More on Giuliani, the Neocon Presidential Candidate

Steve Clemons, editor of the excellent foreign policy blog The Washington Note, writes about a recent Washington Monthly article on the Giuliani campaign, and in particular pointing out that the former New York mayor's track record indicates his presidency would likely see a continuance of the "Unitary Executive" philosophy re-initiated by John Yoo, Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration for prosecuting the "Global War on Terror."

As Clemons puts it, the Washington Monthly piece "exposes that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may be small time aggrandizers of executive power compared to [Giuliani]."

Rachel Morris, who penned the Monthly article, argues that:

Today, Giuliani is a front-runner for the presidency of the United States. Since 9/11 the office he seeks has been radically remade. Led by Dick Cheney, the Bush administration has expanded White House powers to levels unseen since the Nixon years. Claiming an inherent authority to act outside the law, it has unilaterally set aside treaties, intercepted telephone calls between citizens without court warrants, detained individuals indefinitely without judicial review, ordered "enhanced interrogations," or torture, prohibited by law, and claimed the ability to disregard more than 1,000 parts of legislation that it has deemed to improperly restrict its authority. To thwart oversight and checks on its power, all spheres of executive branch operations have been fortified by heightened secrecy.

This expansion has warped policy decisions, undermined the country's authority abroad, and damaged the framework of laws, institutions, and processes that secure citizens against abuse by the state. It also prompts two of the most crucial, if as yet unasked, questions of the 2008 presidential race: Which contenders are most likely to relinquish some of these powers, or, at the very least, decline to fully use them? And, alternatively, which candidate is most likely to not only embrace the powers that Bush has claimed, but to seize more? The reply to the first question is complicated, but to the second it's simple: Rudy Giuliani.

Morris offers several notable characteristics of his political practices (or "management style" if you will) as Mayor, such as surrounding himself with Yes-men, pushing the envelope in terms of the legality of his actions, maintaining an unprecedented veil of secrecy around his policies as far as the public, watchdog groups, government oversight boards and the media were concerned and generally acting as though following the law was merely optional for a man as powerful and enlightened as himself.

If all of this sounds frighteningly familiar to the two terms of the George W. Bush Administration, then Morris has succeeded in elucidating the clear parallels between Bush 43 and the power-mad politician who would succeed him.

So what, then, would the election of Rudolph Giuliani as our 44th President next November really mean, in practical terms, for this country? According to Morris:

During his time as the mayor of New York, Giuliani's operating style became so ingrained, so pervasive, that we can imagine with some confidence what he might do with the power he would inherit as president. Already, he has surrounded himself with a group of accomplished legal advisors with especially muscular views of executive power and close ties to the Bush administration. Chief among them is Ted Olson, the solicitor general in Bush's first term. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Justice Department, Olson helped develop the "unitary executive theory," which envisions a constrained role for Congress in regulating the executive branch.

By Giuliani's own admission, he would, as president, perpetuate many of Bush's boldest assertions of presidential authority. In 2006, Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal that he would probably keep the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, saying that its conditions had been "grossly exaggerated." This year, at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, he refused to say whether the Bush administration had gone too far in denying the protection of the Geneva Conventions to terrorist suspects. Giuliani has also indicated that presidents have the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. At a debate, he declared himself opposed to torture but refused to say whether he would outlaw waterboarding, instead offering that interrogators should perform "any method they can think of."

What is most disturbing is the likelihood that a Giuliani administration would venture beyond the expansive claims of executive authority staked out by the Bush White House. For instance, though Bush has demanded that Congress fund the war in Iraq, he has never openly questioned Congress's power of the purse. Giuliani, however, told a reporter that the president has the right to provide money for the troops to stay in Iraq even if Congress withdraws funding. Similarly, Bush has implied that critics of his Iraq policy are unpatriotic, but he has not declared that the government can silence their voices. This September, echoing the sentiments that he repeatedly attempted to enforce as mayor, Giuliani said that the "General Betray Us" ad paid for by the left-wing group MoveOn "passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass."

One might minimize the significance of these kinds of statements as the loose talk of a candidate trying to impress conservative primary voters—indeed, that is how the press has generally treated them. To believe that Giuliani is merely grandstanding, however, is to ignore his history. If he reaches the White House, he will almost certainly do what he did at City Hall: punish dissent, circumvent the law, conceal the workings of the government in secrecy, and use his litigator's gifts to obstruct mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed that the central conundrum of the American system of democracy is "to devise means of reconciling a strong and purposeful Presidency with equally strong and purposeful forms of democratic control." One of the weaknesses in the American form of government is that a leader, if determined enough, can thwart the constitutional checks on his power. The Founders weren't omniscient, and the governing apparatus they devised contains weak points that require a degree of good faith from its participants if the system is to work. In the past, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, even the most forceful presidents didn't subvert the system of checks and balances as a matter of ideology or routine. Bush, Cheney, and Giuliani are different from each other in many ways, but they are alike in their scorn for the separation of powers.

The need for oil and the drive for military intervention

Some valuable insights into the economic considerations of US military planners for the Iraq war and occupation can be gleaned from reading a recent article entitled "The Costs of War for Oil" by Adil E. Shamoo and Bonnie Bricker for the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus (and republished here by Common Dreams).

The Op-Ed starts off by posing to the reader a bit of a trick question:
“We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people.” Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that’s the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.

The authors go on to note that none other than Alan Greenspan has acknowledged that “…the Iraq war is largely about oil” in his latest auto-hagiography; as well as pointing out the recent public pronouncement by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel that even though “people say we’re not fighting for oil . . . Of course we are . . . They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”

The authors go on to explain the problem as it currently stands in terms so clear that even a Fourth grader can clearly comprehend:

"If we keep using energy the way we always have, we’re going to need a dependable source of it to ensure that our children and grandchildren have access to the same way of life. But we have competitors for oil in the world marketplace–China, especially–and many argue that if we don’t lock up Middle Eastern oil for ourselves now, we won’t have it for our use in the very near future. That will mean paying even more for energy and allowing other nations to rev up their economic engines at our expense. (emphasis added)

But of course, as the authors point out, guaranteeing our nation maintains permanent, uninterrupted access to an unfettered supply of oil is an expensive - and dangerous - proposition.

