The House is set this week to begin the first in a series of impeachment hearings. As we listen to testimony and consider the facts, we should bear in mind the big picture.

So far, the focus is rightly on Donald Trump’s extortion — the correct legal term — of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for personal political gain. Our attention is on his warping of American foreign policy, putting the service of our national interests below his own. That alone is an abuse of power that the framers themselves thought was worthy of indictment by a majority of the US House of Representatives.

But as the Editorial Board has argued, that’s not the big picture. Focusing on Ukraine is a tactical decision on the part of House Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and others apparently believe they have enough evidence, and are going to procure more, that can impeach (indict) Trump. This crime, however, is almost certainly just one of a galaxy of crimes that may later come to light. Some Republicans are prepared to go to the wall for the president. Only a full context can reveal the depth of their betrayal.

Betrayal? Yes. To paraphrase Pelosi, all roads lead to Moscow.

It would be one thing for the Republicans to argue, as they are, that Trump didn’t do anything wrong in asking Zelensky to investigate corruption in Ukraine. It would be one thing if that investigation just happened to include corrupt practices by an energy firm on whose board of directors sat Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. It would be one thing to suggest, as some Republicans are saying outright, that the president hasn’t done anything worse than any other president. They’ve all done a little quid pro quo.

But it’s another thing entirely for Trump to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid in exchange not for an investigation but for Volodymyr Zelensky’s public declaration that an investigation is underway. It’s absolutely another thing when the president refuses to meet with Zelensky at the White House unless he announces that his government plans to investigate the Bidens. According to all witness testimony from Trump-appointed State Department officials, it was clear to everyone involved that there was a difference in the president’s mind between Ukraine investigating and just saying it was investigating, and that saying it was more important than doing it.

What conclusions can we draw from that difference? For one thing, that actual corruption, whether or not it involved the Bidens, was beside the point. For another, that actually investigating corruption didn’t matter either. What mattered to Trump was Zelensky announcing an investigation in order to give the impression that it’s valid and legitimate though it had no grounding in fact. Public statements that have the appearance of truth but that are empty of truth are classic tools of propaganda. The president didn’t withhold military aid in exchange for an investigation. He tried to straw-boss Zelensky into becoming an accomplice in turning lies into reality.

The question then: why would Trump put a higher value on propaganda than on his own country’s national interests (which were said to be anti-corruption for the sake of liberal western-style democracy). To answer that, we have to ask another question: who does the propaganda serve? To be sure, it serves Trump, but that’s not all. We know that’s not all because the president linked three things in his bid to extort Zelensky, according to testimony by George Kent, a senior State Department official. Those three things were “investigations, Biden and Clinton.” Yes, meaning you-know-who.

With the addition of Hillary Clinton to the mix, we know the president wasn’t just trying to rig the next election against a leading Democratic rival. He was trying to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, meaning write Russia right out of it. The president says he believes, and wishes the rest of us would believe, that it wasn’t the Russians who attacked our sovereignty in 2016. It was the Ukrainians. And it wasn’t his campaign that conspired to defraud the American people. It was the Democrats. If the Democrats are the bad guys, then he’s the good guy, and whatever role Russia played in Clinton’s defeat was only to the extent that it exposed the enemy within.

This disinformation story has its origins in Russia. Efforts to validate this “false narrative” — to make it real — began with Paul Manafort, continued with The Hill’s John Solomon and concluded, to the best of our knowledge, with Rudy Giuliani, who has led Trump’s “shadow diplomacy” to Ukraine. Giuliani’s goal has been finding ways to launder Russian propaganda through mainstream political discourse. That has given him the confidence to cast even a combat veteran as a disloyal saboteur. To put this in the starkest of terms: Trump’s interests are not America’s. They are Vladimir Putin’s.

This is the big picture to bear in mind as the House begins impeachment hearings. This is the context in which the Republicans are operating. To know this is to know the potential depths of their betrayal. Just remember: all roads lead to Moscow.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 12 November 2019
Word Count: 851
—————-

In no particular order, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Haiti, Spain, France. That list is not complete. Squalls of street protests around the world are filling television screens and Twitter feeds.

In some ways, it is reassuring that many of the same issues are resonating in different parts of the world. The “Arab spring” seems to be everywhere — and all year round.

The fabled “Arab street,” a metaphor once touted by Western analysts to explain ominous and inchoate public opinion, appears to run through many conurbations outside the region. Not too long ago, Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice-president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote: “There is not one Arab Street.” To that, one might add, the notional Arab street is now in Europe, East Asia and South America, too, at least in the sense of febrile public sentiment causing political turmoil.

Economic inequality prompted the displays of public anger in Iraq, Lebanon and Chile, although each had its own bespoke trigger. Iraq and Lebanon share with Haiti the frustration of years of misgovernance.

What’s interesting about the protests almost anywhere in the world right now is their lack of form and a clear leader. Gatherings of differing sizes and intensities take random shape. Sometimes, as in Lebanon and Iraq, they sing or dance to infantile songs such as “Baby Shark” rather than revolutionary anthems.

As for goals, they are sweeping and indistinct, except for Bolivia, Spain and possibly Egypt. In Bolivia, the unrest is about President Evo Morales’s fourth-term election victory, which some describe as a fraud (and he has just resigned). In Barcelona, Spain, it is anger at the harsh prison sentences for nine Catalan leaders. In Egypt, the protests were focused on corruption after a businessman, from self-imposed exile in Europe, posted videos on YouTube alleging the squandering of public funds.

In Iraq and Lebanon, (or for that matter, Chile, Hong Kong, Haiti and France) however, there is nothing so defined. As a Lebanese protester told the BBC in reference to the now-scrapped daily charge imposed by the government on voice calls made through WhatsApp and other apps: “We are not here over the WhatsApp. We are here over everything.”

Haider Jalal, a 21-year-old protester in Baghdad, offered a broad manifesto for the sort of change he might regard as acceptable. It had to be wholesale, the draining of the entire swamp: “I hope to get rid of all the parties that participated in the political process from 2003 to today.”

So, what is happening and why? Michael Heaney, a research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, said: “There’s been more protests and there’s been more coverage of protests, which means that people are learning more about protests. The other is that people are sharing information through social media and communicating with one another about protests.”

Does that mean Iraq is the copycat result of nearby Lebanon and that Lebanon learnt from Hong Kong, where the cycle of protests began five months ago? It’s probably fair to say that there is an imitative element because of repeated exposure to images and video from protests.

