Month: June 2011

President Obama’s tale of Osama bin Laden’s death was very much a comic book style rambling narrative of fantasy and wonder, with many of the details retracted within hours of the telling. Another comic book version of the killing is coming out, though this time in actual comic book format.

Written by minor character actor and retired Marine Dale Dye, the comic will, to quote Dye, ““celebrate what happened, especially among youngsters.”

The basis is centered around what he was told about the raid. He also insists all the soldiers will be portrayed as “calm, solid professionals” so the story is likely to be fairly straightforward with little intrigue. His wife terms the book “a souvenir program” to commemorate “something we all did together.” Still, at its core, the book will be a work of fiction with only the basic grounding in something loosely related to reality.

And if you find yourself struggling to tell the difference between that and President Obama’s speech again remember… this time it’s an actual comic book and not just a simulation of a comic book turned live national address.

Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty is performing a political move to make a name for himself by giving a speech deriding Obama’s response to the Arab Spring. The speech is “being billed as a major foreign policy address” from the very guy who has trouble distinguishing Iraq from Iran.

Although not as manically jingoist as his fellow candidate Rick Santorum, Pawlenty gives the same old rap that every Republican attempts to give a Democratic President: You’re too soft and don’t love Israel enough.

“He has been timid, slow, and too often without a clear understanding of our interests or a clear commitment to our principles,” Pawlenty is to say.

[…] Pawlenty, the conservative former governor of Minnesota, will say that it is essential that the United States make clear its unabashed support for Israel.

“Israeli-Palestinian peace is further away now than the day Barack Obama came to office. But that does not have to be a permanent situation. We must recognize that peace will only come if everyone in the region perceives clearly that America stands strongly with Israel,” he is to say.

The first comment about timidity and lack of understanding of our interests or principles carries almost no information at all. It is a catchall crafted to let people write in their own vague grievances with Obama’s foreign policy. It’s no different than “Change you can believe in” in that the change can be a million different things to a million different people listening. Additionally, Obama has acted out every hawkish, interventionist, imperial wetdream in response to the Arab Spring in presumably the same way Pawlenty would have conformed perfectly to the national security culture that subsumes the bubble of presidential life. Despite what the speech is made to seem like, the policies of the two men are virtually identical; Pawlenty is just playing on people’s preconceived political grievances which have been ingrained in the public’s collective mind for decades.

As for not showing Israel enough support, this is too clearly false to warrant an explanation. But it must be said if the speech is going to accomplish its goals. First, play on the ignorant public’s feelings. Second, pander to the Israel lobby.

The violence the government has been unleashing on the Syrian people unfortunately continues, with Syrian troops Monday reaching towns near the Lebanon border “guns echo[ing]” and “claiming to look for terrorist groups.” But Monday also saw more than 150 Syrian activists, intellectuals, and dissident leaders meet to show support for the pro-democracy protests as well as condemn Assad’s violence and call for a peaceful transition that could lead to the end of Assad’s rule.

“The solution to this crisis has to address its root causes. This regime must be toppled and replaced with a democratic system,” said leading Syrian writer Michel Kilo, who spent three years as a political prisoner.

A declaration issued at the end of the meeting at a Damascus hotel pledged to support the goal of a democratic state that guarantees freedom and rights to all members of society.

It called on the authorities to end military assaults on cities and towns, withdraw troops and security forces from the streets, release thousands of political prisoners held without trial and allow the rights of protest and assembly.

The additional international pressure, primarily through sanctions, has also put pressure on Assad and given legitimacy to the protesters. But the more important factor is that the Assad regime’s ally, Turkey, has been pressuring him as well:

In the past five months, [Turkish Prime Minister] Mr Erdogan and Mr Davutoglu have repeatedly urged long-overdue reforms on President Assad, including gradual moves towards multi-party elections.

As the Assad regime continues to wage war on its people, the Turks have become more outspoken, with the prime minister, warning they would not tolerate another Hama – the 1982 massacre of Sunni Islamists by Mr Assad’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad.

[…] Pressure is building for decisive action as Syria’s scorched-earth campaign gets ever closer to the border. Turkish leaders are becoming more strident, with Mr Erdogan denouncing the repression as “savagery”. “There are three types of leader in this region,” says Mr Davutoglu. “Those who see change as a must and want to lead and manage it; those who accept the need for change but who are following rather than leading in the hope of gaining time; and those who are resisting change.

“The third category will disappear – I told Bashar this – the second can get by for a time, but only the first category will survive. We are telling our friends in the region we want them in that first category,” he says. Look at us. We made these sorts of changes [after the AKP came to power] in 2002 – even before people started to demand them.”

We’ll see how far these small victories go, but it is nonetheless progress, and a far cry indeed from what some foaming-at-the-mouth Congressional war-mongers like Lindsey Graham were advocating just a couple weeks ago:

“If it made sense to protect the Libyan people against Qaddafi, and it did, . . . the question for the world is have we gotten to that point in Syria?” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, added: “We may not be there yet, but we’re getting very close.” He explained: “It has gotten to the point where Qaddafi’s behavior and Assad’s behavior are indistinguishable . . . You need to put on the table all options, including a model like we have in Libya.”

