Will Blog for Food

The Israeli Palestinian Conflict

by John Lawrence

President Obama has said recently that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to go back to the 1967 borders with "mutually agreed upon swaps." Really?? Since when have these two parties "mutually agreed upon" anything? The mistake in my opinion is to think that the Palestinians and the Israelis are adult enough to sit down and negotiate and compromise and come up with a solution acceptable to both. It's not going to happen.

They are like two children arguing over a bunch of toys. Each child maintains that all the toys belong to him. Now an adult comes along and says, "Now children you must negotiate a solution in which each of you agrees to give up some of your toys. Go ahead now." What do you think will happen? They will continue to fight and haggle ad infinitum and this is exactly what the Israelis and the Palestinians have done. Left to their own devices they will never come to a solution. The solution to the two children fighting over their toys is not for an adult to encourage them to negotiate; it's for an adult to decide on a rational and fair solution and then say, "Children this is the way it's going to be whether you like it or not." Then both children are going to cry and complain and say the solution is unfair. But after a while they'll get used to it because they have no choice.

Everbody that has looked at the problem has agreed that a two state solution with a Palestinian state living side by side with the Israeli state is the best solution. But each side would rather pursue its own perceived interests than to accept a two state solution if it were to be left up to them. The Israelis say "We're not going to negotiate with the Palestinians unless they say Israel has a right to exist." What difference does it make what the Palestinians "say"? What if they said, "Oh yeah, we recognize the right of Israeli to exist", and then, after the peace treaty was signed, invaded Israel the next day. This is almost precisely what happened in the days leading up to World War II when the British PM Neville Chamberlain agreed to let Hitler annex the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland where many ethnic Germans were living in return for "peace in our time." Hitler promised to go no further in his territorial ambitions, but shortly thereafter invaded Poland which was the start of World War II. The point is that whatever the Palestinians say is not as important as coming up with a solution in which the Palestinians cannot harm Israel regardless of what they say because in the final analysis what they say means nothing just as what Hitler said about "going no further" meant nothing.

What is needed in the Israeli Palestinian situation is a strong adult who will enforce a fair and rational solution on both parties just as what is needed in the case of the two children who can't resolve the "who owns what toys" issue needs a strong adult to resolve it for them. The US is not that adult! The US gives an enormous amount of military aid to Israel. Obama's FY 2011 budget called for a record-breaking $3 billion in military aid to Israel. Netanyahu has said, "Israel has no better friend than America. And America has no better friend than Israel." Well, at least half that statement is true. Here is what activist Roi Maor who lives in Tel Aviv had to say:

The US has many better friends than Israel Among the many troubling statements in Netanyahu’s speech before the US congress yesterday, it was something that he said at the very outset, which really stood out: "Israel has no better friend than America. And America has no better friend than Israel." The first sentence is true. Indeed, it is probably an understatement. The US extends to Israel support and assistance which it provides to no other country in the world (perhaps not even to some parts of the US itself). The second sentence is false. The US has plenty of better friends than Israel. There are countries in the world that have put their soldiers in harm’s way when the US was attacked on September 11th. Others have changed policies or offered diplomatic support despite the internal and external price they had to pay. Certainly, they have done so for their own interests, or because the US had done the same for them. But both considerations apply to Israel as well. And yet, this country refuses to show any consideration for US interests, even when the price to pay is tiny. The settlement freeze debacle and the ugly, and pointless, confrontation between Netanyahu and Obama over 1967 borders are just the most recent examples. Israel has repeatedly embarrassed the US, and undermined its initiatives and policies, for the last few decades, on issues ranging from human rights to nuclear disarmament. It backed down from selling US technologies to China only under monumental pressure, recruited spies in the US to get information the Americans would not share, and many other acts of ingratitude. It is a well-known psychological phenomenon, that a person is often more bound to another by extending help rather than receiving it. The more you assist someone else, the more you feel committed to her, rather than the other way around. The US-Israel relationship is a perfect example of that.