As books like Daniel Yergin's "The Prize", Michael T. Klare's "Blood and Oil" and Dilip Hiro's "Blood of the Earth" lay out in stark, undeniable detail the critical importance petroleum plays in US (and all other major powers') geopolitical planning and considerations, it remains a fact that most Americans seem willfully ignorant about. Whether you subscribe to the theory of "peak oil" or not, it seems pretty clear that if US (and Chinese) demand for oil continues to outstrip the supply released by Opec dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the construction of permanent military bases, maintenance of a foreign military occupation and all these realities entail will be far from the last military entanglement between the West and the Middle East.

Further Reading:
• "It's the Oil" by Jim Holt, London Review of Books October 18, 2007
• "The US military oil consumption" by Sohbet Karbuz, Energy Bulletin February 26, 2006
• "Oil and Democracy Don't Mix" by Frida Berrigan, In These Times February 6, 2004

Guest Essay: "On Neuroscience and Moral Politics"

Gary Olson, Chair of the Political Science department at Moravian College, has penned a truly fascinating article entitled "Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky's Intellectual Progeny." He was kind enough to email me a link to his piece over at the website IndentityTheory.com along with a request that I reprint it at my blog. As a matter of policy, I usually don't reprint articles that have been previously published elsewhere, but this essay is so unique and thought-provoking that I had no problem whatsoever in obliging the good professor's request.

So, here is the essay; be sure to post a comment and let me know what you think about it. And just to remind everyone, if you have an original piece of non-fiction dealing with a topic at least tangentially-related to this blog, email it to me and if I'm interested I'll be happy to reprint it and help provide some free additional marketing for your work.

Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky's Intellectual Progeny

Throughout the world, teachers, sociologists, policymakers and parents are discovering that empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
—Arundhati Ray

The official directives needn’t be explicit to be well understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions.
—Norman Solomon

The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world’s most eminent scientists, “What are you optimistic about? Why?” In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cites the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are “wired for empathy.”

Iacoboni’s optimism is grounded in his belief that, with the popularization of scientific insights, these recent findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and “. . . this explicit level of understanding our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us.” (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14)

While there are reasons to remain skeptical (see below) about the progressive political implications flowing from this work, a body of impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of prosocial behavior, including moral sentiments such as empathy, precede the evolution of culture. This work sustains Noam Chomsky’s visionary writing about a human moral instinct, and his assertion that, while the principles of our moral nature have been poorly understood, “we can hardly doubt their existence or their central role in our intellectual and moral lives.” (Chomsky, 1971, n.p., 1988; 2005, p. 263)

In his influential book Mutual Aid (1972, p. 57; 1902), the Russian revolutionary anarchist, geographer, and naturalist Petr Kropotkin, maintained that “. . . under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly abandon it are doomed to decay.” Species cooperation provided an evolutionary advantage, a “natural” strategy for survival.

While Kropotkin readily acknowledged the role of competition, he asserted that mutual aid was a “moral instinct” and “natural law.” Based on his extensive studies of the animal world, he believed that this predisposition toward helping one another—human sociality—was of “prehuman origin.” Killen and Cords, in a fittingly titled piece “Prince Kropotkin’s Ghost,” suggest that recent research in developmental psychology and primatology seems to vindicate Kropotkin’s century-old assertions (2002).

The emerging field of the neuroscience of empathy parallels investigations being undertaken in cognate fields. Some forty years ago the celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall observed and wrote about chimpanzee emotions, social relationships, and “chimp culture,” but experts remained skeptical. A decade ago, the famed primate scientist Frans B.M. de Waal (1996) wrote about the antecedents to morality in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, but scientific consensus remained elusive.

All that’s changed. As a recent editorial in the journal Nature (2007) put it, it’s now “unassailable fact” that human minds, including aspects of moral thought, are the product of evolution from earlier primates. According to de Waal, “You don’t hear any debate now.” In his more recent work, de Waal plausibly argues that human morality—including our capacity to empathize—is a natural outgrowth or inheritance of behavior from our closest evolutionary relatives.

Following Darwin, highly sophisticated studies by biologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson posit that large-scale cooperation within the human species—including with genetically unrelated individuals within a group—was favored by selection. (Hauser, 2006,
p. 416) Evolution selected for the trait of empathy because there were survival benefits in coming to grips with others. In his book, People of the Lake (1978) the world-renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey unequivocally declares, “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation.”

Studies have shown that empathy is present in very young children, even at eighteen months of age and possibly younger. In the primate world, Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig, Germany, recently found that chimps extend help to unrelated chimps and unfamiliar humans, even when inconvenienced and regardless of any expectation of reward. This suggests that empathy may lie behind this natural tendency to help and that it was a factor in the social life of the common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans at the split some six million years ago (New Scientist, 2007; Warneken and Tomasello, 2006). It’s now indisputable that we share moral faculties with other species (de Waal, 2006; Trivers, 1971; Katz, 2000; Gintis, 2005; Hauser, 2006; Bekoff, 2007; Pierce, 2007). Pierce notes that there are “countless anecdotal accounts of elephants showing empathy toward sick and dying animals, both kin and non-kin” (2007, p. 6). And recent research in Kenya has conclusively documented elephant’s open grieving/empathy for other dead elephants.

Mogil and his team at McGill University recently demonstrated that mice feel distress when they observe other mice experiencing pain. They tentatively concluded that the mice engaged visual cues to bring about this empathic response (Mogil, 2006; Ganguli, 2006). De Waal’s response to this study: “This is a highly significant finding and should open the eyes of people who think empathy is limited to our species.” (Carey, 2006)

Further, Grufman and other scientists at the National Institutes of Health have offered persuasive evidence that altruistic acts activate a primitive part of the brain, producing a pleasurable response (2007). And recent research by Koenigs and colleagues (2007) indicates that within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or VMPC is required for emotions and moral judgment. Damage to the VMPC has been linked to psychopathic behavior. This led to the belief that as a rule, psychopaths do not experience empathy or remorse.

A study by Miller (2001) and colleagues of the brain disorder frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is also instructive. FTD attacks the frontal lobes and anterior temporal lobes, the site of one’s sense of self. One early symptom of FTD is the loss of empathy.

We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one’s own pain and the pain of others. Through brain imaging, we also know that separate neural processing regions then free up the capacity to take action. As Decety notes, empathy then allows us to “forge connections with people whose lives seem utterly alien from us” (Decety, 2006, p. 2). Where comparable experience is lacking, this “cognitive empathy” builds on the neural basis and allows one to “actively project oneself into the shoes of another person” by trying to imagine the other person’s situation (Preston, in press), Preston and de Waal (2002). Empathy is “other directed,” the recognition of the other’s humanity.

