Another blogger voices concerns about Obama

At The Sideshow, Avadon Carol types her concerns about Obama:

This is the thing that always worries me about Obama - he seems very much a part of that subgroup of people in his age group who fell hook, line, and sinker for the "libertarian" excuses to oppose liberalism, because he doesn't know any better. And unlike a lot of other people in that group, he hasn't learned anything from the last eight years. I have a friend who seems convinced that Obama is the Real Deal because he spoke to him back during his Senate race and learned that Obama really doesn't like Bush - but, really, despising Bush is a pretty low threshold. Not many people ever really liked Bush, anyway. What's important is understanding why the policies are bad, and listening to Obama talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, I get the feeling he doesn't really know what was wrong with Iraq, either. Same with healthcare.

Not buying Obama's "one president at a time" excuse

Jeff Huber suggests that President-elect Obama's refusal to speak to the unfolding atrocities being played out upon the Palestinian refugees in Gaza points to Israel's ownership of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

It would be nice to believe that change is just around the corner, but the ear-splitting silence from Barack Obama, on a holiday surfing safari as the Gaza debacle unfolded, has me suspecting that the Israelis now own U.S. foreign policy trigger, stock and barrel regardless of who the American public puts in power. I don't buy Obama's "one president at a time" excuse. Bush, Cheney and the neocons have gotten away with atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for eight merciless years because people who could have stopped them didn’t want to speak out of turn.

I'd also like to believe that Barack Obama is more concerned with doing the right thing than with what the John Boltons and Sean Hannitys and Bill Kristols of this world have to say about him.

But just now, I'm more inclined to believe in Scientology.

In Washington nothing really changes

Writing at the Defense and the National Interest web site, William S. Lind is not optimistic about prospects for change in U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration. Sadly, I agree.

The advent of the new American President changes nothing, because in Washington nothing really changes. One wing of the Establishment leaves government and goes into the think tanks and lobbying firms, another returns from those same places to government. The Obama crowd will not face up to the problem of America’s over-extension. It is just as Globalist, interventionist and imprudent as Bush’s herd of Gadarine swine. Gates may prove the one exception, but in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is hated. Plan on more mad foreign military adventures, despite the fact that we now have to print the money to pay for them. 4GW opponents will end up winning most.

Continuation of a horrific scientific experiment by other means

At Counterpunch, Uri Avnery provides context for the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by the Israeli military upon the Gaza refugees.

“ISRAEL MUST defend itself against the rockets that are terrorizing our Southern towns,” the Israeli spokesmen explained. “Palestinians must respond to the killing of their fighters inside the Gaza Strip,” the Hamas spokesmen declared.

As a matter of fact, the cease-fire did not collapse, because there was no real cease-fire to start with. The main requirement for any cease-fire in the Gaza Strip must be the opening of the border crossings. There can be no life in Gaza without a steady flow of supplies. But the crossings were not opened, except for a few hours now and again. The blockade on land, on sea and in the air against a million and a half human beings is an act of war, as much as any dropping of bombs or launching of rockets. It paralyzes life in the Gaza Strip: eliminating most sources of employment, pushing hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation, stopping most hospitals from functioning, disrupting the supply of electricity and water.

Those who decided to close the crossings – under whatever pretext – knew that there is no real cease-fire under these conditions.

...

WHAT WAS THE AIM? Tzipi Livni announced it openly: to liquidate Hamas rule in Gaza. The Qassams served only as a pretext.

Liquidate Hamas rule? That sounds like a chapter out of “The March of Folly”. After all, it is no secret that it was the Israeli government which set up Hamas to start with.

...


THE OFFICIAL NAME of the war is “Cast Lead”, two words from a children’s song about a Hanukkah toy.

It would be more accurate to call it “the the Election War”.

In the past, too, military action has been taken during election campaigns. Menachem Begin bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor during the 1981 campaign. When Shimon Peres claimed that this was an election gimmick, Begin cried out at his next rally: “Jews, do you believe that I would send our brave boys to their death or, worse, to be taken prisoner by human animals, in order to win an election?” Begin won.

Peres is no Begin. When, during the 1996 election campaign, he ordered the invasion of Lebanon (operation “Grapes of Wrath”), everybody was convinced that he had done it for electoral gain. The war was a failure and Peres lost the elections and Binyamin Netanyahu came to power.


Barak and Tzipi Livni are now resorting to the same old trick.

...

THE MAIN LINE was: not to repeat the mistakes of Lebanon War II. This was endlessly repeated on all the news programs and talk shows.

This does not change the fact: the Gaza War is an almost exact replica of the second Lebanon war.

