Category: Democratic Party Foreign Policy

Democratic Party Foreign Policy

Obama’s Escalation in Syria

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President Obama’s announcement that he would send up to 50 U.S. Special Forces to “train, advise and assist” armed militia fighting forces of the so-called “Islamic State” in Syria marks an escalation in U.S. military involvement in that country.

It also raises some serious legal, political, strategic, ethical, and constitutional questions and may open the way to a far larger and dangerous military entanglements in the future. Despite the absence of the requisite approval of Congress, the United States has been engaged in regular airstrikes in that country for more than a year as well as arming, training, and funding “moderate” rebel groups with little strategic gain to show for it.

On at least sixteen occasions, President Obama assured the American people that, despite increased U.S. military involvement in Syria, there would be “no boots on the ground.” It was assumed there would be exceptions for situations such as rescuing a downed pilot, or a short-term special commando operation such as destroying critical targets or rescuing hostages.

Obama’s announcement, however, means that for the first time there will be U.S. troops on the ground on an ongoing basis. The hope is that the elite forces will act as “force multipliers” by being embedded in what they hope to be a pro-democratic, multi-ethnic unit and by coordinating their operations with well-established Kurdish militia.

Given the limited nature of the intervention, the small number of troops involved, and the perfidious nature of the ISIS enemy, many traditional critics of U.S. military involvement overseas are not raising objections. These U.S. advisors might even make a positive difference: Unlike the Syrian regime and the U.S.-backed forces of the Iraqi regime—which have engaged in major human rights abuses, have little support in ISIS-controlled areas, and have often proved to be an ineffective fighting force—these American soldiers will be working with popular Kurdish militia which have repeatedly proven themselves in battles against ISIS.

However, from Vietnam to Somalia to Afghanistan, Americans have seen what were supposed to have been limited engagements escalate into long, bloody, and costly wars. The Pentagon has made clear that this is an open-ended mission, and the administration has not ruled out sending in additional forces at a later date.

Recent decades have shown that the more the United States has become involved militarily in the Middle East, the more violent and destabilized the region has become and the less secure the United States and its interests have become.

During the past fifteen months, the U.S. has deployed 3,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and has engaged in more than 6,000 air strikes in the fight against ISIS, but Congress has still not voted on whether to authorize this latest U.S. military intervention. Even with last week’s announced escalation, Congress has failed to live up to its constitutional responsibilities.

Obama did submit a proposed authorization for the use of military force earlier this year. Since many Democrats thought it was not restrictive enough, and Republicans thought it was too restrictive, it never passed. Despite this, U.S. involvement has not only continued, but increased.

President Obama claims that due to previous Congressional resolutions following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the October 2002 resolution approving the invasion of Iraq, he does not actually need such authorization. However, the former resolution was only in regard to Al Qaida (which actually opposes ISIS) and the latter was in regard to the long-deposed Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution, which bars a president from engaging U.S. forces in a hostile situation for more than 90 days unless Congress approves the deployment, should have prevented Obama’s escalation. However, it appears that a bipartisan effort has effectively shredded this landmark piece of legislation which grew out of popular opposition to the Vietnam War.

So, whether or not one thinks this might be a case where US military intervention might be justified, the bottom line is that it is illegal, a threat to the Constitution, and a very dangerous precedent.

Bipartisan Attacks Against Anti-occupation Divestment Campaigns

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In April, the student senate at Earlham College, a Quaker liberal arts institution in Indiana, approved a resolution by consensus recommending the college endowment divest from three U.S. companies (Motorola, Hewlett Packard and Caterpillar) which are directly supporting the Israeli occupation in violation of international law. The resolution (thus far ignored by the college’s board of trustees) follows decisions by a number of Quaker-affiliated organizations — as well as the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and other nonprofit groups — to divest from these companies.

The response was swift. Within weeks, the Indiana state legislature passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the boycott/divest/sanctions campaign as “anti-Jewish,” accusing it of “promoting a climate of hatred, intimidation, intolerance, and violence against Jews.” Despite the absurdity of the notion that the consensus of an elected body of students at a college rooted in a Christian pacifist tradition would promote “violence against Jews” or anybody else, the resolution received near-unanimous support from both Republicans and Democrats.

A similar resolution passed in the Tennessee legislature as well, also with virtually unanimous bipartisan support.

The tactic of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) has been used for years to pressure U.S. companies to stop illegally profiting from foreign occupations, particularly in cases where the United States has blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolutions calling for withdrawal of occupation forces in accordance with the U.N. Charter. Boycott and divestment campaigns in previous decades targeted companies supporting South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. A campaign is currently underway, particularly strong in Europe, in support of BDS against the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

In the case of the Israeli occupation, however, supporters of the Israeli occupation and the right-wing Israeli government have mounted a strong counter-attack.

For example, Hillary Clinton — the front runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination — has declared that the BDS movement was working to “malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.” Similarly, the Democratic-controlled State Assembly in California passed a non-binding resolution declaring BDS advocacy “anti-Semitic activities” which should “not be tolerated” on state university campuses.

For decades, student activism in solidarity with oppressed peoples in the Global South has attracted a variety of supporters, ranging from Christian pacifists to proponents of armed revolution, and from liberal Democrats to Marxist-Leninists. Similarly, while the BDS movement has attracted some hardline pro-Palestinian elements which could reasonably be considered anti-Israel (and, in a few cases, even anti-Semitic), the vast majority are sincere and principled supporters of human rights and international law.

This tendency by Democratic politicians to malign BDS supporters as the movement’s most extreme elements is politically damaging for the party, which depends heavily on young progressive student volunteers. For example, Obama’s very narrow victory in Indiana in the 2008 election was made possible in part by the hundreds of students from Earlham and other colleges in the state going door-to-door. These statements and resolutions are giving a signal that supporters of BDS and other campaigns for corporate responsibility are no longer welcome in the party.

A number of prominent Democratic politicians first became politically engaged while in college, working on divestment campaigns targeting apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Their contemporaries will be much less inclined to become involved with a party which attacks them and unfairly portrays their human rights activism as a form of bigotry. As a result, the Democrats are in jeopardy of losing many of the very kind of idealistic young people with strong organizing skills the party needs.

The anti-BDS fervor has gone beyond statements and nonbinding resolutions. This spring, the Illinois legislature passed a unanimous measure sponsored by Democratic leaders which requires divesting state pension funds from companies that invest in Iran or Sudan, but ironically also calls for divesting from companies that boycott Israel, Israeli settlements, or otherwise use economic means to oppose the occupation.

As a result, state pension fund shares in any publicly-traded company — even one that invests in Israel — now have to be sold if they had a policy of boycotting the illegal settlements in the occupied territories. These would include socially-conscious companies like Ben & Jerry’s, which manufactures and sells its ice cream in Israel but refuses to buy products used in their manufacturing if produced in Israeli settlements.

Support for the settlements through discouraging BDS has also been included in federal legislation. A clause in the “fast track” bill to help insure passage of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership which became law in June forces the Obama administration to pressure potential U.S. trading partners to no longer boycott products made in illegal settlements or to discourage their companies from supporting the Israeli occupation.

There appears, then, to be a growing acceptance by politicians of both parties of the neoconservative view that the enforcement of international humanitarian law — such as provisions that bar companies from supporting illegal occupations — should be opposed (at least as it applies to the United States and its allies) and that those who support the universal applications of such principles should be attacked, marginalized and punished, such as by labeling proponents as anti-Semitic or by hurting their businesses.

This bipartisan willingness to defame and punish those advocating socially-responsible investment policies also may be based upon the belief that defending corporate profits for companies like Motorola, Hewlett Packard, and Caterpillar is a higher priority than defending human rights. It may be only a matter of time before groups like Students for a Free Tibet — which calls for boycotts and related activities targeting the Beijing government and U.S. companies that support that occupation of Tibet — will be labeled as anti-Chinese racists. One can imagine other scenarios in which those who advocate divestment and similar actions against carbon polluters, arms manufacturers, and others will also be targeted by politicians.

Some have cautioned against interpreting such statements and legislation too broadly, arguing that politicians who support anti-BDS measures do so only because it impacts Israel and that they are being forced by some kind of rich cabal of Jews behind the scenes. Such rationalizations, however, really are anti-Semitic. No one has ever lost an election for refusing to attack advocates of socially-responsible investment policies.

This is why even those who do not necessarily support the BDS campaign against Israel or the Israeli occupation should oppose such efforts. At root, these anti-BDS efforts are about defending corporate profits, regardless of the moral and legal implications.

Hillary Clinton, phosphates, and the Western Sahara

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For more than a half-century, a series of United Nations resolutions and rulings by the International Court of Justice have underscored the rights of inhabitants of countries under colonial rule or foreign military occupation. Among these is the right to “freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources,” which “must be based on the principles of equality and of the right of peoples and nations to self-determination.”
As far back as 1962, the United Nations determined that “the right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources must be exercised in the interest of their national development and of the well-being of the people of the State concerned,” and “violation of the rights of peoples and nations to sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources is contrary to the spirit and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” This reflects the longstanding legal principle, reiterated subsequently by the General Assembly, that “the right of the peoples of the Non-Self-Governing Territories … to enjoyment of their natural resources and their right to dispose of those resources in their best interest.”

Similarly, a series of decisions by the International Court of Justice regarding Namibia, Nauru, East Timor and Palestine has further codified the rights of non-self-governing people to control over their own natural resources.

Perhaps the most serious contemporary violation of this longstanding international legal principle involves the nation of Western Sahara, the former Spanish colony invaded, occupied, and annexed by Morocco in 1975. Morocco has ignored a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions and a landmark World Court decision underscoring the right of the Western Saharan people — who are ethnically and linguistically distinct from most Moroccans — to self-determination. However, France and the United States, veto-wielding permanent members of that body and longstanding allies of Morocco, have blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolutions.

The Moroccan government and its supporters point to the kingdom’s ambitious large-scale development projects in Western Sahara, particularly in urban areas. More than $2.5 billion has been poured into the territory’s infrastructure, significantly more than Morocco has procured from Western Sahara’s natural resources and more than they would likely obtain in the foreseeable future. For this reason, the regime’s supporters argue that they have fulfilled the requirements regarding interests, well-being, and development needs of the indigenous population.

However, most of the infrastructure development in the occupied territory has not been designed to enhance the standard of living of the Western Saharan people, but has instead involved the elaborate internal security system of military bases, police facilities, prisons, surveillance, and related repressive apparatuses; housing construction, subsidies, and other support for Moroccan settlers; and airport, seaport, and other transportation facilities designed to accelerate resource extraction. More fundamentally, the decisions on how to use the proceeds from the mines and fisheries are being made by the Moroccan government in the capital of Rabat, not by the subjugated population.

In 2002, then U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs Hans Corell determined that the exploitation of natural resources in Western Sahara is a “violation of the international law principles applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.”

Unfortunately, this did not stop mining companies, oil companies, and fishing fleets from Morocco, Europe and the United States from effectively stealing from the people of Western Sahara — or from trying to influence political leaders.

For example, the Office Cherifien des Phosphates (OCP), a Moroccan government-owned mining company that controls one of the world’s largest phosphate mines in the occupied Western Sahara, is the primary donor to the Clinton Global Initiative conference last week in Marrakech. This and other support provided to the Clinton Foundation by OCP — now totaling as much as $5 million — has raised some eyebrows, given Hillary Clinton’s efforts as secretary of state to push the Obama administration to recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation of the territory through a dubious “autonomy” plan promoted by King Mohammed VI that would deny the people of Western Sahara the option of independence as international law requires.

About five years ago, opposition from Michael Posner, then assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights, along with some key Democratic senators and members of the National Security Council convinced the White House to instead encourage further U.N.-led negotiations between Morocco and the Western Saharan government-in-exile, known as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR.) The SADR has been recognized by scores of governments and is a full member state of the African Union, whose Peace and Security Council has called for a “global boycott of products of companies involved in the illegal exploitation of the natural resources of Western Sahara.”

Since leaving office, Hillary Clinton — now the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination — has continued her outspoken support for the autocratic monarchy. When she announced the Marrakesh meeting last fall, she praised Morocco as a “vital hub for economic and cultural exchange,” thanking the regime “for welcoming us and for its hospitality.” A number of key supporters, such as attorney Justin Gray and former Congressman Toby Moffett, are registered lobbyists for the Moroccan regime.

This has not gone unnoticed on Capitol Hill. “You’ve heard of blood diamonds, but in many ways you could say that OCP is shipping blood phosphate,” Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said. “Western Sahara was taken over by Morocco to exploit its resources and this is one of the principal companies involved in that effort.”

Pitts and New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, chair of the Human Rights Subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, sent a letter to the Clinton Foundation, saying, “Out of respect for internationally recognized human rights norms, the Clinton Global Initiative should discontinue its coordination with OCP and return any accepted money from the enterprise.” The foundation did not respond.

As an attorney well-versed in international affairs, Clinton is no doubt aware of the legal and moral issues regarding the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara and the seeming impropriety of her foundation accepting money from a government-owned company illegally exploiting the natural resources of a non-self-governing territory.

That she is willing to do so anyway raises some troubling questions.

Hardliners on All Sides Undermining Iran’s Nuclear Talks

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The Progressive & Common Dreams, April 5, 2015:Reaching an interim nuclear deal with Iran would have been difficult enough even without hardliners in both Iran and the US seeking to undermine them. Many US critics of the draft treaty deny this, however, naively assuming Iran is as weak as it was several decades ago, when foreigner powers could impose policies and even replace governments at will. Not only have such imperialist intrigues become more difficult overall, the reality is that Iran has, for better or worse, reemerged as a major regional power—as it has been for much of the past two and half millennia. If President Obama and other Western leaders could dictate terms of a nuclear agreement, they certainly would. They realize they cannot, however. [FULL LINK]

Progressives Flock to Ed Markey’s Senate Campaign Despite Hawkish Record

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Democratic Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts is heavily favored to win the June 25 special election to fill the US Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated by John Kerry’s appointment as Secretary of State. Markey’s campaign has received widespread and enthusiastic backing from the progressive community, including endorsements from groups such as Peace Action and Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) which have previously tended to formally endorse only a selected number of candidates who have strong records on peace and human rights. This nearly unprecedented level of support comes despite the fact that – even though he comes from one of the most liberal states in the country – Markey’s foreign policy record is well to the right of the majority of Democrats, both in Massachusetts and nationally.

