But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I’ve reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can’t try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don’t think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.
zmag.org

Is Chomsky a shill for Isreael?

The ruling Kadima party won yesterday’s general election in Israel, according to exit polls, but with fewer seats than the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, wanted in order for him to claim a mandate for his plan to impose Israel’s final borders.
The election proved disastrous for the once dominant Likud party, driven into fourth place by Labour and the rise of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu which advocates removing Arabs from Israel.

According to exit polls last night, Kadima won up to 32 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Labour has about 21, Yisrael Beiteinu 14 and Likud 12. The balance of seats is mostly held by religious and nationalist parties. The turnout, at 63%, was the lowest in Israel’s history.

Mr Olmert’s likely coalition partners are Labour and two smaller parties. He may also turn to the Pensioners party, which has never before held seats in parliament but is estimated to have won eight in an apparent protest vote.

The election was widely regarded as a referendum on Mr Olmert’s commitment, backed by Labour and the left, to unilaterally withdraw from large parts of the West Bank, to remove tens of thousands of Jewish settlers while retaining the main settlement blocks, and to carve out a border using the West Bank barrier. Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, and other parties on the right argued that pulling out of Palestinian territory would be a victory for terrorism.

In his victory speech, Mr Olmert said he would press ahead with his plan to separate from the Palestinians.

“In the near future we will bring about the shaping of the final borders of the state, guaranteeing a Jewish democratic state,” he said.

The acting prime minister said he wanted to negotiate frontiers with the Palestinians only on condition they recognise Israel and end violence.
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi’ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

“After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There’s been huge misinformation,” Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi’ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.
news.yahoo.com

In a crescendo of violence in Iraq, a suicide bomber killed 40 army recruits in Mosul as Shia leaders reacted furiously to a US-Iraqi raid on a mosque which they claim killed 37 people. A further 21 bodies were found in and around Baghdad, some with nooses around their necks.

The suicide bomber blew himself up yesterday in a recruitment centre near a joint Iraqi-American military base, with the usual devastating results for the unemployed young men waiting for a job in the armed forces.

The killing of what the Americans say were 16 “insurgents”, and what Shias claim were 37 unarmed worshippers in the Mustafa mosque, may turn out to be a turning point in the three-year-old Iraq crisis. Iraq’s Shias, 60 per cent of the population, have hitherto largely co-operated with American occupation while Sunni Arabs have resisted. But the Shias increasingly see the US as trying to deny them power despite the electoral success of its Alliance.
independent.co.uk

Iraq: As Many as 90 Killed
A suicide bomber struck an army recruiting station near Tal Afar in northern Iraq, killing 40 and wounding 20. President Bush recently lauded the situation in Tal Afar and environs as a US success story.

About 29 corpses corpses showed up in the streets of Baghdad, most of them strangled and tortured.

A rocket attack on a building resulted in several casualties. The building housed political offices for the Fadhila (Virtue) and Dawa Parties. Both are Shiite religious parties.

A young physician in Kirkuk confessed on Kurdistan television Monday to having been an serial killer on behalf of the guerrillas, giving lethal injections to more than 40 Iraqi soldiers and police or denying them oxygen. At the same time, he was secretly treating wounded members of the guerrilla movement.

Guerrillas abducted 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company on Monday, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The governor of Baghdad province, Hussein al-Tahan, announced Monday “Today we decided to stop all political and service cooperation with the US forces until a legal committee is formed to investigate this incident.” [i.e. the US/Iraqi attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district on Sunday, which left some 20 persons dead).

Officials of the United Iraqi Alliance of Shiite fundamentalists, the largest single bloc in parliament, demanded Monday that security matters be turned over to Iraqis and taken out of US hands. Reuters says, ‘ “The Alliance calls for a rapid restoration of (control of) security matters to the Iraqi government,” Jawad Al Maliki, a senior Alliance spokesman and ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari, told a news conference. ‘

I have to say that if the US military doesn’t even know, as its spokesmen admitted, to which branch of Islam the persons its joint operation killed on Sunday belonged, it really is acting as a bull in a china shop.

The Intrepid Ann Garrels and Joost Hilterman report that some Shiites are speaking now of a second great betrayal by the Americans of the Shiites, as they fear that the US it tilting now toward the Sunni Arabs. In spring of 1991, the US stood by while Saddam’s forces massacred rebelling Shiites after the Gulf War.

Some Shiites, according to al-Hayat, are saying that the US is deliberately attempting to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Among their concerns was the US military’s announcement that the attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in Ur was the work of an Iraqi military unit. Which unit? Where? To whom does it report? Is it little more than a death squad? Is it commanded by the Americans? Why didn’t the Prime Minister know about this attack, which spilled over on Dawa Party offices? PM Jaafari is a member of the Dawa Party.

