Whoa -- State News Update

Fear not, concerned citizens of both Russia and Syria, your leaders are going through an incredible period of ball-growth...together!

State news in Syria has Medvedev and al-Assad meeting to discuss the violation of treaties and agreements. Perhaps also they will play with their dolls, and have tea.

Dabbling in pacifism...

K: Secretary Rice is finally dabbling in pacifism...and her guru is Bashar al-Assad!

Here's a Syrian spokesman two weeks ago, calling for Israeli-Lebanese talks:

The president hinted that it would not be in Lebanon's interest if it did not have its own talks if Syrian-Israeli talks advanced[...]

And here's Condi one week ago, calling for Israeli-Lebanese talks:

I also told him that the United States believes the time has come to deal with the Chebaa Farms issue[...]

And here's Israel calling for Lebanese talks. Oh, and Olmert's going to meet Assad in Paris in July, for crepes, presumably.

So the same Sec. Rice three weeks ago was on the Dick Cheney, Bloodthirsty Persians tip. Partly this is a matter of tailoring the message to the audience; Rice bellowed bellicose for AIPAC, and -ahem- detumesced for the Lebanese. In theory, rhetorical fireworks can accompany Israel's land-for-peace negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, and the prisoner-exchange negotiations with Hezbollah. The unique aim is to pick allies off of Iran's branch.

But the timing of Bill Kristol and John Bolton's rabies attack doesn't serve that strategic purpose. War fervor is already plenty high: Israel just finished a dry-run for an attack on Natanz, dudes. Nor is this an escalation of rhetoric by people who currently have real jobs. These are dudes with the same security clearance as you and me...

More to the point, Kristol and Bolton aren't responding to similar Iranian bloviations; they're calling out Americans. State just proposed sending an American mission/outpost/charge d'affaires to Iran. Whammo! Like squirrel blood to hammerheads! All the unemployed sharks have to remind us of the "nature of the threat..." They're calling Rice out.

Clearly spooked by the power of language to change "facts on the ground," having just watched the administration's war of words provide Israel cover to bomb Syria, to war-game a Natanz raid, etc., Condoleezza decides it's time to throttle back the warmongering, at last joining Ali Larijani on some calmer-than-you-are shit...

Hope for a cooler summer...and I like to think my prediction was not totally wrong...
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Reruns of wars...

John the Evangel was an oil industry tout.

Imagine if "wars and rumours of wars," had hit the headlines last week, when light sweet crude hit 135 on speculation that it would reach 150 later. This, to my illiterate eye, looks like self-fulfilling prophecy, or a corrupt enterprise, but that's how markets work. Add to the rumor some dick-waving by the man in charge of Israel's school buses:

Traders also zeroed in on remarks by an Israeli Cabinet minister who was quoted as saying his country will attack Iran if it doesn't abandon its nuclear program. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz added that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "will disappear before Israel does,"[...]

and we got ourselves a party!

This is why I never get tired of deflating expectations of all-out war in west Asia. There's always some illiterate villager transported into the spotlight, ready to spike oil prices with a phrase.

Mr. Mofaz, of course our friend Mahmoud will be gone before Israel is: Ali Larijani got elected Majlis speaker last week, and has promptly set about persuading the world of Iran's pragmatism. (Also, he's persuading Iranians to develop issues-based politics, rather than the politics of personality. Since it took the French 200 years -- from the Marquis de Lafayette to Charles de Gaulle -- to figure that out, Dark Steer wishes luck to the Iranian Majlis.) Rather than call the IAEA a bunch of little devils, he points to the time and money they're wasting, sounding for all the world like Bob Novak talking about the prosecution of Scooter Libby, viz.:

[...] Fitzgerald's long, expensive investigation found no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if only because Plame was not covered by it.

In fact, Larijani and the American Right should come to terms at what I'm now calling the Plame Nexus: external investigations, national sovereignty, and presidential prerogative. Both see obfuscation and stonewalling as legitimate secrecy in the interest of national security; both resent special investigators, call their enemies evil, and rig elections. Both quash challenges to their rule by the backdoor; one by removing from election rolls all progressive politicians, the other by firing insufficiently Bushite Assistant Attorneys General.

The Iranian regime, in effect, is a wet-dream version of the Bush adminstration. Imagine the power to shut down newspapers, imprison journalists, exile agitators! The Patriot Act is for fags...

The main difference between Bushites and the incipient Larijani administration is that only one group sees its influence over Middle Eastern geopolitics as stabilizing. Bushites are content to let havoc reign, begging Israel to pop off at Lebanon again, or Syria, or Iran; ignoring the fatal conflict between our arming Sunnis in Iraq and officially backing a Shiite central government; making sure the shadow-conflict with Iran is still audible amid the continuous din of news in the acutal world. Larijani, on the other hand, remains on some Walter-Sobchak-calmer-than-you-are shit.

So wait for the Speaker to make some comments on oil prices soon. Maybe the administration will finally get the idea, and the next time someone's Minister of Motorboats talks shit, someone else will be there to flip his wig...
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Congratulations, Sahib!!

