Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, 1974

A recent Financial Times arts podcast predicts that we are headed for another outburst of Great Gatsby mania. A new movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic will be released on Christmas Day starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. Here’s the trailer. It is a dreadful disconnect from the book. I sometimes wonder if moviemakers bother to read the books they make into pictures.

Disconnection has been the norm. Previous cinematic efforts have used The Great Gatsby as a point of departure. I’m referring to the curious 1949 production with Alan Ladd, the popular 1974 misinterpretation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and the 2000 version with Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens. The latter may be the least objectionable.

The FT podcast is an intellectual gabfest. I highly recommend it. The four intense interlocutors regard Gatsby as a multifaceted metaphor for Fitzgerald’s time and our own.

Gatz, the eight-hour, word-for-word theatrical rendition of the novel, has just opened in London after being a hit in New York. In London, an adaptation at Wilton’s Music Hall is up and running. There is yet another musical version set for a London premiere in August. The short explanation: The copyright protection for Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has lapsed.

I also highly recommend the unexpurgated audiobook read by the late Alexander Scourby. He makes the Nick Carraway narration come to life. I have his readings of Hemingway’s short stories, and they are almost as good, especially the gut-wrenching “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

But the best experience is the book itself. Fitzgerald was a meticulous writer who took his work seriously. He revised right into the final galleys. The book’s central riddle is Gatsby: Who is he? Where does he come from? A major theme of the book is new versus old money.

Fitzgerald likens Daisy Buchanan to “the king’s daughter, the golden girl.” She could not marry Gatsby when they met and fell in love in Louisville, Kentucky. Gatsby, an army officer headed off to war, had no prospects and no fortune then. Daisy breaks it off while he is fighting on the Western Front in France. On the rebound, she marries Tom Buchanan, a strapping young Yale football star from a wealthy Chicago family. The day before the wedding, Tom gives Daisy a string of pearls “valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Four or five years later, Tom has “come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away…he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.” Narrator Nick Carraway comments, “It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.” Nick is starting out in the bond business and commutes from Long Island’s north shore to lower Manhattan. Tom and Daisy have rented an enormous waterfront mansion with stables and vast grounds. Nick is renting a bungalow in a nearby village. The bungalow is next to a Hôtel de Ville-styled mansion with forty acres of lawns and gardens. This is where Gatsby lives.

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Nick went to Yale in the same class as Tom; Daisy is Nick’s second cousin once removed. It is no coincidence that Jay Gatsby’s waterfront palace in West Egg sits right across the inlet from Tom Buchanan’s estate in East Egg. At the end of Tom’s dock, there is a green light which shines all night. Gatsby watches that light from his front portico. He is fixated on it.

Gatsby has returned, intent against all odds and reason, to take up where he left off with Daisy. He is living in a dream world. Gatsby confides to Nick, “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. She’ll see.”

Nick cautions him, “You can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby responds confidently, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”

Gatsby is a mystery man. He does not even make an appearance until the third chapter when Nick attends a party. Gatsby has casual open-house parties every weekend. They are well-attended. The partygoers don’t know Gatsby or anything about him. The talk is that Gatsby was a German spy, the illegitimate son of the Kaiser, a nephew to von Hindenburg, a bootlegger and a killer, among other things.

An anonymous gentleman sitting at a table with Nick asks, “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the War?” The gentleman is Gatsby. Nick and Gatsby fought in France together but were never formally introduced. The moment after Gatsby identifies himself, “a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire.”

Then at a midtown Manhattan luncheon, we meet Gatsby’s friend Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler whom Gatsby claims fixed the 1919 World Series. Wolfsheim is a businessman, the proprietor of an outfit called “The Swastika Holding Company.” Later, after Gatsby is shot and killed, Nick pays Wolfsheim a visit in the vain attempt to get him to attend the funeral. Nick asks, “Did you start him in business?” Wolfsheim responds, “Start him! I made him…I raised him out of nothing, right out of the gutter.”

Fitzgerald keeps it vague. There are hints and clues. When Tom Buchanan begins to suspect that Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair, Tom asks Nick, “Who is this Gatsby anyhow? Some big bootlegger?” Tom decides to investigate. In the FT podcast, Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature, calls Gatsby a bootlegger, a precursor to present-day drug dealers. In the 1949 film adaptation, Alan Ladd is seen firing a machine gun at a rival gang of bootleggers.

One must assume securities fraud and forgery. Whatever it was, it outranked the drug-store rackets, which were just “small change”. Fitzgerald keeps us guessing. Recall in Chapter V the aborted, cryptic conversation between Nick and Gatsby about bonds? Gatsby asks, “...you don’t make much money, do you?.... You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?.... I carry on a little business on the side…. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.” Gatsby is trying to pull Nick into the game and reward him for his help in inviting Daisy over for tea. 

It hardly matters if any of this makes sense. What matters is the quality of Fitzgerald’s matchless prose. There has never been anything like it. No wonder there is a revival. Remember what Hemingway said about Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, “If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby, I was sure he could write an even better one.” Perhaps Tender is the Night fits that bill. Again, stick with the book.

We are facing another US presidential election. The two candidates have been picked, most likely by hand. It is depressing how fast these contests come around and how similar and pointless they have become. It seems like only yesterday I was recovering from the 2008 campaign between Senators Obama and McCain. And now the game has started all over again. Why?

I came across an unpublished essay I wrote entitled “Agog with Politics.” It is a fragment from November 2008 that was never submitted for publication. So little has changed between then and now. We are going through the same expensive process, this time between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Does it matter who wins? Aside from the winner himself and his extended entourage, the outcome will make little or no difference to the citizenry at-large.

Agog with Politics
(November 16, 2008)

The first billion-dollar presidential campaign is over. It came down to Barack “Slippery” Obama v. John “Crackbrain” McNasty in a quest to become the nominal leader of Ex America II, the lone surviving “superpower.”

I no longer refer to this country as “America.” I call it “Ex America II” in light of the fact that the North American republic of 1789 is no more. It was obliterated by the bloodbath variously called “the Civil War,” “the War Between the States,” or by my Southern diehard friends, “the War of Northern Aggression.” The last term is most accurate. The conflict commenced in 1861 when Lincoln decided to prevent the Southern states’ peaceful secession. Thus ended the republic of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, and along with it the US Constitution.

