Greenland on Verge of Meltdown

Greenland on Verge of Meltdown

The complete collapse of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet -- which has a mean height of about two kilometres -- now appears inevitable, and could raise sea levels seven metres. "It's a sobering message, I think," says Tim Lenton, of the School of Environmental Sciences at Britain's University of East Anglia.


Lenton's research group surveyed climate and glacial experts around the world and the consensus is that the recent evidence shows that rising temperatures will soon reach the Greenland Ice Sheet's "tipping point", where it will break up within 300 years, raising sea levels by seven metres and flooding millions out their homes long before the year 2300.


Recent calculations show the Greenland collapse could be triggered by temperature rise of just 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. This is an example of what scientists call a "non-linear response", in which a small change can make a big difference, more commonly described as "tipping points".


And this point is coming much sooner than it looks. Due to a time lag in the atmospheric warming response, even if there were no more greenhouse gas emissions from this day forward, temperatures would still rise another 0.6 degrees Celsius.


"I don't want to say the Greenland meltdown is inevitable, but it will be very difficult to avoid," Lenton told IPS. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, believes that without drastic international efforts, a sea level rise of up to five metres is possible before the end of this century. "In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century," Hansen wrote in the Jul. 25 issue of New Scientist magazine.

Help End Dick Cheney's Quagmire in Iraq

Help End Dick Cheney's Quagmire in Iraq

Heritage Foundation finds the enemy: it's the CIA

Robert Dreyfuss:

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation makes its contribution to the global war on terror by finding the real enemy -- no, not bin Laden. It's the CIA.


Rowan Scarborough and John Edward Hilboldt will tell us how the CIA is the bad guys. The name of the panel is called: "Sabotage--America's Enemies Within the CIA." The title comes from a book of the same name by Scarborough, a former writer for the Washington TImes.


The blurb for the event says:


"Significant elements within the CIA are undermining both the President and national security through leaks, false allegations, and outright sabotage. ... Using sources in all levels of national security – from field officers to high-ranking analysts to former intelligence heads – Scarborough presents a disturbing picture of partisan politics endangering the success of our campaigns abroad and the very lives of our soldiers and agents. In his view, the agency has become increasingly political and digressed from its job of being a scrupulously nonpartisan collector of facts."


You might have thought that it was the Bush administration and Vice President Cheney who've been twisting facts, leaning on the CIA to get in line with the prefabricated analysis that led to the war in Iraq. But no.

Forced Sex and Labor Trafficking in the U.S.

AlterNet

We like to think of slavery in America as something consigned to history books, a dark chapter set in Southern cotton plantations and the hulls of ships set sail from Africa. Flor Molina wishes this were true.


For part of the year in 2003, Molina, a 29-year-old Mexican, was held against her will and forced to work in a factory in southern California, making dresses from 5:30 in the morning until 11 at night, seven days a week. She was not allowed to leave the factory or take a shower; she shared a small bed with another woman in the back of the shop. If she didn't sew fast enough, her boss would pull her hair, pinch and slap her.


"If we wouldn't do what she [her employer] said, she told us somebody who we love would pay the consequences," says Molina, a small woman with steady dark eyes and black hair that falls below her waist. "She told me she could kill me and no one would ask her for me. She told me dogs have more rights than I have in this country."


Molina is one of tens of thousands of people trafficked into the U.S. from other countries and forced to work against their will. They come here primarily from El Salvador, Mexico, Korea and China, but in any country where people are desperate for jobs they're prey to the allure of a mythic, prosperous U.S.


About 80 percent of those enslaved are women, pawns in the fastest-growing and one of the largest criminal industries in the world, second only to the drug trade and tied with the arms trade. With an estimated 800,000 people trafficked across all international borders each year, the shadow industry is estimated to generate $31.6 billion in profits annually.


There is a perception, propagated in large part by mainstream media, that slavery in the U.S. occurs mostly in the guise of forced prostitution. But the majority of trafficking victims are people who may be sewing our clothes, picking our crops, washing dishes in our restaurants, cleaning our motel rooms and building our homes and office buildings. They may be enslaved as domestic servants in our neighbors' homes.

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

The Observer

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis.


[..]A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.


Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

Turkey Still Massed on Iraqi Kurdish Border

Djelloul Marbrook

One of the events that has overtaken General Petraeus’ report—remember, he has already told the BBC we need to stay 18.jpgput—is the positioning of 160,000 Turkish troops along Iraq’s northern border. This may well prove to be the event that overtakes everything else.


