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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 11:37 am Post subject: Why We Must Break with the American Crazies - Sunday Times |
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i'm quite surprised to see this in the sunday times 
| Quote: | Why We Must Break with the American Crazies.
by Anatole Kaletsky, Sunday Times
When Gordon Brown returned from his fact-finding tour of Iraq on Monday, he proclaimed the importance of learning from our mistakes but also of looking forward instead of backward. Did this admission hint at a shift in Britain’s foreign policy when Mr Brown takes over in ten days’ time? To judge by the announcement he made in the next sentence - a restructuring of the British security apparatus to guard against future intelligence failures such as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction - the answer is “no”. Mr Brown’s foreign policy will remain as backward-looking and self-deluding as Tony Blair’s.
I say this with growing despair, because I too have returned from a fact-finding tour, to America. Viewed from across the Atlantic it is clear that the parochial British obsession with WMD and “sexed-up dossiers” bears no relationship to the catastrophes now unfolding in the Middle East and beyond - not only in Iraq, but also in Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan, and soon maybe Syria, Iran and Pakistan. What people are talking about in America is not whether the invasion of Iraq was legally or morally justified but why it went so disastrously wrong and whether the same blundering fanatics will launch another catastrophic military adventure, most likely a bombing campaign against Iran, to distract attention from failure in Iraq. After all, the neoconservative ideologues who still run the Bush Administration have nothing left to lose politically - and in their fevered imaginations they still think they could inflict military defeat on the “Islamofascists” in what they now see as an even greater historical confrontation than the Cold War.
While Mr Brown and the British media are still fretting about who said what to whom about WMD intelligence, the talk in American policy circles is about an article, The Case for Bombing Iran, published two weeks ago in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal and cited approvingly to anyone who cares to listen by officials close to Dick Cheney. Its author, Norman Podhoretz, is an intellectual mentor to the people who took America into Iraq. His self-explanatory message is that Iran today is more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany, since it could soon have nuclear weapons - and that Israel’s very existence is menaced now as never before.
It is significant that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, travelled to Washington at about the same time as the article was published to plead with congressmen “not to tie President Bush’s hands over Iran”. Also that John McCain, the only unequivocally pro-war presidential candidate, endorsed Podhoretz’s argument, stating that “the only thing more dangerous than attacking Iran is allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons” - and that Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, came out with a strikingly undiplomatic public statement, giving warning that “crazies in Washington” now seemed to be planning to repeat the Iraq disaster by attacking Iran.
To their credit, well-informed Americans, some even inside the Bush Administration, are now looking forward instead of backward, debating not what happened five years ago, but how to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and, even more urgently, how to prevent “the crazies” from starting another war. Instead of obsessively returning to now-irrelevant WMD and intelligence issues, Americans understand that the greatest scandal of the Iraq war was not its alleged justification but its conduct and the lack of preparation for the chaos that the invasion unleashed.
Compare the intelligence failures from which Mr Brown wants to draw his lessons with the facts - confirmed in numerous published memoirs - about this war’s irresponsible and incompetent conduct that are now common knowledge in America. For instance, General Anthony Zinni, the chief of US central command, war-gamed Iraq for more than a year before the invasion and every scenario he devised ended in a disaster, requiring many hundreds of thousands of US troops to bring it under control and remain in occupation for many years. Yet none of these scenarios was even considered by President Bush when he made the decision to invade.
Vice-President Cheney viewed the Iraq as a perfect opportunity to prove the “Rumsfeld doctrine” of low-manpower, shock-and-awe aerial warfare, without any need for the US to win allies or for the military to engage in “state-building” tasks.
There is now strong evidence that President Bush didn’t even know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims when he decided to attack Iraq - and that dissenting opinions were simply blocked by Mr Cheney before they could reach the President’s desk.
