Climate Denialism: A Future Crime

By Steve Hynd

TP Green notes that Mitt Romney is climbing aboard the denialist crazy train in his search for GOP primary votes, attacking Gingrich in a public email for appearing in a 2008 ad for Al Gore's climate campaign.

Romney�s campaign spokesman Ryan Williams bashed Gingrich as being part of the �Soros agenda� for the advertisement:

"It is interesting to see the latest attack from Speaker Gingrich and his disintegrating campaign. Unlike Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney never sat next to Nancy Pelosi in an ad funded by George Soros on behalf of Al Gore�s global warming initiative. As recently as 2008, the Soros agenda had no better friend than Newt Gingrich. Nice try, Mr. Speaker."

For most of the world, anthropogenic climate change is settled science. We get that putting more energy into the system (a.k.a global warming) means not just an overall temperature rise but also vastly more energetic and unpredicatble weather systems leading to things like unusual cold spells and snowfalls in Winter, or to stronger tonadoes and heavier flooding in areas where such already occur. The evidence is overwhelming and the notion that climate change is some Soros-created conspiracy is just crazy. Anyone who believes otherwise has a reality-map which is so divergent from what is actually happening as to fulfil the primary requirement for a psychosis: a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired.

But the Republican Party has been bought and paid for by the Energy lobby; the Kochs and Halliburton, Exxon and the rest. Scientific shills for hire take to the pages of rightwing newspapers to push the Energy lobby's agenda and that filters down to the Republican rank-and-file as a gospel teaching to which purity tests apply. Both Romney and Gingrich, along with others in their party like McCain in 2008, have had to shift their public stances on climate change to a full-on denialism under the sway of this psychosis.

I'd understand if the GOP's position was that anthropogenic climate change was real, was happening, but that it was economically unviable to try to halt its progression. I'd disagree but at least it'd be a logically consistent position and the GOP could join the rest of us in talking about how we handle the effects of that change. Instead, their denialist intransigence is shaping up to become the greatest crime against humanity the Republicans have ever backed - and I include Iraq, their many bigotries and their "I'm alright, Jack" economic support for the 1% against the 99% in that statement. If they won't admit there's a cause, they cannot begin to formulate policies to deal with the problems.

Analyst Jack Whipple puts it succinctly:

"Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come."

While a 2007 report by the centrist think-tank CNAS was rather more explicit:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6�C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

The tipping point for that 2.6�C radical change has already been reached.

As TP Green's Brad Johnson noted last year:

The Republican Party is doing its utmost to cripple our nation�s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. At Majority Leader Eric Cantor�s behest, House GOP slashed clean energy investments to pay for emergency disaster relief following the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They cut the DHS disaster preparedness budget, including firefighter funding, in half (after Democrats raised an outcry, some firefighter grants were restored). They have blocked funding for the NOAA Climate Service, and slashed money for critical weather satellites. In states throughout the nation, conservatives are gutting clean-energy programs and attacking climate science, while local emergency services budgets are stripped to the bone.

With the security of our homeland under the clear and present threat of global warming, conservatives are choosing to cripple our defenses, simply to serve the obscene profits of climate polluters.

Climate change is the big anvil-to-be around the GOP's neck. In decades to come, their denialism for so many years will wreck their claims to be the strong party on national security, as it becomes clearer that their intransigence (and being in hock to the energy lobby) for nearly a decade in power under Bush left the US lagging behind others in facing up to the security challenges climate change entails. Mitt and the other GOP frontrunners want to repeat that crime of ommission for another term or two. Meanwhile, many people will die and others will live miserable lives. Their denialism constitutes a crime against humanity "in waiting".

Aboriginal People's Tragedy = Profit Opportunity!

By BJ Bjornson

Some background information needed for this one. The tiny Northern Ontario Aboriginal community of Attawapiskat has been in the news a lot recently here in Canada due to the fact that years of neglect have finally caused enough of crisis to receive widespread attention, with the Red Cross flying in aid to help the desperately poor people living there.

I�d like to write more about the situation itself, but several others far better informed and eloquent have already been on the case. You can start here, then here, and in fact that whole blog is well-worth the read, and then you can head over to here if you want to get more informed about the whole mess, at least for a start.

My own contribution has to do with an article I came across in the Financial Post, that starts with this:

De Beers Canada and its Victor diamond mine is currently in the media spotlight regarding the poverty in the nearby First Nations community of Attawapiskat. Many are questioning why the community is not significantly benefiting from this diamond mine, located on its traditional territory. The Victor deposit � which is the smallest of Canada�s four diamond mines � just started production in July 2008 and has an expected life of 11 years. The mine employs about 500 people, half of whom are of First Nations background and 100 come from Attawapiskat.

I then read through the article, which swiftly moves to criticism of the Far North Act, which has set aside lands for parks and other, non-destructive mining uses, and then goes on to laud the amount of money being spent in exploration and the fact that some of the newer mines are hiring some small portion of their workforce from the surrounding aboriginal communities. But there appears to be something missing from the whole thing.

Well, actually, there�s a whole lot missing, like the entire history of the mining industry in rural Canada, with its poisoned rivers, fishing lakes turned into toxic tailings ponds, and massive clean-up bills left to the taxpayers after all the valuable minerals had been sucked out of the ground, but no, there�s something more that�s missing from this article that can be basically summed up as:

What�s happening to those people in Attawapiskat is a tragedy, so give us more land to pillage the wealth out of, and then ...

Yeah, it�s the �and then� that seems to be missing. It�s the answer to the question from the article�s opening paragraph. If these mines and their bounty are so valuable and productive to the local aboriginal communities in northern Canada that to deny mining companies the ability to despoil massive tracts of landscape in their hunt for more minerals is the equivalent of being anti-aboriginal, then why, pray tell, is Attawapiskat in such dire straights when they have an existing diamond mine right on their doorstep? Where are those fantastic benefits from the mine going, if not to the people whose land is being mined? Why is the community "not significantly benefitting from this diamond mine"?

The question is asked, but never answered, since of course the answers wouldn't help the mining industry's cause all that much. If the mining industry was such a unmitigated boon for the communities around them, Attawapiskat wouldn�t be in the news at all, and then this jackass couldn�t use their suffering to pretend that if only those dastardly �well-funded and powerful� environmentalists and �Liberal-left� government folks would allow the (apparently weak and poor) mining corporations access to pillage additional massive tracts of rural wilderness, the folks living in third world conditions in the midst of one the richest countries in the world would be all puppies and flowers.

Too bad it�s all a fairly tale.

Guest Post: The latest Jeffrey Goldberg scandal

Our guest post today comes from "smintheus", a long-time friend of the Newshoggers who usually blogs at Unbossed.com.

On Monday Jeffrey Goldberg added a bizarre and nearly incomprehensible note to a highly controversial post at The Atlantic. The note sought to explain and justify an earlier, unacknowledged revision to the piece whose effect had been to make him appear less foolish. He maintains that he misled readers inadvertently by accidentally deleting the word �UPDATE� from that revision. His account was far from adequate and refers to obscure technical difficulties. Goldberg even said that he couldn�t really understand what had happened as he repeatedly revised the post the previous Friday. He promised to look into his electronic trail to figure the situation out.