In its place came “Ex America,” which lasted from 1865 until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Big Brother regime in the 1930s. Since then, it’s been “Ex America II.” It is a world of fear, fantasy, and force along the lines of Charles Beard’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace” and Henry Miller’s “air-conditioned nightmare.” I’m referring to World War II, the Cold War, and now Washington’s crowning achievement, GWOT, the “Global War on Terror.” GWOT is predicated upon an alleged all-consuming “clash of civilizations” between the West and a reawakened Islamic world. This is a contrived scenario, albeit widely accepted by the misinformed. 

This is supposedly why these two professional politicians, Barack O and McNasty, were fighting. It hardly mattered which of them won the prize. WEP would retain power. Whoever controls WEP stays in power. Status quo ante. More fear, more fantasy, more force and deception.

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The Washington Establishment Party (WEP) presented a deceptive “choice” to a confused, unwary American electorate. It must be evident to most neutral observers that the Democratic and Republican Parties constitute little more than two WEP front organizations and that there is no substantive difference between them save for style and spin. WEP is a revolving door for ambitious career politicians. 

Representing the Democrats in one corner was an upstart mystery man, the junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. His career trajectory has been astounding. Barack O is a brilliant talker—cerebral and crafty. A consummate con man. During the campaign he posed as an outsider promising “change.”

In the other corner was Arizona Senator John McNasty. He was a Navy brat from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Son of a famous admiral, he finished near the bottom of his class. He fought and crash-landed in Vietnam. Surviving prison camp, he launched a second career by cashiering his first wife and marrying an Arizona beer baroness. Bankrolled and renewed, McNasty became a permanent Capitol Hill fixture. McNasty is an ex-wrestler, an entitled roustabout with a hair-trigger temper who’s intent on telling the rest of the world what to do in true neocon style. He is a bully like G. W. Bush.

Our current predicament at the dawn of the third millennium begs the question, “Can democracy be regarded as a waste of time, a wrong turn in humanity’s history?” My answer is yes, it probably should be regarded as such. Think of all the time, money, and effort spent on these elections which could have been avoided if there existed a system such as that of the ancient Venetian Republic, where governance was left up to a patrician class composed of duty-bound individuals who elected a figurehead king. 

In this manner, the average person would not be bothered and caught up in the spectacle of irrelevant elections which has resulted in putting mountebanks, opportunists, and jackasses into the White House and Congress and keeping them there for a long time.

The 2008 election confirms what has been suspected by thoughtful people since at least 1900. Politics is passé and a pack of lies.

Our Peace Prize president lobbed some harsh words toward Iran in his long-winded pep rally last Tuesday night:

Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies.  From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America. (Applause.)

He is referring to the drone war. Moments later, Obama turned his sights on the big enchilada:

Look at Iran….The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent.

Let there be no doubt:  America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. (Applause.)

Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran. Congressional resolutions have effectively mandated that the White House not negotiate with Iran. The propaganda line is that Iran is a terrorist pariah state. The unstated but de facto US policy toward Iran seems to be regime change. First came economic sanctions, now an embargo of Iran’s oil exports, to which EU has just agreed.

This affair is all about Washington’s ongoing effort to demonize Iran and justify increasingly onerous economic sanctions on them, as was the case with Iraq. The hook on which they are hanging this policy is Tehran’s alleged program to acquire nuclear weapons. Such a development supposedly endangers our “allies” and “interests.” They used a very similar hook—a supposed threat about “weapons of mass destruction”—to get the weary American public to go along with the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq.

Iran looks like a replay. Although the projected threat from Iran has been hyped to the skies, I have seen no convincing proof of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program. Chief of state Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa forbidding the development and use of nuclear weapons. The US National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 concluded that Iran had not been developing a nuclear-weapons program for the previous four years.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts—former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration—suggests that the whole Iran nuclear-weapons crisis is a hoax. Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker articles over the years lean toward a similar conclusion, especially his recent “Iran and the Bomb.”

On January 22, Bill Keller, former New York Times executive editor and now an op-ed columnist, let his bad conscience about Iraq bring him to his senses. He wrote an oh-so-witty column called “Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?” He followed up the same day with a blog entry entitled “How About Not Bombing Iran?”

Yet everybody goes their merry way, continuing to enable the contagion of hysteria. Under Peace Prize Obama, the disastrous Bush/Cheney greater Mideast foreign policy has been carried forward, expanded, and upgraded to outlandish proportions. All elements have been put in place to start a new shooting war in the Middle East which might collaterally blow the fragile, debt-ridden world economy to kingdom come. The Persian Gulf would become a war zone. World oil prices might skyrocket.

It makes perfect sense in view of the American election cycle. A war president is almost a cinch for reelection. War is a great distraction. It transforms the president from a mountebank into a hero.

Not to be outflanked, Republican candidates have eagerly jumped onto the war wagon. Dr. Ron Paul is a notable exception to the current crop of Republican zanies. Dr. Paul pointed out during the NBC debate on Monday, January 23rd:

Mitt said he would go to war, but you have to think about the preliminary act that might cause them [the Iranians] to want to close the Straits [sic] of Hormuz. And that’s a blockade. We’re blockading them….[T]he act of war has already been committed….You have to put this into perspective. But this whole idea that we have to go to war—because we have already committed an act of war by blockading the country….I don’t see. We have too many wars and people want to come home, and they certainly do not want a hot war in Iran right now.

Paul is correct in the sense that economic and financial sanctions in themselves are acts of war. A coordinated embargo of Iranian oil would require a full-scale naval blockade.

But except for Ron Paul, both Republicans and Democrats are talking tough about Iran in this election year. They are also talking stupid. Regardless of political party, that’s the official US stance on Iran—tough and stupid.

Should we seek the deeper meaning in the video of US Marines urinating on Taliban combatants’ dead bodies in the wilds of Afghanistan? What does it tell us about our country? What does it say about Washington and the hypocrites in charge of the lone surviving superpower? What does it demonstrate about Washington’s self-destructive crusade that started with 9/11 and led to the “War on Terror”?

The incident itself is trivial, albeit symbolic. Such conduct is illegal under the Geneva Conventions and contrary to US military regulations. It is also a war crime. Nonetheless, it might be comparable to drunken acts at a rogue fraternity house. But these Marines were not drunk; they were only acting like idiots.

