Monthly Archives: August 2012

War on Iran?

Posted by on 2012-08-22 No comments

When it comes to Israel, we seem to be continuously inundated with Israeli hardliner views. The August 21st piece (“Cooling off Israel: Five ways to avert a strike on Iran”) by former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin, curiously labelled “National View” since it hardly reflects an American view on the subject, was no exception. The “five” views in his article basically boil down to one: Israel can’t go it alone, so the U.S. should see that it is in “our” interests to bomb Iran for Israel, or at least threaten it with war. But while Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak may bluster about unilaterally bombing Iran, they first need to drag the U.S. into such a war. Why? Because they can’t even sell their war domestically.

The Israeli public is justifiably wary of such go-it-alone threats. A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute showed 61 percent of Israelis believe Iran should not be attacked without U.S. consent. Yadlin’s article, and those like it, bear the fingerprints of a massive P.R. offensive – by AIPAC stalwarts; the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in a recent WSJ article; frequent Standard Times contributors Richard Haas and Charles Krauthammer calling for war; a recent article in the NYT by Uzi Dayan, former IDF chief of staff; a recent barrage of Israeli government “leaks,” including a “shock and awe” style war plan; speculations in Israel’s English-language newspaper, and elsewhere.

And both House Democrats and Republicans, as well as every Republican candidate up to and including Mitt Romney, have eagerly parroted the Likudnik line: Iran has the bomb; Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; Israel’s interests are American interests.

None of this is true. This is about nuclear hegemony: Israel’s.

Despite the alarm an Iranian enrichment program provokes, Iran does not yet possess either a nuclear weapon or a missile capable of delivering it. In fact, “recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” (NYT article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Feb 24, 2012).

America’s intelligence agencies say: baloney.

Hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties would result from an Iranian response to an Israeli (and/or American) first strike. If Americans still have a taste for reckless wars after our many adventures in the Middle East, we could delude ourselves that the mighty American military could make quick work of Iranian missile defenses (Iran has a military budget of only $6 billion a year), but no one can predict Iran’s non-military responses. Would the Straights of Hormuz stay open? How would the rest of the world respond? Even a brief (unlikely) war would cost at least $40 or $50 billion, to be paid for by either Israeli – or more likely American – taxpayers who already shell out $4 billion a year to the highly militarized state.

But here’s an even better idea for averting another unnecessary war.

Israeli nuclear scientist Uzi Even suggests that Israel shutter its nuclear plant in Dimona and dismantle its own (approximately 200) nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran dismantling its program. After all, if we are concerned with nuclear weapons presenting an existential threat to the 7 million people in Israel, we should also be at least somewhat concerned that Israel’s nukes present an existential threat to the other 350 million people in the Middle East.

If the U.S. goal is not simply to ensure Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region, an approach other than beating the drums of war is necessary. On the other hand, if this kerfuffle indeed is about preserving the Zionist state’s nuclear advantage and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world, well, then we’d better be prepared to pay the price for this madness.

Democrats Need a Wake Up Call

Posted by on 2012-08-19 No comments

The Obama administration is taking well-deserved heat for trying to control the Benghazi affair with shifting talking points. Obama’s opponents altered, perhaps even criminally, leaks of these talking points to score their own political points, but the administration’s own opacity, more than Republican forgery, is the real cause of its woes. Government should be more open.

Likewise, the IRS “scandal” may be an opportunity for Republicans, but again the administration shot itself in the foot by its obsession with secrecy. The spectacle of an IRS Commissioner taking the Fifth does nothing to inspire confidence. Yet all this is bipartisan political theater deflecting attention from real IRS scandals: approving, in the first place, 5014c status for groups that are obviously political; and conducting illegal wiretaps of those whose taxes it is auditing. Neither party has challenged either.

One of the minor scandals is the Obama administration’s spying on the Associated Press. Maybe it’s not a crime if the president does it (to quote Nixon). But, really, where is the bipartisan outrage regarding these (and other) violations of the Constitution? When did the Second Amendment become the only one Americans care about?

Speaking of trifling Constitutional technicalities, there is yesterday’s admission by the Obama administration that it has been assassinating Americans abroad. This has been known for some time, yet the administration doggedly defends its secrecy. But the American public deserves to know how the Constitution may be abrogated to kill one of us. Claiming “reasons of National Security” for everything is less a feature of a democracy than a police state. Again, both major parties have no objections.

Then there is the unprecedented crackdown on whistle-blowers and renewed domestic spying. Shortly into his first term it was clear that we had exchanged Tweedle Dumb for a surprisingly Nixonian Tweedle Dee. Obama has used the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to harass and intimidate not only right-wing groups associated with ALEC but also the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Fusion centers” proliferated and civilian police forces became militarized. We now have drone flights over Quincy that no one will explain. The conservative president who replaced the liberal candidate was willing to dismantle FDA chicken inspections but never had any intention of scaling down the Pentagon’s budget.

The Democratic presidency is in trouble, and the rest of the party is too.

Brimming with millionaires, billionaires, Blue Dogs, Blue Bloods, and old-time Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party (like the GOP) is little more than a way-station for lobbyists and business interests. Recently our own Lt. Governor resigned to become president of the Worcester Chamber of Commerce. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran is now a Rhode Island health care lobbyist. Former state Rep. Stephen Canessa resigned from the Legislature to go to work for SouthCoast Health System as its “legislative liaison.” Watching former Obama point man and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel trying to bust the teacher’s union and shut down neighborhood schools says much about the party today. A marginalized Progressive Caucus and a few earnest souls like Elizabeth Warren will never make the Democratic Party a voice for the 99%.

