Mondoweiss

One Cheer for Olbermann's Latest Bush/Iraq Tirade

Tonight I watched one of Keith Olbermann's trademark rants against George Bush. It went on for 15 minutes of vituperative outrage, generally surrounding Bush's politico interview, and his decision to give up golf while the Iraq War was going on...

The first thing you have to say is that it's completely impressive that Olbermann gets to hold forth with such fury, it's a proof that we still have a democracy, even on commercial TV. Good for him. He's surely ignored a lot of responsible people telling him to Cool it. The second thing is that Olbermann's analysis is a little cheap. He blames Bush for the Iraq War. Good, so do I. He says that Bush is a nincompoomp. Agreed. There are suggestions that Bush is doing it for business interests. There is anger that Bush overruled the "realists." If you're going to talk about realists, you have to talk about neocons, and you have to talk about ideas. This war was built on bad ideas. Yes George Bush showed the worst judgment in American history, but he is a nincompoop, he doesn't have time to read books. Guys who read books came up with this war and he was swayed by their arguments post-9/11. Of course it's his fault, but it's also the fault of the guys who read and wrote books.  Blame the intellectual agents of this horror, or you are going to have more like it.

Olbermann also gives a pass to the Congress, saying it was misled by mendacious Bush-fed intelligence. But Congress voted for this war; the Congress showed a disastrous lack of judgment when handed obviously-shaky intelligence. Barack Obama was a state senator then, in Chicago, and he knew it was a bad war, Lincoln Chafee knew it when he did the minimum and went to see the CIA guys. The weird thing about Olbermann's rant is that it's so focused on George Bush, and so trembling with operatic outrage, that it creates an odd sympathy for its nincompoop target. I'm glad MSNBC is airing this stuff. I just wish Olbermann was smarter.

Being Right About Iraq War Finally Yields Career Dividends (Obama Closes In)

A week back I drafted a post saying that MSNBC should take Chris Matthews off air unless he says he's not running for Senate in '08 then never posted it because Matthews is such a political genius that I almost forgive him. Last night he had another crushing insight. At about midnight, as he and Buchanan and Russert were agreeing that the Dems' race is over, he said that the only reason Barack got his foot in the door in the first place and was now in a position to shut off the feeding tube was because of Hillary's vote in 2002 to authorize the war. That's why he got to run as a believable change candidate; and she didn't: She had made a terrible mistake in judgment on the most important decision of the last 40 years.

Not Obama. As an Illinois state senator in October 2002, Obama, with a real sense of the moment, and some courage too, opposed the war and took on the neocons.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

Supporters of the decision to invade a country that did not attack us have tried to argue these facts away for a long time. They say that Obama would have made the same decision as Hillary if he had been holding statewide office (highly unlikely) or that Hillary's vote was really not that meaningful because the whole establishment was sliding off the edge (exactly; the brave tried to stop the insanity). Or, yielding to Packerism, they say that George Bush and Rumsfeld just fought it the wrong way. These are all self-serving claims, so that war supporters don't suffer in position for having blown the call. Eric Alterman used to wonder when we who opposed this war were finally going to get our dividend. It occurred to me after Matthews's comment that the birds may finally be coming home to roost, six years on...

Abu Ghraib's a Moral Fig Leaf for the Disastrous Decision to Invade (and Other Wit n Wisdom of Linc Chafee)

I just watched the great Lincoln Chafee, formerly a Rhode Island senator, now the author of Against the Tide, on C-Span talking about the war and politics at the Watson Institute last month. He made a few great points.

The most salient was one I've expressed here: War contains atrocity, and the horror over Abu Ghraib is kind of a rear guard moral action by people who supported the war to somehow justify their disastrous choice by crying out, Look how they screwed it up! As if occupying an Arab society could have been done well, and it was Cheney and a bunch of degraded majors and sergeants and Lyndie England who botched things. Chafee said Look, Vietnam produced My Lai; war is a horrible thing. Charles Lindbergh, as I have pointed out here before, served in WW2, the great war, and in his (fabulous) war journals pointed out the terrible things that the Greatest Generation did to Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific--threw them out of airplanes alive, blocked their egress from caves and poured oil down inside and torched them, etc. I favor none of this stuff. But I've studied war enough to know that it brutalizes people and utterly strips the enemy of humanity and it is much easier to judge this behavior from an armchair having voted for the war than if you spend all day worrying about being maimed by IEDs. Palestinians murder innocent Israelis out of something of the same dehumanization, Israelis commit atrocities likewise; war is a cycle of violence.

Chafee reminded us that the real error was the decision to invade. "This is insanity," Chafee said to his Republican caucus back in 2002 and got blank looks back. He at least had "done the homework," looked at the evidence, had gone to the CIA and spoken to the analysts and seen what the case for war consisted in, understood it to be baseless. "There was no evidence," Chafee said. Saddam threatened the U.S.--nuts! He was coming down Main Street! Insanity, Chafee said again. This is why I and many thousands of others were in the streets protesting the war plans. Then it took us three days to capture Baghdad, Chafee went on; this was some great threat to us? Obama should be making this point: Hillary didn't do the homework.