Since then, however, Goldberg has added nothing to his garbled explanation. It should be a simple matter to extract from The Atlantic�s servers a record of his updates to that post, if in fact it would corroborate and clarify his flimsy account. As things are, Goldberg stands accused of deliberately doctoring a post to mask how outrageous his original post had been. Prominent journalists such as Jay Rosen have called him to task. And yet four days later Goldberg still has produced no evidence on his own behalf. His colleagues at The Atlantic remain silent as well.

There are detailed descriptions of this scandal here and here.

The facts as I understand them are as follows: Last Friday afternoon Goldberg posted a two-paragraph screed, �Mumbai Comes to Norway,� blaming the attacks unequivocally on Islamic terrorists. When events demonstrated how reckless he�d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an �UPDATE�. At the same time he also added �(UPDATED)� to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.

On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, �On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.� It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in �Mumbai�.

On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he�d made those unacknowledged changes to �Mumbai�, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an �update�. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.

The Atlantic needs to address this disgrace. The �Mumbai� post was reprehensible to begin with. The doctoring of it is a further scandal. Goldberg�s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still.

And as if that weren�t shameful enough, his colleagues at The Atlantic have some answering to do for ignoring or excusing all of this. On Saturday James Fallows called for the Washington Post to apologize for a Jennifer Rubin post that, like Goldberg�s, used the Norway attacks to propagandize about Islamic terrorism. His call was seconded by two other Atlantic writers. But none of them has so much as mentioned Goldberg�s reprehensible �Mumbai� post. In correspondence, Fallows bobbed and weaved when pressed about holding Goldberg to basic journalistic standards.

So will Goldberg and The Atlantic ever properly address this bundle of scandals?

Originally posted here.

The Rhetorical Infrastructure of Violent Hate

By Steve Hynd

The Norwegian rightwing terrorist Anders Breivik is insane, according to his lawyer. This should hardly need saying. Walking calmly among teenagers shooting them by the score is not the action of a sane person. That's something that has been stressed again and again by "counterjihad" and rightwing authors over the last few days as they run to distance themselves from Breivik's fandom for their writings, revealed in his 1,500 page manifesto.

They do have a bit of a point, for once. As Slate's William Saletan puts it:

The vindictive part of me wants to blame [Pamela] Geller and her ilk for what happened in Oslo. But then I remember something Abdul Rauf said: "The Quran explicitly states that no soul shall be responsible for the sins of another. Terrorism, which targets innocents who had no part in a crime, fundamentally violates this Quranic commandment." That principle---that no one should be held responsible for another person's sins---is the moral core of the struggle against terrorism. It's the reason I can't pin the slaughter in Norway on bloggers who never advocated sectarian violence. I just wish those bloggers, and the politicians who echo them, would show Muslims the same courtesy.

And James Joyner, in a fine round-up of various op-eds on this subject, writes:

As Foust notes, the Internet is full of bad ideas, including a great deal of hate speech. Decent people should condemn it. And to the extent intelligent people with large followings are spreading the false message that the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are somehow responsible for the crimes of a handful of their brethren, other intelligent people with large followings should speak up against that notion.

There's a fine line, though, between arguing against bad ideas and calling for civility in our discourse and chilling honest and vigorous debate. There is legitimate reason to talk about things like immigration policy, militant Islam, and national cultural identity. To shut down that discourse because the likes of Anders Behring Breivik might commit outrageous acts of violence would not be "cost-free," either.

But, and here's the rub, writers like Geller, Robert Spencer and the rest don't not advocate sectarian violence either. There's no hint of Ghandi or King style non-violent protest in their writings. Instead their rhetoric, as Marc Sageman says, is the rhetoric of violence.

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik�s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam �is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.�

�This rhetoric,� he added, �is not cost-free.�

If you call your "counterjihadist" blog Gates of Vienna- so named because "At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war"; if you write about Muslim immigration in terms of it being a deliberate "invasion" of Europe by Islam; if the very basis of your argument is couched in terms of a "clash" of civilizations - then you're simply not being an advocate of nonviolence. Only one of the counterjihadist bloggers has the guts to say "It is clear that Anders Behring Breivik is one of us."

His opinions are virtually identical to my own and those of most people in the Counterjihad movement. He accesses the same websites and information sources that most of us do, and he has exactly the same concerns about the Islamification of Europe.

Of course, that same blogger then goes on to put the real blame on the political left:

It is the left-wing that is responsible for this outrage, not the right-wing. This act of violence is the consequence of a deranged political elite attempting to demographic re-engineer an entire continent against the wishes of its people; exploiting imperfections in the democratic system so that the people are never allowed a real choice; passing laws to criminalise free speech so that honest discussion is scarcely possible any more; and a media conspiracy (embodied in laws or informal agreements like the NUJ Guidelines on Race Reporting) to systematically suppress information about the negative consequences mass third-world immigration, and particularly the Muslim component of it, is having on Europe.

And, of course, if you describe "a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite" as if democracy just didn't enter into it; if you describe Norwegian teens as like the "Hitler Youth"; or if you write, baldly, that "Breivik may be right" then you're playing into that conspiracy mindset and your rhetoric will provide the infrastructure for violence when there's no call to eschew violence in sight.

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Opposition to Islam was the killer's stated motivation. He targeted other white Scandinavians because he considered them race traitors. He wrote all of this down, too, so we don't even have to make guesses about it! He blamed liberals for enabling jihad by supporting "multiculturalism." (Funnily enough, that is also exactly what Mark Steyn thinks.)

Breivik's own lawyer confirmed that today.

�He believes that he is in a war and in a war you can do things like that,� Mr. Lippestad said. ...Asked if the rampage was aimed at the Labor Party, or at Muslim immigrants, Mr. Lippestad said, �This was an attack on the Labor Party.�

Contrary to Frontpage Magazine's apologia today, folk like Roberts Spencer don't have to make explicit "calls for anyone to commit acts of terrorism", they just have to refrain from calling on their readers not to commit those violent acts.  Their rhetorical framework uses the language of violence and hate, they should not pretend they are surprised when violence is the result.

My colleague B.J. put it well in a comment yesterday.

Blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few is wrong, but there are those in the Muslim community whose rhetoric and actions place them in a far more blame-worthy position for the violence.

By the same token, I wouldn�t blame all Christians for the actions of the terrorist few like Breivik, but there are those whose rhetoric and actions inspire and inform such actions, and while they may not be directly responsible, neither are they totally blameless.

There is a chain of causality here that cannot be parsed away or sidestepped. It's something everyone involved in the debate - especially conservatives - is just going to have to deal with.

Swimming In A Sea Of Night Raids

By Steve Hynd

The New York Times headline says "Night Raids Curbing Taliban, but Afghans Cite Civilian Toll". What the paper seems to have missed is that the Taliban aren't foreigners. The U.S. military can cite its own secret figures and secret investigations all it wants to "show" that night raids are an effective counter-terrorism tool but - since the Taliban are not a threat to the United States and the Afghan government wants the raids to stop - it is obvious that Afghan sovereignty and the rule of law are being treated as a joke.

