Lara Logan Casts Her Spell for War

by Kelley B. Vlahos, October 13, 2009

"What appears to be a wavering in American resolve is the smell of victory for al-Qaeda and the Taliban."

Normally, one would expect only a veteran in the art of war demagoguery – Charles Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson, Cliff May perhaps – to exhale such square-ball jazz.

So score at least one for the military, because these words, spoken on the wildly popular Colbert Report on Oct. 6, came from none other than CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan.

In fact, her three-minute interview with Stephen Colbert passed a succession of similar kidney stones, such as "in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is so strong, it is the spiritual home of al-Qaeda," and "the time [Obama] is taking [to decide on a strategy] is so frightening, especially to the soldiers on the ground. Because in a way, we are lost right now."

After so much bald-faced propaganda in so little time, one fully expected Logan – like at the end of a half-hour Scooby Doo mystery – to rip off the mask and reveal none other than Kimberly Kagan herself inside.

Lara Logan

These days, the U.S. military leadership, led by the indomitable Gen. David Petraeus and his equally indubitable ace Gen. Stanley McChrystal, needs all the civilian emissaries it can find – and they don’t get much better than Lara Logan. She almost makes up for all those pesky media stories last week about al-Qaeda being diminished and the administration thinking the Taliban is not so much of a threat to U.S. national security.

But in Logan, the military and their pro-war strategic communicants have an advocate so perfect one would think she was put together by the fictional hucksters on Mad Men. She’s a knockout. With that sexy, authoritative accent (think David Kilcullen meets Charlize Theron), one is strangely compelled to listen to what she has to say. She’s a ball-buster, but she’s just so charming about it. She can grandstand one minute about putting an "armor-piercing RPG in the face of the bureau chief" to get her story on the air, then purr the next in that low, intimate way about being the poor victim of a petty U.S. news cycle.

Called everything from an "ass-kicker" to a "bombshell in Baghdad," Logan has been an embedded correspondent in both Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. She’s infiltrated insurgencies, but she claims she never wants to leave her mascara and moisturizer behind. That sloppy mess about husband-stealing aside, she’s got cred, especially with a mainstream audience that puts such a high premium on good looks and barrier-breaking heroics.

That credibility (at least among the antiwar Left) was at its peak when she was dive-bombed back in January 2007 by none other than the 101st Fighting Keyboarder Brigade for what they charged was "passing along terrorist propaganda." (Logan had launched an e-mail appeal to force her bosses at CBS to air controversial footage of fighting along Haifa Street in Baghdad – footage critics later said was captured by al-Qaeda and not attributed as such by the network.) Right-wing doyenne Michelle Malkin called Logan a "correspondent-turned-activist," while progressive bloggers leaped instantly to Logan’s defense.

However, after three weeks on a more recent assignment to Afghanistan, CBS and its favorite foreign correspondent seem to be on the same sheet of music, and they are now carrying Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s tune. Beyond the shock and awe of the aforementioned Logan-Colbert exchange, a click through to the network’s war coverage displayed on its Web site, "Afghanistan: The Road Ahead," reveals first-rate access to the generals, the suits, and the battlefield. But one look at the final, odious product and you’re instantly compelled to ask, "At what price?"

First, there’s this useless interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which super-anchor Katie Couric sounds like she is channeling Joe Lieberman and/or Lindsey Graham:

"Our stated objective in Afghanistan and Pakistan is to quote, ‘Disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al-Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan.’ Can that goal be accomplished without providing stability to the country, in the form of security and economic opportunity for the people of Afghanistan?"

Lara Logan in Iraq (U.S. Army)

Key stories include "Cooperation Rises Between Iran and the Taliban" and "Afghan City’s Close Ties with Iran," both by Lara Logan. Fellow correspondent David Martin asks, "Not Enough Troops?" Logan gains access to Taliban fighters on the ground in "Taliban Gaining Firepower and Influence" and again surmises:

"The fight against the Taliban has become inseparable from the war against al-Qaeda. The momentum now is on the side of the insurgents and terrorists. They’re watching antiwar feeling in the U.S. grow, and they smell victory."

In fact, Logan does a lot of surmising, and CBS seems to assume we all want to hear it. The Oct. 8 interview with her own network (she does a lot of those) was spectacular in that it showed she has absolutely no shame in advocating for more war – in particular, a war that she and her husband (a federal contractor) have benefited from, both professionally and financially, since the beginning.

In this presentation, which a now appreciative HotAir.com refers to as "CBS’s Afghan Correspondent Tears Obama’s Taliban Strategy to Shreds," Logan says a proposed shift to a "counter-terrorism plan," as advocated by Vice President Joe Biden, is "just ludicrous" and "an absolute disaster," before leaping into apparatchik territory with McChrystal:

“‘You can’t do any of those things if you have no security in most of the country,’ Logan told moderator Bob Orr. ‘I don’t understand why no one will listen to the man you put your faith in and said he is the guy who is going to do this for us,’ she said referring to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more combat troops. …

"’Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are clearly at war with the U.S. They are not concerned with the counterinsurgency, counterrorism… They are at war and McChrystal has to fight that war,’ Logan said, reiterating the need for the Obama administration to give more combat troops to the effort."

Logan’s remarks left the normally cynical posters at Malkin’s HotAir.com a bit baffled, including "Mojave Mark," who enthused, "Maybe some at CBS have been listening to Rush on CBS affiliates."

In CBS’ desperate post-Rathergate quest for right-wing forgiveness, Logan unleashed could be a positive first step on the road to redemption. And this is more than McChrystal & Co. could hope for. Even combined, all of the academics and think-tankers the general has collected for his
growing "brain trust" couldn’t equal the 100-proof appeal of Lara Logan. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most Americans still watch network TV to get their news, and the younger set increasingly considers The Daily Show and Colbert primary news sources. Logan and her Afghan epiphanies have been making the rounds with the force of a country preacher, hitting all the target audiences smack in the eyeballs.

In the end, the 101st (keyboarders, that is) may think they’ve gained a worthy accomplice. And maybe they have. It’s more important, however, to recognize that for the U.S. military, having its way – advancing COIN in Central Asia with the tens of thousands of U.S. troops and billions of dollars it demands – means engaging in high-stakes media hardball, Strategic Communications-USA, if you will. And Lara Logan is the Message Force Multiplier for today’s mission.

Read more by Kelley B. Vlahos

• PATRIOT Act Fight Needs More Patriots – October 5th, 2009
• The Two Faces of Kimberly Kagan – September 28th, 2009

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The still-missing central fact in the Iran drama

By Glenn Greenwald - Octber 7, 2009

Ever since Iran reported the existence of its Qom enrichment facility to the IAEA, one central assertion has been repeated as fact over and over by the American media to make the story as incriminating as possible: namely, that Iran only disclosed this because they discovered they had been "caught," i.e., they found out that the West knew of this facility and they thus had no choice but to disclose it. That assertion has been fundamental to the entire Iran drama. After all, if Iran voluntarily notified the IAEA of the Qom facility before it was even operational and thus agreed to have the facility inspected, it's impossible to maintain the melodramatic storyline that Iran was planning something deeply nefarious here and got "caught red-handed." The assertion that Iran was forced into disclosure is vital to the entire plot, and it's been constantly repeated as fact.

But ever since this episode began, I've read countless accounts from numerous sources and never once saw a single piece of evidence to support this claim -- and I've been actively looking for it and asking if anyone has seen such evidence. Today in Time Magazine, Bobby Ghosh writes of an exclusive interview he conducted with CIA Director Leon Panetta about Qom, in which Panetta claims the CIA knew of the facility for three years. After describing Panetta's account of how the CIA discovered the site and how they learned it was designed for uranium enrichment, this paragraph appears:

U.S. officials believe that it was only when Iran found out that its cover had been blown that it chose to own up to the plant's existence -- although how it might have learned of Washington's discovery remains unclear. On the eve of the U.N. General Assembly last month, the Iranians sent the IAEA a terse note, acknowledging the presence of the Qum facility.

