All Hank, all the time.

[Spanky]

Middle East policy

To Israel with love
Aug 3rd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Why America gives Israel its unconditional support

ANYBODY who doubts the size of the transatlantic divide over Israel should try discussing the Middle East conflagration in Britain and then doing the same in America. Everybody watches much the same grisly footage. But, by and large, people draw very different conclusions. The emphasis in Britain is overwhelmingly on the disproportionate scale of the response. Americans are much more inclined to give Israel the benefit of the doubt—and to blame Hizbullah. Some Jewish organisations are so confident of support for Israel that they even take out slots during news programmes, pleading for donations.

Opinion polls confirm that Americans are solidly on Israel's side. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted on July 28th-30th showed that eight in ten Americans believed that Israel's action was justified—though a majority were worried about the scale of the action. A plurality (44%) thought that America was doing “about the right amount” to deal with the conflict. An earlier USA Today poll found that 53% put “a great deal” of the blame for the current crisis on Hizbullah, 39% put the blame on Iran and only 15% blamed Israel.

Similarly, Americans are far more likely than Europeans to side with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Pew Global Attitudes survey taken between March and May found that 48% of Americans said that their sympathies lay with the Israelis; only 13% were sympathetic towards the Palestinians. By contrast, in Spain for example, 9% sympathised with the Israelis and 32% with the Palestinians.

The political establishment is even more firmly behind Israel than the public is. Support for Israel stretches from San Francisco liberals like Nancy Pelosi to southern-fried conservatives like Bill Frist. The House and Senate have both passed bipartisan resolutions condemning Hizbullah and affirming Congress's support for Israel. The House version passed by 410 to 8 (of which three were from districts in Michigan with concentrations of Arab-Americans). The Senate resolution, sponsored by 62 senators—including the leaders of both parties—passed unopposed.

Indeed, the parties are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most pro-Israeli. Twenty or so Democrats, including Ms Pelosi, the House leader, and Harry Reid, the Senate leader, demanded that Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, retract his criticisms of Israel or have his invitation to address Congress cancelled. (Mr Maliki, strongly backed by the administration, was eventually allowed to go ahead.) Several leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have addressed pro-Israeli rallies. The contrast with the simmering rage within the Labour Party over Tony Blair's support for George Bush could hardly be more marked.

Pro-Israeli forces command the intellectual high ground as well as the corridors of power. Commentators such as Charles Krauthammer issue column after column ridiculing the notion of proportionality and stressing Hizbullah's responsibility for civilian casualties. Most middle-of-the-road commentators question the effectiveness, rather than the morality, of Israel's actions. Out-and-out critics of Israel are relegated to the sidelines.

Why is America so much more pro-Israeli than Europe? The most obvious answer lies in the power of two very visible political forces: the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and the religious right. AIPAC, which has an annual budget of almost $50m, a staff of 200, 100,000 grassroots members and a decades-long history of wielding influence, is arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington, mightier even than the National Rifle Association.

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs. (The Washington Post reports that Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, has been on four.)

The Christian right is also solidly behind Israel. White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.

Religious-right activists are trying to convert this latent sympathy into political support. John Hagee, a Texas televangelist who believes that supporting Israel is a “biblical imperative”, recently founded Christians United for Israel. Last month he brought 3,500 people from across the country to Washington to cheer Israel's war against Hizbullah. Mr Hagee's brigades held numerous meetings on Capitol Hill; both Mr Bush and Mr Olmert sent messages to his rally.

These pressure groups are clearly influential. Evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the American electorate and are the bedrock of Mr Bush's support. Congressmen take on AIPAC at their peril. But they deal with well-heeled lobbies every day. And the power of the religious right can hardly explain why Democrats are so keen on Israel. Two other factors need to be considered: the war on Islamic radicalism, and deep cultural affinities between America and Israel.

