-key delivery of his criticism is pleasant too, but I don't make the liberal mistake of confusing moderation of tone with moderation of content.

The flip-flopping works both ways, as usual.  The same liberals who cheer Leo's denunciation of war were mostly silent when Obama bombed wedding parties and turned Libya into a slave market.  Many of them supported George W. Bush's wars too, and many embraced Israeli atrocities until they began to hurt their own chances of election or re-election.  The quality of mainstream discussion on these matters is, as usual, abysmal; and getting worse.

Swing Battuh Battuh Battuh, Swing

 

This sort of slop isn't the product of partisan thinking. It's a product of not being able to think at all.  When news outlets assign sports reporters who see everything through the lens of elite corporate sports to cover serious news, this is what you get.

I'd already heard NPR's Scott Simon and Franco Ordoñez do a more restrained version of the same thing on Weekend Edition today:

ORDOÑEZ: ... And again, as you noted, it comes as American and Iranian teams are meeting in Pakistan for peace talks led by the vice president, Vance. You know, they kicked off this morning between the U.S., Iran and Pakistan, which of course is serving as host and intermediary for the talks.

SIMON: To state the obvious, I suppose, this seems like a huge test for Vice President Vance.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, very much so. I mean, perhaps the most significant of his political career. I mean, it'll be a defining factor as he looks ahead to a, you know, possible run for the White House himself. 

But there is no joy in Mudville, mighty JD has struck out.  Does this mean he'll be sent back to the minors, or will he just be benched for awhile?

 

An Elephant's Faithful, One Hundred Percent

Some people are still trying to defend liberal / centrist Democrats for being angry that Trump didn't annihilate Iran. You know, they didn't really want the war, they were just angry because he didn't have a plan.  Trump never has a plan; he's always just winging it, he can't remember what he said from one end of a sentence to the other, and he just expects everyone else to have the same convenient amnesia.

But not having a plan is not these Democrats' main complaint.  The core is that Iran hasn't been crushed yet.  As Senator Shaheen complained, "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out." What does one have to do with the other?  Under international law, Iran has the right of self-defense (hence the missiles), and also the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (despite all the bipartisan alarmism, there is no evidence that Iran has enriched uranium for weapons).

Senator Chuck Schumer used the same talking points: "Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated". Because Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA, and Biden didn't rejoin it, Iran is no longer bound or "checked" by the limitations it imposed. Its leaders may well have decided that getting nuclear weapons for self-defense, like so many other countries, is a good idea (though to repeat, there still is no evidence that they were doing so). Nor does the US have any right under international law to bomb Iran to make it  comply with our imperial demands.

As one online weirdo put it, "if i was a prominent democrat politician i would be saying stuff like 'Israel is fucking up your amazing peace & ceasefire deal on purpose mr. president! they think you're a sucker, show them who's boss!' instead of like 'He didn't even nuke iran lol. Is he gay??' but whatever [i guess]" It's true, as Senator Chris Murphy complained, that Trump is incompetent - but so is the Democratic leadership.  This is an old complaint of mine, going back at least to the Obama years, that these cute, supposedly media-savvy solons -- at least they have hired media-savvy staff -- are so tin-eared, so clueless, so unprepared.  Obama was consistently surprised that the Republicans wouldn't play nice, and instead of thinking creatively about how to stymie them, he would just let them have their way.

But like, you know, "by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility."  I mean, the President promised to wipe out Iran, and it looks really bad if he doesn't keep his promise.  It's not that these people want war, though they do, it's that a promise is a promise and America's word is its bond.

I suddenly remembered the biblical book of Jonah, because we atheist leftists can quote scripture to our purpose.  Everybody knows about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and then being vomited up onto dry land, but how many remember the context?  Briefly, Jonah was a prophet, which was a thing in those days, and Yahweh told him to go to the non-Israelite city of Nineveh and threaten it with destruction if it didn't repent.  Jonah ran away, because if the Ninevites repented the prophecy would be falsified, and in the course of his flight he ended up in the belly of the great fish, which brought him to Nineveh and spewed him out.  So Jonah went in and proclaimed, "Yet thirty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

The King of Nineveh heard, and commanded general repentance, so Yahweh changed his mind and didn't destroy Nineveh.  Jonah was very upset by this.  He left the city and built himself a booth in whose shadow he sulked.  Yahweh caused a gourd plant to grow up overnight and give him some shade, then made it wither and made Jonah uncomfortable.  Drama queen that he was, he said he wanted to die.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? 

This is obviously out of character for Yahweh, who would ordinarily be perfectly happy to kill 120,000 heathen children plus adults and "also much cattle," so you know this story is a fable.  But it's a good one, and its point is relevant today.  Don't worry, I'm not getting religion.  But I'll use any material that is pertinent.  

Peace In Our Time?

When I went to bed last night, the stories of the announced ceasefire with Iran were already starting to fray. By this morning, it was clear that Israel had not been consulted on the deal and was continuing to bomb Lebanon. US and Iranian media acknowledged conflicting understandings of the terms, with Trump claiming that the Strait of Hormuz had been opened and Iran saying that it wasn't, yet.  Trump thought that Iran would give up its missiles, Iran didn't agree.  And so on.  It was reported that JD Vance was going to participate in negotiations, but at one point the White House said he wasn't, for security reasons.  As with the war, disentangling the confusion and lies was an uphill struggle.

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, their White House Correspondent Franco Ordoñez told their resident Hoosier Steve Inskeep:

It's, of course, never a bad thing to kind of avoid the dire scenario that Trump was describing. But by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility. I mean, he's likely to face some criticism, even more so now that, you know, he has a reputation of backing down from some of his most flattening rhetoric.

