Normalization

I'm not willing to pretend that this was lawful.

Last week our new President delivered a 500 pound bomb "message."

Biden launched an air strike against the facilities of Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been launching rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. When asked today what message he was sending, he said: “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful.”

Uncharacteristically, a smidgen of me is sympathetic to what Biden claims to be doing here: he's emphasizing that, though he intends to put all he can into resurrecting the Obama-era "deal" that constrained Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, he's not taking lightly any adjacent provocations, especially threats to U.S. troops. Curbing an Iranian push for nukes is a good idea. And after a president who wouldn't do anything to respond Russia's putting a bounty out for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. president might need to take a stand. 

But it remains worth mentioning that if U.S. troops weren't blundering about in tangled conflicts in other people's countries, there would be less need for such a show of force.

And there doesn't seem much doubt that Biden is continuing one of the worst features of a lawless chief executive: presidents aren't supposed to make war without authorization from Congress. Senators know this and also have mixed feelings.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Friday that Congress "must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously," noting that "offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances."

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations committee with Kaine, said that the recent strikes by Iranian-backed militias on Iraq bases were "unacceptable" and that he inherently trusts Biden's national security decision making ability. But he added that retaliatory strikes that are not necessary to "prevent an imminent threat, must fall within the definition of an existing" authorization for use of military force. 

"Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action," said Murphy.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reacted more bluntly.

"This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East. ... There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization."

Here in the U.S. we don't think much about this (comes of being an empire) but this airstrike violated international law. So explains Rutgers Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque at Just Security:

The U.S. airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time ... And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor (or two, or more)... These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

It's very difficult for this country to understand that we can't claim to be essential pillars of "the international liberal order" if we ignore the legal apparatus that order has fostered when we find it convenient.

An appointment

No, not Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's V.P. I'll get to that I'm sure.

Rather, it's seems worth noting that the Trump regime has moved that nasty old cold warrior Elliott Abrams from its project of overthrowing Venezuela's government to its project of overthrowing Iran's government. 

Abrams should feel right at home working with and against Iran. In the late 1980's he was knee deep in the Reagan Administration's illegal plot to trade arms to Iran in return for cash to pay a right wing force to attack Nicaragua's then-leftist elected government. (Confusingly, Nicaragua now has an oppressive regime headed by the same tinpot caudillo, but that was then and this is now and Nicaragua remains on the USA's enemy list.) Abrams was convicted for lying to Congress; this country used to penalize its crooks. The crackpot Iran-Contra scheme was a foreshadowing of the private dealing and grifting that Republicans substitute for government when they get the power to do so.

Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post who knows more than a thing or two about Iran, having been held hostage in Iranian prisons for a couple of years during the Obama administration. He has a conclusion about U.S. policy toward Iran under Trump -- and also some suggestions should the world be so fortunate as to win a Biden administration. 

After decades of punitive measures directed at Iran under the still unfulfilled promise of defanging the Islamic Republic, the Iranian people deserve better from the U.S. government. And so do Americans. ... [Trump's last envoy] managed to play a role in worsening the lives of average Iranians, in part by promoting measures such as indiscriminate economic sanctions and travel bans. ...

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he will have a chance to alter our current collision course with Iran. Biden would inherit a situation in which the United States enjoys significant leverage over Tehran, and he will have foreign policy advisers with years of experience working on these issues. He should take advantage of both, conditioning any concessions on real change that improves the lots of average Iranians. After all the harm we have caused them with nothing positive to show for it, the United States owes that to the Iranian people. ...

Not surprisingly, Rezaian also thinks a better U.S. government could do better at aiding any of our citizens so unfortunate as to be imprisoned in Iran.

Why U.S. elites are suckers for war with Iran

The U.S. policy elite, usually of both parties, hates Iran with a recurrent, near-maniacal, fury that is not shared by most of us.

I thought about this when I read that one response to the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani was a rush of queries to Google about a military draft. Are we being drafted into yet another war in the far off place we call "Middle East"? Seems so.

I've probably written this summary before but it seems worth repeating. What explains the endless elite animosity toward a country about which few of us think very often? I see three streams that intermingle.

Historic guilt
Persia -- modern Iran -- is unlike most of the countries we use and abuse in the so-called Middle East. Its boundaries are not some accidental affliction inherited from European colonial conniving after World War I as is true for most of the Arabic-speaking countries. Persia, an ancient Farsi-speaking Shiite Muslim land, was and is more or less what it has always been: a rich and diverse nation that is conscious of its history as the center of the civilized world when Europe was a feudal backwater.

In the aftermath of World War II, Iran was on its way to becoming a modern parliamentary democracy. British oil companies combined with a cowboy C.I.A. agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow its elected Prime Minister in 1953 and stick the unhappy Iranians with several decades of repressive, authoritarian rule led by the oil companies.