The method of the raids, especially the forced entry of houses and invasion of women�s quarters, let alone killing of women, is deeply offensive culturally to Afghans. Although coalition forces say most raids are conducted using a �soft knock� � calling by loudspeaker for people to come out � there are still numerous accounts of forced entry and cases of men being shot in their beds next to their wives.

The raids and attendant sweeping arrests have become the primary complaint of rural communities, human rights officials say. When Lt. Col. Aziz Ahmad took up a new job as police chief of Shah Joy District in the southeastern province of Zabul, townspeople asked immediately what he could do to stop the night raids.

Reports of innocents arrested and beaten, of wives killed, even of pregnant woman butchered to remove the evidence, abound. Even if only one in five raids is mistargeted then the understandable outrage generated has knock-on effects that soon outweigh any possible military benefits. Effects like this today:

An Afghan guard opened fire and shot dead two NATO troops accompanying a reconstruction convoy traveling in a northern province today.  The shooting took place in the Darah district of Panjshir province, about 62 miles north of the capital, Kabul, according to provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Qasim Jangalbagh.  The police chief said the guard, who goes by the name Amanullah, was standing outside his home when the convoy passed by. He stopped the convoy, started arguing with the NATO troops and then opened fire, Jangalbagh said. A third coalition service member was wounded in the shooting.  Jangalbagh said another NATO service member fired back and killed Amanullah.

...More than 70 people have been killed incidents involving Afghan security forces, or attackers disguised as security personnel, who have turned their weapons against Afghan or NATO troops since September 2007.  Such incidents have become more common over time. Out of about 25 attacks, nearly half took place in 2011.

Or like this:

According to United Nations and Afghan government estimates, night raids caused more than half of the nearly 600 civilian deaths attributable to coalition forces in 2009.

Those raids, which also violate the sanctity of the Afghan home, have become the primary Afghan grievance against the U.S. military. As long ago as May 2007, Carlotta Gall and David Sanger described in the New York Times how night raids had provoked an entire village in Herat province to become so angry with the U.S. military that men began carrying out military operations against it.

Or like this:

A quiet city in the north of Afghanistan ignited today after yet another NATO night raid reportedly tore another family apart. Thousands of people took to the streets, again chanting, "Death to America!" as they pelted Karzai's billboards with mud and stones. They attacked police. They attacked the local NATO outpost. At least a dozen people were killed in the clash, which showed local rage directed at every level of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy, from the local security forces, to our corrupt and feckless local "partners" in the Karzai government, to the U.S. itself.

As experts like Matt Aikins, Giles Dorronsoro, Antonio Giustozzi, Anatol Lieven, Nir Rosen and Alex Strick van Linschoten put it, in their open letter to Obama last December:

What was supposed to be a population-centred strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and destruction of property. Night raids have become the main weapon to eliminate suspected Taliban, but much of the Afghan population sees these methods as illegitimate. Due to the violence of the military operations, we are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Pashtun countryside, with a direct effect on the sustainability of the war. These measures, beyond their debatable military results, foster grievance. ... The losses of the insurgency are compensated by new recruits who are often more radical than their predecessors.

The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a cure.

In fact, the end result of all these night raids, as opposed to negotiating a peace settlement, seems to be to perpetuate a war that is not in Afghanistan's interest and no longer, by a long chalk, in anyone's interests in the U.S. other than careerist generals and DoD budgeteers. 

You Can't Be Raped If You're A Bad Girl, But You Can Walk If You're Rich

By Steve Hynd

Today's piece of yellow journalism from the NY Times about "major holes in the credibility" of the woman who accused IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn or rape , a piece obviously co-ordinated with leaks to the Associated Press, is causing some stir. Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha does a good rundown of the NYT and AP leaked "major holes".

Let us sort the anonymous "law enforcement" claims about the accuser from most to least serious!

� "the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him." This is the most interesting thing, as it was recorded, and is the actual kind of thing that can be used in court.

� "the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said." These lies are not explained or listed, except for some conflicts regarding her asylum application.

� a "number" of men put something like $50,000 in her bank account each year for two years. One of them was arrested for having a lot of drugs. She said one of these men was her fianc�/p>

� "she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies." I think this one is an insinuation that goes unelaborated?

� She said she was raped in her asylum application but the application contains no note of that, and she said she had been genitally mutilated before she arrived in America but her "account" differs from her formal application for asylum.

Annnnnnd that's it. You know what would be useful? Evidence presented in a court of law. Oh yes! The American way, so hated by French intellectuals.

As plenty of people are saying today, that the woman may have lied on a number of matters does not mean she may have lied on sexual assault. Moreover,there's no indication in the NYT story that Strauss-Kahn is also not a credible witness, one who initially denied being anywhere near the place at the time, then said he was having lunch with his daughter and finally sorta-kinda admitting that there was sexual contact after all. That is, his defense lawyers are not now contesting the results of the rape kit which found his DNA in bodily fluids on the woman's body.

Strauss-Khan has been accused of sexual assault by others, most notably by French writer Tristane Banon but also by "Manhattan Madame" Kristin Davis, who provided prostitutes for Elliot Spitzer, and has named Strauss-Kahn as a client  saying that he was "aggresive", "rough and angry" with the $600-an-hour girls she sent him. Today in the Guardian, they noted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz' observation to Newsweek that "All the money is his wife's money" - that is, the wealthy finiancier has deliberately sheltered his wealth from civil lawsuits alleging crimes of this nature. His lawyer is Benjamin Brafman, who has made a lucrative career out of defending the predations of the rich and famous by casting doubt on witness testimony and the judicious use of planted leaks to the press - then cutting plea deals if that didn't work.

Some observations of this kind from the NYT would have been useful information for its readers, but no. Instead we get, as Andrew Cohen notes:

The New York Times' story Thursday night -- which posits the notion that the prosecution's case against the former chief of the International Monetary Fund chief is "on the verge of collapse" -- is a devastating bit of business. Even if portions of it are inaccurate -- and I am not claiming that they are -- the piece virtually guarantees that prosecutors would lose the case if they were to proceed to trial. This is so because the alleged victim's credibility now is forever shattered -- for her, there's no going back from this in the court of public opinion, which will make up the jury pool, which ultimately would make up the deliberating panel. Such is the power of the press! And such is the burden of proof in a criminal case.

 That the leaks seem to have come from prosecutors or law enforcement officials rather than Strauss-Kahn's defense team mean little to me - DSK and his backers have deep pockets and a lot of influence. At this rarified level of politics and international finance, the connections are downright incestuous (as illustrated by the bio of the alleged victim's lawyer). The prosecutors office may have found this evidence that harms the credibility of DSK's accuser, but were they led to it? And what business do they then have leaking the details to the press and utterly spoiling the jury pool?

I continue to believe that Strauss-Kahn is probably guilty - and that there's no inconsistency in a democracy between the legal presumption of innocence and my having a personal opinion about guilt or innocence.

Update: Strauss-Kahn has been released without bail.