The Badr Organization, a political party that represents the paramilitary Badr Corps, the Shiite militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded Monday that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, be expelled from that country.

This moment is therefore a particularly inauspicious one for Khalilzad to press for the sidelining of Ibrahim Jaafari as candidate for prime minister of the United Iraqi Alliance. Jaafari narrowly won an internal party vote, but was backed by Muqtada al-Sadr and opposes loose federalism and unrestrained capitalism. For all these reasons he is unacceptable to the Kurds and to the US.

Izzat Ibrahim Duri, one of Saddam’s key officials, is said to have issued a tape on Monday. It was played on Aljazeera but has not been authenticated. The tape calls on the Arab League to recognize the Iraqi insurgency as the true government of Iraq, and condemns the blowing up of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra, an anti-Shiite strike. Al-Duri led the charge to repress and massacre the Shiites in sping of 1991 when they rose against Saddam, so he is unlikely to get any points for his defense of the Askariyah.

Is it soup yet?

It is the fastest growing city on earth, a landscape of building sites full of workers feverishly constructing the highest, the largest and the deepest in the world. It’s a neverland, rising out of the barren desert and fringed by beaches and a ski resort. There are no taxes. And it is the favoured destination of Britons wishing to work and play abroad.

Fifty per cent of the world’s supply of cranes are now at work in Dubai on projects worth $100bn – twice the World Bank’s estimated cost of reconstructing Iraq and double the total foreign investment in China, the word’s third-largest economy.

But there is also a downside to the glistening towers that soar above the shopping malls, the six-lane highways and the world’s only seven-star hotel with suites that can cost $50,000 (£28,000) a night. More than 2,500 workers at the site of the world’s tallest building, the $800m Burj Dubai, went on strike last week in a country where striking – and unions – are illegal. It is the latest manifestation of the deep discontent felt by the semi-indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent who are building this glitzy oasis. Complaining of unpaid wages, and demanding better conditions, the labourers marched out of the cramped, stifling dormitories where they are corralled 25 to a room in violent protests which caused $1m worth of damage. They overturned cars and smashed up offices in a very graphic reminder of a problem which normally receives little publicity.
independent.co.uk

TOKYO (AFX) – With the US trade deficit at a record high and global interest rates rising, East Asian economies need to be prepared for a possible sharp slump in the value of the dollar, the Asian Development Bank warned here.

‘Any shock hitting the US economy or the global market may change investors’ perceptions given the existing global current account imbalance,’ Masahiro Kawai, the ADB’s head of regional economic integration, told reporters on a trip here. The ADB’s headquarters are in Manila.

‘Our suggestion to Asian countries is: don’t take this continuous financing of the US current account deficit as given. If something happens then East Asian economies have to be prepared,’ he said.
forbes.com

A Russian court yesterday barred major shareholders in the beleaguered oil company Yukos from taking part in its bankruptcy proceedings, the first step in what analysts said was a slow state campaign to renationalise the remains of the company.
guardian.co.uk

Rai Merchant, the narrator and a major character in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet says about India: “The non-stop sensory assault of that country without a middle register, that continuum entirely composed of extremes.”

“How can one define India? There is no one language, there is no one culture. There is no one religion, there is no one way of life. There is absolutely no way one could draw a line around it and say, ‘This is India’ or, ‘This is what it means to be Indian.'” (Arundhati Roy)

It couldn’t be said better. At first you are hit by a whirlwind of India’s charm, its people so full of life and friendliness, the beauty of the bright-eyed children and young people, the dignity of the women dressed in colorful saris, the impeccably dressed men in Kurta and Pajama, or more western style jackets and slacks, all the different aspects of the streets that are teeming with rickshaws, bicycles, cars, cows and people: all this takes your breath away when you first arrive in India.

After some time, though, you might feel that seeing the daily and never-ending hardship of a huge part of the Indian population overpowers you with feelings of shame and disgust. I am of course mostly referring to the Dalit, also called the untouchables, because of the way the four castes (called Varna in a religious context) consider them unclean. The Dalits make up 20% of the Indian population and together with the lowest caste, the Sudra, they make up about half of the entire population. The Dalits are made to do all the dirty and polluting work there is, burn dead human bodies, deal with the animals, their hides and even their excrements, sweep and clean streets, deal with sewage and do various kinds of menial work. You can see them make patties from cow dung with their bare hands, for decoration and also to make fire when wood is scarce.
axisoflogic.com

Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt earned the nickname “the General” after taking power in a 1982 coup d’etat. His sixteen-month rule is considered one of Guatemala’s bloodiest periods since the Spanish conquest. Under the General’s command, entire villages were massacred in a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, and some 150,000 mostly indigenous Guatemalans were killed. Despite his gruesome history, Rios Montt remained a powerful political figure and in 2003 ran as a presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban prohibiting former dictators from entering the race. In 1999, Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú submitted an indictment against the former dictator, but over six years later, the trial is still pending.