In 1979, Iranians -- left, right, and center -- rose up to take back their nation. Such eruptions are not neat and orderly and Iranians ended up with the Shiite Islamic rulers who still run the place. (Repressively, we should understand.) Along the way, nationalists seized the U.S. Embassy, grossly mistreated U.S. diplomats, and crowed over their dramatic escapade. Protection of diplomats is a real imperative of any international law-based system, but it's understandable that many Iranians didn't much credit the U.S. commitment to good behavior. The ensuing 444 day hostage crisis became a domestic political football in the U.S. and helped bring down Democratic President Jimmy Carter who looked ineffectual while Ronald Reagan wandered around beating his chest. (He was, after all, a celluloid cowboy.) For a slice of the U.S. elite, of which our current president is an exemplar,

If it’s always 1979, it’s always 1979.

David Graham

Iran remained hostile the U.S. while the U.S. remained hostile to Iran. During the entire 1980s, we encouraged and funded Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war on the Islamic state, a murderous conflict that killed at least half a million combatants.

Iran didn't take U.S. hostility sitting down. In 1983 Iran almost certainly was responsible for helping Hezobollah, its allied Lebanese Shiite militia, carry out Beirut suicide truck bomb attacks which killed 241 U.S. military personnel, 58 French military personnel and 6 civilians. For a somewhat younger slice of the U.S. foreign policy elite, this was the opening act of a war with Iran they've never given up on. It's little remembered today, but that era's pseudo-cowboy president knew better than to be drawn into overt hostilities: Reagan quickly withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon.

In the years since, Iran and the U.S. have warred covertly with a few episodes breaking into public consciousness as when we shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and they supported and trained Shiite Iraqis fightings against the U.S occupation after 2003. Then again, sometimes these enemies have been temporarily on the same side as when Iran, in operations led by the assassinated General Soleimani, helped the U.S. find al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. Iran, too, wanted ISIS eradicated. This is a complicated part of the world -- a little much for monochrome U.S. thinking.

Our sick relationship with the state of Israel
In the U.S., relations with Israel are about domestic politics. Given the (more and more inaccurate) assumption that the route to the (tiny) Jewish vote runs through fealty to Israeli political aims, U.S. politicians have more often than not been onboard with Israeli demands we stand in for them in containing Iran. Israel does have something to worry about. Unlike their venal and repressive Sunni Arab neighbor states, Iran is a modern country of 80 million people, scientifically educated and capable of making a real threat if it came to hostilities. The Obama-era "Iran deal" was meant to walk back the threat of Iran advancing toward nuclear capability.

This wasn't good enough either for Israeli right wingers or our right wingers. They didn't want Iran constrained. They wanted the country obliterated. Trump did their bidding by violating the nuclear deal and thus pushing the region toward hot war.

And then there are our rapture-seeking evangelical Christian whack doodles ...
Apparently Secretary of State Pompeo is one of these, as is Vice President Pence. These nutcases believe that the Persians are tools of Satan and fighting them will bring on the battle of Armageddon, bringing back their weird version of a Messiah. Or some such. If they manage to start a war with Iran, they are just helping fulfill Biblical prophecies.

I cry: "Heaven preserve us!"

Once again, showing up for peace

The priest at the church I attend remarked to me one day, "you know, we can't expect people to show up out of a sense of duty anymore ..." As it happens, I don't go to church out of duty; I like the values and community I find there.

But when it comes to small, necessary, urgent, demonstrations against the latest U.S. imperial atrocity, duty is what gets me there. Sure, I see a lot of friends ... but must I go? Well, yes.

That said, rallying Saturday in San Francisco against escalating U.S. hostilities against Iran, was surprisingly interesting.

The good people of Code Pink set a theme that seemed to resonate generally:

We know what happens when the U.S. turns its military loose on some place we've decided we don't like: a lot of people -- mostly innocent of any crime -- die. And the unfortunate country ends up a violent failed state. The last 20 years have provided irrefutable evidence of this conclusion.

A slogan from several signs from slightly different tendencies caught my attention. One example:

And here's another:

In most any antiwar protest I've ever been part of those signs would have had a different slant:
"No war ON Vietnam" "No war ON Afghanistan" "No war ON Iraq"
Does the "No war WITH Iran" slogan reflect that antiwar people now understand that the countries we attack fight back? That our vaunted military might find itself someday retreating with tail between legs? This seems the most likely outcome after we make a cruel and horrible mess of Iran ... have the lessons of last 20 years (and of the last 50 years if we'd paid attention) begun to get through to the willing?

