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The Winograd report on Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon is largely a whitewash for Olmert and the Israeli military. His government may survive after all.

But what did the writers think of when they wrote in the report’s summary:

we regard the 2nd Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity

A missed opportunity to do what? The report doesn’t explain.

But it is quite truthful on who started the war:

Israel initiated a long war …
…
… it was a limited war initiated by Israel itself

The report also states that the use of cluster bombs does not conform to international law.

But it does not recommend any punishment for those who ordered and committed the crime of dropping these. As UN mine clearance officials report, Israel is still withholding where such bombs were dropped.

Since the end of the war, over 30 Lebanese have been killed and over 200 injured, many permanently disabled from the loss of a limb after accidentally triggering an unexploded bomblet.

For the farmers in south Lebanon the war is still going on.

John Edwards to quit presidential race

The choice is now between Skyllarry Clinton and Baracharybdis Obama.

by Malooga
lifted from a comment

As the popular chestnut, often attributed to Emma Goldman, goes, "If
voting could change anything, they would have made it illegal."

Kudos to r’giap, b real, and monolycus for rescuing this
conversation from the cob-webbed corridors of the Camelot Memorial Hair
Salon For Upper Class White Men.

While candidates like TR and Wilson were the first to employ modern
propaganda techniques in a national candidacy, and Harding was the
first to appear on mass media, Kennedy took image manipulation
techniques to a new level. After the buck-stopping, bomb-dropping
haberdasher from Kansas City and poor Bess, and the avuncular General
assassin and dowdy Mamie, the media, particularly the newest media, TV,
were positively starving for a way to increase their ratings. One could
argue that the media sold itself (to advertisers) during the campaign
of 1960, as much as Kennedy sold himself to the public, and that
Kennedy was the perfect acutrement to enhance and clinch that sale.

Kennedy was ever-aware of the importance of image. (November’s
Vanity Fair carries reprints of the famous Avedon pre-inaugural photos
of the publicly loving and glamorous family.) Kennedy, at 43, cut a
fine figure despite the fact that he clearly looked gravely ill and ten
years beyond the sticker date, and Jackie, at a mere 31 (imagine!), was
more interested in veneer than machivellian machinations. If today the
media talks about which candidate you would rather have a beer with,
back then the electorate, male and female, secretly thought (and voted)
for the candidate they would rather end up in the sack with. And with
poverty rates hovering at 22.5% in 1960, perhaps a little fantasy was
just what the ruling elite needed to burnish the charade for those who
had not benefitted from the US’s unparalleled post-war economic
expansion.

(Even the doting VF article is bold enough to note that "given
Kennedy’s history of womanizing, was this — the photo shoot — also a
way to insulate himself from public speculation?) Slick Willie should
have paid better attention. Discussions of morals aside, Kennedy’s
endless womanizing, particularly with mob women, put himself at
extraordinary risk of blackmail.

Looking back on Camelot, one finds the issues, the spectacle, the
challenges, and the image projected, remarkably relevant to today.

Cont. reading: On JFK

There are some interesting developments around Afghanistan where pipeline promoter Karzai, currently mayor of Kabul, is getting a bit uptidy.

Despite the wishes of the U.S. and UK he rejected ‘Lord’ Paddy Ashdown as viceroy.

His people claim this was not because of Ashdown’s personality – as international "high representative" Ashdown ran Bosnia like a Raj –  but because of his envisioned role:

The Afghan government had however had concerns about the powers of the job, which had previously been that of special representative of the United Nations but which international circles had wanted to expand.

Initial suggestions that it would grow so the envoy would become the leading representative of the UN, NATO and the European Union were "not acceptable," [Afghan Foreign Minister] Spanta said.

Most likely both issues, Ashdown’s proposed role and personality, are relevant here. Karzai certainly had reason to be concerned about each of those.