***

So where does this leave us? If morality is rooted in biology, in the raw material or building blocks for the evolution of its expression, we now have a pending fortuitous marriage of hard science and secular morality in the most profound sense. The technical details of the social neuroscientific analysis supporting these assertions lie outside this paper, but suffice it to say that progress is proceeding at an exponential pace and the new discoveries are persuasive (Decety and Lamm, 2006; Lamm, 2007; Jackson, 2004 and 2006).

That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be explained is why so little progress has been made in extending this empathic orientation to distant lives, to those outside certain in-group moral circles. Given a world rife with overt and structural violence, one is forced to explain why our deep-seated moral intuition doesn’t produce a more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful world. Iacoboni suggests this disjuncture is explained by massive belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level. These tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring people together.

Here a few cautionary notes are warranted. The first is that social context and triggering conditions are critical because, where there is conscious and massive elite manipulation, it becomes exceedingly difficult to get in touch with our moral faculties. Ervin Staub, a pioneering investigator in the field, acknowledges that even if empathy is rooted in nature, people will not act on it “. . . unless they have certain kinds of life experiences that shape their orientation toward other human beings and toward themselves (Staub, 2002, p. 222). As Jensen puts it, “The way we are educated and entertained keep us from knowing about or understanding the pain of others” (2002). Circumstances may preclude and overwhelm our perceptions, rendering us incapable of recognizing and giving expression to moral sentiments (Albert, n.d.; and also, Pinker, 2002). For example, the fear-mongering of artificially created scarcity may attenuate the empathic response. The limitation placed on exposure is another. As reported recently in The New York Times, the Pentagon imposes tight embedding restrictions on journalist’s ability to run photographs and other images of casualties in Iraq. Photographs of coffins returning to Dover Air Base in Delaware are simply forbidden. Memorial services for the fallen are also now prohibited even if the unit gives its approval.

The second cautionary note is Hauser’s (2006) observation that proximity was undoubtedly a factor in the expression of empathy. In our evolutionary past an attachment to the larger human family was virtually incomprehensible and, therefore, the emotional connection was lacking. Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist, adds that “We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn’t face the other kind of situation.” He suggests that to extend this immediate emotion-linked morality—one based on fundamental brain circuits—to unseen victims requires paying less attention to intuition and more to the cognitive dimension. If this boundary isn’t contrived, it would seem, at a minimum, circumstantial and thus worthy of reassessing morality (Greene, 2007, n.p.). Given some of the positive dimensions of globalization, the potential for identifying with the “stranger” has never been more robust.

Finally, as Preston (2006-2007; and also, in press) suggests, risk and stress tend to suppress empathy whereas familiarity and similarity encourage the experience of natural, reflexive empathy. This formidable but not insurmountable challenge warrants further research into how this “out-group” identity is created and reinforced.

It may be helpful, as Halpern (1993, p. 169) suggests, to think of empathy as a sort of spark of natural curiosity, prompting a need for further understanding and deeper questioning. However, our understanding of how or whether political engagement follows remains in its infancy and demands further investigation.

***

Almost a century ago, Stein (1917) wrote about empathy as “the experience of foreign consciousness in general.” Salles’ film The Motorcycle Diaries addresses empathy, albeit indirectly. The film follows Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his friend Alberto Granada on an eight-month trek across Argentina, Peru, Columbia, Chile and Venezuela.

When leaving his leafy, upper middle-class suburb (his father is an architect) in Buenos Aires in 1952, Guevara is 23 and a semester away from earning his medical degree. The young men embark on an adventure, a last fling before settling down to careers and lives of privilege. They are preoccupied with women, fun and adventure and certainly not seeking or expecting a life-transforming odyssey.

The film’s power is in its depiction of Guevara’s emerging political awareness that occurs as a consequence of unfiltered cumulative experiences. During their 8,000-mile journey, they encounter massive poverty, exploitation, and brutal working conditions, all consequences of an unjust international economic order. By the end, Guevara has turned away from being a doctor because medicine is limited to treating the symptoms of poverty. For him, revolution becomes the expression of empathy, the only effective way to address suffering’s root causes. This requires melding the cognitive component of empathy with engagement, with resistance against asymmetrical power, always an inherently political act. Otherwise, empathy has no meaning. (This roughly parallels the political practice of brahma-viharas by engaged Buddhists.) In his own oft-quoted words (not included in the film), Guevara stated that, “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

Paul Farmer, the contemporary medical anthropologist, infectious-disease specialist and international public health activist, has adopted different tactics, but his diagnosis of the “pathologies of power” is remarkably similar to Guevara. He also writes approvingly of Cuba’s health programs, comparing them with his long work experience in Haiti. Both individuals were motivated early on by the belief that artificial epidemics have their origin in unjust socioeconomic structures, hence the need for social medicine, a “politics as medicine on a grand scale.” Both exemplify exceptional social outliers of engaged empathy and the interplay of affective, cognitive and moral components. For Farmer’s radical critique of structural violence and the connections between disease and social inequality, see (Farmer, 2003; Kidder, 2003). Again, it remains to be explained why there is such a paucity of real world examples of empathic behavior? Why is U.S. culture characterized by a massive empathy deficit of almost pathological proportions? And what might be reasonably expected from a wider public understanding of the nature of empathy?

Hauser posits a “universal moral grammar,” hard-wired into our neural circuits via evolution. This neural machinery precedes conscious decisions in life-and-death situations, however, we observe “nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” At other points, he suggests that environmental factors can push individuals toward defective moral reasoning, and the various outcomes for a given local culture are seemingly limitless. (Hauser, 2006) For me, this discussion of cultural variation fails to give sufficient attention to the socioeconomic variables responsible for shaping the culture.

“It all has to do with the quality of justice and the availability of opportunity.” (2006, p. 151). Earlier, Goldschmidt (1999, n.p.) argued that, “Culturally derived motives may replace, supplement or override genetically programmed behavior.”

Cultures are rarely neutral, innocent phenomena but are consciously set up to reward some people and penalize others. As Parenti (2006) forcefully asserts, certain aspects of culture can function as instruments of social power and social domination through ideological indoctrination. Culture is part and parcel of political struggle, and studying culture can reveal how power is exercised and on whose behalf.

Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky’s critique of elites, note that “Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their social advantages, the power to do so.” (Cohen, 1991, p. 17) (For a concise but not uncritical treatment of Chomsky’s social and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.) Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication cuts both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic response. When de Waal writes, “Animals are no moral philosophers,” I’m left to wonder if he isn’t favoring the former in this comparison. (de Waal, 1996b, n.p.)