Donald Trump has no credibility to begin with. Anyone who believes what he says (and NPR still gives him credence most of the time) discredits himself immediately.

Unfortunately, though, Ordoñez was correct that Trump is facing criticism.  Jon Schwarz wrote on Twitter that "There's a very real chance the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will attack Trump for the Iran war — from the right, because he didn't 'finish the job'". He linked to a Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, who'd complained "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out."

Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT, also was upset: 

It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran. The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking. What on earth is happening?

Iran already had control of the Strait of Hormuz. The US has no claim on it. But Murphy, like some other Democrats, supports Trump's illegal war; he only wants it to be run "competently."  The most pressing need is not to prolong the war, but to end it. The US and Israel are the aggressors, and they have already done enormous harm to human lives, not to mention the world economy.

I have a special contempt for Murphy, since he posted in 2020 that Trump had interfered with his plan to overthrow the government of Venezuela and install a crooked US collaborator:

Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak.

Notice the words I put in boldface: "a kind of coup."  Murphy bragged in public that he'd conspired to stage a coup in another nation, which has to be some kind of violation of international and other law.  He suffered no consequences for this, of course.  Now he wants to prolong a war that should, in a halfway sane world, put its perpetrators in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  The US isn't entitled to demand concessions from its victims. Yes, Trump is incompetent and stupid, but refraining from destroying another country, however clumsily he's doing it, should be supported rather than undermined.  Yes, the Iranian regime is evil, but so is Chris Murphy, and so are the other pols and pundits who like Trump's war but think they should be in charge of it.

P.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has weighed in, using talking points like Shaheen's:

"Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated…The nations at the world are furious at Trump: the Asians, the Europeans, even the Middle Eastern allies."

These people want Trump's war, and they want it to be more murderous and more destructive.

But We Think the Price Is Worth It

 

As I write this, it appears that the world may have dodged a bullet: Trump has put off his threat to wipe out Iran.  But no one should suppose that he won't change his mind in a week or two, and the reports I've seen so far don't say that Israel has agreed to pause its aggression against Iran. (Or Lebanon.  Or Gaza. Or the Occupied Territories.) Any ceasefire will just give the US and Israel time to arm themselves for further atrocities.

I haven't written about this war before, largely because it's just too depressing.  I'm not alone in this: many commentators I respect have been reduced to sputtering outrage at Trump's conduct.  Doug Henwood, for example, mostly posts one- or two-word grunts on Twitter/X, like "Gross," "Disgusting," "Shameful," "Ugh," etc. over reposts of other people's material. Some do better, but after awhile it comes down to detailing how Trump's a deranged criminal.

It's better than the corporate media's fondness for pussyfooting around.  The political scientist Corey Robin quoted the New York Times on Facebook this evening: "One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?"  Later he added, "The New York Times has been hemming and hawing for days about whether killing civilians is a war crime or not. What if civilians are surrounded by 'military-age males?' What if a power grid upon which civilians and hospitals depend has a 'dual use' for military purposes? So complicated, so nuanced, so grey an area. But now comes the prospect of imposing a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. And what is the NYT headline? "How Tolls in the Strait of Hormuz Would Undercut International Law'".

NPR has been about the same.  The other day one of their talking heads fretted about the effectiveness of a ceasefire: would Iran respect it?  He didn't wonder whether the US or Israel would "respect" it; maybe because the answer is so obviously No.

I don't know what it would take to stop Trump and Netanyahu. With one or two honorable exceptions, the mainstream Congressional Democrats have been busy complaining that Trump didn't ask their permission before he went to war. Of course they would have given him that permission, so what difference would it make?  Many of them have wanted to destroy Iran for years.  They might pretend to distinguish between Iranian citizens and "the Regime," but they're willing to sacrifice Iranian lives in a good cause.

In another Facebook post, Corey Robin spelled out parallels between Trump's war and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

1. A hard-right Republican president comes to power denouncing the more "internationalist" and "establishment" Republicans and Democrats who see the United States as policeman to the world. (Don't forget, this was one of Bush's promises when he ran in 2000: he wouldn't do nation-building, he wouldn't be the world's cop, he would be "humble," he would have a narrow view of US national interest.)

 

2. A small group of influencers—neocons in Bush's case; the Israelis, in Trump's case—make the case for war to the president on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful, that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy.

 

3. Top-level US intelligence and military officials say that this advice is nonsense, totally lacking in evidence. Additionally, they repeatedly ask, what if you are able to destroy the regime, what comes next? How are you going to run the country?

 

4. Eager to destroy an enemy that has been a thorn in the side of the US for decades, the president ignores the intelligence and military establishment, displays scant concern about what comes next, and takes the country to war. 

 

5. Republicans and conservatives scratch their heads. How did a president who came into office promising not to be the world's policeman wind up taking the country to war.

 

Structurally, the two important features to focus on are these: 1) the distinction between a radical right and moderate establishment right in the Republican Party is nonsense; 2) Congress and both parties have long abandoned their role in limiting the power of the president when it comes to war.

One of the most depressing things about this is that, twenty years later, there are still pundits and politicians who defend Dubya's war.  Even if Trump's war were to end now, the long-term consequences, especially for the Iranian people and other civilians killed or hurt or displaced, will continue indefinitely, because neither Trump nor his successor will have any interest in cleaning up after it, and since there have so far been very few US casualties, most Americans will happily sink into lethargy and amnesia.

Uh, What?