At a hearing to seek changes to his bail conditions, prosecutors said the credibility of the woman at the center of the case had been thrown into question.

As a result, the court agreed to let Strauss-Kahn be freed and his bail and bond returned. He agreed to return to court as needed, including for a July 18 hearing.

"I understand that the circumstances of this case have changed substantially and I agree the risk that he would not be here has receded quite a bit. I release Mr. Strauss-Kahn at his own recognizance," Justice Michael Obus told the court.

Privilege literally means "private law".

For 2012, Republicans run to the anti-war side of the street

By Steve Hynd

According to Mike Allen of Politico, Wahington Post conservative writer George Will's Sunday column will call U.S. intervention in Libya a "debacle" and an "absurdly disproportionate and patently illegal war". In saying that, he'll be speaking for a sizeable part of the American public. But more importantly he'll be giving valuable political support to Republicans, both incumbents and prospective presidential candidates, as they head for 2012 by running to the anti-war left.

House leader Boehner says he is reviewing options on Libya after the White House's non-answer on the question of congressional authorization:

�The White House says there are no hostilities taking place, yet we�ve got drone attacks under way, we�re spending $10 million a day, [and] part of the mission is to drop bombs on [Libyan dictator Moammar] Gadhafi's compound,� Boehner said. �That doesn�t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we�re not in the midst of hostilities.�

...The �ultimate option,� Boehner said, is that �Congress has the power of the purse� and could cut off funding for the mission. �Certainly that is an option as well,� he said.

Such a move would certainly be opposed by Dems in the Senate and in any case vetoed by Obama, leading to an optic going into 2012 of Democrats, led by a loose-cannon President, forcing Congress to fund a war they haven't authorized. Thanks to weak-kneed Dems, the Left could only dream of such a scenario going into 2008 - one that would have led to an even bigger landslide for Obama and could lead to apathy on the part of the Democratic base next year.

Boehner's not the only one sounding like a peacenik lefty hippie recently either. As Jim Malone of VOA News notes:

The recent Republican debate had a different tone in the discussion of the war in Afghanistan compared to debates in the past two U.S. presidential elections.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the frontrunner for the Republican Party�s presidential nomination next year. Romney says the long U.S. commitment to the war in Afghanistan should serve as a cautionary lesson to those who would support nation-building efforts in the future.

�I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals," he said. "But I also think we have learned that our troops should not go off and try to fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan�s independence from the Taliban.�

During the debate Ron paul went even further:

�I wouldn�t wait for my generals. I�m the commander in chief. I make the decisions," he said. "I tell the generals what to do and I would bring them home as quickly as possible and I would get them out of Iraq as well. And I wouldn�t start a war in Libya and I would quit bombing Yemen and I�d quit bombing Pakistan.�

And even Michele Bachmann described American policy on Libya as "substantially flawed".

Finally, today newly-announced candidate Jon Huntsman threw his anti-war statement into the arena:

Huntsman, during an interview last week with CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley that aired on "State of the Union," raised the question of whether U.S. forces can remain until 2014 or beyond. "I would argue you can if you're willing to pay another quarter of a trillion dollars to do so. But if it isn't in our direct national security interest and if there isn't a logical exit strategy and if we don't know what the cost is going to be in terms of money and human lives, then I think you have to say it's probably time we reevaluate this if we can't make that strong argument with the American people."

In a separate interview just published in Esquire Magazine, Huntsman said remaining engaged in Afghanistan does not seem to be key to America's national security.

"It's a tribal state, and it always will be. Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it's now or years from now, we'll have an incendiary situation...Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don't think that serves our strategic interests," Huntsman, a former U.S. ambassador to China, told Esquire. In excerpts released of its upcoming story, Huntsman said if the U.S. can't "define a winning strategy for the American people, where we somehow come out ahead, then we're wasting our money, and we're wasting our strategic resources."

Huntsman told CNN the American people want to be out of the country "as quickly as we can get it done."

It's making for an interesting 2012, I must say. Not that I believe one word of it, though. Like Democrat apparatchiks before them, the Republican power players are just trying to tap the votes of an American public which is sick of the Forever War. Indside the beltway, though, interventionism as the guiding light of American foreign policy isn't dead - in fact it is flourishing. Like Dems in 2008 who deserted the anti-war movement in droves, Republicans will spurn their current stances should they win the presidency and reclaim the wars as "theirs".

How Much Of An Afghanistan Withdrawal?

By Steve Hynd

Prof. Donald Snow is one of the treasures of the international relations/military affairs analyst community. His work is always clear, approachable (a minimum of acronym-laden jargon) and sensible. Yesterday at the New Atlanticist he neatly summarized competing arguments on the strength of any Afghan troop withdrawal.

The opponents, whose chief spokesman increasingly is Massachusetts senator John Kerry (chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Democratic nominee for president in 2004), make at least three separate arguments for pulling back. The first is that the United States cannot afford to continue to drop $10 billion a month into Afghanistan given current economic conditions at home. The expenses are particularly odious because they are inflated by the costs of �nation-building� associated with the Petraeus strategy of counterinsurgency, a cost that could be reduced with a smaller commitment with smaller troop numbers. Second, they argue the situation can be handled with a more concentrated effort aimed at the remnants of Al Qaeda, which requires neither large numbers of �muddy boots� on the ground nor the levels of financial resources currently being expended. Third, the scaling back is further justified by the successful elimination of Usama bin Laden (and subsequently his heir apparent), leaving the terrorist organization in some level of disarray. Not so openly discussed are the further assumptions that the war is probably unwinnable under any circumstances and that the Karzai government does not really warrant continuing American support (part of the reason the war is unwinnable).

Supporters, of course, disagree with this assessment. Their arguments are most sharply made by active participants in the war itself, notably Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General Petraeus. Both of these officials have argued that progress has been made but that it is, in a phrase first used by Petraeus but adopted by Gates, �fragile and reversible.� The heart of the argument is that real progress is being made and that a precipitous drawdown would endanger what has been accomplished. In Gates� own words, �Far too much has been accomplished, at far too great a cost, to let the momentum slip away just as the enemy is on its back foot.� In an interview with 60 Minutes, Gates drew a football analogy, warning against abandoning the field when the U.S. was on the enemy�s �two-yard line.� Critics, of course, find these descriptions of progress to be overblown.

...So what will the president decide? As usual in the hyper-partisan atmosphere that dominates Washington, it is a �damned if he does, damned if he doesn�t� set of choices. He cannot avoid withdrawals altogether, because to do so would be politically too injurious, reneging on a public promise and alienating his natural constituent base on the left. He cannot order a massive withdrawal, because doing do runs the risk of the entire enterprise going south before the 2012 election, and certainly inflaming the core of the GOP right. That leaves him with options inside the extremes, ranging from a token to a moderate to a sizable reduction. So what will the President choose to do?

Professor Snow is doubtless correct that Obama will try to keep both these constituencies happy by announcing a withdrawal amount that splits the difference:

Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a porridge that is not too hot, not too cold, but just right. How does a reduction of 15-20,000 sound?