The Marines were doing little more than aping the attitudes and lawlessness of their superiors—the Washington politicians and functionaries who have launched a fool’s errand across the greater Middle East and Southwest Asia.

In their own small and depraved way, the Marines in the video were carrying out Washington’s grandiose foreign-policy objectives. As such, they reflect the neoconservative mindset of the Washington foreign-policy establishment, whose hubris has trickled down to the troops.

The smart operators at the top of the pyramid thrive on secrecy, misdirection, and lies. It got them where they are. They are sticking with it. The foot soldiers out in the field doing the dirty work are more honest but less mature. The Marines made the mistake of flaunting their misdeed to the world via YouTube.

And now Washington officially goes through the act of being outraged. How can the Marines be criticized by “our elites” for symbolically carrying out US foreign-policy objectives? Were not the deceased Taliban they urinated upon “terrorists”? That’s what Hillary Rodham “hell to pay” Clinton, the second-biggest hypocrite in Washington next to Mr. Peace Prize, has told us.

H. R. Clinton has not faced such a challenging public-relations task since the night Israeli commandos stormed the Gaza flotilla on May 31, 2010. The official US position is all in favor of Israel blockading Gaza, but Washington wanted to distance itself from the killings. Mr. Peace Prize ran for the tall grass, leaving H. R. Clinton to remark from the State Department on June 1st, 2010: “I think the situation from our perspective is very difficult and requires careful, thoughtful responses from all concerned.” Blah, blah, blah.

Ms. Clinton’s approach was less measured in the urinating Marines’ case. The PR problem confronting the US Secretary of State was essentially the same as with the Gaza flotilla twenty months previous: how to keep the region’s natives from reacting negatively to the ongoing war efforts Washington and its partners undertake against “terrorists,” dissidents, and other reprobates.

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Clinton proclaimed on January 12, 2012 that she was in “total dismay” over the urination incident. She condemned the Marines’ “deplorable behavior” and went on to warn that “anyone, anyone, who is found to have participated or known about it…must be held fully accountable….” So there!

The change of approach is noteworthy. US personnel were directly involved in this incident. Obama’s “right war” in Afghanistan, as distinguished from the Cheney/Bush “wrong war” in Iraq, is in disarray and breaking bad—so bad that Washington is getting ready to sit down for peace talks. Marines acting like frat-house morons do not help matters.

What’s worse is when top officials in Washington such as H. R. Clinton and Peace Prize Obama act stupidly. This malfeasance has been going on for decades by all parties and is now routine. Washington is entirely responsible for putting the US Marines and NATO troops in Afghanistan and keeping them there far too long and for no good reason. We are now bogged down in a hopeless quagmire after al-Qaeda has evaporated from the country.

Retired Marine General James Jones, former National Security Advisor for Mr. Obama, stated in October 2009 that there were less than 100 al-Qaeda members in all of Afghanistan. US Marines and NATO troops are not fighting “terrorists” in Afghanistan. They are fighting a homegrown insurgency made up of ethnic Pashtuns who represent the country’s majority tribe and who regard the Karzai government as illegitimate and installed by infidels. This is both a civil and tribal war.

My guess is that the Marines do not understand why they are in Afghanistan—and neither do the policymakers at the White House, State Department, and Pentagon.

Elle and Blair Fowler

My executive editor at a Florida magazine, Hardy Burt, informed me at lunch one day, “God is a girl!” This was after his first vodka martini. I can’t imagine what we were discussing. He may have been right. It would be nice to think so. He appeared to be dead serious. He was much older and wiser than me and had been a public-relations genius in New York before a scandal forced him to leave town.

I have stumbled upon something extraordinarily profound, and it reminds me of what Hardy said years ago.

I tend not to get through The New York Times and London’s Financial Times on a daily basis. So they pile up. After a month or so I need to stay put in my room and set aside an entire Sunday to look them over, cut out articles, and think about the news as it was first presented, comparing it to what eventually happened. Some events are reported in passing, never to appear on the radar screen a second time. Certain phenomena I would have never heard about at all.

In this way, last weekend I discovered an article dated September 30th in the Financial Times about teenage shopping sprees and “haul videos.” What in the world is this? I asked myself. The article focuses upon two young, attractive American sisters named Elle and Blair Fowler, also known to their many fans in the viral world of YouTube videos as AllThatGlitters21 and Juicystar07.

What did the sisters do to merit an article in the Financial Times? They go shopping and report about what they buy over YouTube. It’s not complicated. The girls are enthusiastic and wide-eyed. They are not selling anything, or at least they weren’t when they started in 2008. They merely talk about themselves and the products they buy to keep themselves happy and beautiful. I mean, that’s it. By way of introduction, here’s an interview with the two sisters. And a sample of an Elle beauty video. Here’s another, a long one discussing books!

Retail therapy should not be underestimated. It is real and significant, a necessity. It could be argued that the entire US economy is now based upon it, which is to say, upon the consumer.

But Elle and Blair represent more than that. For me they are proof positive of an unspoiled, youthful world free of intellectualism, where there is no place for regrets, second thoughts, or big ideas. Everything just is, as it should be, and it is all good. There is no conflict in which to become embroiled, and you don’t need to solve a problem. The possibilities are endless.

Shopping is simply a manifestation of this fact, not an end in itself. It is the nearest and most convenient reality to be enjoyed by anyone, oblivious or not to our modern age’s glaring defects. In sum, Elle and Blair are not mere airheads, although that would likely be your first impression.

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Which brings me to the end of ideology. H. L. Mencken remarked in an interview that “The whole country is full of propagandists who are bothering everybody.” I recall my undergraduate days at Columbia University toward the end of the Vietnam War. Several avowed communist groups on campus competed with one another to spread the party line. These ranged from genuine hard-core Maoists to Trotskyites and everything in between. The war was a disaster which lent these characters a degree of credibility. They were running with it.

The campus was in a constant state of flux and hyperventilation, of Sturm und Drang. Nobody was doing any homework. Everybody was racing around, agog with politics.