Rios Montt is not an anomaly in Latin America. F! rom El Salvador to Chile, ex-military leaders guilty of violent crimes perpetrated during the region’s “dirty wars” of the 70’s and 80s roam free. Many, like Rios Montt, wield enough political power to ensure that their macabre pasts remain buried from public scrutiny. Throughout Latin America, human rights groups are seeking to convict these criminals, but most have confronted the greatest obstacle to a functioning justice system–impunity. In Guatemala, the state has made little attempt to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of war victims–most likely because a large percentage of these criminals still hold high government positions. In the few cases that have ended in conviction, only the material authors, those at the lowest level of the military, have been punished, while the intellectual author! s remain immune to prosecution.
counterpunch.org

Condoleezza Rice Revisits The Scene Of Us Crimes
“Do you know how Chileans first learned about Indonesia?” asks Jorge Insulza, foreign secretary of the Chilean Communist Party. “Long before the coup of Pinochet, right wingers were intimidating members of progressive movements and parties: ‘Watch out, Jakarta is coming!'”

Thus the reference to the 1965 military coup led by General Suharto which was full-heartedly supported by western politicians and companies. In a matter of months, between 1 and 3 million Indonesian Communists, atheists and members of the Chinese minority were mercilessly slaughtered in what can be described as easily the most intensive massacre of the 20th century.

A few days after talking to Insulza I was facing Chilean victims of the 1973 coup who had come to see my documentary film “Terlena–Breaking of a Nation,” about the Indonesian dictatorship, at Universidad Arsis in Santiago. One elderly woman, apparently shaken, came close to me and whispered: “we heard it was bad there, in Indonesia, but we had no idea that it was so bad. Apparently, Chile and Indonesia not only share the same ocean, they also share a horrific past.”

In March, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to embark on a round-the-world journey, visiting Chile, Indonesia and Australia. The symbolism of her trip conveniently escaped the attention of almost all mass media outlets.

In both countries, dictatorship officially collapsed under tremendous popular pressure: in Chile in the late 80’s, in Indonesia almost 10 years later. But both former client states developed in a radically different way: one proudly embarked on a democratic path emphasizing social development, while the other struggled under a feudal system with most people living in outright misery.

The reason for Ms. Rice’s visiting Chile was the inauguration of new Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet – a socialist, single mother of three and an agnostic. Ms. Rice had to sit through and swallow an inaugural speech in which President Bachelet paid homage to her father, Alberto Bachelet, an air-force general kidnapped, tortured and murdered in prison for opposing the 1973 coup against the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Michelle Bachelet herself survived imprisonment, torture and exile, by-products of US foreign policy. But now she was proudly taking her oath at the crowded Hall of Honor of Chile’s Congress in the historical and stunning port city of Valparaiso, surrounded by her friends – leaders of left-wing governments from all over South America.

“South America has changed,” declared Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela who has managed to survive a US-supported coup. “A worker is president of Brazil – there comes Lula; an Indian is president of Bolivia; a woman is president of Chile, and in Venezuela, a revolutionary soldier, which is what I am.”

Condoleezza Rice described the elections in Chile as a “triumph of democracy,” omitting the fact that the triumph took more than 3 decades to achieve at the cost of more than 4 thousand dead and millions of men, women and children who were tortured, dispossessed or exiled. But a triumph nevertheless!

Debates – BOLIVIA: Has Morales sold out?
Even before the January 22 inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first indigenous president, commentators from all sides of the political spectrum, particularly on the left internationally, have begun to speculate about what course Bolivian politics will take under a Morales government.

One of the most prolific contributors to the debate has been US Marxist sociologist James Petras. Given his long history of well-respected research and also of working with some of the most important social movements in South America, Petras’s critical viewpoint has been taken seriously and welcomed by many.

However, his contributions to the left’s discussion of the significance of Morales’s electoral victory seems to be aimed at carving himself out a niche based on denunciations of Morales as a ‘sell-out’ In his article “New Winds from the Left or Hot Air from the Right”, posted on the Canadian Dimension website on March 1, Petras wrote: There are powerful left-wing forces in Latin America and later or sooner they will contest and challenge the power of the neoliberal converts, sooner in the case of Bolivia, where the scale and scope of Morales’s broken promises and embrace of the business elite has already provoked the mobilization of the class-conscious trade unions, the mass urban organizations and the landless peasants.

