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Sunday, September 21, 2014

This week's scattered links:

• David Atkins: Unsettling science:

  Steve Koonin has an obfuscatory piece in the Wall Street Journal today claiming that the science of climate change isn't settled. But it's not the usual radically ignorant posturing. As with much of the evolution of the conservative "debate" over climate, it represents another move in the shifting ground of conservative chicanery intended to paralyze action to solve the problem.

  Koonin doesn't dispute that the climate is changing and that the world is getting hotter. He doesn't dispute that humans are causing the change through greenhouse gas emissions. He doesn't even dispute that these changes are dangerous. His position is that because we don't fully understand all of the complex reverberating effects of climate change, we can't make good climate policy yet. [ . . . ]

  Of all the cynical arguments against action on climate change, Koonin's ranks among the most disturbing because it's so obviously calculated by a very smart person to make a radically irresponsible conclusion just to protect a few entrenched economic elites.

  By the way, a People's Climate March took place in New York City today:

  

  A comment I noticed on Twitter, from Robert Loerzel:

  GOP lawmakers say there's no definitive scientific proof that there's a Climate Change march today.

• Carikai Chengu: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS: I've alluded to this many times of late -- it's hard to think of Al Qaeda without thinking of William Casey, even more so with Henry Kissinger hawking a new book -- but this bears repeating, especially since this includes a few wrinkles I didn't even recall:

  The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

  The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

  The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, "by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism -- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation."

  During the 1970's the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

  Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980's. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of "the database" in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

  The article gets a little cloudier as it approaches ISIS. As far as I know -- and I haven't read Patrick Cockburn's new book on ISIS, The Jihadis Return, but I've read much of his reporting -- nobody's assembled a good accounting of the CIA in Syria. We do know, for instance, that ISIS arms are overwhelmingly American, but we do not know to what extent those arms were provided by the US by Syrian rebels, looted from Iraq, or provided by Saudi Arabia or Qatar -- nations which are nominally allied with the US but are free to use militant jihadis to implement their programs. Chengu does regard ISIS as an offshoot from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, but that runs somewhat counter to the fact that another Syrian group, Al Nusra, claims the Al Qaeda brand. The problem with secret organizations like the CIA operating in Syria is that there's never any accountability, and therefore never any reason for discipline or restraint. I think that's reason enough to abolish the CIA (at least he "operations" end of the racket): they can never plausibly deny anything, no matter how outrageous, because their entire existence is based on secrecy and lies. The US will never be able to be taken at its word as long as the CIA exists.

  Also see Andrew Levine: Fear of a Caliphate, long and rather rambling, but this much is surely true (bold added):

  Talk of caliphates serves the IS's purpose, much as beheadings on You Tube do. And talk is cheap, and become cheaper. Since 9/11, the cost of getting America to do itself in has plummeted.

  And so, the IS, wins: Obama's America is off to war again.

  Worry about that; not about what the IS says it wants to establish in the region or the world.

  The potential for harm resulting from the United States and other Western powers fighting against the IS is greater by many orders of magnitude than any harm that the IS can do in the areas it controls.

  As I've written before, what brought the World Trade Center towers down wasn't Al Qaeda; it was gravity. As long as the US responds to provocation with the same unthinking, unreflective automation as the laws of physics, we'll never be able to command our fate.

• Juan Cole: Shiite Militias of Iraq Reject US Return, Threaten to Attack US Forces: More proof that US intervention against ISIS will be a colossal failure even the Americans manage to kill every Arab who leaves his house dressed in black. Nor are the threats only coming from Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army: the Badr Brigades and foreign minister Ibrahim al-Jafari are upset that the US snubbed Iran in putting together their "coalition of the killing." The Iraqi Army (effectively another Shiite militia) is beginning to chafe about depending on US air support. And Prime Minister al-Abadi is unlikely to have any wiggle room to make concessions to Sunni tribes with the Shiite militias staging their own revolt. Rather than destroying ISIS, the only thing the US mission is likely to accomplish is the secession of Kurdistan from Iraq. Cole adds:

  It is difficult to tell how serious these militia leaders' pronouncements are, since they might be attempting to save face with their followers even as they benefit from the US air cover. On the other hand, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haqq actually did in the past kidnap US troops, and the Mahdi Army fought them tooth and nail in spring of 2004, inflicting high casualties on them. Since President Obama's air campaign requires Special Ops forces like Navy Seals or Green Berets to be on the ground with the Iraqi Army, they should apparently watch their backs. The people they are trying to help against ISIL don't seem to appreciate their being there. And many of them seem to prefer Iran's help.

  Speaking of which, Kerry seems to have softened the anti-Iran stand (see Changing US-Iran Relations: Kerry: Iran has a Role in Defeating ISIL Militants, although I don't think we've heard the last from AIPAC on this). The fact remains that the US is opposed to Assad in Syria, but eager to fight against Assad's worst enemy, even if it winds up aligning with Assad's allies to do so.

• Matthew Kalman: Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel: While Israel has generally been able to escalate its war on Gaza without incurring any real costs or hardships for its first-class citizenry, wars still make tourists nervous, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Israel's tourist business has declined of late. (I think it was during the 2006 war on Lebanon when we worried that some of my wife's relatives were going to Israel; upon checking, we were relieved to find out they had gone to Auschwitz instead.)

  This year should have been a record year for Israeli tourism. In 2013, Israel attracted 3.6 million foreign visitors. Numbers from January to June showed a 15 percent increase. Then the war began in July, and the number of visitors slumped. In July and August, the number of tourists fell to 400,000, down from 578,000 in the same period last year, a 31 percent decline. Ninety percent of cruise ship visitors canceled.

  United States flights to Israel were banned for 24 hours after a rocket landed near Ben-Gurion airport. There was little damage and few casualties, but those who came found themselves running for shelter as air-raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv.

  The Israel Hotels Association said that occupancy rates, usually 80 percent in July, fell below 40 percent. Top hotels offered deep discounts. The new Ritz-Carlton in Herzliya slashed its room rate to $400 from $575. In Jerusalem, Hilton's new Waldorf-Astoria offered a 10 percent discount online and a 20 percent discount for inquiries by phone.

  Dan Hotels, which owns the King David in Jerusalem, warned shareholders in August that third-quarter revenue was liable to fall by 30 percent because of war-related cancellations.

  Wasn't the King David the hotel the Stern Gang blew up in 1948? Kalman doesn't mention the most famous tourist during the war: a Palestinian-American teenager visiting Jerusalem, where his cousin was immolated by Israeli settlers, after which he was beat and arrested by Israeli police, and was only allowed to leave the country after Israel's normally servile allies in the US embassy intervened. The article details various ideas Israelis have to revive the tourism industry, but they don't include forgoing future wars, opening up Gaza, or inviting Palestinian refugees to "come home" for a visit.

  Meanwhile, see: Alice Rothchild: Gaza and the American awakening:

  The seven week war on Gaza is theoretically over though Israeli forces continue limited incursions into the beleaguered and bombed out strip of coastal land and over 11,000 wounded and 100,000 homeless pick through the rubble of their lives, mourn their dead children, and survive hungry on the generosity of overstretched international aid. The headlines are all Abbas and airstrikes in Syria and Netanyahu declaring without a shred of credible evidence that ISIS is Hamas and Hamas is ISIS. Even more invisible are the ongoing land grabs, continued Jewish settlement growth, and arrests and killings of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. [ . . . ]

  Although the media has largely turned its gaze elsewhere, the war in Gaza has forced more of these kinds of contradictions to become painfully obvious to liberal Jews in the US. While the Israeli government talks about "pinpoint strikes" and "unprovoked attacks from Hamas" it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the massive destruction of the Gazan infrastructure, hospitals, schools, government buildings, UN facilities, homes. With more than 60 Israelis dead and a Jewish population fearful of the ever increasing reach of the primitive Qassam rockets, it is time to ask if three devastating attacks on Gaza in six years and a policy of periodically "mowing the lawn" is a long-term strategy that leads to an end to Palestinian resistance and a secure Israel.