One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky’s and Herman’s “manufacture of consent,” a form of highly sophisticated thought control. Potentially active citizens must be “distracted from their real interests and deliberately confused about the way the world works.” (Cohen, 1991, p. 7; Chomsky, 1988)

For this essay, and following Chomsky, I’m arguing that the human mind is the primary target of this perverse “nurture” or propaganda, in part because exposure to certain new truths about empathy—hard evidence about our innate moral nature—poses a direct threat to elite interests. There’s no ghost in the machine, but the capitalist machine attempts to keep people in line with an ideological ghost, the notion of a self constructed on market values. But “. . . if no one saw himself or herself as capitalism needs them to do, their own self-respect would bar the system from exploiting and manipulating them.” (Kelleher, 2007) That is, given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which to launch further critiques of elite manipulation, this cultivation of callousness.

First, the evolutionary and biological origins of empathy contribute hard empirical evidence—not wishful thinking or even logical inference—on behalf of a case for organizing vastly better societies.

In that vein, this new research is entirely consistent with work on the nature of authentic love and the concrete expression of that love in the form of care, effort, responsibility, courage and respect. As Eagleton reminds us, if others are also engaging in this behavior, “. . . the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love.” Because reciprocity mandates equality and an end to exploitation and oppression, it follows that “a just, compassionate treatment of other people is on the grand scale of things one of the conditions for one’s own thriving.” And as social animals, when we act in this way we are realizing our natures “at their finest.” (2007, pp. 170, 159-160, and 173) Again, the political question remains that of realizing a form of global environment that enhances the opportunity for our nature to flourish.

I’ve noted elsewhere, Fromm’s classic book The Art of Loving is a blistering indictment of the social and economic forces that deny us life’s most rewarding experience and “the only satisfying answer to the problem of human existence.” For Fromm, grasping how society shapes our human instincts, hence our behavior, is in turn the key to understanding why “love thy neighbor,” the love of the stranger, is so elusive in modern society.

The global capitalist culture with its premium on accumulation and profits not only devalues an empathic disposition but produces a stunted character in which everything is transformed into a commodity, not only things, but individuals themselves. The very capacity to practice empathy (love) is subordinated to our state religion of the market in which each person seeks advantage in an alienating and endless commodity-greedy competition.

Over five decades ago, Fromm persuasively argued that “The principles of capitalist society and the principles of love are incompatible.” (Fromm, 1956, p. 110). Any honest person knows that the dominant features of capitalist society tend to produce individuals who are estranged from themselves, crippled personalities robbed of their humanity and in a constant struggle to express empathic love. Little wonder that Fromm believed radical changes in our social structure and economic institutions were needed if empathy/love is to be anything more than a rare individual achievement and a socially marginal phenomenon. He understood that only when the economic system serves women and men, rather than the opposite, will this be possible (Olson, 2006).

***

The dominant cultural narrative of hyper-individualism is challenged and the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that claims we are motivated by greedy, dog-eat-dog “individual self-interest is all” is undermined. From original sin to today’s “selfish gene,” certain interpretations of human nature have invariably functioned to retard class consciousness. These new research findings help to refute the allegation that people are naturally uncooperative, an argument frequently employed to intimidate and convince people that it’s futile to seek a better society for everyone. Stripped of yet another rationalization for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the capitalist mode of production becomes ever more transparent. And learning about the conscious suppression of this essential core of our nature should beg additional troubling questions about the motives behind other elite-generated ideologies, from neo-liberalism to the “war on terror.”

Second, there are implications for students. Cultivating empathic engagement through education remains a poorly understood enterprise. College students, for example, may hear the ‘cry of the people’ but the moral sound waves are muted as they pass through a series of powerful cultural baffles. Williams (1986, p. 143) notes that “While they may be models of compassion and generosity to those in their immediate circles, many of our students today have a blind spot for their responsibilities in the socio-political order. In the traditional vocabulary they are strong on charity but weak on justice.”

Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education’s record at cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding the lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship can be realized through the arts and literary humanities. There is little solid evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take on empathy-enhancing practices within U.S. colleges and universities is considerably less sanguine. Nussbaum’s episodic examples of stepping into the mental shoes of other people are rarely accompanied by plausible answers as why these people may be lacking shoes—or decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and long-life expectancy. The space within educational settings has been egregiously underutilized, in part, because we don’t know enough about propitious interstices where critical pedagogy could make a difference. Arguably the most serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research puts this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies for cultivating empathy and identifying with “the other.” Joining the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require risky forms of radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989). Evidence produced from a game situation with medical students strongly hints that empathic responses can be significantly enhanced by increased knowledge about the specific needs of others—in this case, the elderly (Varkey, 2006). Presumably, limited prior experiences would affect one’s emotional response. Again, this is a political culture/information acquisition issue that demands further study.

Third, for many people the basic incompatibility between global capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications, not the least being consequences for the planet. Within the next 100 years, one-half of all species now living will be extinct. Great apes, polar bears, tigers and elephants are all on the road to extinction due to rapacious growth, habitat destruction, and poaching. These human activities, not random extinction, will be the undoing of millions of years of evolution (Purvis, 2000). As Leakey puts it, “Whatever way you look at it, we’re destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet. . .” And researchers at McGill University have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that “. . . if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological resources with our fellow species.” (Mikkelson, 2007, p. 5)

While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities. Decety and Lamm (2006, p. 4) remind us that “. . . one of the most striking aspects of human empathy is that it can be felt for virtually any target, even targets of a different species.”

This was foreshadowed at least fifty years ago when Paul Mattick, writing about Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid, noted that “. . . For a long time, however, survival in the animal world has not depended upon the practice of either mutual aid or competition but has been determined by the decisions of men as to which species should live and thrive and which should be exterminated. . . . [W]herever man rules, the “laws of nature” with regard to animal life cease to exist.” This applies no less to humans and Mattick rightly observed that the demands of capital accumulation and capitalist social relations override and preclude mutual aid. As such, neuroscience findings are welcome and necessary but insufficient in themselves. For empathy to flourish requires the elimination of class relations (Mattick, 1956, pp. 2-3).

Fourth, equally alarming for elites, awareness of this reality contains the potential to encourage “destabilizing” but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless “other,” both here and abroad. In de Waal’s apt words, “Empathy can override every rule about how to treat others.” (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) Amin (2003), for example, proposes that the new Europe be reframed by an ethos of empathy and engagement with the stranger as its core value. The diminution of empathy within the culture reduces pro-social behavior and social cohesiveness. Given the dangerous centrifugal forces of ethno-nationalism and xenophobia, nothing less than this unifying motif will suffice, while providing space for a yet undefined Europe, a people to come.