In the meantime, at the other end of the spectrum, I had founded a short-lived movement called The Douglas MacArthur Society. I still worship MacArthur as a great man and thinker, but in retrospect all these efforts spent upon politics and ideology in my salad days now seem like a horrible waste of time. Many of the student commies at Columbia made the transformation into stockbrokers. For them it was all a mistake, a phase.

Something along these lines may have belatedly occurred to Deng Xiaoping and his associates when they stopped taking Mao and communism seriously and tried instead to advance China in a less artificial way—without drama, murder, and hysteria. In retrospect, the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square was a bump in the road. Without it, Apple would not be manufacturing the iPhone in China. 

At about the same time, similar thoughts must have occurred, out of necessity, to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. Before ideology strangled humanity to death, it had to be thrown overboard in Russia in favor of reality and what worked.

In this regard, a letter to the editor of the Financial Times dated August 31st is worth noting. I came across it a few hours before discovering the Fowler sisters in the same stack of newspapers. The letter is from a professor at the University of California:

As a visitor to Moscow in June 1983…in an academic conference, the only question was whether the bear would go down quietly or otherwise. The shops were empty; the lines were long; the people were despondent; there was only ice-cold water to bathe in at the hotel of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The decay from within was obvious. And the Leninist babble that our Russian colleagues were obligated to espouse somewhere in their talks, no matter how irrelevant, was clearly just that: an obligation, not a belief. The system was indisputably unsustainable.

All this misery and wasted energy because of a misbegotten idea from an intelligentsia too arrogant, misguided, and hateful to think clearly. That is the epitaph for the age of “socialist” and Marxist ideas that roughly covers the past hundred and fifty years. It’s over.

Henceforth, my solution is to not think at all, but rather to go on instinct. With rare exceptions, the fashion layouts are more significant than the written page. We should rejoice in the fact that, as bad as things may be with the economy, they could be far worse. The grocery stores and pharmacies are still amazingly well-stocked. School is out. Don’t waste your time. For starters, go watch the latest video from Elle and Blair.

Adel al-Jubeir

Last week brought news of a purported Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador to the US Adel al-Jubeir, but the whole murder-for-hire story may have already imploded by the time you read this. Skepticism is rampant. Aside from the insufferable, trigger-happy neocons, nobody who knows anything is buying the official version as enunciated by Eric Holder, Barack’s Attorney General. Holder is the same Washington functionary who green-lit the Marc Rich pardon on the last day of the Bill & Hillary Clinton Administration.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was also at the press conference on October 11th and backstopped Holder’s implausible narrative about the alleged plot—“conceived, sponsored, and directed from Iran”—to have a Mexican drug cartel kill the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a fashionable Washington restaurant with plastic explosives. But Mueller and his FBI have lost significant credibility with PBS’s airing of The Anthrax Files, which appeared the same day as Holder’s press conference.

The used-car-salesman-turned-terrorist who is now behind bars is an Iranian American named Manssor Arbabsiar. Manssor traveled between Iran and Mexico during the summer, supposedly to arrange the hit on the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. Putting aside the apparent lack of any rational motive by Tehran, some important factual details remain unclear in the 21-page indictment filed in New York federal court.

For instance, how did Manssor first make contact with a leader of Los Zetas, the crazed Mexican drug cartel, who also just happened to be a paid DEA informant? Was this sheer happenstance or was Manssor pointed in that direction? Did the business start out as a drug deal and then get sidetracked into an assassination plot? Was Manssor attempting to act as a middleman to sell Iranian opium to Mexico?

At what point in the proceedings did the FBI make the hapless Manssor aware that he was involved in a sting operation and that he should cooperate to implicate the alleged co-conspirators in Tehran? The government states that Manssor has already admitted under questioning that he conspired to kill the Saudi Ambassador. If that is so, why has Manssor’s lawyer stated that Manssor will plead not guilty if indicted by a grand jury?

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This affair could amount to little more than a vintage case of entrapment à la John DeLorean. American officials have admitted that no one was ever in any danger. Tehran has categorically denied any connection to Manssor or to the alleged plot.

Tehran has demanded consular access to Manssor, a dual national, in order to question him. Iran’s Foreign Minister announced on Monday: “We are prepared to examine any issue, even if fabricated, seriously and patiently, and we have called on America to submit to us any information in regard to this scenario.” Wouldn’t it be great if Washington could send a special ambassador to Tehran to sort out the matter?

Who wired the bank transfer of a hundred thousand dollars as a down payment for the crime? The money did not come from Iran. If the wire transfer was for real, it is the only tangible evidence that something was afoot, including the possibility of a false-flag operation to advance a hidden foreign-policy agenda.

Investigative reporter Gareth Porter is based in Washington and writes for Inter Press Service and Asia Times Online. Based on the amended indictment and the FBI report, Porter suggests that the “terror plot” was really a drug sting. Paul Jay, senior editor and CEO of the Real News Network, has interviewed Porter twice. Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here. What really happened may or may not come out in the wash. What matters now is whether or not the incident will be utilized as a catalyst for a shooting war.

I say it will, because Washington is already at war with Iran and has been for some time. Economic sanctions are an act of war. The ongoing project to demonize and destabilize Iran is longstanding. This is an undeclared war by the lone surviving superpower, a war whose sole purpose is Iranian regime change. The war could be ended anytime Washington wants to call it off. But Washington can’t call it off, because its politicians are dependent upon making Iran the bogeyman and profiting from the current scenario.

Americans were conned repeatedly under the Cheney regency and are being conned shamelessly again under Barack Obama’s Potemkin Village presidency. It all amounts to warmongering. We are watching a continuation of the same old movie.

Mahmoud Abbas

The protracted Mideast “peace process” has finally hit the Iron Wall. The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has wandered off the reservation and is taking the Palestinian question to the UN.

It’s about time. The much-ballyhooed, American-sponsored “peace process” began with 1978’s Camp David Accords. It was revived at 1991’s Madrid Conference—in Operation Desert Storm’s aftermath—and has continued ever since under various guises: The Oslo Accords (1993); Gaza-Jericho Agreement (1994); Oslo II (1995); Wye River Memorandum (1998); Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum (1999); Camp David Summit (2000); Taba Summit (2001); Roadmap for Peace (2002); Aqaba Peace Summit (2003); The Geneva Initiative (2003); Sharm el-Sheikh Summit (2005); Sharm el-Sheikh Summit II (2007); Annapolis Summit (2007); Obama’s Cairo Speech (2009); Waldorf Astoria Hotel Trilateral Meeting (2009); and the Washington Summit (2010).