Israel has no US miltary bases there while we station our troops in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and other less friendly countries. You'd think that for $3 billion a year at least they would let the US have a base there! But the point is that, because of the unique US-Israeli relationship which has historically strongly favored the Israelis over the Palestinians, the US cannot be an honest broker in the denouement of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The US has been Israel's enabler for far too long. It's as if we expected one of the children's mothers to decide which child got what toys. So who would be an honest, fair and objective broker then? Perhaps the EU which has shown much more equity and balance in its relationship with both parties. Therefore, what I propose is that a commission set up by the EU should decide on what the borders for the two state solution should be and then just say to both the Israelis and the Palestinians, "Hey, these are your borders period." This is similar to the situation in which a fair and relatively objective adult (not one of the kids' mothers) tells them 'this is who gets what' period, end of story. The kids will squawk, cry and scream just as the Israelis and Palestinians will do, but this is really the only way out of this morass.

Then the next component of the solution is to station an international peacekeeping force along the Palestinian/Israeli border tasked with protecting the territorial integrity of both countries. It should have the muscle to go after any offenders just as once the objective adult has decided on which kid gets what, she would have to enforce the solution. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves should be relatively demilitarized so that there is parity between them militarily and they should not enforce the borders. If that international peacekeeping/military force had to be kept in place for 100 years, it would still be cheaper than letting the conflict go on unabated because it would be the cornerstone of peace in the middle east and would do more to curb terrorism than any other action. And it would save the US some $3 billion a year because I would expect other countries to chip in. And while the US was at it, it might as well stop giving Pakistan $2 billion a year. Why does the US think it has to buy the friendship of countries where they're either unwelcome or not appreciated especially at a time in which the US is in a profound debt crisis?

As to the disposition of Jerusalem, it should be made an international city open to all parties and again protected by an international peacekeeping force. The Palestinians and the Israelis will both kick and scream at this solution but they both must - as children must - learn the lesson that it is more important to share than to carry on a raging conflict saying, "Mine. Mine. That toy is mine. God gave it to me." They both must learn that in the final analysis peace and cooperation is more important than ownership.

The West Can No Longer Claim to Be an Honest Broker in the Search for Peace

Published on Sunday, February 13, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

by Gary Younge

 

You think you know what Arab rage looks like," claimed an article in Time magazine last week. "Wild-eyed young men shouting bellicose verses from the Qur'an as they hurl themselves against authority, armed with anything from rocks to bomb vests."

But after some time witnessing Egypt's uprising the author had a revelation. Arabs had humanity and a range of attributes to go with it: humor, subtlety, sophistication, conviviality and, yes, anger – the full compliment. "So who were these impostors gathered in Tahrir Square?" he asked, seeing his prejudice confronted by reality. "They were smiling and laughing, waving witty banners." Though he didn't mention them, many women were present too. And most of the weaponry on display, from teargas to tanks, was either made in, sponsored or subsidized by America.

The events of the last month in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have challenged the way the west thinks of the Arab world (and how the Arab world thinks of itself). What remains to be seen is the extent to which these ongoing events confront the way in which western powers view themselves and their relationship to the Middle East.

Over the last decade in particular, the Arab world has increasingly been depicted in the west as a region in desperate need of being tamed so that it can be civilized. It has been portrayed as an area rooted in religious fervor, where freedom was a foreign concept and democracy a hostile imposition. Violence and terrorism was what they celebrated, and all they would ever understand. Liberty, our leaders insisted, would have to be forced on them through the barrel of a gun for they were not like us. The effect was to infantilize the Arab world in order to justify our active, or at least complicit, role in its brutalization.

While this view has been intensified by the 9/11 terror attacks, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, it was not created by them. "There are westerners and there are Orientals," explained the late Edward Said, as he laid out the western establishment's prevailing attitude to the region at the turn of the last century, in his landmark work . "The former dominate, the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another western power."

So the sight of peaceful, pluralist, secular Arabs mobilizing for freedom and democracy in ever greater numbers against a western-backed dictator forces a reckoning with the "clash of civilizations" narrative that has sought to overwhelm the past decade. It turns out there is a means of supporting democracy in this part of the world that does not involve invading, occupying, bombing, torturing and humiliating. Who knew?

Evidence of this dislocation between expectation and reality went way beyond the pages of Time magazine. Where the west predicted chaos in the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's departure, protesters came to sweep up the rubbish in Tahrir Square. When women in headscarves (those supposedly submissive victims whom the French government pledges to rescue from themselves) were embroiled in physical confrontations with the Tunisian state, France sided with the state.

In the crude Manichean struggle between political Islam and democracy invented by a wrongheaded strand of western liberalism, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that marched for freedom while the self-appointed defenders of the Enlightenment prevaricated for tyranny.