Democrats Share the Blame for Tragedy of Iraq War

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Here on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is important to remember that it was not just those in the Bush White House who were responsible for the tragedy, but leading members of Congress as well, some of whom are now in senior positions in the Obama administration. The 4,500 Americans killed, the far larger number permanently wounded, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions displaced, the trillion dollars of US taxpayers’ money squandered (and the resulting cutbacks through sequestration), the continued costs of the war through veterans’ benefits and interest on the national debt, and the anti-American extremism in reaction to the invasion and occupation which has spread throughout much of the world all could have been avoided if the Democratic-controlled Senate hadn’t voted to authorize this illegal and unnecessary war and occupation.

On this and other web sites – as well as in many scores of policy reports, newspaper articles, academic journals and other sources – the tragic consequences of a US invasion of Iraq and a refutation of falsehoods being put forward by the Bush administration to justify it were made available to every member of the House and Senate (see, for example, my cover story in The Nation magazine The Case Against a War with Iraq). The 2003 vote authorizing the invasion was not like the vote on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution on the use of force against North Vietnam, for which Congress had no time for hearings or debate and for which most of those supporting it (mistakenly) thought they were simply authorizing limited short-term retaliatory strikes in response to a specific series of alleged incidents. By contrast, in regard to the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Congress had many months to investigate and debate the administration’s claims that Iraq was a threat as well as the likely implications of a US invasion. Members of Congress also fully recognized that the resolution authorized a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation and a subsequent military occupation of an indefinite period.

Violating International Legal Conventions

Those who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq did so despite the fact that it violated international legal conventions which the US government is legally bound to uphold. The resolution constituted a clear violation of the United Nations Charter that, like other ratified international treaties, should be treated as supreme law, according to Article VI of the US Constitution. According to articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, no member state has the right to enforce any resolution militarily unless the UN Security Council determines that there has been a material breach of its resolution, decides that all non-military means of enforcement have been exhausted, and then specifically authorizes the use of military force.

This is what the Security Council did in November 1990 with Resolution 678 in response to Iraq’s ongoing violations of UN Security Council resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Kuwait, but the Security Council did not do so for any subsequent lesser Iraqi violations. The only other exception for the use of force authorized by the charter is in self-defense against armed attack, which even the Bush administration admitted had not taken place.

This effective renunciation of the UN Charter’s prohibition against such wars of aggression constituted an effective repudiation of the post-WWII international legal order. Alternative resolutions, such as one authorizing force against Iraq if authorized by the UN Security Council, were voted down by a bipartisan majority.

Concerned Scholars

Members of Congress were also alerted by large numbers of scholars of the Middle East, Middle Eastern political leaders, former State Department and intelligence officials and others who recognized that a US invasion would likely result in a bloody insurgency, a rise in Islamist extremism and terrorism, increased sectarian and ethnic conflict, and related problems. Few people I know who are familiar with Iraq were at all surprised that the US invasion has become such a tragedy. Indeed, most of us were in communication with Congressional offices and often with individual members of Congress themselves in the months leading up to the vote warning of the likely consequences of an invasion and occupation. Therefore, subsequent claims by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Harry Reid and other leading Democratic supporters of the war that they were unaware of the likely consequences of the invasion are completely false.

The resolution also contained accusations that were known or widely assumed to be false at that time, such as claims of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. A definitive report by the Department of Defense noted that not only did no such link exist but that no such link could have even been reasonably suggested based on the evidence available at that time.

The Senate resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq was “actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.” In reality, Iraq had long eliminated its nuclear program, a fact that was confirmed in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1998, four years prior to the resolution.

The resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq at that time continued “to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability.” In reality, as the US government now admits, Iraq had rid itself of its chemical and biological weapons nearly a decade earlier and no longer had any active chemical and biological weapons programs. This likelihood that Iraq no longer had operational chemical or biological weapons was brought to the attention of members of Congress by a number of top arms control specialists, as well as Scott Ritter, the American who headed UNSCOM’s efforts to locate Iraq’s possible hidden caches of chemical and biological weapons, hidden supplies or secret production facilities.

No Evidence

Virtually all of Iraq’s known stockpiles of chemical and biological agents had been accounted for and the shelf life of the small amount of materiel that had not been accounted for – which, as it turned out, had also been destroyed – had long since expired and could therefore have no longer been of weapons grade. There was no evidence that Iraq had any delivery systems for such weapons, either. In addition, the strict embargo, in effect since 1990, against imports of any additional materials needed for the manufacture of WMDs, combined with Iraq’s inability to manufacture such weapons or delivery systems themselves without detection, made any claims that Iraq constituted any “significant chemical and biological weapons capability” transparently false to anyone who cared to investigate the matter at that time. Indeed, even the classified full version of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, while grossly overestimating Iraq’s military capability, was filled with extensive disagreements, doubts and caveats regarding President Bush’s assertions regarding Iraq’s WMDs, WMD programs, and delivery systems.

The House and Senate members who now claim they were “misled” about Iraq’s alleged military threat have failed to explain why they found the administration’s claims so much more convincing than the many other reports made available to them from more objective sources that presumably made a much stronger case that Iraq no longer had offensive WMD capability. Curiously, not a single member of Congress has agreed to allow me any access to any documents they claim convinced them of the alleged Iraqi threat except for one excerpt from a 2002 National Security Estimate released in July 2003 – widely ridiculed at the time for its transparently manipulated content. In effect, they are using the infamous Nixon defense from the Watergate scandal that claims that while they have evidence to vindicate themselves, making it public would somehow damage national security. In reality, if such reports actually exist, they are clearly inaccurate and outdated and would therefore be of no threat to national security if made public.

Democrats’ Responsibility

The Democrats who voted to support the war and rationalized that vote by making false claims about Iraq’s WMD programs were responsible for allowing the Bush administration to get away with lying about Iraq’s alleged threat. For example, Bush was able to note how “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate – who had access to the same intelligence – voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” In a 2005 speech attacking anti-war activists, Bush noted how, “Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: ‘When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security.'”

Indeed, the fact that 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry chose to make such demonstrably false statements and voted in favor of the resolution likely cost the Democrats the White House since it led many potential supporters, myself included, to refuse to vote for him. Furthermore, because of Kerry’s vote in support for the war and his false claims about Iraq’s weapons capabilities, the debate during the fall campaign was not about who was right about Iraq (since they were both wrong), but Kerry’s alleged “flip-flopping” for belatedly raising questions about the conduct of the war.

Kerry was not alone in rushing to the defense of the Bush administration. Despite serious doubts being raised by arms control specialists, including some within the US government, about Iraq having proscribed weapons and a series of articles in academic journals, daily newspapers and elsewhere disputing the administration’s claims, Senator Hillary Clinton, in justification of her vote to authorize the invasion, falsely insisted that Iraq’s possession of such weapons was “not in doubt” and was “undisputed.” Despite her lies, Obama named her his first secretary of State.

Similarly, Senator Joe Biden, then head of the Senate foreign Relations Committee, falsely claimed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein – severely weakened by UN disarmament efforts and comprehensive international sanctions – somehow constituted both “a long-term threat and a short-term threat to our national security” and was an “extreme danger to the world.” Despite the absence in Iraq of any “weapons of mass destruction” or offensive military capabilities, Biden – when reminded of those remarks during an interview in 2007 – replied, “That’s right, and I was correct about that.”

In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing. Biden refused to even allow testimony from former UN inspectors like Scott Ritter – who knew more about Iraq’s WMD capabilities than anyone and would have testified that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament. Ironically, on Meet the Press in 2007, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi WMDs by falsely insisting that “everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them.” Biden also refused to honor requests by some of his Democratic colleagues to include some of the leading anti-war scholars familiar with Iraq and the Middle East in the hearings. These included both those who would have reiterated Ritter’s conclusions about nonexistent Iraqi WMD capabilities as well as those prepared to testify that a US invasion of Iraq would likely set back the struggle against al-Qaeda, alienate the United States from much of the world and precipitate bloody urban counter-insurgency warfare amid rising terrorism, Islamist extremism, and sectarian violence. All of these predictions ended up being exactly what transpired. Nor did Biden even call some of the dissenting officials in the Pentagon or State Department who were willing to challenge the alarmist claims of their ideologically-driven superiors. He was willing, however, to allow Iraqi defectors with highly dubious credentials to make false testimony about the vast quantities of WMD materiel supposedly in Saddam Hussein’s possession. Ritter has correctly accused Biden of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and … using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

Despite all this, Obama made Biden his pick for vice president.

At least Biden initially tried to alter the wording of the war authorization resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority. By contrast, Harry Reid – as assistant majority leader of the Senate – helped circumvent Biden’s efforts by signing on to the White House’s version. As the Democratic “whip,” Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic Senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Senator Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the US that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization.

In March 2003, after Iraq allowed United Nations inspectors to return and it was becoming apparent that there were no WMDs to be found, President Bush decided to invade Iraq anyway. Reid rushed to the president’s support, claiming that – despite its clear violation of the United Nations Charter – the invasion was “lawful” and that he “commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President.”

Despite all this, the Democrats voted to make Reid their leader in the Senate, where he now holds the powerful post of majority leader.

It is also important to recognize that not everyone in Congress voted to authorize the invasion. There were the 21 Senate Democrats – along with one Republican and one Independent – who voted against the war resolution. And 126 of 207 House Democrats voted against the resolution as well. In total, then, a majority of Democrats in Congress defied their leadership by saying no to war. This means that the Democrats who did support the war, despite being over-represented in leadership positions and among future presidential contenders, were part of a right-wing minority and did not represent the mainstream of their party.

The resolution backed by Reid, Biden, Clinton, Kerry and other Democratic Senate leaders also claimed that “the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States … or provide them to international terrorists who would do so … combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself.” In other words, those who supported this resolution believed, or claimed to believe, that an impoverished country, which had eliminated its stockpiles of banned weapons, destroyed its medium- and long-range missiles and eliminated its WMD programs more than a decade earlier, and had been suffering under the strictest international sanctions in world history for more than a dozen years, somehow threatened the national security of a superpower located more than 6,000 miles away. Furthermore, these members of Congress believed, or claimed to believe, that this supposed threat was so great that the United States had no choice but to launch an invasion of that country, overthrow its government, and place its people under military occupation in the name of “self-defense,” regardless of whether Iraq allowed inspectors back into the county to engage in unfettered inspections to prove that the WMDs, WMD programs and weapons systems no longer existed.

International Opposition

The US invasion of Iraq was opposed by virtually the entire international community, including Iraq’s closest neighbors, who presumably had the most to be concerned about in terms of any possible Iraqi military threat. However, the members of Congress who voted to authorize the invasion were determined to make the case that the United States – with the strongest military the world has ever known and thousands of miles beyond the range of Iraq’s alleged weapons and delivery systems – was so threatened by Iraq that the United States had to launch an invasion, overthrow its government and occupy that country for an indefinite period.

This shows a frighteningly low threshold for effectively declaring war, especially given that in most cases these members of Congress had been informed by knowledgeable sources of the widespread human and material costs that would result from a US invasion. It also indicates that they would likely be just as willing to send American forces off to another disastrous war again, also under false pretenses. Indeed, those who voted for the war demonstrated their belief that:

The United States need not abide by its international legal obligations, including those prohibiting wars of aggression.
Claims by right-wing US government officials and unreliable foreign exiles regarding a foreign government’s military capabilities are more trustworthy than independent arms control analysts and United Nations inspectors.
Concerns expressed by scholars and others knowledgeable of the likely reaction by the subjected population to a foreign conquest and the likely complications that would result should be ignored, and faith should instead be placed on the occupation policies forcibly imposed on the population by a corrupt right-wing Republican administration.

As a result, support for the resolution authorizing the Iraq War is not something that can simply be forgotten. There is no reason to be any more forgiving of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or Harry Reid than we are of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice.

Hillary Clinton’s Legacy as Secretary of State

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Hillary Clinton leaves her position as Secretary of State with a legacy of supporting autocratic regimes and occupation armies, opposing enforcement of international humanitarian law, undermining arms control and defending military solutions to complex political problems. She was appointed to her position following eight years in the US Senate, during which she became an outspoken supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, lied about Iraq’s military capabilities to frighten the public into supporting the illegal war, unleashed repeated attacks against the United Nations, opposed restrictions on land mines and cluster bombs, defended war crimes by allied right-wing governments and largely embraced Bush’s unilateralist agenda.

Despite this, Clinton is receiving largely unconditional praise from liberal pundits and others for her leadership, some even claiming that she is some kind of role model for young women!

Part of this unlikely defense of the dishonest and hawkish outgoing Secretary of State may be in reaction to the onslaught of misleading, petty, and sexist attacks from the right, such as her recent grilling on Capitol Hill about last summer’s attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. Such spurious criticisms, particularly those motivated by sexism, certainly deserve to be challenged. However, this should not in any way be used as an excuse to fail to acknowledge the damage Clinton has done, or her embrace of much of the dangerous neo-conservative doctrines of the previous administration.

It is not unusual for a president to want to be his own secretary of state, but rarely has a secretary so badly wanted to be her own president. In assuming her position in 2009, she insisted on being able to effectively appoint most of the key political positions in the State Department, which she stacked with some of the more hawkish veterans of her husband’s administration. Obama, by contrast, appointed members of the White House-based National Security Council who – while still very much part of the foreign policy establishment – tended to be younger, more innovative, and politically liberal. As a result, unlike most administrations – in which the State Department would sometimes challenge the hawks in the National Security Council – it has been the other way around under Obama, as the NSC was forced to play the moderating voice to the hawkish Secretary of State Clinton and her appointees.

During the Arab Spring, Clinton pushed for stronger US support for pro-Western dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, as well as the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. She successfully convinced the initially critical White House to support the right-wing golpistas in Honduras, who ousted that country’s democratically-elected government in 2009. She was a major proponent of NATO’s military intervention in Libya’s civil war and has encouraged a more active US role in the Syrian conflict.