This does not render copycat protests less authentic, organic or deeply felt but they do have a problem. The more the protests are normalised, prompting more and more people — even families with young children — to participate in them, the more routine they start to appear and the less threatening they seem to authorities.

And, while they can force through some change — Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned; Iraqi President Barham Salih offered new elections — the protests’ amorphousness means they are less likely to trigger a systemic overhaul or the clear view of the shining city on the hill demanded by protesters.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 11 November 2019
Word Count: 629
—————-

It’s a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.

Scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of human-made climate change since the late 1950s and political leaders have been discussing it for nearly as long. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called carbon dioxide one of the “big problems” of the world “on whose solution the entire future of the human race depends.” Fast-forward nearly 30 years and, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), promising “concrete action to protect the planet.”

Today, with Puerto Rico still recovering from Hurricane Maria and fires burning across California, we know that did not happen. Despite hundreds of scientific reports and assessments, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers, and countless conferences on the issue, man-made climate change is now a living crisis on this planet. Universities, foundations, churches, and individuals have indeed divested from fossil fuel companies and, led by a 16-year-old Swedish girl, citizens across the globe have taken to the streets to express their outrage. Children have refused to go to school on Fridays to protest the potential loss of their future. And if you need a measure of how long some of us have been at this, in December, the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC will meet for the 25th time.

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.

Making climate change go away Much focus has been put on ExxonMobil’s history of disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial began in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while Massachusetts is prosecuting ExxonMobil for misleading consumers as well.

If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in great detail in How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change, a report I recently co-authored, as well as in my 2010 book and 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt.

A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry’s disinformation campaign was the mobilization of “third-party allies”: organizations and groups with which it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for creating.

In the 1990s, these allied outfits included the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed Citizens for the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, such groups endlessly promoted a public message of denial and doubt: that we weren’t really sure if climate change was happening; that the science wasn’t settled; that humanity could, in any case, readily adapt at a later date to any changes that did occur; and that addressing climate change directly would wreck the American economy. Two of these groups — Informed Citizens for the Environment and the Greening Earth Society — were, in fact, AstroTurf organizations, created and funded by a coal industry trade association but dressed up to look like grass-roots citizens’ action organizations.

Similar messaging was pursued by a network of think tanks promoting free market solutions to social problems, many with ties to the fossil-fuel industry. These included the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated contrarian claims were presented in formats that make them look like the scientific reports whose findings they were contradicting.

In 2009, for instance, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely mimicked the format, layout, and structure of the government’s U.S. National Climate Assessment. Of course, it made claims thoroughly at odds with the actual report’s science. The industry also promoted disinformation through its trade associations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Both think tanks and trade organizations have been involved in personal attacks on the reputations of scientists. One of the earliest documented was on climate scientist Benjamin Santer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who showed that the observed increase in global temperatures could not be attributed to increased solar radiation. He served as the lead author of the Second Assessment Report of the U.N.’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, responsible for the 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on the climate system.” Santer became the target of a vicious, arguably defamatory attack by physicists from the George C. Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who accused him of fraud. Other climate scientists, including Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine Hayhoe, and, I should note, myself, have been subject to harassment, investigation, hacked emails, and politically motivated freedom-of-information attacks.

How to play climate change for a fool When it came to industry disinformation, the role of third-party allies was on full display at the House Committee on Oversight hearings on climate change in late October. As their sole witness, the Republicans on that committee invited Mandy Gunasekera, the founder and president of Energy45, a group whose purpose, in its own words, is to “support the Trump energy agenda.”

Energy45 is part of a group known, bluntly enough, as the CO₂ Coalition and is a perfect example of what I’ve long thought of as zombie denialism in which older players spouting industry arguments suddenly reappear in new forms. In this case, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the George C. Marshall Institute was a leader in climate-change disinformation. From 1974-1999, its director, William O’Keefe, had also been the executive vice president and later CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. The Marshall Institute itself closed in 2015, only to re-emerge a few years later as the CO₂ Coalition.

The comments of Republican committee members offer a sense of just how deeply the climate-change disinformation campaign is now lodged in the heart of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans as 2019 draws to an end and the planet visibly heats. Consider just six of their “facts”:

1) The misleading claim that climate change will be “mild and manageable.” There is no scientific evidence to support this. On the contrary, literally hundreds of scientific reports over the past few decades, including those U.S. National Climate Assessments, have affirmed that any warming above 2 degrees Centigrade will lead to grave and perhaps catastrophic effects on “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth.” The U.N.’s IPCC has recently noted that avoiding the worst impacts of global warming will “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy… infrastructure… and industrial systems.”

Recent events surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey, Maria, and Dorian, as well as the devastating wildfire at the ironically named town of Paradise, California, in 2018 and the fires across much of that state this fall, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already part of our lives and becoming unmanageable. Or if you want another sign of where this country is at this moment, consider a new report from the Army War College indicating that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.” And if the Pentagon isn’t prepared to manage climate change, it’s hard to imagine any part of the U.S. government that might be.

2) The misleading claim that global prosperity is actually being driven by fossil fuels. No one denies that fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution and, in doing so, contributed substantively to rising living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. But the claim that fossil fuels are the essence of global prosperity today is, at best, a half-truth because what is at stake here isn’t the past but the future. Disruptive climate change fueled by greenhouse gas emissions from the use of oil, coal, and natural gas now threatens both the prosperity that parts of this planet have already achieved and future economic growth of just about any sort. Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the foremost experts on the economics of climate change, has put our situation succinctly this way: “High carbon growth self-destructs.”

3) A misleading claim that fossil fuels represent “cheap energy.” Fossil fuels are not cheap. When their external costs are included — that is, not just the price of extracting, distributing, and profiting from them, but what it will cost in all our lives once you add in the fires, extreme storms, flooding, health effects, and everything else that their carbon emissions into the atmosphere will bring about — they couldn’t be more expensive. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the cost to consumers above and beyond what we pay at the pump or in our electricity bills already comes to more than $5 trillion dollars annually. That’s trillion, not billion. Put another way, we are all paying a massive, largely unnoticed subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industry to destroy our civilization. Among other things, those subsidies already “damage the environment, caus[e]… premature deaths through local air pollution, [and] exacerbat[e] congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle use.”