Last week Tony Blair said Mubarak was "immensely courageous and a force for good". On Sunday he said Mubarak's departure could be a "pivotal moment for democracy in the Middle East". The man charged by the major world powers with bringing peace to the region can't make up his mind whether he is for despotism or democracy from one week to the next.

Such are just some of the contradictions, hypocrisies, tensions and inconsistencies of the west's policies towards the region over the last month.

Where the west's self-image is concerned the principal casualty has been the insistence that it is an honest broker seeking to expand democracy, peace and freedom in the region and anxious to avoid meddling in any nation's internal affairs. This was never true. "We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians," the former British prime minister Arthur Balfour told the House of Commons in 1910. "Though we are there for their sake, we are there also for the sake of Europe at large." But in the postcolonial era it was repeated often enough on both sides of the Atlantic that western leaders started to believe it themselves.

So the truth is that the west was already involved. It is simply not credible to arm a dictator for 30 years and then claim neutrality when opposition mounts against him.

The west supports democracy when democracy supports the west. But Egypt further proves that, for the west, freedom is a question of strategy not principle. That's why, while most of the world looked on at the throngs in Cairo with awe and admiration, western leaders eyed them with fear and suspicion. They know that if the Arab world gets to choose its own leaders, those leaders would be less supportive of everything from rendition and Iran to Iraq and the blockade of Gaza. The west's foreign policy in the region has not simply tolerated a lack of democracy, it has been actively dependent on dictatorship.

Moreover, it became apparent that while the west has been deeply complicit in what has happened in the region, it was not even remotely in control of what would happen next. Indeed, it was barely relevant. The protesters saw the US neither as the primary problem nor the solution. Washington's preferred option of replacing Mubarak with Omar Suleiman in return for the promise of democracy at some unspecified future date revealed how little it understood what was happening in Egypt. This would have been the equivalent of a huge US social movement ousting Bush only to find him replaced by Dick Cheney.

But nor apparently did the US fully understand the tenacity of the monster it had created. Mubarak's final national address was not just a rebuff to the demonstrators but also to the White House, which apparently had no idea what he was going to say until he'd said it. The problem wasn't that Washington had no horse in the race, but that its horse was lame – and when it bolted, it dragged the US into a ditch.

While the west has been wrongfooted, its ability to influence events has not been extinguished. Mubarak's departure was a massive achievement. However, revolution demands not only the upending of the old order but the establishment of a new one. Removing a man is one thing; transforming a system is quite another.

"Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793," wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI's execution after the French revolution. "But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever."

The west's credibility in the region has been terminally damaged. But while it lacks influence, it still has power. The king has fled. But the kingmakers still wait in the wings.

© 2011 Guardian/UK

Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US

135 Arrested at White House Protesting War!

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Witness at the White House Fence

Published on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

by Ray McGovern

“Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are,” my grandmother would often say with a light Irish lilt but unmistakable seriousness, an admonition about taking care in choosing what company you keep.

On Thursday, I could sense her smiling down through the snow as I stood pinned to the White House fence with Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Margaret Flowers, Medea Benjamin, Coleen Rowley, Mike Ferner, Jodie Evans, and over 125 others risking arrest in an attempt to highlight the horrors of war.

The witness was sponsored by Veterans for Peace, a group comprised of many former soldiers who have “been there, done that” regarding war, distinguishing them from President Barack Obama who, like his predecessor, hasn’t a clue what war is really about. (Sorry, Mr. President, donning a bomber jacket and making empty promises to the troops in the middle of an Afghan night does not qualify.)

The simple but significant gift of presence was being offered outside the White House. As I hung on the fence, I recalled what I knew of the results of war.

Into view came some of my closest childhood friends — like Bob, whose father was killed in WWII when Bob was in kindergarten. My uncle Larry, an Army chaplain, killed in a plane crash.

Other friends like Mike and Dan, whose big brothers were killed in Korea. So many of my classmates from Infantry Officers Orientation at Ft. Benning killed in the Big Muddy called Vietnam.

My college classmate with whom I studied Russian, Ed Krukowski, 1Lt, USAF, one of the very first casualties of Vietnam, killed, leaving behind a wife and three small children. Other friends, too numerous to mention, killed in that misbegotten war.

More recently, Casey Sheehan and 4,429 other U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and the 491 U.S. troops killed so far this year in Afghanistan (bringing that total to 1,438). And their mothers. And the mothers of all those others who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Mothers don’t get to decide; only to mourn.

