program on our food, and biologically, why we eat, often too much.
Dr. David Kessler, former U.S. Health Commissioner and Prof. of
Medicine at UCSF is intervewed, extensively and specifically, on
Democracy Now. Listen @9AM, today. Highly recommended.
Ed
From: Abie Dawgee/ The R.A.I.N. Newsletter: So. Africa
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07312009.html
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch: July 31 - August 2, 2009
Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president
and his secretary of state disclose president Obama, in the dawn of his
first term, already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts by senior
members of his own cabinet.
At the superficial level Obama is presiding over an undisciplined
administration; on a more realistic and sinister construction, he is
facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were
claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far
superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois .
The great danger to Obama posed by Biden's and Clinton's "time bombs" (a
precisely correct description if we call them political, not diplomatic time
bombs) is not international confusion and ridicule over what precisely are
the US government's policies, but a direct onslaught on his presidency by a
domestic Israeli lobby that is so out of control that it renders ridiculous
Obama's puny attempt to stop settlements--or to curb Israeli aggression in
any other way.
Take Joe Biden. Three weeks ago he gave Israel the green light to bomb Iran,
only to be swiftly corrected by his boss. At the time it seemed yet
another,somewhat comical mile marker in a lifetime of gaffes, perpetrated in
the cause of self-promotion and personal political advantage.
But Biden's subsequent activities invite a darker construction. In the
immediate aftermath of Obama's Moscow visit, the air still soft with honeyed
words about a new era of trust and cooperation, Biden headed for Ukraine and
Georgia, harshly ridiculing Russia as an economic basket case with no
future. In Tbilisi he told the Georgian parliament that the U.S. would
continue helping Georgia "to modernize" its military and that Washington
"fully supports" Georgia's aspiration to join NATO and would help Tbilisi
meet the alliance's standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow,
pledging sanctions against any power rearming Georgia.
Georgia could play a vital, enabling role, in the event that Israel decides
to attack Iran's nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is
diplomatically and geographically challenging. On the other hand, Georgia is
perfectly situated as the take-off point for any such raid. Israel has been
heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia's armed forces. President
Saakashvili has boasted that his Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili and
also Temur Yakobashvili , the minister responsible for negotiations over
South Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding "Both war
and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews."
On the heels of Biden's shameless pandering in Tbilisi, Secretary of State
Clinton took herself off to Thailand for an international confab with Asian
leaders and let drop to a tv chat show that "a nuclear Iran could be
contained by a U.S. 'defense umbrella,'" actually a nuclear defense umbrella
for Israel and for Egypt and Saudi Arabia too.
The Israel lobby has been promoting the idea of a US "nuclear umbrella" for
some years, with one of its leading exponents being Dennis Ross, now in
charge of Middle Eastern policy at Obama's National Security Council. In her
campaign last year Clinton flourished the notion as an example of the sort
of policy initiative that set her apart from that novice in foreign affairs,
Barack Obama.
From any rational point of view the "nuclear umbrella" is an awful idea,
redolent with all the gimcrack theology of the high cold war era, about
"first strike", "second strike", "stable deterrence" ,"controlled
escalation" and "mutual assured destruction", used to sell US escalations
in nuclear arms production, from Kennedy and the late Robert McNamara("the
Missile Gap") to Reagan ("Star Wars").
Indeed, as one Pentagon veteran remarked to me earlier this week, "the
Administration's whole nuclear stance is turning into a cheesy rerun of the
Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, all based on a horrible
exaggeration of one or two Iranian nuclear bombs that the Persians may be
too incompetent to build and most certainly are too incompetent to deliver."
The Biden and Clinton "foreign" policy is: 1) to recreate the same old Cold
War (with a new appendage, the US versus Iran nuclear confrontation) for the
same old reasons: to pump up domestic defense spending; and 2) to continue
sixty years of supporting Israeli imperialism for the same reasons that
every president from Harry to Dubya (perhaps barring Ike) did so: to corner
Israel lobby money and votes. Regarding the latter, Obama did the same by
grabbing the Chicago-based Crown and Pritzker family money very early in his
campaign and by making Rahm Emanuel his very first appointment (the two are
hardly unrelated).
So right from the start Obama was already an Israel lobby fellow traveler.
The Mitchell appointment and the toothless blather about settlements were
simply cosmetic, bones tossed to the increasing proportion of the American
electorate that's grossed out by the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from the
Holy Land. Obama does have a coherent strategy: keep the defense money
flowing and increasing, but without making so much noise as the older
generation did about ancient Cold War enemies (e.g. Russia and Cuba). The
F-22 -- to date, the one and only presidential issue on which he's shown any
toughness at all -- is in no sense a departure from keeping the money
flowing, since he is indeed increasing the defense budget, in part by using
the F-22 cancellation to push spending on the even worse F-35 and to hide
his acquiescence to all the other pork in the Congressional defense budget.
The window for any new president to impose a decisive change in foreign
policy comes in the first three months, before opposition has time to
solidify. Obama squandered that opportunity, stocking his foreign policy
team with tarnished players such as Ross. As the calculated indiscretions of
Biden and Clinton suggest, not to mention the arrogance of Netanyahu and his
political associates, the window of opportunity has closed.
Would it have been that hard to signal a change in course? Not really. Obama
could have excited the world by renouncing the Bush administration's
assertion, in the "National Defense Strategy of the United States" in 2005,
of the right and intention of the United States to preëmptively attack any
country "at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing." As
William Polk, the State Department's middle east advisor in the Kennedy era,
wrote last year: "As long as this remains a valid statement of American
policy, the Iranian government would be foolish not to seek a nuclear
weapon."
But Obama, surrounded with Clinton-era veterans of NATO expansionism and, as
his Accra speech indicated, hobbled with an impeccably conventional view of
how the world works, is rapidly being overwhelmed by the press of events.
He's
bailed out the banks. He's transferred war from Iraq to Afghanistan. The big
lobbies know they have him on the run.
Hence Biden and Clinton's mutinies, conducted on behalf of the Israel lobby
and designed to seize administration policy as Obama's popularity weakens.
When the results of the latest Rasmussen presidential poll were published,
showing Obama's declining numbers, there were news reports of cheering in
Tel Aviv. And remember two useful guiding principles: first, it is
impossible to underestimate the vanity of politicians, particularly of Joe
Biden. Maybe he secretly entertains some mad notion of challenging Obama in
2012, propelled by Israel Lobby money withheld from Obama. Maybe Bill is
reminding HRC that he reached the White House in 1992 partly because the
Israel lobby turned against George Bush Sr. Second, there is no such thing
as foreign policy, neither in democratic governments nor in dictatorships.
All policy is domestic.
Professor Gates Should Count Himself Lucky!
"Eighty years ago, with the publication of the Wickersham Report on
Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, America learned that torture didn't work.and
promptly forgot.
"Debates on the morality and practical efficacy of torture periodically
erupt in American politics. Now, the issue has re-emerged with the efforts
of ex-Bush administration officials and allies to defend their legacy and
their legal impunity against the current administration's stated desire to
move beyond coercive interrogations."
This is Peter Lee in our latest CounterPunch newsletter, in an enthralling
piece of historical excavation about how a commission appointed by Herbert
Hoover managed to include a savage expose of torture as practiced by US
police departments. Lee shows how exactly the torture techniques of our
current era and their rationales mirror those of the practitioners and
sponsors of torture in the last century.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
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