4) A misleading claim about poverty and fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are the solution to the energy needs of the world’s poor is a tale being heavily promoted by ExxonMobil, among others. The idea that ExxonMobil is suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor is, of course, laughable or its executives wouldn’t be planning (as they are) for significant increases in fossil-fuel production between now and 2030, while downplaying the threat of climate change. As Pope Francis, global justice leader Mary Robinson, and former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon — as well as countless scientists and advocates of poverty reduction and global justice — have repeatedly emphasized, climate change will, above all, hurt the poor. It is they who will first be uprooted from their homes (and homelands); it is they who will be migrating into an increasingly hostile and walled-in world; it is they who will truly feel the heat, literal and figurative, of it all. A fossil-fuel company that cared about the poor would obviously not be committed, above all else, to pursuing a business model based on oil and gas exploration and development. The cynicism of this argument is truly astonishing.

Moreover, while it’s true that the poor need affordable energy, it is not true that they need fossil fuels. More than a billion people worldwide lack access (or, at least, reliable access) to electricity, but many of them also lack access to an electricity grid, which means fossil fuels are of little use to them. For such communities, solar and wind power are the only reasonable ways to go, the only ones that could rapidly and affordably be put in place and made available.

5) Misleading assertions about the costs of renewable energy. The cheap fossil fuel narrative is regularly coupled with misleading assertions about the allegedly high costs of renewable energy. According to Bloomberg News, however, in two-thirds of the world, solar is already the cheapest form of newly installed electricity generation, cheaper than nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Improvements in energy storage are needed to maximize the penetration of renewables, particularly in developed countries, but such improvements are happening quickly. Between 2010 and 2017, the price of battery storage decreased a startling 79% and most experts believe that, in the near future, many of the storage problems can and will be solved.

6) The false claim that, under President Trump, the U.S. has actually cut greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans have claimed not only that such emissions have fallen but that the United States under President Trump has done more to reduce emissions than any other country on the planet. One environmental reporter, who has described herself as “accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation” about climate change, characterized this statement as “brazenly false.” In fact, U.S. CO2 emissions spiked in 2018, increasing by 3.1% over 2017. Methane emissions are also on the rise and President Trump’s proposal to rollback methane standards will ensure that unhappy trend continues.

Science isn’t enough And by the way, when it comes to the oil companies, that’s just to start down a far longer list of misinformation and false claims they’ve been peddling for years. In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics used by Big Energy to deny the harm of fossil-fuel use were, in many cases, remarkably similar to those long used by the tobacco industry to deny the harm of tobacco use — and this was no coincidence. Many of the same PR firms, advertising agencies, and institutions were involved in both cases.

The tobacco industry was finally prosecuted by the Department of Justice, in part because of the ways in which the individual companies coordinated with each other and with third-party allies to present false information to consumers. Through congressional hearings and legal discovery, the industry was pegged with a wide range of activities it funded to mislead the American people. Something similar has occurred with Big Energy and the harm fossil fuels are doing to our lives, our civilization, our planet.

Still, a crucial question about the fossil-fuel industry remains to be fully explored: Which of its companies have funded the activities of the trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about climate change? In some cases, we already know the answers. In 2006, for instance, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom documented ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and misleading” views of climate science. The Society was able to identify $2.9 million spent to that end by that company in the year 2005 alone. That, of course, was just one year and clearly anything but the whole story.

Nearly all of these third-party allies are incorporated as 501(c)(3) institutions, which means they must be non-profit and nonpartisan. Often they claim to be involved in education (though mis-education would be the more accurate term). But they are clearly also involved in supporting an industry — Big Energy — that couldn’t be more for-profit and they have done many things to support what could only be called a partisan political agenda as well. After all, by its own admission, Energy45, to take just one example, exists to support the “Trump Energy Agenda.”

I’m an educator, not a lawyer, but as one I can say with confidence that the activities of these organizations are the opposite of educational. Typically, the Heartland Institute, for instance, has explicitly targeted schoolteachers with disinformation. In 2017, the institute sent a booklet to more than 200,000 of them, repeating the oft-cited contrarian claims that climate science is still a highly unsettled subject and that, even if climate change were occurring, it “would probably not be harmful.” Of this booklet, the director of the National Center for Science Education said, “It’s not science, but it’s dressed up to look like science. It’s clearly intended to confuse teachers.” The National Science Teaching Association has called it “propaganda” and advised teachers to place their copies in the recycling bin.

Yet, as much as we know about the activities of Heartland and other third-party allies of the fossil-fuel industry, because of loopholes in our laws we still lack basic information about who has funded and sustained them. Much of the funding at the moment still qualifies as “dark money.” Isn’t it time for citizens to demand that Congress investigate this network, as it and the Department of Justice once investigated the tobacco industry and its networks?

ExxonMobil loves to accuse me of being “an activist.” I am, in fact, a teacher and a scholar. Most of the time, I’d rather be home working on my next book, but that increasingly seems like less of an option when Big Energy’s climate-change scam is ongoing and our civilization is, quite literally, at stake. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails — and this time, if democracy fails, as burning California shows, so much else could fail as well. Science isn’t enough. The rest of us are needed. And we are needed now.

Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. She is coauthor, with Erik Conway, of Merchants of Doubt. Her latest book is Why Trust Science? This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2019 Naomi Oreskes — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 11 November 2019
Word Count: 2,849
—————-

I’m dismayed to discover that some members of my generation have sided with the generation before us in condemning a trendy catch-phrase among younger Americans. Of all people, Generation X (born 1965-1980) should know better than to join the wrong side of a generational war raging at least since Richard Nixon’s second term.

Let me rephrase. It’s not a war in the sense that two sides are clashing. It’s more one-sided. It’s only when young Americans, whether Millennials or Generation Z (ages 7-22), stand up and say something about the war that you hear anything about it in the mainstream news media. Baby boomers own and run the news media. They make the big decisions. Their hold on our news media, our political culture, and what we’re even allowed to talk about is so complete as to be invisible. So when young Americans come up with a flippant catch-phrase like “OK, Boomer” to acknowledge the war, it’s news. There’s never been “friendly generational relations.” Young people are getting woke.

Let me rephrase again. It’s not so much a one-sided war as a kind of slow-motion sabotage of the very society that created the richest and most politically powerful cohort the world has ever seen. It’s no stretch to say young white baby boomers had every advantage one could imagine from a government shaped and informed by the compromises of the New Deal (later the Great Society). Free college, low-cost housing, thriving wages, and an ever-expanding economy. It’s no stretch to say this same generation did not want to share the blessings of an expanded democracy with the generations that came afterward. The ladder was dropped down for them. They climbed it. They pulled it up behind them. And that started with Generation X.