Does that sound like the CIA actually knows whether Iran ever even discovered "that its cover had been blown," let alone that this was the reason the Iranians disclosed the facility to the IAEA? Obviously not. Time can say only that U.S. officials (unnamed, of course) "believe" that this happened -- based on what? -- but cannot even say how Iran might have learned of the U.S. discovery (that's "unclear"). Plainly, at least according to this account and every other that I've seen, there are no known facts to support the claim that this is what motivated Iran's IAEA disclosure. It's just something that gets asserted without any challenge or questioning.

Just this weekend, a New York Times Editorial flatly asserted: "Of course, Iran didn’t even acknowledge that it was building a plant near Qum until last week after it was caught red-handed." In fact, the Times has no idea whether Iran's disclosure to the IAEA had anything to do with that or whether Iran even knew that the West had learned of the Qom facility. Worse, the very first news story the Times published about this matter -- the day after the Press Conference with the leaders of the U.S., Britain and France -- contained this sentence: "At some point in late spring, American officials became aware that Iranian operatives had learned that the site was being monitored, the officials said." There's no evidence at all for that critical claim, and the Time article today unintentionally casts doubt on it by making clear that this is nothing more than a "belief" of unnamed American "officials."

Obviously, it's possible that the U.S. really did learn three years ago that Qom was an enrichment facility, that Iran somehow found out that this was the case, and that it was this that prompted the Iranians to disclose to the IAEA. But that's a mere possibility, an unproven assertion from government officials which, at least as of now, they're not even claiming is certain. But it's also obviously quite possible that Iran voluntarily disclosed this facility to the IAEA because they're willing to allow inspections, believe their NPT obligations require disclosure 180 days prior to operability (which is what they've claimed since 2007), and intend to use it for civilian purposes and thus have nothing to hide. Since the claim about Iran's motives for disclosure is the linchpin of all the hysteria -- the vital fact that makes what Iran did appear sinister -- shouldn't newspapers refrain from repeating it as though it's proven and make clear to their readers that this is but one of several possibilities: one for which absolutely no evidence has been presented?

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Is the Left Promoting War on Iran?

This analysis, while not current, is as relevant as ever. At this time it should be more evident than ever that the global forces promoting aggression on Iran are driven by Zionist motives, however we still find attempts at redirection, desperate baseless rationales for war are presented in the hope of exonerating Israel and its supporters.


By Bob Finch

Preamble

A number of commentators hold that the primary reason America will attack Iran is to defend the dollar as a global currency. Iran is alleged to be threatening the role of the dollar as the sole currency for oil transactions by setting up an oil bourse on which oil can be bought and sold for euros – just as Saddam Hussein threatened the dollar by selling Iraqi oil for euros. Paradoxically, most of those supporting such an hypothesis are anti-war commentators –both on the left and the (paleo) right wing.

The big political danger of the petro-dollar explanation of the war against Iran is that both left, and right, wing anti-war activists are in effect providing a justification for the war they are supposedly seeking to avert. Although the proponents of the petro-dollar hypothesis are anti-war, and personally do not regard the petro-dollar hypothesis as a justification for an American attack on Iran, it has to be suggested that for many Americans this hypothesis would provide sufficient justification for war. If Americans are told that Iran is devaluing the dollar in their pocket and threatening to bring about the collapse of the American economy they are going to want to know why America hasn’t started bombing iran. In their eyes, such a war would be self-defence, defending their way of life. There is a considerable danger that anti-war critics are going to find their explanation for the likelihood of an American attack on Iran is a self fulfilling prophesy which helps to win popular support for the war.

This article highlights the commentators promoting the petro-dollar hypothesis but does not seek to examine the merits of this hypothesis.

The Economic Origins of the Petro-Dollar/Oil Bourse Thesis

The idea that iran’s proposed oil bourse would pose a threat to the global supremacy of the dollar started primarily as an economic speculation.

William Clarke:
"The Iranians are about to commit an "offense" far greater than Saddam Hussein's conversion to the euro of Iraq’s oil exports in the fall of 2000. Numerous articles have revealed Pentagon planning for operations against Iran as early as 2005. While the publicly stated reasons will be over Iran's nuclear ambitions, there are unspoken macroeconomic drivers explaining the Real Reasons regarding the 2nd stage of petrodollar warfare - Iran's upcoming euro-based oil Bourse. In 2005-2006, The Tehran government developed a plan to begin competing with New York's NYMEX and London's IPE with respect to international oil trades - using a euro-denominated international oil-trading mechanism. This means that without some form of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given U.S. debt levels and the stated neoconservative project for U.S. global domination, Tehran's objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on U.S. dollar supremacy in the international oil market." (William Clark ‘The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target’).

Krassimir Petrov:
"The Iranian government has finally developed the ultimate "nuclear" weapon that can swiftly destroy the financial system underpinning the American Empire. That weapon is the Iranian Oil Bourse slated to open in March 2006. Whatever the strategic choice, from a purely economic point of view, should the Iranian Oil Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar." (Krassimir Petrov ‘The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse’).

Emilie Rutledge:
"This is primarily because of Iran's reported intention to invoice energy contracts in euros rather than dollars. The contention that this could unseat the dollar's dominance as the de facto currency for oil transactions may be overstated, but this has not stopped many commentators from linking America's current political disquiet with Iran to the proposed Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB)." (Emilie Rutledge ‘Iran - a threat to the petrodollar?’).

The Left Wing, Anti-war Commentators who have taken up the Oil Bourse Thesis

The left/anti-war wing of the political spectrum (in both America and Britain) is so dominated by Zionist sympathizers that it will support any fantasy to avoid blaming Israel, the significantly Jewish owned and directed media in America, the Jewish lobby in America, and the Israel firsters in the Bush [Obama] administration, for pushing America into an invasion of Iraq and an attack on Iran. The petro-dollar hypothesis has three main advantages for the Jewish dominated left wing, anti-war movement. Firstly, it reinforces the idea of an American empire thereby implying that the Jewish separatist state in Palestine and the Jewish lobby in America are insignificant agents of American global power. Secondly, it suggests that America’s economic/financial interests are under threat when they are not. Thirdly, it diminishes the role played by Israel, the Jewish dominated American media, the Jewish lobby in America, and the Israel firsters in the Bush [Obama] administration, in pushing America into a war against Iran for the benefit of Israel.

The Jewish dominated left finds it impossible to countenance the idea that Jews have taken control of the American political and economic system and are using America’s colossal military power to boost the regional supremacy of the Jews-only state – at the expense of American interests. For the Jews on the left, the petro-dollar hypothesis is invaluable because it helps to protect Israel from adverse political criticism.

The influence of Jews on the left/ anti-war movement has become so poisonous and corrupting that in order to protect the Jews-only state in Palestine they are willing to promote a thesis which provides the American public with a rationale for an attack on Iran. Although left wing Jews pretend they are opposed to the war against Iran many would secretly applaud such a war because of the benefits it will bring to Israel - even though it will have calamitous consequences on America’s economic and military interests.

Thierry Meyssan:
"Tehran is optimistic about putting in place an oil spot market which doesn’t accept dollars. This is already working at an experimental stage. If no nation has officially announced its participation, many are encouraging participation through private companies acting as intermediaries. Now, the dollar is an overvalued currency whose value is maintained essentially by its role as a petro-currency. Such a spot market, once really up and running, would provoke a collapse of the dollar, comparable to that of 1939, even if its transactions only amounted to a tenth of the world turnover. US power would be undermined by the falling dollar and, in time, Israel would also find itself bankrupt." (Thierry Meyssan ‘The hidden stakes in the Iran crisis’).

Michael Keefer:
"The coming attack on Iran has nothing whatsoever to do with concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Its primary motive, as oil analyst William Clark has argued, is rather a determination to ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the sole world currency for oil trading." (Michael Keefer ‘Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding the Planned Assault on Iran’).

Geov Parrish:
"It preferably wants regime change before Tehran follows through on its threat to convert the currency in which it sells its oil from dollars to euros - a precedent-setting move that could have dire global consequences for the dollar as the international currency of choice, and, hence, ugly long-term consequences for the debt- and trade-deficit-riddled American economy." (Geov Parrish ‘The next war?’).

Toni Straka:
"A decline of the dollar's position in oil trading might also open the floodgates in other commodity markets where the dollar is the medium of exchange but where the US has only a minority market share." (Toni Straka ‘Killing the dollar in Iran’).

The Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique Europe:
"The Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique Europe 2020, LEAP/E2020, now estimates to over 80% the probability that the week of March 20-26, 2006 will be the beginning of the most significant political crisis the world has known since the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, together with an economic and financial crisis of a scope comparable with that of 1929. This last week of March 2006 will be the turning-point of a number of critical developments, resulting in an acceleration of all the factors leading to a major crisis, disregard any American or Israeli military intervention against Iran. In case such an intervention is conducted, the probability of a major crisis to start rises up to 100%, according to LEAP/E2020. The announcement of this crisis results from the analysis of decisions taken by the two key-actors of the main on-going international crisis, i.e. the United States and Iran:

- on the one hand there is the Iranian decision of opening the first oil bourse priced in Euros on March 20th, 2006 in Tehran, available to all oil producers of the region ;
- on the other hand, there is the decision of the American Federal Reserve to stop publishing M3 figures (the most reliable indicator on the amount of dollars circulating in the world) from March 23, 2006 onward1.

These two decisions constitute altogether the indicators, the causes and the consequences of the historical transition in progress between the order created after World War II and the new international equilibrium in gestation since the collapse of the USSR. Their magnitude as much as their simultaneity will catalyse all the tensions, weaknesses and imbalances accumulated since more than a decade throughout the international system." (The Laboratoire européen d’Anticipation Politique Europe 2020, LEAP/E2020 ‘Iran-USA, beginning of a major world crisis’).

Heather Wokusch:
"In the eyes of the Bush administration, however, Iran's worst transgression has less to do with nuclear ambitions or anti-Semitism than with the petro-euro oil bourse Tehran is slated to open in March 2006. Iran's plan to allow oil trading in euros threatens to break the dollar's monopoly as the global reserve currency, and since the greenback is severely overvalued due to huge trade deficits, the move could be devastating for the US economy." (Heather Wokusch ‘WWIII or Bust: Implications of a US Attack on Iran’).

While heather wokusch’s sympathies clearly lay on the left and are anti-war she does surprisingly manage to slip an extreme right wing Zionist idea into her article, "It would incite the Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Iran's, potentially sparking increased global terrorism."
She even peddles Chomsky's argument that Turkey will support a Zionist attack on Iran, "Given what's at stake, few allies, apart from Israel, can be expected to support a US attack on Iran. While Jacques Chirac has blustered about using his nukes defensively, it's doubtful that France would join an unprovoked assault, and even loyal allies, such as the UK, prefer going through the UN Security Council. Which means the wild card is Turkey. The nation shares a border with Iran, and according to Noam Chomsky, is heavily supported by the domestic Israeli lobby in Washington, permitting 12% of the Israeli air and tank force to be stationed in its territory. Turkey's crucial role in an attack on Iran explains why there's been a spurt of high-level US visitors to Ankara lately, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director Porter Goss. In fact, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in December 2005 that Goss had told the Turkish government it would be "informed of any possible air strikes against Iran a few hours before they happened" and that Turkey had been given a "green light" to attack camps of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Iran "on the day in question." (Heather Wokusch ‘WWIII or Bust: Implications of a US Attack on Iran’).

The Right Wing, Anti-War Commentators who have taken up the Oil Bourse Thesis

Ron Paul:
"It’s not likely that maintaining dollar supremacy was the only motivating factor for the war against Iraq, nor for agitating against Iran. Though the real reasons for going to war are complex, we now know the reasons given before the war started, like the presence of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connection to 9/11, were false. The dollar’s importance is obvious, but this does not diminish the influence of the distinct plans laid out years ago by the neo-conservatives to remake the Middle East. Israel’s influence, as well as that of the Christian Zionists, likewise played a role in prosecuting this war." (Ron Paul ‘The End of Dollar Hegemony’).

Paul Sheldon Foote:
Paul sheldon foote accepts the Iranian oil bourse thesis. He circulated an article highlighting the supposed dangers of an Iranian bourse, "The neo-conservatives (neo-Trotskyites) have been lying about exporting American democracy and values. These are some of the real reasons why these American traitors want to bomb Iran and establish a totalitarian regime for the Iranian Communist MEK (Rajavi Cult) terrorists." (pfoote@fullerton.edu).

The Bush [Obama] Regime’s Disinterest in the Petro-Dollar/Oil Bourse Thesis to Promote a War against Iran

Despite the fact that both left and right wing anti-war commentators believe that the real reason for the war against Iran is the establishment of Iran’s oil bourse nobody in the Bush [Obama] administration or the neo-con media has made any comment about it.

The Right Wing use of the Petro-Dollar/Oil Bourse Thesis to Promote a War against Iran

The petro-dollar hypothesis is a legitimate economic speculation but politically it could be used to provide America with a seemingly legitimate excuse for a war against Iran. This section highlights the commentators seeking to do precisely that.

Jerome R. Corsi:
The first right wing commentator to start using left wing arguments to support the war is Jerome R. Corsi who acknowledges the source of his ideas, "Many administration critics argue today that the real reason for invading Iraq in 2003 was not to remove WMD from Iraq or to establish freedom but to preserve the dollar dominance of the world's oil market. These same critics argue today that the real reason for the ramp-up of concern over Iran has nothing to do with Iran's secret nuclear weapons program or with President Ahmadinejad's threats to destroy Israel but everything to do with oil." (Jerome R. Corsi ‘Will Iran's 'petroeuro' threat lead to war?’).

Corsi points out that, "Today, about 70 percent of the world's international foreign currency reserves are held in dollars. If the petroeuro begins to challenge the petrodollar, this percentage could diminish drastically. The United States depends on the dollar foreign-currency reserves in order to sell the Treasury debt that sustains budget deficits. What if foreign-exchange portfolios from oil sales fell to 60 percent being held in dollars – would that cause a crisis in the U.S. economy? Or would it take 55 percent? Most Americans are completely unaware of this threat Iran represents to the U.S. economy." (Jerome R. Corsi ‘Will Iran's 'petroeuro' threat lead to war?’). He points out the dangers of a challenge to the petro-dollar to America’s poor, "Clearly, any threat to petrodollar holdings could undermine social programs in the U.S., including Medicare and key welfare programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families." (Jerome R. Corsi ‘Will Iran's 'petroeuro' threat lead to war?’). He concludes, "If the Iranians persist in creating a market mechanism to settle world oil transactions in the euro, the United States will attack just to preserve the oil market for the dollar. If Iran does open an oil bourse next month, we should expect the warplanes will soon thereafter begin to fly." (Jerome R. Corsi ‘Will Iran's 'petroeuro' threat lead to war?’). Corsi is the author of some highly illuminating works such as co-authoring with John O'Neill the No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." and the sizzler, "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians."

Critics of the Petrodollars Hypothesis

Paul Craig Roberts:
"Will an Iranian oil bourse hurt the dollar? Not really. The dollar's value depends on the world's willingness to hold dollar denominated assets, not on the currency used to pay oil bills. If payments were not made in dollars, there could be a slight negative impact on the dollar from countries reducing their dollar cash balances and from the psychological shock of pricing oil in Euros (or some other currency). However, what really counts is what do the oil producers, for example, do with the currency that they are paid. If they are paid in dollars, but exchange the dollars for Euros or Yen and purchase equities or bonds or real estate in Europe and Japan, it doesn't help that oil is billed in dollars. Or if they are paid in Euros but exchange the Euros for dollars and purchase US assets, it doesn't hurt that the oil is billed in Euros." (Paul Craig Roberts ‘Paul Craig Roberts on the Iranian Oil Bourse’). "The negative impact on the dollar will be far greater from the additional red ink necessary to finance an attack on Iran than from an oil bourse."

Jeff Blankfort:
Blankfort sent out the following email concerning Michael Keefer’s article ‘Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation’. "I am forwarding this, not because I agree with the writers' premise, that there will be a US attack on Iran -which I don't -but because it has become typical of the scholarship, or lack of same, that has come to distinguish what passes for the opposition to US foreign policy. I am also aware that it will be spread by unthinking, well-meaning others as the gospel truth. Apart from the glaring absence of any mention what effect an attack on Iran would have on the situation in Iraq which has a very long border with Iran, Keefer's noting that "Michel Chossudovsky wrote in May 2005, (about) widespread reports that George W. Bush had "signed off on" an attack on Iran," is but one example of the lack of scholarship as well as analysis on the writer's part, a failing he shares with other pundits who have taken that allegation seriously.