Finally, as de Waal observes, “If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon rather than going against our nature.” (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) An ethos of empathy is an essential part of what it means to be human and empathically impaired societies, societies that fail to gratify this need should be found wanting. We’ve been systematically denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with this moral sentiment. I would argue that the tremendous amount of deception and fraud expended on behalf of overriding empathy is a cause for hope and cautious optimism. Paradoxically, the relative absence of widespread empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its potentially subversive power.

Is it too much to hope that we’re on the verge of discovering a scientifically based, Archimedean moral point from which to lever public discourse toward an appreciation of our true nature, which in turn might release powerful emancipatory forces?

*Please see the original article at the link provided at the beginning of this post for a list of acknowledgements and references.

George Will calls out Democrats for "pandering" to the Middle Class (as opposed to the GOP's fealty to multi-millionaires)

Blogger David Sirota points out the utter ridiculousness of Mr. Will's muddled thinking as evidenced by the thesis of his latest column for Real Clear Politics.com.

Reading through Will's rambling Op-Ed, one finds that there are no arguments put forward that are based on official government data, informed by an college-level understanding of the principles of micro- and macroeconomics that the Democratic presidential candidates as of the fall of 2007 are putting forward disingenuous, cynical and inefficient policy platforms with regard to dealing with the nation's serious crisis of a dramatically fraying social "safety net" due to the shift that has occurred in this country in responsibility for aiding the working poor and middle class Americans who suffer a sudden financial catastrophe: medical illness, job loss and unexpected long-term unemployment from the Congressional Representatives who have been elected by the American people to multi-national corporate employers (read Hacker's book on middle-class economic insecurity and risk titled The Great Risk Shift. The same corporations busy off shoring their labor force to Third World nations where employees can be paid pennies an hour with no labor or human rights protections.

Take just one of Will's arguments:

[Hillary] Clinton's idea for helping Americans save for retirement is this: Any family that earns less than $60,000 and that puts $1,000 into a new 401(k)-type plan would receive a matching $1,000 tax cut. For those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 the government would match half of the first $1,000. She proposes to pay for this by taxing people who will be stoical about this -- dead people -- by freezing the estate tax exemption at its 2009 level.

So what's wrong with Hillary's policy? First of all, why should the government use he tax revenue it receives from all Americans and then create a special exemption on the tax dollars collected from multimillionaire estates to their children as opposed to helping families with three children and a husband suddenly out of work for a few months at the same time that the wife needs to pay for her cancer care out of pocket due to lack of health insurance.

A conservative case can be made for something like Clinton's proposal. It is a case for reducing the supply of government by reducing demand for it, and doing so by giving people ownership of enlarged private assets as a basis for their security. It is a case for raising the nation's deplorable saving rate and simultaneously encouraging the nation's economic literacy and temperance by giving more people a stake in equities markets.

Will is not surprisingly quite silent on the question of how this mysterious "we" can help make the bankrupt middle class worker "raise his savings rate" as though his income were perfectly elastic. Also, "giving more people a stake in the equities markets" does not in itself ensure that the typical working middle class family will gain an increase in their net worth of savings rate. The broad domestic stock markets (e.g. NYSE, NASDAQ) are good for long-term investing; one could make, say, a 10-20% return over a decade investing in Blue Chip companies. And as an asset class, it probably beats any competitor as a long-term investment strategy.

But the problem is that individuals (and their families dependent on his or her savings) enter, exit and permanently withdraw from the labor market at times that are often inopportune as far as their equity investment valuations might be concerned. As a simple thought experiment, imagine someone with a large share of their Social Security investments tied up in the NASDAQ stocks in the middle of 2001 who is forced into early retirement at the age of 60 for medical reasons. (And by the way, as recently as six months ago, many of the shares in their portfolio were considered safe, "growth" stocks, unlike junk bonds were in the 1980s.) This experiment can be replicated by imagining someone whose retirement was invested in what seemed like rock solid investments in early 2001 - perhaps WorldCom or Enron stock?

Will then goes on to attempt a further journalistic sleight-of-hand:

George W. Bush made this case in his advocacy of personal accounts financed by a portion of individuals' Social Security taxes and invested in funds based on equities and bonds. When he proposed this, Clinton stridently opposed him, and not just because she thought it would undermine Social Security's solvency and political support. She also said it was a dangerous gamble that would make retirement insecure by linking retirement savings to the stock market. Echoing a trope from Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, she said investing retirement funds in the stock market was a "risky scheme."

Today her Web site calls her proposal a way to save for "a secure retirement." After an undisclosed epiphany, she belatedly recognizes that 401(k) funds invested in equities are a foundation for security.

The important point here is that Clinton's health care plan differs substantively from the GOP fallback on financing tax cuts for the super-rich by cutting back on federal government programs, services and financial support for the poor who have no social safety net of which to speak. He is embarrassingly cynical in this sentence, hoping perhaps that none of his reading audience will bother to compare Clinton's policies with George W. Bush's.

For example, Clinton has made public a policy agenda for reforming healthcare, strengthening the middle class and helping support parents as they raise their families, all of which are radical departures from the Bush Administration's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% and proposal to partially privatize Social Security and other entitlement programs.* To get a better sense of the Bush Administration's and allied Republican lawmakers' actual budget priorities, start off by reviewing this recent report from Reuters, for instance.

*Obviously, given the Clintons' track record of making populist-sounding campaign promises aimed at securing support from progressive Democratic voters prior to primary elections, and then triangulating in order to appease the demands of the Wall Street bankers who bankrolled their campaign, it very much remains to be seen as to whether if elected Hillary would make good on her current platform.

**If you are interested, for parts I and II of my blog's running series on George Will's utter detachment from reality, see this previous post here.

(By the way, I fully realize that an apt subtitle for this post might very well be "Signs of Life", as I haven't been, um, blogging for the past few months. I have a ton of half-finished drafts of posts that need additional research, so hopefully a lot of "new" material will pop up on Troubled Times in the next few weeks.)

In Iraq, how can the US identify "the enemy"?

While being interviewed on the record by the AP recently, Major General Rick Lynch quite candidly noted:

"It's critical to better coordinate between coalition forces, Iraqi security forces and concerned citizens," as he calls the vigilante-style groups that have sprouted up across the country to fight extremists.