A pure snow showered down as if to say blessed are the peacemakers. Tears kept my eyes hydrated against the cold.

The hat my youngest daughter knit for me three years ago when I had no hair gave me an additional sense of being showered with love and affirmation. There was a palpable sense of rightness in our witness to the witless ways of the White House behind the fence.

I thought to myself, this White House is a far cry from the “Camelot” administration of John F. Kennedy, who brought me, and so many others to Washington almost a half-century ago. And yet, I could not resist borrowing a song from the play, Camelot: “I wonder what the king is doing tonight. What merriment is the king pursuing tonight…”

Perhaps strutting before a mirror in his leather bomber jacket, practicing rhetorical flourishes for the troops, like, “You are making our country safer.” The opposite, of course, is true, and if President Obama does not know that, he is not as smart as people think he is. 

More accurately, the troops are making Obama’s political position safer, protecting him from accusations of “softness” on Afghanistan, just as a surge of troops into Iraq postponed the inevitable, sparing George W. Bush from the personal ignominy of presiding over a more obvious American defeat in Iraq.

Both presidents were willing to sacrifice those troops on the altar of political expediency, knowing full well that it is not American freedom that “the insurgents” hate, but rather U.S. government policies, which leave so many oppressed, or dead.

Despite our (Veterans for Peace) repeated requests over many months, Obama has refused to meet with us. On Wednesday, though, he carved out five hours to sit down with many of the fat cat executives who are profiteering from war.

It seems the President was worried that he had hurt the fat cats’ feelings – and opened himself to criticism as being “anti-business” – with some earlier remarks about their obscenely inflated pay.

Before our witness on Thursday, we read in the Washington Post that Obama told the 20 chief executives, “I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” and solicited ideas from them “on a host of issues.” By way of contrast, the President has shown zero interest in soliciting ideas from the likes of us.

‘The Big Fool Said to Push On’

In another serendipitous coincidence, as we were witnessing against the March of Folly in Afghanistan, the President was completing his “review” of the war and sealing the doom of countless more soldiers and civilians (and, in my view, his own political doom) by re-enacting the Shakespearean tragedy of Lyndon the First.

Afraid to get crossways with the military brass, who have made it embarrassingly clear that they see no backbone under that bomber jacket, Obama has just sped past another exit ramp out of Afghanistan by letting the policy review promised for this month become a charade.

Hewing to the script of Lyndon the First, Barack Obama has chosen to shun the considered views of U.S. intelligence agencies, which, to their credit, show in no uncertain terms the stupidity of keeping U.S. troops neck-deep in this latest Big Muddy in Afghanistan — to borrow from Pete Seeger’s song from the Vietnam era.

There is one reality upon which there is virtually complete consensus as highlighted by the U.S. intelligence agencies: The U.S. and NATO will not be able to “prevail” in Afghanistan if Pakistan does not stop supporting the Taliban. Are we clear on that? That’s what the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan says.

A companion NIE on Pakistan says there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the Pakistani Army and security services will somehow “change their strategic vision” regarding keeping the Taliban in play for the time when the United States and its NATO allies finally leave Afghanistan and when Pakistan will want to reassert its influence there.

Should it be too hard to put the two NIEs together and reach the appropriate conclusions for policy?

It is difficult to believe that – after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early 2009 decision to insert 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and then from waist-deep to neck-deep by deciding a year ago to send in 30,000 more — Obama would say to “push on.”

The answer lies in the kind of “foolish consistency” Emerson termed the “hobgoblin of little minds.” Out of crass political considerations, Obama continues to evidence a spineless persistence behind this fool’s errand. He seems driven by fear of offending other important Washington constituencies, such as the neoconservative opinion-makers, and having to face the wrath of the be-medaled and be-ribboned Gen. David Petraeus. This is pitiable enough — but a lot of people are getting killed or maimed for life.

‘When will we ever learn?’

To answer this other Vietnam-era song, well, we have learned — many of us the hard way. We need to tell the big fool not to be so afraid of neocon columnists and the festooned left breast of the sainted Petraeus — you know, the ten rows of medals and merit badges that made him so lopsided he crashed down on the witness table and was given a time-out by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Outside the White House on Thursday, we found ourselves singing “We Shall Overcome” with confidence. And what we learned later of other witnessing conducted that same day provided still more affirmation, grit, and determination.