First, there were no "widespread reports" of Bush taking this action. It was dropped as an aside by Scott Ritter, in February, 2005, when he was speaking in Seattle, and neither he nor anyone else has been able to substantiate it. Why Ritter, an ex-Marine and now a famous ex-WMD inspector (as well as a strong supporter of Israel, who acknowledges having worked with Israeli intelligence under Barak) would have access to such information, he and no one else, did not seem to trouble those who were sure that the US was going to bomb Iran in 2005 as Ritter had stated (and which he subsequently rationalized when it didn't happen as did Chussodovsky in the statement below).

It is also curious that when Ritter recently stated and has written that John Bolton's speech writer told him that he has already written the speech Bolton will make at the UN to justify a forthcoming US attack, that no one, at least publicly, has wondered why this speech writer would not only violate a speech writer's required anonymity, but why he would tell this to someone who appears, at least publicly, to oppose the US war on Iraq.

What Keefer and the others never write about is critical and its absence from their analysis is inexcusable, namely, that given that a sizable segment of the Iraqi troops being trained in Iraq are loyal to the pro-Iranian SCIRI and Dawa parties, both of which were founded in Iran in 1982, it is logical that their guns would be turned on the US and British soldiers as Mokata Sadr has already promised to do with his Mahdi army should the US attack Iran. Add to this, the ability of Iran to block the Straits of Hormuz. Blocked shipping in the Gulf would be devastating for world oil supplies and for economies. Gas at $8 a gallon is not what the voters want to see."(Jeff Blankfort" jblankfort@earthlink.net).

Chris Cook:
One of the financial directors involved in setting up the bourse is amused at the prospect that he is about to bring down the global economy, "It is therefore with wry amusement that I have seen a myth being widely propagated on the Internet that the genesis of this "Iran bourse" project is a wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros." (Chris Cook ‘What the Iran 'nuclear issue' is really about’).

Mathew Maavak:
The Iranians have not even decided on a marker for the oil to be sold. "The Iranians so far have not indicated whether they have come up with an oil marker - a euro-denominated oil pricing standard - like the dollar denominated West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI), Norway Brent crude, and the UAE Dubai crude." (Mathew Maavak ‘Beware The Ides Of March’).

Ann Berg:
"If you're waiting for the Iranian oil bourse (IOB) – the proposed euro-based petroleum futures exchange in Tehran – to overthrow the global dollar-based economy, don't hold your breath. Establishing a futures-trading mechanism to compete with the powerhouses of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) for the oil trade is as probable as U.S. energy independence in our lifetime." (Ann Berg ‘Is the IOB DOA?: The Iranian oil bourse: theory and reality’).

More Iran Hysteria from the NY Times

By Tony Karon

Rootless Cosmopolitan

Wednesday, Oct 7, 2009

The surest sign that another neocon bill of goods is being hawked in respect of the Iran “nuclear peril” is the revival of Rumsfeld-esque “unknowable unknowns”, a la Iraq WMD panic circa late 2002. In the real world, of course, solid progress is being made towards a plausible diplomatic deal to strengthen safeguards against Iran weaponizing the nuclear material it is producing. (See my latest on this at TIME.com)

But in the fevered world of the neocons, which the New York Time has, once again, bought into wholesale, the progress is illusory; Iran is playing games by only showing us the tip of the iceberg. Utterly shameless in its willingness to repeat the Judith Miller debacle, the Times tells us that Iran at Geneva agreed “to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium” to Russia for reprocessing into fuel rods for a medical research facility. Twice more in the story it uses the phrase “declared stockpile” — unmistakably signaling the reader that he or she ought to believe that Iran, of course, has other stocks of enriched uranium that are undeclared.

This new neocon talking point is explicitly elaborated by Michael Crowley in the New Republic: “It’s definitely good news that Iran has agreed to ship a large quantity of its low-enriched uranium out of the country. Every pound of the stuff that leaves Iran is a pound less that they can use for a bomb. But an agreement isn’t a shipment. And if there are more Qom-like secret enrichment facilities–which is likely–then Iran may have more enriched uranium than we know, and has the luxury of making a public show of giving some away.”

The New York Times may think it’s a serious newspaper, but not when it comes to Iran, where it is simply reprising the role of Fox News-for-the-arugula-crowd that it played in support of the Iraq invasion.

Writing about Iran’s “declared” facilities implies that there are undeclared ones. This is what Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called an “unknowable unknown” in the buildup to war in Iraq. Nobody knows that Iran has such undeclared stocks, nor has any evidence to that effect been cited by the IAEA or by U.S. intelligence. It’s simply a guess.

And a pretty stupid guess at that. If Iran was, indeed, secretly stockpiling enriched uranium, with all the risks that entailed, the only rationale for doing so would be to build a bomb. In which case, they wouldn’t confine themselves to the 4% enrichment of their “declared” stocks, which are suitable only for reactor fuel; they’d have enriched that material to the upward of 90% necessary to make weapons-grade materiel. Otherwise, why bother to keep it secret?

But if Iran already has stockpiles of weapons grade uranium, then the whole process of engagement is a farce. Sanctions, too. Because it means Iran essentially already has the key component of a bomb. And, of course, the vaunted “military option” still on Obama’s “table” would be a joke — if nobody knows where the “undeclared” facilities are, they can’t be bombed.

Having done its bit to create a climate for war against Iraq, the New York Times is once again carrying water for the neocons. Unwittingly, I’m sure, because I wouldn’t want to suggest that such a venerable institution had an “undeclared” agenda.

Rootless Cosmopolitan

The Iranian Rift in the IAEA

Leaked Paper on Iranian Nuke Based on Disputed Intel

By GARETH PORTER
October 6, 2009

Excerpts of the internal draft report by the staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published online last week show that the report's claims about Iranian work on a nuclear weapon is based almost entirely on intelligence documents which have provoked a serious conflict within the agency.

Contrary to sensational stories by the Associated Press and The New York Times, the excerpts on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reveal that the IAEA's Safeguards Department, which wrote the report, only has suspicions – not real evidence - that Iran has been working on nuclear weapons in recent years.

The newly published excerpts make it clear, moreover, that the so-called "Alleged Studies" documents brought to the attention of the agency by the United States five years ago are central to its assertion that Iran had such a programme in 2002-03.

Whether those documents are genuine or were fabricated has been the subject of a fierce struggle behind the scenes for many months between two departments of the IAEA.

Some IAEA officials began calling for a clear statement by the agency that it could not affirm the documents' authenticity after the agency obtained hard evidence in early 2008 that a key document in the collection had been fraudulently altered, as previously reported by this writer. As journalist Mark Hibbs reported last week in Nucleonics Week, opposition to relying on the intelligence documents has come not only from outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei but from the Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination.

Since September 2008, however, the Safeguards Department, headed by Olli Heinonen, has been pressing for publication of its draft report as an annex to a regular agency report on Iran.

Heinonen leaked the draft to Western governments last summer, and in September it was leaked to the Associated Press and ISIS. That has generated sensational headlines suggesting that Iran can already build a nuclear bomb.

The draft report says the agency "assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device". But other passages indicate the authors regard such knowledge only as a possibility, based on suspicions rather than concrete evidence.

It says the "necessary information was most likely obtained from external sources and probably modified by Iran". But it cites only the 15-page "uranium metal document" given by the A. Q. Khan network to Iran when it purchased centrifuge designs in 1987.

"Based on the information in the document," it says, "it is possible that Iran has knowledge regarding the contents of a nuclear package."

The IAEA "suspects" that the 15-page document was part of "larger package that Iran may have obtained but which has not yet come to the Agency's attention", according to the leaked excerpts.

But that document only outlines procedural requirements for casting uranium into hemispheres, not the technical specifications, as the IAEA report of Nov. 18, 2005 noted. No evidence has ever surfaced to challenge the Iranian explanation that Khan's agents threw in the document after a deal had been reached on centrifuges in an effort to interest Iran in buying the technology for casting uranium.