The comments reflect rising concerns about possible friendly fire killings that could threaten to undermine the U.S. strategy of seeking alliances with local Sunni and Shiite leaders to fill the vacuum left by a national police force that has been plagued by corruption allegations and infiltration by militants.

Incidents of shooting of civilians at checkpoints has drawn allegations by many, in Iraq and beyond, that U.S. troops and contractors are quick to fire and ask question later.

Such criticism was widespread after the March 2005 fatal shooting of an Italian intelligence officer at a checkpoint near Baghdad airport. The officer was traveling at night shortly after securing the release of a kidnapped Italian reporter, who was wounded along with an Italian driver when a U.S. soldier opened fire. The U.S. military has said the soldier acted appropriately in the incident.

After the Abu Lukah shooting, the so-called North of Hillah Awakening Council staged a three-day strike to register its anger over the loss of three of its members, but guards resumed their posts on Sunday.

"Such acts will create a gap between us and the Americans. We are trying to restore security in the area while the Americans are killing us," Nabil Saleh, 37, said as he stood with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder at his post in Abu Lukah.

Jabar Hamid, a 33-year-old Shiite from the village, said the U.S. military had paid $2,500 to each family of the three men killed.

"It is a tragedy and regrettable thing," he said.

From this mater-of-fact wire story, we learn that the US is paying off so many "terrorists" in the Iraq to keep rival factions off balance that we can no longer readily identify which gang is currently "on our side" - leading to obvious logistical problems like innocent civilians getting their heads blown off by our GIs; and (2) the Pentagon is currently valuing the life of an Iraqi killed in a "regretable" act of "friendly fire", meaning the "tragic" result of "collateral damage" from coalition forces, is $2500.

But it gets even better . . .

In a bid to distinguish the [US] recruits from potential militants, the groups have been given vests with reflective stripes, similar to those worn by traffic police in many countries. Others wear brown T-shirts with Iraqi hats similar to those worn by the national army.

Capt. John Newman, 31, of Columbus, Ga., said the soldiers believe they can discern volunteers from the insurgents.

"We've given them their road guard vests," Newman said. "So, he'd better be wearing that vest if I see him carrying an AK-47."

Lynch stressed the Americans are not arming the groups because the men already have weapons, primarily AK-47s that are legally permitted in Iraqi households.

"We are allowing the people of Iraq to secure their own areas and they are using their personal firearms to do that," he said.

(The Pentagon's claim that their hands are clean in this civil anarchy is laughable if recent history serves as a rough guide, Ed.)

The southern belt of Baghdad is a mosaic of Sunni enclaves, such as Arab Jabour and Jisr Diyala, once al-Qaida havens, and all-Shiite strongholds, such as the town of Nahrawan. In that community, the country's strongest Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, has lately been overshadowed by rogue Shiite elements and "gangs," as the U.S. military describes them.

Iraqi volunteers — both Sunnis and Shiites — mostly watch over their neighborhoods, guard mosques and man checkpoints. The theory is that, as natives to the area, they can better recognize foreign fighters and al-Qaida loyalists in their midst.

The tactic was first implemented in the Sunni western Anbar province, and later in Diyala, a province northeast of Baghdad.

Now it is being tested in Lynch's territory, such as the wind-swept planes surrounding U.S. patrol base Hawks, 20 miles southeast of Baghdad — one of 36 small bases Lynch's troops have built up as outposts in their region.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Shiite leaders have expressed concern over the American policy of sponsoring armed Sunnis, many of whom were likely former insurgents.

(So "volunteers" aren't being armed by the Pentagon, but Sunni militia members are? Ed.)

"Acceptance rules for these recruits should be within a legal framework so that we do not allow the emergence of new militias," al-Maliki said Friday during a meeting with the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen.

The U.S. military says the ultimate goal is to bring the volunteers into the Iraqi security forces, which the Americans hope will be eventually able to take over the country's security so they can go home.

Lynch insisted that every volunteer is nominated by tribal leaders and vetted by Americans with retina scans and fingerprinting. The serial numbers of their AK-47s also are logged.

I'd love to know what "being vetted" actually entails in this context. And the serial numbers of "volunteers'" AK-47s are tracked, but all Iraqi citizens are legally able to own AK-47s and keep them in their homes? I can see how the Pentagon brass think this new plan is going to help secure Iraqi civilians from the volunteer armed insurgents it is arming and vetting to kill rival militias.

For some more background info on these developments, peruse this post from democrats.com (not affiliated with the Democratic party) originally released back in July here as well as this great article from CounterPunch written way back in January 2005 here.

And don't miss this discussion over at Dissent Magazine on "Exit or No Exit? Morality and the Withdrawal from Iraq," appearing in the publication's Winter 2008 issue. Panelists include: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, Gerard Powers, Trudy Rubin, and Michael Walzer.

According to the discussion:

There has been considerable--and heated--argument over the potential exit strategies from Iraq. Last month, Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, and Gerard Powers debated the moral and political consequences of withdrawal from Iraq at Fordham University. The panel, which was sponsored by Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, was moderated by Trudy Rubin, the foreign affairs columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Update: Watch this powerful video from the New York Times I came across this afternoon titled "Know Thine Enemy" (permalink here) on the idological roots of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation.

Reviewing Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

Matthew Yglesias links to a great book review of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's recently published book on the Israel lobby - which to my understanding is for the most part an expansion of their controversial article on the same topic published a year ago by the London Review of Books.

I think the review, penned by Israeli political analyst and independent journalist/blogger Daniel Levy (he occasionally writes opinion pieces for Haaretz, is about as balanced as you can really get for a topic as politically-charged as this: namely, the role AIPAC and other Israeli lobbyist organizations play in shaping the contours of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Indeed, Levy seems to have read the book quite closely, yet he has done so in such a way that allowed him to maintain an emotionally detatched perspective; he considers the evidence and conclusions presented by the authors in an open-minded but simultaneously critical manner. As I don't think I have the inclination to read the book in its entirety, and I doubt I could maintain anything remotely resembling an unbiased viewpoint on the authors' powerful charges, I think Levy has done me a great service by reading and evaluating the book.

He starts of his review with a statement that summarizes his views on the Lobby and its influence: “I am convinced that the relationship between the US, Israel and the lobby that speaks in its name needs to change for everyone’s sake, that this book contributes to a re-think and that the authors are not driven by prejudice.” While he finds various details in the book with which he finds fault with, for the most part he accepts the central thesis propagated by Walt and Mearsheimer in an apologetic, uncritical manner. As Levy is an Israeli journalist firmly positioned on the left wing of political ideology, it is perhaps not surprising that he would feel most comfortable arguing from this particular perspective. Nevertheless, while he is a great writer who generally offers readers a nuanced analysis of Middle East geopolitics, I think he unfortunately got this one wrong.