We should know better. Generation Z, which includes my own daughter, is going to face problems boomers refuse to concede are problems at all. Generation X should understand this well. We have been living under the shadow of the boomer generation our entire lives. So much so in fact that many people forget we even exist. And there’s another thing we understand. Most boomers don’t get it. Never will. Many Gen Xers get it. We have for a long time. Let’s not make common cause with the wrong side.

What do we get? Lots, but what comes to mind is that the boomer generation isn’t really what we’re told it is. To be sure, baby boomers in their youth protested the Vietnam War, marched for civil rights, went to Woodstock, and all that. But that warm nostalgia is contravened by an ice-cold fact. Since 1972, a majority of boomers has voted for the Republican candidate in all but one presidential election. That was Jimmy Carter in 1976, probably due to Watergate’s reformist aftermath. Other than that, boomers went with the Republican each and every time. Yes, not all. But most.

Again: Not all, but most. And I’m not singling out a majority unfairly. This is fair. Because the biggest generation in size and influence voted for the Republican candidate in all but one presidential election in nearly half a century, boomers are responsible more than any other group of Americans for the dominance of the Republican Party between Reagan’s election in 1980 and the financial panic of 2007-2008. They are responsible for the long contraction of government activism in the lives of ordinary Americans. They are responsible for massive inequities of power and wealth. They are responsible for assaults on the law, morality, the environment and on the truth. They are responsible for what was the “conservative consensus” in which everyone, even liberals, agreed that government was best when it governed least.

That consensus cracked with the election of the first black president. That’s when limited government, fiscal responsibility and all the other conservative principles were no longer sufficient for a generation suddenly awakened by societal change. The America they grew up in was no longer the America they were living in, and they lashed back against Barack Obama the way they lashed back against 1960s social justice movements. Only this time, instead of creating a new world on an egalitarian foundation of the New Deal, they longed to create a new world on a foundation of selfishness and greed. Democracy wasn’t the solution. Democracy was the problem.

The biggest American generation in size and influence looked at the younger and rising generations voting for hope and change in 2008, and said no. You can’t have the house. We’ll burn it down first. This is what the boomers should be known for. Not peace and love. The “culture war” is drawn out generational conflict that on occasion spasms violently. Only the young are not equals to the old, because the old have all the money and power. Young Americans are right to suspect that older Americans are trying to harm them. But most boomers refuse to call it a war. They’d have to look at themselves if they did. It’s easier to blame “political correctness” or condescend to youth facing incredible challenges. It’s easier to be offended by “OK, Boomer.”

If anything, “OK, Boomer” is too timid. It tries to avoid offending people offended by the acknowledgement of political reality. By virtually everything. Though we failed, Generation X wasn’t timid. We don’t have much, but at least we can offer that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 07 November 2019
Word Count: 894
—————-

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder — evidence of a deployment with a specific unit — had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”

We young cadets arrived then with far different expectations about Army life and our futures, ones that would prove incompatible with the realities of military service in a post-9/11 world. When my mother — as was mandatory for a 17-year-old — put her signature on my future Army career, I imagined a life of fancy uniforms; tough masculine training; and maybe, at worst, some photo opportunities during a safe, “peace-keeping” deployment in a place like Kosovo.

Sure, the U.S. was then quietly starving hundreds of thousands of children with a crippling sanctions regime against autocrat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at “terrorist” encampments here or there, and garrisoning much of the globe. Still, the life of a conventional Army officer in the late 1990s did fit pretty closely with my high-school fantasies.

You won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the world of future officers at the Academy irreparably changed when those towers collapsed in my home town of New York. By the following May, it wasn’t uncommon to overhear senior cadets on the phone with girlfriends or fiancées explaining that they were heading for war upon graduation.

As a plebe (freshman), I still had years ahead in my West Point journey during which our world changed even more. Older cadets I’d known would soon be part of the invasion of Afghanistan. Drinking excessively at a New York Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, I watched in wonder as, on TV, U.S. bombs and missiles rained down on Iraq as part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s promised “shock-and-awe” campaign.

Soon enough, the names of former cadets I knew well were being announced over the mess hall loudspeaker at breakfast. They’d been killed in Afghanistan or, more commonly, in Iraq.

My greatest fear then, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that I’d miss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long after my May 28, 2005, graduation that I’d serve in Baghdad. Later, I would be sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. I buried eight young men under my direct command. Five died in combat; three took their own lives. After surviving the worst of it with my body (though not my mind) intact, I was offered a teaching position back at my alma mater. During my few years in the history department at West Point, I taught some 300 or more cadets. It was the best job I ever had.

I think about them often, the ones I’m still in touch with and the majority whom I’ll never hear from or of again. Many graduated last year and are already out there carrying water for empire. The last batch will enter the regular Army next May. Recently, my mother asked me what I thought my former students were now doing or would be doing after graduation. I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer.

Wasting their time and their lives was, I suppose, what I wanted to say. But a more serious analysis, based on a survey of U.S. Army missions in 2019 and bolstered by my communications with peers still in the service, leaves me with an even more disturbing answer. A new generation of West Point educated officers, graduating a decade and a half after me, faces potential tours of duty in… hmm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or other countries involved in the never-ending American war on terror, missions that will not make this country any safer or lead to “victory” of any sort, no matter how defined.

A new generation of cadets serving the empire abroad West Point seniors (“first-class cadets”) choose their military specialties and their first duty-station locations in a manner reminiscent of the National Football League draft. This is unique to Academy grads and differs markedly from the more limited choices and options available to the 80% of officers commissioned through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Throughout the 47-month academy experience, West Pointers are ranked based on a combination of academic grades, physical fitness scores, and military-training evaluations. Then, on a booze-fueled, epic night, the cadets choose jobs in their assigned order of merit. Highly ranked seniors get to pick what are considered the most desirable jobs and duty locations (helicopter pilot, Hawaii). Bottom-feeding cadets choose from the remaining scraps (field artillery, Fort Sill, Oklahoma).

In truth, though, it matters remarkably little which stateside or overseas base one first reports to. Within a year or two, most young lieutenants in today’s Army will serve in any number of diverse “contingency” deployments overseas. Some will indeed be in America’s mostly unsanctioned wars abroad, while others will straddle the line between combat and training in, say, “advise-and-assist” missions in Africa.

Now, here’s the rub: given the range of missions that my former students are sure to participate in, I can’t help but feel frustration. After all, it should be clear 18 years after the 9/11 attacks that almost none of those missions have a chance in hell of succeeding. Worse yet, the killing my beloved students might take part in (and the possibility of them being maimed or dying) won’t make America any safer or better. They are, in other words, doomed to repeat my own unfulfilling, damaging journey — in some cases, on the very same ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where I fought.