The IAEA affirmed that it has found no evidence that Iran ever acquired such technology.

The only external "nuclear package" ever reported to have been provided to Iran is a set of flawed technical designs for a "high-voltage block" for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon, which was slipped under the door of the Iranian mission in Vienna by a Russian scientist working for CIA's Operation Merlin in February 2000.

Another far-reaching claim in the draft report is that the IAEA "has information, known as the Alleged Studies, that the Ministry of Defence of Iran has conducted and may still be conducting a comprehensive programme aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system."

It does not explain how the "Alleged Studies", which are documents on work done in 2002 and 2003, could have any bearing on whether Iran is now conducting work on nuclear weapons.

Using the same language found in published IAEA reports, the draft suggests that the Alleged Studies intelligence documents represent credible evidence. "The information, which has been obtained from multiple sources, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent," it says.

But that characterisation of the intelligence first shown to the IAEA by the United States in 2005 has been contested by sceptics in the agency. A senior IAEA official familiar with the documents suggested in an interview with IPS last month that the claim of "multiple sources" may be misleading.

Given the existence of "intelligence sharing networks", the official said, "one can't rule it out that one organisation got the intelligence and shared it with others." That would explain the reference to "multiple sources consistent over time", he said.

The initial U.S. account, according to the official, was that the documents came from the laptop computer of one of the Iranian participants in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme. Later, however, that account was "walked back", he said.

"There are holes in the story," said the official.

The introduction by ISIS to the excerpts from the report, evidently based on conversations with the IAEA personnel, confirms that the documents did not come from Iran on a laptop computer, as U.S. officials had claimed in the past. It suggests that the documents were smuggled out of Iran as "electronic media" by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by German intelligence and was later arrested.

That new explanation is highly suspect, however, because an intelligence agency would not confirm the identity of one of their agents, even if he were arrested. Asked about the ISIS account, Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence office for the Middle East when the "laptop documents" surfaced, said it "sounds unusual".

The draft report also argues that the information in the documents is credible, because it "refers to known Iranian persons and institutions under both the military and civil apparatuses, as well as to some degree to their confirmed procurement activities".

But the senior IAEA official cast doubt on that claim as well. The names of people working in the relevant Iranian military and civilian organisations are readily obtainable, he observed. "It's not difficult to cook up such a document," the official told IPS.

The draft paper states that the agency "does not believe that Iran has yet achieved the means of integrating a nuclear payload into the Shahab 3 delivery system with any confidence that it would work".

That statement hints at the fact that the reentry vehicle studies were found to have serious technical problems. The senior IAEA official told IPS that the Sandia National Laboratories, which ran computer simulation analyses of the plan, not only found that none of them would have worked, but had expressed doubt that they were genuine.

The paper makes an indirect reference to a plan for a bench-scale facility for uranium conversion, but does not mention that it had several technical flaws, as acknowledged by Heinonen in a February 2008 briefing for members.

Nor do the draft report's conclusions deal with the fact, confirmed by the senior IAEA official to IPS, that none of the intelligence documents have any security markings, despite the fact they are purported to be part of what presumably would have been Iran's most highly classified programme.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

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Dollar Hysteria

Commentary on Robert Fisk's recent warmongering:

Is the Sky Really Falling?
06.10.2009
By Mike Whitney

October 06, 2009 "Information Clearing House" — - Robert Fisk lit the fuse with his hyperventilating narrative which appeared in Tuesday's UK Independent titled, "The Demise of the Dollar". The article went viral overnight spreading to every musty corner of the Internet and sending gold skyrocketing to $1,026 per oz. Now every doomsday website in cyber-world has headlined Fisk's "shocker" and the blogs are clogged with the frenzied commentary of bunker-dwelling survivalists and goldbugs who're certain that the world as we know it is about to end.

From Fisk's article:

"In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security." (UK Telegraph)

"International cabal"? C'mon, Bob, you're better than that.

Reports of the dollar's demise are greatly exaggerated. The dollar may fall, but it won't crash. And, in the short-term, it's bound to strengthen as the equities market reenters the earth's gravitational field after a 6 month-long ride through outer-space. The relationship between falling stocks and a stronger buck is well established and, when the market corrects, the dollar will bounce back once again. Bet on it. So why all this bilge about Middle Eastern men huddled in "secret meetings" stroking their beards while plotting against the empire?

Isn't that the gist of Fisk's article?

Yes, the dollar will fall, (eventually) but not for the reasons that most people think. It's true that the surge in deficit spending has foreign dollar-holders worried. But they're more concerned about the Fed's quantitative easing (QE) program which adds to the money supply by purchasing mortgage-backed securities and US Treasuries. Bernanke is simply printing money and pouring it into the financial system to keep rigamortis from setting in. Naturally, the Fed has had to quantify exactly how much money it intends to "create from thin air" to placate its creditors. And, it has. (The program is scheduled to end by the beginning of 2010) That said, China and Japan are still buying US Treasuries, which indicates they have not yet "jumped ship".

The real reason the dollar will lose its favored role as the world's reserve currency is because US markets, which until recently provided up to 25 percent of global demand, are in sharp decline. Export-dependent nations--like Japan, China, Germany, South Korea--already see the handwriting on the wall. The US consumer is buried under a mountain of debt, which means that his spending-spree won't resume anytime soon. On top of that, unemployment is soaring, personal wealth is falling, savings are rising, and Washington's anti-labor bias assures that wages will continue to stagnate for the foreseeable future. Thus, the American middle class will no longer be the driving force behind global consumption/demand that it was before the crisis. Once consumers are less able to buy new Toyota Prius's or load up on the latest China-made widgets at Walmart, there will be less incentive for foreign governments and central banks to stockpile greenbacks or trade exclusively in dollars.

Here's a clip from the Globe and Mail cited on Washington's Blog:

"A UBS Investment Research report says that while it would be wrong to write off the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, its roughly 90-year iron grip on that position is loosening. “The use of the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency is in decline,” said UBS economist Paul Donovan.

“The market share of the dollar in international transactions is likely to decline over the coming months and years, but only persistent policy error – or considerable fiscal strain – is likely to cause the dollar to lose reserve currency status entirely.”

The UBS report maintains that the gradual slide of the U.S. dollar is being driven not by the world’s central banks, but by the private sector, as individual companies increasingly abandon the greenback as their international currency of choice.

“The private sector’s use of reserves is more important than official, central bank reserves – anything up to 20 times the significance, depending on interpretation,” Mr. Donovan said. “There is evidence that the move away from the dollar as a private-sector reserve currency has been accelerating since 2000.”

As private industry veers away from the dollar, governments, investors and central banks will follow. The soft tyranny of dollar dominance will erode and parity between currencies and governments will grow. This will create better opportunities for consensus on issues of mutual interest. One nation will no longer be able to dictate international policy.

So-called "dollar hegemony" has added greatly to the gross imbalance of power in the world today. It has put global decision-making in the hands of a handful of Washington warlords whose narrow vision never extends beyond the material interests of themselves and their constituents. As the dollar weakens and consumer demand declines, the United States will be forced to curtail its wars and adjust its behavior to conform to international standards. Either that, or be banished into the political wilderness.

So, what exactly is the downside?

Superpower status rests on the flimsy foundation of the dollar, and the dollar is beginning to crack. Fisk is right; big changes are on the way. Only not just yet.

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“Save Darfur”: Fast the Eid!

by Alex de Waal - September 14, 2009

America’s Darfur campaign sometimes goes beyond parody. The last few weeks have shown this to the full, beginning with the fantastical “Sudan Now” campaign and culminating in the proposal to fast the Eid. It beggars belief.

Having spent most of the last few months in Sudan, especially Darfur, it is increasingly evident that “Save Darfur”—here meaning not just the Save Darfur Coalition but the wider movement—is out of touch with realities. What they describe and prescribe has little or no relation to what is happening and what should be done. Three recent “Save Darfur” activities highlight this.