• Jay Caspian Kang: ISIS's Call of Duty:

  The similarities between ISIS recruitment films and first-person-shooter games are likely intentional. Back in June, an ISIS fighter told the BBC that his new life was "better than that game Call of Duty." [ . . . ]

  The use of video games as a recruiting tool is not new. The United States Army has, for the past decade, offered "America's Army," an online multiplayer shooter; it is among the most downloaded war games of all time and has been credited with helping boost enlistment. In 2009, according to the New York Times, Army recruiters hoping to attract enlistees from urban areas set up stations in a Philadelphia mall where kids could play video games and, if they so chose, talk to someone about what life in the armed forces would be like. [ . . . ]

  Aside from the recruitment films tailored to evoke video games, they also have released a series called Mujatweets, which stresses the brotherhood of ISIS fighters and shows them handing out candy to children.

• Paul Krugman: Wild Words, Brain Worms, and Civility:

  First, picturesque language, used right, serves an important purpose. "Words ought to be a little wild," wrote John Maynard Keynes, "for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." You could say, "I'm dubious about the case for expansionary austerity, which rests on questionable empirical evidence and zzzzzzzz . . ."; or you could accuse austerians of believing in the Confidence Fairy. Which do you think is more effective at challenging a really bad economic doctrine?

  Beyond that, civility is a gesture of respect -- and sure enough, the loudest demands for civility come from those who have done nothing to earn that respect. Noah felt (and was) justified in ridiculing the Austrians because they don't argue in good faith; faced with a devastating failure of their prediction about inflation, they didn't concede that they were wrong and try to explain why. Instead, they denied reality or tried to redefine the meaning of inflation.

  And if you look at the uncivil remarks by people like, well, me, you'll find that they are similarly aimed at people arguing in bad faith. I talk now and then about zombie and cockroach ideas. Zombies are ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but keep shambling along -- e.g. the claim that all of Europe's troubled debtors were fiscally irresponsible before the crisis; cockroaches are ideas that you thought we'd gotten rid of, but keep on coming back, like the claim that Keynes would never have called for fiscal stimulus in the face of current debt levels (Britain in the 1930s had much higher debt to GDP than it does now). Well, what I'm doing is going after bad-faith economics -- economics that keeps trotting out claims that have already been discredited. [ . . . ]

  And of course, people who engage in that kind of bad faith screech loudly about civility when they're caught at it.

  I never think of myself as a rock critic more than when I'm writing about politics. Rock critics are always sensitive to ambient noise, and looking for some choice words to break through the din.

  Also see Krugman's Return of the Bums on Welfare, about "John Boehner's resurrection of the notion that we're suffering weak job growth because people are living the good life on government benefits, and don't want to work." Conclusion:

  So basically the right is railing against the bums on welfare not only when there aren't any bums, but when there isn't any welfare.

• Amanda Marcotte: Creationism is just the start: How right-wing Christians are warping America's schools: This, of course, is nothing new -- I recall reading Paul Goodman's book Compulsory Mis-Education back in the 1960s, when it first occurred to me that the ideological purpose of school was to brainwash the masses. Still, the broad consensus of received wisdom in the 1950s at least gave lip-service to science and smarts, and painted US history as progressive -- we were taught that the US fought for independence and free trade, that the North faught against slavery, and that the reunited US frowned on imperialism and put an end to fascism (although we still had to read Animal Farm on the evils of Godless Communism). Now, however:

  The attempts to indoctrinate children into the belief that America is basically a Christian theocracy are bad enough, but that's not the only conservative agenda item the books are trying to trick students into buying. The books also try to subtly discredit the civil rights movement by implying that segregation wasn't so bad, with one book arguing that white and black schools had "similar buildings, buses, and teachers," which the researchers argue "severely understates the tremendous and widespread disadvantages of African-American schools."