Newsweek spreads rumors that Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the UN and former Unocal adviser, wants Karzai’s job. This makes some sense because Karzai never got that pipeline deal done. Khalilzad is a pure neocon with a U.S. and an Afghan passport and may think he has better connections to bribe the right people to finally let the central asian spice flow into the U.S. economy.

The Financial Times adds to the fight by pointing to a "serious reason" why Karzai might want to resign:

Cont. reading: Afghanistan Update – Kill Karzai

A democracy should not cling to dynasty rule as a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton row would represent.

So there is Obama promissing Change.

But now he is endorsed by some Kennedys, Ted, Patrick and Caroline (other Kennedys, Cathleen, Robert F. and Kerry endorse Clinton) and Obama is even compared to JFK.

That is a big minus in my view.

John F. Kennedy was a mediocre President. His foreign policy record is a list of failures. He

• ordered the CIA to proceed with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba but denied the nessessary air and naval support that would have given the project a slight chance of success.
• was outgamed by Khrushchev when he retracted U.S. missiles from Turkey in an exchange for Russian missiles retraction from Cuba.
• didn’t response but with polite protest when the Sowjets build the wall around West Berlin in violation of the postwar Potsdam Agreements.
• escalated the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and assisted in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in a military coup.
• backed the Baathist coup against the anti-imperialist Iraqi government.

In domestic policies there was much hopeful talk but little done in the two years of Kennedy’s rule. He endorsed civil rights but was reluctant to act against Southern Democrats. He launched the program to put a man on the moon. A project that cost some $25 billion and had little scientific and strategic value.

So what did he achieve?

Do the U.S. people really want a president that will continue in that tradition?

Max Boot and Bing West have detected Iraq’s No. 1 problem. Its name is Nouri Maliki:

However, it is the government’s ineffectiveness, not the insurgency, that is Iraq’s biggest problem. Maliki has antagonized the Kurds, Sunnis and most of the Shiite parties.

To solve the problem, they propose to use a modern form of government selection, instead of clinging to specific personal.

The U.S. should support democracy in Iraq, not Maliki per se.

So what is their plan? A recall vote? New elections? Purple fingers?

Kind of.

This time Boot and West demand real imperial democracy in Iraq. The type where only one vote is relevant. That of the emperor himself.

If [Maliki] doesn’t come through, the American president may have no choice but to cast his vote — probably a decisive one — against the Iraqi prime minister.

Since when does Bush carry an Iraqi passport?

I’ll be traveling the next two days, so there will be only light, if any, posting.

Please let us know your news & views here.

Open thread …

Some folks are still concerned about War on Iran.

Zbigniew Brzezinski interviewed by Laura Rosen in Mother Jones:

The president is determined to string [Iraq] out and hand this war over to his successor, but he is at the same time determined to try to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem before he leaves office, and I am afraid, very seriously afraid, that the conjunction of the two—continuous conflict in Iraq and impatience over Iran—may produce a situation whereby before he leaves office he plunges us into some sort of semi-accidental and semi-deliberate conflict with Iran.
…
I don’t see the administration expanding the conflict the way it started the conflict with Iraq.  [..] I think far more likely is a series of incidents, aggravations, collisions, provocations which are mutual, a negotiating posture which doesn’t give Iran any leeway, and then some explosion, some collision that creates a great deal of emotion in the country, conceivably even a terrorist act which is credibly blamed on the Iranians, and then there is a patriotic wave and a military action launched before the election, which actually inflames the country in a wave of kind of hysterical patriotism that benefits the Republicans.

Q: What about the potential for [an Al Qaida] surprise happening to the U.S.?

ZB: I wonder who knows that Al Qaeda in one of the strategic documents actually has said that an American-Iranian collision would be of great strategic benefit to Al Qaeda’s cause. So here is a party that might even have an interest in provoking such a collision.

Leon Hadar, a research fellow with the Cato Institute, writes in Asia Times Online:

At the minimum, Bush wants to be recalled as someone who "kicked some ass" in the Persian Gulf before leaving office.