To recap, sahibs:

Sunni radicals are having a government-sponsored bitchout in advance of a government-sponsored interfaith summit in Mecca.

Mohammed el-Baradei is going to Syria. Syria says that's fine.

Sunnis in Lebanon are being truculent about the compromise government.

The President has said some wack shit about Iran. So has John McCain.

Hezbollah released the remains of (at least) two Israeli soldiers in exchange for one live hezbollahi.

Everywhere around the Middle East are the wriggling vestigial tails of Bush's Iranienkampf. As the second term winds down, the strategy of mollycoddling Sunni governments to check Iran has devolved into watching each state in the region pursue its interests catch-as-catch-can.

Thus is the administration reduced to feebly attempting to sabotage peace when it comes by another's terms; to nudging action through language; to wheedling for more oil; to averting its eyes from repression.

Ehud Olmert, unlike the President, is capable of admitting defeat and moving on. Having seen that Hezbollah can simultaneously frighten his people, snarl his military, win the hearts of hitherto-moderate Lebanese, and win a PR victory, he's decided to sue for peace. Bush's response (or someone's response, because I'm sure he doesn't give a real shit) is to lash out at Iran. Yawn.

Negotiators and technocrats the world over roll their eyes. Syria suggests to Israel, "Hey, while we're at it, let's settle with Lebanon over the Chebaa Farms." Israel: "Aight." Iranian conservatives, for their part, back Ali Larijani for speaker of Parliament, snubbing our old friend Mahmoud. And the Lebanese back off the brink of civil war, form a government, and no one even bats an eye when Bush's boy Fuad Saniora remains prime minister.

What we're learning, slowly, is the absolute limit of American influence in the Middle East. Israel humored our request for an airstrike in Syria, found nothing, and has had it with our slam-dunk intelligence services; they're negotiating for peace. Egypt is working with Hamas to stabilize Gaza. Hezbollah is going to have a plurality of power in Lebanon; Moqtada al-Sadr is going to have a share in Iraq. The things everyone from the Weekly Standard to the Atlantic thought were portents of the end of time will all happen.

A hush will fall on west Asia, and we will pay 5 dollars a gallon for gas. Certain men will make noise about the catastrophe to befall the US in the region if we let X or Y happen. Other men will bruit about the benefits of sticking it out, as if the House of Saud were populated by leprechauns with a cache of black gold. In short, we will be irritated.

But everyone else will be cool.

So in the next few years, when some retro-Bushite lets out a war whoop, or some imam talks about the Devilish Occupier, and you want to scream for the region to calm down, think instead of the Dude and Walter, and imagine the placid faces of Khalid Meshaal, Ali Larijani and Bashar al-Assad all saying in unison:

"Calmer than you are."
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Save your pencil lead...

The Jerusalem Post turned a quick profit Tuesday on that weird Bush appeasement speech. And the White House denial meant an even quicker follow-up story!

According to JPost, the Israeli Army heard it from a senior Israeli, who heard it from a senior American official that Bush and Cheney would "really really like to bomb Iran, but Gates and Rice won't let them." Why now? Hezbollah!

Bush, the official reportedly said, considered Hizbullah's show of strength to constitute evidence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's growing influence. In Bush's view, the official said, "the disease must be treated - not its symptoms."

Dude, Hezbollah is the last thing on Bush's brain right now. The consensus over here is that sooner or later, for good or ill, the Saniora government will fall, hezbollahis in parliament will get a better slice of the pie, and the world will not end. The Beirut street fighting doesn't even merit page 3.

What's really up is the bimensual banging of war gongs, or, as my neighbor Manav once said, "Dude, this is just dick-waving." Mahmoud calls Israel a stinking corpse; Bush calls Mahmoud Hitler. The Israeli Army, knowing that the President has no intention of living up to his rhetoric (maybe they read this Fred Kaplan piece in Slate?), calls Bush's bluff.

Nuhs is mad itchy with the trigger finger! Calm down...Like Slavin says, for various reasons, no one will start a shooting war. The whole point of seeking and exercising influence in politics is to conserve resources. When pragmatic Iranian conservatives say "We will not stretch our legs beyond our carpet," believe it! Much to the Jerusalem Post's chagrin, both the US and Iran realize that expending resources to gain influence is a losing proposition. (Cf. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, etc.) And, as usual, dick-waving writers have no say in the matter...

"If Yeats had saved his pencil lead
would 'certain men' have stayed in bed?

For history's a twisted root
with art its small, translucent fruit

and never the other way round.
The roots by which we were once bound

are severed here, in any case,
and we are all now dispossessed…"

-- Paul Muldoon, "7 Midagh Street"

CIA does backfill; so do I!

a brainiac with a cranium packed...
...actually there's no maniac and no uranium here, it turns out. The Inqy woke me up this morning with a for-real terror dream. Syria was making the bomb! No mention of skepticism from David Albright or Mohammed el-Baradei. A senior admin official saying the reactor was just a click away! A grainy ISIS photo from space! Strangely, no mention of yesterday's videotape.