According to Levy, a “key distinction” to draw here is that “it is not Israel per se that has become a strategic liability for the US, but rather Israel as an occupier (which is indeed, a liability to itself).” I would argue, though, that one cannot use the charged description of Israel as an occupier of Palestinian Territories in the same way one could (quite justifiably) describe the US’s present occupation of Iraq. In the former case, even though the Israeli government under the leadership of various politicians across the ideological prism, the territory in question is Israeli land – a matter long ago settled by the UN and as a result of 1the 1967 and 1973 wars and further illustrated by the refusal of the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Yassir Arafit to accept the compromises offered by Israel in the now discredited Oslo Accords conmpleted in 1993.

Levy next goes on to acknowledge that:

“The [W–M] book does go too far in conflating the Israel lobby with neocons. But that act of conflating does not exist only in the minds of Walt and Mearsheimer . . . the mainstream lobby allowed itself to be co-opted and it moved so far to the right and made such dubious alliances, that the co-option gave the impression of being almost seamless.

Yes, the ingredients of Middle East policy post- 9/11 are characterized by elements of exceptionalism, not just continuity. But Israel and the lobby speaking in its name, out-sourced their policy to neo-cons (and even the Christian Right and also Islamo-phobes) with devastating effect. And Walt and Mearsheimer are not to blame for this unfortunate reality.



According to Levy, the book does an excellent job of rebutting the commonly-held assumption (by the American public and political elites) that Israel is a worthy beneficiary of the US’s billions of dollars in economic and military aid granted in recent decades by providing an exhaustive list of evidence of the Jewish state’s violations of international human rights law; in particular their historic and continual mistreatment of Palestinian refugees. The authors also connect the dots here by outlining why such largess on the US’s part on Israel’s behalf is a direct result of the Israeli Lobby’s efforts, as opposed to a a foreign policy course driven solely by the engine of where the US’s perceived best geopolitical/economic/military interests lie.

According to Levy, if Israel was of "limited strategic value" during the Cold War, it has become a veritable "liability" during the current so-called “Global War on Terror.” He states:

“The [US’s] alliance with Israel does not serve American Middle East interests as defined by these authors: It doesn't help keep Gulf oil flowing to markets; doesn't discourage the spread of weapons of mass destruction; and certainly doesn't reduce anti-American terrorism originating in the region. Last year's bipartisan Iraq Study Group of wise American policy elders may have put it more politely, but they essentially reached the same conclusion. For Walt and Mearsheimer, support for an Israel that is at war with its neighbors "has fueled anti-Americanism ... gives Islamic terrorists a powerful recruiting tool, and contributes to the growth of radical Islam." It is not Israel per se that is a liability, but Israel as an occupier.

He also takes issue with one of Walt and Mearsheimer’s arguments on the grounds that the authors are intellectually sloppy in describing the different historical and political etymologies of “neocons” and the Lobby’s “pro-Zionist” membership:

Walt and Mearsheimer place [neocons] four-square inside the Israel lobby. The reality seems more complicated than that. Many leading neocons, by their own admission, care greatly about Israel, but they want to impose their policy, not follow Jerusalem's. Unlike, for instance, AIPAC, which takes its lead from the Israeli government, and then tends to give it an extra twist to the right, the neocons adhere to a rigid ideological dogma and are not afraid to confront a government in Jerusalem they view as too "soft." 

The view that sees neocons as spearheading the Israel lobby position under Bush has serious flaws. It is more likely that the neocons co-opted the Israel lobby, and Israel itself, to their own vision of regional transformation. This is more PNAC than AIPAC. Still, most of the Israel lobby were willing accomplices, and this represents their historic error.

If you’re like me and interested in the subject matter discussed here, mostly because regardless of one’s personal views we should all be able to agree that the conflicts ignited here are quite significant in understanding the mess the Middle East is currently embroiled in, but don’t have the stomach to read through “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, this book review is a pretty good place to start your research. If you'r intersted in the book's background, history and an outline of its thesis, I've culled a very basic summary here (most of the primary sources can be accessed here:

Content

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical".[2] They argue that "in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the Executive branch," as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media." They claim that AIPAC in particular has a "stranglehold on the U.S. Congress," due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."

Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism," and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia; they maintain, however, that the Lobby has yet to succeed in its "campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses" (see Campus Watch and U.S. Congress Bill H.R. 509). The authors conclude by arguing that when the Lobby succeeds in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, then "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."[1]

"The Lobby"

The paper says the following about "The Lobby":
• "We use ‘the Lobby’ as a convenient short-hand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction."

• "The core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests."

• "The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay...all of whom believe Israel's rebirth is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God's will."

• "In addition, the Lobby’s membership includes neoconservative gentiles such as John Bolton, the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and columnist George Will."

• "Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).”

• "Jewish-Americans have formed an impressive array of organizations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and well-known.”

• "Many of the key organizations in the Lobby, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party's expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo Peace Process."

• "AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress."

• "The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress."

• "The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch. That power derives in part from the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections."

• "Key organizations in the Lobby also directly target the administration in power ... [and] make sure that critics of the Jewish state do not get important foreign-policy appointments"

• "Pro-Israel congressional staffers are another source of the Lobby’s power. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘There are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill] … who happen to be Jewish, who are willing … to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness.... These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators.'"

• "The Lobby’s perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media in good part because most American commentators are pro-Israel."

• "The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide."

• "Were it not for the Lobby’s ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today."

• "American Jewish leaders often consult with Israeli officials, so that the former can maximize their influence in the United States."

• "The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach."

• "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses is the effort by Jewish groups to push Congress to establish mechanisms that monitor what professors say about Israel."

• "Jewish philanthropists have established Israel studies programs (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programs that already exist) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus."

• "No discussion of how the Lobby operates would be complete without examining one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-Semitism. Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy — an influence that AIPAC celebrates — stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite."

• "the [Iraq] war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it."

• "Congress insisted on putting the screws to Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israel officials and pro-Israel groups like AIPAC."

• "the Lobby must keep constant pressure on U.S. politicians to confront Tehran."

• "If their efforts to shape U.S. policy succeed, then Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."

• "It is not meant to suggest that 'the lobby' is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues."

• "Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them."