That doesn’t mean an all-out war with Iran or even an attack on its suspected nuclear installations. If you followed the recent bizarre encounter between the US Navy and the Iranians in the straits of Hormuz, you get an idea of the opportunities that are opened to the Bushies if and when they decide to orchestrate or exploit a crisis in the Persian Gulf that could lead to an American retaliation against an Iranian "provocation".
[…]

Cont. reading: Still Worried About Iran

A usual defense/security rip-off goes like this:

• Find some tiny curious event that can be blown up to The Threat.
• Personify The Threat by pinning it to Evil of the Day.
• Urge action – gain support from sympathic media idiots like Fred Hiatt.
• Propose the solution that makes the most for your interests.
• Reap in the profits.

Never worry that the original event may turn out bogus. If that happens, it will inevitably be ignored. The Threat will never vanish and the profits will continue to flow.

The scheme is regularly used in a national context. Just think of all the stupid stuff the ‘Hauptabteilung für die Sicherheit des Heimatlandes’ is financing. Thinking bigger, tiny Estonia successfully managed to run the rip-off on an international scale.

We can follow the trail by simply listing news accounts:

Estonia hit by ‘Moscow cyber war’,
BBC, May 16, 2007
Estonia says the country’s websites have been under heavy attack for the past three weeks, blaming Russia for playing a part in the cyber warfare.

Many of the attacks have come from Russia and are being hosted by Russian state computer servers, Tallinn says.

—

Cont. reading: An International Security Rip-Off

by Debs is Dead
lifted from a comment

The news that a 33 year old junior shit kicker in France’s Societe
Generale Bank ‘defrauded that institution for 5 billion euros’ strikes
as one of these stories which instantly splash around the world
overwhelming every other piece of news, yet somehow too much of this
tale doesn’t add up.

How did he do it? Right towards the end of a rather obscure Reuters article we learn:

Five billion euros of losses is enormous. It represents a position
of several dozens of billions of euros, perhaps 30 or 40 billion. How
can one person all by themselves do that?

Indeed. How can one "junior trader" "certainly not a star" do this?

This is being compared to the Englishman Nick Leeson’s ‘one point something billion Euro’ fraud on Barings Bank that ‘broke’ that bank but in the case of Leeson, senior bank executives knew
he was their biggest earner. He had kept the bank ahead of the game in
a year or more of tough times. When Leeson’s luck finally ran out, he
had been betting on Japan stock futures and their run finally
foundered, the Barings execs ran a million miles from Leeson and had
him thrown into jail. Typical capitalist perfidy. But SocGen exec’s
claim to have known nothing about young Jerome Kerviel’s antics has an
even fishier smell to it than the Barings bastards.

To have lost as much as he did he would have had to take a position
of tens of billions of Euros on one of the most basic derivatives in an
extremely complex market, futures contracts on European equity indices.
No one noticed for over a year?

As one amerikan derivatives trader said:

Cont. reading: What is behind the Societe Generale scandal?

Congratulations to the people of Gaza who broke out of the ghetto walls Israel and Egypt had erected around them.

Yesterday Egypt’s cowardly dictator had his police use water cannons against hungry Gazans who tried to get through the border. Today they blew up the walls. Mubarak now claims he let them through because "they were starving". He certainly fears the wrath of the U.S. congress which might take away the yearly $1.7 billion bribe he gets.

For now the illegal total isolation of Gaza is broken and there is not yet any reaction from the Israeli side. For some stupid reason the border between Gaza and Egypt is supposed to be controlled by the Palestinians and the EU. But when Israel started the Gaza blockade after Hamas took over, the EU supported that policy by retracting its officers.

Hamas chief Khaled Meshal rightly points out that the border should be controlled only by Egypt and the Palestines and, of course, be open.

With the total blockade of Gaza Israel has again managed to shot itself into its foot. While the "west" is used to look away from the normal Israeli disregard of human rights and its strangeling of Gaza, the total blockade and the humanitarian catastrophy following the collective punishment has renewed the understanding for the Palestinian struggle.