Chafee also went after the neocons.

Since When Did 'Helping Israel' Turn Into a Stated Reason for Invading Iraq?

Last night Chris Matthews said he was shocked by a suggestion McCain made in a speech that the Iraq war was waged for oil. Matthews commented, So this means it wasn't about spreading democracy or defending Israel! Let's hear this right: Matthews was saying that helping Israel was one of the stated reasons for the war.

Cuddly Michael Scheuer says the same thing in cleverly denouncing Douglas Feith's book on antiwar.com:

[T]here seems to be a newly emerging iron law   of history; to wit; everything the Neocons do in the name of helping Israel   – such as hyping the threat from state sponsors of terrorism, invading Iraq,   and urging war with Iran – digs Israel's grave a bit faster and a bit deeper.   There is more than a bit of poetic justice in that.

And Glenn Kessler said as much in his fine 2007 biography of Condi Rice:

The invasion of Iraq had been promoted in part as a way to bring democracy to the region and help Israel.

Well I'm sorry, I never got the memo. I was told it was about WMD, then about democracy. George Bush specifically said it wasn't about Israel.

If it was about Israel--and I believe it was, in good part--the public should have been told. Bringing it in the back door now is irresponsible journalism. Acting as if it was true all along is a sly way of avoiding what we need here: open debate about whether Israel's treatment of Arabs is in America's interest. MSNBC and Kessler's employer, the Washington Post, owe us that discussion.

P.S. McCain's speech underlines the main reason that Obama, or Hillary, will clean his clock in the fall: he's addlepated.

Hillary's Strategist Once Sought Full Accounting for Vietnam War Decision-Makers (Will Hillary Ever Apologize?)

A couple of readers have pointed out that I was unfair to Geoff Garin, Hillary's top strategist, in my suggestion that he was milking the Rev. Wright controversy on MSNBC Monday. They're right. Turns out Garin was actually saying it was time to move past the Wright business; it was Andrea Mitchell who was milking it. (I was making lunch, so the factchecking department was drinking wine...) Geoff Garin's a kind person and on the left; he's not the type to exacerbate racial divisions.

That said, I want to return to Garin's writings from college. Yesterday I wrote about his call for violent revolution. To be fair, a temporary mood on Garin's part, confined to 2 pieces at age 20. But a leftwing radical spirit characterized his work. That is the reason I as a young Jewish lefty looked up to him. He was clearthinking, he had figured out what he thought, he was never egotistical, and he had moral vision (at a time in my own life when I was immature and intellectually turbulent).

Garin often hit a theme I hit today: the need for accountability by our leaders and thinkers for a disastrous war policy--the Vietnam war in his case. And as I do he even blamed the meritocracy for producing the war:

Then there is the problem of meritocracy itself. Do we want, or does the rest of the world need, a Harvard that picks out an elite to do society's work when society's work means bombing Asian peasants... [emphasis mine]

Garin wanted war-crimes prosecutions. In 1975, at 22, he opposed the mood of let's-move-on. When Vance Hartke, an Indiana senator famous for opposing the war, said there must not be fingerpointing over who got us into the war, because it had been started by "desperate men caught up in a process that had a momentum of its own and which they neither understood nor could control"--which is sort of Hillary's line-- Garin wasn't buying. He wrote:

That way nobody gets hurt, at least not until the next time around... A conspiracy of silence will rob the United States of its Vietnam heritage: the moral, legal and political questions that American involvement raised but never quite settled.

Beautiful. Here's another inspired passage:

Neoconservatism Has Gotten a Bad Name. Why Not 'Nest of Vipers'?

Joel Kovel is an old lefty--or anyway, he was wearing a green corduroy jacket at the Brecht Forum last night-- and he insists on a central argument of this blog: that the neocons pushed the Iraq war out of a Zionist agenda. The neocons, says Kovel, are "a nest of vipers in the heart of the Bush Administration." Dozens of them came into the Bush Administration--"not all of them Jewish, but every last one of them a violent ultra-Zionist." And then they overreached, by recruiting the U.S. in "satrap" Israel's "paranoid" and militarized response to the Arab world.

The Iraq war has now created a "serious division within the U.S. elite... that could have fateful consequences for Israel."

Light, Light, Light Is Coming Into Our Lives (on Israel/Palestine)

Last night at the Brecht Forum, I heard Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism, and this morning I need to shout that There is light coming into Americans' lives on this issue. Everything I've said on this blog, about "The tide is ours," and "There will be a robust debate about this issue in America soon" is coming to pass. I feel this way because Kovel made the following points:

--He participated in a forum two weeks back in Chicago, with two other Jews, one of them Tony Karon, on Post-Zionism. 150 people were in the room, many of them young Jews. This would never have taken place two years ago.

--The campaign to commemorate the Nakba would also have been unheard of a couple years back, in American alternative culture. It is now a big deal on the left. Events in Brooklyn on May 21, at Columbia University next Monday with Nadia Abu El-Haj, lately in the New Yorker, plus "No Time to Celebrate," the Jewish campaign to recognize the Nakba. Major progress.