Even when she was right – such as opposing the egregious human rights abuses by the Assad regime in Syria – her defense of human rights abuses by US allies and other brazen double-standards significantly weakened her ability to make a credible case. For example, she insisted that a Russian and Chinese veto of a UN Security Council resolution critical of Syria had “neutered” the Security Council’s ability to defend basic human rights, yet she has defended repeated US vetoes of resolutions critical of Israeli violations of human rights. Similarly, she has criticized the Russians for supplying Syria with attack helicopters which have been used against civilian targets, but has defended the US supplying Israel, Turkey and Colombia with attack helicopters despite their use against civilian targets.

Under her leadership in the State Department, the United States has become even less popular than it was under the Bush administration. Clinton, however, has insisted that it simply because of a failure to explain US polices better rather than the policies themselves.

Support for Women’s and LGBT Rights

To her credit, Hillary Clinton has been more outspoken than any previous Secretary of State regarding the rights of women and sexual minorities. This appears to be more rhetoric than reality, however.

One illustrative case comes in her support for the autocratic monarchy in Morocco, which she has praised for having “women’s rights protected and expanded.” The reality for women in Morocco and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, however, is very different. For example, Article 475 of the Moroccan penal code absolves the rapist if he consents to marrying his rape victim. Just weeks after Clinton praised the Moroccan regime for its record on women’s rights, Amina Filali, a 16-year old Moroccan girl – who had been raped at the age of 15 and forced to marry her rapist, who subsequently battered and abused her – burned herself to death. Similarly, it was not long after a previous visit to Morocco, where she praised that autocratic monarchy’s human rights record, that the regime illegally expelled Aminatou Haidar, known as the Saharan Gandhi, for her leadership in the nonviolent resistance struggle to the illegal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. Haidar – a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and other honors for her nonviolent activism, and who had previously spent years in Moroccan prisons, where she was repeatedly tortured – went on a month-long hunger strike that almost killed her before Morocco relented to international pressure and allowed her to return to her country.

Given Clinton’s backing of neo-liberal economic policies and war-making by the United States and its allies, her advocacy of women’s rights overseas within what is widely seen outside this country as being within an imperialist context, may have actually set back indigenous feminist movements in the same a way that the Bush administration’s “democracy-promotion” agenda was a serious setback to popular struggles for freedom and democracy. Just as US support for dictatorial regimes in the Middle East gave little credibility to President George W. Bush’s pro-democracy rhetoric, Hillary Clinton’s call for greater respect for women’s rights in Muslim countries never had much credibility while US-manufactured ordinance is blowing up women in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Clinton’s Support for Arab Dictatorships

In the often contentious debates within the administration on how to respond to the civil insurrections in the Arab world challenging US-backed dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, Clinton was among the most reluctant to support the pro-democracy struggles.

Her first statement on Tunisia was nearly four weeks after the outbreak of the uprising, in which she expressed her concern over the impact of the “unrest and instability” on the “very positive aspects of our relationship with Tunisia,” insisting that the United States was “not taking sides” between the repressive dictatorship and the pro-democracy struggle. She went on to note that “one of my biggest concerns in this entire region is the many young people without economic opportunities in their home countries.” Rather than calling for a more democratic and accountable government in Tunisia, however, her suggestion for resolving the crisis was that the economies of Tunisia and other North African states “need to be more open.” Ironically, Tunisia under the US-backed Ben Ali dictatorship – more than almost any country in the region – had been following the dictates of Washington and the International Monetary Fund in instituting “structural adjustment programs,” privatizing much of its economy and allowing for an unprecedented level of “free trade.”

Another example of her failure to recognize the pro-democracy yearning in the Arab world, Clinton insisted during the early days of the Egyptian revolution that the country was stable. She further insisted that US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak was “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” despite the miserable failure of the regime in its nearly 30 years in power to do so. As the protests grew, Clinton called for the regime to reform from within rather than supporting pro-democracy protesters’ demand that the dictator step down, saying, “We believe strongly that the Egyptian government has an important opportunity at this moment in time to implement political, economic and social reforms to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” As the repression increased, Clinton pressed for restraint by security forces and called for an “orderly, peaceful transition” to a “real democracy” in Egypt, but still refused to call for Mubarak to step down, insisting that “it’s not a question of who retains power. That should not be the issue. It’s how are we going to respond to the legitimate needs and grievances expressed by the Egyptian people and chart a new path.”

On the one hand, she recognized that whether Mubarak would remain in power “is going to be up to the Egyptian people.” On the other hand, she continued to speak in terms of reforms coming from the regime, stating that US policy was to “help clear the air so that those who remain in power, starting with President Mubarak, with his new vice president, with the new prime minister, will begin a process of reaching out, of creating a dialogue that will bring in peaceful activists and representatives of civil society to … plan a way forward that will meet the legitimate grievances of the Egyptian people.”

Despite nearly 800 Egyptians being killed over the 18-day period by the US-supplied military and police, Clinton insisted, “There is no discussion of cutting off aid.” Up until the final days of the uprising, Clinton was publicly advocating a leadership role for General Suleiman, the notorious “torturer-in-chief” of the Egyptian regime, whom Mubarak had named as his vice-president.

Similarly, that March, when Saudi-backed forces of the repressive Bahraini monarchy brutally crushed nonviolent pro-democracy demonstrators in that Persian Gulf kingdom and the killings, torture and repression were being condemned throughout the world, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton had emerged as one of the “leading voices inside the administration urging greater US support for the Bahraini king.” While insisting that the United States back right-wing Israeli governments because Israel is “the sole democracy in the Middle East,” Clinton has done her best to make sure other Middle Eastern countries remain undemocratic.

Clinton’s fondness for autocratic allies includes those in Central Asia. For example, despite evidence to the contrary, Secretary of State Clinton has claimed that the Karimov dictatorship – which has massacred demonstrators by the hundreds, boiled opponents in oil and forced hundreds of thousands of children into forced labor – was “showing signs of improving its human rights record and expanding political freedoms.” Similarly, when asked about the dictator’s claim that he was committed to leave a legacy of freedom and democracy for his grandchildren, one of Clinton’s top aides responded, “Yeah. I do believe him. I mean, he’s said several times that he’s committed to this. He’s made a speech last November where he talked about this.” In response to some skeptical follow-up questions by journalists, the official replied that “we think that there is really quite an important opening now to work on that stuff, also work on developing civil society, which again President Karimov has expressed support for. So, yeah, I do take him at his word.”

During her first year as Secretary of State, Clinton visited Morocco during an unprecedented crackdown on human rights activists. Instead of joining Amnesty International and other human rights groups in condemning the increase in the already-severe repression in the occupied Western Sahara, Clinton instead chose to offer unconditional praise for the Moroccan government’s human rights record. Just days before her arrival, Moroccan authorities arrested seven nonviolent activists from Western Sahara on trumped-up charges of high treason, who were immediately recognized by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. Amnesty called for their unconditional release. Clinton decided to ignore the plight of these and other political prisoners held in Moroccan jails.

These activists were demanding implantation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions, endorsed by previous US administrations, for a referendum on the fate of the occupied territory. Clinton, however, has endorsed Morocco’s plans for annexing the territory under a dubious “autonomy” plan and simply called for “mediation” between the Moroccan kingdom and the exiled nationalist Polisario Front, a process that would not offer the people of the territory a say in their future.

Support for the Israeli Occupation

Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara was not the only foreign military occupation backed by Secretary of State Clinton.

As a Senator, Clinton was an outspoken defender of Israel’s colonization efforts in the occupied West Bank and highly critical of the United Nations for its efforts to uphold international humanitarian law, even taking the time to visit a major Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank in a show of support. She moderated that stance somewhat as Secretary of State in expressing concerns over how the right-wing Israeli government’s settlements policies harms the overall climate of the peace process, but she has refused to demand that Israel abide by international demands to stop building additional illegal settlements. An outspoken critic of Palestinian efforts for UN recognition, Clinton has even equated Palestine’s legal right to have its state recognized by the United Nations with Israel’s illegal settlements policy.

When the Netanyahu government reneged on an earlier promise of a temporary and limited freeze and announced massive subsidies for the construction of new settlements on the eve of a recent Clinton visit to Israel, she spoke only of the need for peace talks to resume. Indeed, Clinton refused to travel to nearby Ramallah to meet with Palestinian leaders and focused the discussions with Israeli officials on Egypt and Iran, not Palestine.

In 2011, Clinton successfully pushed for a US veto of a UN Security Council resolution reiterating the illegality of the settlement drive and calling for a settlement freeze, saying, “We have consistently over many years said that the United Nations Security Council – and resolutions that would come before the Security Council – is not the right vehicle to advance the goal.” She has never explained why the UN Security Council, which has traditionally been the vehicle for enforcing international law in territories under foreign belligerent occupation, should not continue to play such a role, particularly given the US failure to stop this right-wing colonization drive on its own.

Clinton has even opposed humanitarian efforts supportive of the Palestinians, criticizing an unarmed flotilla scheduled to bring relief supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip, claiming it would “provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.” Clinton did not explain why a country had “the right to defend themselves” against unarmed ships carrying relief supplies that were clearly no threat to Israel. Not only did the organizers of the flotilla go to great steps to ensure there were no weapons on board, the only cargo bound for Gaza on the US ship were letters of solidarity to the Palestinians in that besieged enclave who have suffered under devastating Israeli bombardments, a crippling blockade golpistas and a right-wing Islamist government. Nor did Clinton explain why she considered the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the port of Gaza to be “Israeli waters,” when the entire international community recognizes Israeli territorial waters as being well to the northeast of the ships’ intended route.

Clinton’s State Department issued a public statement designed to discourage Americans from taking part in the flotilla to Gaza because they might be attacked by Israeli forces, yet they never issued a public statement demanding that Israel not attack Americans legally traveling in international waters. Indeed, Clinton spokesperson Victoria Nuland tried to position the United States to blame those taking part in the flotilla rather than the rightist Israeli government should anything happen to them. Like those in the early 1960s who claimed civil rights protesters were responsible for the attacks by white racist mobs because they had “provoked them,” Nuland stated, “Groups that seek to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza are taking irresponsible and provocative actions that risk the safety of their passengers.” Not only did Clinton never encourage caution or restraint by the Israeli government nor mention that the International Red Cross and other advocates of international humanitarian law recognize that the Israeli blockade is illegal, it appears she successfully convinced the Greek government to deny them the right to sail from Greek ports.

In short, Clinton’s legacy at the State Department has been one of continuing the policies of her predecessors in the Bush administration of opposing international law and human rights. It remains to be seen whether John Kerry, who joined Clinton as one of the right-wing minority of Congressional Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq, will do much better. In any case, it is important to challenge the myth that Hillary Clinton is a figure who deserves support or admiration for her role of Secretary of State, or that she deserves another opportunity for influencing US foreign policy.

The Case Against Kerry

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President Obama’s selection of John Kerry as the next secretary of state sends the wrong signal to America’s allies and adversaries alike. Kerry’s record in the United States Senate, where he currently chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has included spurious attacks on the International Court of Justice, unqualified defense of Israeli occupation policies and human rights violations, and support for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, thereby raising serious questions about his commitment to international law and treaty obligations. Furthermore, his false claims about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and his repeated denials of well-documented human rights abuses by allied governments raise serious questions about his credibility.

In the 1980s, during the early part of his Senate career, Kerry was considered one of the more progressive members of the U.S. Senate on foreign policy. His record included challenging the Reagan administration’s policies on Central America, providing strong leadership during the Iran-Contra investigation, opposing U.S. support for the Marcos regime in the Philippines and other allied dictatorships, and supporting the nuclear freeze, among other positions supporting peace and human rights.

More recently, however, Kerry became a prominent supporter of various neoconservative initiatives, including the invasion and occupation of Iraq, undermining the authority of the United Nations, and supporting Israeli militarism and expansionism.

Opposition to International Law – Iraq War

Kerry was an outspoken supporter of the Bush Doctrine, which declares that the United States has the right to unilaterally invade foreign countries, topple their governments, and occupy them indefinitely if they are deemed to pose even a hypothetical threat against the United States. In 2002, he voted against an unsuccessful resolution authorizing the president to use force against Iraq only if the United Nations Security Council permitted such force under the UN Charter and instead voted for an alternative Republican resolution, which authorized President Bush to invade that oil-rich country unilaterally in violation of the UN Charter.

The October 2002 war resolution backed by Kerry was not like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution regarding Vietnam, where there was no time for reflection and debate. Kerry had been briefed by the chief UN weapons inspector and by prominent scholars of the region, who informed him of the likely absence of any of the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” and the likely consequences of a U.S. invasion, but he voted to authorize the invasion anyway. It was not a “mistake” or a momentary lapse of judgment. It demonstrated Kerry’s dismissive attitude toward fundamental principles of international law and international treaties that prohibit aggressive war.

Kerry and his supporters claim he does not really reject international law. They note that, in voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Kerry stated at that time that he expected President Bush “to work with the United Nations Security Council and our allies . . . if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force.” He then promised that if President Bush failed to do so, “I will be the first to speak out.”

However, Senator Kerry broke that promise. When President Bush abandoned his efforts to gain United Nations Security Council authorization for the war in late February 2003 and pressed forward with plans for the invasion without a credible international coalition, Kerry remained silent. Indeed, when President Bush actually launched the invasion soon afterwards, Senator Kerry praised him, co-sponsoring a Senate resolution declaring that the invasion was “lawful and fully authorized by the Congress” and that he “commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President . . . in the conflict with Iraq.”

Unlike the hawkish senator from Massachusetts, most Democrats in Congress voted against authorizing the invasion. For example, Senator Robert Byrd introduced a resolution in the fall of 2002 clarifying that authorizing an invasion of Iraq would not diminish Congress’ Constitutional authority to declare war and that no additional authority not directly related to a clear threat of imminent, sudden, and direct attack on the United States could be granted to the president unless Congress authorized it. Senator Kerry voted against it, saying “Every nation has the right to act preemptively if it faces an imminent and grave threat.”