Turkey, a Sunni nation and a member of NATO, has been telling the government of Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad for more than a year now that it must curb pan-Kurd ambitions in northern Iraq. The situation is far more volatile than the press has described. The Shias have their own militias. The Kurds have the well-trained Pesh Merga, which is in fact a standing army. But Iraq’s Sunnis have only their tribes. That in itself is enough to explain Sunni concerns.


The Kurds would like to see an independent Kurdistan. Considering the large Kurdish minorities in Iran and Turkey, it is not difficult to see why Shia Iran and Sunni Turkey are worried. Short of independence, the Kurds would like a semi-autonomous Kurdistan, which would contain Mosul’s rich oil fields. The Kurds could then continue to agitate for a greater Kurdistan, perhaps even arming militants inside Iran and Turkey.


Where does this leave us? In the soup, where we have been from the beginning. Consider these combustibles:


—Turkey has not set foot on Arab land since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.


— Iran and Turkey are traditional enemies. Iran would feel as threatened by an expanded border with Turkey as the Arabs feel threatened by a militant Iran.


—The Sunni Arabs have more in common with the Turks than they have with the Iranians, but the reappearance of Turkish soldiers on Arab land would be viewed with alarm.


—There are more than 100 million people in the world of Turkish origin. Turkey, a secular nation with an Islamist party in power, regards itself as the protector of these people. There are large Turkish minorities in Iran and Afghanistan, and people of Turkish origin are spread throughout Central Asia.


—Turkey has no oil, but it is host to oil pipelines. Moving into northern Iraq would give Turkey control of its oil fields. The Turks would say they have come only to stabilize the situation, but that is our story too, and we have already witnessed how many people in the world believe us.


If we are soon presented with a situation in which Turkey has as many troops in Iraq as we do it will change the entire equation, and yet the Washington establishment—the press, the government, the think tanks, the industry lobbyists—are all silent about an eventuality that would change everything in a thin minute.

Bhutto: Democracy is the Hope of Pakistan

OpinionJournal

Ms. Bhutto offers what amounts to a double diagnosis of Mr. Musharraf's problems, one narrowly political, another fundamentally philosophical.


On the political front, she says, Mr. Musharraf "has had a set of partners since 2002, the last elections, and it's under those partners that extremism has spread in the country. Now as these negotiations have been going on with the Pakistan People's Party, that group is worried that it's going to lose control. . . . So they are trying to jettison the return to democracy."


According to this analysis, Mr. Musharraf's problem, in effect, is that he is attempting to oblige two opposite constituencies: on the one hand, Islamic political parties, on whom he depends for parliamentary support and as a bulwark against Pakistan's democratic forces; on the other hand, the U.S., on whom he also depends for financial support, international legitimacy and a genuinely shared interest in combating Al Qaeda (though not necessarily lesser terrorist groups).


Not without reason, Ms. Bhutto sees herself as the solution to Mr. Musharraf's problems, provided he's willing to come to terms with her various demands. "In Pakistan there are two fault lines," she says. "One is dictatorship versus democracy. And one is moderation versus extremism. So while we are on opposite sides of the spectrum on the one end we have something in common on the other end. So we have been meeting with Gen. Musharraf to see how we could agree on a plan to move Pakistan in the direction of credible elections and the restoration of a truly democratic government."


But Ms. Bhutto also offers a more subtle and cohesive analysis for what she describes as Mr. Musharraf's "ambiguity of policies" toward Islamic extremism. "The military regime," she argues, "needs the threat of Al Qaeda and the militants to justify military rule, to justify the derailment of democracy . . . and also because it brings the money in. You see, if there is no threat, there is no money."


This is not an idle theory. As Ms. Bhutto accurately recounts, U.S. assistance to Pakistan has followed a stop-go pattern for over 50 years, often to disastrous effect. Aid flowed in the 1950s and '60s, when Pakistan was seen as an ally against the Soviet Union and Soviet-tilting India. (Gary Francis Powers's U-2 spy plane, which was shot down by the Soviet Union in May 1960, took off from an airbase near Peshawar.) It dried up in the 1970s, a period when Ms. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, dominated Pakistan's political scene until his execution at the hands of his successor.


Aid resumed in the 1980s, when the U.S. needed Pakistan to wage a proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. It evaporated again after the war, when Pakistan was sanctioned by the U.S. for its nuclear programs. And it resumed again when Pakistan was called into service against Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, 2001.


Now prominent American voices--a certain U.S. Senator from Illinois among them--are calling for a new hard line against Pakistan, including unilateral U.S. military action in the tribal areas. How does Ms. Bhutto feel about Barack Obama's tough-guy act?