The strategic concept is the same: to terrorize the civilian population by unremitting attacks from the air, sowing death and destruction. This poses no danger to the pilots, since the Palestinians have no anti-aircraft weapons at all. The calculation: if the entire life-supporting infrastructure in the Strip is utterly destroyed and total anarchy ensues, the population will rise up and overthrow the Hamas regime. Mahmoud Abbas will then ride back into Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks.

In Lebanon, this calculation did not work out. The bombed population, including the Christians, rallied behind Hizbullah, and Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the Arab world. Something similar will probably happen this time, too. Generals are experts on using weapons and moving troops, not on mass psychology.

Some time ago I wrote that the Gaza blockade was a scientific experiment designed to find out how much one can starve a population and turn its life into hell before they break. This experiment was conducted with the generous help of Europe and the US. Up to now, it did not succeed. Hamas became stronger and the range of the Qassams became longer. The present war is a continuation of the experiment by other means.

Broken treaties

The long U.S. history of broken treaties with the Native American tribes leaves me to doubt that the Obama administration will abide by the terms of the recently agreed to SOFA with Iraq. At Counterpunch, Ron Jacobs reports:

Only a few hours after the United Nations mandate for Iraq expired and the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) went into effect, US forces opened fire on a female staffer for Iraq’s Biladi TV, critically wounding her. The reason for the attack was unclear. This incident could be the first test of the SOFA. After all, US forces are not supposed to do anything in Iraq without coordinating with the Iraqi government and aren’t supposed to have anything to do with civilians outside of an Iraqi court issued warrant. The possibility exists that this may be treated as a criminal assault and the US forces involved will be tried in an Iraqi court. The greater likelihood, however, is that nothing will happen and that US forces will continue to operate like the occupying forces they are. Kind of like the way the Israeli military operates in Gaza.

They have no sense of what constitutes a real threat anymore

Digby comments on the recent Oakland Police killing of the unarmed 22-year old supermarket worker Oscar Grant as he lay face down on a rapid transit station platform with hands behind his head. It was suggested that perhaps the killer had intended simply fire his Taser stun gun instead of his pistol.

The police use their stun guns on people who are already on the ground and offering no threat all the time. It's no wonder that one of them would get confused and just start shooting people in the same position. They have no sense of what constitutes a real threat anymore.

See, the problem isn't the form of gun they use, a stun gun or one with bullets. It's that they use any gun on people who are already down. They do not have a right to inflict pain or kill people who are already in custody, for any reason.

Digby might be putting the most charitable construction on what was done here: "They have no sense of what constitutes a real threat anymore." It could also be about abuse of power, sadism, punishment, racism.

This happens in America. And as economic times get tougher, as more people slip out of the middle class comfort zone into poverty, expect similar incidents to happen more frequently.

An obscenity of the present moment

At his Tomdispatch web site, Tom Engelhardt has penned as accurate and fitting a summary of the legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration as we are likely to see.

[I]t is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should increasingly be portrayed here as a limited Bush administration "surge" success. Only a country -- or a punditry or a military -- incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion.

If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it's reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first term fantasy about a pacified "Greater Middle East" and its late second term vision of a facilitated "peace process" between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. Consider this a count all its own.

...

Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt: all this was brought to us by a President, now leaving office without apology, who said the following in his first inaugural address: "I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility ... to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

He lived, however, by quite a different code. Destruction without responsibility, that's Bush's legacy, but who's counting now that the destruction mounts and the bodies begin to pile up here in the "homeland," in our own body count nation? The laid off, the pension-less, the homeless, the suicides -- imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them.

It's clear enough in these last days of the Bush administration that its model was Iraq, dismantled and devastated. The world, had he succeeded, might have become George W. Bush's Iraq.

Without water, how will we manage?

Haaretz.com reports on the effects of the U.S. approved Israeli state-sponsored terrorism. This kind of reporting does not find its way into the pages or onto the airwaves of the U.S. main stream media.

Three hours after the Israel Defense Forces began their ground operation in the Gaza Strip, at about 10:30 P.M. Saturday night, a shell or missile hit the house owned by Hussein al A'aiedy and his brothers. Twenty-one people live in the isolated house, located in an agricultural area east of Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood. Five of them were wounded in the strike: Two women in their eighties (his mother and aunt), his 14-year-old son, his 13-year-old niece and his 10-year-old nephew.

Twenty hours later, the wounded were still bleeding in a shed in the courtyard of the house. There was no electricity, no heat, no water. Their relatives were with them, but every time they tried to leave the courtyard to fetch water, the army shot at them.