--A "chipping away" has taken place over a long time, with the help of the New Historians, that is finally making a difference in the discourse on Israel, Kovel proclaimed. He has done about 100 events in the last year or so, he said, and things have changed. He still gets the "catcalls" and venom from pro-Israel supporters. But it's subsided. "They more or less leave you alone. They don't know what to say, or they've gone under their flat rock." I've noticed that too. Fewer enraged deniers...

--The Establishment is fracturing before our eyes. An important discussion has begun inside the foreign policy elite about whether Israel is in our best interest. Walt and Mearsheimer was a huge event. It signalled the end of consensus in the elite. I complain all the time on this blog about the marginalization of Walt and Mearsheimer. But Kovel is saying, and I agree, that their ideas are seeping, seeping in, like water into a rock, that will break down a mountain. Believe me, soon this issue will make the mainstream media.

--The neocons are ultra-Zionists. They built the Iraq war. The debacle is also feeding this process.

The world is changing, let me say it again. Light is coming into American lives!

'The Atlantic' Was Prophetic on Palestine in 1930

Jeffrey Goldberg has done the good service of noting several major pieces about Israel/Zionism in the Atlantic prior to his own this month. He warns us that one shouldn't regard these pieces as prophetic. But at least one is--this one from 1930 by William Ernest Hocking, which includes the following:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword....

Why I Talk About Dual Loyalty

My post about Masa raised the dual-loyalty issue, and this seemed a good time to repeat myself and offer a number of instances in which the issue has come to my attention in the last year or so. Here goes:

--Harvard Yiddishist Ruth Wisse  says at the Center for Jewish History that young American Jews should consider themselves part of Israel's "army" and just give up a couple of years of their lives to fight as advocates here, particularly against Arab voices on campus. To his credit, Eric Alterman (a board member of "J Street," the alternative lobby) identified this as a call to dual loyalty.

--John Judis of the New Republic bravely states on TNR's website that many American Jewish organizations "make dual  loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a  Jewish state exists." You will find that the link in my original post no longer goes to that text on the TNR site. Does that make my post the only record of this courageous statement?

--A friend of mine returns from the birthright trip and shows my family photographs of his tour, including a visit to an Israeli army base where the kids meet Americans who have joined the IDF. As I recall, some of the visiting kids got to handle guns. The U.S. is at war. Has any of these able-bodied kids set foot anywhere near an American base?

--The New England Patriots' owner's wife says her sons can fight for Israel, not the U.S.

--At a Columbia U. event featuring the awe-inspiring Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, Rachel Glaser, a rep for Zionist Organization of America, attacks the Jewish sponsors of the presentation, saying it was OK for such a show to go on in Israel, but "Outside of Israel, you're playing with fire." I.e., Jews have to stand together and manipulate American opinion in favor of Israel.

--A writer at Huffington Post, having read Bush Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams's 1997 statement  that outside of Israel, Jews must "stand apart from the nation in which they live" (printed in Walt and Mearsheimer's book, reported by me years ago in the Observer),  says that Abrams should be investigated by the Senate so as to determine whose national interest he was putting first, Israel's or the U.S.'s. 

--Dual loyalty is obviously a major issue in the AIPAC espionage trial, which keeps getting put off.

I've never called on anyone to be prosecuted or investigated for dual loyalty, though I'd sure like to be there to hear the testimony. I don't have any evidence of treason. Also it is not illegal to have dual loyalty, especially since the Supreme Court allowed an American-Israeli artist to come back here and vote in a landmark decision some 40 years ago.

What I've said again and again is that I find all the invocations of loyalty to Israel confusing and inappropriate. But as Judis said, this is now part of Jewish identity. At Jimmy Carter's speech at Brandeis a year or so back, Jewish kids wore blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, to protest him. A lot of the kids on Masa's promotions appear to be similarly indoctrinated. On the Sabbath, synagogues offer a "prayer for the state of Israel" and put banners out on their lawns saying, "We Stand With Israel." The merging of U.S. and Israeli interests is most concerning in public life. I always wonder why the American Enterprise Institute slips $96,000 a year to Dore Gold, a neocon and former Netanyahu ambassador, as a "scholar" in Jerusalem, and his services are rarely evident in AEI events. Or why Richard Perle and David Wurmser of AEI could write a paper for Netanyahu urging him to end the peace process and then go to work in Bush's Administration--which claimed it was for the peace process.

I never thought about this stuff till Iraq happened and my country stepped off its path. Why? Why did we invade an Arab country that did not attack us, and occupy it for many years, causing untold misery, and causing our soldiers to become the targets of suicide bombers? One reason was a climate of dual loyalty, and the confusion it helped to foster among some advocates for the war about what is the American national interest.

Bibi Says 9/11 Attack Has Been Good for Israel

Haaretz reports that Bibi Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

It is true that many Americans came to think that we are in the same war Israel is in after 9/11. Podhoretz's World War IV. I believed as much myself for a little while. But this belief, to be sustained over many years, requires stupidity, bad leadership, propaganda, racism, parochialism, or all of the above. Americans are stirring from their nightmare...