She grimaces. "I was disturbed by his comments. And I was disturbed because any unilateral attack will unite all Pakistanis together because they will see it as a threat against our country."


What Ms. Bhutto proposes instead is for Pakistan itself to do more. "We'd like to work closely with NATO and the United States in eliminating militancy," she says. "But I think enough effort hasn't been made by Pakistan on its own in those areas. . . . If the government had the consistent and persistent will to take them on then I think government writ can be established."


Ms. Bhutto is unimpressed with suggestions that the tribal areas are simply too wild to govern or police: She claims she cleaned out drug barons--as violent and heavily armed then as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are today--from the area in the late 1980s. It's part of her larger complaint against Mr. Musharraf's government and what she charges are its ongoing links to extremists.


"Whether Gen. Musharraf is colluding in what is happening, or whether he is ineffective in dealing with it . . . the net result is the same," she says. "And what has really bothered me from the very beginning is the type of people around Gen. Musharraf." She gives the example of Brigadier Ijaz Shah, who runs Pakistan's intelligence bureau: "Brigadier Shah and the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] recruited Omar Sheikh, who killed Danny Pearl. So I would feel very uncomfortable making the intelligence bureau, which has more than 100,000 people underneath it, run by a man who worked so closely with militants and extremists."


Ms. Bhutto also raises hard questions about the long chain of decisions leading up to the Red Mosque showdown. "Three years ago when [mosque ringleader Abudl Rashid] Ghazi was arrested bringing weapons into Islamabad to store at the Red Mosque, the minister of religious affairs had him freed. There is no question of the Homeland Security officer in America, for example, releasing terrorists who are caught with weapons."


What does all this portend for Pakistan? Ms. Bhutto is by turns hopeful and despondent. "Pakistan is still caught in a time warp, it is still the same battle lines between the modernizers and the extremists. But unfortunately the long period of military rule has emboldened the extremists. . . . I think it is just a matter of five to 10 years, if they continue building as many militant headquarters as they have in the last five years, it may be too late. They have been building and building and building."


The remedy to all this, says Ms. Bhutto, is democracy, plain and simple. She does not believe that Pakistani society has become more illiberal in its political outlook, despite the almost metastatic growth of radical madrassas (religious schools) in recent years. On the contrary, she argues that the increasing--and increasingly unrestrained--power of militants to compel or kill ordinary people to get what they want has created a huge backlash, one that could make itself felt at the ballot box if people are given the chance to vote their consciences. Radicals and militants, she says, recalling the fate of the moderate Mensheviks at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1917, "are not enough to tilt an election. But they are enough to unleash against the population, to rig an election, to kidnap police, to kill the army, and therefore to make it possible to take over the state."


Ms. Bhutto plans to return to Pakistan quite soon, perhaps within a matter of weeks. She worries that Mr. Musharraf could have her arrested, or that he will declare a state of emergency (as it seems he was nearly prepared to do this week), or that he will use brazen or subtle methods to rig the elections. She is plainly confident that her party will score big at the polls if given a fair chance, and that, whether as prime minister or from behind the scenes, she will be at its helm. In a life marked by the sharpest reversals of fortune, it's another turn of, and at, the wheel.


Mr. Stephens writes "Global View," The Wall Street Journal's foreign affairs column.

Informed Comment Global Affairs

Our anxiety and mistrust for our most valuable ally in the global war on terrorism comes from the same fear and incomprehension with which we perceive the broader Muslim world. Our news coverage, after all, shows us little besides faces contorted into masks of rage, mosques turned into fortresses of hate, and the aftermath of yet another bomb blast. Our support for “democratization” will remain nominal until we learn to look beyond the dictates of conventional wisdom and the confines of a pre-destined clash of civilizations. We must know, understand, trust and dialogue with the global community of Muslims


Instead of reducing this sprawling, diverse, multi-denominational and multi-cultural nation to nothing more than a caricature of its madrasas and tribal chieftans, US policy must explicitly support immediate and full democracy in Pakistan. As we continue to insist on a flat, binary world of those with us or against us; as we continue to distrust those masses populating the streets of Pakistan; as we continue to believe that the only outcome to an election in Pakistan will be power for the extremists, we ignore the birth of a real and pure movement for democracy – and we ignore it at our peril.


We have to practice what we preach. Our weapons against extremism are democracy, civil society, a free press and the rule of law, not support for military dictators.

Facism in America?

Brief flash movie.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Glenn C. Loury in Boston Review

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.


Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.


How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.


[..] The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:


"The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes). "


[..]This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.


Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow.


[..]Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:


"Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods."


The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.


So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.


[..]The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.


[..]Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.


Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.


Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other.


[..]Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.


Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.


Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other.


[..]Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do. MORE

More on Ethnic Cleansing in 1948 Israel

United Press International

The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror.


Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.”


Textbooks for Jewish Israelis in the same grade make no such verbal concession. But Israel’s “new wave” historians have been combing through fresh material now available from the British mandate period and Israeli archives that document the history of Israel before and after it became a state. Long-lasting myths are being debunked.


Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and Haifa University lecturer, whose ninth book is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” documents how Israel was born with lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years.


During the British mandate (1920-1948), Zionist leaders concluded Palestinians, who owned 90 percent of the land (with 5.8 percent owned by Jews), would have to be forcibly expelled to make a Jewish state possible. Pappe quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, addressing the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, as saying, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”


Pappe outlines Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), which followed earlier plans A, B and C, and included forcible expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians from both urban and rural areas with the objective of creating by any means necessary an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab presence. The methods ranged from a campaign of disinformation -- “get out immediately because the Jews are on their way to kill you” -- to Jewish militia attacks to terrorize the Palestinians.


The first Jewish militia attacks, says Pappe, began before the May 1948 end of the British mandate. In December 1947 two villages in the central plain -- Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa -- were raided, and their panicked Palestinian inhabitants fled. Jewish leaders gave the order to drive out as many Palestinians as possible on March 10, 1948. The terror campaign ended six months later. Pappe writes 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities were emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants.


There is no doubt in Pappe’s mind that Plan D “was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.”


Plan Dalet began in the rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains halfway on the road to Tel Aviv, according to Pappe. It was called Operation Nachshon, and served as a model for massive expulsions using terror tactics. Pappe also details what he calls the “urbicide of Palestine” that included attacking and cleansing the major urban centers of Tiberias, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Safad and what he calls the “Phantom City of Jerusalem” once Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied its western Arab neighborhoods in April 1948. The British did not interfere.
MORE

Ethnic Cleansing Continues in Israel Against Arab Israelis

Building permits anywhere else are designed to protect the naive home owner from shoddy building practices. But in Israel, it serves another purpose. Concerned about the growing proportion of Arab Israelis in Israel, the government uses building permits and razing of housing without them as a form of ethnic cleansing.
Since 1948, the official government policy of Israel has been to ensure a Jewish state. With the birth rate higher among Arabs, they will fail in this endeavor unless they more aggressively drive Arab Israelis out of their country.
Clearly, Israel runs a virtual apartheid, keeping Arab citizens as second class class citizens in their own country and driving out as many as they can.
The Daily Star

Six months pregnant and exhausted, British mother Jessica Barhoum is still shocked that Israeli authorities ordered her, her husband and their baby out of bed at daybreak and pulverized their home. "I can't believe that it's lawful, that this law exists. I'm from England. Do you know what I mean?" asked Jessica, 32, who grew up in the southern city of Salisbury but moved to Israel after marrying Moussa, her Arab Israeli husband. "You can't believe a country like this would make a law against its own citizens," she added.


For the last four decades, Israeli legislation has permitted the demolition of homes built without a construction permit, the case for the Barhoums' home in the village of Ein Rafa, west of Occupied Jerusalem, although a permit was pending.


Critics say the law is disproportionately used against Arab Israelis rather than Jewish Israelis. Permits can take years to acquire, particularly for Palestinians wanting to build in Israeli-occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.


Jessica, a landscape gardener who also holds Swiss nationality, converted to Islam before marrying and moving to her husband's village, giving birth to their daughter Sara and learning to speak nearly fluent Arabic and Hebrew.


Last week she watched in disbelief as two bulldozers with pneumatic drills implemented an 18-month-old demolition order against their home, which Moussa spent eight years building on land owned by his family.


Armed Israeli security forces woke them up at 5:00 a.m. Jessica said she was given five minutes to get out. Her daughter screamed and her husband was arrested as clearers stuffed some of their possessions into plastic bags before the bulldozers pulverized the two-bedroom house and vegetable patch into rubble.

