A US State Department official, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph:
“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
War on Iraq
The US withdrawal from Iraq
Let Jon Steward explain it to you:
On a more serious note, it was clear long before he was elected that Obama was never going to be the great anti-war president we would like him to be. He was smart enough to see that the War on Iraq was a bad idea, but he’s still steeped in the ideology of American exceptionalism and has surrounded himself with hardline foreign policy hawks; Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, undsoweiter.
On domestic policies he may well turn out to be the most leftleaning president of the last thirty years (which isn’t hard) but as post-war history shows, space for “radicalism” at home is often bought through hardline foreign policies. With Obama there will be less of the bull in the chinashop foreign policy practised by Bush and his cronies, there will be more international outreach, more of the sort of stuff Serious Liberals find important, but the fundamentals of America’s foreign policy won’t change. My prediction is that at the end of his term, the US will still have significant forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The only thing Blair deserves costs 30 cents
But since this is a fundamentally unjust world, he’ll get one million dollars for his “global leadership”:
Tony Blair has won a prestigious million-dollar (£697,000) prize for his leadership on the world stage, it was announced today.
The former prime minister, now a Middle East peace envoy, will receive the Dan David prize for “his exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict”.
The award is presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University, and a spokesman for Blair said the money would be donated to the former Labour leader’s charity for religious understanding, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
It sounds absurd to give Blair this prize — and you’ll notice the word “Iraq” doesn’t occur in the announcement — until you realise who‘s giving this award. Dan David is an avowed zionist and his foundation is located at Tel Aviv University; zionist usually have little problems with mountains of corpses, if they’re Arab corpses. Furthermore, Blair was very helpful to Israel not just with Iraq, but also with the War on Lebanon, helping delay the ceasefireto give the IDF more time to kill civilians.
It would of course be impolite to mention Blair gets this money for helping get rid of an enemy of Israel or perpetuating mass murder, hence the blather about “asking the important questions” and “morally courageous leadership”.
Note that the Israelis aren’t theonly ones to thank Blair for delivered services; he’s made a very nice living hovering up sinecure jobs after he left office.
Withdrawing from Iraq to fight in Afghanistan? Hell-no!
Obama says he wants to withdraw from Iraq by 2010 to concentrate on Afghanistan and send more troops there. Juan Cole comments on how awful this policy would be and where it comes from:
If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.
I think Obama has a little bit of a tendency to try to fix his political problems by going overboard. Thus, he faces skepticism from Jewish American voters. So he made a Zionist speech in Boca. In the context of US politics, that is to be expected; he would not be any sort of politician, much less a phenomenon, if he did not try to reassure Jewish Americans about his commmitment to Israeli security, which is after all a worthy goal. But Obama went on to praise Zionist thinker Theodore Herzl, who started this nonsense about a people without a land for a land without a people. And then he gave away Jerusalem, undivided and permanently, to the Israelis in the middle of ongoing negotiations over its status between Israel and the Palestine Authority in the context of the Quartet, which the US government supports. Neither of those two things was necessary. It was overkill. And Obama now has some bridge building to do with the Arab and Muslim worlds if he becomes president, since Jerusalem is also dear to their hearts.
Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.
A good example of how much domestic concerns are driving US foreign policy, to a much greater extent than in other countries. Leftie bloggers have long noticed how much Democrats are “locked in” to supporting awful foreign policies out of fear for being seen as weak; this does seem to be another, particularly egrigious example of this tendency.
On the other hand, the War of Aghanistan has always been seen as a “good war” even by leftwing Americans and Obama isn’t the first Democratic heavyweight to criticise the War on Iraq because it’s a distraction from Aghanistan. I’m not sure Juan Cole is right in thinking Obama went overboard because he wanted to look more serious or tough, or whether Obama doesn’t genuinely believe in the fight against the Taliban. Neither position is likely to do much good of course.
Torture porn
During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents of Omar Khadyr:
TORONTO—Burying his face in his hands, a 16-year-old captured in Afghanistan sobs and calls out “Oh Mommy!” in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday that provides the first look at interrogations inside the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
[…]
The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr breaking down in tears. At one point he pleads for help and displays chest and back wounds that he says had not healed six months after his capture.
Peeling off his orange prisoner shirt, he shows the wounds and complains he cannot move his arms, saying he has not received proper medical attention, despite requests.
“They look like they’re healing well to me,” the agent says of the injuries.
“What you see in the video is a teenager begging for help and what you see is an interrogation that violates U.S. law and any international law concerning the rights of children,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantanamo prisoners.
“If this is the way a teenager in Guantanamo has been treated, you can just imagine how anyone else has been treated.”
It honestly would not surprise me at this point if Bush, Cheney et all collectively popped a stiffy over videos like this. There seems to be a deep sexual perversion at the root of the War on Terror, ever so often surfacing in e.g. the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Supposedly the naked pyramids and forced simulated fellatio of prisoners is done to soften them up for interrogation “because Arabs are uniquely shamed by sexual matters”, but you do wonder whether the incessent fascination with sexual humiliation isn’t much more present in the minds of the interrogators themselves…. As if 9/11 gave a certain part of America carte blanche to force its power fantasies on an unending supply of helpless victims.
Meanwhile the treatment of Omar Khadr is justified on him supposedly being a murderer, but as Eli notes:
George Bush (and Barack Obama and the Congress and the media and etc.) insist the U.S. is at “war” in Afghanistan, and they don’t mean that metaphorically as in the “war on drugs,” they mean it literally. Well, if the U.S. is at “war,” then Omar Khadr is a prisoner of war and has to be treated as such. If every single person captured by the U.S. in such a “war” is an “illegal combatant” and not a prisoner of war, then the U.S. can’t possibly be at war, since there is no opponent in this war. You can’t have it both ways.