Senator Kerry’s embrace of unilateralism and his rejection of the United Nations system was further illustrated in his attacks on former Vermont governor Howard Dean—who had been a rival for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination—for arguing that a genuine international coalition should have been established before the United States invaded Iraq. Kerry claimed that such multilateralism “cedes our security and presidential responsibility to defend America to someone else” since it would “permit a veto over when American can or cannot act.” Dean’s call for the United States to work in broad coalitions, insisted Kerry, is “little more than a pretext for doing nothing.”

Even after the Bush administration acknowledged that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” or WMD programs, Kerry said he would have voted for the war anyway because of the oppressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the fact that Iraq could potentially make WMDs in the future. What is disturbing about this is that there are scores of oppressive governments around the world that could conceivably pose some kind of threat at some time in the future. Kerry apparently believes that the president should have the power to go after any of them right now.

Even conservative analysts like Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and later a lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, criticized what he called Kerry’s “recklessly prowar positions,” arguing that Kerry’s criteria for going to war were “wildly aggressive.” Correctly referring to Kerry as an “uber-militarist”, Edwards observed, “I know of no leading American ‘hawk,’ not even among the most militant of the neocons, who has said he or she would have supported going to war if it were absolutely known that the perceived ‘imminent threat’ did not exist.”

It appears that Kerry has not changed his hawkish view. As recently as November 2011, Kerry voted against a resolution which would have repealed the 2002 authorization for the use of force in Iraq.

Kerry basically rejects the UN Charter and the whole basis of the post-World War II international legal system, which is based on the notion of collective security and the illegality of any nation launching an aggressive war. In Kerry’s view, powerful nations like the United States can invade any country they want if they determine that it might hypothetically pose some kind of threat someday in the future. To have someone with this extremist position as secretary of state sends a message to the international community that little has changed since the Bush administration.

Opposition to International Law – Israel

Iraq is not the only example of Kerry’s hostility toward international law, however. An outspoken supporter of the policies of a series of right-wing Israeli governments in the occupied territories, Kerry has defended the Israeli re-occupation of sections of the West Bank; Israel’s ongoing violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions; Israel’s policy of assassinating suspected militants and other Palestinian leaders; former rightist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed annexation of vast stretches of occupied Palestinian territory in order to incorporate illegal Jewish settlements into Israel; moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; opposing Palestinian self-determination or UN recognition of statehood outside of parameters agreed to by Israel’s right wing government; and the Israeli government’s construction of an illegal separation wall deep inside occupied territory (in defiance of a recent near-unanimous ruling by the International Court of Justice, which led Kerry to strongly criticize the UN’s judicial body).

Kerry defended Israel’s 2010 attack on an unarmed humanitarian flotilla in international waters, during which they killed nine crewmen—including a 19-year-old American citizen—despite the attack’s violation of international maritime law. Despite the ships being inspected prior to leaving the port of a NATO ally, Kerry justified the fatal raid on the unarmed ships on the grounds that Israel had every right “to make sure weapons are not being smuggled in.”

In the face of international outcry at Israeli’s 2006 war on Lebanon and 2008-2009 war on the Gaza Strip, Kerry joined Republican Senate colleagues in co-sponsoring resolutions unconditionally supporting the attacks. Reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and others condemned both Israel and the Arab militias for apparent war crimes, but Kerry insisted that Israel’s actions constituted legitimate self-defense and were perfectly legal. Kerry also attacked a well-documented 575-page report by the UNHRC, led by a team of reputable international jurists, which presented evidence of war crimes by both Hamas and Israel during the 2008-2009 fighting. Kerry insisted that attacks by Israel (which were responsible for over 800 civilian deaths) were perfectly legal, attributing the entire fault to Hamas (which was responsible for three civilian deaths). Despite longstanding international legal conventions against bombing civilian-populated areas, Kerry insisted that Israel’s entire military operation constituted legitimate self-defense.

Kerry’s hostility toward international humanitarian law came into particular focus in 2004, when he launched a series of attacks against the International Court of Justice. That summer, the World Court issued a unanimous (save for the U.S. judge) advisory opinion that Israel—like all countries—is bound by international humanitarian law and that the separation barrier being built inside the occupied West Bank was illegal.

In response, Kerry cosponsored a Senate resolution “supporting the construction by Israel of a security fence to prevent Palestinian terrorist attacks, condemning the decision of the International Court of Justice on the legality of the security fence, and urging no further action by the United Nations to delay or prevent the construction of the security fence.” Kerry’s resolution claimed that “the International Court of Justice is politicized and critical of Israel” since “The United States, Korea, and India have constructed security fences to separate such countries from territories or other countries for the security of their citizens.” Kerry’s comparison, however, fails to note that the other barriers, unlike Israel’s, were placed along internationally recognized borders and were therefore not the subject of legal challenge. The Court explicitly affirmed Israel’s right to construct the barrier on their border, just not in foreign territory under Israeli occupation. Rather than displaying a bias against Israel, the World Court has actually been quite consistent: In the only other two advisory opinions issued by the ICJ involving occupied territories (South African-occupied Namibia in 1972 and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara in 1975), they also ruled against the occupying power.

In the case of the occupied West Bank, however, Kerry insisted, that the World Court “do[es] not have jurisdiction” and that any legal challenges to the route of the wall should go through the Israeli judiciary “and we should respect that process.” In other words, Kerry takes an extreme position, effectively saying that legal matters involving international humanitarian law in territories under foreign belligerent occupation should be addressed solely by the courts of the occupying power. Part of this may be that he doesn’t even recognized territory invaded by U.S. allies as occupied. Kerry’s Senate resolution against the World Court decision, had it passed, would have marked the first time either house of Congress has passed a resolution that refers to the West Bank not as an “occupied” territory but as “disputed.” This distinction is important for two reasons: the word “disputed” implies that the claims of the West Bank’s Israeli conquerors are as legitimate as the claims of Palestinians who have lived on the land for centuries, and disputed territories—unlike occupied territories—are not covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention and many other international legal statutes.

Despite rationalizing for his support for the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Iraq was violating a series of UN Security Council resolutions, when U.S. allies have defied UN Security Council resolutions, Kerry has defended them. For example, he has supported Israel’s annexation of occupied East Jerusalem, which Israeli forces seized in June 1967, despite a series of UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Israel rescind its annexation (such as resolutions 262 and 267). He has also opposed efforts to block Israeli efforts to colonize large sections of the West Bank, despite a series of resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from these illegal settlements (such as resolutions 446, 452, 465, and 471).

Thus, in John Kerry’s world, the United States alone can decide which United Nations Security Council resolutions to enforce and how they are enforced. No less than President Bush, Kerry seeks to effectively overturn the post-World War II international system based upon the rule of law and collective security in order to forcibly impose a Pax Americana.

Credibility Problems

A U.S. secretary of state, even one as far to the right as John Kerry, must not be perceived as dishonest. Repeatedly being caught making blatant falsehoods in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary does not give America’s chief diplomat the kind of credibility our country needs to conduct relations with foreign nations.

Unfortunately, Kerry’s credibility has repeatedly been put into question by his willingness to either fabricate non-existent threats or naively believe transparently false and manipulated intelligence claiming such threats exist—such as when he chose to ignore a plethora of evidence from weapons inspectors and independent arms control analysts who said that, prior to his vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq in October 2002, Iraq had already achieved at least qualitative disarmament.

In a speech on the Senate floor immediately prior to the vote, Senator Kerry categorically stated that Saddam Hussein was “attempting to develop nuclear weapons.” However, there appears to be no evidence to suggest that Iraq had had an active nuclear program for at least eight to ten years prior to the U.S. invasion. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in 1998 and subsequently that Iraq’s nuclear program appeared to have been completely dismantled. To justify his claims of an Iraqi nuclear threat, Senator Kerry claimed that “all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons.” The reality, of course, was that much of the U.S. intelligence community was highly skeptical of claims that Iraq was attempting to acquire nuclear materials, and this fact was widely circulated in academic journals, the mainstream media, and in intelligence reports.

In addition, despite being briefed to the contrary by former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and other arms control experts, Senator Kerry stated unequivocally that “Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.” He even claimed that most elements of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs “are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.” He did not try to explain how this could be possible, given the limited shelf life of such chemical and biological agents and the strict embargo against imports of any additional banned materials that had been in place since 1990. The Massachusetts senator also asserted that authorizing a U.S. invasion of that oil-rich country was necessary since “these weapons represent an unacceptable threat.”

However, despite inspections by the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) and subsequent searches by U.S. forces, no chemical or biological weapons have been found.

Senator Kerry’s fabrications about Iraq did not stop there. He made similarly ludicrous claims that “Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents, which could threaten Iraq’s neighbors as well as American forces in the Persian Gulf.” In a cynical effort to take advantage of Americans’ post-9/11 fears, Kerry went on to claim that “Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives which could bring them to the United States homeland.”

Again, no such Iraqi UAVs or other systems capable of delivering chemical and biological weapons have been found.

To this day, Kerry’s Senate office has refused to provide me or any other independent analysts access to the supposed intelligence that supposedly said Iraq had these supposed WMDs and delivery systems that were supposedly such a threat that we supposedly had to invade. He did, however, presumably see the polls that showed that the only way the American people would support a war on Iraq would be if Iraq was a threat to the United States, which may have influenced his decision to make that claim.

Kerry claims that under the circumstances present in October 2002, when he and his congressional colleagues made the fateful decision to grant President Bush unprecedented war-making authority, “any president would have needed the threat of force to act effectively.” Kerry went on to say, “The idea was simple: We would get the weapons inspectors back in to verify whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” This is an extraordinarily misleading statement, however. Saddam Hussein had finally agreed to unconditional unfettered United Nations inspections as demanded by the UN Security Council on September 16, nearly four weeks prior to Kerry’s vote authorizing the U.S. invasion.

Kerry has also demonstrated a tendency to make things up to rationalize war crimes by U.S. allies. For example, to explain civilian deaths caused by Israeli air strikes and other military operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, he co-sponsored resolutions accusing Hamas and Hezbollah of deliberately using civilians as “human shields.” Subsequent human rights reports noted that Hamas and Hezbollah were guilty of other violations of international humanitarian law, but found no cases of either group deliberately holding civilians against their will as a deterrent from enemy attacks. Kerry’s office has refused to reply to a series of inquiries asking the senator to provide examples of where and when Hamas or Hezbollah ever used human shields.

Kerry insisted that a United Nations report ignored how the Israelis supposedly went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties by dropping leaflets and sending robo-calls to Palestinian homes warning them of impending attacks. In reality, the report examined these claims in detail, but concluded that many of the calls and leaflets were sent out too late or were too vague to enable civilians to reach safety. Furthermore, Israeli calls for civilians to flee to downtown Gaza City led those who heeded such advice right into the line of Israeli fire, as when the Israelis attacked the UN compound and school with mortars and phosphorous bombs where hundreds of fleeing residents had sought refuge. The UNHRC report confirmed the conclusions of previous investigations that there were no legitimate military targets in the area.

There are quite a few other examples of Kerry’s willingness to make things up to support controversial actions by the Israeli government. For example, back in 2004, when Palestinian president Yasir Arafat was repeatedly calling for a resumption of peace negotiations but was being rejected by Israel’s right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon, Kerry insisted that it was Arafat who was refusing to “take part in a peaceful process.”

Similarly, during an interview on Meet the Press, Kerry justified Israel’s assassination policy by saying that “The moment Hamas says, ‘We’ve given up violence. We are prepared to negotiate,’ I am absolutely confident they will find an Israel that is thirsty to have that negotiation.” In reality, the Israeli government has repeatedly stated that, even if Hamas made such a statement, they would not negotiate with the Islamic group. Furthermore, Israel’s assassination policy has included more than just terrorists: it has included community leaders such as Isaac Saada, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Bethlehem who was working with Israeli colleagues in developing a joint curriculum in conflict resolution, and Shaden Abu Hijleh, a Palestinian social worker and nonviolent activist in Nablus. A special UN investigation, headed by a prominent Jewish American professor of international law, concluded that Israel has utilized “a seemingly random hit list” in its assassinations.

Imperial Hubris

Kerry has repeatedly demonstrated an incredible level of hubris and arrogance regarding American military power. Indeed, in supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Kerry apparently worked on the assumption that the United States could get away with an indefinite occupation of a heavily populated Arab country with a strong history of nationalism and resistance to foreign domination.

Similarly, his attacks on those with more moderate views raise questions as to whether he has the temperament to be secretary of state. For example, in 2003, when Governor Dean proposed that the United States take a more “even-handed role” as the chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “bring the sides together” in a “constructive way,” and “not point fingers” at who is to blame, Kerry not only insisted Dean was wrong for suggesting it, but made the bizarre assertion that such an approach “would throw this volatile region into even more turmoil.”

Kerry has also made a habit of accusing those who do not support his right-wing agenda as somehow being soft on terrorism. In 2004, Kerry attacked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for backing the UN General Assembly’s decision to ask the ICJ to consider the legal questions involved in Israel’s separation barrier, claiming that doing so casts doubt on the chief UN official’s opposition to terrorism.

Kerry was particularly hostile towards those who refused to support Bush’s war in Iraq and those who believed the United Nations should take the lead in the post-war effort of stabilization and reconstruction. In 2004, when the newly elected government of Spain announced that it would fulfill its longstanding promise to withdraw its forces from Iraq unless the mission was placed under the United Nations, Kerry responded by saying, “I call on Prime Minister Zapatero to reconsider his decision and to send a message that terrorists cannot win by their act of terror.” Not only did Kerry believe that the Bush/Cheney administration was somehow more trustworthy than the international community in resolving the serious problems besetting post-war Iraq, Kerry was arguing that if a government disagreed with him and insisted that there be a UN mandate in place before participating in the occupation of a foreign country, they were somehow appeasing terrorists.

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he promised to not just end the war in Iraq, but to end the “mindset” that led to the war. However, in nominating John Kerry to be his next secretary of state, it appears that mindset is alive and well.

Democratic Leaders Undermine Israeli-Palestinian Peace and Their Own Procedures

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In a stunning violation of its own rules, the wishes of the majority of delegates at its national convention, and positions taken by the United Nations and virtually every country in the world, the Democratic Party leadership pushed through an amendment to its platform early during its proceedings on Wednesday, with barely half the delegates present and without allowing for any discussion or debate, stating that Jerusalem “is and will remain the capital of Israel” and should be “undivided.”