Pat Tillman's Death and the Fog of War

The fog of war is a frequent topic in the media these days. There is a dirty little secret about war that is beginning to emerge from the Pat Tillman debacle. It's beginning to look like Pat Tillman was murdered by his comrades while the platoon was under fire by the enemy. It appears that the cover-up began with the platoon, spread to commanding officers, through the Army investigative team, through the command structures right into Rumsfeld office. The higher command, recognizing the high profile nature of Pat Tillman, an NFL football star, rather than tarnish the image of US soldiers in the field, it was decided to paint him as a hero and cover up fratricide. A murder in war time becomes a propaganda tool to protect an illegal war.
The real consequences of war has been covered up by every participant throughout history. The soldier in the field covers his shame for participating, the officer covers to ensure his career advances, top officers cover to protect the image of the soldier in the field, politicians cover to protect the political fall out.
War is hell, more hellish than most of us ever knew. The dirty little secret is all war has been and always will be just like this glimpse we get in this one incident. There have been many recent chapters, including Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha, and many more untold stories.
Forbes.com

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.


"The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.


The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.


[..]Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, who has long suggested that her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said she is still looking for answers and looks forward to the congressional hearings next week.


"Nothing is going to bring Pat back. It's about justice for Pat and justice for other soldiers. The nation has been deceived," she said.


The documents show that a doctor who autopsied Tillman's body was suspicious of the three gunshot wounds to the forehead. The doctor said he took the unusual step of calling the Army's Human Resources Command and was rebuffed. He then asked an official at the Army's Criminal Investigation Division if the CID would consider opening a criminal case.


[..]It has been widely reported by the AP and others that Spc. Bryan O'Neal, who was at Tillman's side as he was killed, told investigators that Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" again and again.


But the latest documents give a different account from a chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman was killed.


The chaplain said that O'Neal told him he was hugging the ground at Tillman's side, "crying out to God, help us. And Tillman says to him, `Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God's not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling ..."

Must read article by Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother, and also an Army Ranger.

New Poll From Mulsim Countries Finds Views Moderating

Most Muslim countries have been moderating their views towards suicide bombing and Osama bin Ladin. However, signs of impending conflict predominated Lebanese and Palestinian populations.
IPS News

Ironically, while 61 percent of Lebanese felt that Fouad Siniora's national government had "a good influence on the way things are going," only six percent were satisfied with the state of the nation. In the Palestinian territories, a slight majority believed the government had a positive influence on current conditions, yet only six percent were satisfied with the state of affairs. Only a quarter of respondents in both countries were "satisfied with their own life."


In Lebanon, 70 percent of those surveyed viewed crime as a "very big problem", while 75 percent believed corrupt leaders constituted one the most pressing national problems. In Palestinian territories, 73 percent viewed political corruption as main concern.


Egypt, led by President Hosni Mubarak, rated least favourably of all Middle Eastern countries polled, with a meagre 13 percent of respondents stating they approved of the national government.


While the Pew survey generally focused on the mood of respondents in developing countries as a result of economic growth and their hope for a brighter future, in the Middle East, the general tenor of questions reflected more sensational topics of Islamic extremism, support for suicide bombing, and confidence in international terrorist Osama bin Laden.


In Lebanon, just 34 percent of Muslims surveyed said that suicide bombings are often or sometimes justified, compared to 74 percent who expressed the same view in 2002. Only eight percent of those polled in Egypt believed suicide bombing was justified, as did 11 percent in Morocco.


In contrast, 41 percent of Palestinians said such attacks are often justified while another 29 percent said it can sometimes be justified. The poll was conducted between April and May, before Hamas took over the Gaza Strip following violent clashes with Fatah.


The survey also reflected declining support -- identified as "Muslim confidence" -- for Osama bin Laden. The percentage of Jordanian Muslims who support bin Laden dropped from 56 percent in 2003 to just 20 percent in 2007. Support for bin Laden also fell sharply in Lebanon, plummeting to one percent from 20 percent in 2003.


But "few consistent demographic patterns emerge in Muslim attitudes toward suicide bombing," according to the report.


The opinion of the United States in the Muslim world also remains abysmal, as overwhelming majorities in those countries say they "are very or somewhat worried that the U.S. could be a military threat," according to the report. Muslims in Bangladesh (93 percent) and Morocco (92 percent) are most concerned that the U.S. could become a military threat. Surprisingly, in Turkey -- a U.S. NATO ally -- 77 percent of those polled viewed the U.S. as a significant threat.


While the international showdown over Iran's nuclear programme looms, publics in just nine of the 47 countries surveyed most often named Iran as the greatest threat to their own countries. In the Middle East, 52 percent of Kuwaitis, 46 percent of Jordanians, and 42 percent of Lebanese viewed Iran as a threat to their country. Yet even larger majorities of Egyptians (85 percent), Jordanians (81 percent), and Lebanese (74 percent) cited Israel as a great future threat to their countries.


The survey also reflected increased concern by Muslims in the Middle East over sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.