It becomes the task of the peace movement, once again, to spread the bad news that overkill is just that -- overkill from which nothing good comes.

One more sign that looked backward:

Actually, 2003 was a crime. But the connection is made.

Assasination in Iraq

H/t to Juan Cole who puts the U.S. assassination of a leading Iranian military leader (and also a thuggish terrorist) in its proper context. Tough times ahead.

It's good to see Democratic politicians largely pointing out the illegality of Trump's strike. The polarization here seems no different than about anything else under our quasi-fascist leader: Republicans kowtow obsequiously; Dems call for Constitutional virtues and norms deep-sixed by the Cheeto.

What passes for an Iraqi government is screwed from all directions, most obviously with its own populace.

Looks like John Bolton may be getting his desired war and have managed to get out soon enough to retain some shred of dignity. There is no justice.

When it comes to Iran, the U.S. press fails over and over

The great stare down is on again. The pawns are likely to get bloodied. Washington is ramping up its threats against Iran. Iran has continued to observe the Obama-era agreement not to build a bomb that Trump trashed on assuming office; Europe has tried to preserve what was a pretty good bargain. Meanwhile the Trump regime seems to be doing its best through economic sanctions and bluster to push Iran to break an uneasy peace.

Yeah -- we've seen this movie before in another oil rich nation adjacent to Iran. That didn't turn out so well.

The same anticipatory helplessness so many of us felt in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002-3 is back.

(Reuters) - Half of all Americans believe that the United States will go to war with Iran "within the next few years," according to a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll [PDF] released on Tuesday amid increased tensions between the two countries.

A plurality of us (49%) disapprove, but most believe there's no stopping the dynamic at work. And most say they would rally round the flag if they believed Iran had attacked our forces in the region -- so the situation is ripe for a "Gulf of Tonkin incident" like the phony provocation used by Washington to jump into our Vietnam adventure. That didn't turn out so well either.

Meanwhile, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who until recently headed up the Defense Department under Trump and knows something of war, had some words of warning:

"The United States should buy time to keep peace and stability and allow diplomats to work diplomacy on how to keep peace for one more hour, one more day, one more week, a month or a year," Mattis said during remarks in the United Arab Emirates.

Task and Purpose

You probably hadn't heard that. U.S. news media apparently didn't think the guy who was at the top of our military until recently had something important to say. (The report is from a specialized military newspaper.)

U.S. major media seem incapable of delivering a serious, rounded account of US-Iranian relations. This failure is so acute that Andrew Lee Butters, a former Time magazine Beirut bureau chief now teaching at Yale, shared tough conclusions about professional failures in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The broad psychological takeaway of reading the news is inevitably that Iran is a threat. Even balanced appraisals of Iran—that note, for example, that the Iranian Revolution occurred in 1979 in part as a reaction to the American antidemocratic coup there, in 1953— get lost amid the noise of buzzwords like “terror,” “mullah,” “nuclear,” “proxies,” and “militias.” ... Even though the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear deal that Iran had negotiated with the Obama administration—a deal that stopped Iran’s nuclear enrichment program—most headlines and talking points on air tell us that Iran is “threatening” to resume the production of nuclear material.

The US, it must not be forgotten, has done its fair share to threaten Iran: encouraging Iraq to invade Iran in the 1980s and kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, invading Iraq in 2003 and soon after eyeing Iran, selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to anti-Iranian Middle Eastern autocrats, embracing a known anti-Iranian terror cult—the MEK—in the hope of fomenting a regime change. ... The Iranian government has much to answer for, especially for its role assisting the Bashar al-Assad regime in the murderous suppression of the Syrian democracy movement, which was once peaceful. But to counter Iran’s regional military power with the application of more American military power is neither moral nor practical.

I’m pretty sure that most of the reporters and editors at CNN, the Times, and NPR know this. And I’m sure that most of them know exactly what game the Trump administration is playing. But there is some deep-seated loyalty to something like “balance” or “objectivity” that is misplaced, and ends up looking like regulatory capture. ...

Why the amnesia and partisanship from the media? Perhaps because it’s hard to tell Americans that a country full of angry-looking men with black turbans and beards who have captured our diplomats and designed bombs that kill our soldiers have real, legitimate reasons to be angry and afraid of us. And perhaps because it’s hard even for those American reporters who know the Middle East to keep that unconscious bias from slipping into our copy, especially in headlines and photo choices. Raised on American exceptionalism, it’s hard to swallow that our misdeeds in the Middle East may not be exceptions, but an extension of American rule.

We seem only to learn what a shitshow we've made in foreign regions at the cost of other peoples' lives and countries.

Are we about to get John Bolton's war on Iran?