Seeing themselves in Israel
Americans instinctively see events in the Middle East through the prism of September 11th 2001. They look at Hizbullah and Hamas with their Islamist slogans and masked faces and see the people who attacked America—and they look at Israeli citizens and see themselves. In America the “war on terror” is a fact of life, constantly reiterated. The sense that America is linked with Israel in a war against Islamist extremism is reinforced by Iranian statements about wiping Israel off the surface of the earth, and by the political advance of the Islamists of Hamas in Palestine.

But the biggest reason why Americans are so pro-Israel may be cultural. Americans see Israel as a plucky democracy in a sea of autocracies—a democracy that has every right to use force to defend itself. Europeans, on the other hand, see Israel as a reminder of the atavistic forces—from nationalism to militarism—that it has spent the post-war years trying to grow beyond.

Americans are staunch nationalists, much readier to contemplate the use of force than Europeans. A German Marshall Fund survey in 2005 found 42% of Americans strongly agreeing that “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice” compared with just 11% of Europeans. A Pew survey found that the same proportion of Americans and Israelis believe in the use of pre-emptive force: 66%. Continental European figures were far lower.

Yet all this unquestioning support does not mean that America will give Israel absolute carte blanche to do whatever it wills. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, was visibly shaken after the tragedy in Qana where at least 28 civilians, half of them children, were killed by Israeli bombs. There are growing worries both about Israel's conduct of the war and its wider impact on the Middle East. Many of these anxieties are expressed by the “realist faction”. Chuck Hagel, a Republican maverick, has given warning that America's relationship with Israel “cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships”. Richard Haass, a State Department official under George Bush senior who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, has laughed publicly at the president's “birth of a new Middle East” optimism about the crisis. Some of the worries extend to conservatives. Tony Blankley, a former press secretary for Newt Gingrich and a fire-breathing columnist for the Washington Times, says that “We ignore world opinion at our peril.”

A few cracks are starting to appear. But they are still insignificant in the mighty edifice of support.

[Spanky]

The Arab world

A surge of anger
Aug 3rd 2006 | BEIRUT
From The Economist print edition

The longer the war goes on, the stronger the Islamists and those who reject peace with Israel are becoming across the region

Cairenes cheering for HizbullahTHE al-Jazeera satellite channel, prime viewing for millions of Arabs, labels this the Sixth War, after the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. On the ground it still looks smaller than those earlier conflicts. It pits Israel, the perpetual protagonist, not against massed armour and multiple countries but against a single force which, though seasoned, spirited and armed with rockets, numbers only a few thousand men.

Yet this war has produced a potential for change that is at least as great as those other wars. This is not because the fighting has struck Israel's own cities or because its toll on Lebanon's civilians has been so shockingly high or because it has now, after three weeks, gone on longer than in any Arab-Israeli war since the first one.

Increasingly, this conflict has come to be seen by the combatants as one of survival. For Hizbullah, the aim is not just to bloody the nose of a more powerful adversary but to thwart the perceived evil intention of Israel's staunchest backer, the United States, to dominate the region.

This notion of a wider dimension has taken hold around the region. To many it is a proxy war between Hizbullah's main sponsor, Iran, and America. But it may also herald the re-emergence, after a decades-long trend among Israel's neighbours to accommodate the Jewish state, of a broad rejectionist front, this time inspired by pan-Islamist feeling rather than the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Anger has risen steadily across the region as the blood flows. This week, in the wake of the slaughter at Qana, it surged to new heights. But Israel, this time, is not the only target of fury. “May God inflict on the children of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia what He has inflicted on the children of Lebanon,” said a placard brandished by a protester in Beirut, pointing to America's closest Arab allies as complicit, by virtue of silence and inaction, in Israel's crime.

“People [across the region] see Hassan Nasrallah as the leader they've been waiting for for five decades,” says Marwan Kabalan, a Syrian academic, of Hizbullah's turbaned and telegenic chief. With American policy now “in tatters,” he—like many other observers—foresees American influence in the region being rolled right back. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, who now faces daily demonstrations calling for Mr Nasrallah to “destroy Tel Aviv”, speaks of the imminent collapse of any vestige of a peace process.

