To the Editor:
As mentioned in the Op-Ed article, "we continue to spend more on the
military than the countries with the next 15 largest military budgets
combined."
In one of Eisenhower's first speeches as president, in 1953, he said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ... The cost of one heavy
bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. ... We pay for
a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a
single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000
people."
He proposed universal disarmament. Regardless of our party affiliation,
maybe it is time for us to listen to Ike. The military-industrial complex is
stealing from the future of all of our grandchildren.
S. Norman Reich
Salisbury, Conn., Dec. 15, 2010
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_2010_successes_and_failures_in_the_middle_east_20101221/
Obama's 2010 Successes and Failures in the Middle East
Juan Cole
Truthdig: December 21, 2010
As 2010 dawned, President Barack Obama had four big issues on his plate
regarding the Middle East. These were Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Iran, and
Afghanistan. The year has been as unkind to him on those issues as it was
with respect to unemployment and the Republican resurgence. As the decade
draws to a close, it is clear that the bright hopes inspired by Obama's 2009
Cairo speech have markedly faded, and the disappointments have outweighed
achievements in the most important arena for contemporary American foreign
policy. In some important respects, the fault lies with Obama himself for
being less a leader than a coordinator.
In Iraq, the U.S. State Department's hopes that the March 7 parliamentary
elections would contribute to national reconciliation between Sunnis and
Shiites and form a bridge to a successful American withdrawal have been put
in doubt. The Iraqiya Party, headed by former interim Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi, had attracted the support of Iraq's minority Sunnis, and was backed
by Saudi Arabia and, initially, the United States. Although it had the
largest single number of seats in the new Parliament, it never found enough
partners to form a majority.
In contrast, Iran sought to re-create the Shiite majority of past elections
by wheedling the Shiite parties into uniting into a postelection grand
coalition. In the end, Iran prevailed upon Muqtada al-Sadr, the
anti-American fundamentalist cleric, to side with incumbent Nouri al-Maliki,
giving him the momentum to attract the support of other Shiites and of the
Kurds. Although Maliki will include Sunni Arabs from the Iraqiya Party in
his Cabinet, his gaining of a second term can only be interpreted as a solid
victory for Iran. The good news is that Maliki has proved relatively
decisive and able to command the new Iraqi army.
If Iraq is a mixed picture, Obama's hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough in
the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians have thoroughly
crashed and burned. The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had insisted that
Israel cease pouring colonists into the Palestinian West Bank if he was
going to sit at a table and directly negotiate the future of that territory
with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Otherwise it would be like dickering
with a furniture salesman over bedroom suites for a new house even while the
salesman's workers were carting off one piece after another for their own
homes. The Israelis agreed to only a 10-month freeze on the start of new
colonies, and then only in part of the occupied West Bank.
When that freeze expired, in the midst of the negotiations, the far
right-wing government headed by Netanyahu declined to extend it. Netanyahu
probably took heart in defying Obama from the Republican victory in the
midterms in the House of Representatives. Obama's hopes of moving quickly to
a two-state solution, or even to concrete preparations for one, have
faltered, raising the specter of decades of Israeli apartheid in the
Palestinian territories and all the anger and violence that will flow from
Palestinian statelessness and consequent lack of basic rights.
On Iran, Obama, having failed to persuade Tehran at the negotiating table to
halt its enrichment of uranium, implemented a plan B. His alternative was to
ratchet up United Nations financial sanctions. Despite initial resistance
from Russia and China, Obama skillfully rallied the U.N. Security Council
into voting the increased sanctions on June 9, 2010. Nevertheless, Turkey
and Brazil voted against new sanctions, and Lebanon abstained, showing
growing unease with punitive policies toward Iran in the global South. While
the new sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, they are unlikely to
produce a genuine change in policy or to seriously challenge the regime.
Obama's surge in Afghanistan has faced more political than military
difficulties, but they may be the ones that sink his enterprise. President
Hamid Karzai, having blatantly stolen the presidential election in the fall
of 2009, has been acting more and more erratically, recently declaring in a
private meeting with U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus that the U.S. was
one of Afghanistan's enemies and that he would have been better off joining
the Taliban. The parliamentary elections of this fall were so riddled with
fraud that a fifth of the ballots had to be thrown out, and no new Cabinet
has been formed. The despised Shiite Hazara ethnic group did
disproportionately well, and many Pashtuns (the former ruling ethnic group)
feel disadvantaged by the way parliamentary politics have unfolded.
To the humiliation of the administration and of Karzai, a man claiming to be
a high-ranking member of the Taliban, who had entered into negotiations with
Kabul in return for "a lot of money," turned out to be a confidence man. A
leaked new National Intelligence Estimate by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies
found that big chunks of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the
Taliban, and that rogue cells inside the Pakistani military continue to
support some Taliban groups in order to project Islamabad's authority inside
Afghanistan.
This was the year, then, that Iran again won the struggle for influence in
Iraq; the year the Israelis sabotaged a revived peace process; the year Iran
went on thumbing its nose at the international community with regard to its
nuclear enrichment program; and the year that the government in Afghanistan
lost a good deal of its credibility. Obama should get credit for good
intentions, and talking directly to the major principals. But he appears
never to have appreciated the lessons taught by Jimmy Carter at Camp David
in 1978, which is that a big geopolitical breakthrough can be accomplished
only if the president inserts himself directly into the negotiations and
lays his own political capital on the line. Obama has seemed relatively
distant from these pressing Middle East issues, and farmed some of them out
to subordinates. They are not the sort of problems that can be resolved in
that way.
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