First is their campaign to push Obama to “keep the promise” and the ridiculous advertisements in newspapers and the Obamas’ vacation destination. They might do well to recall John Maynard Keynes’s well-known riposte to someone who accused him of inconsistency: “When the facts change, I change my mind? What do you do sir?” The facts have changed, the campaign hasn’t. A few months ago I asked rhetorically, “Can Sudan activism transform itself for the Obama era?” So far, the record is dispiriting.

There’s an episode in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 where the principal character, Yossarian, is tending to a badly wounded young airman, Snowden. He goes about stemming a leg wound in the airman’s leg, while the boy mutely nods, until Yossarian realizes that he is meaning that there’s another wound too—a piece of shrapnel has got inside Snowden’s flak jacket and torn open his side. Yossarian has been busy bandaging the wrong wound while the poor boy is dying. It’s the defining trauma of the book. And it’s the defining error of the “keep the promise” campaign—money misspent on a campaign that is only hampering General Scott Gration the task he has correctly identified, which is finding a workable political settlement for Sudan as a whole. The efforts by “Save Darfur” to try to link its clamour on Darfur with the national issue stretches credibility.

Next was a revealing quote from John Prendergast in response to the remark by Gen. Martin Agwai, outgoing UNAMID Force Commander, that the war in Darfur was essentially over. He could not dispute Gen. Agwai’s facts nor his integrity. Prendergast’s criticism was that this was “something that takes the wind out of the sails of international action.”

This was perhaps more illuminating than Prendergast intended: his campaign is not about domestic solutions but international (read: U.S.) action. That’s Save Darfur’s second big error: if there is to be a solution, it will come from inside Sudan, and must be political, addressed at the structural political challenges of Sudan. A campaign focused on a genocide that isn’t happening, for the U.S. to step up its pressure to stop killing that has already ended, is just making Save Darfur look poorly-informed, and America look silly. Intermittently, “Save Darfur” has tried to rebrand itself as a peace movement—but its origins as an intervention campaign make it virtually impossible to make the transformation. Peace cannot be forced or dictated. If “Save Darfur” is interested in peace, the best it can do in the cause of peace is to fall silent.

Third–and simply stunning–is the choice of date for a fast for Darfur: 21 September. Muslims have been fasting since the beginning of Ramadhan and Eid will fall on 20 and 21 September. As soon as I mentioned the date to my wife, who is a Muslim, she laughed out loud. Not just her: every Muslim, Sudanese or otherwise, I have mentioned this to (trying my best to keep a straight face) has guffawed in amazement. Just as Darfurians are breaking their fast, Save Darfur’s campaigners will be starting theirs. The choice of day is astonishingly ignorant of, and insensitive to the Muslim world. “Save Darfur” may be a multi-faith initiative, but Muslims hardly count. “Save Darfur” isn’t about Sudan, or indeed Darfur, at all–it’s about an imagined empathy and generating a domestic American political agenda. Shame on you, Prendergast and your fellow “activists”, shame, shame, shame.

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The sources used by The Liberal Media

By Glenn Greenwald
October 4, 2009

Here are some of the sources which David Gregory cited today during Meet the Press:

The question is how much leverage does the U.S. really have? Charles Krauthammer, critical of the approach, saying . . . "This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb." Is this a cat and mouse game?

And there on Twitter is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and he posts this. He says, "President Obama fails to get the Olympics while unemployment goes to 9.8% Iran continues nuclear program."

But first, news about Iran in this morning's newspapers. The New York Times reports they may be closer now to producing a nuclear weapon than originally thought.

Those are the Liberal Media's sources: Charles Krauthammer's column on Iran, Newt Gingrich's Twitter feed, and the latest flagrantly fear-mongering, irresponsible, Saddam's-shopping-for-yellowcake piece from The New York Times' new Judy Miller/Michael Gordon team, causing that paper to reprise its 2002 role in leading the beating of war drums (Gregory also quoted from Peggy Noonan, Tom Friedman and John McCain). And on every topic, Gregory's questions to Obama aide Susan Rice were grounded -- as Gregory's questions typically are -- in neoconservative dogma and sounded like they were lifted from the pages of The Weekly Standard (Afghanistan: "why wouldn't the president immediately grant the request of his commanders to fully resource this war of necessity"?; Iran: "what is the deadline for Iran to either put up, to negotiate away its nuclear potential or face consequences?" U.N.: "Recently during the U.N. General Assembly Meeting in New York, Americans saw this kind of parade of anti-Americanism. . . . You once said that the U.N. is imperfect but it is also indispensable. When you look at that showing, what is the indispensable part?"). To summarize: escalate in Afghanistan; bomb Iran; and pull out of the U.N.

Reviewing the Sunday news shows and newspapers creates the most intense cognitive dissonance: a nation crippled by staggering debt, exploding unemployment, an ever-expanding rich-poor gap, and dependence on foreign government financing can't stop debating how much more resources we should devote to our various military occupations, which countries we should bomb next, which parts of the world we should bring into compliance with our dictates using threats of military force. It's like listening to an individual about to declare personal bankruptcy talking about all the new houses and jewels he plans on buying next week and all the extravagant trips he's planning, in between lamenting how important it is that he stop spending so much. That would sound insane. And that's exactly how our political discourse sounds.

*******

And on a related note, the discussion I had earlier this week on Laura Flanders' GRITtv with Jeremy Scahill regarding the establishment and independent media can be viewed below [and I will, I believe, once again be on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC program tomorrow morning at some point discussing Iran, with an attempt to incorporate all of the helpful technical suggestions made by commenters here last week]:

UPDATE: Obama's National Security Adviser, retired Marine Gen. James Jones, denies The New York Times' report that Iran's nuclear program is more advanced than previously believed; stands by the 2007 NIE conclusion that Iran ceased work on a nuclear weapons program back in 2003; and affirms that, as part of the ongoing negotiations, "Iran has taken positive steps," steps he deems "very significant." There are certainly some factions inside the U.S. Government eager for a confrontation with Iran (the ones feeding David Sanger and William Broad their NYT script), but there are also significant figures in the administration who realize what a disaster such a confrontation would be for the U.S.

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The Business of Lobbying in American Politics

By Karin Friedemann
October 04, 2009

A lot of aging leftists invite us to march in the streets. Some say, “Mass action will defeat the empire.” Will protesting stop war? Everyone who has been paying attention probably already knows that marching on Washington will not even disturb President Obama’s breakfast.
In fact, by causing havoc on the streets we actually distract the public’s attention from the real crimes taking place like AIPAC’s lobbying of Congress to bomb this or that country or like Haliburton’s pocketing of our tax money. Americans and their politicians need to understand that invading other countries hurts America. This approach is the only way to get the anti-war movement into the mainstream and away from the fringes of society.

The Israel Lobby has made sure the Zionist perspective permeates American discourse from grammar school through the highest levels of government. No child is too young for brainwashing.

An official diverging one iota gets 
his knees shot metaphorically. Holocaust Studies in the public school curriculum can start as early as Pre-K. Anyone that wants to discuss the role the Holocaust plays in US policy-making is an insane Holocaust denier. The Israel Lobby makes no distinction between national, transnational, and international politics.

Obama told AIPAC, “... the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow and 
forever.” As long as Zionist subversives dictate to Obama, patriotic Americans will not make much headway in attempting a direct effort to change US policy. Activists need to change tactics by focusing on the danger that 
the Israel Lobby represents to the American political system and by attack-ing the discourse on which the Israel Lobby stands.

The pro-Israel lobby operates on every level of American society. Holocaust propaganda serves to shield the most privileged group in America from just criticism of many of its members and of its collective conduct—especially in relation to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and the destruction of America’s Constitutional liberties.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was one of the main proponents of the Patriot Act, which monitors the reading history of library patrons. Zionist organizations are heavily involved with Homeland Security and they use book banning and far worse methods to squelch criticism of Israel. While there is no limit to the amount of hate speech against Muslims or Christians that is tolerated now in the western world, the mere suggestion that Muslims and Christians should have equal rights with Jews in the Holy Land, or that the Hollywood version of the Holocaust is not entirely accurate, have in recent times resulted in the deportation, imprisonment, and even assassination of the speakers, writers, or publishers, and in the banning of their books or films because of Zionist pressure on western governments to abandon the principle of freedom of expression.