It's been a little over a year since that old war hawk tucked in as National Security Adviser to an ignorant, impetuous president. Having done their best to break up the alliance agreements that were keeping some uneasy constraint on ever larger conflicts in a dangerous region, now we're getting the sort of headlines we can expect from a rogue regime in Washington bent on catastrophe. "U.S. orders ‘non-emergency’ government employees to leave Iraq". "Skeptical U.S. Allies Resist Trump’s New Claims of Threats From Iran." Here the receding empire goes again ... ginning up a war to distract from our fractures at home.

The world knows better.

But European military allies have questioned whether the threat level against U.S. assets has shifted in recent weeks.

“We haven’t seen anything convincing yet, but tensions are definitely rising,” said one Western diplomat ...

Washington Post

... a senior British military official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that he saw no increased risk from Iran or allied militias in Iraq or Syria.

New York Times

Of course, in 2003, the world knew better as well, when the George W. Bush administration was making up "intelligence" to support its Iraq invasion. Fat lot of good that did millions of Iraqis and so many others killed or left with societies torn apart; fat lot of good that did the thousands of US military personnel murdered or maimed in service of monsters like Dick Cheney and John Bolton last time around.

Let's hope some combination of Trump's feral, canny timidity and world opprobrium hold the USofA back this time around.
...In terms of push back for peace coming from people within this big, confused country, the moment feels more like the awful days immediately after the 9/11 attacks than the eve of Iraq. Even then, a few of us knew our ignorant, overconfident government was on the way to making a hash of Afghanistan (how'd that turn out?). Two years later, by the eve of the Iraq war millions rallied across the globe against the disaster. And empire, led by the likes of Bolton, could not be deterred. The mass peace movement infrastructure that was laboriously built in the '00s has atrophied.

Oh sure, small dedicated historic peace organizations carry on honorably as they have for decades. In Congress, Win Without War has labored to reduce US support for the Saudi war on Yemen that is one of the world's current most extreme human atrocities.

But effectual peace agitation has to break into the actual existing political conversation if it is to achieve any mass heft. And that means, at this moment, making sure that aspiring Democratic presidents ALL put themselves on the right side of history, against a US attack on Iran.

Just Security launched a useful initiative yesterday. They reminded us that Democrats have been to this movie before.

Many Democrats still prominent in public political life voted against the [Iraq] war. Dick Durbin voted no. Bernie Sanders voted no. Robert Menendez voted no. Jack Reed voted no. Nancy Pelosi voted no. Ben Cardin voted no. Patrick Leahy voted no. Patty Murray voted no. Debbie Stabenow voted no. Ron Wyden voted no.

Many Democrats still prominent in public life voted for the war. Joe Biden voted yes. Chuck Schumer voted yes. Steny Hoyer voted yes. Eliot Engel voted yes. Adam Smith voted yes. Adam Schiff voted yes.

The Just Security petition aims to pressure these luminaries to get an impending threat of unnecessary, unwinnable war right this time around.

Most importantly, this initiative aims to pressure Joe Biden to get it right this time -- and to disqualify Biden for the Democratic nomination if he fails to oppose yet another US war. We'll see.

Iran: where Bolton and Pompeo get their payoff for playing dead

Monday's news that our tweeting President has turned his fire on Iran makes perfect sense.

“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” Trump tweeted.

I'd been wondering why renowned war hawks like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were willing to work for President Appeaser.

Now it seems clear: if they pretend the man in the White House is capable of carrying out a foreign policy, especially in Russia, perhaps he'll give them the war they really want. For reasons that have always seemed obscure to me, the U.S. establishment has long lusted after using our military might to overthrow the government of Iran. Sure, the Iranian government is genuinely horrible to those of its own citizens, especially women, who want to move beyond theocracy. But that's not what the war fever is about. Maybe they really think they can "seize the oil." Or are they still bent out of shape because Iranians held some U.S. diplomats hostage 40 years ago? Or are they vaguely guilty that, when Iranians elected a free and fair government of their own, they sent the C.I.A. to oust it?

For sure, governments around the world are going to know how to interpret Trump's fawning over Putin and cozying up to Kim Jung Un -- it's safer to have nukes than not to have them.

Rumors of war in That Part of the World

E.P. has taken on the thankless task of surveying the carnage -- made in America, made by other powers, and homegrown -- in what we call the Middle East. With Trump running amok in other areas, we've tended to look away from the region that so inflamed our fears for the last 15 years. But we can't really. The consequences could be too dire.

With President Trump and his secretary of state now talking openly about a possible “escalation between us and the Iranians,” there is a real risk that some combination of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia could initiate a war with Iran. If there’s one lesson to be learned from US wars since 9/11, it’s “don’t start another one.”

Read it all at the link.