The prospect of Obama making such a political decision and emerging unscathed, however, isn't a good one. Any withdrawal of less than the whole of that original 30,000 "surge" force announced in December 2009 amounts to a de facto escalation - albeit with considerable legerdemain. The American public are in less of a mood to accept that than ever, given the many different ways in which the surge has failed to meet Obama's plan as announced back then:

These are the three core elements of our strategy: a military effort to create the conditions for a transition; a civilian surge that reinforces positive action; and an effective partnership with Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the career-minded generals who know careers go better and faster when there's a war on are talking about a Mega-Friedman Unit: staying to 2017. Republicans who support the military-industrial complex which supports such insanity aren't going to lay off Obama if he throws them half a bone in any case.

Obama should go big on withdrawal. Unfortunately I agree with Prof. Snow that he'll wimp out and go small.

House GOP: Forget The Tornadoes - Fear The Mexicans!

By Steve Hynd

The Republican Party has presided over a decade of ignoring the largest single threat to America's national security - climate change. They continue to put their own fear of "the other" before a clear and present danger to the American public. Via Think Progress and our own tireless Kat:

In a nearly party-line vote of 242 to 180 on Thursday, the House adopted an amendment by Rep. John Carter (R-TX) to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from participating in the Obama administration�s Interagency Task Force on Climate Change Adaptation.

The DHS's role in that Task Force is disaster planning: constituent agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard are involved in flood management, safeguarding fresh water resources, and disaster response. FEMA logs 38 Federal climate-related disasters already this year (before hurricane season even starts) and 81 last year (the most since at least 1953). There are also federal responses to seven climate related emergency declarations and 57 Fire management Assistance declarations, most caused by the South-West's continuing severe drought.

According to Rep. Carter, the DHS' priority should be securing the southern border with Mexico instead. A place that is safer for police than working in a big city from which workers both legal and illegal come to fuel the U.S. economy.  Even texas, Rep. Carter's own state, gains more in taxation alone from illegal immigration than it spends on services for those immigrants. Some threat.

TP:Climate notes:

The Republican Party is doing its utmost to cripple our nation�s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. At Majority Leader Eric Cantor�s behest, House GOP slashed clean energy investments to pay for emergency disaster relief following the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They cut the DHS disaster preparedness budget, including firefighter funding, in half (after Democrats raised an outcry, some firefighter grants were restored). They have blocked funding for the NOAA Climate Service, and slashed money for critical weather satellites. In states throughout the nation, conservatives are gutting clean-energy programs and attacking climate science, while local emergency services budgets are stripped to the bone.

With the security of our homeland under the clear and present threat of global warming, conservatives are choosing to cripple our defenses, simply to serve the obscene profits of climate polluters.

Climate change is the big anvil-to-be around the GOP's neck. In decades to come, their denialism for so many years will wreck their claims to be the strong party on national security, as it becomes clearer that their intransigence (and being in hock to the energy lobby) for a decade in power left the US lagging behind others in facing up to the security challenges climate change entails.

Michael Lind, VSP Asshat Part Deux

By Steve Hynd

Michael Lind, luminary thinker at the New America Foundation, has a response to critics of his incredibly ill-informed and energy lobby driven op-ed on climate change the other day.

Short version: I'm not a "global warming denialist" but...

If there were really a clear and present danger of catastrophic overheating, we could not afford to rely on feeble, indirect, "market-friendly" measures like cap and trade and renewable energy mandates on utilities, to say nothing of trivial, symbolic gestures like LEED certification of "green" houses. The only rational course of action would be for the federal government to declare martial law, nationalize the energy sector, conscript American industry and engage in an emergency nuclear power build-out at taxpayer expense. There would need to be Marshall Plan subsidies to help poor coal-burning countries shift to nuclear energy. Most people would consider an occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl a price worth paying, if the apocalyptic alternative were a runaway global greenhouse effect and the end of civilization or humanity on an earth as dead as Venus.

Get that? If the incredibly well informed and impeccably respectable VSP's who correctly foresaw the derivatives debacle and housing bubbles before the turned into economy-wrecking crises aren't doing shit, then obviously we've nothing to worry about. Trust us. (/snark)

Along the way, Lind makes some other howlers, like failing to wonder why Europe needs a country-sized solar plant in Africa when it has plenty of wind, tide and hydro resources of its own. Umm, Scotland, Mr. Lind? Well on it's way to generating 100% of its own power requirements from renewable means by 2020.

And as for the notion of a massive build of nuke plants, when studies show it'd be difficult to find enough safe sites to increase nuclear generation worldwide by more than 2%...

This guy gets backing from Democrats. No, really! It's nausea-inducing stuff to contemplate.

Yet another F from Lind, who seems to have assembled his op-eds by copying and pasting from big energy pamphlets. And yet another F for Salon for continuing to publish his shill pieces.

Michael Lind - Fossil Fuel Shill Or Unwitting Dupe?

By Steve Hynd

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, a heavyweight pundit at a heavyweight left-leaning thinktank. At Salon yesterday, he attempted to make the case that "everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong" (H/t Kat). In the process, he becomes a shill, willing or duped, for the entrenched energy lobby. An extended quote, with my emphasis, is in order.

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable �shale gas� or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable �tight oil,� thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken "play" along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India.

Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the dangers of fracking).

The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at least until China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves.

Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of fossil fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic global warming?

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world�s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world�s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy consumption.

There's just so much wrong with this and I've tried to flag up the key mis-statements in bold. Let's take those bolded sections and see why Lind is only considering a carefully chosen picture.

Fracking does indeed free up new oil and gas resources. But it comes at a heavy cost - one probably too heavy to pay in a world where "water wars" are already a reality. Fracking relies on injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to fracture the strata and release the fossil fuels. The trouble is that most of the world's shale deposits also constitute valuable ground water resources, used to provide irrigation and water for both animal and human consumption. As Texas - which has the worst water quality in the U.S. -has already discovered, fracking increases contamination of those ground water resevoirs with heavy hydrocarbons and heavy metals, making them unuseable without carbon-heavy, money and energy intensive treatments. Pennsylvania has the same problem.

The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people�s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman�s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.

Linn may be dismissive about the prospect of radical climate change, with dry places getting dryer as wet areas get wetter, but others aren't. More of that later, suffice to say for now that fracking is unlikely to be the complete and perfect panacea that Lind wants it to be, for a variety of reasons to do with poisoning the very people it is supposed to provide energy to. Oh, and then there's the little thing about it possibly causing earthquakes in some areas (H/t Kat). How well that would go down in Lind's "nuclear heavy" world doesn't have to be imagined.

But even if all the problems with fracking could be ressolved satisfactorily, we're not out of the woods and into Lind's fossil fuel Utopia yet. Lind correctly states that burning methane produces less carbon than burning coal or oil. He just doesn't say exactly how much less. However the EPA figures (PDF) show that methane has half the carbon emmissions for a given heat content of coal and threequarters that of fuel oil. Coal is far and away the most carbon-heavy way to "power industrial civilization" and can't be done heavily for another decade, let alone "centuries", without tipping the world into catastrophic climate change. Burning methane is only going to put off that problem for a little while.