Al A'aiedy tried to summon help on his cell phone, but Gaza's cell phone network is collapsing. Shells have hit transponders, there is no electricity and no diesel fuel to run the generators. Every time the telephone works, it is a minor miracle.

...

While I was on the phone with PHR, at about noon, H. called. He just wanted to report: Two children, Ahmed Sabih and Mohammed al-Mashharawi, aged 10 and 11, had gone up on the roof of their Gaza City house to heat water over a fire. There is no electricity or gas, so fire is all that remains.

Tanks are spitting shells, helicopters are raining fire, warplanes are causing earthquakes. But it is still hard for people to grasp that heating water has become no less dangerous than joining Hamas' military wing.

...
[T]here was no point in trying H.'s land line: A bomb destroyed his neighborhood's entire phone system on Saturday. The target was a print shop (yet another of the IDF's "military" targets). Its owner, a retired UNRWA employee, had invested his entire pension in the shop.

In B.'s neighborhood, the bombs hit the water mains, so she has had no water since yesterday morning. "I'm already used to coping without electricity," she said. "There's no television, but I hear what happens from friends who call. One friend called from Lebanon, another from Haifa. And Ramallah. But without water, how will we manage?"

A. offered his own take on the situation: "I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it's dangerous. They're bombing us from the sea and from the east, they're bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It's cold and the windows are open; there's fire and smoke in open areas; at home there's no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?"

IDF wreak more desctruction on IDF than Hamas rockets

This Haaretz.com article also suggests that IDF are self-inflicting far more carnage on themselves than the Hamas rockets.

While all that rocket destruction has been raining down, the IDF has managed to accomplish the following:

Kill three Israeli soldiers while wounding 20

Three Israeli soldiers from the Golani infantry brigade were killed and about 20 others wounded, three seriously, one critically, after an errant IDF tank shell hit a building in which they were operating.

Injure IDF soldiers by machine gun fire and while detonating an explosive

Over the past two days there have been at least two cases in which soldiers have been injured in 'friendly fire,' one by machine gun fire and one during the detonation of an explosive device.

Kill about 100 Palestinians, many of them civilians

Of course, the IDF is killing Palestinians in far greater numbers.

Kill two entire Palestinian families along with a pregnant Palestinian woman and her four children

Over the past 24 hours, two Palestinian families were killed. In the Shati refugee camp the parents and five children of the Abu Aisha family were killed. In the Zeitun neighborhood, the seven members of the Salmuni family were killed. In another incident, a pregnant Palestinian woman and her four children were killed.

Productively deploy their military air craft

The infantry forces advanced yesterday under cover of heavy artillery and helicopter fire.

The Israel Air Force continued Monday to bomb tunnels on the border at Rafah, to prevent their renewed use by Hamas as supply tunnels along the Philadelphi Route.

And when all else fails to get Palestinians to come out and fight and be slaughtered, the IDF has developed tactics to convince Palestinian children to show resistance. We are left to let our imaginations wander as to what "response-stimulating operations" entail.

IDF troops are going out on ambushes and attacks known as 'response-stimulating' operations.

Hamas rocket damage

Haaretz.com presents a fair and balanced report on the damage caused by Hamas rockets and various successes of the IDF

Hamas mortar shells explode near troops

The major firefight started at around 6:30 P.M. Monday in the Sajaiyeh neighborhood in east Gaza City. According to preliminary information gathered by the IDF, Hamas attacked with mortar shells that exploded near the troops.

Two Israelis wounded, one moderately

Hamas responded with additional mortar fire. In one of the strikes, near the border, two Israelis were wounded, one of them moderately.

IDF advances so are so effective that almost no launches are reported seen from from areas IDF now controls.

Sources in the IDF said the advance of the forces into the Strip forced the rocket-launching teams to retreat somewhat, with Sajaiyeh identified as main launch location. Practically no launches were seen from areas in which the IDF had taken control.

Hamas rockets strikes cause a number of people be treated for shock, and almost destroy a kindergarten.

Still, over 40 Qassam and Grad rockets were fired Monday from Gaza at southern Israel striking Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot, Kiryat Malakhi, near Ofakim, Netivot and Be'er Sheva. Hamas also fired rockets at the area between Ashdod and Gedera. A number of people in Sderot were treated for shock, and in Ashdod a rocket nearly destroyed a kindergarten. Inside Gaza, eight soldiers were slightly injured in other incidents in the Strip yesterday.

The rockets have not caused much physical damage, either to property or to Israelis. They certainly have a deep psychological impact. Note too, that even when the IDF "takes control" of an area, it is not complete control, because some rockets are still seen being fired from areas in the control of the IDF.