I was in the library this morning, trying vainly to get anything constructive done, when a middle-aged couple came into the Fireplace Room with their son, who was in a powered wheelchair, and began talking to an older woman they evidently knew.  First they talked about the boy, and then switched to politics.  The younger woman said that she objected to people who say that Trump isn't their president, she didn't like Obama but she never trash-talked him like some people did, and Trump is the president so he should be respected, he's the president.  I share her distaste for the Not My President Resistance, but that never stopped me from criticizing Obama or his predecessors, and it doesn't stop me from criticizing Trump.  Her husband remarked quietly that Obama was a "puppet of Congress" (what?). 

Next she said how glad she was that Trump had killed "that terrorist" (presumably Soleimani) - when Obama killed "that terrorist" (presumably Bin Laden) everybody thought it was great, and it's not fair.  We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists, we kill them.  Perhaps she's just too young to remember Ronald Reagan negotiating with Iran to free American hostages, or again to get money for Nicaraguan terrorists.  It was a long time ago.  Frankly it's a stretch to claim that Trump's critics thought it was bad to kill Soleimani.  The objections from corporate media and the Beltway were not to killing Soleimani per se, everyone agreed that he was a Bad Man and a Terrorist who deserved to die in fire and fury, but because Trump didn't say "Mother May I" to Congress first.  There was also concern -- well, panic -- that the assassination might lead to war with Iran, which was not a consideration in the execution of Bin Laden as I recall.

But then I saw the video clip I embedded above, which reminded me that the Trump administration has been openly negotiating with the Taliban, the Evil Terrorists Responsible for 9/11, which drove America to invade Afghanistan to defend America against terrorism.  We did remove the Taliban for awhile, but they are back, and now we have to negotiate with them.  This will have no more impact on true Trumpians than Reagan's negotiations with Iran hurt him with true Reaganites, of course.  I wished I could have asked this woman about these little matters, but I stayed in my corner and held my peace.  Sometimes I romanticize my new/old town, and an episode like this is a bracing reminder. These people were perfectly nice, they didn't froth at the mouth, they were equable and mild, but they were still scary.

The Ministry of Truth Explains It All to Iran

I decided last night to write something about the crisis of US involvement in Iraq, leading to the current standoff between the US, Iran, and Iraq.  And then this morning I heard a sort of interview between NPR's Steve Inskeep and Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi.  Inskeep was trying to be an adversary journalist, holding Ravanchi's (and by proxy, Iran's) feet to the fire, but as usual with elite US media personalities, he came across as an obnoxious, clumsy buffoon.  I don't remember who introduced the segment, but he advised listeners to pay attention to the tone of Ravanchi's remarks, not to take his words at face value.  This reminded me of some ancient Doonesbury cartoons from the early days of the Iranian revolution, depicting an Iranian student during the hostage crisis. A voiceover balloon reminded the viewer that "this could be propaganda."

First Inskeep asked Ravanchi, "Is Iran's retaliation against the United States finished?"  Presumably he was referring to reports, including a statement by Ravanchi himself, that the retaliation was indeed finished.  Inskeep tried to play "gotcha":

When you said you don't take responsibility for the actions of others, that raises a question because there was an Iraqi militia leader who was killed in the same U.S. drone strike as Gen. Soleimani. So far as we know, no revenge attack has been taken out for him. Are you saying it is entirely possible that Iraqi militias aligned with Iran could still lash out and Iran would not accept responsibility for what they're doing?

It seems to me that if anyone might want to take revenge for the killing of an Iraqi militia leader, it would be the government of Iraq.  And, of course, the US constantly tries to dodge responsibility for
the actions of its proxies, but it wouldn't do to go into that.  Ravanchi replied fairly directly, disavowing responsibility for the actions of anyone but the government of Iran.

A bit later, Inskeep asked:

Ambassador, you're correct that Iraq's parliament did vote to expel forces from Iraq. But we should be clear, they didn't vote to expel the United States from Iraq. They voted to expel foreign forces from Iraq. And that leads us to note that Gen. Soleimani, a member of Iran's military, was in Iraq when he was killed. What was he doing there?

Strictly speaking Inskeep was right, that the vote called for the removal of US, "coalition" and other foreign forces.  The catch is that Iran claims to have no forces in Iraq; the US can't make the same claim.  There are Iranian "technical advisors" in Iraq, a term that covers a multitude of sins, but as Ravanchi replied to Inskeep more generally, the burden of proof lies on the US.  Soleimani, he said, was in Iraq to fight "terrorists," a mission to which the US can hardly object; because of his successes against Daesh, aka ISIS, he was popular in Iraq and in the region.  And, as even Inskeep must be aware, the resolution against foreign forces in Iraq was passed after and as a direct response to Soleimani's assassination.

Inskeep pressed on:

[Inskeep:] As you must know ambassador, the United States asserts that General Soleimani was plotting attacks against Americans, against the United States. Are you able to say if he was plotting such attacks?

[Ravanchi:] It is, it is the duty of the United States to to to prove otherwise, I mean, to prove that he was he was, in fact, plotting to to kill Americans. Because --

[Inskeep:] But I can also ask you, was he plotting to kill Americans?

[Ravanchi:] No, as I said, he was there in order to help the Iraqi government to better, I mean, fight terrorists pure and simple.

We should be as skeptical of an Iranian government representative as we should be of any government's representative.  But Inskeep here is parroting the claims of an administration that has been shown many times to be a gang of liars, and this particular claim has already largely been discredited as a typical Trump fabrication.  But that's NPR for you: when Trump announced the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on a Sunday morning last October, NPR's anchors treated his fantasies with total credulity.

As I've said before, the loud laments over public distrust of the media are hard to take seriously when the media work so hard to be worthy of distrust.  (Which probably isn't why many people distrust them, I realize.)  Inskeep's little clown show this morning was just embarrassing; or would be, if NPR had any shame.

