The partisans of Israel in America are a powerful constituency, as Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out in the London Review of Books.
“The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history.”
Israel‘s lobbyists and partisans are often talking about the democratic elements of Israel‘s governance, its political freedom, and its religious diversity.
The fundamental and overpowering objection to this first claim about democracy is the occupation of the West Bank and the millions of disenfranchised Palestinians living under Israeli control, walled off arbitrarily from enclaves of Jewish settlers who can vote.
The other former “occupied territory,” Gaza, continues to see attacks from Israeli military (and outgoing fire from within it) even though Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert carried out Ariel Sharon’s “unilateral withdrawal” plan in the area. Reuters reports this story about an airstrike on a residence:
“An Israeli air strike destroyed a house in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday after residents said they received two telephone calls from the army, one urging them to leave and a second insisting, ‘This is not a joke.’ An Israeli army spokeswoman said the house had been used by the Islamic Jihad militant group to store weapons. No one was injured in the blast. A person who lived in the house denied any ties to militants.”
So despite any other elements of democracy (Israel has most of them) the occupation and its violations of UN Sec. Council Res. 242 gives lie to the claim of democratic governance.
Religious diversity is tolerated in Israel, with large numbers of Muslims and Druze holding Israeli citizenship. However these groups are widely regarded as low in Israeli society, and no important official in the country hails from one of those sects. Basam Jaber at ynetnews.com writes about the complex situation the ethnic Arabs living in Israel face:
“We do not voice our protests against Nasrallah because the majority of the Arab population in Israel opposes war. We do not oppose a single side, but oppose war itself. Therefore, we demand an immediate ceasefire. We are protesting against the war not against one leader or another. We the Arabs of Israel are witnessing the death of Israeli citizens and soldiers, we are personally experiencing the missiles, but at the same time we are also seeing how Israel is attacking the country of Lebanon we love so dearly, and we are also witnessing how the Israeli Air Force is destroying Lebanon – this is very painful.”
Political freedom is a resource that must be used. And just like Democrats like Joe Lieberman and the dozens of other Democratic senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war, Israel seems to have a useless or “rubber-stamp” opposition. With an air force general as the chief of staff, Israel has pursued a stupid, brutal and useless bombing campaign all over Lebanon while Hizbullah continues to fire rockets into Israel, sometimes over a hundred a day, and most of the world waits for a ceasefire while Condi Rice makes typically stupid comments, this time about “birth pangs.” Juan Cole assaults this nonsense at Informed Comment [includes link from Cole]:
“Condi Rice echoes the old Neocon theory of ‘creative chaos’ when she confuses the Lebanon war with ‘the birth pangs’ of a ‘new’ Middle East. The chief outcome of the ‘war on terror’ has been the proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel‘s assault on the very fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it and further that proliferation. Since asymmetrical challengers often turn to terrorism as a tactic, the ‘war on terror’ has been, at the level of political society below that of high politics and the state, the most efficient engine for the production of terrorism in history.”
The leader of Labour, Amir Peretz, is the defense minister who used to belong to an organization called Peace Now, but then again, read their own words, how dovish do they sound?:
“In Lebanon this situation came to be. But will the war, which as I said is justified, continue to be justified without thought to the amount of force used?”
It is pretty clear already that an absurdly excessive amount of force has been used by Isreal with American-supplied weaponry on all sorts of targets, including “civilian infrastructure.” If this is the range of acceptable political opinion–trying to calibrate just right how much bombing and raids will accomplish while remaining “justified”–what kind of democracy is Israel?
The heinous war goes on, as Reuters reports:
“Israeli aircraft also hit the last coastal crossing on the Litani River between Sidon and Tyre, Lebanon, cutting the main artery for aid supplies to civilians in the southern part of the country, aid agencies said.
‘We must be able to have movement throughout the country to deliver supplies. At this point we can’t do that,’ said the UN humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, David Shearer. ‘The deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a violation of international law.'”
[photo: AP]

Does the New Republic still expect history to vindicate Joe Lieberman? As the Connecticut Senator heads into a primary next Tuesday against Ned Lamont, I’m wondering how loyal Lieberman’s flacks in the press will remain if he loses. This tirade comes from a 2004 article (“Our Choice“) endorsing Lieberman for the Democratic nomination for president:

“Only Lieberman–the supposed candidate of appeasement–is challenging his party, enduring boos at event after event, to articulate a different, better vision of what it means to be a Democrat. Three years ago, that vision seemed ascendant. Today, it is once again at the margins. It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naïvely, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman’s warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day.”
[photo: AP]