For Petras, it is the case not just in Bolivia, but in all of South America, that the rebellion against neoliberalism can be explained through the dogmatic schema of (nearly always) reformist leaders who betray and (nearly always) revolutionary masses who are betrayed.

The fact that Morales would go down the path of betrayal was a foregone conclusion for Petras, who writes that his predictions have been proven right because the principal economic and defense ministers and high ranking officials in Morales’s government have been linked to the IMF, World Bank and previous neoliberal regimes. Morales has totally and categorically rejected the expropriation of gas and petroleum, providing explicit long-term, large-scale guarantees that all the facilities of the major energy multinational corporations will be recognized, respected and protected by the state.

While Petras seems almost glad to write that Morales has filled his cabinets with ‘neoliberals’, neither US imperialism nor the right-wing in Bolivia have taken comfort from the new cabinet, expressing particular alarm over Morales’s choice for minister of hydrocarbons, Andres Soliz Rada, a long-time advocate of nationalisation of Bolivia’s gas.

It is true that the Morales government will not be nationalising the foreign companies that currently run Bolivia’s gas industry and booting them out of the country. But Morales didn’t promise to do either of these things, so it seems odd to speak of ”breaking promises”. Rather, Morales has promised, not unlike Venezuela, to nationalise the country’s gas reserves, which his government has declared it will carry out by July 12.

Tabatinga, the other triple border – A new Vietnam?
“We are in one of the strategic points of the planet, in the heart of the Americas,” says the mayor of Tabatinga, a small Brazilian city in the middle of the tropical forest, “on the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru.”

This is a highly militarized region, in Amazonia. This zone is almost uninhabited, approximately five million square kilometers in size and the government considers it a national priority. A beautiful treasure, that Brazil is determined to defend.

Brazilian public opinion is convinced that natural resources are for sure a cause for war. Amazonia has enormous oil deposits and possesses the biggest fresh water reserves in the world, not to mention a biodiversity that is well beyond comparison. Are these sufficient reasons for a future war?

So, who do they think they would have to defend this treasure from?

The military high command wearily watch US military bases close to the borders of Brazil, Colombia, Peru and also more recently Paraguay. The Defense Minister has recently sent a high-ranking military delegation to Vietnam to study the guerrilla tactics and strategies used against the US army in the jungle during the war. Soon they will also guard Amazonia’s air space in partnership with the Venezuelan Armed Forces.

THE END OF THE WORLD
“Tabatinga is so important strategically, that we have deployed a Battalion here permanently,” says Brigadier General Joaquin Maia Brandao, and Bishop Alcimar Caldas can feel the imminent danger of a military attack. “We are afraid that one of these days US troops will come here and say to us too: Ok, from now on, the airport belongs to us and you all answer to us because we now control the rivers.”

Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina: Reversing the Logic of Capitalism
Argentina’s worker-run factories are setting an example for workers around the world that employees can run a business even better without a boss or owner. Some 180 recuperated enterprises up and running, providing jobs for more than 10,000 Argentine workers.

The new phenomenon of employees taking over their workplace began in 2000 and heightened as Argentina faced its worst economic crisis ever in 2001. Nationwide, thousands of factories have closed and millions of jobs have been lost in recent years. Despite challenges, Argentina’s recuperated factory movement have created jobs, formed a broad network of mutual support among the worker-run workplaces and generated community projects.

Water Law and Indigenous Rights in the Andes
n Andean countries, widespread protests over violations of traditional rights have resulted in creative reform proposals to secure indigenous water rights and water system management.

“Our irrigation system, we have to defend it because it is our work and it costs us much effort. So many mingas, so many meetings, so many commissions, so many problems we have faced in the Guarguallá irrigation project! They cannot impose on us, not the landowners, not the State; they cannot leave us without this project that has been achieved with the organization’s effort, with the effort of people who have stopped sleeping, of women who have left their duties at home… We have to defend it to death because of how much it hurts, and we can’t let nobody take from us what has cost us so much sacrifice!”1
— Rosa Guamán, Licto, Ecuador

A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that “New Orleans is back,” pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin’s constituents–including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans–are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, “New Urbanists” and neo- Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority- black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush’s pledge to “get the work done quickly” and mount “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen” has proved to be the same fool’s gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq’s bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect–what Representative Barney Frank has labeled “a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction”–the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.
zmag.org