Paul Pillar - Netanyahu’s ‘King David’ Complex

Israeli hardliners and American neocons say U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same, meaning that if Israel bombs Iran, the United States should join in. But other observers say Washington must create some distance from Israel’s messianic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

We have a comparative lull at the moment in what has been saturation attention to Iran and its nuclear program. The lull comes after the concentrated warmongering rhetoric associated with the recent visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the AIPAC conference in Washington, and before the opening in mid-April of the only channel offering a way out of the impasse associated with the Iranian nuclear issue: direct negotiations between Iran and the powers known as the P5+1.

It is a good time to reflect on how much the handling of this issue underscores the gulf between Israeli policies and U.S. interests. The gulf exists for two reasons. One is that the Netanyahu government’s policies reflect only a rightist slice of the Israeli political spectrum, with which many Israelis disagree and which is contrary to broader and longer-term interests of Israel itself.

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/02/netanyahus-king-david-complex/

Renee Parsons - Iran and the Non Proliferation Treaty

Soon after President Obama's speech before AIPAC's annual convention, the potential attack on Iran, which just a few weeks earlier had seemed so imminent, faded quietly into the background. Gone from the headlines were the daily threats of military options 'on the table' and bellicose rhetoric that did little to calm the fevered war pitch that was building prior to the AIPAC meeting.

In what seemed like walking a political tightrope, the president offered an impressive inventory of his administration's support for Israel with caution against "too much loose talk of war" and that "now is not the time for bluster" as the president appeared to distance himself from beating the tom-tom for war. Missing, however, was any mention of the president's earlier suggestion implementing UN Resolution 242 which requires a return to the 1967 borders regarding the Palestine-Israel dispute -- an issue at the top of a long list of grievances on U.S. Mideast policy with undeniably deep roots in creating terrorism. 

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/iran-nuclear-weapons_b_1385241.html

Henry Giroux - Youth in Revolt: The Plague of State-Sponsored Violence

Young people are demonstrating all over the world against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. At the moment, these demonstrations are being met with state-sanctioned violence and insults in the mainstream media rather than with informed dialogue, critical engagement and reformed policies. In the United States, the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s and, in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, poor minorities, immigrants and increasingly women. As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability. Collective insurance policies and social protections have given way to the forces of economic deregulation, the transformation of the welfare state into punitive workfare programs, the privatization of public goods and an appeal to individual responsibility as a substitute for civic responsibility. Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cut backs in basic social services, especially for the poor, young people and the elderly.(1) Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres, which have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.

Read More:

http://www.truth-out.org/youth-revolt-plague-state-sponsored-violence/1331663173

Norm Chomsky - Are We About to Get Embroiled in a Nightmare War With Iran?

The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs featured the article “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option,” by Matthew Kroenig, along with commentary about other ways to contain the Iranian threat.

The media resound with warnings about a likely Israeli attack on Iran while the U.S. hesitates, keeping open the option of aggression – thus againroutinely violating the U.N. Charter, the foundation of international law.

As tensions escalate, eerie echoes of the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in the air. Feverish U.S. primary campaign rhetoric adds to the drumbeat.

Concerns about “the imminent threat” of Iran are often attributed to the “international community” – code language for U.S. allies. The people of the world, however, tend to see matters rather differently.

The nonaligned countries, a movement with 120 member nations, has vigorously supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium – an opinion shared by the majority of Americans (as surveyed by WorldPublicOpinion.org) before the massive propaganda onslaught of the past two years.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154540/chomsky%3A_are_we_about_to_get_embroiled_in_a_nightmare_war_with_iran

Kevin Ryan - SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: Failures of the US Secret Service on the Morning of 9/11: A Call for Transparency

Guest Post by Kevin Ryan, former Site Manager for Environmental Health Laboratories, a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL). Mr. Ryan, a Chemist and laboratory manager, was fired by UL in 2004 for publicly questioning the report being drafted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on their World Trade Center investigation. In the intervening period, Ryan has completed additional research while his original questions, which have become increasingly important over time, remain unanswered by UL or NIST.

The U.S. Secret Service failed to do its job on September 11, 2001 in several important ways. These failures could be explained if the Secret Service had foreknowledge of the 9/11 events as they were proceeding. That possibility leads to difficult questions about how the behavior of Secret Service employees might have contributed to the success of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Answering those questions will require the release of existing interview transcripts as well as follow-up questioning, under oath, of a few key people within the agency.