Mortal Kombat in the Heavens

The dirtbag Right loves to wave religion around, which doesn't particularly distinguish them from many liberals and progressives and leftists.  So of course I've been seeing numerous liberals scolding the Right for, as they see it, "distorting Scripture."

Daniel Larison, whose work I mostly like, praised this article by Bonnie Kristian attacking Mike Pompeo for "misrepresenting the Bible to gin up war with Iran."  The article is a rebuttal worth reading, it contains some important arguments, but it falls down here and there.  The author focuses on Pompeo's use of the biblical Book of Esther, which she says "is a story of different kinds of courage, of God working in unexpected ways, of assurance of eventual justice for the downtrodden."  The trouble here is that Esther is notorious for not mentioning God, or his working, at all.  The only other biblical book that doesn't mention God is the Song of Solomon, which is about sex; of course that hasn't stopped theologians, Jewish and Christian alike, from interpreting it as an allegory of God's boner for Israel, or Christ's for the Church.

Kristian is right that Esther "is not a lesson on the longstanding malfeasance of the Iranian people. Esther offers no commentary on Islam, which did not exist when it was written. It is not included in the Jewish and Christian scriptures to tell us Iran is bad."  If anything, it depicts Persia/Iran as a haven for Jews after the bad guys who conspired to harm them were exposed and punished.  But that's something else Kristian papers over, what this article calls "the bloodthirsty bits": Haman, the royal official who led the plot against Esther's people,

was hanged, or more likely impaled; the Jews were given permission to "destroy, kill and annihilate" their enemies, with their women and children (8:11), a permission of which they took full advantage. Esther asked for an extension of the bloodletting (9:13) and for the impalement of Haman's 10 sons; 800 men were killed in the capital Susa and 75,000 elsewhere in the empire. The Jews were saved, Mordecai was promoted and the events have been celebrated on the Feast of Purim ever since.

That's presumably what Bonnie Kristian meant by "eventual justice for the downtrodden."  It's probably the part that Pompeo likes best, and that inspires his agenda on Iran.  I wouldn't accuse Kristian of misrepresenting the Bible, exactly, but she certainly de-emphasizes to the point of erasure the part that most resonates spiritually for Pompeo and other right-wing supporters of Israel -- including the Israeli government -- who'd like to treat Iran as Esther did.

Lest someone complain that Esther is the Old Testament, for chrissake, and the New Testament is about love, it's not full of hate and vindictiveness and judgment like the Old -- that's just not true. The New Testament is full of bloodthirsty fantasies of "eventual justice for the downtrodden," from Jesus' constant threats of eternal torture to the extravagant blood-in-the-streets-to-the-height-of-the-horses'-bridles visions of the Revelation.  And as I pointed out recently, the video-game ultraviolence of the Revelation is perpetrated by the good guys, the servants of the Lamb, not by Satan's minions.

Kristian's piece on the abnormality of the Pledge of Allegiance is much better.  But she, no less than Mike Pompeo, can't seem to represent the Bible in all its messy complexity.  It's not necessarily invalid to use stories, ancient or modern, to comment on current events and controversies, but one should at least try to get the details and the context right.  I'll be having more to say about this soon, perhaps including Bonnie Kristian's well-meant but inadequate attempt to resolve the role of religion in American political life.  But I have numerous other examples by other writers who dwell on the specks of biblical misrepresentation in their brothers' and sisters' eyes, while ignoring the beams in their own.

Those Who Manufacture History Get to Repeat It Over and Over

Something to keep in mind amid all the Trump administration's ranting about North Korea: Iran entered into an agreement with the US to ensure that they would make no nuclear weapons. Iran hadn't in fact been making nuclear weapons in the first place. US propaganda consisted largely of references to Iran's "nuclear program," which most people, often including the propagandists, heard as "nuclear weapons program."  The GOP and some Democrats opposed the agreement, for unclear reasons. The agreement is now in place, and Iran is in compliance with it, but the warmongers still are trying to portray Iran as a nuclear threat to the US.

Now imagine that North Korea agreed to get rid of its (still very few) nuclear weapons, and kept its promises, as Iran has. Does anyone believe that the US would lay off, would stop threatening North Korea and presenting it as an existential danger to American security? Or would the US continue to lie, as it does about Iran and its compliance with the agreement that the US forced on it?

You don't have to imagine very hard, because North Korea made such an agreement with the US in 1994, and kept to it.  The US broke it.  I think it's reasonably clear that these media campaigns have nothing do with peace, stability, or even American security -- not least because our hawks are doing everything in their power to diminish our stability and everyone else's. They're not even about oil or other resources that our plutocrats crave; Iran has oil, but North Korea doesn't have much we could want.  The issue is domination, the demand that nowhere in the world should there be any nation that isn't under US control.

Propagandists and Anti-Propagandists

The most useful part (for me, anyway) of Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (Seven Stories Press, 2013), another book of interviews with Noam Chomsky, though by Laray Polk rather than Chomsky regular David Barsamian, is the appendices, which take up almost the last third of the book.  Appendix 1, for instance, is a declassified 1945 dialogue between two US Army brass who want to squelch reports from Japan about the effects of A-bomb radiation on survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima.  They're especially indignant because one of the sources is an American, not just the "Jap scientists" they can easily dismiss as "propagandists."  Appendix 4 is an open letter from a Marshallese magistrate to the US military doctor who'd been waltzing in irregularly to study the effects of radiation from nuclear testing on the islanders in 1970s.  "We've never really trusted you," says the writer.  "So we're going to invite doctors from hospitals in Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way" (105).  There's also material on the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in the early 1980s, and more I haven't gotten to yet. 