For example, 75 witnesses braved freezing temperatures at the Times Square recruiting station in New York to express solidarity with our demonstration in Washington.

There in Times Square stood not only veterans, but also grandmothers from the Granny Peace Brigade, the Raging Grannies, and Grandmothers Against the War. Two of the grandmothers were in their 90s, but stood for more than an hour in the cold. The Catholic Worker, War Resister League and other anti-war groups were also represented.

What? You didn’t hear about any of this, including the arrest of 135 veterans and other anti-war activists in front of the White House? Need I remind you of the Fawning Corporate Media and how its practitioners have always downplayed or ignored protests, large or small, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Dave Lindorff summed the situation up (see http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/345 ) .

A Rich Tradition

Civil Disobedience was Henry David Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. Thoreau was protesting an earlier war of aggression, the U.S. attack on Mexico.

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau asked:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed it:

“The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about a mile and a half from Concord. He returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some men obey laws without asking if the laws are just or unjust; and, (2) why do others obey laws they think are wrong?

More recent American prophets have thrown their own light on the crises of our time while confronting the questions posed by Thoreau.

Amid the carnage of Vietnam, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, posed a challenge to those who hoped for peace without sacrifice, those who would say, “Let us have peace but let us loose nothing. Let our lives stand intact; let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.”

Berrigan saw no such easy option. “There is no peace,” he said, “because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison.”

So, if the making of peace today means prison, that’s where we need to be. It is time to accept our responsibility to do ALL we can to stop the violence of wars waged in our name. Now it’s our turn to ponder those questions.

This article first appeared at Consortiumnews.com.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). 

New START Treaty: Dems Beat Back GOP Efforts To Alter Accord

DONNA CASSATA | 12/20/10 11:03 PM |

from Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama tried to sway reluctant Republican senators on Monday to back a new arms control treaty with Russia as GOP aversion to giving a politically damaged president another victory intruded on his national security agenda.

The White House and senior Democrats expressed confidence that they had the votes for the accord that was signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April. The two countries negotiated the New START pact to cap nuclear weapons and restart weapons inspections in the spirit of U.S. efforts to reset the relationship between the former Cold War foes.

Proponents edged closer to getting the two-thirds vote they needed for ratification as Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts announced he would support the treaty. In recent days, Brown had received a call from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who also heard from Clinton, sent the strongest signal yet that he would support ratification.

Treaty backers also were heartened as several Republicans broke ranks, voting against three GOP amendments that would have effectively killed the treaty. With the help of eight Republicans, Democrats beat back an amendment to increase the number of weapons inspectors on a 64-33 vote. They also rejected a measure to change the accord and increase the number of deployed launchers on a 64-33 vote. An effort to change the treaty to include tactical nuclear weapons also failed, 62-35.

Obama, who delayed his holiday vacation, lobbied senators by phone as he pressed to complete the treaty before January when Republicans increase their numbers by five in the Senate, casting the accord's fate in doubt. Vice President Joe Biden and Clinton also called lawmakers to push for ratification.

Bolstering Obama's argument for quick action, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a letter to lawmakers reiterating support for the accord.

"This treaty enhances our ability to do that which we in the military have been charged to do: Protect and defend the citizens of the United States. I am confident in its success as I am in its safeguards. The sooner it is ratified, the better," Mullen wrote.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., read parts of Mullen's letter at the closed briefing.

Despite the letter, several conservative Republicans insist the treaty would restrict U.S. options on a missile defense system to protect America and its allies and argue that the accord has insufficient procedures to verify Russia's adherence.

Politics coursed through the debate on Monday as Republicans were still peeved by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to interrupt the six days of treaty consideration for votes on the gay ban and an unsuccessful immigration measure, legislation they considered a sop to the Democratic Party's liberal base.

"No senator should be forced to make decisions like this so we can tick off another item on someone's political check list before the end of the year," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

Obama suffered a self-described "shellacking" in the Nov. 2 midterm elections as his party lost control of the House and suffered an erosion in its Senate majority. Yet he has scored two major political wins in Congress' postelection session – overwhelming bipartisan passage of the tax deal he cut with Republicans and repeal of the ban on openly gay members serving in the military.

His top foreign policy priority before the year's end is ratification of the treaty.

Kerry bemoaned the politics atypical for arms control treaties.