Smart politicians would use the new situation for talks towards a solution of the conflict. But smart politics are rare in Israel and elsewhere. So I expect something dumb and utterly disgusting to happen next.

Yesterday’s post speculated about neocon influence on the report that urges an imperial NATO strategy. There now is "an increase in certainty" that pure neocon thinking is at the base of the proposal.

While the media reported only yesterday about the report, it had been launched on January 10 at the US Center of Strategic Studies. The 150-page paper is titled Towards a Grand Strategy
for an Uncertain World – Renewing Transatlantic Partnership (pdf).

The report by the five former NATO generals was financed through "generous sponsorship" of the Dutch Noaber Foundation. The foundation is the private fiefdom of the Christian fundamentalist Paul Baan, a failed 1990s "new market" entrepreneur. In 2000 Business Week portrayed The Fall of Baan :

[S]ales sextupled between 1994 and 1997, and the Baan brothers, both members of the conservative Dutch Reformed Church, flew in their jet between Barneveld, Silicon Valley, and a host of charities they sponsored around the world.
…
Pummeled by questions about its finances, blindsided by an industry downturn, and undermined by poor management, Baan’s stock collapsed in 1998, and the company limped along without much hope of recovery. The Baan brothers departed two years ago and pocketed most of their profits before the final cave-in.
…
At the heart of Baan was a fatal split, one represented by the brothers and their dual fascinations: God and geld.

…
Baan [started] as a consulting firm in 1978. Most of Baan’s engineers back then were members of the Dutch Reformed Church. They kept their labs free of swearing, mandated long skirts for women, and shut down on Sundays–even when customers were clamoring for help.

The Noaber Foundation Advisory Board is chaired by Henk van den Breemen, former Chief Defence Staff of the Dutch Armed Forces and one of the five generals that signed the study. He also chaired the 12 meetings the generals held to devise the report. But one can not write 150 pages in 12 committee meetings and the report acknowledges that it was written "With
Benjamin Bilski and Douglas Murray".

Who are these guys?

Cont. reading: ‘Certainty’ On the Neocon NATO Report

As Rick pointed out in the comments, today’s Guardian previews a curious report on NATO’s future five former senior generals from the U.S., UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands delivered to the Pentagon and NATO. The report was not officially requested.

This news comes the same day as other news on NATO and there may well be a deeper relation.

According to the Guardian the report argues for lunatic politics like preemptive nuclear strikes against "imminent" WMD proliferation. But such nonsense only sets the general tone.

Coming up with a list of "threats" the report prescribes a completely de-nationalized imperial NATO force under control of a "directorate": 

Cont. reading: A Neocon Grasp for NATO

[You may want to read Coup in Kenya – Part I and the comments to that piece first]
—

by b real

The U.S. contribution to the crisis:

Seeing it as a key ally in the “war on terror,” the Bush Administration has built a close military relationship with the Kibaki government; The U.S. has played a central role in building up Kenya’s weaponry and internal security apparatus, now being deployed in the crisis. Current U.S.-Kenyan relations are a product of 24 years of U.S. support to the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship that jailed, exiled or disappeared those opposed to the regime. The legacy of these politics remains institutionalized within the political process itself and creates huge barriers to democratic freedom and political participation. Overall, the current turmoil in Kenya is the clear result of colonial rule, external intervention, and detrimental foreign aid policies.

— Association of Concerned Africa Scholars,
Press Statement on the Crisis in Kenya, January 5, 2008

It was a quick mention that was almost swallowed in a larger, more pressing narrative, but — for those who did pick up on it — has since proved to be an omnious foreshadowing of how the elections have played out in Kenya over the past weeks. Last April, in an interview with the independent syndicated news program Democracy Now discussing the events taking place to Kenya’s north in Somalia, of which the former nation was very much involved, Kenyan Daily Nation columnist Salim Lone stated that "one leading opposition … candidate in Kenya, said that the US has promised to support the government in the elections at the end of this year in exchange for the terrible things it has been doing" as a favored partner nation in the so-called global war on terror (GWOT).

