Today there are well-financed groups who are well-financed groups who are attempting to move the Jewish world even further to the Right. Elliot Abrams, the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Regan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Central American Affairs, who left government after having been implicated in the dishonesty surrounding the arming of the Contras, has joined with many other Jewish neocons to champion conservative politics inside the Jewish world. They bought an ad on the op-ed page of the New York Times in December 1994, in which they congratulated Newt Gingrich and argued that traditional Jewish values favor conservatism (a claim frequently refuted in Tikkun and more systematically disputed in my book Jewish Renewal. The triumph of conservatism that these neocons are attempting to facilitate will further polarize the society, give greater credence to fascistic and anti-Semitic forces that have always found their primary base of support within the Right and its anti-immigrant, racist, and xenophobic nationalist proclivities.
By the time these right-wing Jews realize what they’ve wrought; America may be plunged into a resurgence of hatred and reaction far more pernicious than anything we’ve experienced since the thirties. Although they represent only a small percentage of American Jews, their impact is magnified because they represent the worldview of the riches Jews, they can fund their magazines and political organizations, their circles have disproportionate access to the most influential media, and they are overly represented among orthodox Jews and Jews in positions of leadership in organized Jewish community.
The power of these neocons is increased the more that Jews tend to think of themselves and their interests as indistinguishable from that of the majority of American middle-class, suburban whites.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jews & Blacks Let the Healing Begin
PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLE
June 3, 1997
American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.
We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.
As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?
We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital -- both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements -- built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation's ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.
We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.
Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
• We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle
Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz
Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz
IRAQ~PNAC OVERREACH
The Greedy Battle For Iraq's 'Hearts And Minds'
September 26, 2011For years, federal auditors have reported that millions of American dollars have been wasted or are unaccounted for in the effort to rebuild and stabilize Iraq.
State Department employee Peter Van Buren gives a ground-level account of that waste and corruption in his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Van Buren was a veteran Foreign Service officer who'd spent much of his career in Japan, Korea and Taiwan when he volunteered for Iraq service in 2009. He was sent to Baghdad as part of a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he was in charge of a group trying to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and economy. For the next year, he encountered oblivious bureaucrats, comically misguided projects, greedy contractors, a never-ending cash flow, and campaigns aimed at improving the lives of Iraqi people. But many of those campaigns were misguided, says Van Buren, and they often wasted a lot of money.
A man stands in a sewage-filled street in Fallujah in 2010. The Fallujah wastewater treatment system was left unfinished more than four years past the initial deadline. The sewage facility is among hundreds of projects funded by U.S. taxpayers that remain abandoned or incomplete, wasting more than $5 billion, according to auditors.
Van Buren's book isn't kind to American policymakers, and he has strong feelings about the futility of his efforts. Fresh Air contacted a spokesman for the State Department, who declined to respond to Van Buren's book except to say that the author's views are his own, and not necessarily those of the State Department.
"The State Department is not very happy about what I've done," Van Buren tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "I was required to submit an early copy of the manuscript to them to determine that I wasn't releasing classified information ... It's pretty clear that I'm speaking for myself here."
Van Buren says many of his State Department colleagues who have read the book agree with him in private but have publicly shunned him for speaking out about what he saw in Iraq.
"Many of them accused me of picking on them or ... blaming them for things that I knew were institutional," he says. "They didn't make these decisions because they were stupid. I didn't make these decisions because I was stupid. We all knew we were told we were to do these things, and they're a little angry at me for labeling them as complicit in this when they knew that they weren't."
Garbage Removal in Baghdad
When Van Buren arrived in Iraq, he tells Davies that he was overwhelmed by the amount of garbage he saw on the street.
"I've never seen more trash in one place in my life," he says. "It was as if the only thing being manufactured in Iraq was garbage."
The State Department's reconstruction teams were told that they had to find a way to remove the trash in the street. They enlisted the help of local sheiks who had volunteered to find and pay workers to assist with the garbage removal.
"It was an amazing thing until we found that we were overpaying these people so much that we had distorted the local labor market, and several shops had closed down because people found it more profitable to have us pay them to pick up trash than to operate small businesses," says Van Buren. "And they were temporary jobs in the sense that when [the State Department] got bored with picking up trash, or some other shiny object caught our attention, we moved on to a different project."