And this is where Lind really shows his hand. he may well state, blithely, that "scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes" but he gives no additional evidence for this statement -- and the vast majority of experts disagree. In 2008, an equally auspicious thinktank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which has provided the wonk thinking and many appointees for the Obama administration's foreign and defense policy, had this to say about a mere 2.6 degree Celsius (4.7 degrees Farenheit) global temperature increase:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6�C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

And just on Friday, new figures on carbon emmissions were released which made the idea of keeping global temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius a utopian one, according to the chief economist of the International Energy Authority. CNAS' scenario is the one we're already facing. It can get worse, if we keep burning fossil fuels at profligate rates as Lind suggests.

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100," he said.

At a 5.6 degree Celsius (10 Farenheit) rise, according to CNAS:

The catastrophic scenario, with average global temperatures increasing by 5.6�C by 2100, finds strong and surprising intersections between the two great security threats of the day� global climate change and international terrorism waged by Islamist extremists. This catastrophic scenario would pose almost inconceivable challenges as human society struggled to adapt. It is by far the most difficult future to visualize without straining credulity. The scenario notes that understanding climate change in light of the other great threat of our age, terrorism, can be illuminating. Although distinct in nature, both threats are linked to energy use in the industrialized world, and, indeed, the solutions to both depend on transforming the world�s energy economy�America�s energy economy in particular. The security community must come to grips with these linkages, because dealing with only one of these threats in isolation is likely to exacerbate the other, while dealing with them together can provide important synergies.

Lind, in his position as a senior director at New America, must have read the CNAS reports. Apparently he just wanted to ignore them. He's likewise ignoring the evidence when he writes that "the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power". As Andrew Simms notes in the Guardian today (H/t Kat): "A comprehensive, favourable assessment by MIT concluded that even under an almost unimaginably positive scenario, containing several major unsolved problems, nuclear would only increase its global share of electricity generation by 2%". As Simms also says:

Mobilise the same amount of money that was used to bail out states and banks in the wake of the financial market failures, and use it to invest in smart grids and mixed renewable energy systems. That scale of investment could, potentially, displace fossil fuels at a stroke.

But if there's anything on which Lind should know his stuff, it's foreign policy and international relations. Unfortunately, he drops the ball there too, with his predictions that shale oil and gas will finally free the US and Europe of the tyranny of Russian and Middle eastern energy blackmail, and enable the West to contemplate a more hands-off policy with regards to those regions. You see, he's also willfully ignoring the news that the climate-change driven food crisis (H/t Kat):

An Oxfam report published yesterday forecasts that a billion people will go undernourished this year. It is not the only one to sound the alarm: last week the UN warned that spiralling food prices could well lead to riots, as happened in 30 countries three years ago. Then there is Christian Aid, which recently put out its own report on hunger, and the World Bank, which has talked more and more of late about food poverty. However alarming Oxfam's predictions this week about the future of food might be � that the average price of staples will more than double in the next couple of decades, hitting the world's poorest hardest � few of the other NGOs working in this field would sharply disagree with them. Nor would Oxfam's description of the food-supply system as "bust" be too controversial. Any system that produces enough food for the entire world and yet fails to feed one in seven people, which is subject to rampant speculation and land-grabbing, and where crops and land that could be used to feed people are instead turned into fuel for Hummers, is patently not working.

Add famine to water wars, mass migrations and disease epidemics, not to mention climate-fuelled natural disasters, and one can see why no nation can remain untouched or above dealing with societal changes driven by global warming, even if it wanted to take an "I'm alright, Jack" stance due to its own massive fossil fuel reserves now made accessable. back to CNAS again:

A few countries may benefit from climate change in the short term, but there will be no �winners.� Any location on Earth is potentially vulnerable to the cascading and reinforcing negative effects of global climate change. While growing seasons might lengthen in some areas, or frozen seaways might open to new maritime traffic in others, the negative offsetting consequences�such as a collapse of ocean systems and their fisheries�could easily negate any perceived local or national advantages. Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades or longer. Today�s �winner� could be tomorrow�s big-time loser.

Climate change effects will aggravate existing international crises and problems. Although a shared sense of threat can in some cases promote national innovation and reform as well as induce cooperation among governments, the scenario authors found that climate change is likely to worsen existing tensions, especially over natural resources, and possibly lead to conflict. Indeed, this magnifying of existing problems by climate change is already taking place, from desertification in Darfur, to water shortages in the Middle East, to disruptions of monsoons in South Asia and attendant struggles over land and water use. These and other effects are likely to increase and intensify in the years ahead.

Lind's combination of climate denialism and fracking triumphalism is entirely wrong-headed. I'm not sure whether he, like 9 out of 10 climate denying scientists, was paid by Exxon (or Shell) to deliver his timely Salon vision of utopia - but I almost wish he were simply a paid shill rather than grading his expertise a total F for Fail.

Exxon Backs 9 of 10 Top Climate-Denying Scientists

By Steve Hynd

Via Grist:

Climate change deniers like to point out that they have scientists on their side, too. But an analysis of more than 900 papers supporting climate skepticism showed that about 20 percent of those papers came from the same 10 scientists, and nine of them, according to The Carbon Brief, have ties to ExxonMobil.

Eight of the scientists were directly connected to organizations that took money from Exxon, and one other only showed up on papers written with an Exxon-affiliated scientist. Only one of those 10 could claim to be independent of the oil giant.

Despite their backing for climate-denial so that they can keep making humungous profits from an oil-dependent America, I'm pretty sure Exxon won't be slow to throw their hat into the ring when full-scale development and exploitation of oil and gas reserves uncovered by retreating Arctic ice is possible (due to global warming, duh).

Top diplomats from eight Arctic countries will meet Thursday to set down rules for opening the vast region to fishing, tourism, oil and mineral exploration as global warming melts the ice.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her colleagues from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden will gather in Greenland's tiny capital of Nuuk to discuss how to manage the area's development while protecting its fragile ecosystem.

...Earlier this month scientists said that warming in the Arctic is occurring at twice the global average and is on track to lift sea levels by up to 1.6 metres (5.3 feet) by 2100, a far steeper jump than predicted a few years ago.

Steinberg said Washington wants the Nuuk talks to launch a task force designed to negotiate an instrument for handling Arctic oil spills.

"We know that there are significant deposits of oil and gas that were in the past difficult to access and may become more accessible over time," he said.

The United States wants the Arctic countries to be prepared to both prevent oil spills or other disasters and to create "effective mechanisms to deal with accidents should they happen," Steinberg said.

More than one fifth of the world's undiscovered but technically recoverable reserves of hydrocarbons are located north of the Arctic Circle, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

The region accounts for about 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas, USGS data shows. About 84 percent of the resources are offshore.

Notice how Arctic oils spills are a given, and only deciding how to handle them is an option on the table? A moritorium on drilling in this ecologically fragile region is a non-starter, apparently.

P.S. Exxon gave 88% of its political donations in the 2010 cycle to Republicans.