Readers unfamiliar with Chomsky's political writings could do worse than begin with this book, especially those with a special interest in the environment.  Since Chomsky is in his eighties now and has been concerned with politics as a dissident and writer for more than half a century, he provides a long view that shows the continuity in US policy and practice over that period.  For example:

It should be remembered that when he escalated the attack on South Vietnam fifty years ago from support for a murderous client state [installed by his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower] to outright US aggression, President Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons to destroy ground cover and also food crops, a crime in itself, even apart from the dreadful scale and character of the consequences, with deformed fetuses to this day, several generations down the line in Saigon hospitals as a result of persistent genetic mutations [36].

This conversation took place before President Obama's manufactured indignation over the use of chemical weapons in Syria this fall, which nearly led to another war in the Middle East.  It's good to be reminded that the US' own record with chemical warfare would (if we applied our own standards to ourselves) require a "humanitarian intervention," or invasion, to clean up our act.

Chomsky also talks about the symbiosis between academia, the military, the government, and corporate interests in the post-WWII period, which fits with David F. Noble's account in Forces of Production.

The actual US economy since the colonies has relied quite substantially on government intervention.  This goes right back to the earliest days of independence, and for advanced industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  The American system of mass production, interchangeable parts, quality control, and so on -- which kind of astonished the world -- was largely designed in government armories.  The railroad system, which was the biggest capital investment and, of course, extremely significant for economic development and expansion, was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was too complicated for private business [56].

Later Polk quotes a right-wing Christian radio pundit who said that Christian voters "would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated [!] by a real intellectual... He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama's head off."  Chomsky comments:

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not "won" on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally.  Rather, their outcome turns on Nixon's five o'clock shadow, Reagan's sugary smile, lines like "have you no shame" or "you're no Jack Kennedy," etc.  That's not surprising.  Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed.  Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange.  A debater is not allowed to say, "That was a good point.  I'll have to rethink my views." ... I don't know who Richard Lund is, and if he regards Gingrich as a "real intellectual," I don't see much reason to explore further [68].

Here I part company with Chomsky somewhat.  I think he's using "debate" in a narrow, tendentious way, referring to public spectacles like the candidates' debates staged during the American presidential campaigns.  Maybe we need another word for those performances, because it's true, they have nothing to do with "serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally."  They're gladiatorial combat, political sports events for people who are watching to cheer on their team, not to learn anything.  But that's not all there is to debate, as Chomsky knows, being a fierce, even bloodthirsty debater himself, whether about politics or about linguistics.  I have the same difference with him over his use of the word "intellectual," which he uses to refer to paid functionaries of the state and of business, not people who are interested in working with ideas.  But as with so many terms, I'm not going to harp too much on terminology: it's not the words but what they refer to, and there I agree about the function of argument and the proper role of those interested in ideas and evidence.

All the News That Fits

Don't you love the way the corporate media concentrate on the issues, instead of trivia?

I approve of Clinton's look, and it occurred to me again today while listening to her on the radio that the way she speaks is refreshing too: she keeps her voice in a relatively low register, without sounding insecure about exercising authority.  But that doesn't change the fact that she's a warmongering liar.  The other day she told an audience in India:

That's a very good question, and let me give you a little context for that question. When President Obama took over in 2009, we knew Iran's continuing development of a nuclear weapons program would be very destabilizing in the region, because there would be an arms race with the nations in the region who have pre-existing enmity between themselves and Iran. And it would also cause a great threat to Israel.

As Peter Hart of FAIR pointed out, there's no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.  But you know how it is: the GOP only has emotion, the Democrats have facts.  (I forgot to include the Iran canard when I was writing about Obama's lies in that one, but it shouldn't be forgotten.)

In a related vein, I'm beginning to suspect that some fans of the "Texts from Hillary" tumblr believe that the images are authentic -- actual examples of wit and wisdom from the smartphone of the Secretary of State herself, instead of a gag by a couple of geeks.  (Yes, she submitted one herself.)  Has anyone noticed this?  Even if these people know better, some of the gushing I've seen ("I luv Hillary's texts LOL!") seems excessive; I don't think they're that funny.  But then, I liked the Downfall video.

Bring the Sentinel Home (Bring Him Home!)

A good many Americans rejoiced when Barack Obama became President, on the grounds that they no longer had a president who embarrassed them before the world. That didn't last long, not because Obama isn't embarrassing, but because his devotees will defend anything he says or does.

This one is relatively mild compared to his new Facebook ad promising to outbid any Republican candidate on aid to Israel; in fact it's more entertaining than embarrassing, much like many of Bush's stupidities, and to be thoroughly fair it's Secretary of State Clinton who's making a fool of herself before the world on her President's behalf: the US is asking Iran to return the RQ-170 Sentinel drone they captured.

"We are very clearly making known our concerns. We submitted a formal request for the return of our lost equipment, as we would in any situation. Given Iran's behaviour to date, we do not expect them to reply," she said.

She said that despite numerous "provocations" from Iran, the US would continue to pursue a "diplomatic approach".

("Provocations" is cute, when you consider the US' campaign against Iran, ranging from lies about its supposed nuclear weapons program -- perhaps Iran does have one, but the US has not presented any evidence that it does, in a performance reminiscent of Bush's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and no doubt with the same intention -- its probable involvement in the murder of Iranian scientists, and its support for terrorist attacks on Iran from Iraq. And PS: Obama eventually bit the bullet and asked Iran for the drone himself.)