Cont. reading: Coup In Kenya: Part II

Current ticker numbers:

Nikkei		-3.86%
FTSE		-3.35%
DAX		-5.86%
CAC		-4.73%
DOW		-4.73%
S&P		-4.73%

As I wrote yesterday – You ain’t seen nothing yet …

This WaPo piece about the rightwing Freedom’s Watch could likely not have been published, if not for Walt/Mearsheimer’s work about the Israel Lobby. That book revealed a can of worms and now more and more people dare to peak inside.

Freedom’s Watch will have money — a lot of money. While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million, people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle.
…
The organization was conceived at a Florida meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition last spring with the initial aim of defending Bush’s policies in Iraq and Iran. But like its inspiration and antagonist, it has moved on.

The aggressively negative anti-illegal-immigration ads that ran during the Ohio special election race strayed far from Middle East policy, but the ad campaign — like the group itself — was bankrolled largely by Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who last year pledged an unprecedented $200 million to Jewish and Israeli causes.

…
As an appetizer, Freedom’s Watch took out full-page ads last fall in the local newspapers of seven freshman House Democrats from rural districts, targeting their antiwar votes and linking them to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Many in Freedom Watch’s donor base — including Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., and Sembler, the strip-mall magnate from St. Petersburg, Fla. — have always been strong supporters of Israel. The group’s initial ad blitz in defense of Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq came naturally out of those interests. [emphasis added]

Expressed shorter: War on Iraq and Iran is naturally in Israel’s interests and pressure for those wars is financed and organized by very rich U.S. Zionists.

Such was obvious to many for years but hardly ever published in mainstream media.

But the U.S. people are for now somewhat done with further wars in Israel’s interest and the result of Freedom’s Watch millions will be a surge in anti-semitism.

In who’s interest is that?

The "paper of record" wants you to know that an Inquiry Finds Power Failure in London Jumbo Jet Crash.

A ‘Jumbo Jet’ is a four-engine Boeing 747 while the plane that crashed in London was a twin-engine ‘Triple Seven’. A trivial mistake one may think but for the fact that the crash landing was likely a result of engine problems.

If the NYT gets even such banalities wrong, how about other stuff? Yes, a rhetorical question …

News accounts are often misleading – intentionally or by mistake – and one has to read from multiple sources to know what really happens.

In the last open thread Bea documents the Israeli attempts to derail the current ‘peace process’. b real keeps watch on AFRICOM and on the aftermath of the Coup in Kenya.

Please help their efforts and contribute your news & views here.

This is an open thread.

1. Sorry for not posting. There was a family emergency I needed to attend and the place had no intertubes connectivity. Fortunately the emergency had a happy ending. I am an uncle now.

2. Spam filter: Dear Uncle$cam, one of your comments was caught about ten times. The problem should(!) be fixed now. Just in case you’d like to continue your valuable contributions.

3. As I am still on the road I can not write the piece on Afghanistan I had in mind. The situation  for the imperial NATO/US invaders there is quite hopeless. This diary by Ben Anderson in the London Review of Books gives some impressions on the military and "reconstruction" situation.

Gates’ views, however, reflect those expressed recently by senior U.S. military officials with responsibility for Afghanistan. Some have said that an overreliance on heavy weaponry, including airstrikes, by NATO forces in the south may unwittingly be contributing to rising violence there.
…
"The wide view there, which I hear from Americans, is that the NATO military forces are taking on a Soviet mentality," said one senior U.S. military veteran of Afghanistan. "They’re staying in their bases in the south, they’re doing very little patrolling, they’re trying to avoid casualties, and they’re using air power as a substitute for ground infantry operations, because they have so little ground infantry."
Gates faults NATO force in southern Afghanistan, Jan 16, 2008

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.
…
"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."
U.S. Boosts Its Use of Airstrikes In Iraq, Jan 17, 2008