Peter Van Buren has contributed to The Nation, The American Conservative magazine and The Huffington Post.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On the cash flow in Iraq
"Working for the government for 23 years, the only constant is there's never money to do all of the things we wanted. There were times when I've bought my own office supplies and stolen yellow stickies from my kid's school so I had them in the office. In Iraq, we had money everywhere. It was literally in boxes you had to step over. At one point in time, I had $100,000 in a safe in my office. I felt like a drug dealer pulling out bundles of money. There was so much money that the Iraqis invented a new slang term in Arabic that means 'a large pile of hundred-dollar bills.'
On microgrants
"One of the more amazing ways we spent money was a short-term project called microgrants. Someone somewhere decided that if Iraqis were to open small businesses, this was going to solve a lot of problems. They would all become little shopkeepers and vendors, and therefore not be terrorists and everything would be OK, and we could go home. The way to implement this was through the microgrant program, which was literally us handing out $5,000 in cash to people and encouraging them to open a business with it. There was no follow-up, there was no accountability, there was nothing the Iraqi person had to do but sign a receipt and smile nicely at us, and we handed him $5,000."
On humanitarian assistance bags
"One colonel that I worked with thought that the best way to win hearts and minds was to give away stuff. Everybody likes free stuff. He characterized this as a humanitarian gesture. What would happen is the Army would load up some trucks with food bags. The amount of food in there might have given a family of four a meal or two. It was nothing special, nothing elaborate. ... What you saw in these instances was very interesting. If you imagined yourself as a camera and you focused very closely, you saw happy, smiling soldiers handing food bags to young children or women. If you zoomed out a little bit, you saw that the soldiers who weren't in camera range probably weren't smiling. If you zoomed out a little further, you found that the Iraqi men would stay in the background and give us hard stares. This is a country where pride and self-image are very important to people, and being handed food by Americans who had invaded their country was a shock to the Iraqi people, was a blow to their pride."
CULTURE OF VICTIMHOOD
On the Media: September 23, 2011
http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/sep/23/
Criticizing Israel, Outside of Israel
In a much-discussed essay in a 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, journalist Peter Beinart argues that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League squelch criticism on these shores by regarding critics of Israel as enemies of Israel. Beinart and Steven Rosen, formerly of AIPAC, debate the issue in a story originally broadcast in June 2010.
Prosecuting the Irvine 11
Friday, September 30, 2011
In February of last year, a group of Muslim students on the University of California Irvine campus disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US. The university punished the students, but the "Irvine 11" also faced criminal charges, and last Friday 10 of them were convicted of conspiracy and disturbance of a meeting. Bob spoke with Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, who explained why his office decided to prosecute, and with the Dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, who says the student outburst was not protected by the First Amendment, but prosecuting them went too far.
Turkey's Quiet Deal Keeps U.S. Close, Israel Not So Far
by Peter Kenyon
Turkey's leaders have called Israel the "West's spoiled child," and the "bully" of the eastern Mediterranean. When a Tel Aviv soccer team showed up in Istanbul recently for a match, the welcome was less than warm.
In September, Turkey kicked out the Israeli ambassador, suspended military and trade deals and threatened legal and naval action to challenge Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.
As roars of approval went up around the Arab world, few noticed another announcement quietly slipped in by Ankara: Turkey had signed off on a plan to host an American X-band radar system as part of a NATO missile defense system that Washington hails as protection against an Iranian ballistic missile threat.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/01/140971489/turkeys-quiet-deal-keeps-u-s-close-israel-not-far
ON POINT RADIO
A Lost Decade?
Is the U.S. economy heading for a Japan-style lost decade? And if it is, what would that look like? What would it mean?
People wait in line at the 2011 Maximum Connections Job and Career Fair Thursday, Sept. 15, 2011, in Portland, Ore. (AP)
American wages have been in a slump for years. Then came the crash of ’08. The Great Recession. We bailed out and stimulated and waited for the bounce-back — that hasn’t come.
Now, we’ve got storm clouds again. And fear that it may be years before a real upturn comes. Who else has done that? Japan has. It’s Lost Decade was really two. And it’s still struggling.
What’s it mean for a country, for its people, when -– if — a downturn lasts that long?
This hour On Point: Is the US economy headed for a Japan-style “lost decade”? What would that look like? What would it mean?
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Betsey Stevenson, Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
Richard Koo, Chief economist with the Nomura Research Institute.
Richard Katz, Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter The Oriental Economist Report.
From Tom’s Reading List
Reuters “As the U.S. economy slouches toward another recession and confidence in policymakers erodes, investors are coming to grips with the notion that the country may already be several years into a Japan-style lost decade.”
The New York Times “Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.”
CNN “The economy is still struggling. And Americans are in for a long and painful adjustment period.”
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