What I kept thinking about whenever I'd hear about the downed drone was a similar event a decade ago: on April Fools' Day, 2001, a Chinese jet fighter and an American spy plane collided over the ocean near the Chinese coast. The Chinese pilot died at sea, but the American crew managed to land their damaged craft on Hainan Island, where they were kept for ten days. The scenario was familiar: the US denied that its plane was in Chinese airspace, the Chinese demanded a US apology for its espionage. The US chided China for being so mean. At first the US President responded belligerently to Chinese demands, but eventually he backed down and apologized, though a "senior administration official was quoted as saying 'What the Chinese will choose to characterize as an apology, we would probably choose to characterize as an expression of regret or sorrow.'" In any case, the crew were released on April 11. The Chinese dismantled the plane to examine its intelligence equipment, which the crew hadn't had time to destroy before their capture, and eventually returned the pieces by way of Russia. The plane was "reassembled and returned to duty."

Of course, if another country's military technology were to fall into our hands, the US would give it right back without peeking, wouldn't we? Of course not. When a Soviet pilot defected to the US in 1976 with his MiG-25 more or less intact, the US ignored Soviet anger, gave the pilot asylum and disassembled the plane before returning it to the USSR, learning a good deal about Soviet military technology in the process.

And so on. I'm old enough to remember when the Soviets shot down a U-2 American spy plane in 1960, though I don't remember much about it. Later I learned that the US felt comfortable denying the Soviet charges of high-altitude espionage because U-2 pilots were supposed to destroy their planes and commit suicide to avoid capture, so our government lied freely for several days before

[Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev sprang his trap and announced:

I must tell you a secret. When I made my first report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well… and now just look how many silly things [the Americans] have said.

Not only was Powers still alive, but his plane was also largely intact. The Soviets recovered the surveillance camera and even developed some of the photographs. The incident resulted in great humiliation for Eisenhower's administration, caught in a lie.

It couldn't have been too humiliating, for the US has continued to lie reflexively about sensitive matters right down to the present -- just like any government that has been caught, as it were, with its pants down. You know the Richard Pryor joke where he advises men caught cheating by their girlfriends or wives simply to deny it, saying, "Who are you going to believe, the man you love, or your lying eyes?"*

And of course, like parents, our Presidents exist to embarrass us. You want more?

It’s certainly true, as President Obama said, that many of the unethical and damaging acts of Wall Street were not illegal: thanks in large part to the orgy of de-regulation that took place in the Clinton era under Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Gary Gensler and others (also known as: Obama’s economic team). But — as even life-long Wall Street apologist Alan Greenspan admits — much of what was done by Wall Street was outright fraud. Even after the 1990s spasm of deregulation, fraud — e.g., representing debt instruments to the public as sound and top-grade while scorning them privately as toxic junk — is (as Greenspan pointed out) still very much illegal, criminal, under existing statutes.

*The joke is a lot older than that. It goes back at least to Stendhal's On Love:

Everybody in France knows the story of Mademoiselle de Sommery, who was caught in the very act by her lover and denied it brazenly. When he protested, she cried out, “Oh, well, I can see that you no longer love me – you would rather believe your eyes than what I tell you!”

I owe the quotation to Stephen Vicinczey's The Rules of Chaos (McCall, 1970) p. 169.

American Interests?

Glenn Greenwald has a good, if by-the-numbers piece on Obama's hypocrisy in condemning Iran for hypocrisy. It's good to have the quotations, but there's nothing really new in it; anyone who hasn't noticed Obama's hypocrisy either isn't paying attention, or doesn't want to see it.

Obligingly, an Obama apologist with the screen name JC Watts leapt into the fray. His rebuttal is also by-the-numbers, and it's worth looking at what he says for its incoherence as well as the way he regurgitates the familiar talking points.

The fact that Glenn is comfortable, no gleeful, in his assessment of false equivalence between President Obama and a Iranian theocracy, is stunning. But it shouldn't be. Glenn represents a type of liberalism that lost us every major election until Clinton. That allows chicken hawk republicans to call democratic war heroes cowards and get away with it. I have friend who believes in almost everything dems stand for and he still votes republican. Why? because when his dad came back from Vietnam dems spit on him. He can't get past it. Won't. Doesn't even try. Glenn is like those protesters.

Watts trips over his shoelaces in the first sentence, which on its face says that Greenwald was claiming a "false equivalence between President Obama and a Iranian theocracy." It's Watts who accuses Greenwald of declaring a "false equivalence" between Iran and the US -- "false equivalence" means that someone says two things are the same when they aren't. Greenwald was saying that the US and Iran claim to be different, but when it comes to a particular issue, namely supporting dictatorial states that kill their own people, they are more alike than different. So first off, Watts reveals that he doesn't know the terms he's using; he's probably parroting what he's heard from other loyalists. (Someone like the guy I discussed here, say.)

Second, which "democratic war heroes" does Watts have in mind? Not Obama; not Clinton. John Kerry was meant, I suppose, whose status as a hero is open to debate, as is that of the Republican "war hero" John McCain. Certainly George W. Bush had no war record to point to. Granted, attacking the Democrats as soft on Communism or terror is a popular Republican tactic, but the Democrats also use it when they can. But it's not at all obvious that Democratic presidential candidates have lost elections because of such accusations; it could be because of their economic policies, which they get from the Republicans. And what this has to do with Greenwald's criticism of Obama is far from clear. Again, Watts seems to have simply put together a word salad of Democratic talking points.

Third, Watts appeals to the right-wing urban legend of hippies spitting on returning Vietnam veterans. Hippies -- not "dems", unless they were wearing buttons "that said 'I AM A DEMOCRAT' to be sure he remembered which party spat on him". Several other commenters challenged Watts on the claim, which has never been documented and has been shown to be an urban legend, especially by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke in his book The Spitting Image (NYU Press, 1998). Ironically it's Watts who accepts Republican propaganda on all these matters, and posits that the only way to resist it is to refrain from any criticism whatever of Democrats. (I don't believe that would work.)