The State Department had prepared to send hundreds of diplomats and private sector construction experts with Arab-language skills and Middle East experience to help to rebuild Iraq. But less than a month before the war started, all these people were “stood down” on orders from Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as their Middle East experience would bias them towards an “Islamist” and defeatist worldview. The peremptory disbandment of the Iraqi Army and the Baath party, now regarded as the worst mistake of the immediate postwar period, was decided at the “highest level” in Washington and was then imposed against the advice of the US military governor Jay Garner, who quickly understood the anarchy that this would unleash.
The list of misjudgments and mistakes could go on and on, but my point should by now be obvious. The question Mr Brown must now ask himself is whether he can still allow himself to remain publicly allied to a US Administration that is so recklessly belligerent in its diplomatic conduct, so demonstrably incompetent in warfare and so irresponsibly dangerous to the peace of the world.
As the anarchy in Iraq goes from bad to worse and Washington’s only answer is to expand the circle of its aggression, clichés about the special relationship are no longer sufficient. Mr Brown must decide whether to remain a silent but active partner in this madness, whether to retreat quietly like the Italians, Poles and Spaniards or to develop a third and genuinely courageous option. This is to positively forestall further disasters by breaking publicly with the Bush Administration and trying to develop a genuine European alternative to the suicidal American-led policies, not only in Iraq, but also in Israel, Palestine and Iran. |
they had a quite good bit in yesterdays ft as well on gaza; maybe the tide is changing
| Quote: | Disaster in Gaza
Published: June 16 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 16 2007 03:00
The events leading up to the bloody takeover of Gaza by Hamas should be a matter for regret and, in many quarters, shame. No one, least of all Israel, should take any satisfaction from watching the Palestinian dream of an independent state dissolve into two failed statelets - Islamist Hamastan and a West Bank sliced up by Jewish settlements - contesting Israeli borders pushed deep into occupied Palestinian land.
As with everything to do with this emotionally turbo-charged conflict, everyone will distribute the blame for this tragic implosion according to political preference or prejudice: is it more the result of Israeli militarism or Palestinian paramilitarism; American fecklessness or European irrelevance?
It is all of the above, but it is analytically and morally wrong to start with the weakest party: the Palestinians under occupation and frequent military siege, and up against US diplomacy that, far from offering even-handed mediation, has backed whatever Israel has wanted.
That diplomacy, to use the term loosely, has operated from the false premise that the Palestinians, led by the late Yassir Arafat, were solely to blame for the collapse of the Oslo peace process of 1993-2000. Arafat was no statesman, and could never wholly abandon the gun. But it was the relentless expansion of the occupation that killed Oslo. The number of settlers in the West Bank rose 50 per cent in 1993-96, the peak of the peace process.
The targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants was also politically disastrous in killing off Israel's peace movement, even among Israelis who pointed out that Israel's response kills far more Palestinian civilians.
Palestinian leaders of all stripes are responsible for the collapse of their national project into quasi-tribal internecine war. But the Bush administration can add this mess to its catastrophic record in the Middle East. By imposing unrealistic preconditions, and then sanctions, on Hamas after its 2006 election victory, and then backing local Fatah warlords, it seemed actively to seek this violent outcome - another human disaster for the Palestinians.
There may be no way back. But if there is, it requires urgent Arab mediation to get Hamas and Fatah back into a caretaker government. That would call new, externally supervised elections, starkly confronting two visions: two states, Israel and Palestine, living securely side by side; or two hopeless statelets, sinking south to Somalia.
Israel should respond to what would surely be its last chance to embrace a two-states outcome, and thereby secure its own future. The Arab League offer, full peace for the return of occupied Arab land, must be pursued by the US and its allies, ideally through a credible mediator such as ex-president Bill Clinton or former US secretary of state James Baker. The Middle East will never be stable unless this is resolved.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007 |
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Lostinthestates
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
Location: Bethlehem, USA
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks Luke! Those are two excellent articles!!! |
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nekokate
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: West Yorkshire, UK
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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| The Times, it is a-changing. |
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