Convincing! So here comes WaPo to rain on the parade: another senior admin official says nobody thought this was legitimate information:

At the same time, a senior U.S. official acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence experts had formally assigned only "low confidence" to the possibility that the site was at the heart of a Syrian nuclear weapons program, because it lacked basic components such as a reprocessing plant.

Since we can't both be right here, and since Israel seems to want a land-for-peace deal with Assad, the September bombing and the current flurry of flaky data are clearly functions of inter-agency squabbling, no? Senior intelligence officials in favor of preemptive strikes against fantasy targets are undercutting their colleagues, indeed undercutting Israeli foreign policy. Clearly, the original story is backwards: what the CIA's presentation to Congress suggests is that in September, we got the satellite pics to Israel and leaned on them to make a surgical strike. What does "they asked for no green light" mean? It means preemption was our idea.

So, predictions are easy to come by at this point. Within the month, let's say, Olmert and Assad will sign an historic peace agreement, and Tzipi Livni will make plain that Israel didn't want to bomb that patch of desert, but Bushites bullied Israel into it.

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Mad Yoo

In the interest of finally catching up on things I've meant to talk about, I'm just going to print an email I sent to the Inquirer in January. John Yoo had just been sued by Jose Padilla's lawyers for his work at the Office of Legal Counsel. On 15 January 2008, the Inquirer ran his apologia. Reading it was like smoking crack. There's not really anything in this email that isn't obvious to everyone, but it's a start.

Sir:

1) Yoo's arguments for the plenary power of the executive during time of war fail to account for the interminable nature of the so-called war on terror. Permanent presidential rule by fiat represents the end of democracy, and the inception of a police state. Thus the animus against Yoo. If this is a democracy, we can only ask Yoo's defenders, in what sense is the global war on terror finite? And the corollary, in what ways are the president's war powers circumscribed?

2) Yoo's relationship to Padilla has less to do with his arrest than with his detention. Yoo is no Jack Bauer. As the primary author of the now-infamous "Torture Memo" written in 2002 in the Office of Legal Counsel and exposed in May 2004, he argues that interrogation methods tantamount to torture are legal (at best, not illegal), that enemy combatants are not subject to Geneva protections, that only the executive shall determine what does and does not constitute torture, and that the executive is justified in keeping the entire process shrouded in secrecy.

Apologists need to make a case. Does torture work? Does torture work quickly? Are other means of interrogating terror suspects invalid? If so, why? Is torture's efficacy and necessity profound enough to trump Eighth Amendment protections against it? How can Congress or the people legitimize a secret war? How can the executive branch write the rules for its own behavior?

No one defending Yoo will touch these concerns with a ten-foot pole, content instead to cry "lawfare."

3) Since Yoo's resignation, every one of his positions has been picked apart in Congress and the courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that indefinite detention without trial is unconstitutional, even when the detainee is a foreign-born "enemy combatant." The practice of torture has been swatted back everywhere from the Detainee Treatment Act to the Army field manual.

All of which begs the question, what extralegal or quasi-legal acts is Yoo currently defending? If we take the president at his word when he says, "We do not torture," then Yoo's spirited assertion of single-handedly crafting a victory strategy in the GWOT falls flat. If we don't need torture anymore to beat Al-Qaeda, why did we need it in the first place?

4) The operative word may not be lawfare, but avoision in Yoo's case. His work at OLC was the foremost instance of sneaking illegality in under a cloak of legalisms. His defenders need to square his charges against Padilla with the Bush adminstration's ongoing use of the law for political ends.

Alternately, if this isn't a crusade to deny terrorist fellow-travelers the use of a legal arsenal, but is merely typical conservative angst over the pressing need for tort reform, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree. (For my part, I see a right to sue anybody anywhere enshrined in the Fifth, Seventh and Fourteenth Amendments.)

But the question of magnitude makes this no ordinary suit. Yoo's actions affect all U.S. citizens, and everyone the United States suspects of being a terrorist sympathizer; depending on your definition, that could amount to one-fifth of the entire world. We're not talking about a cup of coffee to the pants; if actions such as Yoo's are not repudiated, our fundamental rights are forfeit, and human rights takes another body blow.

5) Finally, I am actually on Yoo's side. Padilla's lawyers have turned a matter of obviously unconstitutional behavior into an open political question. They've given the right something to sink its teeth into. By suing a man who could only be loved by far-right law wonks, and who most of us barely recall, Padilla's lawyers have enabled their position to be caricatured as just one opinion among many -- some red some blue all valid -- when it is a matter of redressing transgressions. Sue the president, the DoJ and the OLC instead. Picking on subordinates is craven. The president is the officer with a constitutional duty to discharge; he was either derelict in his management of the executive branch, or was brazenly flouting the law. Sue him.

In fact, this is the only avenue of defense likely to yield a positive result for Professor Yoo. Should he express interest in retaining my services, please forward my email to him.

Yours,
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