Eighty-eight percent of Muslims in Lebanon, and significant majorities in Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories believed the tensions between Sunnis and Shias had increased, and that the war in Iraq had exacerbated this tension.


In Lebanon, a majority of Christians (56 percent) and Sunni Muslims (59 percent) named Iran as Lebanon's greatest threat, compared with just 8 percent of Shia Muslims.


The Islamist political organization Hezbollah was cited as a top threat by 66 percent of Christians and 33 percent of Sunnis in Lebanon, while only 7 percent of Shia Muslims viewed the movement as a threat.

Personal vs Collective Self-Interest

How to Save the World
But Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki, who went to such pains to explain in his book the need for a surveyed 'crowd' to be objective and independent of 'groupthink' (if their collective perspectives are to be truly wise), points out in this week's New Yorker that the self-interest of individuals, taken collectively, can be very different from the collective self-interest of the group as a whole.
As an example he notes that, in a market 'undistorted' by regulation, people choose to buy large, gas-gulping, clumsy vehicles (SUVs and light trucks) -- because they (mistakenly, as Malcolm Gladwell points out) believe they are safer, that if your car is bigger and heavier than the other guy's, in an accident you will fare better. But when asked if they would favour regulations that ban such vehicles, they overwhelmingly say yes.
Another example that was reported recently is that, while the majority of business owners want less social and environmental regulation of their industry (because they think it puts them at a competitive disadvantage versus countries that lack such regulation), an overwhelming number would not only support, but would actually prefer, strong social and environmental regulations on business provided they were across-the-board (affecting every competitor equitably) and rigorously enforced.
We can see examples of this everywhere. The expressed self-interest of individual buyers in the absence of regulation is very different from their acknowledged collective self-interest in an equitably regulated environment. It's not regulation we hate -- in our modern crowded society we could not live without regulation (sorry, libertarians, though I like the idea); it's inequitable regulation, and regulation that is clearly arbitrary and not in the collective self-interest, that we are opposed to.
And because of our (often deliberately fostered) skepticism about the competence of government to do anything effectively (and about its honesty), we tend to believe that all regulations will necessarily be inequitable and 'selectively applied'.
So given that skepticism, we tend to prefer to pursue our (unregulated) personal self-interest, and shrug off the fact that our collective self-interest would be better served if that personal self-interest were restricted, and altered, by effective, honest regulation.
Unequivocably anti-regulation forces (the corporatists) prey off this skepticism, playing us off against each other, and profiting from the inequities and the selective application and non-enforcement of regulations. And laugh all the way to the bank.
Bush's orders to regulators not to enforce the law, and to dismantle regulations, have therefore gone largely unchallenged, except by a few brave whistle-blowers, who promptly lost their jobs.
The bottom line is that we need to restore integrity to government, and restore authority to regulators to uphold and enforce regulations equitably and not arbitrarily, before we have any hope of persuading citizens to vote for their collective self-interest over their personal self-interest.
We're smart enough to know that the collective self-interest is better for all of us. The question is whether we're smart enough and committed enough to fix the shattered hulk of dismantled, corrupted North American governments (I can't speak for Europe's governments, though I sense that regulations there are stronger and more or less intact), so that they can make regulation work effectively again in our collective self-interest.

$100 a Barrel Oil Coming?

Looks like $100 a barrel oil is coming our way unless Saudi Arabia opens it's spigots to increase the world's supply of oil. Even if they do, any major disruption of oil production anywhere will result in unprecedented oil prices. Here in the US, with discretionary income diverted to energy costs and crashing home equity, the risk of deflation will loom. Few middle income families will have the money to spend on much anything.
International Herald Tribune

The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away. Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the largest brokerage firm, said that $95 crude was quite likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increased production and that declining inventories were raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets said $100 a barrel could come as soon as next year.


[..]A record number of options have been sold that give the buyer the right to buy crude oil at $100. The contracts, covering 50 million barrels, pay off only if oil were to go above the target price.


[..]Currie, Goldman's global head of commodities research in London, is predicting that oil prices will probably touch a record high and stay at unprecedented levels for months or years. The all-time high for the benchmark Nymex crude future is $78.40 a barrel on July 14, 2006. "Ultimately, the key to the outlook going forward is when will Saudi Arabia ramp up production," he said in an interview. "If you have a situation in which inventories globally get drawn to critically low levels, the volatility in this market is likely to explode, which significantly increases the probability of $100 oil."


[..]Oil prices could triple in three months to more than $200 a barrel, given the right circumstances, according to Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons, a Houston investment bank.