I saw things in the apartment shifting around a little at around 8:18 p.m. tonight and felt some shaking. The futon seems like a better place to watch an earthquake from than the computer chair so I moved and by the time I was situating myself (this obviously wasn’t a very major quake where I was) the shaking had stopped. Jessica was seeing a show with a friend tonight during that time and just told me now on the phone that she didn’t feel anything where she was (downtown at the performance of A Chorus Line). Here in the Outer Richmond of San Francisco we had a little tremor or aftershock or whatever but epicenter seemed much higher north according to reports. As the AP via the San Jose Mercury News reports:
“A magnitude 4.4 earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay area Wednesday night, but no serious injuries or damage were immediately reported.”
[photo: KRON 4]

Jessica and I took a walk together along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz Saturday evening. At one point I snapped a twilight picture of the rather calm ocean waters with surfers waiting for waves and a sailboat hovering offshore.

New York Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez is coming off the disabled list today to pitch against the Atlanta Braves. Shaping up as the National League’s best team at the end of the All-Star break, the Mets are looking to end the 15-year run of division championships by the Braves and make it to the World Series for the first time since losing the subway series to the New York Yankees in 1999.

As Italy won its fourth World Cup championship in Germany this summer, the Italian soccer federation was investigating a major match-fixing scandal that has implicated several major clubs. As a result of the inquiry, league champion Jeventus of Turin has been stripped of its championship and Inter Milan, the highest-finishing team not pulled into the scandal, has been declared the new Italian league champ.

“Yeah Blair, what are you doing?” Bush asks.
What are either of them doing? Do they know?
What’s for sure is, they didn’t know the microphone was on until Blair found it and muted it.
More interesting at the G8 summit lunch in Russia than George W. Bush’s profane discussion of irony was the lowly fealty of Tony Blair throughout the conversation.
After Bush says “What about Kofi?…I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything is settled…,” Blair responds with “Yeah, no. I think…” and stammers on from there about the need to get “international visits agreed.”

Standing near Bush and leaning over, Blair hopefully proclaims “I am perfectly happy to try to see what [inaudible], but you need that done quickly–“

Bush explains: “–Well she’s going, I think Condi’s gonna go pretty soon…I told her your offer too.”
“It’s only if…if she needs the ground prepared, as it were,” Blair graciously deflects after a few seconds.
After Blair says that Condi (Rice) has “got to succeed as it were” in a diplomacy mission (as opposed to him), Bush then moves the topic to Syria, and says “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah stop doing this sh** and it’s over.”

Blair later backs Bush up on Kofi (Annan): “What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way.”
The way that Blair turns the disaster in Iraq into something so peripheral is downright cowardly. How much chance, the British people should ask him, that Iraq “goes in the right way,” given present trends?

In this war between Hizbollah (and Hamas, and Lebanon) and Israel, that Bush and Blair failed to provide necessary leadership in pushing for a ceasefire is by now obvious, with or without the recording of their conversation.

Bush and Blair are both now highly unpopular in their own countries. Their war for Iraq is an historic disaster, and no amount of round-the-clock coverage of the war going on just to the west of it can obscure the fact that it remains the deadlier conflict, even over the last week.
Now the dark specter of further war looms over the paranoid rants of neoconservative commentators and other assorted Iran haters and Syria bashers. These people have a truly hateful, worthless ideology that is now preaching the predictable–that punishment has come upon those with insufficient faith in the cult of militarism and forced “democratization.” Not that such a critique could apply to Tony Blair.

So what of a ceasefire now? Well, according to the AP from papers on Monday, Bush hasn’t acquired much of a taste for one:
“However, White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones said after the meeting that “our position on an immediate cease-fire is well known and has not changed.“”

On the other hand, at least one foreign and commonwealth official is applying serious pressure, while the Blairite spin management trys to deflect the impact–soon they are claiming that he “had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
According the Guardian in Britain:

“Mr Howells ignored the diplomatic convention that he tone down his comments because of his presence in the host country, saying the Israelis “have got to think very hard about those children who are dying.”
…
Yesterday, in an interview in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mr Howells said the Israelis
“know only too well it is not enough just to seek a military victory, they have got to win a wider political battle. That means they have got to think very hard about those children who are dying. It is not enough to say it is unfortunate collateral damage. Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now”.
At some stage, he said, the Israelis had around 60 jets flying over the Mediterranean, readying for strikes in Lebanon. “I think it is something the whole world should worry a great deal about,” he said.
Mrs Beckett, interviewed on BBC Radio Four yesterday, insisted there was no difference between the line espoused by Downing Street and herself, and Mr Howells. “I think basically what he is saying is that Israel has been saying all the way through that they are targeting Hizbullah. And there are bound to be problems because Hizbullah have entrenched themselves in relatively speaking ordinary neighbourhoods – not totally, but to a very large extent,” Mrs Beckett said.
“What Kim is saying is that targeting Hizbullah is one thing and one understands why it is being done, but it is not working in the way that Israel had hoped and claimed that it was. And so that’s why we have to continue to … urge recognition of that danger on Israel.”
Asked whether Israel had heeded calls for restraint, Mrs Beckett said she would not disclose private conversations with Israelis.
Foreign Office diplomats confirmed over the weekend there were significant differences between No 10 and the Foreign Office, and within the Foreign Office about how to respond to the conflict. No 10 also claimed that Mr Howells was merely calling for restraint all round and had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
So it does not appear that Bush and Blair have made any substantive change to their views since their G8 luncheon talk, despite the continuing casualties with hundereds of Lebanese dead and dozens of Isrealis dead already thus far in the war. They made the wrong call about how much war Iraq needed and they are miscalculating again, while Kim Howells gets to make the visit Blair asked Bush permission to take.
[photo: AFP]

How quickly has Minnesota Congressman Gil Gutknecht reversed course on his views of the Iraq war? According to the Washington Post:

“The evolving Republican message on the war contrasts with the strong rhetoric used by House and Senate Republicans recently in opposing a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. During a debate last month, Gutknecht intoned, “Members, now is not the time to go wobbly.” This week, he conceded “I guess I didn’t understand the situation,” saying that a partial troop withdrawal now would “send a clear message to the Iraqis that the next step is up to you.””

How does it work, that one month he was helping to spread Republican lies and intimidation about the war, but now he expects to be taken completely seriously in arguing differently? Does he really now, as Gutknecht implies, “understand the situation?” Or this a sign that mercifully, finally, the political advantages of supporting Iraq withdrawal overpower the bloodlust and bravado of even the stupidest Republican representatives?

Jessica and I had dinner and then stopped by the dance party at 111 Minna in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 19, 2006.

(Book review: The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, 2005, ISBN 0-374-29288-4)

Reading Thomas Friedman’s book of mangled preaching about the world economy, it becomes clear before long that The World is Flat is like one long, terrible newspaper column whose premise is misguided and whose writer is a charlatan, a moron and an apologist for authoritarianism.

“Yes, China has had a good run for the past twenty-five years,” Friedman states, “and it may make the transition from communism to a more pluralistic system without the wheels coming off. [p. 247]”

Does this transition include events like the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989? It certainly is included in the “good run” he speaks of.

It sometimes seems that Friedman, a New York Times columnist, thinks that America’s economy would work a lot better if the country adopted strategies from Communism. He certainly finds a lot of things right with China’s system, and enlists some of his friends to bolster his point. Here’s Google board member John Doerr:

“‘You talk to the leadership of China, and they are all engineers, and they get what is going on immediately. The Americans don’t, because they’re all lawyers.’ [p. 280]”

Bill Gates met with President Hu of China recently, and in The World is Flat he’s all about that Chinese way—even, or especially, the system of government:

“‘The Chinese have risk taking down, hard work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them—you are never discussing `give me a one-liner to embarrass [my political rivals] with.` You are meeting with an intelligent bureaucracy.’ [p. 281]”

Friedman also offers his own parenthetical remark:

“For a Communist authoritarian system, China does a pretty good job of promoting people on merit. The Mandarin meritocratic culture here still runs very deep [p. 34].” [‘authoritarian’ corrected from ‘authoritarianism’ 7-22-2006]

As far as labor standards, Friedman aims to at least demonstrate his good will, if less than thorough investigation, on the matter. Talking about a place in India, he reports back:

“Although I am sure that there are call centers that are operated like sweatshops, 24/7 is not one of them. [p. 22]”

Friedman makes a false claim about Salt Lake City, where members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in reality make up about half the city’s population:

“So he based his home reservation system in Salt Lake City, where the vast majority of the women are Mormons… [p. 37]”

The book is filled with frequent nagging that people in America (presumably other than himself) need to study engineering and be fired at the drop of a hat.