Consider just a quick survey of some of the possible missions that await them. Some will head for Iraq — my first and formative war — though it’s unclear just what they’ll be expected to do there. ISIS has been attritted to a point where indigenous security forces could assumedly handle the ongoing low-intensity fight, though they will undoubtedly assist in that effort. What they can’t do is reform a corrupt, oppressive Shia-chauvinist sectarian government in Baghdad that guns down its own protesting people, repeating the very mistakes that fueled the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. Oh, and the Iraqi government, and a huge chunk of Iraqis as well, don’t want any more American troops in their country. But when has national sovereignty or popular demand stopped Washington before?

Others are sure to join the thousands of servicemen still in Afghanistan in the 19th year of America’s longest ever war — and that’s even if you don’t count our first Afghan War (1979-1989) in the mix. And keep in mind that most of the cadets-turned-officers I taught were born in 1998 or thereafter and so were all of three years old or younger when the Twin Towers crumbled.

The first of our wars to come from that nightmare has always been unwinnable. All the Afghan metrics — the U.S. military’s own “measures for success” — continue to trend badly, worse than ever in fact. The futility of the entire endeavor borders on the absurd. It makes me sad to think that my former officemate and fellow West Point history instructor, Mark, is once again over there. Along with just about every serving officer I’ve known, he would laugh if asked whether he could foresee — or even define — “victory” in that country. Take my word for it, after 18-plus years, whatever idealism might once have been in the Army has almost completely evaporated. Resignation is what remains among most of the officer corps. As for me, I’ll be left hoping against hope that someone I know or taught isn’t the last to die in that never-ending war from hell.

My former cadets who ended up in armor (tanks and reconnaissance) or ventured into the Special Forces might now find themselves in Syria — the war President Trump “ended” by withdrawing American troops from that country, until, of course, almost as many of them were more or less instantly sent back in. Some of the armor officers among my students might even have the pleasure of indefinitely guarding that country’s oil fields, which — if the U.S. takes some of that liquid gold for itself — might just violate international law. But hey, what else is new?

Still more — mostly intelligence officers, logisticians, and special operators — can expect to deploy to any one of the dozen or so West African or Horn of Africa countries that the U.S. military now calls home. In the name of “advising and assisting” the local security forces of often autocratic African regimes, American troops still occasionally, if quietly, die in “non-combat” missions in places like Niger or Somalia.

None of these combat operations have been approved, or even meaningfully debated, by Congress. But in the America of 2019 that doesn’t qualify as a problem. There are, however, problems of a more strategic variety. After all, it’s demonstrably clear that, since the founding of the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, violence on the continent has only increased, while Islamist terror and insurgent groups have proliferated in an exponential fashion. To be fair, though, such counterproductivity has been the name of the game in the “war on terror” since it began.

Another group of new academy graduates will spend up to a year in Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states of Eastern Europe. There, they’ll ostensibly train the paltry armies of those relatively new NATO countries — added to the alliance in foolish violation of repeated American promises not to expand eastward as the Cold War ended. In reality, though, they’ll be serving as provocative “signals” to a supposedly expansionist Russia. With the Russian threat wildly exaggerated, just as it was in the Cold War era, the very presence of my Baltic-based former cadets will only heighten tensions between the two over-armed nuclear heavyweights. Such military missions are too big not to be provocative, but too small to survive a real (if essentially unimaginable) war.

The intelligence officers among my cadets might, on the other hand, get the “honor” of helping the Saudi Air Force through intelligence-sharing to doom some Yemeni targets — often civilian — to oblivion thanks to U.S. manufactured munitions. In other words, these young officers could be made complicit in what’s already the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.

Other recent cadets of mine might even have the ignominious distinction of being part of military convoys driving along interstate highways to America’s southern border to emplace what President Trump has termed “beautiful” barbed wire there, while helping detain refugees of wars and disorder that Washington often helped to fuel.

Yet other graduates may already have found themselves in the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia, since Trump has dispatched 3,000 U.S. troops to that country in recent months. There, those young officers can expect to go full mercenary, since the president defended his deployment of those troops (plus two jet fighter squadrons and two batteries of Patriot missiles) by noting that the Saudis would “pay” for “our help.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that basing American troops near the Islamic holy cities of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t exactly end well the last time around — you undoubtedly remember a guy named bin Laden who protested that deployment so violently — the latest troop buildup in Saudi Arabia portends a disastrous future war with Iran.

None of these potential tasks awaiting my former students is even remotely linked to the oath (to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”) that newly commissioned officers swear on day one. They are instead all unconstitutional, ill-advised distractions that benefit mainly an entrenched national security state and the arms-makers that go with them. The tragedy is that a few of my beloved cadets with whom I once played touch football, who babysat my children, who shed tears of anxiety and fear during private lunches in my office might well sustain injuries that will last a lifetime or die in one of this country’s endless hegemonic wars.

A nightmare come true This May, the last of the freshman cadets I once taught will graduate from the Academy. Commissioned that same afternoon as second lieutenants in the Army, they will head off to “serve” their country (and its imperial ambitions) across the wide expanse of the continental United States and a broader world peppered with American military bases. Given my own tortured path of dissent while in that military (and my relief on leaving it), knowing where they’re heading leaves me with a feeling of melancholy. In a sense, it represents the severing of my last tenuous connection with the institutions to which I dedicated my adult life.

Though I was already skeptical and antiwar, I still imagined that teaching those cadets an alternative, more progressive version of our history would represent a last service to an Army I once unconditionally loved. My romantic hope was that I’d help develop future officers imbued with critical thinking and with the integrity to oppose unjust wars. It was a fantasy that helped me get up each morning, don a uniform, and do my job with competence and enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, as my last semester as an assistant professor of history wound down, I felt a growing sense of dread. Partly it was the realization that I’d soon return to the decidedly unstimulating “real Army,” but it was more than that, too. I loved academia and “my” students, yet I also knew that I couldn’t save them. I knew that they were indeed doomed to take the same path I did.

My last day in front of a class, I skipped the planned lesson and leveled with the young men and women seated before me. We discussed my own once bright, now troubled career and my struggles with my emotional health. We talked about the complexities, horror, and macabre humor of combat and they asked me blunt questions about what they could expect in their future as graduates. Then, in my last few minutes as a teacher, I broke down. I hadn’t planned this, nor could I control it.

My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4:00 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets — unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears — moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.