The Truth About Israel

During the 1948–49 War, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs fled Israel and were settled in refugee camps near Israel's border. Why did they leave? Conventional knowledge would have it that they left voluntarily or at the encouragement of Arab leaders.
Can you really think anyone would voluntarily leave their home, or any respectable Arab leader would deliberately create a refugee problem on their border with a hostile power? I don't think so. They left because of terror, the same sort of terror that has accompanied every war of conquest in world history.
TruthDig

This is the story that Israel's leaders and Jews throughout the Diaspora have clung to for more than half a century. But since the early 1990s a new generation of Israeli historians and investigative journalists--drawing on formerly classified documents as well as recollections of Israeli leaders of the War of Independence--has demolished the traditional Israeli position.


According to their research, the Palestinians fled their villages not in response to a call from Arab leaders but because of a concerted campaign of terror--including massacres and rape--perpetrated by military units of the newly declared Israeli state.


As Gideon Levy, a leading columnist from Haaretz, put it, "1948 was Israel's finest hour, the culmination of a mad dream: the formation of an independent Jewish state." At the same time he declared, "it was our darkest hour, in which we committed war crimes on a large scale. And did so in all good conscience."


The key point, often overlooked, is that in 1948, Resolution 181 of the U.N. General Assembly didn't just call for the creation of the single state of Israel from the British mandate of Palestine. In fact, it recommended dividing Palestine into two separate countries--one predominately Arab, the other Jewish--to be joined by an economic union.

Why would Israel and the US perpetrate this myth? Are the Jews of the Diasporia more worthy refugees than the Palestinians? Is this a matter of prejudice? Has one of the results of the Holocaust undermine the moral fabric of Jews fleeing Hitler that they identified with the aggressor and became like him: any means necessary to justify not just survival, but any risk to it?

Turkish Election Leans the Army Away from Iraq

TURKEY’S mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has won an impressive election for a second term. This would appear to enhance the future of Turkish democracy and away from a military coop. Turkey would also appear to be headed towards membership talks with the European Union (EU).

Erdogan’s party had won 47% of the vote—a dramatic 12-point rise from the 34% that got him to office in 2002. Laying claim to 340 of the 550 seats in parliament the AK party can comfortably form a government alone. But it failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to amend the country's authoritarian constitution, drawn up by the armed forces when they last seized power in 1980.


With all of the ballots counted unofficial results suggested that Mr Erdogan’s party had won 47% of the vote—a dramatic 12-point rise from the 34% that got him to office in 2002. Laying claim to 340 of the 550 seats in parliament the AK party can comfortably form a government alone. But it failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to amend the country's authoritarian constitution, drawn up by the armed forces when they last seized power in 1980.


[..]The other big challenge facing the government is the upsurge in Kurdish separatist violence in the southeastern provinces bordering Iran and Iraq. The army has been backed by the CHP and the MHP in calls for a cross-border operation against some 3,500 rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. A large invasion would damage Turkey's relations with America and the EU and could scare foreign investors who control 70% of the shares traded by the Istanbul stock exchange. Worse, Turkey could get mired in conflict in Iraq. It will take all of Mr Erdogan's skills to resist pressure to go into Iraq. He will need all the help he can get from America to get the Iraqi Kurdish leadership to clamp down on the PKK.

However, the Turkish, Iranian border is like northern Pakistan. It's heavily mountainous limiting the usefulness of heavy armor and sports many hiding places for guerrilla fighters. The Turkish army may well bog down in a quagmire in Iraq.
AlterNet

Hiding in the high mountains and deep gorges of one of the world's great natural fortresses are bands of guerrillas whose presence could provoke a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq and the next war in the Middle East.


After the election, Ankara may find it impossible to retreat from the bellicose rhetoric of recent weeks and will send its troops across the border, even if the incursion is only on a limited scale.


[..]If the Turkish army does invade, it will not find it easy to locate the PKK guerrillas. Their main headquarters is in the Qandil mountains which are on the Iranian border but conveniently close to Turkey. It is an area extraordinarily well-adapted for guerrilla warfare where even Saddam Hussein's armies found it impossible to penetrate.


[..]The scale of the fighting is small. Pejak launches sporadic raids into Iranian Kurdistan. The PKK stages ambushes and bombings in Turkey and has escalated its attacks this year, killing at least 67 soldiers and losing 110 of its own fighters according to the Turkish authorities. But this limited skirmishing could have an explosive impact. The attacks provide an excuse for Turkish action against an increasingly independent Iraqi Kurdish state. "They [the Turks] want an excuse to overturn what has been achieved in Iraqi Kurdistan," says Mr Dezayee. A referendum is to be held in northern Iraq by the end of 2007 under which the oil city of Kirkuk may vote to join the KRG. The incentive for a Turkish invasion is growing by the day.