How about a turn-around in rhetoric? Instead of trying to make Americans care about Arabs—too hard—we need to increase their awareness that the Jewish Lobby is undermining American democracy and costing taxpayers money. Since activists can destroy a movement if they dwell upon who the good guys are (there are various opinions), we should concentrate on what we can all agree on: The Lobby needs to be stopped. That’s the only way to stop war and war taxes. The Israel Lobby is the enemy of all Americans. I would suggest a public rhetoric campaign against all Israel lobbyists suggesting prison. It should be social suicide to participate with Hillel or other pro-Israel organizations training future lobbyists.

There are plenty of ways to address this issue in town meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and other mundane ways. Causing a huge stir at a Martin Luther King school assembly or sending a mass mailing to all the high school students will create a lot more word-of-mouth grassroots pressure than a protest in DC, which doesn’t even get discussed. We are at war because we allowed our country and our minds to be taken over by Zionists and other opportunists. We refused to take responsibility for our country or for our children’s education.
Every town has a web of pro-Israel groups that work together to undermine American democracy to promote their personal interests. Pro-peace advocates need to identify the Zionist individuals who are pushing their agenda in the local school system. As soon as you start engaging in anti-Israel activism, all the Israel lobbyists will come crawling out of the woodwork to try and discredit or stop you.

Once you know who these individuals are, then you will be able to protest directly to the local leadership and law enforcement specifically about those who are personally responsible for pushing Americans to die for Israeli interests. You probably know where they live. If Americans started talking to their neighbours we could probably stop this insanity.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women

Oil and the Israel Lobby

Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alam offers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy:


In the slow evolution of US relations with Israel since 1948, as the latter mutated from a strategic liability to a strategic asset, Israel and its Jewish allies in the United States have always occupied the driver’s seat.

President Truman had shepherded the creation of Israel in 1947 not because the American establishment saw it as a strategic asset; this much is clear. “No one,” writes Cheryl Rubenberg, “not even the Israelis themselves, argues that the United States supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons of security or national interest.”(1) Domestic politics, in an election year, was the primary force behind President Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel. In addition, the damage to US interests due to the creation of Israel – although massive – was not immediate. This was expected to unfold slowly: and its first blows would be borne by the British who were still the paramount power in the region.

Nevertheless, soon after he had helped to create Israel, President Truman moved decisively to appear to distance the United States from the new state. Instead of committing American troops to protect Israel, when it fought against five Arab armies, he imposed an even-handed arms embargo on both sides in the conflict. Had Israel been dismantled [at birth], President Truman would have urged steps to protect the Jewish colonists in Palestine, but he would have accepted a premature end to the Zionist state as fait accompli. Zionist pressures failed to persuade President Truman to lift the arms embargo. Ironically, military deliveries from Czechoslovakia may have saved the day for Israel.

Once Israel had defeated the armies of Arab proto-states and expelled the Palestinians to emerge as an exclusively Jewish colonial-settler state in 1949, these brute facts would work in its favor. Led by the United States, the Western powers would recognize Israel, aware that they would have to defend this liability. At the same time, the humiliation of defeat had given an impetus to Arab nationalists across the region, who directed their anger against Israel and its Western sponsors.

This placed Israel in a strong position to accelerate its transformation into a strategic asset. In tandem with the Jewish lobby in the United States, Israel sought to maximize the assistance it could receive from the West through policies that stoked Arab nationalism; and as Israel’s military superiority grew this emboldened it to increase its aggressive posture towards the Arabs. Israel had the power to set in motion a vicious circle that would soon create the Arab threat against which it would defend the West. As a result, at various points during the 1950s, France, the United States, and Britain began to regard Israel as a strategic asset.

America’s embrace of Israel did not begin in 1967. Israel’s victory in the June War only accelerated a process that had been underway since its creation – even before its creation. Indeed, the Zionists had decided in 1939 to pursue the United States as their new mother country; they knew that they could use the very large and influential population of American Jews to win official US backing for their goals.

This paid off handsomely in 1948; but thereafter, the United States sought to contain the damage that would flow from the creation of Israel. However, these efforts would be self-defeating; the die had been cast. Israel – not the United States – was in the driver’s seat; and Israel would seek to maximize the negative fallout from its creation. As Israel succeeded in augmenting – within limits – the Arab threat to itself and the United States, the Jewish lobby would regain confidence; it would re-organize to reinforce Israel’s claim that it was now a strategic asset.

We have here another vicious circle – virtuous, for Israel. The Jewish lobby would gain strength as the Arab-cum-Soviet threat to the Middle East grew. When Israel scaled back the Arab threat in 1967, the Jewish lobby would step in to spend the political capital the Jewish state had garnered in the United States. The Israeli capture of Jerusalem in 1967 also energized the Christian Zionists, who, with encouragement from Jewish Zionists, would organize, enter into Republican politics, and soon become a major ally of the Jewish lobby. The sky was now the limit for Israel and the Zionists in the United States. The special relationship would become more special under every new presidency.

Several writers on the American left have pooh-poohed the charge that the Jewish lobby has been a leading force shaping America’s Middle East policy. They argue that the United States has supported Israel because of the con-vergence of their interests in the region. (2) Oil, primarily Saudi Arabian oil, they maintain correctly, is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”(3) Incorrectly, however, they insist that this is what has driven US policy towards the Middle East.

A priori, this is an odd position to maintain, since Britain – up until 1948 – had managed quite well to maintain complete control over Middle Eastern oil, a dominance the United States could not sustain ‘despite’ the ‘strategic support’ of Israel. Successively, they argue, Western control over oil came under threat from Arab nationalism and militant Islamism. Israel has demonstrated its strategic value by holding in check and, later, defeating, the Arab nationalist challenge. Since then, Israel has fought the Islamist challenge to US hegemony over the region.

It may be useful to examine Noam Chomsky’s analysis of this relationship, since he enjoys iconic status amongst both liberal and leftists in the United States. Chomsky frames his analysis of ‘causal factors’ behind the special relationship as essentially a choice between “domestic pressure groups” and “US strategic interests.” He finds two limitations in the argument that the “American Jewish community” is the chief protagonist of the special relationship between Israel and the United States.

First, “it underestimates the scope of the “support for Israel,” and second, it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision-making.” Chomsky points out that the Israel lobby is “far broader” than the American Jewish community; it embraces liberal opinion, labor leaders, Christian fundamentalists, conservative hawks, and “fervent cold warriors of all stripes.”(4) While this broader definition of the Israel lobby is appropriate, and this is what most users of the term have in mind, Chomsky thinks that the presence of this “far broader” support for Israel diminishes the role that American Jews play in this lobby.

Two hidden assumptions underpin Chomsky’s claim that a broader Israel lobby shifts the locus of lobbying to non-Jewish groups. First, he fails to account for the strong overlap – barring the Christian fundamentalists – between the American Jewish community and the other domestic pressure groups he enumerates. In the United States, this overlap has existed since the early decades of the twentieth century, and increased considerably in the post-War period. It is scarcely to be doubted that Jews hold – and deservedly so – a disproportionate share of the leadership positions in corporations, the labor movement, and those professions that shape public discourse. Starting in the 1980s, the ascendancy of Jewish neoconservatives – together with their think tanks - gave American Jews an equally influential voice in conservative circles. Certainly, the weight of Jewish neoconservative opinion during the early years of President Bush – both inside and outside his administration – has been second to that of none. The substantial Jewish presence in the leadership circles of the other pressure groups undermines Chomsky’s contention that the pro-Israeli group is “far broader” than the American Jewish community.

There is a second problem with Chomsky’s argument. Implicitly, he assumes that the different pro-Israeli groups have existed, acted and evolved independently of each other; alternatively, the impact of the lobbying efforts of these groups is merely additive. This ignores the galvanizing role that Jewish organizations have played in mobilizing Gentile opinion behind the Zionist project. The activism of the American Jews – as individuals and groups - has operated at several levels. Certainly, the leaders of the Zionist movement have directed a large part of their energies to lobbying at the highest levels of official decision-making. At the same time, they have created, and they orchestrate, a layered network of Zionist organizations who have worked very hard to create support for their aims in the broader American civil society.