Aside from providing a convenient diplomatic cover for military occupation, the “peace process” has resulted in half a million fanatical Jewish “settlers” imposed on the West Bank, complementing the Israeli annexation of Arab Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. Real-estate and water rights have been expropriated from occupied Palestine to accommodate the “settlers” from Brooklyn, the former Soviet Union, and the four corners of the globe. In plain language, this is called theft. It has been ongoing since 1948. In addition, the gentlemen in Jerusalem have built a concrete wall higher and longer than the Berlin Wall to encase the West Bank. Gaza remains blockaded.

Washington now euphemistically refers to such unilateral acts by the occupying power—illegal under international law—as “facts on the ground” which the Palestinians must condone or else be deemed terrorists. To a remarkable extent, the US Congress and tax-deductible contributions from America have paid for these operations.

This prolonged scam began for the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat’s leadership and is ending with Abbas. Washington summarily jettisoned Arafat in July 2000 as soon as he failed to accept the Camp David diktat proffered by Bill Clinton and Israel’s lawyers Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, acting in concert with Israel’s slippery Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. Clinton blamed the summit’s blowup entirely on the hapless Arafat. Bill and Hillary washed their hands lickety-split of the whole affair, managing to keep their pro-Israel credentials intact and their post-White House career prospects alive.

On Ariel Sharon and Dick Cheney’s advice, G. W. Bush refused even to pick up the phone and talk to Arafat. In thrall to the neocons, he outsourced America’s entire Mideast policy to Ariel Sharon until Sharon suffered a stroke, which left him in a coma. After being feted in Washington for almost a decade, Arafat ended his days under siege at his ramshackle Ramallah compound, where he died a broken man under mysterious circumstances in 2004.

Arafat was either a victim of the “war on terror” or a target of Ariel Sharon’s war of terror. Arafat’s deputy, the colorless and mild-mannered Abbas, took over the leadership of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. He was rebuffed in his attempts to negotiate.

G. W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice hit upon the idea that the Palestinians should have an election. The election took place in 2006, monitored by former US President Jimmy Carter and others. Hamas won big in both the West Bank and in Gaza. Carter enthused about an “honest, fair, and safe election process” and said “we were all surprised at the enormity of the Hamas victory.” Washington refused to accept the outcome. Bush jettisoned Hamas. Washington and Jerusalem would henceforth only deal with Mahmoud Abbas.

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Washington funded, propped up, and perfumed Abbas’s unelected West Bank regime, while Hamas’s stronghold in Gaza was turned into the biggest prison camp on Earth for 1.5 million human beings, relegated to a free-fire zone for Jerusalem to attack at will with impunity. David Rose wrote of how the Cheney White House, in the person of Likudnik sympathizer Elliott Abrams, orchestrated an attempted military takeover of Gaza by Fatah in 2006. It failed.

Evidently, Abbas has grown weary of being treated like a stooge and having little to show for it. Surely he hoped that Peace Prize Obama could deliver concessions and a modicum of rationality from Sharon’s successor, the double-talking Bibi Netanyahu.

But all Obama delivered was pap, platitudes, and bromides. Contrary to his grandiosity, Obama had no clout when it came to dealing with Israel or the domestic pro-Israel lobby.

Abbas and his apparatchiks are obviously desperate. They have been subsidized by Washington, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, but that is getting them nowhere fast. They may even be worried about an internal revolt on the West Bank along the lines of what happened in Egypt. They need leverage in dealing with their Zionist overlords. They have no bargaining chips. Washington and Jerusalem like it that way. 

This explains Abbas’s démarche to the UN. No wonder Jerusalem and Washington are going ballistic. Their “peace process” playbook has been torn up. For Obama, it will be especially embarrassing. If the US vetoes Palestinian statehood in the Security Council—I’m praying that Hillary Clinton will be the US representative sitting at the table who casts the veto—Obama will be exposed before the entire world as just another hypocrite, dwarf, and proxy for Jerusalem along the lines of Tony Blair. Obama has pretended to be a principled, liberal, evenhanded, and sincere peacemaker. It will be most difficult to maintain that fiction after the veto. As for Hillary’s reputation, a veto will only confirm what has long been obvious. Can you imagine her next trip to Riyadh?

Does Obama want to be regarded as a yes-man for Jerusalem to shore up Jewish funding and votes for his reelection campaign? That is entirely possible, even likely. Like Hillary, Obama is a consummate opportunist. Meanwhile, Republican fruitcakes and fools are blasting Obama for supposedly throwing Israel under the bus. They must believe that spouting such falsehoods advances their cause.

When it comes to America and the Middle East, we are not dealing with foreign policy. This goes back to Harry Truman’s difficult election campaign of 1948 and his recognition of Israel as a legitimate state, which went against the US State and Defense Departments’ advice. In the current hubbub over Palestinian statehood, as in everything pertaining to Zionism’s march since 1917, we are dealing with American domestic politics—specifically, with ethnic politics, campaign contributions, special interests, and a favorable press. In other words, it’s a racket.

With the 9/11 anniversary upon us once again, Middle East expert Robert Fisk in Beirut has written an instructive article about our predicament. He says that we have lied to ourselves for 10 years to avoid asking the one real question: Why did it happen? Without motive, there would have been no attack.

Fisk says we’ve been lying to ourselves about the motive, but the reality is a little different. We have been constantly misinformed and misled. We are on the receiving end. We have swallowed the lies. How could we be so naive?

Some of us have taken the route of avoidance, saying, “Hey, I don’t give a damn about the Middle East and those people—why should I?” But what happens out there is affecting us back here. What our leaders do in the Middle East has dramatic, adverse repercussions on the home front.

In CIA parlance, what happened on 9/11 ten years ago is called “blowback,” the unforeseen or at least unintended consequences of US foreign-policy decisions. It would be wise to understand what Washington, in all its glorious malfeasance, has been doing in our name in the greater Middle East.