Three years have passed. About 130 students of mine graduated in May. My last group will pin on the gold bars of brand new army officers in late May 2020. I’m still in touch with several former cadets and, long after I did so, students of mine are now driving down the dusty lanes of Iraq or tramping the narrow footpaths of Afghanistan.

My nightmare has come true.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris Henriksen.

Copyright ©2019 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 07 November 2019
Word Count: 2,633
—————-

Today is Election Day here in New Haven and in cities and towns around the country. It’s what some call an off-off-year election, meaning that it’s between a midterm — midway through a four-year presidential term — and the next presidential election.

Off-off-year elections are notorious for having low turnout, and low turnout is bad for democracy. For this reason, some political scientists argue that democracy would be better served if more elections were more in sync, and there’s something to that. If municipal elections were held at the same time as statewide and congressional elections, there might be more participation. Democracy would be in better health.

Like I said, there is something to that, but only something. I’ve always found that argument to be rather wooden, bloodless and amoral, as if democracy were in service to questions of convenience. Mind you, I understand that when voting is more convenient, people vote more. I don’t begrudge anyone for trying to create systems that encourage voting. I want barriers to be torn down with extreme prejudice. But I don’t think the discussion should stop at mechanisms. It should include values. It should include a vision of a just society. In short, it should be small-r republican.

Another way of putting this is that we need to cultivate a democratic culture, one in which Americans vote because voting is what Americans do, and it’s what Americans do, because a democratic culture compels them to. I don’t think we have anything close to that, not even here in New England, the cradle of American democracy. New Haven is run by Democrats, has been for ages. The question isn’t whether a Democrat will win, but which Democrat, so party primaries draw a modest amount of attention but general elections generally don’t. By Election Day, the fight’s been over for weeks.

A democratic culture reveres the rights of citizens but also their duties, and the overwhelming duty of each and every citizen is to participate in the exercise of self-government not only for their own good but for the greater good. I respect the argument against compulsory voting (forcing people to vote or pay a fine), but compulsory voting is attractive to republican liberals like me, because it has the potential, at least, to snap citizens out of the idea that voting is something you did if you feel like it. I don’t think we’d be talking about compulsory voting if we had a democratic culture making demands of citizens. In the absence of that, many of us dwell on compulsory voting.

With this in mind, consider two reports, one from the New York Times and one from the Washington Post, that assessed where we are one-year from the next presidential election. In both, Donald Trump is unpopular — his approval rating is under 50 percent—but the states in which he’s well-liked create conditions in which he could lose the national popular vote by even more than he did last time and still win, thanks to the Electoral College.

These reports collectively shocked some people, if my Twitter feed is any indication. Some were amazed he could win again, seemingly under the impression that a president mired in scandal can’t be reelected or that a Democrat is a shoo-in. I don’t know. But the reaction suggests to me a couple of things. One, that people do not understand that people don’t vote for presidents — states do — and they don’t know this, because we don’t have a democratic culture that would inform them of the truth.

Moreover, the reaction suggests something terrifying — that people are so convinced Trump can’t win reelection they won’t bother showing up next November. So let me clear: Donald Trump can absolutely win reelection. He is the incumbent. Incumbents have a colossal advantage. He is a Republican. He has an Electoral College advantage. He has a money advantage. He is also a narcissist. An international right-wing media apparatus will repeat every lie. So will our enemies in places like Russia, China and Iran. Trump is indeed a criminal. We believe crime doesn’t pay. In 2020, it could.

But voting Trump out should not be a voter’s animating principle. The animating principle should be voting for its own sake because that’s what Americans do, and that’s what Americans do because a democratic culture compels them. Ideally, it would compel them so much that few racist barriers would be strong enough to stop Americans filled with the righteous spirit of democracy from having their say.

We aren’t there yet. We may never be. But we need to do the work.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 05 November 2019
Word Count: 764
—————-

You may have noticed I don’t spend time here at the Editorial Board sifting and sorting through the Democratic candidates’ policy proposals. It’s not that I believe, as some do, that public policy doesn’t matter in a presidential campaign. It’s that I think it doesn’t matter as much as the commentariat, hence the rest of us, tends to believe.

Elizabeth Warren released Friday her “Medicare for All” plan. The AP: She “proposed $20 trillion in federal spending over the next decade to provide health care to every American without raising taxes on the middle class, a politically risky effort that pits the goal of universal coverage against skepticism of government-run health care.”

Now, I’m no expert on these things, but the idea of covering the cost of the health and well-being of every American without raising taxes on the middle class is more than a bit of a stretch. To be sure, Warren says the very rich would bear the lion’s share of massive revenue required. And to be sure, costs would go down. (Obamacare, when allowed to function properly, lowered costs meaningfully. I’d surmise that “Medicare for All” would do the same.) But lots of policy experts, people who know what they are talking about, have said health care is so expensive none of that would be enough.

So the middle class is probably going to pay its fair share, too.

This, of course, is what Warren would rather not talk about, and she’s right not to. The president and the Republicans will accuse her of advancing SOCIALISM! whether or not she admits to raising middle-class taxes. The press corps, moreover, cannot be trusted to convey to voters the critical nuance among revenues, costs and benefits.

So Warren is right to gloss over an important detail. Is that lying? I’ll get to that in a moment. Glossing over it, however, does come with a downside, namely that her rivals can poke holes in her campaign’s “brand” for having a plan for each of the problems Americans face. If she can’t get this right, critics say, why should we trust her to get anything right? Joe Biden called her proposal “mathematical gymnastics.” He prefers building on the Affordable Care Act. He said that Warren’s plan would eliminate private insurance coverage. He said it amounts to a tax increase on working people.

He’s not wrong. But raising taxes on the middle class isn’t so bad if workers are getting something better, and getting something better is Warren’s goal. (The former vice president is preposterously wrong about eliminating private insurance; more on that below.) But again, Biden’s not wrong, and a “moderate” not being wrong is enough rationale for those worried about Warren being “too far left” to say that her plan and its rearranging of a third of the US economy is not just bad but disqualifying. It’s not.

Disqualifying is cheating to win an election, as the president did when it accepted, however tacitly, the aid and comfort of Russian operatives engaged in a one-sided cyberwar against his Democratic opponent. Disqualifying is not doing anything to stop a repeat of Russia’s 2016 attack on our national sovereignty. Disqualifying is asking Ukraine or China or any country fearful of Democratic leadership in America to sabotage the rule of law and the will of the people on the incumbent’s behalf. Disqualifying is committing crime after crime after crime with no end in sight.