"When the leader comes to the floor and says that our national security is being driven by politics, we really need to step back for a moment and calm down and think for a moment about what is at stake," the Massachusetts Democrat said. He later added: "I mean is there no shame ever with respect to the arguments that are made sometimes on the floor of the United States Senate."

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Republican lawmakers had legitimate concerns, but "we believe that we've answered those concerns." So at this point, he said, objections "are more about politics than substance."

Senior Democrats pushed toward a possible decisive vote on Tuesday to cut off debate and set the stage for a final vote later in the week. Republicans and Democrats were discussing amendments to the accompanying resolution – not the treaty – that would address GOP concerns about missile defense and build support for the agreement.

"It's going to be a real slog, house by house combat if you will, but I think we'll be there," Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Monday. Schumer also said longtime Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran was on board, but when questioned later in the day, the Republican told reporters he didn't want to talk about his vote.

Democrats expect to get 57 votes from their caucus, with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., absent due to cancer surgery on Monday. Five Republican senators – Richard Lugar of Indiana, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, George Voinovich of Ohio and Brown – have said they back the treaty while four others – Robert Bennett of Utah, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Tennessee's Bob Corker and Isakson – said they were leaning toward approval.

Corker said he has received several calls from Biden.

In Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned against any changes to the treaty.

"I can only underline the fact that (the treaty) that was developed on a strict basis of parity, in our view corresponds fully to the national interests of Russia and the U.S.A.," Lavrov told Russia's Interfax news agency. "It cannot be opened up and become the subject of new negotiations."

The treaty specifically would limit each country's strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550, down from the current ceiling of 2,200. It would also establish a system for monitoring and verification. U.S. weapons inspections ended a year ago with the expiration of a 1991 treaty.

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Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Mark S. Smith contributed to this report.

The Story of the Obama Administration: Headed in the Right Direction But Not Headed There Fast Enough

by John Lawrence

President Obama said today that the economy was headed in the right direction but was not headed there fast enough. This could well be the epitaph for the whole Obama administration. Although Obama has done a lot of good things, and has an impresssive list of accomplishments two years into his term, hardly any of his accomplishments have gone far enough. Many of them are too little too late. Of course, we can't blame Obama for all of this. He has to work in an environment of right wing talk show hosts and hard right Republican politicians who label piddling, middling policies as government takeovers. Republican senators filibuster every initiative, criticize Obama for everything he does and go out of their way to block every little change Obama attempts to make as if it would ring in the the death knell for the Republic.

The last thing Republicans want to see is the economy improving. If the economy remains mired in the doldrums, their chances in the upcoming elections will be vastly improved and they know that. Obama and the Democrats can't seem to find their footing and rationale for major changes in the US way of life. They have embraced continuity and modest change as if that were a panacea and sufficient to deal with what ails the US economically and in other ways. They can't seem to work up a head of steam to make the radical changes that FDR made. They hope that turning around the lumbering ship of state without jerking the controls will be sufficient and timely enough to get the job done before a catastrophe occurs.

There is absolutely no consensus about what needs to be done especially about the economy. Should they do more government spending, should they cut taxes, what should they do? All of the conventional remedies and prescriptions have fallen short. Keynesianism? Well, maybe. But then again maybe tax cuts would spur businesses to hire more. We've had 30 years of that with the result that the economy is in limbo having just escaped another Great Depression. And it's not at all clear that we still might slip into another Great Depression. We're not out of the woods yet. Economic adviser Christine Romer's forced cheeriness about the economy is not at all reassuring. Obama should get rid of her.

The fact of the matter is that the US is in a structural economic tailspin. It is where it is because of the policies of the last 30 years under Republican and Clinton administrations. The truth is that the US economy is based on militarism. The US is a national security state. Its largest jobs program by far is the US military and the military-industrial complex including the CIA, FBI and related agencies. While over a trillion dollars a year is spent on national security and militarism including a world wide garrison of over a thousand military bases, there is no money left over for a jobs program that might benefit the civilian economy. Cutting the military budget would be great insofar as it would free up money to be used in the civilian economy, but it would be an economic disaster throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work and leading directly to the next Great Depression. So we must soldier on building an economy based on militarism. If only those jobs could be replaced with jobs building a green economy, but it's easier said than done. Then too the vested interests of the Defense establishment with their army of lobbyists would do everything they could to see that that does not happen.