In Iraq, too, pro-American politicians give warning that, as Lebanon's Shias suffer, their Iraqi brethren may well join Sunnis in a full-scale uprising. Even in stridently Sunni Saudi Arabia, conservative clerics who denounced Hizbullah as an Iranian tool have faced a furious backlash of calls for Muslim unity in jihad.

In Lebanon itself, the large, pro-Western liberal elite is palpably at a loss. Many have left the country, their hopes shattered after being raised by the drama of a year in which a movement with broad support across the many religious groups had united behind calls for peaceful change, and ended years of domination by neighbouring Syria. “We were the only people in the Arab world to truly and honestly believe in the American programme for democracy,” says Osama Safa, a Shia analyst who has been critical of Hizbullah. “Now we've driven into a wall at 150 miles per hour.”

Before the war, Hizbullah had been increasingly isolated in its insistence on maintaining its bellicosity to Israel. With most Lebanese, including many Shias, just beginning to taste the fruits of reconstruction, and with a record summer tourist season in prospect, the Islamists were widely regarded as a dangerous anomaly. Though many respected its toughness and reputation for probity, Hizbullah seemed to promote an agenda that benefited Syria and Iran more than its fellow Lebanese.

Such doubts and fears have not gone, but criticising Hizbullah in public has become a taboo. Commentators concur that, in the short run at least, Israel's attempt to blame Mr Nasrallah for Lebanon's destruction has backfired. Instead, Israel's bombing of bridges, factories and traffic far from the front is seen as indiscriminate revenge. Israeli strikes against the Lebanese army, which represents all sects and has not joined the fighting, are felt as a national humiliation. The wave of northbound refugees—more than 800,000 people, mostly poor Shias, are thought to have been displaced—has prompted an outpouring of cross-sectarian sympathy and charity.

Lebanon's shaky coalition government, hamstrung by sectarianism, has been weakened by its physical impotence in the face of Israel's onslaught and by its failure to win diplomatic support for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire. Many think the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, brave and capable but doomed by too close an association with the West. Even if Hizbullah emerges militarily weaker, it may become more popular and more extreme, empowering those who now condemn Mr Siniora and his allies as traitors.

As for the wider region, whether Hizbullah emerges as victor or vanquished, it has proved an inspirational model for change. “When the dust settles, we'll be facing a new strategic equation, a paradigm shift,” says a gloomy senior Western diplomat. Non-state actors ideologically aligned to Hizbullah, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, may well get stronger. It is precisely because the stakes are so high that a ceasefire has proved so elusive.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
The article talks about someone getting shot twice over the placement of garbage bags.

Yeh, that was overkill. But I think it'd be ok to shoot the fuckers who used to break into my cars in the legs. No headshots... just a few slugs in the limbs...

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Yeh, that was overkill. But I think it'd be ok to shoot the fuckers who used to break into my cars in the legs. No headshots... just a few slugs in the limbs...

Dissent. With guns, first rule of fight club, is if you are going to pull it, be prepared to use it and if you use it shoot for maximum damage. Anything less and you risk purchasing a ticket to getting killed with your gun in your hand.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Dissent. With guns, first rule of fight club, is if you are going to pull it, be prepared to use it and if you use it shoot for maximum damage. Anything less and you risk purchasing a ticket to getting killed with your gun in your hand.

I thought the first rule of fight club was, don't talk about fight club.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Gattigap
I thought the first rule of fight club was, don't talk about fight club.

Touche! Shoot me now!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Touche! Shoot me now!

Since you care, check this out.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Since you care, check this out.

Hmm. Thanks. What's the state of the law in my state?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Hmm. Thanks. What's the state of the law in my state?

I think it's either "duck" or "return fire," but I'll have to check my handy NRA guide to be sure.