The language, as foreign policy analysts noted, is in “in direct opposition to longstanding U.S. policy on Jerusalem” that the status of the city should be determined by talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, both of whom desire Jerusalem as their capital, and that the city should not be unilaterally recognized as the capital of either Israel or Palestine until then. Most observers have recognized that a workable two-state solution would include having Jewish-populated western Jerusalem recognized as the capital of Israel and the predominantly Arab part of eastern Jerusalem—currently under Israeli military occupation—as the capital of a Palestinian state.

The amendment to the platform, however, ignores Palestinian claims to the city completely, which—combined with the insistence that the city be “undivided”—could be interpreted as a call for exclusive Israeli control. By contrast, a recent poll showed that Democrats by a nearly 2:1 margin believe that Jerusalem should be divided between Israelis and Palestinians rather than controlled exclusively by Israel.

Virtually no country currently recognizes Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Neither the United States nor any other country currently has its embassy in Jerusalem—nearly all foreign embassies are located instead in Tel Aviv.

Convention chairman and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa put the amendment to the floor, along with another amendment to include mention of God in the platform, for a voice vote, noting that a two-thirds majority was necessary for adoption of the amendment. He looked surprised when the “nay” votes appeared to outnumber the “aye” votes. He called the motion a second time with the same results. He then called the motion a third time, still way short of the required two-thirds majority and probably still short of even a simple majority, but he claimed that the motion had somehow received at least two-thirds vote anyway and declared the motion carried.

Outraged delegates in the majority started booing at the chair for his extraordinary abuse of power. The media jumped on the unprecedented discord in what had until then been a very unified and orderly convention, while leading Republicans and conservative commentators began claiming that Democrats were “booing God and Jerusalem.”

As an illustration of the depth of the dishonesty in the Democratic Party leadership, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed that the vote was “absolutely two-thirds” and that “there wasn’t any discord.” Afterwards, CNN’s Anderson Cooper observed that the DNC chair must live in an “alternate universe.”

Pushing through the amendment was in part a reaction to Republican criticisms that the Obama administration—despite providing record amounts of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel’s rightist government and blocking the United Nations from challenging Israeli violations of international humanitarian law—was somehow not supportive enough of Israel. It appears, then, that President Obama and other Democratic leaders were more concerned about assuaging right-wing Republicans than honoring the beliefs of members of their own party or following their own convention rules.

Indeed, the Democratic leadership was so desperate to push through this right-wing amendment that the chair was willing to lie in front of a nationally televised audience that an amendment had passed by a two-thirds majority voice vote when it was obvious to any viewer or listener that, despite three separate attempts, it had not. And they did so despite the likelihood that it would create a chaotic and angry scene on the convention floor that the media and the Republicans would exploit to the fullest.

It was also a demonstration of just how determined the Democratic Party leadership is to undermine the Middle East peace process and weaken international law, even if it means running roughshod over their members and thereby hurting their chances in November.

The craven way in which the Jerusalem amendment was pushed through demonstrates that the Democratic Party is not a democratic party. It has shown to the world an essentially authoritarian mindset, both in terms of its willingness to undermine international law in its support of the expansionist goals of allied right-wing governments as well as its willingness to ignore its own rules and overrule the majority of the elected delegates at its national convention.

This raises some critical questions for Democrats as we move into the final three months of the 2012 campaign: If the leadership refuses to respect party members, why should party members respect the leadership? And why should ordinary Democrats work to re-elect leaders who put their own right-wing agenda ahead of the beliefs of the party’s more progressive majority?

Progressive Defense of Weiner Overlooks His Right-Wing Foreign Policy

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A surprising number of progressives have been expressing regret at the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) over the “sexting” scandal, correctly noting how the grossly inflated media coverage has distracted from far more pressing issues, as well as the far worse sins (mostly not involving sex) committed by Republican lawmakers. What is disturbing, however, is the way Weiner is being treated as if he was a leading progressive voice on Capitol Hill despite his decidedly right-wing political agenda, particularly on foreign policy.

For example, blogger Katie Halper argued that lying about sending explicit pictures to young women via text message isn’t nearly as bad as lying about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that led to a tragic, illegal and unnecessary war.

Unfortunately, Weiner was one those who did lie about Iraqi WMDs. Despite strong antiwar sentiment in his liberal district, he was among the right-wing minority of Democrats on Capitol Hill who unconstitutionally provided George W. Bush the unprecedented power to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to us, at the time and circumstances of his own choosing. And, to this day, Weiner supports unconditional funding for the ongoing Iraq occupation. Weiner’s war vote revealed contempt for the most basic principles of international law, including the United Nations (UN) Charter, which prohibits such aggressive war. He demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice over 4,500 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, help create a whole new generation of Islamist extremists radicalized by the invasion of the Arab heartland by a Western power, and sacrifice over one trillion dollars – which could have been used here at home for health care, education, the environment, public transportation, housing and other human needs – for the sake of oil and empire.

Weiner is also one of the most right-wing members of Congress when it comes to backing the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

While President Obama’s refusal to pressure Israel to end its colonization of the occupied Palestinian West Bank has brought him criticism from supporters of international law, Weiner has joined Republicans in attacking Obama’s Middle East policy from the right. For example, when Obama raised concerns about Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank (in violation of the road map and other US-led peace initiatives, a landmark World Court ruling, the Fourth Geneva Convention and a series of UN Security Council resolutions), Weiner announced, “There’s a line between articulating US policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line.” Labeling the illegal colonization of someone else’s country as “a domestic policy” is nothing short of endorsement of the right of conquest. Virtually the entire international community recognizes the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as being under belligerent occupation and distinguishes that region from the 78 percent of historic Palestine controlled by Israel prior to June 1967, which is recognized as within the purview of the Israel’s domestic jurisdiction. According to Weiner, however, “There are people who believe that there is settlement activity in the Palestinian territory. I don’t believe that,” adding, “The settlement that is going on is in Israel.” Rejecting a two-state solution, he insists that Israel’s western border is “the Jordan River.”

Despite the deaths of at least 900 civilians, including 400 children, from Israeli attacks, Weiner called Israel’s 2008-2009 war on Gaza a “humane” war. Contradicting findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and other investigations – which found overwhelming evidence of widespread indiscriminate attacks on civilian population centers – Weiner insisted that Israel used restraint in its attacks on the heavily populated enclave “as surgical a job as possible.” He also defended Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, which killed at least 700 civilians, defending Israel’s use of cluster bombs and claiming the war was a “defensive action,” and that, “This is a time of need for our ally.”

Weiner was a leading defender of last year’s Israeli attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in the high seas, during which Israeli commandoes killed nine people, including a 19-year-old US citizen, who was initially shot while filming the attack, then fatally shot, execution-style, in the back of the head while lying on the ship’s deck. In Weiner’s view, murdering humanitarian aid workers in international waters is legitimate “self-defense” which he “strongly support(s).” Though this international effort was initiated by a broad coalition of human rights groups in several different countries, including the United States, Weiner said, “We know this tragedy was instigated by Turkey.” And, though Turkey remains in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Wiener went as far as referring to Turkey as “our former ally.”

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Weiner’s Intolerance for Dissent

Weiner has long been a fierce opponent of academic freedom, spearheading a campaign to press Columbia University to fire political science professor Joseph Massad for his criticisms of the right-wing Israeli government. Fortunately, despite Weiner’s efforts to relaunch a McCarthyistic purge of professors who challenge the policies of the United States and its allies, Columbia held firm to its commitment to academic freedom. Ironically, Massad has also been critical of anti-Semites and others who have exaggerated the power of the “Jewish lobby” as the primary force behind US Middle East policy, recognizing more salient factors, including perceived US strategic interests and the use of Israel to advance US hegemony in the region. What apparently offends Weiner about scholars such as Massad, then, is not prejudice against Jews or a bias against Israel, but their audacity to challenge the essentially imperialistic view of the Bush administration and supporters of Bush’s neoconservative agenda like himself.

Another target of Weiner’s has been the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a Congressionally funded foundation based in Washington that has engaged in research and education in conflict resolution and sends staff to various conflict regions for work in mediation and other efforts to prevent bloodshed. Though the organization is ideologically diverse in orientation and sometimes criticized from the left for its rather centrist orientation, Weiner apparently considers its “peace” orientation a threat to the American and Israeli wars he has so eagerly supported. While voting for hundreds of billions of dollars for the Iraq War and various other Pentagon boondoggles, he has referred to the USIP as a, “case study in how government waste thrives,” and calls the modest $54 million in public funding proposed this year a “misuse of taxpayer money.” He has teamed up with right-wing Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz in co-sponsoring legislation to defund the USIP and has cowritten articles in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere trashing the institute.

Weiner’s intolerance for those who disagree with him extends even to international organizations. Despite treaty obligations that require the United States to allow recognized delegations access to the UN headquarters in New York, Weiner introduced legislation to bar the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – recognized since 1974 as the Palestinians’ sole legitimate representatives – from the UN. Weiner called on PLO representative Dr. Riyad Mansour, a distinguished US-educated academic, and his colleagues at the UN mission to pack their “little Palestinian terrorist bags.”

In Weiner’s worldview, if you disagree with his right-wing predilections, such as his defense of the rightist government in Israel, you are attacked as ideologically biased: If Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch (HRW) documents Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, even if they simultaneously cite violations by Arab parties, it means that Amnesty and HRW are “biased against Israel.” If mainstreams media outlets, including the strongly pro-Israel New York Times, dare to report Israeli transgressions of international legal norms, he labels them as “biased against Israel” as well. He has attacked the International Court of Justice in the Hague for being biased against Israel for its near-unanimous 2004 advisory opinion (with only the US judge dissenting) noting that Israel – no more or less than any other country – is obliged to uphold international humanitarian law and that the separation barrier being built by that country’s rightist government could not be built beyond the country’s internationally recognized border. When the United Nations reported violations of international humanitarian law by both Hezbollah and Israel during their 2006 war, Weiner claimed that the UN, “seems to be siding with the terrorists.”

In order to advance his right-wing foreign policy agenda, Weiner has also been known to simply make things up. In addition to his false claims about Iraq still having weapons of mass destruction, he has claimed repeatedly that the high civilian casualty rates in the Israeli wars on Lebanon in 2006 and on the Gaza Strip in 2009 were due to Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ use of human shields, despite exhaustive investigations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various UN agencies that did not find a single such incident. Weiner has claimed that the Israeli armed forces do not occupy the West Bank, and even insists there isn’t any Israeli military presence in the territory. He claimed that Israel’s blockade of civilian goods to the Gaza Strip was “internationally recognized,” despite the widespread consensus to the contrary among international legal scholars, the International Committee of the Red Cross and reputable human rights groups. He claimed that the PLO is recognized by the US government as a “terrorist organization,” even though that designation was dropped over 20 years ago. He even denied that the moderate Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is also head of the PLO, which Abbas has been since Yasir Arafat’s death in 2004.

Why Do “Progressives” Defend Weiner?

Despite Weiner’s right-wing proclivities and his intolerance of progressives, liberals, and even centrists who disagree with him, the hawkish New York Congressman still found himself on the receiving end of unqualified praise from prominent liberal organizations. The liberal group Democracy for America named him as a top hero in the House of Representatives, citing him as the third-most-influential “progressive” in that body. MoveOn and other progressive groups have routinely endorsed his re-election and heaped praise on his supposedly “progressive” agenda.

Many point to his relatively liberal positions on some economic issues, abortion, gay rights and other domestic concerns. However, a liberal record on domestic issues did not save hawkish Democrats like the late senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson from criticism for their support of the Vietnam War, nor did it curb criticism of Democrats who supported US intervention in Central America in the 1980’s. Why has Weiner largely escaped critical scrutiny for his support for US and Israeli militarism, his disdain for international law and human rights, his quickness to attack human rights organizations and advocates, and his willingness to lie to advance his right-wing agenda?

There may be some underlying racism at work, in that his supporters may see Weiner’s progressive positions on certain domestic issues that benefit (primarily white) Americans as somehow of more importance than policies which negatively impact Arabs and other people of color.

Has the bar become so low that politicians like Weiner are now considered progressive? Back in the 1980’s, we referred to politicians who defended war crimes in Central America as “death squad Democrats.” Today, like-minded politicians who defend war crimes in the Middle East are labeled “progressive heroes.” Self-described “progressives” nowadays are willing to contribute millions of dollars – money that could instead be used to support peace and human rights activism – to support groups like Democracy for America and MoveOn in their efforts to keep re-electing hawkish politicians like Weiner.

The sensationalist coverage of the Weiner scandal says a lot about the sorry state of the media and American political culture. Unfortunately, the effort to defend this right-wing Congressman also says a lot about some segments of the American left.

http://www.truthout.com/progressive-defense-weiner-overlooks-his-right-wing-foreign-policy/1308331221

Netanyahu’s Speech and Congressional Democrats’ Embrace of Extremism

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As Israeli opposition parties, peace and human rights activists, and editorialists denounced their prime minister’s intransigence in the face of President Barack Obama’s peace initiative, Congressional Democrats here in the United States have instead joined their Republican counterparts in lining up to support the right-wing Israeli leader’s defiance. As Benyamin Netanyahu arrogantly rejected Obama’s modest parameters for a peace settlement in a May 20 speech before a joint session of Congress – a rare honor for a foreign leader – Democrats joined Republicans in giving him no less than 29 standing ovations, more than were given to Obama during his State of the Union Speech earlier this year.

Mitchell Plitnick of Jewish Voice for Peace, in the immediate aftermath of Netanyahu’s speech, observed how “The United States itself has never been as shameless in its blind support” for the Israeli right, placing support for the Likud leader, “over the interests of justice and human rights and even its own self-interest.”

In an apparent challenge to her president, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) told Netanyahu, in response to his harsh retort to Obama, “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.” Similarly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) rebuked President Obama by stating, “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else,” and that terms for peace talks, “will not be set through speeches.” As former president Jimmy Carter observed in an op-ed in The New York Times, in embracing Netanyahu’s position, the current Democratic leadership is not only rejecting the current US president, but previous agreements involving the Israelis and longstanding positions taken by the United Nations (UN) and previous administrations.