I don’t think we are in any real external danger from “the Muslims” or “the Arabs” or anyone else. Rather, I believe we have put ourselves in harm’s way. We—meaning the average citizens—are not directly responsible. We are only along for the ride. We are almost irrelevant. It is Washington’s policymakers who have done it. They have created danger where there was none before. But we have allowed them to do it.

The average American is far too trusting of official explanations. We have swallowed their bilge and failed to take action to prevent them—be they named Clinton, Bush, or Obama—from pursuing self-destructive and counterproductive initiatives. So we suffer the consequences.

The US has been meddling militarily in foreign affairs at least since 1917 with Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War. For us, the most horrific and visible consequence of Washington’s mischief-making has been 9/11. Like the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the 9/11 atrocity was the direct result of an errant, incendiary US foreign policy, sold to the American people as something entirely different.

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In his article, Fisk mentions Kenneth Pollack and his 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for invading Iraq. The establishment media hyped the book to the skies. While Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, working in tandem with their odious neocon playmates, ginned up the fear propaganda about “weapons of mass destruction” from inside the government, it was Pollack’s fat book that reaffirmed the mass hysteria from the outside and gave it a scholarly gloss. It was all part of the same mindless talking-head crusade in response to 9/11.

Everybody who was anybody wanted to hop on that war wagon, including the ambitious future Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as well as the rest of the Senate’s liberal Democratic leadership. Among the more notable “liberal” pundits beating the war drums were Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, George Packer, Richard Cohen, and the hyperactive Christopher Hitchens. The neocons who called themselves “conservatives” were all gung-ho. Both sides have traveled together inside the bipartisan war wagon ever since. Meanwhile, Ken Pollack has been rewarded for his service to The Cause by being made the Director of Research for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

On the day after the 9/11 attacks, Robert Fisk wrote a powerful piece for the Independent in London entitled “The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people.” The only thing Fisk got wrong was the number of casualties.

In March 2002, ex-CIA operative Robert Baer gave an interview to London’s Sunday Observer. The article was entitled “Bombing Saddam is ignorance.” Baer had worked in the Directorate of Operations for 25 years, mostly in the Middle East. From the article:

After a quarter of a century abroad, Baer hardly recognises the States and is appalled at the level of public ignorance. “There is no debate,” he says. “People will not address the question of Palestine in the context of the World Trade Centre attacks. It’s not in the terms of discussion.”

In June 2004, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald testified about the hijackers’ motives before the 9/11 Commission and suggested that the attackers “identify with the Palestinian problem.” His remarks never made it into the Commission’s final report.

Until America comes to grips with what motivated the terrorists to attack New York and Washington on 9/11, there will be scant hope of Americans regaining control of their country. 9/11 is the basis for everything which followed. Thanks to 9/11, America was railroaded into invading Iraq. That invasion was based upon a mountain of mendacious propaganda produced for Americans by their own government. There has been no accountability. Under Obama, only the rhetoric has changed. US foreign policy remains the same.

The only good thing which could result from Bibi Netanyahu’s May 24 speech to a joint session of the US Congress is that it may open people’s eyes after a very long nap. If so, it will have served a useful purpose and could be a turning point. A lot of intelligent Americans and Europeans are in denial. They have generally viewed criticism of Israel from any quarter with suspicion and skepticism. If one brings up the larger topic of Zionism’s shadowy history and adverse consequences, they become even more suspicious.

But the Likud kingpin’s magnificent con job—and the unseemly performance of a servile Congress in embracing it—should give every true-blue American who has not been brainwashed a wake-up call. What exactly is going on here, and why? Has Washington’s leadership abdicated its responsibilities to the American people and humanity? Has it simply offshored American foreign policy to Tel Aviv? Such appears to be the case, and it is downright embarrassing.

This is a huge topic which has been examined over the years by one expert after another far more qualified than me. Despite warnings and exposés, the momentum has all been in the wrong direction. The appallingly sycophantic cheering in Congress confirms the worst. There can be no excuse for such grotesquery. Don’t Congressmen and Senators have any self-respect? Do they have any brains? Do they know the conflict’s true history? Do they care one way or the other? Can they really be that ignorant?

It has become increasingly apparent that the White House and Capitol Hill are not dealing with a foreign-policy issue when it comes to the Middle East. They see it differently and by necessity have done so for decades. When it comes to the so-called “Middle East peace process” and Israel, we are dealing with the quest for election, reelection, and career advancement. Nothing more. That is the reason for May 24th’s bipartisan Capitol Hill pander-fest. 

Please note that it was the Speaker of the House, Ohio Republican John A. Boehner, who invited Bibi to speak before Congress in joint session. Republicans cannot afford to be left behind. Indeed, the Israel Lobby is the shorthand explanation for the foreign misadventures of the crackbrained “neoconservative” G. W. Bush Administration, a k a the Cheney Regency. Washington politicians seem motivated almost entirely by the chance to get elected and reelected, regardless of what is in Uncle Sam’s legitimate interests.

The surefire ticket to success in Washington is to be in the good graces of the Israel Lobby in all its multilayered manifestations, especially when it comes to campaign contributions and good press. The mutually beneficial relationship is part racketeering and part quid pro quo. What passes for American foreign policy in the Middle East is now little more than a business calculation. Congressmen are not in the main ignoramuses, first-blush appearances notwithstanding. But they are opportunists: some shameless, many merely unthinking. In any event, they are in the bag.

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Speaking of the Lobby, the joint congressional session at which Bibi presided was a sideshow compared to the four-day extravaganza across town at the annual “Policy Conference” of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Tel Aviv’s premier front organization was in its glory. Bibi had made a stop there the day before to touch base with his American agents. Obama had dropped by the day before that to reaffirm his obeisance and to inform these apparatchiks of Zion about what he had actually said at the State Department a few days earlier—“not what I was reported to have said.” And what was that, pray tell? More doubletalk, adding up to precisely nothing. The nervous AIPAC attendees needed reassurance of this fact, lest they entertain the mistaken idea that Obama had wandered off the reservation.

Did you know that Ronald Reagan declined to appear before AIPAC in 1988? Did you know that Bill Clinton was the first president who accepted an invitation to speak before AIPAC while still in office? I didn’t before reading this informative article by Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Did you know that President John Kennedy declined to meet Israel’s first PM, David Ben-Gurion, at the White House in 1962, opting instead for a private meeting at the Waldorf Astoria? I didn’t before reading this article in that interesting “neoconservative” receptacle, Commentary magazine.