  Researchers also found that the books were playing the role of propagandist for unregulated capitalism. One textbook argues that taxes have gone up since 1927, but society "does not appear to be much more civilized today than it was" back then. It's an assertion that ignores the much reduced poverty and sickness, improved education, and even things like the federal highway system, all to make an ideological point. Another book argues that any government regulation whatsoever somehow means that capitalism ceases to be capitalism, a stance that would mean capitalism has never really existed in all of history.

  That these books are stuffed full of lies and propaganda is not a surprise. From the get-go, the State Board of Education made it clear it was far more interested in pushing a right-wing ideology on students than actually providing an education. In July, the Texas Freedom Network reviewed the 140 people selected to be on the panels reviewing textbooks. Being an actual expert in politics or history practically guaranteed you couldn't get a slot, as "more than a dozen" Texas academics with expertise who applied got denied, while conservative "political activists and individuals without social studies degrees or teaching experience got places on the panels." Only three of the 140 members of the panel are even current faculty members at Texas universities, but a pastor who used to own a car dealership somehow got a spot.

• Heather Digby Parton: Wingnuts' crippling Ebola fury: Why they're enraged about fighting a disease: Superficially most of these wingnuts appear to be griping about ISIS rather than Ebola, but I suppose that's because they prefer threats they can misunderstand to ones they cannot grasp, or maybe they just prefer enemies they can kill to diseases that could kill them. For example, Allen West:

  The world need to step up against Islamo-fascism but I suppose fighting Ebola is easier for a faux Commander-in-Chief than to fight a real enemy of America. Nice optics there Barack, good try to change the subject, and make yourself seem like a leader fighting a really bad flu bug -- all the while you dismiss the cockroaches who behead Americans.

  Then there are the right-wingers who fear illegal child refugees will sneak Ebola into the country. Unless, of course, we head them off by setting up an ambush on the Syria-Iraq border.

• Paul Rosenberg: We really must remember the epic failures of George W. Bush: Frank Bruni asks, "Whenever Barack Obama seems in danger of falling, do we have to hear that George W. Bush made the cliff?" Well, yes, not that there was no cliff before Bush, but it got much steeper and less study under Bush's eight years of malign neglect and extreme right-wing activism.

  But the real problem here was not that Obama supporters attacked Bush. It was that Obama himself did not. [ . . . ]

  While it's true that we can't undo Bush's mistakes, that hardly means it's foolish to keep them in mind. It would be foolish to forget them, after the terrible price we've paid -- and at the same time when the architects of that disaster are urging another mission in the Middle East to "destroy" ISIS.

  And yet, as with domestic policy, Obama's most significant mistake has been his reluctance to break sharply with previous Republican policy, call out their failures, and hold them responsible. War crimes have not even been investigated, much less punished -- only those who sought to expose them have been prosecuted. Yet, holding our own accountable for their misdeeds would work wonders for regaining trust throughout the world.

  I don't see how you can blame Obama's supporters. He did promise change when he ran in 2008, and I'm pretty sure most of us took that as meaning change from G.W. Bush, who gave us seven years of stupid, pointless wars; two huge tax giveaways to the already rich; runaway deficits; a bad recession early, a fake recovery, and an even worse recession late, which he turned into a trillions of dollars of gifts to the big banks; perversion of the criminal justice system and the right-wing politicization of civil service; major failure in federal disaster relief; complete inattention to festering problems like health care and climate change; utter disregard for international law. Obama, the Democrats, the press, everyone should have routinely repeated that list, not so much to heap scorn upon the Republicans (although they certainly deserve to be shamed) as to warn ourselves against repeating such disastrous policies.

  Indeed, most of Obama's problems since taking office result not from the few changes Obama did manage -- Obamacare, for instance, is a success by any measure, at least against the previous system if not against the single-payer system we would have preferred -- but from the many ways he continued and conserved Bush policies.

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