Dire times

The difference between John Bolton and most of the rest of the cast of characters around our ignorant, fearful, impulsive president is that he actually believes that war can accomplish something in the interests of the United States. Even most of the generals don't believe that after nearly two decades of murderous futility. Bolton is a true believer in forever war. The POTUS is a small man facing escalating threats in a big job.

Expect war before the midterm elections ...

A prescient warning of national weaknesses

I've occasionally been advised I could not consider myself properly educated if I haven't read some of the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a left-leaning, but anti-Communist, public intellectual who tried to explain this country to itself in the 1940s and '50s. He argued for "political realism" -- Barack Obama claimed Niebuhr's thought as a major influence. Though he's no household name, he left a substantial mark on U.S. culture by writing the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Back at the dawn of American empire, Niebuhr highlighted aspects of our national history and experience which made us suckers for launching dumb wars, a warning that feels completely current as that blustering ignoramus in the White House spouts threats against Korea and Iran.

... the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of ... fear that our "technocratic" tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations.

The political term for such an effort is "preventive war." ...

The power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe's continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe.

Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddles every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor....

Nieubhr had our number, I fear, though some residual impulse toward modesty and sanity kept our rulers from initiating annihilation during the long years of Cold War.

Niebuhr's little volume, The Irony of American History, is available online as a .pdf and probably from every older library in the country. It is worth snagging. I am sure I'll find myself quoting further from it in the future.

When values lead to exile

This memoir, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran, is the story of what a vicious, insecure, rather stupid, dictatorial state will do to break someone it decides is a threat. It's not fun. It is, however, human and instructive.

Shirin Ebadi was an educated Iranian nationalist, a judge in the Tehran city court, who welcomed the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah. When the new Islamic regime solidified its power, it fired her from her post, relegating her to the secretarial pool. For a decade, she could not work in her field, but was finally permitted to practice law again in 1993. For the next decade, she argued for human rights, most especially for improved legal status for women, children and refugees, all within an Islamic legal framework. She was jailed and heavily pressured. Ebadi gained so much international notice that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The prize afforded her work some degree of protection from a hostile state and enabled her to travel widely.

This volume describes the closing down of space for human rights work in Iran after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and her involuntary exile after his disputed re-election in 2009.

Over and over, Ebadi tried to maintain that "human rights" efforts did not mean that she was a political dissident. Her cause was the rule of law within the Iranian nation. She certainly did not aim to be an agent of the Iran's Western enemies, but the government could see her through no other lens.

I was not an opponent of the state -- I was a human rights defender, and I based my criticisms of the state on legal grounds. But authoritarian governments are not fond of shades of gray; they cannot tolerate any criticism at all ...

... I had been a judge and was now a lawyer, and the law concerns itself with intent and the results of intent. If the state intended the best for its citizens, then it needed to demonstrate that in its behavior toward them. It could not arrest journalists, throw them in prison, inflict all manner of psychological torture and abuse on them, and then dispatch an agent to talk to me about America "exploiting" my objections to this.

And this determined woman would not give up. She defended members of the Bahai faith who the Iranian clerical state considers traitorous apostates from their version of Islam, worthy of prison or death. She exposed the death penalty for children; she protested torture and illegal imprisonment of people who the regime declared enemies. And she was hard to silence because the Nobel had given her international standing.

And so, the state looked for ways to reach into what she held dear, her family -- and thus to break her will to keep agitating for the rule of law. The story builds toward the Iranian intelligence service's great triumph: drawing her loved husband of three decades into a "honey trap" (an illicit liaison) and forcing him through shame and then torture to denounce her work on video. The ending is dramatic, but I found the one of the episodes on the way to that horrible end most illuminating.

The state had finally started going after my family. It wasn't just content with me anymore. I had witnessed this over the years with many of my clients, dissidents and activists, whose relatives suffered state intimidation, were hassled and threatened and sometimes blackmailed or imprisoned, all "collateral damage" in the quest to get the original target -- the dissident or activist or journalist in question -- to drop their activities. It was the dirtiest of the methods the security agencies used, exploiting these families and their emotional ties.

Ebadi recognized that she was the target when the authorities seized her daughter's passport and summoned the young woman for interrogation. She explained was happening to her daughter Nargess and husband Javad.

"This a test," I said as we sat down around the table. "It's a test to see if I'll cave, if they can use Nargess to get to me. If we react, they will try to use her forever. But if I stand firm and don't respond, they'll realize they'll need another tactic."

Nargess took up her mother's perspective; she was willing to fight. The test came when the authorities summoned the daughter for questioning on a day when Ebadi was supposed to fly to an overseas seminar.

... intelligence agents had timed their little game purposefully. Would I leave the country, knowing that my daughter was sitting in a government office with the officials of a ministry that just years prior had plotted my assassination? Would I board the plane and turn my back on my daughter .. would I blink?