• "There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy; the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy... For the most part the individuals and groups in it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better." However, "the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about."

•"Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so ... But that is not going to happen anytime soon."

On U.S. support for Israel
Economic: According to the authors, Israel is "the largest total recipient since World War II" of U.S. aid. "Total direct U.S. aid to Israel for this period amounts to well over $1.4 trillion from 1973 to 2003. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is about one-fifth of America’s foreign aid budget." The authors claim that "This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain."

The authors claim that "Israel is the only recipient of U.S. aid that does not have to account for how the aid is spent." According to the authors, this makes it "virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the United States opposes."

Diplomatic/political: The authors write, "Since 1982, the United States has vetoed 32 United Nations Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel, a number greater than the combined total of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members together." They further posit that the U.S. also "blocks Arab states’ efforts to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s agenda."

Analysis of Israel as a Strategic Asset and the moral case for support

The authors state: "This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for sustained U.S. backing. But neither rationale is convincing". The authors offer the following in support of this argument:

Israel as a Strategic Asset
"Backing Israel is not cheap, however, and it complicates America's relations with the Arab World."

"The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden."

"In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."

"More important, saying that Israel and the U.S. are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards; the U.S. has a terrorism problem because it is so closely aligned with Israel, not the other way around."

"As for the so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital U.S. interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel."
"A final reason to question Israel's strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally."

The Moral Case for Support
"There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's continued existence, but that is not in jeopardy."

"Today Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbors and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons."

"That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid."

"The country's creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians".

"Yet on this ground (seeking peace), Israel's record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents."
"...Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister of Israel declared that 'neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.'"

See this article by Ari Berman for The Nation as well as this article written by Michelle Goldberg for Salon for more background on the topic.

The plan to partition Iraq: Analyzing Motives and Consequences

The blogger who goes by the name “Lenin” reports on the Senate overwhelmingly endorsing a political settlement for Iraq "that would divide the country into three semi-autonomous regions." And it's worth noting here that this is a political settlement that benefited from "bi-partisan consensus."

The plan was hatched by Joe Biden, which tells you everything you need to know about how disastrous its implementation would be. Lenin points out that one somewhat major problem with the idea of partitioning Iraq is the fact that this overtly imperialistic game plan doesn't exactly have a history of working (e.g. Ireland, Palestine, India, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, etc).

Tom Engelhardt has some critical analysis of the partition over at Alternet. As with almost everything Engelhardt writes, this article deserves to be read quite closely. His indispensable blog is www.tomdispatch.com.

Also, see this review of the current dynamics of the occupation written by Anthony Arnove here. His analysis of the "partition" option:

One plan that the ISG did not recommend, and which Bush has also criticized, but which remains a real possibility as the crisis in Iraq unfolds, is partition. The deteriorating situation on the ground has encouraged some analysts and politicians—including incoming Democrat Joseph Biden, the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair—to call for the breakup of Iraq into three independent countries or three relatively autonomous territories within a loosely federated state.

Such a division of Iraq, however, could only be accomplished by massive ethnic cleansing. The largest urban concentration of Kurds in Iraq is not in the northern zone that would likely make up a future Kurdish enclave or state, but in Baghdad. Most cities described by reporters as “Sunni strongholds” or “Shiite townships” have mixed populations with significant minorities of Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen, Kurds, or Assyrians. In addition, any predominantly Sunni state in central and western Iraq that emerged from a tripartite division of the country would be significantly impoverished compared to its oil-rich southern and northern neighbors.

See also here and here for further analysis of the partition option being floated in Washington.

Is America suffering from a "Delusion of Exceptionalism"?

UC Boulder law professor Paul Campos has penned a worthwhile Op-Ed in the otherwise reliably conservative Rocky Mountain News, entitled "Delusions of Exceptionalism." While it touches on themes that have in years past been explicitly dealt with on this blog, I do have to say Campos has a way of packaging it up in an eloquent form. The topic of his analytic insight is the downside of nationalistic fervor, especially in the not-so-rare occurance here in the US. This is, of course, a very important issue in terms of international relations and the current Administration's track record of arrogance and stubborness on various issues such as Iraq, global warming and globalization have gone a long way to hurting our ability to practice effective stagecraft in bilateral and multilateral negotiations.

Campos begins by identifying the crux of the problem, arguing: "Nationalism is perhaps the most interesting delusion of modern times. Its power is illustrated by the fact that lots of otherwise sensible people are unapologetic nationalists, even though nationalism requires its adherents to subscribe to various bizarre beliefs. For example, the nationalist believes that while other nations act invariably on the basis of self-interest, his country is historically unique, in that it makes great sacrifices for the good of others. This thesis has been put forth with complete seriousness by many a well-credentialed supporter of the Iraq war, such as the historian Francis Fukuyama, who argues that the invasion of that country represented a kind of "virtuous imperialism."

He goes on to explain just how harmful the ideological prevelance of American Exceptionalism has truly been, and how the neocons that have been running US foreign policy for the past eight years - as well as the liberal hawks such as Richard Cohen writing for the Washington Post and Peter Beinhart at The New Republic- have manipulated the public's "patriotism" to serve as a tool to achieve their narrow-minded and dangerous ideologies and goals.

As Campos notes:

I have no doubt that both the neo-cons and their liberal hawk enablers believe that their devotion to neo-imperialism is based not on the crass considerations that have always driven international politics, i.e., power and money, but on a virtuous urge to use whatever means were necessary to bring what Mark Twain referred to as The Person Sitting in Darkness into the light of freedom, democracy, etc., etc.

That every imperial power since the dawn of time has claimed exactly the same thing has not the slightest effect on this touching faith in the purity of our own motives.

I particularly like his use of the term "neo-imperialism", which may be somewhat of a neologism for a mass media newspapers editorial page.

N.B. Despite the fact that I've noted numerous times that I was a qualified supporter of the Iraq War in the early months of 2003 (on humanitarian grounds, not because of the ridiculous "Weapons of Mass Destruction" claims made by the Bushies", I suppose I should note once again that I myself did fall into the same trap as many liberal hawks in thinking the invasion was warranted. In reflection, I realized very quickly just how disastrous and immoral the war and occupation really were not because of how incompetent the administration has been in nation-building and establishing democracy, but because it was a fundamental violation of international law and our continued military presence is not supported by the majority of Iraqi civilians. Of course, the numerous human rights violations, deaths and injuries to both US troops as well as Iraqi civilians are major problems as well, which I have discussed quite substantively in previous posts here.
-SJ