American Jews have worked through several channels to influence civil society. As growing numbers of American Jews embraced Zionist goals during the 1940s, as their commitment to Zionism deepened, this forced the largest Jewish organizations to embrace Zionist goals. In addition, since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks and ideas that would translate into media, congressional and presidential support for the Zionist project. In addition, since Jewish Americans made up a growing fraction of the activists and leaders in various branches of civil society – the labor, civil rights and feminist movements – it was natural that the major organs of civil society came to embrace Zionist aims. It makes little sense, then, to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations had emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community.

Does our contention fail in the case of the Christian Evangelicals because of the absence of Jews in their ranks? In this case, the movement has received the strongest impetus from the ingathering of Jews that has proceeded in Israel since the late nineteenth century. The dispensationalist stream within Protestant Christians in the United States – who believe that the ingathering of Jews in Israel will precede the Second Coming – has been energized by every Zionist success on the ground. They have viewed these successes - the launching of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the creation of Israel, the capture of Jerusalem, ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’ in 1967 – as so many confirmations of their dispensationalist eschatology. The movement expanded with every Zionist victory. At the same time, it would be utterly naïve to rule out direct relations between the Zionists and the leaders of the evangelical movement. The Zionists have rarely shrunk from accepting support even when it has come from groups with unedifying beliefs.

Noam Chomsky raises a second objection against the ability of the Jewish lobby to influence policy on its own steam. “No pressure group,” he maintains, “will dominate access to public opinion or maintain consistent influence over policy-making unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power (emphases added).”(5) One problem with this argument is easily stated. It pits the Jewish lobby as one “pressure group” – amongst many – arrayed against all the others that hold the real power. This equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined “pressure group” is misleading. We have argued – a position that is well supported by the evidence – that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the organs that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about it. This is no little Cuban lobby, Polish lobby or Korean lobby. Once we recognize the scale of financial resources the Jewish lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.

Chomsky quickly proceeds to undermine his own argument about “elite elements with real power.” He explains that the “[elite] elements are not uniform in interests or (in the case of shared interests) in tactical judgments; and on some issues, such as this one [policy towards Israel], they have often been divided.”(6) Yet, despite the differences in their interests, their tactics, and their divisions, Chomsky maintains that these “elite elements” have “real power.” Oddly, these “divided” elites – whoever they are – exercise the power of veto over the multi-faceted Jewish lobby with its deep pockets, hierarchical organizations, and influence over key organs of civil society, campaign contributions, popular votes, etc.

Chomsky’s argument shifts again – a second time in the same paragraph – away from “elite elements” to “America’s changing conceptions of its political-strategic interests” in the Middle East.(6) This suggests a new theory of the chief determinant of US policy towards Israel. At the heart of these “political-strategic interests” is the oil wealth of the Middle East – and the twin threats to American control over this oil wealth from Arab nationalists and the Soviets. Presumably, Israel protects these “political-strategic interests” by holding the Arabs and the Soviets at bay. Chomsky conveniently forgets that the Arab nationalist threat to US interests in the Middle East was – in large part – the product of Israel’s insertion into the region, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its aggressive posture towards Arabs since its creation. It is unnecessary to account for the Soviet threat, since they entered the region on the back of Arab nationalist discontent. Indeed, had Israel never been created, it is more than likely that all the states in the Middle East – just like Turkey and Pakistan – would have remained firmly within the Western sphere of influence.

In another attempt to convince his readers that oil has driven US policy towards the Middle East, Chomsky claims that the United States was “committed to win and keep this prize [Saudi oil].” Presumably, the United States could not keep this “prize” without help from Israel.

This argument fails because it ignores history. Starting in 1933, American oil corporations – who later merged to form Aramco – gained exclusive rights to explore, produce and market Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia first acquired a 25 percent ownership stake in Aramco in 1973. Had there emerged an Arab nationalist threat to US control over Saudi oil in the 1950s – in the absence of Israel – the United States could have handled it by establishing one or more military bases in Saudi Arabia or, preferably, in one of the Emirates, since American military presence in Saudi Arabia might inflame Islamic sentiments. Far from helping entrench American control of Saudi oil, Israel, by radicalizing Arab nationalism, gave Saudi Arabia the excuse to first gain a 25 percent stake in Aramco and then nationalize it in 1988.

Chomsky claims that the United States was committed to winning and keeping the “stupendous” oil prize. This claim is not supported by the results that America’s Middle Eastern policy has produced on the ground over the years. If the United States was indeed committed to this goal, it would have pursued a Middle East policy that could be expected to maximize – with the lowest risks of failure – the access of US oil corporations to exploration, production and distribution rights over oil in this region. This is not the case.

In creating, aiding and arming Israel, the United States has followed a policy that could easily have been foreseen to produce, as it did produce, exactly the opposite effects. It gave a boost to Arab nationalism, radicalized it, and led within a few years to the Arab nationalist takeover of three of the four key states in the Arab world. In turn, this contributed to the nationalization of oil wealth even in those Arab countries that remained clients of the United States, not to speak of countries that were taken over by Arab nationalists , who excluded the US oil corporations from this industry altogether. In addition, America’s Middle Eastern policy converted the Middle East into a leading arena of wars. It also became a source of deep tensions between the US and the Soviets, since US partisanship of Israel forced the Arab nationalist regimes to ally themselves with the Soviet Union. In the October War of 1973, the United States provoked the Arab nations – because of its decision to re-supply the Israeli army during the war – to impose a costly oil embargo against the United States. In opposition to the pleadings of its oil corporations, the United States has also prevented them from doing business with three oil-producing nations in the Middle East – Iran, Iraq and Libya.(8)

If oil had been driving America’s Middle East policy, we should have seen the fingerprints of the oil lobby all over this policy. In recent decades, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the oil lobby has directed its efforts “almost entirely on their commercial interests rather than on broader aspects of foreign policy.” They focus most of their lobbying efforts on getting the best deals on tax policies, government regulations, drilling rights, etc. Even the AIPAC bears witness to this. In the early 1980s, Morris J. Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, noted, “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues…In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”(9)

Why does it matter whether it is oil or the Jewish lobby that determines US policy towards Israel and the Middle East?

The answer to this question has important consequences. It will determine who is in charge, and, therefore, who should be targeted by people who oppose Israel’s war mongering and its destruction of Palestinian society. If US policy is driven by America’s strategic interests – and Israel is a strategic US asset – opposing this policy will not be easy. If Israel keeps the oil flowing, keeps it cheap, and keeps down the Arabs and Islamists – all this for a few billion dollars a year – that is a bargain. In this case, opponents of this policy face an uphill task. Sure, they can document the immoral consequences of this policy – as Noam Chomsky and others do. Such moral arguments, however, will not cut much ice. What are the chances that Americans can be persuaded to sacrifice their “stupendous prize” because it kills a few tens of thousands of Arabs?

On the other hand, if the Jewish lobby drives US policy towards the Middle East, there is some room for optimism. Most importantly, the opponents of this policy have to dethrone the reigning paradigm, which claims that Israel is a strategic asset. In addition, it is necessary to focus attention on each element of the real costs - economic, political and moral – that Israel imposes on the United States. Winning these intellectual arguments will be half the battle won; this will persuade growing numbers of Americans to oppose a policy because it hurts them. Simultaneously, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must organize to oppose the power of the Israel lobby and take actions that force Israel to bear the moral, economic and political consequences of its destructive policies in the Middle East.

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). Send comments to alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Visit the author’s website at http://aslama.org/ .

References

1. 
   “Virtually every professional in the for-eign affairs bureaucracy, including the secretaries of state and war (later, defense) and the joint chiefs of staff, opposed the creation of Israel from the standpoint of US national interests (Rubenberg: 1986, 9-10).”
2. 
   For criticisms of Chomsky, see James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006): 168-81; and Jeff Blankfort, Damage control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
3. 
   This assessment comes from a 1945 re-port of the State Department (Chomsky: 1999, 17).
4. 
   Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 13.
5. 
   Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 17.
6. 
   Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle:: 17.Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle:: 17.
7. 
   Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel lobby and US foreign policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 143.
8. 
   Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel lobby: 145.

Source

Related:
Militant Zionism and the Invasion of Iraq