Watts goes on:

We aren't Iran, we haven't been and won't be again. But there are no saints amoung state actors. There are nothing but murders and people acting in the interests of their nation. Before people ask whether killing Al- was in our interests I will point out that unlike many other places on earth, including Iran, we have elections to determine who makes that call. We select someone to represent us and our we have to live with the consequences of those choices.

First off, of course, Iran does "have elections to determine who makes that call." Iranian elections are as corrupt as American ones, of course, but they do have them. And Watts appears to be the person who doesn't want to "have to live with the consequences of those choices," not even to acknowledge the consequences.

The key to this paragraph, though, is the remark that "there are no saints among state actors. There are nothing but murders and people acting in the interests of their nation." This is generally what state apologists say when confronted with undeniable evidence of atrocities by their nation: States aren't moral actors. Ironically, people who point this out about our own state -- Noam Chomsky or Greenwald himself, for example -- will be denounced as America-hating terrorist-loving traitors. It's only acceptable to point it out in order to excuse American crimes.

Greenwald replied to Watts, who countered that he was complaining that

your entire discourse, and I include here not simply this post but your continued hectoring of the President, is based on a first principle that the US government's role is to act morally or humanistically. It isn't. Why would it be? The obligation of nationhood is self propagation. They are neither moral nor immoral they are amoral, with their own interests as the only controlling factor.

Greenwald replied:

This is absolutely not my principle at all, let alone my "first principle."
If American political and media elites admitted that the country acts in its self-interest just like every other country, then I'd stop objecting to the constant stream of propaganda and deceit about America's moral superiority and exceptionalism. It's precisely because America does operate by self-interest like every other country - albeit with more aggression and violence -- that I find the propaganda so harmful.

Taken as a principle, though, this means that Watts can't consistently criticize the government of Iran, or Syria, or any other official enemy according to Obama. (Of course he doesn't care about consistency: defending the right of the United States and its god-king is all that matters.) You can't consistently attack other states for immorality and then defend your own state by saying that states are "amoral, with their own interests as the only controlling factor." (It would be more accurate to say that it is elites' interests, not those of the general population, that are the controlling factor, but who needs accuracy when you're defending a beleaguered President?) But this sort of waffling is common if not universal in nationalist propaganda.

Under questioning by other commenters, Watts naturally insisted that he didn't mean to say that Greenwald couldn't criticize Obama, but not very convincingly. Like so many Americans, he trumpeted American freedom of dissent compared to countries like Iran, but is hostile to any American who actually exercises that freedom. To criticize a Democrat, anyway.

Watts finally (so far) addressed Greenwald:

You are tilting at windmills or swinging at phantoms. Let me assure you Pols aren't coming with the customers. There are hoops you have to jump through in order to be elected in this country, in any country. Propaganda is one of them. Saying you believe in "American Exceptionalism," is like wearing a flag pin, or going to church, synagogue or mosque. Ubiquitous and necessary but not demonstrative of conviction.

And so on. Once again he undercut himself here, as so many Obamaristas do, for if "there are hoops you have to jump through to be elected in this country", then he can't criticize Republicans either. He also tacitly or unconsciously admitted that the real Obama (as opposed to the sweet-talking campaigner) is a hypocritical murderous thug. Not quite what he hoped to achieve, I daresay.

The Salon comment system is going haywire again (though obviously not for all the other people), or I might have put most of this in comments there. But it might be convenient to have this fine example of Obama apologetics collected in one place here.

Squandering Our Sanctimony

The Great and Powerful IOZ has been back from self-imposed exile for a few weeks now, but not (in my not-so-humble opinion) exactly on stride. His comment today on the conviction of American backpackers for espionage in Iran was pretty good, though:

Well, Hillary Clinton is disappointed, proving once more that while the poor Persians must make do with the Ghazal, our greatest, infinitely variable native poetic form is sanctimony. It is most likely that these poor nincompoops are exactly the Lonely Planet backpacker assjockeys that they claim to be, and yet for a country that runs several very public infinite interment camps, a country in possession of some of the world's more insane border controls, a country in which a number of internal states have passed hysterical papieren-bitte laws to counter the grave threat of Mexican hedge trimming to go deploring other nations for arresting illegal border-crossers is a bit rich.

Who Would Barack Bomb?

Glenn Greenwald wrote a useful post at Salon on Wednesday, mocking Secretary of State Clinton's warning that Iran may be in the process of becoming a military dictatorship.

Reuters, February 15, 2010: "The United States believes Iran's Revolutionary Guards are driving the country toward military dictatorship and should be targeted in any new U.N. sanctions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday. . . . 'We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship,' she said."

As Greenwald pointed out, this is laughable. It even got some laughs from her audience, according to one commentator he cites.

Half a century of American foreign policy flatly contradicts this sentiment (which is why Clinton heard soft chuckles and a few muffled guffaws as she spoke). The US has adored military dictatorships in the Arab world, and has long supported states dominated by the shadowy world of intelligence services. This became even more obvious after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Washington intensified cooperation with Arab intelligence services in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East are military and police states where men with guns rule, and where citizens are confined to shopping, buying cellular telephones, and watching soap operas on satellite television. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, as well as the entire Gulf region and other states are devoted first and foremost to maintaining domestic order and regime incumbency through efficient, multiple security agencies, for which they earn American friendship and cooperation. When citizens in these and other countries agitate for more democratic and human rights, the US is peculiarly inactive and quiet.

