Egypt
Tom Englehardt, introducing Dilip Hiro's article "Behind the Coup in Egypt", calls Obama's speech to the 2014 West Point graduates "a bookend" to the disastrous policies underway when George Bush addressed the graduates of 2002. As President Obama pointed out to the class of 2014, some of those “terror cells in 60 or more countries” [referred to by Bush] have by now become full-scale terror outfits and, helped immeasurably by the actions the Bush Doctrine dictated, are thriving. In Afghanistan, a long-revived Taliban can’t be defeated, while neighboring Pakistan, with its own Taliban movement, has been significantly destabilized. Amid the ongoing drone wars of two administrations, Yemen is being al-Qaedicized; the former president’s invasion of Iraq set off a devastating, still expanding Sunni-Shiite civil war across the Middle East, which is also becoming a blowback machine for terrorism, and which has thrown the whole region into chaos; Libya...is now a basket case; across much of Africa, terror groups are spreading, as is destabilization continent-wide. "Behind the Coup in Egypt" details how Egypt's military and intelligence services orchestrated the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood [and how]...Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Hiro describes the increasing restrictions on Egyptian democracy, the phony trials for Morsi supporters, the relentless anti-Brotherhood campaign, the judge who set "the world's mass death-penalty record", the rewritten Egyptian constitution, and the eventual victory of one of the military leaders (Abdel Fattah el-Sisi) in a May 26 election that had only one opposition candidate and was marred by poor turnout. Egypt is one of Washington's strongest allies in the region and the story is indicative of how from Kabul to Bonn, Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro so many ruling elites no longer feel that listening to Washington is a must. [TomDispatch.com, June 5]
Michele Dunne Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposes "A U.S. Strategy towards Egypt under Sisi", June 5 Egypt is at a perilous juncture in a decades-long journey of change. Washington should focus on supporting the Egyptian people more than whoever is currently in power.
Afghan Prisoner Swap
In a June 4 post at Informed Comment, Juan Cole wonders if the "prisoner swap hysteria is a sign of GOP war withdrawal symptoms." With the imminent end of war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the five former officials of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, held at Guantanamo as prisoners of war, would have to be released according to the Geneva Conventions. Wars fulfill multiple functions for the US elite. They justify vast expenditures that benefit the political clients of the president. They throw tax-payer money to a small group of arms manufacturers. They can revive faded fortunes. In the last decade the Republican Party...became the war party. The problem for the happy warriors among the conservatives is that they can’t stop Obama from winding down America’s decade of war. They continually carp that Obama should have kept troops in Iraq past 2011...They are further unhappy that Obama has announced that as of January, 2017, there will be no US troops in Afghanistan. For the first time in over a decade and a half, the US will not be at war...The Republican Party, with the exception of its Libertarian wing, has become so wedded to perpetual war that it has been thrown into a fit of hysteria by this release of former Afghan officials. The hysteria has even led to the ridiculing of Bergdahl’s father for having a beard, which [at least one news] anchor likened to Taliban beards. Categorizing American critics of a war as the enemy is the most wretched sort of demagoguery...The GOP has to get over it. We won’t be at war much longer. And if their platform is again in 2016, as it was in 2012, that the US should have retained a division each in Iraq and Afghanistan and should intervene militarily in Syria and other conflicts as well, I think they will find that the public is just as unenthusiastic about that platform two and a half years from now as it was a year and a half ago.
The Nation, referring to a 1973 article in its magazine, discusses "the outpouring of truly vicious commentary about the return of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from five years in Taliban imprisonment." The 1973 article notes that, for the Vietnam War, To acknowledge the political motivations of many of the deserters—disbelief in the cause, disgust at fellow Americans’ behavior, moral objections to war generally—would be to undermine the foundations of the American project in Southeast Asia. It would, the Nation essayist concludes, “require an admission that massive numbers of ordinary, enlisted GIs rejected the war.” That fear lies behind the attacks against Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, if the accounts are correct, served on the front lines of the American imperial machine with the unenviable misfortune of doing so with eyes wide open. The obvious psychological duress evident in e-mails Bergdahl sent to his parents just before his July 2009 disappearance was the consequence of seeing reality all too clearly. Those who stop just short—often not even that—of calling for his execution betray in their almost uncontrollable vituperation a refusal to acknowledge the reality of this most recent American adventure in Asia, just as the Nixon administration stubbornly clung to the war in Vietnam.
