The Pentagon Budget
TomDispatch contributor Mattea Kramer writes about the Pentagon's phony budget war. Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk...Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon. Kramer analyzes the positioning of the military-industrial-political-complex in an excellent March 6 post at TomDispatch. "Ike" must be turning over in his grave.
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks
The original time frame for the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks is rapidly approaching with no visible progress to report. Former Palestinian negotiator Mohammed Ishtayeh doesn't believe there is much hope for an extension of the April 29 deadline for a framework deal. “What we have seen in the talks is that the gap is growing, rather than narrowing,” said Mr. Ishtayeh, who resigned as a negotiator in November to protest accelerated Israeli settlement building. For the Palestinians, the biggest obstacle is a new demand ... that they accept Israel as a Jewish state, he said. The Palestine Liberation Organization recognized the state of Israel when peace efforts began two decades ago and Mr. Abbas has argued this is sufficient. Mr. Abbas cannot “under any circumstances” recognize Israel as a Jewish state because this would restrict the return options of Palestinian refugees...Israel’s land demands pose another serious obstacle.... Israel wants to annex these “settlement blocs,” but never has presented a detailed border proposal. The Palestinians say these blocs add up to about 12% of the West Bank. Israel also wants a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley, which makes up 28% of the West Bank. [National Post/Associated Press, March 6]
Obama's Message to Netanyahu
Meanwhile Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington speaking with President Obama. Juan Cole's March 5 Informed Comment opinion piece called Netanyahu’s visit even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected...It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out.... Most observers in Europe and even some in the US could see the hypocrisy of the US denouncing Russian troops in Crimea but supporting Israeli troops in Hebron. Prior to his meeting with Netanyahu, Obama had been interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg for Bloomberg. Obama had a strong message for the Israeli Prime Minister on the peace process (see below). Juan Cole called Obama's words more candid than those of any sitting president since the 1970s. Cole's take on the President's statement is that Obama is trying to tell Netanyahu that we can see him...that the world is deciding that the Israelis intend to keep the Palestinians stateless and to constrain their lives with checkpoints and arbitrary arrest and property theft virtually forever...What Obama was...saying was that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to respond to Israeli colonialism against the Palestinians is unfolding in other venues where the US government doesn’t have a veto. The US cannot force the European Union states to disregard EU law. It cannot forestall lawsuits by Palestinian concerns in Europe against European companies involved in helping occupy them. Moreover, ...Palestine [as] a non-member observer state at the UN...could take Israel to the International Criminal Court over criminal Israel actions in the Occupied territories. Obama was simply observing that as the scales fall from the world’s eyes, Israel will be subject to sanctions, and the US government cannot do anything about it.
Ukraine
Crimea declared its intent to rejoin Russia after the demonstrations that removed President Viktor Yanukovich from office. Russia Times reported on March 7: Over 65,000 people gathered on Friday for a demonstration in central Moscow to support residents of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
Juan Cole in an Informed Comment March 7 post noted the hypocrisy of US politicians for opposing the Crimean decision as a violation of international law. He points to Yugoslavia, the Sudan and Iraq as countries where US politicians supported breaking up countries and suggests that George Mitchell’s careful agreement [for Northern Ireland]...would be a good model for keeping Crimea in Ukraine while recognizing Russian interests there.
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic, a land-locked nation of about 4.6 million people, is one of the world's poorest countries. The Human Development Index, a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income, places it in 179th place of the 187 countries with data. These facts make the sectarian violence engulfing the country even more senseless and tragic. The CAR has been in chaos since Muslim rebels seized power a year ago
and then lost it around December as Christian militias fought back...Since then, revenge attacks on the Muslim minority community, including
summary executions, torture and looting, have become more common. [The Economist, Feb 15] A new president, Catherine Samba-Panza, has pledged to put a stop to the violence and to bring reconciliation to the country. She took office on an interim basis in January but so far the violence has not abated. Muslims are fleeing to neighboring countries, French troops are trying to maintain some semblance of order and the UN is considering bringing in a large peace-keeping force. With the mass exodus, the Bangui economy has gone into rapid decline,
made worse by violence on the roads into the capital that has all but
cut the city off from outside supplies. A recent statement by Oxfam and Action Against Hunger highlighted the increased threat of food shortages in a country where 1.3 million are already in dire need of food. [The Guardian, Feb 14](Image of children in refugee camp at Bangui airport is by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images and appeared in The Guardian Feb 21)
Climate Change
The world's oceans play a major role in maintaining our climate. They convey heat from warm regions to cold and vice versa. A disruption in the "thermo-haline" conveyors of the world's oceans and seas can lead to severe, and possibly abrupt, climate change. Temperature (thermo) and salt (haline)
content determine the density of ocean water. Differences in ocean
water density drive this (literally) world-scale conveyor belt. If this
conveyor belt receives a big enough shock - for example, large amounts
of fresh water from melting glaciers or increased precipitation - the
oceans will experience a decrease in salt content and density.
This will interfere with or shutdown the ocean conveyor belt. The
result would be somewhere between the Younger Dryas event (10-20 degree
F. temperature drop) and a return to a full-blown glacial period. If
this catastrophe does occur, the change will be very quick - on the order of a decade. Now a recent study reported at Smithsonian.com concludes that a surge in freshwater at the surface may have shut down mixing of water layers in the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic or in the more dramatic words at the Daily Kos website - The Antarctic Half of the Global Thermohaline Circulation is Collapsing - adding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate models have not considered the effects the collapsing production of Antarctic Bottom Water and political policy has not kept up with the IPCC. We are moving rapidly into uncharted waters as the Arctic melts. Global political policies are not keeping up with the rate of change and our models have, to date, underestimated the rate of change. We are witnessing a total failure of global leadership to deal with changes we caused that are spiraling out of control. Related Links
Obama's Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg: Time Is Running Out
In an hour long interview Thursday in the Oval Office, Obama, borrowing from the Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel, told me that his message to Netanyahu will be this: “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?” He then took a sharper tone, saying that if Netanyahu “does not believe that a peace deal with the Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate an alternative approach." He added, "It’s hard to come up with one that’s plausible....There comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices,” Obama said. “Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?” [Bloomberg View website, Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2]
Central African Republic
Can Catherine Samba-Panza save the Central African Republic? [The Guardian, March 2]
President Eisenhower's Warning About the Military-Industrial Complex
You-Tube of the warning given in his Farewell Address (1961)
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