If Iran is indeed becoming a military dictatorship, this probably qualifies it for American hugs and aid rather than sanctions and threats. Clinton badly needs some more credible talking points than opposing military dictatorships. (Extra credit question for hard-core foreign policy analysts: Why is it that when Turkey slipped out of military rule into civilian democratic governance, it became more critical of the US and Israel?)

Of course the US adoration of military dictatorships is not limited to the Arab world. Honduras provided a recent reminder of that, to which the Obama administration responded with resounding waffling, but the whole Western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande has a pretty consistent history of military dictatorships we could do business with, and elected governments we couldn't. South Korea was ruled by military dictatorships for a quarter century, and the US has never been very comfortable since that happy state of affairs came to an end. So many "Free World" leaders when I was growing up just happened to be, if not Generals, then military men: Chiang Kai-shek, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Anastasio Somoza, Manuel Noriega, and numerous rulers of Argentina, among so many others. Typically, when Somoza's dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinistas, the US evacuated as many of his military thugs as possible for use against the new government.

For that matter, the Iranian revolution was barely over when the US began selling arms to Iran with Israel as the middle man, in hopes of bankrolling a military coup against the new regime that would return Iran to the bloody days of the Shah. Clinton's remarks seem more an expression of US wishes than a warning.

Clinton's current remarks also seem to represent a change from past US government propaganda on Iran. I mean, I thought that the Islamofascist Ayatollah Khameini and President Ahmadinejad were the bad guys who were trampling on Iranian democracy and threatening gallant little Israel with nuclear weapons, but according to the Reuters story,

Clinton later told reporters in Riyadh that she hoped "this is not a permanent change but that instead the religious and political leaders of Iran act to take back the authority which they should be exercising on behalf of the people."

If you're not used to government lying and obfuscation, you might think that Clinton here was endorsing the authority of Khameini and Ahmadinejad. Consistency and honesty are not part of the toolbox of Secretaries of State, nor of the Presidents they serve.

Doomed to Repeat It, Before It's Even History

President Obama ranted to the G20 Summit about Iran's nuclear program the other day. "Rant" is the right word, too. Where did Obama ever get his reputation as an effective speaker? Every time I hear him, I cringe: the hectoring tone, the mechanical Daddy-Won't-Stand-For-This-One-Second-Longer attitude. And when I read him, the obfuscations and lies drive me up the wall.

Numerous writers have been pointing out the errors in Obama's tirade (with this defender), but does he care? He's the President. For all I know he may have the support of most Americans on Iran (though not on Afghanistan, probably because we have American troops dying over there while we don't - yet -- in Iran; but does he care?), but he's still wrong. And I've known just how bad he was since I read his New York Daily News op-ed piece (via SteveB's comment under this article) from 2007 (see "discussion" here); it prepared me to be skeptical of him and his acolytes forever after. As I wrote in comments at A Tiny Revolution (no link to the comment, alas):

Reading SteveB's diary and the comments was interesting too; it made me notice some things about Obama's op-ed that I hadn't before. For example, Iran as a "challenge to American interests" -- "American interests" meaning, of course, the usual elite corporate interests. As Noam Chomsky likes to say, when national politicians and the media denounce "special interests" they mean working people, racial minorities, women, the elderly -- in short, the vast majority of the American population. By "the national interest" they mean the wealthy, the corporate, a tiny percentage of the population.

Bearing this in mind, the main threat to American interests in the Middle East is the government of the United States of America. It is also the main threat to peace in the Middle East, with Israel a close second. The foreign country most responsible for violence in Iraq, including arming Shi'a terrorists, is the United States of America. That Obama would single out Iran, in the face of this well-known reality, shows just how dangerous he is.

His insistence on diplomacy is not reassuring. Some of the Kos commenters yelled that Obama was calling for diplomacy, not war! But by chance I looked at Jon's post of April 19, 2007, in which he quoted George Bush saying, three days before the invasion of Iraq: "Tomorrow is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work..." Bush always pretended -- not very convincingly, of course -- that he only went to war because diplomacy had failed. (So did Clinton, so did Bush Sr.) So, who'd trust Obama? Not me.

There's another thing I've been meaning to mention here, from Whatever It Is I'm Against It, this quotation from an interview Obama gave to the Toledo Blade:

I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference.

It's not exactly new to hear Establishment figures (and you can't get much more Establishment than Barack Obama is now) deriding popular protests on any subject. Just stay at home, you silly-billies, and let us professionals work out the hard issues! Often you can tell by just how peeved they are that the protests are indeed making them feel the pressure. It's hard to say just how much effect the worldwide protests against globalization have, but it seems that they did support the heads of state who rebelled in the late 1990s against US domination of the IMF and WTO, and that is not a bad thing. Katha Pollitt once did a great piece in The Nation (March 16, 1998, though it's not on the site unless you're a subscriber -- you can see part of it here) about a small, well-organized protest during a "Town Hall meeting" (sound familiar?) at Ohio State University meant to drum up support for Bill Clinton's plan to bomb Iraq. It worked so well, to the consternation of Clinton himself, his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and CNN (who helped stage the spectacle) that heads of state from other countries declined to support US warmongering. "Global capitalism" isn't really an "abstraction" in the sense Obama means anyway: the protesters have very concrete notions about what they're against.

What's most offensive about Obama's statement is that, judging from his autobiography, his community organizing in Chicago was based more on his need for a job than for any clear sense of what was wrong and what needed to be done: rather, he went in to try to find something to protest. And even worse, his remarks are a slap in the face to his many earnest and idealistic supporters, who on his recommendation should have stayed home and pressured their city councils instead of joining the campaign of a cynical opportunist who made vague, pretty, and abstract promises that led them to believe he was more than just another politician on the make. Sorry, grassroots -- you were astroturf all along.