As right-wing operatives and media mouthpieces gang up to demonize the last US POW of these tragic and misguided wars, here's a link to a Daily Kos article "The GOP is heading for a world of hurt on Bergdahl, here's why" - interesting reading to say the least and probably the best antidote I've seen to the venom spewing from the right. Reviewing the Universal Code of Military Justice, the author concludes that, given the documented facts in the situation, it is impossible to prove desertion. At worst, [Bergdahl] can be charged under Article 86: Absence Without Leave. That is a far less serious charge, and "time served" as a POW of the Haqqani network would probably be deemed sufficient punishment. Which, incidentally, would also considered an extenuating circumstance under that article.
US Wealth Inequality
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| OWS poster - various websites |
- On wealth inequality: At the same time as wealth is accumulating for the 1%, wages for middle and lower income Americans are sinking, driven by factors also largely under the control of the wealthy. These include the application of new technology to eliminate human jobs, the crushing of unions, and a decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage that more and more Americans depend on for survival.
- On finding jobs: One in six men, 10.4 million Americans aged 25 to 64, the prime working years, don't have jobs at all, a portion of the male population that has almost tripled in the past four decades. They are neither all lazy nor all unskilled, and at present they await news of the uncharted places in the U.S. where those 10 million unfilled jobs are hidden....And how hard is it to land even a minimum-wage job? This year, the Ivy League college admissions acceptance rate was 8.9%. Last year, when Walmart opened its first store in Washington, D.C., there were more than 23,000 applications for 600 jobs, which resulted in an acceptance rate of 2.6%, making the big box store about twice as selective as Harvard and five times as choosy as Cornell.
- On why cutting unemployment and food stamps won't "force people back to work": 73% of those enrolled in the country’s major public benefits programs are, in fact, from working families -- just in jobs whose paychecks don’t cover life’s basic necessities. McDonald’s workers alone receive $1.2 billion in federal assistance per year. Why do so many of the employed need food stamps? It’s not complicated. Workers in the minimum-wage economy often need them simply to survive. All in all, 47 million people get SNAP nationwide because without it they would go hungry.
- The most important step:...Raise the minimum wage. Tomorrow. In a big way...But while higher wages are good, they are likely only to soften the blows still to come. Beyond this, van Buren is pessimistic, concluding that what most likely lies ahead is not a series of satisfying American-style solutions to the economic problems of the 99%, but a boiling frog’s journey into a form of twenty-first-century feudalism in which a wealthy and powerful few live well off the labors of a vast mass of the working poor...Absent a change in America beyond my ability to imagine, that's likely to be my future -- and yours.
Palestinian Unity Government
The technocratic Palestinian unity government was sworn in Monday June 2. Both Hamas and the PLO back the government, ending several years of division. Washington offered its backing several hours later. This did not sit well with the Israeli Likud Government. As reported in a June 5 post at Informed Comment: Several Israeli ministers expressed public anger on Tuesday after the US State Department said it was willing to work with the new Palestinian unity government put together by the West Bank leadership and Gaza's Hamas rulers. Israeli commentators categorized it as a new wedge in the relationship with the US. That relationship was already under scrutiny following the collapse of Kerry's peace efforts, with Washington pointing to Israel's "rampant settlement activity" as a key element in the collapse of US-brokered talks with the Palestinians...Hardliners within Netanyahu's rightwing coalition have been pushing for Israel to take unilateral steps such as the annexation of the main Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank. The security cabinet agreed...to set up a team to examine the annexation option, but ...commentator Shimon Shiffer said the move was a sop to ...hardliners rather than a serious policy change. So far, Israel has imposed only limited sanctions on the Palestinians in response to the unity government. It has frozen the transfer of $5.8 million of the $117 million it collects in taxes each month on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and limited the new ministers' freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank. And even though it has pledged not to negotiate with the new government, it has not vetoed contact with Palestinian leaders, including Abbas...After discussing the issues raised and the difficulties facing the new unity government, Yossi Alpher. commenting in a post on the APN website, writes, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that this could be an important first step toward renewed Palestinian political and territorial unity that eventually leads to heavier pressure on Israel to engage seriously in two-state negotiations.
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