But more than anything else, Warren’s proposal isn’t disqualifying because it’s only a proposal. It’s a proposal by a candidate, not a president. It’s a proposal that would have to get through the US Congress to be law. That means there’d be a thousand nips and tucks, so many you wouldn’t recognize the outcome from what Warren proposed originally. Does anyone believe the middle class won’t pay its fair share? Not me. Does anyone believe Congress would pass a law banning private health insurance? Let’s be serious.

In other words, the press corps, the pundit class and lots of Democratic normies are acting as if Elizabeth Warren’s proposal needs to be perfect, or close to perfect, in order for it to be legitimate. That’s not only unfair, but kinda, you know, fascist. They are acting like a president is going to get what she wants just by dint of being elected while overlooking the point of a democracy: everyone having a say. And lots of people are acting this way because they don’t like Warren or her politics, or don’t think she can win, which is jim-dandy except that they are not being truthful about it.

As for lying about a middle-class tax hike, you might think she is. I think of it as a benevolent omission. All of this is theoretical for the time being, so she may as well omit a major detail for the sake on getting on with the task of government of, by and for the people. That’s the point of Medicare for All. That’s the point of everything.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 04 November 2019
Word Count: 835
—————-

Does anybody remember the Deal of The Century? Granted, there are plenty of other distractions in the Middle East today. Even so, the measure of leadership is not simply to be swept along by the tide of events but to make history.

The Deal of the Century has been shoved to the margins, not only in the Palestinian territories and Israel, where embattled politicians cannot be bothered by an American plan, whatever its merits — or absence thereof.

Impeachment has sucked the wind out of something as esoteric as yet another US diplomatic effort in the Middle East. Trump’s team of amateurs has made the plan’s release hostage to an imagined moment when all parties will cheer its publication. If such a plan exists, don’t expect its release anytime soon.

The international community, which has deferred to Washington’s diplomatic agenda since Camp David four decades ago, is prepared to humour Washington’s declared interest in peacemaking along lines that repudiate basic, long-held diplomatic constants. It is content to watch without protest as institutions such as the Quartet, created to promote an agreement in line with a fast-fading international consensus in favour of a two-state solution, wither.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his achievements in nearby Syria, issued a standing invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to turn a new diplomatic page — in Moscow.

Russian troops are keeping the peace along the Golan and the Euphrates but, if leadership is the ability to turn a diplomatic agenda into hard facts on the ground, Moscow will be hard-pressed to displace Washington, even under US President Donald Trump’s erratic leadership, as an arbiter of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

Trump has been active in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. His unprecedented gifts to Israel’s right-wing are well known. He does have a remarkable ability to make history and he revels in undisciplined actions that upend the rules.

Trump’s forte, however, is unilateralism, not diplomacy and this is the reason the US plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace will never see the light of day.

Those looking for a convincing rationale for this development need look no further than the White House.

The Trump administration is scoring big in its effort to dismantle key elements of the international consensus supporting an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. But Trump’s competing vision is one of least competent efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute in a century of conflict.

Trump’s weaknesses as president and leader are at the heart of this spectacular failure. The ingredients for diplomatic success — in this case peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians — are so much more than a simple idea; in Trump’s transactional vocabulary, a “deal.”

There must be a system in place in the White House and throughout the US foreign policy and security, bureaucracy to conceptualise not just a diplomatic destination but also practical mechanisms to engage the players.

There must be a process that is competently and skilfully managed with a single-minded attention to achieve the desired outcome, backed by the assurance and credibility of presidential interest and commitment.

Virtually every US president since Harry Truman has, for better or worse, mobilised the machinery of the US policymaking and security bureaucracy in pursuit of diplomatic Arab-Israeli understandings crafted to win international support.

Whatever one thinks of them, the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Accords stand out among US diplomatic achievements over recent decades as testaments to Washington’s ability to craft and implement complex diplomatic engagements that won the enthusiastic support and commitment of former antagonists.

These essential ingredients are absent in the Trump White House.

Does anyone think anyone in the Trump administration has the discipline and experience to conceptualise a plan for peace, to mobilise the instruments of its own government and, most important, to win the president’s committed support for such an effort?

Do Trump’s relations with North Korea, Iran, China, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Syria suggest an interest in any diplomatic practice other than strong-armed unilateralism?

Trump’s team dismissed such concerns as evidence of a discredited allegiance to old ideas that have failed to deliver on their promise of Palestinian independence and an end to Israel’s occupation.

These are “the stale, decades-old talking points on this conflict” that the Deal of the Century aims to replace.

There is no shortage of reasons to criticise the inability of the international community, foremost among which is the United States, to establish a viable Palestinian state at peace with Israel but there is no basis for thinking that Trump’s Washington is in a position to orchestrate, organise, administer and lead a diplomatic engagement that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state and an Israeli retreat from the West Bank.

Geoffrey Aronson is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 04 November 2019
Word Count: 792
—————-

Most of the attention yesterday went to Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman’s testimony before House committees investigating impeachable offenses by the president.

There were two areas of focus. First was on Vindman’s direct witness of Donald Trump’s extortion of Ukraine’s president for political gain. Second was on Vindman himself and whether a decorated Ukrainian-American combat veteran is trustworthy.

I’ll get to why the second point is bosh in a minute. Meanwhile, there is a third area of focus that’s not getting the attention it deserves. One of the reasons Vindman came forward against the wishes of the White House was because he was worried about the president and his allies outside of government working to establish a “false narrative” about what happened in 2016 to undermine the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

That “false narrative” was about Ukraine. Vindman believed, per the New York Times, that it was “counter to the consensus view of American national security officials, and harmful to United States interests.” Moreover: “Vindman was concerned as he discovered that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was leading an effort to prod Kiev to investigate Mr. Biden’s son, and to discredit efforts to investigate Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his business dealings in Ukraine.”

This false narrative is something we have been seeing a lot lately. It’s what the Washington press corps keeps referring to as a “conspiracy theory.” But as the Editorial Board has regularly noted, there’s conspiracy theory that goes nowhere and there’s conspiracy theory that rulers use to supplant the truth, paralyze public opinion, and dominate the minds of those they rule. Trump is not engaging in conspiracy theory as much as making war against the truth so nothing is left but loyalty to The Leader.

What is the false narrative? That it was the Ukrainians who attacked our sovereignty in 2016, not the Russians, and that it was the Democrats, including Joe Biden and everyone in the Obama administration, not Paul Manafort and others on Trump’s campaign, who conspired with foreign leaders to undermine the will of the people. As a result, Donald Trump lost the popular vote, and few people came to celebrate his inauguration. He is the original victim and ultimate hero of this false narrative.