Amazingly, AIPAC remains an unregistered agent of a foreign government. For that matter, so does Commentary. In days of yore, wasn’t the Communist Party USA made to register as an agent of Moscow? Why shouldn’t crusading Zionist organizations and their benighted ideologues do the same when propagandizing on behalf of Tel Aviv and its Likud agenda? It only seems fair and would not restrict free speech. On the other hand, if Israel were amenable to becoming the 51st state, no registration would be required. But in that case, Israel would be limited and entitled to only two Senators.

Future AIPAC conventions should be a hoot. For the first time, there was a counter-convention called Move Over AIPAC organized by the liberal group Code Pink: Women for Peace. Alas, only a few hundred attended. The delegates at AIPAC numbered 10,000, including the 350 US Senators and Representatives in attendance.  Nonetheless, the Code Pink/Move Over AIPAC crowd was not bashful and carried on a number of demonstrations. One of their members heckled Bibi from the gallery during his appearance before Congress and landed in the hospital for her trouble. But it was a start and can only get better next year.

My favorite happening involved interviews of the AIPAC faithful by journalist Max Blumenthal. I don’t know where Max is coming from or going with this, but he seems to be a concerned citizen who likes to ask embarrassing questions that invariably evoke embarrassing answers. Max’s modus operandi is to visit various “pro-Israel” get-togethers playing the part of an innocent bystander seeking wisdom. He lets people speak for themselves. He calls this hysterical YouTube installment “Feeling the Ignorance at AIPAC 2011.” Be sure and watch it at least until Max interviews a man wearing a sandwich board painted with the words “Recovering Zionist.” It’s a start.

President George W. Bush and President George H.W. Bush

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and effectively ended the Cold War, there was tremendous relief and a sense of hope for the future. One writer even boldly declared that it marked “The End of History” and, as a natural result, the end of war.

Since global communism—perceived as the main, if not sole, threat to global peace—had been vanquished, President George H. W. Bush promised that Americans would soon enjoy a “peace dividend.” Taxpayers commonly understood this to mean that military spending would be downgraded and the billions that had been siphoned from them to fight communism would be shunted back into their pockets.

But the promised peace dividend never came. With communism defeated, Arabs and Islam were presented as the new threat for the world’s lone surviving superpower. In response to this “threat” that didn’t seem to exist until the Soviet Union fell, the US is now spending more on defense than it was during the Cold War. By 2004 the US defense budget was almost twice that of the next 15 military powers combined. More than twenty years after Bush promised a peace dividend, Washington is still stretched all over the greater Middle East, which is ablaze.

Country by country, here’s what went wrong:

KUWAIT
Kuwait was an artificial entity created by the British. Since gaining independence in 1932, every government in Baghdad had claimed Kuwait to be an Iraqi province. After being Washington’s ally for nearly ten years during Iraq’s ruinous war on Iran’s western border, Saddam Hussein was looking for a “peace dividend” of his own after that war ended in a stalemate. He had a legitimate quarrel with Kuwait over oil. Acting as a presumptive US ally, Saddam consulted Washington about it. Washington’s seasoned ambassador to Baghdad, Ms. April Glaspie, appeared to indicate in face-to-face conversations that the matter did not concern Washington.

No matter. President George H. W. Bush and James Baker III decided in their ultimate wisdom that Washington had to jump in and prevent annexation. Desert Storm commenced with an aerial bombardment in January 1991 and then a ground assault in February. Ironically, Desert Storm turned Osama bin Laden into an Islamic-world hero. Prior to that, he had been America’s de facto ally. He had led a considerable contingent of Muslim volunteers in the 1980s when they fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In Desert Storm’s aftermath, Washington quarantined Iraq as part of an effort to oust Saddam from power. Murderous and draconian economic sanctions were imposed. There was malnutrition and the degradation of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, especially water-purification plants. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died. Lesley Stahl confronted Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a famous 60 Minutes interview about the policy. Albright stated in a moment of unguarded candor that the sanctions were “worth it,” even if the overall situation was difficult to understand.

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IRAQ

The blowback from American meddling in the Middle East came on September 11th, 2001, eight months into G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s neoconservative regime. The terror attacks provided Cheney and his operatives with a field day. There were now no limits to what Washington might attempt to do in the world.

Iraq is still smoldering from the unprovoked 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation. Washington has constructed a billion-dollar embassy in the middle of Baghdad’s Green Zone, but the Shiite government that Washington installed in Iraq wants American troops out of the country as soon as possible. It has been estimated that the price of war in Iraq will cost the US Treasury anywhere from eight hundred billion to three trillion dollars. That’s not a peacetime dividend. That’s a huge wartime debt.

AFGHANISTAN
Peace Prize Obama’s “right war” in Afghanistan (as distinguished from the Republicans’ “wrong war” in Iraq) is rapidly going from bad to worse. The fact that General Petraeus has been nominated to head the CIA tells you that Washington has thrown in the towel in Afghanistan. There is nothing Petraeus or anybody else can do there. The Pentagon has hit the wall in Afghanistan, like the Kremlin and the British Empire did before it. And the “dividend” will be another bill of at least four hundred billion dollars—drawn, as it always is, from the taxpayers’ account.

LIBYA
Libya is the next convenient target, either by default or as a kind of afterthought. As if there were not enough on Washington’s plate already, Obama’s national security team has allowed itself to be talked into joining Libya’s civil war. It looks as if Robert Gates tried to inform the White House’s masterminds that the US military was stretched to the limit. It did not matter. Obama and Hillary pushed through UN Security Council resolution 1973, which gave all interested parties enough cover to do whatever they wanted.

Muammar Gaddafi is a gangster just like Saddam Hussein was, but at least he is a gangster among his own people. He and his sons could be watched and curtailed, if need be, from over the horizon. Even more than G. W.‘s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, Obama’s air war in Libya is blatantly unconstitutional, unauthorized by Congress, and in general, just plain nuts on various levels.

All the above is the natural cumulative result of Washington’s flawed decisions in the Cold War’s aftermath. Why couldn’t DC have withdrawn from “foreign entanglements” and left Middle Eastern security to those in the Middle East? None of this activity is consistent with a peace dividend. Precisely the opposite—it’s a financial liability that will last generations.