So Obama is left to tinker around the edges. Anything he tries to do vis a vis the economy is met with protests that jobs would be lost. When Obama took student loans back within the government, the privatized student loan industry cried and moaned that jobs would be lost in their industry. The Obama health bill, by any measure a historic accomplishment, is met by cries of protest that jobs in the health care sector would be eliminated. Well, if there is to be a changeover from a militarized economy to a peace time economy, jobs will be eliminated. There is no question about it. And powerful corporate forces will send their lobbyists out in swarms to make sure that there will be no real changes in the economy that would jeopardize their interests which are vested in seeing to it that things stay the way they are, come hell or high water.

While the US Pursues War, the Chinese Are Taking Over the World Using the Arts of Peace

The Chinese Aren’t Coming

Posted on Jun 29, 2010 on Truthdig

AP

Chen Yunlin, chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, front right, presses the flesh with his counterpart, Chairman of Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation Chiang Pin-kung, after a signing ceremony in Chongqing, China, on Tuesday.

By Robert Scheer

On Tuesday, the Cold War finally ended with a historic trade agreement between China and Taiwan that will dramatically integrate the mainland’s economy with that of its claimed breakaway province. Peace has descended on the most contentious point of conflict between East and West for the past six decades—but don’t expect the folks at the Pentagon or their military contractors to celebrate. The remaining raison d’être for much of their $700 billion budget has suddenly collapsed, and with it the claim on huge profits and high-flying careers. 

The bulk of that money, higher in constant dollars than at any other time since World War II, is spent on weapons systems to fight a sophisticated Cold War enemy that went out of business with the breakdown of the Soviet Union. And the so-called “war on terror” does not cut it as a substitute excuse for feeding the immense maw of the military-industrial complex. It is laughable to suggest that the ever more complex and costly high-tech weaponry we continue to build is needed to defeat an opponent armed with the box cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers or a primitive roadside bomb set off by an Iraqi insurgent. 

When Sen. Joe Lieberman makes his annual case for those $2.5 billion submarines produced in his home state of Connecticut, his central argument has been that the Chinese are building equally sophisticated weapons that threaten us. “If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind China,” he thundered during one Senate debate. Obviously, it’s harder to make the case that submarines are needed to capture al-Qaida terrorists holed up in some landlocked nation’s mountain caves. So too with the ever more advanced arsenal designed to penetrate enemy defenses not even built when those Cold War adversaries still operated.

“The Chinese are coming” became the last refuge of war-profiteering scoundrels once the Russians started cutting back dramatically, but this alarm was never plausible. The authoritative quadrennial Defense Department reports have always made clear that China has at most threatened to become a regional power with Taiwan as its focus. Yet that pathetic excuse for the U.S. spending as much on its military as do the rest of the world nations combined seemed plausible to most in Congress who voted for massive military appropriations even as our government had to borrow money from the Chinese to cover our deficits.

Then those treacherous Chinese, both the mainland Communists and their feuding Taiwan-based cousins, had to go and ruin a good thing by going way beyond kissing and making up. Even when they were verbally warring they were still doing business together during this past decade. Trade between the two is already a hefty $110 billion, 41 percent of Taiwan’s exports, but the new agreement will much expand that by ending tariffs on key products while opening up the financial services industry to investors from what was once an impenetrable cross-strait divide. Taiwanese business investment on the mainland is already massive, but now it will enter the realm of the mainland’s high finance with the world economy as its playground.

The prospect of war between the two, already vastly diminished from Cold War highs, will soon not be possible without hitting their own investment assets on the other side. Which is exactly the peace of the new world order that some U.S. leaders, most prominently the first President Bush, had once welcomed. The question is whether Americans truly believe they can be winners in a world built on expanding trade rather than on military tension.

One has to wonder about our priorities when Congress cannot find the $34 billion needed to continue unemployment payments for six months to 1.7 million workers thrown out of jobs but never questions that sort of spending on military hardware with no logical purpose. The proud promise of American capitalism, often in conflict with a drearier reality, was that our economy did not need military conquest to succeed. Now it is the Chinese, of varying ideological disposition, the heirs of Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, who will test our commitment to that principle. Clearly those former enemies have concluded that power, in the modern world economy, does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, even from a very big and enormously expensive one.

The China-Taiwan agreement and its implications also raise some questions for Americans: How does a modern nation obtain national security? Are we more secure with our permanent war economy, or is the pursuit of peace through trade and diplomacy, as the formerly most bitter of Chinese enemies are demonstrating, a better way?