... But I understood that if I postponed my trip by even a single day, in order to ensure that Nargess came home safely and that her passport would be returned, they would spot my weakness. That would be the real danger. They would know then that they could use Nargess against me, and it was that I feared more than anything. If they concluded that she was my weakness, there would be no telling what they might do to her next, or to me. ...

Ebadi flew; the officials handed her passport back to Nargess. And so the state eventually went after her husband, then her sister, and a through a legal pretext, the family's property, forcing Ebadi into lonely permanent exile in London. She's not crushed though; hence this terrible telling of their tale.***It felt problematic reading this memoir in the USofA, knowing that the Iranian state is supposed to be my Enemy Number One. (Or is it Number Two, after North Korea? Who knows, on any given day.) The Islamic Republic seems a despicable regime, but then, so is mine. This is the dilemma of western peaceniks. It's not as if our wars of this century amounted to a defense of the rule of law and humane values, for all the verbiage our rulers spew. The War on Terror has confused "the left" because there have been no "good guys" on some anti-imperial side to applaud. Can we make a consistent stand for peace without illusions? Hard, but needed.

All the more reason to listen sympathetically to others, like Shirin Ebadi, stuck in the same painful place, defending values that seem to have no home base.

Donald's gaggle of used wars and warriors

For fifteen years, the US military and our array of shadowy "security" spooks have been fighting -- well something or other. Much of that time, it has been hard to tell what they've been given the task to accomplish except, perhaps, to prevent further embarrassment to US executive authorities. What was it we thought we were killing and being killed for in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hard to know, and certainly whatever the "mission" was, it hasn't been accomplished.

This is not to say that vast quantities of guts and brain power haven't been devoted to whatever this was -- and is -- that our country is doing. Now that Herr Trump is stuffing his entourage with generals whose experience has been in this frustrating, amorphous, and largely fruitless enterprise, it is all the more important for the rest of us bring into focus what we've been doing.

Every once in a while, the muddled project spits out someone who fought the good fight for whatever it is, and, patriotically, wants to try to get the country back on the rails. It's a tough job.

One of the first of these was Ali Soufan. He was just about the only Arabic speaker in the FBI back in 2000, and thus one of the earliest insiders to encounter the absurdity of the post 9/11 enterprise. He left, or perhaps was pushed. He's the principal in the Soufan Group, a "security" consultancy that puts out interesting briefs (ads?) about what they call "challenging international issues."

On the anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 last Wednesday, the Soufan Intelbrief offered an interesting reflection:

In many ways, we are still in a ‘post-Pearl Harbor world’—rather than a post-9/11 world. Much of America’s current national security posture and military capabilities arose out of a war that the U.S. may not have entered with the same level of national commitment had it not been for the Pearl Harbor attack. Indeed, Pearl Harbor has been used to describe the September 11 attacks and aftermath; both attacks were surprising in their timing and nature, but both stemmed from threats that were growing and apparent at the time. The aftermath of September 11 generated a similarly intense rallying point for a shocked nation.

However, Americans after 9/11 were urged to resume a normal life—a reasonable attitude given the true nature of the threat faced at the time. After Pearl Harbor, every level of American society braced for an existential conflict.

The war that followed the September 11 attacks was an entirely different type of conflict than the wars the U.S. had prepared for since December 7, 1941. Indeed, the conflict once dubbed the global ‘War on Terror’ is a real shooting war in many different theaters of operations. Yet unlike the aftermath of 1941—when the U.S. became a nation at war—since 9/11, the U.S. has simply operated as a nation in a war. ...

That last sentence is the crux. The 9/11 attacks were crimes. The 9/11 attacks did not presage a "war". They could and should have been treated as offenses against international and national laws; civil, diplomatic, and military force should have been used to apply law to the miscreants, not to spread carnage far and wide. Because they were treated as equivalent to Pearl Harbor, as if they launched a war, we and the peoples in our path remain trapped in a "war" which is not a "war" but rather a cycle of destruction which has no rational mission or end.

Our post-9/11 military adventures have never been about averting some existential threat to the people of the U.S. Terrorism is despicable and horrible, but it isn't going to maim or kill any significant fraction of us. Yet enough of us demanded of our leaders that they achieve the impossible -- guarantee our perfect safety in a world where many have good reason to hate us -- that they've been empowered to spew death and destruction around the globe without plan, purpose, rhyme, or reason.