How such blood-soaked destruction in Muslim lands benefits the average American is hard to fathom, especially when it comes to oil’s price on the world market and the gargantuan tax bill for such needless meddling.

The peace dividend that was promised back in 1989 has vanished and along with it, a golden age which might have been. Washington’s wrongheaded Middle Eastern interventions remain open-ended and largely unfunded. We have nothing to gain—and everything to lose—in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. On the surface, the incendiary policy that squandered the peace dividend may be considered shortsighted and benighted. Looking deeper, it could be a monstrous crime by insiders who know they will never be held accountable.

It looks as if Washington has fallen into another trap with Obama’s move on Libya. Yes, the Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi is a nutcase and a bloodstained dictator who deserves a merciless kick in the pants and to be bastinadoed within an inch of his life. But the important question remains: Does the Washington-enabled armed intervention into Libya make sense? Patrick Buchanan has argued from the start that military intervention would be a bad idea. Buchanan is unfortunately correct—unfortunate because it would be nice to see Washington honestly come to the rescue of innocent people who need a helping hand.

In the popular imagination, humanitarian intervention motivates the affair. Obama has used it exclusively to justify his policy. Upon his return from South America, he addressed the issue at the National Defense University on March 28:

“...at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action…the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves….I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

We are supposed to buy that at face value.

Prior to leaving for South America, Obama proclaimed strong endorsement for UN Security Council Resolution 1973 and then issued an ultimatum:

“The resolution that passed lays out very clear conditions…these terms are not negotiable….If Gaddafi does not comply with the resolution…the resolution will be enforced through military action.”

Armed with the UNSC resolution, Obama went to war and departed for South America. That was that.

Team Obama saw no requirement to get congressional authorization of any kind before attacking another country. This should not be surprising at this late date. It reflects the reality of the Imperial Presidency. Obama’s nonchalance irks paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan, progressive Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and libertarian Congressman Ron Paul. But if you think it is an impeachable offense, you are living in a dream world.

This sort of cavalier, unilateral action by the White House has been around for a long time and is therefore condoned. It started with the Spanish-American War of 1898, if not before. The 20th century’s two World Wars were presidential wars, driven by a private White House agenda kept hidden from Congress and the American people. Declarations of war in 1917 and 1941 by the Congress were legal afterthoughts. By design and incendiary policies, Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt made war inevitable. In FDR’s case, he deliberately provoked it.

The phenomenon has come to be called “liberal interventionism” which predates the neocons, and it is taken for granted by the Washington establishment. We have to improve the world and make it over in our own image. All of this would be wonderful were it not so hypocritical and ridiculous. At the same time Obama expresses humanitarian concern for Libyan civilians, he has presided over a greatly expanded campaign of drone attacks in the wilds of Pakistan, outdoing anything perpetrated by Dick Cheney and his sidekick, G. W. Bush. These attacks have resulted in the massacre of hundreds, if not thousands, of defenseless civilians. It is called collateral damage. It has made a lot of enemies for America in that part of the world. It has helped destabilize Pakistan and radicalize a sizable portion of its population.

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This is something that evolved from the 9/11 attacks, like artificially low interest rates and the resultant 2008 Wall Street financial crisis. Tellingly, Peace Prize Obama made an effort to explain the background and legal justification for his AfPak war policy in his West Point speech of December 1st, 2009: “Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaeda and those who harbored them—an authorization that continues to this day.” In other words, the authorization for war in the Middle East is open-ended, to be determined and interpreted by the White House as it sees fit. This includes US air attacks in Pakistan or anywhere else. No further authorization is needed.

With Libya, the White House has gone one step beyond. Obama is utilizing the fig leaf of a non-unanimous UN resolution. He bypasses the US Congress entirely. This is a further precedent for future wars of choice by the executive branch with no oversight whatsoever. Anything goes. My guess is that the White House, having been blindsided by events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain, wants to co-opt the so-called “Arab Spring” going forward. Washington wants to take credit for this spontaneous movement, to channel and control it. Washington gave Mubarak and Gaddafi wholehearted support for years; the former because he was in bed with Israel, the latter because he sat on an ocean of oil. Now they are expendable simply because they have outlived their usefulness or viability.

As a counter-policy, let’s first stop telling lies and do no harm to the people on the ground. Veteran foreign policy observer William Pfaff prudently warned of the Libyan ramifications on March 8, prior to events careening out of control:

“...military intervention is highly destructive. A no-fly zone sounds sensible and prudent, but the U.S….does not intervene anywhere without first suppressing all possible defensive threats…. Hence, a NATO or U.S. no-fly zone would be preceded by days if not weeks of systematic bombardment…with much ‘collateral damage’ and many civilian casualties. It is not a humanitarian policy.”

To date, there has already been substantial destruction of infrastructure and adverse consequences for civilians due to the fighting and bombing. The Libyan economy is in shambles. Foreign corporations and workers have rushed to the exits. Food and medicine are in short supply. We may be on the threshold of a humanitarian disaster. What is the plan in the event Gaddafi, his family, and their tribe hunker down? Conservative MP Rory Stewart offers further insights and warnings—”Here we go again”—in the current issue of the London Review of Books.

This past weekend produced an informative article in The New York Times concerning French President Nick Sarkozy and the boulevardier “philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy. According to this report, it was these two social climbers’ joint leadership which brought about the Western intervention in Libya. Although Monsieur BHL is considered to be a charlatan and a jackass by some, that does not rule out the possibility that he could be right on this issue. The article tells a credible story, not denied by the principals, that it was the grandstanding Lévy who persuaded the hyperactive Sarkozy who persuaded the smooth-talking Obama to jump into Libya. At bottom, this was a French démarche, with Obama providing the necessary military firepower and the UNSC enabling.

If so, I’m all for it. I mean, I would have been all in favor of letting the French, the Brits, and the Italians take care of this matter. They have enough firepower, at least when it comes to Libya. The Mediterranean should be considered a European lake, and Libya is a former Italian colony. My guess is that Hillary and Obama could not stand the idea. The notion of Europe actually doing something on its own for a change was anathema and a threat to the Washington foreign-policy establishment. Team Obama had to get involved. Their egos demanded it. So here we are, for better or worse.