UK says be prepared for a "long haul" in Libya, calls for more US involvement

By Steve Hynd

On the day that the UK's unrepentantly neoconservative Defense Secretary, Liam Fox, is in the US to hold a presser with Bob Gates, back home his colleague the Foreign Secretary is warning Britons to prepare for a "long haul" in Libya...but there's no stalemate there, honest guv'nor!

Mr Hague told Cabinet that "the mission is going in the right direction but we need to prepare for the long haul" according to a Downing Street spokeswoman.

The Foreign Secretary told MPs the military situation "remains very fluid" and "it has not settled into a stalemate".

"Members will be aware of how much the situation in Misrata has changed over recent days, fighting has gone backwards and forwards on the western borders of Libya although there is a fairly static situation on what might be called the eastern front between Brega and Ajdabiyah.

"But it has not yet settled into what one would call a long-term stalemate."

Hague also told parliament there was no need for a new vote on the Libyan intervention now that the mission has morphed from a simple no-fly zone to boots on the ground, material aid and regime change. The man should do stand-up. Oh, wait.

Whatever happened to "days, not weeks"?

Meanwhile, the intrepid Fox, who has fled his London apartment in pants-wetting terror of Libyan reprisals yet still thinks it's bravely neocon-ish to tell Gaddafi that he'll be assassinated if he doesn't quit and that Libya is the new Afghanistan (no quagmire there, really, guv'nor!), is in the U.S. to beg Bob Gates to back deeper American involvement.

The defence secretary, Liam Fox, and General Sir David Richards, chief of defence staff, are in Washington to drum up what they fear is flagging US support for the military campaign in Libya, British government officials said on Tuesday.

In public they may appear confident, but in reality they are deeply concerned that weeks of almost daily air strikes, at an escalating cost, are not having a decisive impact on the ground, officials say.

Fox, meanwhile, is moving closer to saying that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi himself is a legitimate target, officials add. It is a suggestion Richards has distanced himself from in the past.

Fox and Richards are grateful that the US agreed last week to deploy armed unmanned Predator drones over Libya, but they would dearly like the US to bring back low-flying A10 tankbusters, as well as providing the rebels with more support, including military advisers, Whitehall officials say.

A conflict in the MiddleEast that's being compared to Afghanistan, is settling down for a "long haul" civil war and that neocons are gung-ho for (Fox himself is said to be "loving this crisis"). Oh sure, let's get deeper involved. What could possibly go wrong?

Obama fires State spokesman for saying torture is torture

By Steve Hynd

CNN is reporting that:

P.J. Crowley is abruptly stepping down as State Department spokesman under pressure from White House officials because of controversial comments he made last week about the Bradley Manning case, CNN has learned from senior officials familiar with the matter.

Crowley had called Mannings detention, naked and in solitary confinement, "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid". Which it is. It's also criminal.

Glenn Greenwald has had the best coverage of Manning's ill-treatment, which qualifies as torture. There are several Democratic pundits gearing up to tell us that Crowley's remarks were "undiplomatic" and that of course he had to go, since the administration can't tolerate internal dissent of this nature. That's bullshit. The administration and their shills have completely accepted the Republican narrative on both torture and dissent.

I will not be supporting Obama's re-election bid.

Not so much a "Runaway General" as S.O.P.

A report that Lt. General William B. Caldwell unleashed his PSYOP team on visiting U.S. politicians in Afghanistan, from Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, is being considered a bit of a bombshell. Here's the meat of the piece:

Under duress, Holmes and his team provided Caldwell with background assessments on the visiting senators, and helped prep the general for his high-profile encounters. But according to members of his unit, Holmes did his best to resist the orders. Holmes believed that using his team to target American civilians violated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was passed by Congress to prevent the State Department from using Soviet-style propaganda techniques on U.S. citizens. But when Holmes brought his concerns to Col. Gregory Breazile, the spokesperson for the Afghan training mission run by Caldwell, the discussion ended in a screaming match. �It�s not illegal if I say it isn�t!� Holmes recalls Breazile shouting.

But the drive to push style over substance via propaganda should come as no surprise to most. Just consider Caldwell's previous career path.

From 2002 to 2004, during the critical run-up to and disasterous immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, he was senior military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz and was almost certainly an insider with knowledge of the workings of the Office of Special Plans which stovepiped intelligence to gin up the case for war. That was also the period when Wolfowitz turned down NATO help in Afghanistan, saying that  "We can do everything we need to" - a decision one might presume his senior military assistant had some input on.

In 2005 he was commander of 82nd Airborne when it was tasked with cleaning up after Dubya and FEMA's incompetence in post-Katrina New Orleans, leading to debates about Posse Commitatus and whether battle-hardened troops with assault rifles were best suited to facing down looters on American streets.

By 2006, though, he was handpicked by the Bush White House to be spinmeister in Iraq, becoming  Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Effects and spokesperson for the Multi-National Force � Iraq.

Indeed, although Caldwell from 2007 to 2009 at Leavenworth in charge of the Army's training, his senior career up until he was posted to Afghanistan in charge of training Afghan security forces has been far more about spin and presentation than actual training.

I've even had my own run-in with Caldwell's staff, who appear to glean the internet for negative comments about him. See this post, this post at Small Wars Journal and the comments to both for details. Apparently Captains under Caldwell's command have nothing better to do than make snarky and inaccurate attempts to rebut blogposts by C-list bloggers which criticize the good general.

But readers should also be unsurprised because, well, this is what the military does. It did it in Iraq (partly under Caldwell's leadership) and it is doing it again in Afghanistan. Michael Cohen notes:

Did everyone just forget about the ongoing manipulation that went on in the Summer and Fall of 2009 to convince President Obama to support escalation - the leaks to major newspapers, the strategic review utilizing well-placed DC thinkers, the public smackdown of civilian leaders by four-star general, the failure of our military leadership to provide civilian leaders with alternatives to a population-centric COIN strategy? Or how about the more recent attempts to whitewash the White House's December strategic review or plant news stories about how well things were going in Afghanistan and it was imperative that the June 2011 drawdown date be finessed in order to maintain "momentum" against the Taliban?

For two years now, since this President took office, the US military leadership has been lobbying and yes, manipulating their civilian bosses to support a population-centric COIN operation, higher troop levels and a steadfast commitment to stay the fight in Afghanistan. That civilian leadership has abdicated its responsibility on strategic decision-making to the military has only exacerbated the problem. But only a blind person would deny that this is what has been taking place.

And Jim White at FDL takes the same argument further.

What should not be missed when contemplating the illegal and immoral aspects of this information operation directed against the citizens of the country and high level government officials is that it is just one more instance in an ongoing pattern of information manipulation and outright deception on the part of the military in recent years. A few recent examples include the use of retired generals posing as independent military analysts to spout information coordinated by the Pentagon, intentional deception to cover up Special Operations troops digging bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women they killed in a night raid and the more recent claim by General Petraeus that parents intentionally burned their children in order to exaggerate injuries received in a US attack, to name just a few.