Trump's cabinet of the military leaders of that enterprise probably contains more awareness of the futility of all this than just about any group in government. After all, unlike the country at large, they have been at war. They've been made responsible to execute policy madness. And they've been losing, or failing, or something that can't really be evaluated because there are no metrics to measure success when you don't know what you are doing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, all this seems to drive some military leaders mad. General Flynn, he of the fake news tweets and hatred of all Muslims, seems in that category. General Mattis may well be a wiser character. Thomas Ricks, who is no military sycophant, thinks so. It is certainly dangerous to civilian control of the military to have so many generals at the top of the government. But if we are going to be in permanent war, perhaps it should be no surprise.

As an unruly teenager, Donald Trump was shipped off to a Hudson River military school to be "straightened out." (I remember marveling at ads for this sort of educational service in the classified section of my parents' Saturday Review in those years. What sort of kid got that treatment?) His classmates remember his getting over on the strict school discipline. We're all going to be forced to see whether he gets over on his next set of officers. There's no sign he's learned any discipline or matured much.

Resist much, we must.

Futile war without end

The subtitle is the true theme of Andrew J. Bacevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. A retired colonel, a professional Army officer before becoming a scholar, Bacevich brings a military professional's eye to decades of U.S. imperial folly, beginning with Jimmy Carter's commitment to keep oil flowing to an insatiable country, through Afghan wars I and II, through Iraq I and II, through Bosnia, Lebanon, the "Arab Spring," Libya, the Syria civil war and beyond. He judges all this violent misery harshly:

I should state plainly my own assessment of this ongoing war, now well into its fourth decade. We have not won it. We are not winning it. Simply trying harder is unlikely to produce a different outcome. ...

This is not a book that judges the morals and motives of U.S. leaders who stumbled from crisis to catastrophe leaving carnage (mostly for other people) behind. He's asking whatever were they thinking? What they thought they might accomplish? Why the military means employed seemed so utterly incapable of accomplishing much anything except destruction (mostly of other people)? And, so now what?

He's a scathing critic, for example of President Jimmy Carter who he describes as allowing domestic politics to lead him into blundering quagmires in Iran and Afghanistan:

... when it came to the exercise of power, Carter was insufficiently devious. He suffered from a want of that instinctive cunning that every successful statesman possesses in great abundance. ...he lacked guile ..."

But his real bile is directed toward his own profession, the U.S. military and permanent "national security" establishment. Victory in the Cold War

brought the armed services and their various clients face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal -- with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled -- what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. ... The Greater Middle East was to serve -- indeed, was even then already serving -- as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America's privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security. That region's predominantly Muslim population thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally benign -- peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian intervention -- to the nakedly coercive.

Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify, rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform and overawe. They bombed, raided, invaded, occupied, and worked through proxies of various kinds. ... The results actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have never come even remotely close to satisfying ... expectations.

I appreciated this book. I learned from this book. But throughout I felt (as well as understood even if only incompletely) that far too much was missing. In particular, Bacevich never really integrates the impact of the festering moral wound that was and is Israeli theft of their homeland from Palestinians. That lurks there in the background; this history cannot be written without bringing it to the foreground, despite its adding new layers of complexity.

Bacevich's lumped together region -- his Greater Middle East -- has little texture, few sub-genres, not nearly enough local quirks, and hardly any diverse people in his telling. U.S. readers have access to far more granular and human accounts of what we have wrought. I recommend especially Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near on Iraq before we facilitated that country's dismemberment and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

But I would recommend this book as well. There are so many vantages from which to condemn the ongoing national war folly ... we need them all.

Marin Democrat hasn't declared on the Iran agreement

Most California Democrats in Congress have thrown down for diplomacy not war and have promised to vote to uphold the deal. Both our Senators are on board. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi is rounding up support in the House. But the Congressman who represents Marin County and parts north is not yet among them. Some of Jared Huffman's constituents turned out Wednesday in San Anselmo to suggest he needs some phone calls.

This micro-demonstration was one of hundreds around the country stimulated by the coalition of peace advocacy groups working together to support the agreement. I must have heard about it from 5 or 6 email lists. Among these I remember Peace Action and Move-On.

Divided Democrats but good news for anti-nuke deal with Iran

Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Reid (NV) has come out for the agreement. This certainly increases the likelihood that enough Democrats will stick with the President's initiative to ensure that it survives, even though Obama will have to veto a Republican vote to disapprove it. There was never any great reason to think Reid would not go along, but still the signal is a good one.


This picture of the members of the Democratic Senate leadership points to the back story. Reid is wearing his sunglasses subsequent to an eye injury. At Reid's left is Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Durbin is the Senate point man rounding up votes for the Iran deal. He is also Reid's Assistant Leader, number two in the Democratic Caucus. On the left looking over his glasses is Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, number three in the present leadership. He is one of only two Democratic Senators so far who has come out against the Iran deal.