Where did this false narrative come from? Well, the whistleblower knew. He or she cited a series of interviews and columns in The Hill conducted and written by American journalist John Solomon. The subject of the interviews and a source for Solomon’s columns was Yuriy Lutsenko, the former top prosecutor in Ukraine.

Lutsenko told Solomon, per the whistleblower complaint, that unnamed “officials” had evidence that Ukraine’s government “interfered” in the 2016 US election in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee; that Barack Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine obstructed corruption cases by providing a “do not prosecute” list; that Obama blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from delivering “evidence” to America about the 2016 election; and that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s former president to fire the prosecutor investigating the energy company that Biden’s son worked for.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the “conspiracy theory” the president keeps talking about, and it’s the “conspiracy theory” that has gripped Trump’s media allies and pretty much the whole of the Republican Party. It is, in other words, a big lie akin to Obama being a secret Muslim and tax cuts fueling economic growth. It is a big lie that would have gotten bigger had not patriots like Alex Vindman said enough is enough.

One last question. How did Solomon find Lutsenko? Hold on to your butts.

Solomon’s attorneys connected them. His attorneys are Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. DiGenova and Toensing appear regularly on Fox News, echoing Trump’s false narrative. DiGenova and Toensing also represent Dmitry Firtash. Firtash is a Ukrainian oligarch—that is, a mobster—who’s fighting extradition to the US.

Now, Firtash wanted to get Trump’s attention probably to get out of the conspiracy charges against him. So he dug up dirt on Joe Biden! His associates cajoled a statement out of Ukraine’s former top prosecutor saying Biden “tried in 2016 to sway Ukrainian politics to help his son.” That, according to Bloomberg News, got Giuliani’s attention. Giuliani, of course, is Trump’s attorney. Giuliani also did business with Lev Parnas.

OK, so Lev Parnas worked for DiGenova and Toensing’s law firm. He arranged the interviews between Yuriy Lutsenko and The Hill’s John Solomon, according to documents reviewed by Pro Publica. (Indeed, Parnas watched the interview between them; he was later arrested on federal charges of campaign finance fraud.) From there, you have the creation of the “false narrative” that Alex Vindman said hurts America. Meanwhile, Lutsenko has recanted, saying everything he told Solomon was bogus.

I told you to hold on to your butts.

There’s more to this, more layers, but I won’t burden you with them. For now, the focus shouldn’t be on Vindman’s loyalty. The focus should be on the fact that he came forward, risking his reputation and even his life, to say the president seems to be parting ways with America. In one direction awaits the truth. In the other, lies.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 30 October 2019
Word Count: 857
—————-

We can’t let another day go by without talking about US Rep. Katie Hill.

You probably don’t know who she is. If you do, you know that she resigned over the weekend amid a House investigation into a sexual relationship with a staffer. You may also know that she’s openly bisexual and was a rising star in the Democratic Party for being an outspoken champion for the cause of women’s rights and liberty. Put these narrative elements together and you have what appears to be a classic Washington story of a power-hungry politician brought low by the temptations for the flesh.

There’s probably some truth to that, but it’s almost certainly not the whole truth. Another way of telling this story, a way that isn’t being told, is that Katie Hill is a victim of revenge porn, that victims of revenge porn are (almost) always women, and that women are always punished for having sex, especially if it’s not with a man.

There’s a lesson here we can all learn.

We’re not learning it.

Hill was a part of the biggest blue wave to crash the doors of the House of Representatives since the Watergate era. Per the Associated Press: “She won the last Republican-held House seat anchored in Los Angeles County, part of a rout that saw GOP House members driven out of their seats in Southern California. She was elected by 9 percentage points last year, ousting two-term Republican Rep. Stephen Knight and capturing the district for her party for the first time since 1990. … Hillary Clinton carried the district in 2016 by 7 points. Hill’s campaign had raised a healthy $2.2 million so far this year, putting her on track for a strong reelection bid.”

Last week, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into allegations that Hill had a sexual relationship with an employee in her office, which would be against a House rule forbidding sexual relationships with subordinates. Those allegations came to light after a right-wing political site called RedState.org published an article about a consensual three-way relationship Hill had with her husband and a female member of her campaign staff. The article included “intimate images” of the women together.

In other words, revenge porn.

Hill has denied having an affair with her legislative director, Graham Kelly, but she did admit to the Los Angeles Times that she had a relationship with a female campaign staffer during a rocky period with husband Kenneth Heslep. She is divorcing Heslep. She claims he is abusive. In her resignation letter, she said that she turned to others for intimacy during her campaign knowing it was inappropriate, and that she lamented that “the deeply personal matter of my divorce has been brought into public view.”

Now, as far as I can tell, the only thing Hill is confirmed to have done wrong was sex with a campaign staffer before she entered the House. This is not against House rules, because Hill had not yet taken the oath of office or her seat in the House. But having sex with a subordinate, whether a campaign staffer or congressional staffer, is going to be a problem for a Democratic Party acutely sensitive to charges of hypocrisy in the #MeToo era. Nancy Pelosi said her “error in judgment” was “untenable.” So this alone might have scuttled Hill’s career. (She might have been lying about denying an affair with her congressional staffer, too, but with her resignation, we’ll likely never know.)

What we do know is that someone leaked those images to RedState, meaning someone in that three-person relationship. (That is, if the device containing the images was not hacked.) That person, Hill claims, is Heslep, and I’m inclined to believe her. He knew what he was doing because there’s no other purpose for “revenge porn” other than being “sexually explicit images of a person posted online without that person’s consent especially as a form of revenge or harassment,” according to Merriam-Webster.

Importantly, “a person” is almost always a women. Men, on the other hand, are almost never subject to the humiliation of having their sex lives made public because that would be in keeping with the larger sexist attitude that men are supposed to have sex.

Women, though, are not. That goes double for a bisexual woman, triple for a bisexual woman in a position of rising power, quadruple for a  bisexual woman in a position of rising power who championed the cause of women’s rights and liberty. If she were a white man, there might be a sense of justice in seeing an ambitious politician brought low by the temptations of the flesh. But what happened to Hill was not justice — unless you’re a regular reader of right-wing political news sites like RedState. In that case, justice has been served. Hill’s “crime” wasn’t what she did. It was who she is. And for that, she’s been justly punished.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 29 October 2019
Word Count: 818
—————-