Just about every honest analyst watching Afghanistan closely has concluded that theres more smell than steak to US happy-talk nowadays. In fact, one insider put it very bluntly:

It has been said many times before, but the gap between rhetoric and what people experience is mind-boggling and ultimately leaves you feeling speechless. How often do you want to keep pointing out that media reporting is being manipulated; that the gap between what policymakers believe privately and what they propagate in public is so vast that it must hurt their brains (not to mention their conscience); that the definitions of success are being defined by what can be achieved and measured, rather than by what could be relevant.

It is impossible to escape the suspicion that all this is being done not just because it is policy to deceive the American public but also because the truth would hurt careers. Still, "it happens all the time" doesn't stop it being illegal. Lt. General Caldwell's actions should be investigated and if Hasting's article is found to have substance then he should be formally charged.

Winning The (Dystopic) Future

By Steve Hynd

President Obama has exhorted us to "win the future" - but if we keep hiding our heads in the sand about the kind of future it is shaping up to be, how are we to do that?

My colleague John has done sterling service this last couple of weeks, as have many others, staying on top of revolutionary unrest which has toppled expectations of stability, domino-fashion, throughout the Middle East. From Tunisia to Egypt and thence to Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and across the region, long-standing dictatorships are tottering, because of perfect storm of historically-unusual high cost of living for commoners has been thrown into sharp contrast against the corrupt and nepotistic excesses of the ruling class: income inequality - and the power disparity that it brings - has been the fuel on the Middle East's fires.

In the United States and across the pond in the United Kingdom too, income inequality has been the driver for protests and pushback by the ruling elites - albeit far less violently - as the "haves" attempt to impose austerity budgets on the "have nots" rather than give more from their own bulging (and untaxably offshored) purses. In Wisconsin and Ohia, as well as on the streets of Britain with the UKUncut movement, people have protested abridgement of their rights and short-changing of government services ordered by the rich so that the rich elite need not pay more or give up any of their own government-funded welfare.  The Uncut movement has now come to America and USUncut is expecting its first day of action on Saturday 26th February. Their website says:

Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America�s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.

If we pay our taxes, why don�t they? If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?

It�s time for ordinary Americans to fight back and demand an end to the corporate tax avoidance.

US Uncut is calling for a national day of non-violent direct action across on Saturday, February 26 2011. Groups of citizen volunteers in cities throughout the U.S. will take actions targeting Bank of America branches demanding that it pays its fair share.

If there is a Bank of America in your city, then it is the central target for action on Saturday. (If there is not, then choose another target locally; the website should have more information on other key corporations soon.)

So in the West as in the Middle East, rising resource costs and massive income inequality are drivers for protests and political unrest. The primary difference right now is that Middle Eastern dictators are shooting their subjects who protest while in the West our elected elites are just concentrating on taking even more conventional political power away from their poorer countrymen. But the global crisis that links them isn't going to go away. In fact, it's only going to get worse.

My colleague Ron noted on Wednesday that "Somewhere between $100 and $120 a barrel the cost becomes more than our world economy can afford," and with the Saudis exaggerating their reserves and oil giant Shell admitting that we may already be past "peak oil", what's for certain is that the days of cheap oil are gone for good. Yet the oil and motor industries refuse to fund change to alternatives at anything like the pace we need to prevent a crash and their industry-paid shills in D.C. continue to support them by playing ostritch - all because those corporations see more and greater profits to be gained as oil prices rise and thus will put off making those changes the rest of us will need as long as possible so as to squeeze a few extra billion dollars out of a deteriorating situation.

There's a similiar short-sighted and short-term, "I'm alright, Jack" corporate attitude about climate change. The fossil-fuel electricity generation industry has millions of dollars to invest in lawmakers to ensure that they don't prevent corporations squeezing extra billions in profits out of pumping carbon into the atmosphere and the big food corporations likewise fund both lobbyists and campaign contributions to ensure their rising profits as prices skyrocket. Rising transportation costs, shifting weather patterns and water shortages raise the price of production - but the corporations ensure there's also an added rise in prices over and above those costs to maximize profits. Meanwhile, the Euphrates at Musul is so low that it can no longer run Iraq's largest hydro-electric power station, Texas is beginning to wonder where it will get the water to support a growing population, a sizeable increase in rainfall across the temperate belts is flooding some of the world's most productive farmlands and Bangladesh is sinking beneath the waters.

As analyst Tom Whipple predicts (hat tip to Ron): "Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition.  Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come."

It's tempting to see hoarding of wealth by the rich elite as a deliberate hedge against the turmoil to come later in the century, although it's more likely just to be an emergent property of something the rich would be doing anyway. But whichever it is, as prices rise and resources become scarcer then the more money they have then the more of those ever-scarcer resources they can afford to buy - and sod the rest of us. Remedies that could soften coming blows are put off or put aside because they don't help the corporate bottom line right now, and our bi-partisanly corporate-funded and in any case rich themselves political leadership go right along with this myopic and dangerous short-termism.

The experts who are meant to advise the elite, the tink-tankers and analysts, are also mostly letting us down. In foreign policy as in domestic, the predominance of the ideology known as "realism" but which in practise actually means lurching from one short-term stability "fix" to another is ironically breaking down under the pressure of reality. There's no way to short-term fix the instability which is on our doorsteps - it's already too late for that. There's only a question of ameliorating somewhat the effects of the crisis, or not. But by and large our think-tankers refuse to contemplate this as they produce grand schemes to piss away more billions in trying for "success" in foreign adventurism or to "fix" economic deficits by taking even more away from those who need help most.

There will be no "world revolution" to redress the balance. Greed and selfishness are not the sole purview of the rich and "I'm alright, Jack" thinking means only a few will protest for others rather than for themselves. What I expect is a series of unrests and revolts over the decades to come, largely unconnected except by their underlying causes, as the common people locally demand that the rich share some of their riches and the elite locally give away as little as the can. As Noam Chomsky told Amy Goodman on Friday:

Actually, during this entire crisis, I thought one of the most astute comments was a two-sentence comment by Marwan Muasher. He�s a former high Jordanian official who�s head of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. He said, "There�s an operative principle in the Middle East." He said, "The principle is, as long as people are quiet and passive, we�ll do whatever we like." That�s a general principle of statesmanship that applies here, too. As long as people are quiet and passive, we�ll do whatever we like. Now, of course, if they stop being quiet and passive, we�ll have to adjust somehow. Maybe they�ll even throw us out, but we�ll try to hang on as much as we can. And that�s what we see going on in the Middle East. That�s what we saw going on in Latin America. It�s what we see right here.

Our future is more or less dystopic, it only remains to determine the extent of the dystopia. In America and the rest of the West we, even the poorest "we", will suffer less than those in other regions and will not die in biblical numbers. The rich need some poor to make stuff to adorn their mansions and yachts and we in the West will benefit from being relatively far less poor than our foreign comrades. But as the rich gather ever more wealth to themselves by ensuring as little "trickles down" on our heads as possible, there's no doubt we will suffer too.

By ignoring long-term trends in favor of "realist" short term thinking which is no better than putting a finger in the crumbling dyke, we're ensuring that "winning the future" is unlikely. Unless you happen to be a multi-millionaire or one of their chosen servants, of course.