Ironically, Palestinians and most other international observers believed Obama did not go nearly far enough in challenging Netanyahu’s colonization and annexation of occupied Palestinian territories. He did not call for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian West Bank – which the Israelis invaded in June 1967 war and which is legally recognized as non-self-governing territories under belligerent occupation – only that the pre-1967 borders be the starting point of negotiations. Obama assumes Israel should be allowed to annex parts of the West Bank with large concentrations of Israeli settlers who moved into the occupied territory in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a series of UN Security Council resolutions and a landmark decision of the International Court of Justice. (In return for allowing Israel to annex these illegal settlements, Obama called on Israel to swap Israeli land, something that Netanyahu has rejected.) In addition, while Jewish West Jerusalem remaining part of Israel was a given, Obama insisted that Arab East Jerusalem – the largest Palestinian city and center of Palestine’s cultural, religious, commercial and educational institutions – was subjected to negotiations. Obama defended Israel’s right to “self-defense,” but insisted the Palestinian state be demilitarized. Indeed, he rejected Palestinian independence except under conditions acceptable to their Israeli occupiers. He even questioned whether Israel should negotiate with the Fatah-led Palestine Authority if it included Hamas in its ruling coalition because the Islamist group refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist even as it insisted the Palestinians negotiate with the Israeli government despite the fact that some parties in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition refuse to recognize Palestine’s right to exist.

To an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress, however, Obama was simply not anti-Palestinian enough.

Implications

As the noted political scientist and American Interest editor Walter Russell Mead observed, “Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American president a foreign leader has ever delivered … demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States.”

Ironically, most Israelis think otherwise. Polls show that 57 percent of Israelis supported Obama’s speech and are critical of the hardline anti-peace line of Netanyahu that Pelosi, Reid and other Congressional leaders find so appealing. The Israeli peace group Gush Shalom issued a statement saying, “The speech of PM Netanyahu in the US Congress was composed of dozens of colorful gimmicks and empty clichés, talk of a peace which he does not intend to conclude and of a fictional Palestinian state which he has no intention of seeing become reality,” adding, “The extremist position that Netanyahu presented … constitutes a final closing of the door to renewed negotiations and an embarkation on a course of collision with the Palestinians and the entire world.”

Leading Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar observed in Haaretz that, “the strength of the applause bears no relation to the genuine interests of the State of Israel.” And Gideon Levy, writing in the same Israeli newspaper and documenting the numerous “lies and illusions” in Netanyahu’s speech, observed, “Did American’s elected representatives know that they were cheering for the death of possibility? If America loved it, we’re in big trouble.”

Debra DeLee, president of the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now, observed that Netanyahu’s speech, “represents a step backward, away from the peace that Israelis and Palestinians yearn for and deserve” and that, “rather than laying out his promised new vision of peace, Netanyahu stayed mainly on the well-worn path of grandstanding, blame-laying, and fear-mongering.” DeLee added that the rightist prime minister’s preconditions for negotiations were unrealistic and are an, “anathema to reviving negotiations and to achieving real peace and security for Israel.”

Similarly, Harvard political scientist Steve Walt observed how these members of Congress, “aren’t genuine friends of Israel, because every burst of applause was another nail in the coffin of the Zionist dream.”

As a result, to claim that Congress is “too pro-Israel” is simply inaccurate. As Obama himself has observed, the current Israeli policy so enthusiastically embraced by Congress is unsustainable and contrary to Israel’s genuine security interests.

Support for Netanyahu, then, is not support for Israel. It is support for an extreme and dangerous kind of militarism. As James Fallows of The Atlantic put it so accurately, Netanyahu is the “Dick Cheney of Israel,” characterizing the former vice president as someone who, “mistook short-term intransigence for long-term strategic wisdom, seemed blind and tone-deaf to the ‘moral’ and ‘soft power’ components of influence, profited from a polarized and fearful political climate, and attempted to command rather than earn support from allies and potential adversaries.” In giving Netanyahu more standing ovations than their own president, Congressional Democrats have joined Republicans in effectively endorsing a Dick Cheney approach to the Middle East.

Not only is it harmful for Israel, but it is also harmful to US interests. Even the staunchly pro-Israel pundit Andrew Sullivan noted how Netanyahu’s view, shared by Congress, is essentially one in which, “the US is supposed to sacrifice its broader goals of reconciliation with an emergent democratic Arab world, potentially jeopardize its relations with a democratic Egypt, isolate itself from every other ally and identify the US permanently with a state that, in its current configuration and with its current behavior, deepens and inflames the global conflict with Jihadist Islam.” Yet both Republicans and Democrats are so blinded by their militarist ideology that they are not only willing to sacrifice the interests of Palestinians – the most immediate victims of Netanyahu’s policies – but Israel and the United States as well.

As will be examined below, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Netanyahu’s speech by Congressional Democrats raises serious questions about whether those who oppose a Cheney-style foreign policy should continue to support the Democratic Party. First, though, it bears examination as to what specifically House and Senate Democrats were joining their Republican counterparts in cheering about.

What Congress Supported

The significance of the bipartisan rebuke of Obama and the broad consensus of the international community is evident in the specific lines spoken by Netanyahu that received the most enthusiastic applause.

Netanyahu got his biggest ovations when he defied Obama’s suggestion that the 1967 borders be the basis of negotiations and reiterated his pledge to never end the Israeli occupation of Arab East Jerusalem. A whole series of UN Security Council resolutions underscores that Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is illegal and should be considered “null and void,” a decision reiterated in a near-unanimous decision of the International Court of Justice. Similarly, UN Security Council resolution 242 – long considered the basis for peace by both Democratic and Republican administrations – reiterates the longstanding international legal principle regarding, “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.”

This was irrelevant to the US Congress, the vast majority of whom gave Netanyahu a particularly raucous standing ovation when he denied Israeli forces and settlers on the West Bank were foreign occupiers. They cheered when he specifically insisted that Israeli occupation forces would remain as far east as the Jordan Valley. They cheered further when he justified his insistence that the West Bank was Jewish land because it was, “the land of our forefathers … , to which Abraham brought the idea of one god [and] where David set out to confront Goliath.” That both Democrats and Republicans would give a standing ovation to an assertion that particular scriptural passages trump international law is indicative of just how much influence right-wing fundamentalists now have over both political parties.

Netanyahu also received a standing ovation when he defended his plans for illegally annexing conquered Palestinian territory by claiming the 1967 borders were “indefensible.” Apparently, the overwhelming majority of Congress was ignorant of the fact that Israel defended those borders quite successfully in two wars, that the military balance between Israel and its neighbors is far more favorable for Israel than it was back then, and that Obama explicitly insisted that any new Palestinian state be demilitarized. Furthermore, the 1967 borders are far more defensible than the scattered settlements and military outposts in the West Bank that Netanyahu, with Congressional support, insists on illegally incorporating into Israel.

The bipartisan audience cheered further when Netanyahu denounced any role for the UN in determining a settlement, insisting that Israel alone, “will be very firm on where we put the border.” In short, Congress believes that the fate of Palestine should not rest on the Palestinians, on international law or the United States, but on the occupying power alone.

There was also raucous applause when Netanyahu added new conditions to peace with the Palestinians, specifically that they explicitly recognize Israel as a “Jewish” state, a precondition that was not demanded of Jordan or Egypt in their peace treaties with Israel. Indeed, virtually no international agreement has ever required one party to explicitly endorse the ideological identity of a state, only the legitimacy of its government, which the Palestinians have already done. (As Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas put it, “It is not my job to give a description of the state.”) Former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat unilaterally recognized Israel in 1988, which was codified by the PLO in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which shortly thereafter removed references from its charter delegitimizing Israel. As Abbas recently reiterated, “Our position is that we recognize Israel. We fully believe in the two-state solution – a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and the state of Israel, living next to each other in peace and security.” Yet Netanyahu received perhaps the most extended applause of his speech when he insisted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state; it’s always been about the existence of the Jewish state.”

One of the most telling examples of the mindset of the bipartisan supermajority came when Israeli-American peace activist Rae Abileah, sitting in the visitor’s gallery, began shouting, “Equal rights of Palestinians.” Right-wing supporters of the Israeli prime minister began attacking her, until Capitol police rescued her and took her to a hospital, where her injuries were determined to be serious enough to require an overnight stay. After initially booing her for interrupting the speaker, virtually the entire House floor rose to its feet cheering while she was being manhandled and silenced. Videos show those who could see that section of the gallery were looking directly at the attack clapping and cheering, apparently well aware of what was happening, indicating how Congress believes such dissident voices should be treated.

US Liberals Keep Supporting the Israeli Right

As indicative in the reaction of Congressional Democrats to Netanyahu’s speech, it is becoming increasing obvious that one cannot profess to support human rights and international law – much less Middle East peace – and support the Democratic Party as well. In comparison to other political parties in industrialized democracies on these core issues, the Democrats are well to the right of not only socialist and liberal parties, but almost all of the conservative parties as well. Indeed, the only Western political parties that are as right-wing as the Democratic Party regarding these principles and their application to the Middle East are the US Republicans and Europe’s small, far-right, xenophobic anti-Muslim parties. In short, the Democratic Party represents a right-wing fringe.

It is important to note that there are a couple of dozen progressive Democratic House members who were not cheering Netanyahu, who do care about human rights and international law, who are aligned with Israeli progressives and moderates, and who deserve support. They are a small minority of the nearly 250 Democrats in Congress, however, and are not represented in the party leadership.

It is easy to try to blame right-wing pro-Likud groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but this would be misleading. The vast majority of pro-Likud Democrats are in safe political districts, and there would be little political consequence of rejecting Netanyahu’s extremism and instead supporting Israeli moderates.(For example, every Democrat who refused to support a 2006 resolution defending Israel’s devastating war on Lebanon was re-elected by a larger margin that November than they had been two years earlier.) Similarly, the overwhelming majority of American Jews are far closer to Obama’s position than that of Netanyahu and Congress.

The problem is that most Congressional Democrats appear to sincerely embrace this right-wing militaristic worldview and know they can get away with it because “progressive” organizations and political action committees (PACs) will support them anyway. This contrasts with the 1980’s, when their counterparts with comparable positions on Central America were disparaged as “death-squad Democrats” and denied such support.

Things are different today, however. For example, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California), who takes perhaps the most pro-Likud position of any Democratic senator and was among the first on her feet cheering Netanyahu, was named “Progressive Hero of 2010” by the liberal group Democracy for America. Could one imagine a senator in the 1980’s cheering Roberto D’Aubuisson or a similar right-wing wing US Central American ally and still getting such recognition?

MoveOn, which has one of the largest PACs of any group supporting Democratic candidates, has also endorsed and raised money for House and Senate members who cheered the rightist Israeli leader and have endorsed his policies, and has also falsely labeled them as “progressive.”

Congressional Democrats get away with such supporting right-wing governments like Israel because groups like MoveOn and Democracy for America keep misleading progressive voters into thinking that people who support Netanyahu are progressives as well, and because people who profess to care about peace and human rights keep supporting these groups and their candidates. This is not to say that one should never vote for a right-wing Democrat to prevent an even further right-wing Republican from being elected. However, falsely claiming they are progressive when they support a Cheney-style foreign policy and making them think there are no political consequences for that support makes it virtually impossible to replace them with people who do care about human rights and international law or to force them to move away from their right-wing positions.

There will always be Democrats who will sell out to corporate interests and compromise. However, when it comes to such blatant affronts to international legal norms as those exemplified by Netanyahu’s May 20 speech, it is time to draw the line. It is time to make it clear to Congressional Democrats that if they continue to oppose international law and human rights by supporting Netanyahu, they will lose the support of voters who do. It’s time to make clear to MoveOn, Democracy for America and other groups who endorse such candidates that they will not receive money or other support until they make human rights and international law a criteria for endorsement.

If enough people do that, AIPAC will no longer be a factor, and right-wing foreign leaders like Netanyahu will no longer get standing ovations from Democrats.

http://truthout.org/netanyahus-speech-and-congressional-democrats-embrace-extremism/1307128075

The United States and the Prospects for Democracy in Islamic Countries

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The unarmed insurrection that overthrew the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the ongoing uprising in Egypt have opened up debate regarding prospects for democratization in Arab and other predominately Muslim countries. Many in the West are familiar with the way unarmed pro-democracy insurrections have helped bring democracy to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa. But they discount the chances of such movements in Islamic countries, despite Tunisia being far from the first. Meanwhile, the United States — despite giving lip service in support for democracy — continues to actively support authoritarian governments in Islamic countries.

Obama was correctly cautious about offering more overt support for the 2009 pro-democracy uprising in Iran, recognizing that his advocacy could set back the more critical issue of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He was also aware that the history of U.S. intervention, explicit threats of “regime change” by the previous administration, and the U.S. invasion of two neighboring countries in the name of democracy, had resulted in such strong anti-Americanism in Iran that the regime could use such support to discredit the pro-democracy movement.

Continuing Bush

Obama’s continuation of the Bush administration’s policy of arming and training security forces in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, and other dictatorial regimes in the region is much harder to defend.

The Obama administration, in rejecting the dangerous neoconservative ideology of its predecessor, has fallen back onto the realpolitik of previous administrations by continuing to support repressive regimes through unconditional arms transfers and other security assistance. Indeed, President Barack Obama’s understandable skepticism of externally mandated, top-down approaches to democratization through “regime change” is no excuse for his policy of further arming these regimes, which then use these instruments of repression to subjugate popular indigenous bottom-up struggles for democratization. (Ironically, this authoritarianism is then used to justify the large-scale, unconditional support of Israel on the grounds that it’s “the sole democracy in the Middle East.”)

Bush’s high-profile and highly suspect “democracy promotion” agenda provided repressive regimes and their apologists an excuse to label any popular pro-democracy movement that challenges them as foreign agents, even when led by independent grassroots nonviolent activists. It is presumably no coincidence that the only autocratic regimes that the Bush administration seriously pressed for reform were those that traditionally opposed American hegemonic goals. Bush called for spreading democracy “from Damascus to Tehran.” Yet, while Syria and Iran could certainly use more democracy, it is striking he did not similarly call for spreading democracy from Riyadh to Cairo. In many respects, Bush did for the cause of democracy what Stalin did for the cause of socialism: he used an idealistic principle to justify war, repression, and hegemony.