The arguments in favor of war for humanitarian reasons are so helplessly narrowed to “the only way to stop these atrocities is U.S. intervention” that they don’t even allow for the possibility of change absent such an intervention. Even so, as I wrote here, “unless and until the U.S. government halts its own support of such atrocities in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Iraq, in Afhganistan, in Pakistan, in Palestine, and elsewhere, we have no moral or practical standing to intervene in Syria.” These minor instances of progress have been made, again, even while the U.S. has not only refrained from engaging militarily, but even foregone opportunities to end the atrocities peacefully.

Hagit Borer, an Israeli American, explained in yesterdays Los Angeles Times that his reasons for participating in the aid flotilla headed for Gaza go beyond, as Glenn Greenwald described, “a theatrical, non-threatening form of peaceful protest against the blockade,” but is also a protest against broader Israeli actions of demolition and settlement building. The U.S. and Israel not only refuse to recognize these motivating factors, but they continue to pretend the flotilla is some sort of security threat.

Yet, in a truly amazing statement of falsity, Elliot Abrams writes “current construction in the settlements is not a critical issue, and the expansion of construction into additional lands has been minimal.” This is incorrect on both counts. Overwhelming majorities of Palestinians consider the issue of settlements a game-changer. And the Israeli expansion has not only been substantial, but it has been increasingly so.

This is happening with the backdrop of news today that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has officially announced its intention to seek statehood at the U.N. in September. Uri Avnery wrote today about how pro-Israelis are complaining that this move is unfair, except of course when Israel does it:

Any Israeli spokesman (not to mention spokeswoman) will tell you readily: because it is a “unilateral” move. How dare they proclaim a state unilaterally? How dare they do so without the consent of the other party to the conflict—us?

A stickler for detail might ask at this point: “But was the state of Israel not proclaimed unilaterally?” Our state, it may be remembered, was declared by David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues on May 14, 1948, without asking anyone.

[…]Furthermore, these dastardly Palestinians are going to the UN General Assembly, trying to circumvent the UN Security Council where the U.S. can block them with its veto. Dirty trick!

But just a moment! Was the state of Israel not proclaimed on the basis of a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly? To be precise: Resolution 181 of Nov. 29, 1947, on the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state?

As a matter of fact, this resolution is still in force. It served as the centerpiece of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and serves now as a basis for the Palestinian demand that the state of Palestine be accepted as a full-fledged member of the United Nations.

But again, how can one compare?

If you want to argue against the right of Palestinians to receive much needed aid, to be free from illegal expulsion, and to claim their own sovereignty as any other people does, you simply have to base you arguments on such falsehoods.

The rhetoric used to marginalize dissenting opinion and coddle the herd into unity conformity is the same in Libya as it has been in other recent wars. I see two main tactics.

The first is the attempt to detract attention and emphasis away from any potential domestic concern about the war with nonchalant casualness. This was exemplified when Harry Ried last week said that the War Powers Resolution doesn’t apply in Libya because “We have no troops on the ground there, and this thing’s gonna be over before you know it anyways, so…” This is common: Don’t trouble yourselves with keeping your own government in check regarding war; this is no big thing and it will be over too soon to be worth any effort to stop it, so sit quiet. Not only did we hear this at the beginning of the war intervention in Libya (it will last “days, not weeks”), but we heard it in Iraq as well. Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials said the Iraq war would “last weeks, not months” while Don Rumsfeld said “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” We’re now about 100 days into this conflict with no end in sight. Also under this category of enforcing conformity is the promise of no ground troops we’ve been hearing, despite some quiet admissions that we will in fact need ground troops. The goal is the same: this war is and will be small and insignificant; don’t you dare make a fuss about it.

The other tactic is to hint in some way that if you are against the war you’re supporting the enemy. Classic with-us-or-against-us Bush rhetoric as well as Hillary Clinton’s recent “Whose side are you on?” talk is the most egregious of this sort. But it has less potent forms like this recent piece in the Wall Street Journal (via):

The press corps is claiming that all this reflects “war weariness,” but the war in Libya will only drag on longer if Gadhafi and his bloody-minded sons have reason to believe that the Americans are divided. These resolutions will encourage our enemies to conclude that if they can only hold out for a few more weeks or months, the U.S. and NATO will give up and sue for peace. The House is also undermining the morale of Libya’s rebels, not to mention domestic support for the intervention.

If you are not convinced by the first tactic of enforcing conformity (that the war is no big thing, thus shut up), then you still should not express dissent because it will encourage the enemy or let them know our plans. Do not “undermine domestic support for the war” by telling the truth about it or pressuring officials to follow the law; we need that domestic support so keep the people ignorant and thus passively in support of our war dictates. This was common with Iraq too, as administration and military officials said withdrawals dates could never be discussed because that would tell the insurgents when we were leaving.

It seems clear these are just rhetorical tactics without any validity. The aim is to quell dissent and prevent those who might question war from acting in that regard. Congressional moves to end or limit the war are still ongoing, but we’ll have to see if these tactics are as successful as they have been in the past, or if the Libya adventure’s almost satire-like absurdity will continue to “undermine domestic support.”