The most glaring example of Secret Service failure on 9/11 was the lack of protection for the President of the United States after it was well known that the country was facing terrorist attacks on multiple fronts.The interesting thing about this was that it was not a consistent approach. That is, the president was protected by the Secret Service in many ways that day but he was not protected from the most obvious, and apparently the most imminent, danger.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29956

Matthew Rothschild - Obama’s Creepy Executive Order: Permanent War Economy

Entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” [1] it authorizes the President and cabinet officials to take over crucial aspects of the national economy not only during emergencies but also in peacetime.

The order relies on a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to further entwine the domestic industrial economy with the military. It talks of fostering “cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors.”

The stated purpose is to strengthen “the domestic industrial and technological base” so as “to ensure it is capable of responding to the national defense needs of the United States.” 

This amounts to putting the economy on permanent war footing, even when there isn’t an emergency.

For instance, the Executive Order talks of the need for the economic base “to satisfy [defense] requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency.” And cabinet officials are authorized to “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources . . . to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions.”

Read More:

http://www.progressive.org/permanent_war_economy.html

Deepak Tripathi - Delusions of Power: Obama Is No Gandhi

First the video of United States Marines urinating on bodies of Afghans who had been killed. Then the revelation that copies of the Quran had been burned at Bagram Air Base, which also serves as an American prison camp in Afghanistan. Nearly thirty Afghans and several NATO troops died in the violent reaction. The BBC Kabul correspondent described these events, and the violent public reaction to them, as the tipping point for NATO in the Afghan War.

Just as the U.S. commander Gen. John Allen and President Obama hoped that apologies from them would help calm the situation comes another disaster. If official accounts are to be believed, an American soldier left his base in the middle of the night, entered villagers’ homes, woke up Afghan families from sleep and shot his victims in cold blood. The soldier was reported to have turned himself up to U.S. commanders, and was flown out of the country. He has since been named as St. Sgt. Robert Bales. Other reports tell a different story, indicating that a group of soldiers was involved. Looking drunk and laughing, they engaged in an orgy of violence, while helicopters hovered above.

Read More:

http://countercurrents.org/tripathi250312.htm

William Hartung - Throwing Money at the Pentagon

If you’ve been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math.  When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.

Advocates of Pentagon reform have criticized President Obama for his timid approach to reducing military spending.  Despite current Pentagon budgets that have hovered at the highest levels since World War II and 13 years of steady growth, the administration’s latest plans would only reduce spendingat the Department of Defense by 1.6% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the next five years.

Still, compared to his main Republican opponents, Obama is a T. rex of budget slashers.  After all, despite their stated commitment to reducing the deficit (while cutting taxes on the rich yet more), the Republican contenders are intent on raising Pentagon spending dramatically.  Mitt Romney has staked out the “high ground” in the latest round of Republican math with a proposal to set Pentagon spending at 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  That would, in fact add up to an astonishing $8.3 trillion dollars over the next decade, one-third more than current, already bloated Pentagon plans.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175518/

Thomas Frank - Too Smart to Fail

In the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.

First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness.

Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well.

Read More:

http://thebaffler.com/notebook/2012/03/too_smart_to_fail#.T2fkq2gJKA8.twitter

David Swanson - Would You Stop a Friend from Destroying the Earth?

What would you do if someone had a button that could destroy the earth and they were walking across the room to push it?  Would you stand in the way?  Would you talk them out of it?  Would you sit by and watch, maybe make a sarcastic remark or two?  What if the button might destroy the earth or might just destroy part of it?  What if it might leave most of the earth intact but kill millions of people, but what if you had no way of being sure how far the destruction would spread? 

Here is an animation made by the Union of Concerned Scientists on the damage a strike on Iran would likely cause, including the death of three million people.

Here is a New York Times article on what would likely happen next, including a war at least regional in scope and involving the United States.

The information used in the animation above and reported by the New York Times as well comes from that peacenik hippie source of antiwar propaganda: the Pentagon, the same institution that says Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

Read More:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-swanson/42079/would-you-stop-a-friend-from-destroying-the-earth