A little outsourcing to Russia, and Friedman scrambles for the paranoid interpretation:

“Wait a minute: Didn’t we win the Cold War? If one of America’s premier technology companies feels compelled to meet its engineering needs by going to the broken-down former Soviet Union, where the only thing that seems to work is old-school math and science education, then we’ve got a quiet little crisis on our hands. [p. 274]”

Here Friedman presses the need for lots of firing-ability for companies (like they don’t have that now or something), using dubious reasoning to try to make a point that could either have been made better or didn’t need to be made at all:

“The easier it is to fire someone in a dying industry, the easier it is to hire someone in a rising industry that no one knew would exist five years earlier. [p. 246]”

Why didn’t Friedman focus on the Middle East, about which he claims to be an expert and has previously written books on? Could it have anything to do with his cheerleading for the Iraq War, which has obviously dented his credibility and given the “liberal hawk” label a bad name? When he finally takes a stab at the region, it doesn’t work out very well anyway. What would his old friend, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, make of this patronizing propaganda?:

“The Arab-Muslim peoples have an incredibly rich cultural tradition and civilization, with long periods of success and innovation to draw on for inspiration and example for their young people. They have all the resources necessary for modernization in their own cultural terms, if they want to summon them. [p. 405]”

Apparently one element of modernizing the Middle East, according to Friedman, is keeping
tabs on what’s happening on the village level—by flying unmanned drones over people:

“He explained that a U.S. Predator drone—a small pilotless aircraft with a high-power television camera—was flying over an Iraqi village, in the 24^th MEU’s area of operation, and feeding real-time intelligence images back to his laptop and this flat screen. [p. 39]”

I’m not sure if Friedman thinks the Iraq invasion was done on “their own cultural terms,” or what that exactly is supposed to mean. Often, throughout the book, it is hard to understand what some his arguments are actually supposed to mean. In many cases the serial abuse of the concept described by the book title, “flat,” serves to mangle into nonsense what are otherwise banal or debatable points:

“All of this is going to have to be sorted out anew. The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identity disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era. [p. 201]”

If that is true, engineering majors should take note.

Sometimes the ill-defined jargon cascades into an avalanche of meaningless chatter:

“How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming.’ In-forming is the individual’s personal analog to open-sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring. [p. 153]”

Got it? Try this:

“I call my own version of this approach compassionate flatism. [p. 277]”

Friedman also goes into the two most predictable business school case studies, Wal-Mart and Dell, during the course of the book. First an un-sourced (un-sourcing? Is that one of those new terms we need to remember?) “estimate” about Wal-Mart:

“Thanks to the efficiency of its supply chain alone, Wal-Mart’s cost of goods is estimated to be 5 to 10 percent less than that of most of its competitors. [p. 135]”

Then later, on page 414, Friedman shares a breathless, boring story about his Dell laptop and its demonstrably fine lineage.

After all that, it is hard to take Friedman seriously as an insightful commentator with anything interesting to say, especially considering that he admits that he built the book out of an inexplicable concept and a confirmation bias:

“Unlike Columbus, I didn’t stop with India. After I got home, I decided to keep exploring the East for more signs that the world was flat. [p. 32]”

Many of Friedman’s comments look, a little more than a year after publication, misguided or stupid. In this argument he seems not to realize that, rather inconveniently for his premise, India is indeed developing and testing ballistic missiles (although recent unsuccessful tests of missiles by India might even deflate some of Friedman’s hype of India’s scientific progress):

“But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. [p. 278]”

Here, Friedman discusses the price of oil, “the path to reform,” and the unrealistic construct of “energy independence”:

“If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. [p. 283]”

So what does he think will happen with oil at over $73 a barrel, now?

In the book, Tom Friedman’s attitude toward the rich and powerful is very much like the “junior media advisor” of Colin Powell that he quotes:

“‘My friends were all impressed,’ she said. ‘Little me, and I’m talking to the secretary of state!’ [p. 213]”

As for the history part of the subtitle in The World is Flat, this segment offers part of the narrative:

“It wasn’t only Americans and Europeans who joined the people of the Soviet Empire in celebrating the fall of the wall—and claiming credit for it. Someone else was raising a glass—not of champagne but of thick Turkish coffee. His name was Osama bin Laden and he had a different narrative. [p. 55]”

At the end of the day, Friedman is a guy who talks (in this book) about his favorite TV commercials. Is that who you want to tell you the history of the 21^st century?