[Penske_Account]

HARTFORD, Conn. -- Sen. Joe Lieberman closed his anti-war opponent's double-digit lead yesterday to just six points as both candidates scrambled across the state ahead of today's Democratic primary. The latest polling results were a relief to the veteran Democrat, who has represented this state in the Senate for nearly two decades and who just six years ago was his party's vice presidential nominee. Mr. Lieberman predicted yesterday that the movement in polls showed momentum at his back and said he expects to win today.

It ain't over but people who respect and value freedom, America's right to self-defence and the sanctity of the state of Israel may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief on this.

In an effourt to help with the GOTV work today I wired some nutmeg friends a few thousand dollars yesterday. They have raised about a $100K and have laid into all of the little airplane size bottles of booze that will buy. They plan to hand these out on the streets of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, Danbury and Storrs in a Chicago-style effort to motivate any drunken street people and/or drunken college students, as the case may be, into getting into the booth and voting for Lieberman. I guess they get a voucher for the bottle and get the actual bottle after they return from the booth with a digital foto of the ballot marked "Lieberman". Dead commie dictator Richie "Dick" J. Daley would be proud.

Looking ahead I wonder if Lieberman will be weakened such that the Rs have a chance in November? Could Rowland run or is he barred?

[Penske_Account]

Lamont's political views were socialist. During the 1930s he was sympathetic to Soviet communism, is what the bio of Ned's uncle Corliss states. Apparently this guy was also some sort of g-dless secular humanist.

I doubt the apple falls far from the tree. Thank G-d the Nutmeggers appear to have wised up.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Apparently the good people at the Lieberman campaign forgot to pay the bill for the campaign's web site, and so it's been taken down.

Oops.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Apparently the good people at the Lieberman campaign forgot to pay the bill for the campaign's web site, and so it's been taken down.

Oops.

Ty,

Why are you spreading that lie

According to Lieberman's campaign communications director, Marion Steinfels, "Yep, we've been hacked."

"There's a coordinated effort to overloaded our bandwith and that has brought down our website and our e-mail," she said. The attack began around mid-morning, she said.

Steinfels said the company that hosts the campaign website is investigating. It's the third time the site was broken into; it's the second time within a month.

Lieberman['s know-nothing radical left wing blog-addled] opponents might suggest that the Lieberman campaign forgot to pay its bill; Steinfels says that's totally untrue.

Wouldn't surprise me if Lamont is involved. Right of his uncle's favoured communist party's bag of tricks.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Ty,

Why are you spreading that lie

According to Lieberman's campaign communications director, Marion Steinfels, "Yep, we've been hacked."

"There's a coordinated effort to overloaded our bandwith and that has brought down our website and our e-mail," she said. The attack began around mid-morning, she said.

Steinfels said the company that hosts the campaign website is investigating. It's the third time the site was broken into; it's the second time within a month.

Lieberman['s know-nothing radical left wing blog-addled] opponents might suggest that the Lieberman campaign forgot to pay its bill; Steinfels says that's totally untrue.

A lot of hosts will shut you down if you exceed your alloted bandwidth. It looks like the site got more usage than they expected, perhaps because they screwed up or perhaps because hackers were sending too much traffic. Steinfels doesn't appear to know what she's talking about, because being having the site "broken into" is different from having too much traffic.

Wouldn't surprise me if Lamont is involved. Right of his uncle's favoured communist party's bag of tricks.

Those communists were notorious for hacking into web sites. Despicable.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Lamont's political views were socialist. During the 1930s he was sympathetic to Soviet communism, is what the bio of Ned's uncle Corliss states. Apparently this guy was also some sort of g-dless secular humanist.


I doubt the apple falls far from the tree. Thank G-d the Nutmeggers appear to have wised up.

I see you are bak in full Penske-form. (Or, in musical terms, I can hear the cuckoo singing in the cuckoo-berry tree.)