Furthermore, in recent years the United States has promoted “economic freedom” — a neo-liberal capitalist economic model that emphasizes open markets and free trade — as at least as important as political freedom. It is noteworthy that, according to 2007 figures, the largest single recipient of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy for the Middle East was the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). Even during the height of U.S. assistance to Egypt and Algeria, the two most populous Arab countries, CIPE received three times as much NED funding as all human rights, development, legal, and civil society organizations combined. While liberalizing the economy from stifling state control can sometimes encourage political liberalization, the more extreme neo-liberal model of the so-called “Washington consensus” has tended to concentrate economic and political power in the hands of elites, particularly under authoritarian regimes, where the result is often crony capitalism rather than a truly free market, which weakens civil society rather than strengthens it.

The use of democracy as a disingenuous means of promoting U.S. hegemony was apparent in the way the Bush administration largely focused its attention on autocratic governments that opposed U.S. interests in the region. It criticized the human rights record of such countries as Syria and Iran and drew attention to the plight of certain suppressed minorities, dissident organizations, and individuals, while ignoring similar or worse abuses by pro-Western dictatorships. Even worse, at the request of the Bush administration in October 2002, a large bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress supported the Iraq War resolution, asserting the right of the United States to invade Middle Eastern countries on the grounds of “promoting democracy.”

In a report released in 2008, polls showed that while the majority of Middle Easterners supported greater democracy in their countries, there was a decidedly negative attitude toward the stated goal of the Bush administration for “democracy promotion.” Only 19 percent thought such efforts had a positive effect on their overall opinion of the United States while 58 percent stating it had a negative effect. Another revealing poll indicated that although two-thirds of Americans surveyed believed Muslim nations cannot be democratic, an even larger majority of Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries believe they can and should.

To Obama’s credit, there has been a subtle but important shift in the U.S. government’s discourse on human rights. The Bush administration pushed a rather superficial structuralist view. It focused, for instance, on elections — which can easily be rigged and manipulated in many cases — in order to change certain governments for purposes of expanding U.S. power and influence. Despite his refusal to push Mubarak and other U.S.-backed dictators to reform, Obama has taken more of an agency view of human rights, emphasizing such rights as freedom of expression and the right to protest. This administration recognizes that human rights reform can only come from below and not imposed from above. Although this has largely been rhetorical and has not altered Washington’s propensity to provide security assistance to repressive regimes, it is this very right of protest that is key to the promotion of democracy in Islamic countries.

How Change Occurs

Throughout the world, in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries, in recent years there has been a dramatic growth of the use of strategic nonviolent action. In contrast to armed struggles, these nonviolent insurrections are movements of organized popular resistance to government authority. Either consciously or by necessity, they eschew the use of weapons of modern warfare. Unlike conventional political movements, nonviolent campaigns usually employ tactics outside the mainstream political processes of electioneering and lobbying. These tactics may include strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, the popular contestation of public space, tax refusal, destruction of symbols of government authority (such as official identification cards), refusal to obey official orders (such as curfew restrictions), and the creation of alternative institutions for political legitimacy and social organization.

Freedom House recently produced a study that, after examining the 67 transitions from authoritarian regimes to varying degrees of democratic governments over the past few decades, concluded that they came overwhelmingly through democratic civil society organizations using nonviolent action and other forms of civil resistance. Such transitions did not result from foreign invasion and came about only rarely through armed revolt or voluntary, elite-driven reforms. In another study on civil resistance of more than 300 struggles for self-determination against colonialism, military occupation, and colonial rule over the past century, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenowith noted that nonviolent struggles were more than twice as likely to succeed as armed struggles.

Islamic countries have experienced this phenomenon at least as often as any place else in the world. In Iran, the tobacco strike in the 1890s and the constitutional revolution in 1906 were both cases of mass nonviolent resistance against neo-colonialism and authoritarian rule. In Egypt, the 1919 Revolution, consisting of many months of civil disobedience and strikes, eventually led to independence from Britain.

In addition to the recent uprising in Tunisia and the ongoing revolt in Egypt, there have been other recent successful unarmed insurrections in the Islamic world. Civil insurrections in Sudan in 1964 and 1985 overthrew dictatorial regimes and led to brief periods of democratic governance. A popular nonviolent uprising toppled Mali’s repressive Traore regime in 1991, resulting in nearly 20 years of stable democracy in that West African country.

In Iran, the largely unarmed insurrection against the Shah toppled the monarchy in 1979 and brought a brief hope for freedom prior to hard-line Islamists consolidating their power; the aborted 2009 uprising may mark the beginning of a more complete democratic revolution. Strikes and other forms of mass resistance forced the resignation of Bangladesh’s General Ershad and the restoration of democracy in 1990. A student-led movement in 1998 forced the resignation of Suharto, one of the world’s most brutal dictators, after 33 years in power in Indonesia.

In Lebanon, the 2004 Cedar Revolution forced Syria to withdraw its troops and end its domination of Lebanese government. The largely nonviolent 2006 Tulip Revolution ousted Kyrgystan’s corrupt and autocratic regime of Askar Akeyev. Years of protests against the 30-year Gayoum dictatorship regime led to free elections in the Maldives in 2008, resulting in the autocrat’s defeat. And in Pakistan, a movement led by lawyers and other civil society organizations resulted in the resignation of U.S.-backed military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2009.

There are also ongoing nonviolent popular struggles against foreign military occupation, including the Palestinians in the West Bank, the Syrian Druze in the Golan Heights, and the Sahrawis in Western Sahara. In addition to those that took place in Iran, nonviolent struggles have sporadically challenged autocratic regimes in Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Niger, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere.

Despite Western stereotypes to the contrary, Islamic countries have been at least as prone to large-scale nonviolent struggles as other societies. One of the great strengths in Islamic cultures, which make unarmed insurrections possible, is the implied social contract between a ruler and subject. Prophet Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, stated this explicitly: “Obey me as long as I obey God in my rule. If I disobey him, you will owe me no obedience.” Such a pledge was reiterated by successive caliphs, including Imam Ali, who said, “No obedience is allowed to any creature in his disobedience of the Creator.” Indeed, most Islamic scholars have firmly supported the right of the people to depose an unjust ruler. The decision to refuse cooperation is a crucial step in building a nonviolent movement. Massive noncooperation with illegitimate authority is critical for any successful pro-democracy struggle.

The Role of the United States

What can the United States and other Western nations do to help this process? External support for nonviolent struggles in the Middle East can be a double-edged sword. Most struggles against a repressive regime would normally welcome international solidarity. But if the outside support is seen as coming from forces that don’t hold the best interest of the country’s people in mind, it can harm the chances of such a movement succeeding in its goals. At the same time, external actors have played an important role in supporting nonviolent struggles in the past. And thanks to enhanced international mobility and communication, such actors will likely play an increasingly important role in the future.

Aid for democracy assistance should be done very carefully to avoid backlash. Such aid worked in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, where the United States was seen as an ally to democracy. In most Islamic countries, however, the United States has been seen as an ally to dictatorship and foreign military occupation. So if Washington embraced oppositions groups too warmly, this could work against the public acceptance of these groups. At the same time, given the serious challenges facing pro-democracy groups struggling against the powerful autocratic regimes in the region, many activists will likely continue to look to the United States and other Western powers for, at minimum, moral and diplomatic support The United States can apply diplomatic pressure to free political prisoners, promote the right to free assembly, and support other means of creating the political space for nonviolent pro-democracy movements to grow. Western leaders who avoid messianic and self-righteous rhetoric when talking about democracy, pursue policies that neither practice nor condone violations of international humanitarian law, and directly communicate with and respect the wishes of nonviolent activists struggling against their autocratic rulers could help to rectify the historically counter-productive policies that have for so long hurt the cause of democracy in the region.

But it’s not clear that the United States even wants greater democracy in the Islamic world. For example, regarding Tunisia, the U.S. government was silent during the first weeks of protests despite savage repression by the government. Less than a week after the uprising began, Congress voted for an addition $12 million in security assistance to Ben Ali’s regime. Tear gas canisters lobbed at pro-democracy demonstrators were inscribed with the words “Made in USA,” a reminder of whose side Washington was on in the struggle against the dictatorship. By early January, the State Department began issuing mild criticism of the Ben Ali regime for firing live ammunition into crowds of demonstrators but was equally willing to blame the pro-democracy activists. While the movement was largely nonviolent, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley chose to characterize it by its most unruly components. He stated that the Obama administration was “concerned about government actions, but we’re also concerned about actions by the demonstrators, those who do not have peaceful intentions.”

On January 18, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her concern over the impact of the “unrest and instability” on the “very positive aspects of our relationship with Tunisia.” She insisted that the United States was “not taking sides” and that she would “wait and see” before even communicating directly with Ben Ali or his ministers. (One can only imagine the reaction if she had similarly insisted the United States was “not taking sides” in the face of the similar recent pro-democracy uprising in Iran and Burma or if previous secretaries of state had expressed such neutrality regarding pro-democracy struggles in Serbia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries.)

Three days later, as Ben Ali was fleeing the country, President Obama came forward with the most pointed declaration in support of democracy in the Islamic world since he became president. He condemned the regime’s violence and applauded “the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people. The United States stands with the entire international community in bearing witness to this brave and determined struggle for the universal rights that we must all uphold, and we will long remember the images of the Tunisian people seeking to make their voices heard.” He further called on the Tunisian government “to respect human rights, and to hold free and fair elections in the near future that reflect the true will and aspirations of the Tunisian people.”

There has long been a sense of fatalism in the Arab world that they are simply passive victims of outside forces. Although it is easy to dismiss Obama’s comments as simply a last-minute show of support to the winning side, this shift indicates the significance of what happened in Tunisia: rather than Washington controlling the course of events influencing the Arab street, the Arab street is influencing policies emanating from Washington.

Indeed, at the point where a movement embarks upon a strategy of large-scale nonviolent action, there is little foreign governments can do to help or hinder its chances of success, other than pressure the regime to limit its repression. Large bureaucratic governments accustomed to projecting political power through military force or elite diplomatic channels tend to have little understanding of, or appreciation for, nonviolent action or any other kind of mass popular struggle or the complex, internal political dynamics of a given country necessary to create the broad coalition capable of ousting the incumbent authoritarian government.

Unlike changes of regime historically promoted by foreign governments during the colonial and much of the post-colonial period, which have tended to be violent seizures of power that install an undemocratic minority, nonviolent “people power” movements make change through empowering pro-democratic majorities. This serves as yet another reason why the Iranian regime’s claims that the United States is somehow responsible for the Green Revolution are so ludicrous. Every successful nonviolent insurrection has been a homegrown movement rooted in the realization by the masses that their rulers were illegitimate and that the current political system was incapable of redressing injustice.

As a result, the best hope for advancing freedom and democracy in Islamic countries comes from civil society rather than from foreign governments. The latter deserve neither credit nor blame for the growing use of nonviolent resistance movements in Islamic countries. As the Tunisian uprising demonstrated, the best hope for freedom in the Islamic world comes not from sanctimonious lecturing from Washington and certainly not from foreign intervention–but from the people themselves.

Democrats Push Through Yet Another Anti-Palestinian Resolution

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Though outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has insisted that there just isn’t enough time for the lame duck Democratic-controlled Congress to consider much of the progressive legislation on the docket prior to the Republican takeover early next month, she and other Democratic leaders did find time last Wednesday to pass a resolution condemning efforts by Palestinian moderates to seek recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The Oslo accords were signed in 1993 with the vision of Israel’s eventual withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This was an enormous compromise on the Palestinian side, given that such a state would leave them with only 22% of their historic homeland, the rest of which became the state of Israel in 1948. Right-wing Israeli politician Benyamin Netanyahu, then in opposition, denounced the agreement and promised to derail it. As prime minister in the late 1990s and again since his coming to office again in last year’s election, he has been doing his best to accomplish this by colonizing large swathes of the West Bank with illegal settlements for Israeli Jews which he insists must be annexed into an expanded Israel. The moderate Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, has been working toward the implementation of the Oslo Accords, offering strict security guarantees for Israel in return for an end to the occupation.

Nevertheless, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives has insisted that it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are responsible for the breakdown in the peace talks. Recognizing that talks are pointless while Israel’s colonization drive continues and noting the Obama administration’s ongoing refusal to exercise its extensive leverage to force Israel to stop building new settlements, the Palestinians have understandably refused to return to direct negotiations until Israel suspends its construction of new settlements, which has been condemned as illegal by the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and virtually the entire international community. However, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), whom the Democrats put in charge of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East, insisted during last Wednesday’s debate, that “Israel has shown time and again that it is ready” to make peace and that Palestinians’ objections to Israelis colonizing their land were “overwrought.”

To help put pressure on Israel and the United States to move the peace process forward, the Palestine Authority has been soliciting international recognition of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. During the past couple of weeks, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Norway have done just that. This is what prompted the House resolution, introduced by House Foreign Affairs committee chairman Howard Berman (D-CA), who serves as the House Democrats’ chief foreign policy spokesman.

The Democratic leadership in the House has long argued that Israel’s attacks on civilian population centers in Gaza Strip and elsewhere are legitimate self-defense and that it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are making peace impossible. Pelosi, for example, has insisted that the conflict is about “the fundamental right of Israel to exist” and that it is “absolute nonsense” to claim it has anything do to with the Israeli occupation. One would think, then, that this Palestinian effort to achieve recognition for a state which explicitly defines the borders as exclusively those occupied by Israel in the June 1967 war and not any part of Israel itself would be welcomed. But, to the Democrats, Palestinians asking for even just 22% of Palestine is too much. Rising in support of last Wednesday’s resolution, Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY) called it “preposterous” that a Palestinian state should be created based on the requirements of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which from Presidents Lyndon Johnson through George H.W. Bush had been recognized as the basis of Middle East peace, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for security guarantees. Similarly, Rep. Berman threatened the Palestine Authority by saying, “If they persist in pursuing a unilateralist path . . . there will be consequences.”