Much has been made of the Republican Party’s meltdown. It now seems that the cranks, the extremists, and the just plain dumb guys are being sidelined as the party grownups try to figure out how to position themselves in 2016. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem smugly content with their permanent move to the right. In 2016 both parties will field “moderate” candidates declared “viable” by a (biased?) press. Once again, voices of third parties will be sidelined. This means that heterodox political ideas and ideals will never make it onto paper, the airwaves, the digital world, or into the public conversation.

Is this attenuated version of democracy really what Americans want? With Citizens United, lobbying, PACs, billionaires, and 501c4 abuse, democracy is up for sale more than it has ever been in our history.

Short of the Democratic Party reforming itself there is one thing voters can still do: raise the bar, demand and vote for principled candidates, and vote your conscience – even if he/she is from a third party. Eventually we’ll get the change we had hoped for.

This was published in the Standard Times on May 28, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20130528/opinion/305280303

Lincoln and Reconstruction

Posted by on 2012-08-19 No comments

Inflating the significance of individuals and downplaying the power of political and social movements is common. Common, but wrong. “Camelot,” John Kennedy’s administration, is a good example of how a fantasy built around an individual often overtakes reality. We remember the haircut but forget that Kennedy pulled the nation deeper into Viet Nam and botched the Bay of Pigs.

Near the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death and now upon the death of Nelson Mandela, we see the same tendency to inflate the influence and power of these individuals, to ignore the social and political contexts, and to downplay their human and political faults.

Perhaps, with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s killing so fresh, Bob Unger can be forgiven somewhat for doing the same with Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. His contention (“Lincoln’s death robbed U.S. of reconciliation”) is that if Lincoln had lived the U.S. might have been spared Reconstruction and the culture wars.

It is fair to say that the humiliation of the South and the devastating effects of Abolition to its economy, based as it was on human trafficking, led to Lincoln’s assassination. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave population was actually greater than the white population. In Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, slaves represented 44%, 46%, 47%, and 48% of the total population. In Jefferson and Washington’s Virginia – in the Upper South – there was one slave for every two free whites.

Despite Mr. Unger’s contention, Reconstruction did not begin after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. It had begun some two years earlier. By the time of Lincoln’s death the South’s economy was in tatters and the rise of “terrorist” organizations like the KKK required a Federal response. The South’s “way of life,” not the political power of a racial elite, was at stake.

South Africa is a completely different story. White Afrikaaners were a miniscule minority (whites now account for 8% of the population) but they ran an industrialized economy and may even have had the Bomb. Mandela was the figurehead of a substantial national liberation movement – a movement of and by black South Africans. There was nothing like this among American slaves. In contrast, the War between the States was fought over tariffs, slaves (to be sure), but a variety of issues largely viewed as economic. The Civil War transformed the U.S. from an agrarian nation into an industrial one – and not only in the South.

The questions we should ask are: if Mandela had been murdered (like Steve Biko and many others) and had not been the figurehead of the ANC, would there have been another Mandela? Certainly. Because injustice would still have required a response.

And if Lincoln had lived, would he have created a national reconciliation movement that would have been able to erase the shock of the end of slavery for 8 million Southern whites? The answer is obvious as well: of course not. Pretty unlikely. And doubly unlikely that a single man could have pulled it off.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 23, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20131223/opinion/312230315

Weakened Encryption

Posted by on 2012-08-19 No comments

In a recent piece, American Enterprise Institute opinion-shaper Claude Barfield (“Encryption: the next battle between security and privacy”) wrote of the demands that spy agencies are making on tech companies to provide back-doors and weakened encryption.

Barfield poses the issue as a “conflict” between tech companies and government – not as one more violation of the 4th Amendment, which provides for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” – and not as something that an ordinary citizen might have an opinion about.

While Apple and Google are actually stepping-up their use of encryption, Barfield writes that FBI directory James Comey’s is demanding neutered encryption. Barfield repeats Assistant FBI director Michael Steinbach’s unproven assertion that terrorist groups are “going dark” with all this great, new encryption.

First of all, some facts.

Terrorist groups did not suddenly discover encryption after Edward Snowden spilled the beans on blanket surveillance of U.S. citizens. Long before ISIS, Al Qaeda often used couriers instead of cell phones and internet chatter. When Osama bin Laden was finally discovered, he was totally off the grid, as had been his practice for over a decade.

Jihadists understand technology – and its weaknesses – quite well.

9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta was an architectural engineer. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed had a degree in mechanical engineering. Two of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group behind the Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. Two thirds of the 25 9/11 hijackers were engineers.

One study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog in the UK, which looked at 400 jihadists, found that an astounding sixty percent of Western-born jihadists have engineering backgrounds.

If you can build a bridge or fly a jet into the Pentagon, using encryption is a piece of cake.

Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm concentrating on Middle East terrorism, reported recently that “there is very little open source information […] that Snowden’s leaks served as the impetus for the development of more secure digital communications and/or encryption by Al-Qaida.”

In fact, jihadists were developing their own encryption software almost a decade ago – long before Snowden’s revelations in 2013.

“Asrar al-Mujahideen,” a PGP-like program launched in 2007, uses both public and private keys to securely send files and messages.

An October 2010 article in Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula”s (AQAP) English language magazine”Inspire” cautioned readers to use encryption.

And on February 7, 2013, right before the Snowden story broke, a new encryption tool, “Asrar al-Dardashah,” was developed, which allowed secure communications to be sent over Google Chat, Yahoo and other messaging services.

But aside from spy agency fear-mongering and lies there is a better reason to reject back-doors in OUR computer products.

The recent Chinese attack on US government computers, which compromised four million federal employees’ personal information, is precisely why weakened security should NOT be baked into the security cake. If a sophisticated and determined nation-state can attack computer security, why design it with vulnerabilities?

This was published in the Standard Times on June 11, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150611/opinion/150619892