"Everything depends on the result of the Turkish election," says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi Kurdish politician.


If the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wins a two-thirds majority then the pressure for an invasion may be off. But if he believes he lost votes because his anti-PKK and Turkish nationalist credentials were not strong enough then he might want to burnish them by ordering a cross border incursion.


The lightly armed PKK, knowing every inch of the mountainous terrain at Qandil, will be able to evade Turkish troops. But the Iraqi Kurds worry that they and not the PKK are the real target of the Turkish army. After making so many threats before the election, Turkey may find it difficult to back off without looking weak.

Katrina Families Still in Distress

The Bush Administration has engaged in the most incredibly blatant demonstration of class warfare I can recall in my adult life. The poor people of New Orleans were always expendable and they continue to be.
Despite the media hue and cry initially, insufficient efforts continue. Children and families continue to suffer in poisonous FEMA trailers, in need of basic services, too many without school, without extended family support, without treatment for traumatic stress disorders.
Psychiatry News

Children were especially hard hit by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, traumatized by loss of their homes and communities and separation from families and friends, said Joy Osofsky, Ph.D., clinical director of Louisiana Spirit and a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry, and public health at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) School of Public Health. Louisiana Spirit offers crisis counseling to child and adolescent hurricane survivors in the state.


For children, distress varied with age; their history of trauma and loss; support received from family, school, and community; and by the trauma they experienced directly. All of this was compounded by pre-existing or subsequent poverty.


"These children were resilient if they were supported by their family and community, but those supports were devastated by the storm," said Osofsky. "The old networks of extended families were lost."


The LSUHSC, in collaboration with school systems, has screened 12,000 children, asking about their experiences and feelings in the wake of the storm. About 46 percent of the children interviewed were African American, 44 percent were white, 4 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent other.


By spring 2007, a majority of New Orleans students were still not back in the schools they had attended before the storm. They had moved an average of three times since the storm. Only 41 percent lived in their own homes while 27 percent lived in trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Half of these children had an unemployed parent, 45 percent had homes that were destroyed, and 90 percent had seen hurricane-related damage. Some still don't know where members of their extended families are.


In fall 2006, 41 percent of fourth through 12th graders continued to meet the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) cutoff score indicating a need for mental health services, though only 5 percent had actually received such services.


Among 787 younger children five months after the storm, 32 percent met the cutoff score for referral to mental health services, and 44 percent of parents had asked for counseling services. The LSU team reinterviewed 184 of those parents about 15 months after Katrina and found no significant changes in the children's mental health or the parents' desire for counseling services.

Arab States Supporting the Insurgency in Iraq

Informed Comment
The Iraqi security services clearly think their biggest problem is jihadi volunteers from the Nile Valley. But the picture emerging from the two sets of detainees is that the publics of the two main US allies in the Middle East, Saudia and Egypt, are the most likely to fall under suspicion of supporting the insurgency. While suspicion falls on some Iranians, they appear to be cleared quickly and released. The Daily Star writes:
"He reports that among those still being questioned, "11 were Jordanians; 64 Syrians; nine Saudis; two Algerians; six Moroccans; six Yemenis; two Libyans; 57 Palestinians; 284 Egyptians; 113 Sudanese, two Emiratis; three Lebanese and one Somali."
All these statistics that are coming out completely undermine the discourse in Washington, DC, about the war. The Iranian and Syrian governments are not the problem. Osama Bin Laden is not the problem. Sunni Arabs, mainly Iraqis, objecting to American and Shiite and Kurdish dominance is the problem. The foreign detainees are a miniscule group compared to the 19,000 detainees in Multinational Force prisons.

War in Iraq: How Lost the War Is

AlterNet has a comprehensive balanced assessment of Iraq and interests the US still has there. It is very interesting, explains the behind the scenes perspective of Clinton and Lugar and likely many other rebellious republicans. The article is written by Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in post-conflict societies, including Iraq. It's a good read. Here is an excerpt.

Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.


The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the U.S. and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.


[..]Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish-Shiite deal: the Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.


Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.


Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. embassy stopped the UN from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.


[..]With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.


Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "NO" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.


For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.


[..]But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.


Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.


Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the U.S. to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.


In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, President Bush never discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaeda victory. Bush's reticence is understandable since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary -- that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics.


Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.


Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan's democracy, and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.