Reid is retiring after this term. He has endorsed Schumer over Durbin to succeed him in leading the caucus. Why should a guy who won't play with the team get to leap frog over the guy who is organizing for one of the greater accomplishments of a Democrat in power?

These guys, and Washington State Senator Patti Murray who is number four, will be jockeying for position through the 2016 election. Whoever the Democratic Senators are in 2017 will vote for which leadership they want. I'm sure constituents will remind them who was there when it counted.

A reminder: the Iran nuke deal matters

It would be possible to think all these gabbing candidates (of both parties) are what's important. That would be a mistake.

What's more important is the push by the incumbent president is to do all he can to lower the danger of civilization-destroying war and increase the chances of peace. This species can kill ourselves (and most everything else) off much more quickly with our weapons than we can by allowing carbon pollution to increase.

(There may come a moment when that balance of danger tips. Certainly moving now to mitigate climate change is the stuff of survival. But if we allow unchecked warming to continue, we're not likely to be able to do much about a climate that won't support our kind of life.)

That venerable interpreter of political doings, reporter Elizabeth Drew, tries to fix our attention on what's vital:

We’re now so close to the fray and the din that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is a historical moment. It’s on a scale of a decision to enter a war or make peace.

It’s about the efficacy of negotiations versus military action. If the deal’s opponents succeed in canceling it, they will have to answer to history. At a minimum, if the deal works, it postpones the day that Iran might have a nuclear weapon.

Those who insist that the deal should have been more punitive toward Iran overlook the fact that it’s the result of a negotiation. Simple logic suggests that a man as obsessed with his place in history as Barack Obama wouldn’t consciously allow his negotiators to reach a deal that’s easily breached. He has said that he expects to be around when the deal has expired and he wants to be able to hold his head up. ...

The signing of this agreement is a concrete step toward choosing life over death. The chances seem good that the naysayers will not be able to block it. Now that's "one small step ..."

An overdue break in a wall of denial

Don't expect me to be upset about this.

That the debate over the Iran nuclear deal is clarifying that the sycophants of Israel's right-wing government want the U.S. to be embroiled in permanent war on the Middle East strikes me as a good tangential benefit of a sound diplomatic process.

Let's get real here. It is not in the U.S. interest to carry water for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Don't take my word for this. Listen to M.J. Rosenberg who used to work for AIPAC (the coordinating force in the Israel Lobby).

Obama is fighting a lobby that has been the bane of every president since Eisenhower ... Will Obama succeed in getting the lobby to back off? Will he do it serious damage? One can only hope so. The lobby is a malignant force in this country.

But it is only a powerful force because politicians allow it to be. ... The lobby is really the Wizard Of Oz. It is back there madly manipulating and issuing pronouncements in a loud voice. ... all it will take is a president willing to take them on. And then beating them badly as must happen with the Iran agreement.

President Obama is doing a great thing, not only for himself and the country, but for everyone of his successors. ... As for 90% of American Jews, if not more, we want and need to be rid of this curse. It doesn’t speak for us and never has. It speaks for the Israeli Right. And it jeopardizes our standing as Americans by making us all look like expatriate Israelis when all we are is Americans. And good ones.

AIPAC is not us. Not even close. Obama, who received 70-80% of our votes in two elections, is. Beat them, Mr. President.

More on this from James Fallows at the Atlantic.

Seeing ourselves as others see us

The vision is scary.

Item One: Our Congress thinks it is debating whether the international agreement to curtail Iran's nuclear program will happen.

The UN Security Council has already approved the deal, and by a 15-0 unanimous vote—hardly its norm on controversial issues. So has the European Union. Sample report, from Reuters: “‘It is a balanced deal that means Iran won’t get an atomic bomb,’ said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. ‘It is a major political deal.’” The Russians and Chinese are moving ahead as if the deal is done, because from the world’s perspective it is.

James Fallows, The Atlantic

Item Two: These scrabbling fools are competing to demonstrate who can be most ignorant and irresponsible in order to have a chance to become President of the United States. Sticking a podium in front of each of them does not confer gravitas or sanity.

It's the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima

At sunrise members of the Martha's Vineyard Peace Council and friends gathered near Gay Head Lighthouse to reflect, mourn, pray and stoke their collective determination to work to ensure that nuclear weapons are never again used.

This country does have a chance at this time to affirm a diplomatic deal to keep Iran out of the nuclear bomb business for at least 10 years. There may be enough Republican Congresscritters and Senators who want to kick President Obama one more time to field a majority against this sensible measure. But if marginally more civilized members stick together, they can uphold a veto. That's what keeping the deal will probably take. It's time again to batter your Congresscritters for peace!

My Senators, Feinstein and Boxer, have lined up for the deal. Have yours? Here's a current tally of Senators.