Congress has correctly condemned violence by extremist Palestinian groups like Hamas, yet when the Palestine Authority tries to advance their freedom through nonviolent means, such as these diplomatic initiatives, the Democrats are just as quick to condemn them as well. Indeed, earlier in their careers, Berman, Ackerman, Engel, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders were on record opposing any kind of Palestinian statehood, changing their view reluctantly only years later. However, they insist that whatever kind of Palestinian “state” may emerge can only be on what the Israeli occupiers are willing to allow them to have, even if all that is left is a series of small non-contiguous cantons surrounded by annexed Israeli settlement blocs. Taking any initiative to advance their independence separate from what the rightist Israeli government can agree to, according to the Democratic leadership, is completely unacceptable.

One can only think of how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” noted that the greatest obstacle to advancing the cause of justice is one who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Recognizing that most ordinary Democrats oppose the Israeli occupation and would likely put pressure on their representatives to vote against the resolution, Berman and Pelosi put the vote on last Wednesday’s agenda before the text was even made available to other House members.

This made it impossible to have any hearings, give any time for constituents to express their opposition, or even allow the Obama administration to offer an opinion. Also fearing opposition from Democratic House members who might be concerned at rousing the anger of their liberal constituents, Berman and Pelosi refused to have roll call vote and instead brought it up under a procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” a procedure normally used for non-controversial measure like honoring a recently-deceased eminent figure. Doing it this way not only limits debate and makes it impossible to attach amendments, it allows a resolution to pass by a non-recorded voice vote and to automatically be recorded as “unanimous.” Only ten representatives were on the floor when the resolution was passed by “unanimous consent.”

This kind of cynical maneuvering by the Democratic Party leadership is unfortunately quite typical of how they have handled resolutions dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during their four years in the majority. It raises the question as to whether the Republicans can do any worse.

Unfortunately, the answer is probably yes. While a growing minority of Democratic House members are finally listening to their liberal constituents’ concerns about U.S. backing for Israeli occupation, colonization and repression, the Republicans — outside of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and a few others of a more libertarian orientation — are solidly aligned with the rightist Israeli government. We can only expect more such resolutions in the coming Congress.

Richard Holbrooke Represented the Worst Side of the Foreign Policy Establishment

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The many accolades coming out following the sudden death on Monday of veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke and his death bed conversion in opposing the Iraq war have overshadowed his rather sordid history of supporting dictators, war criminals and military solutions to complex political problems.

Holbrooke got his start in the Foreign Service during the 1960s in the notorious pacification programs in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. This ambitious joint civilian-military effort not only included horrific human rights abuses, but also proved to be a notorious failure in curbing the insurgency against the US-backed regime in Saigon. This was an inauspicious start in the career of someone Obama appointed as his special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan to help curb the insurgency against those US-backed governments.

In the late 1970s, Holbrooke served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. In this position, he played a major role in formulating the Carter administration’s support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor and the bloody counterinsurgency campaign responsible for up to a quarter-million civilian deaths. Having successfully pushed for a dramatic increase in US military aid to the Suharto dictatorship, he then engaged in a cover-up of the Indonesian atrocities. He testified before Congress in 1979 that the mass starvation wasn’t the fault of the scorched-earth campaign by Indonesian forces in the island nation’s richest agricultural areas, but simply a legacy of Portuguese colonial neglect.

Later, in reference to his friend Paul Wolfowitz, then the US ambassador to Indonesia, Holbrooke described how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”

In a particularly notorious episode while heading the State Department’s East Asia division, Holbrooke convinced Carter to release South Korean troops under US command in order to suppress a pro-democracy uprising in the city of Kwangju. Holbrooke was among the Carter administration officials who reportedly gave the O.K. to Gen. Chun Doo-Hwan, who had recently seized control of the South Korean government in a military coup to wipe out the pro-democracy rebels. Hundreds were killed.

He also convinced President Jimmy Carter to continue its military and economic support for the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.

In the late 1990s, as the US ambassador to the United Nations, Holbrooke criticized the UN for taking leadership in conflict resolution efforts involving US allies, particularly in the area of human rights. For example, in October 2000 he insisted that a UN Security Council resolution criticizing the excessive use of force by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinian demonstrators revealed an unacceptable bias that put the UN “out of the running” in terms of any contributions to the peace process.

As special representative to Cyprus in 1997, Holbrooke unsuccessfully pushed the European Union to admit Turkey, despite its imprisonment of journalists, its ongoing use of the death penalty, its widespread killing of civilians in the course of its bloody counterinsurgency war in its Kurdish region, and other human rights abuses.

Holbrooke is perhaps best known for his leadership in putting together the 1995 Dayton Accords, which formally ended the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Though widely praised in some circles for his efforts, Holbrooke remains quite controversial for his role. For instance, the agreement allowed Bosnian Serbs to hold on to virtually all of the land they had seized and ethnically cleansed in the course of that bloody conflict. Indeed, rather than accept the secular concept of national citizenship that has held sway in Europe for generations, Holbrooke helped impose sectarian divisions that have made the country – unlike most of its gradually liberalizing Balkan neighbors – unstable, fractious and dominated by illiberal ultra-nationalists.

As with previous US officials regarding their relations with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Holbrooke epitomizes the failed US policy toward autocratic rulers that swings between the extremes of appeasement and war. For example, during the 1996 pro-democracy uprising in Serbia, Holbrooke successfully argued that the Clinton administration should back Milosevic, in recognition of his role in the successful peace deal over Bosnia, and not risk the instability that might result from a victory by Serb democrats. Milosevic initially crushed the movement. He also failed to back the nonviolent resistance campaign for independence in Kosovo, then led by the moderate Ibrahim Rugova.

In response to increased Serbian oppression in Kosovo just a couple years later, however, Holbrooke became a vociferous advocate of the 1999 US-led bombing campaign, leading to victory of the hard-line KLA in Kosovo. Meanwhile, in Serbia, the bombing creating a nationalist reaction that set back the reconstituted pro-democracy in Serbia movement once again. The pro-democracy movement finally succeeded in the nonviolent overthrow of the regime, following Milosevic’s attempt to steal the parliamentary elections in October 2000, but the young leaders of that movement remain bitterly angry at Holbrooke to this day.

Scott Ritter, the former chief UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspector, who correctly assessed the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and predicted a disastrous outcome for the US invasion, observed, “not only has he demonstrated a lack of comprehension when it comes to the complex reality of Afghanistan (not to mention Pakistan), Holbrooke has a history of choosing the military solution over the finesse of diplomacy.” Noting how the Dayton Accords were built on the assumption of a major and indefinite NATO military presence, which would obviously be far more problematic in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Europe, Ritter added: “This does not bode well for the Obama administration.”

Ironically, back in 2002-2003, when the United States had temporarily succeeded in marginalizing Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, Holbrooke was a strong supporter of redirecting American military and intelligence assets away from the region in order to invade and occupy Iraq. Obama and many other Democrats presciently criticized this reallocation of resources at that time as likely to lead to the deterioration of the security situation in the country and the resurgence of these extremist groups, but Holbrooke instead sided with the Bush administration in supporting the disastrous invasion and occupation.

It was unclear, then, why Obama chose someone like Holbrooke for such a sensitive post. Indeed, as the past two years have shown, Holbrooke’s efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan appear to have little show for them. Perhaps more than any other appointment, Holbrooke epitomized the tragedy of Obama’s foreign policy: instead of bringing hope and change, he brought in some of the most notorious figures of the foreign policy establishment to continue to pursue failed and immoral policies.

A “Progressive Hero?” Time to Think Outside of the Boxer

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The failure of progressives to make major inroads in electoral politics in the United States today could not be better illustrated than a recent decision by Democracy for America, a million-member political action committee founded by former Vermont governor Howard Dean which claims leadership in the support for progressive candidates for office, regarding a veteran U.S. senator facing reelection in November.

The senator has strongly defended Israeli attacks on civilian population centers in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Lebanon and has categorically rejected calls for linking the billions of dollars in U.S. aid to human rights considerations. The senator has attacked reputable human rights organizations and leading international jurists for daring to document war crimes committed by Israeli forces (in addition to those committed by militant Islamists.) The senator has openly challenged the International Court of Justice on the universality of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, co-sponsoring a Senate resolution attacking the World Court’s landmark 2004 decision. The senator has led the effort in the Senate to undermine President Obama’s efforts to halt the expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, insisting that Obama refrain from openly challenging Israel’s right-wing government to suspend its illegal colonization drive. The senator has attacked supporters of nuclear nonproliferation for calling on Israel to join virtually every other country in the world in signing the NPT. The senator has endorsed Israel’s illegal annexation of greater East Jerusalem and expansion of settlements in violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions, as well as Israel’s construction of a separation barrier deep inside the occupied West Bank to facilitate their annexation into Israel and virtually eliminate the possibility of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. The senator defended Israel’s illegal attack in international waters of a humanitarian aid flotilla, even after a United Nations investigation revealed that five people on board, including a 19-year old U.S. citizen, were murdered execution-style. Indeed, this senator has consistently sided with Israel’s right wing government against those in both the United States and Israel working for peace and human rights.

How did Democracy for America respond to the senator’s reelection campaign? Not only did they give her their enthusiastic endorsement, they gave her the coveted honor of “Progressive Hero of 2010.” The senator, Barbara Boxer of California, has for years angered progressives here by her strident position in support of some of the most militaristic tendencies in Israel.

There was a time — such as during the Vietnam War or during U.S. military intervention in Central America in the 1980s and the Vietnam War earlier — that such callous disregard for human rights and international law would have exempted a member of Congress from ever getting an endorsement from a major progressive organization, much less such an exemplary designation, however progressive their domestic agenda may have been. For example, during their long Senate careers, Democratic senators like Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson took leadership on such progressive causes as civil rights, labor, and the environment, but they were widely despised among grassroots Democrats for their outspoken support for the Vietnam War.

Indeed, imagine if, during the 1980s, Barbara Boxer had taken positions on Central America comparable to her current positions in the Middle East: supporting billions of dollars worth of unconditional military aid to the rightist Salvadoran junta and the Nicaraguan Contras; attacking Amnesty International and the United Nations for documenting human rights abuses by these U.S. allies; attacking the World Court for its ruling against the U.S. war on Nicaragua; or, defending the murder of humanitarian aid workers by U.S.-backed force. Democrats who did support the Reagan administration’s policies — who became known as “Death Squad Democrats” — were subjected to widespread protests by their constituents and were challenged by progressives in the primaries and by progressive third party opponents in general elections.

Nowadays, however, so-called “progressive” organizations like Democracy for America seem to care little about the fate of people of color in faraway lands. There simply isn’t much concern if an influential senator on the foreign relations committee defends those who use white phosphorous, cluster munitions and other illegal weapons against civilian neighborhoods and defames conscientious supporters of human rights who speak up for the rights of non-combatants. For groups like Democracy for America, support for the international legal conventions which arose from the ashes of World War II are apparently not that important.

U.S. policy toward Israel and its neighbors has traditionally been a weak spot for many otherwise liberal senators. Indeed, Russ Feingold, Patty Murray, Harry Reid, and a number of other Democrats facing tough reelection fights this year have, like Boxer, alienated many in the peace and human rights community by their support for the militaristic policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. According to the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli occupation and other groups opposing U.S. support for Israel’s rightist government, however, Boxer is tied with lame duck Senator Evan Bayh as having the most right-wing record of any Democrat in the Senate. Even more significantly, only about a half dozen Republicans are as bad as Boxer; none are worse.

And she does not embrace such a hard-line militarist position due to pressure from her ethnically diverse and relatively liberal California constituency. While an overwhelming majority of Democrats still strongly support Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, there is growing unease at unconditional support for Israeli policies which have violated international legal norms, jeopardized the peace process and resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of innocent civilians. Polls show most Democrats — including Jewish Democrats — oppose the hard-line Netanyahu government’s policies (a trend particularly strong among younger voters), while most Americans who support the current right-wing Israeli leadership are voting Republican anyway.

Indeed, just as the Iraq War made it easier for Democratic voters to recognize that one can be a patriotic American and still oppose the United States invading and occupying an Arab nation, it is also increasingly clear that one can oppose similar Israeli policies and still support the state of Israel. There is also a growing awareness that just as such militaristic U.S. policies have hurt our strategic interests in the region, similar Israeli policies are threatening that country’s legitimate security needs as well.

Unfortunately, California’s senior senator has a hard time recognizing this. And Democracy for America — along with MoveOn and number of other supposedly progressive organizations — doesn’t seem to have a problem with backing those who support the self-destructive policies of Netanyahu, though they would refuse to support those who backed the same kinds of policies under Bush.

Indeed, Democracy for America, MoveOn, and others who are so enthusiastic about Boxer, Feingold, Murray and other Democratic hawks are not unlike Bush supporters: They are so enamored with their candidate that they ignore the reality of their policies. Their candidate supports illegal invasions of Muslim nations at the cost of thousands of lives? No problem. Their candidate attacks the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other international bodies which try to enforce international humanitarian law? No problem. Their candidate repeatedly makes demonstrably false claims in order to justify illegal military operations? No problem. Their candidate tries to discredit Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross, and leading international jurists for publishing empirical studies which counter the lies she spews out in trying to justify the war crimes of foreign right-wing governments? No problem.

This does not mean that, with so much at stake this election year, that progressive organizations should necessarily endorse third party candidates and allow Republicans to win critical races. Indeed, it is important to recognize that the Republican nominee challenging Senator Boxer is no better regarding Middle East peace. For example, at a recent event in Los Angeles, Carly Fiorina declared, “We must stand up unequivocally and declare that Israel is our most important friend and ally in the Middle East and that we will stand with her always no matter what” the right-wing government might do. Like Boxer, she criticized the administration for joining the rest of the international community in calling for a moratorium on the expansion of Israel’s illegal colonization efforts in the occupied West Bank.

The problem is that one of the most right-wing members of the Senate on one of the most critical foreign policy issues of the day is labeled a “progressive hero” rather than the lesser evil that she is.

Yes, “evil” is a strong word. But what else can you call defending the mass murder of Lebanese and Palestinian children? Or allocating unconditionally billions of our tax dollars every year to provide the weapons and ordinance for the murderers? Or opposing restrictions on the export of cluster bombs to countries which use them against heavily populated areas? Or criticizing the UN and other international bodies simply for trying to fulfill their mandates to enforce international law? Or attacking prominent jurists and human rights workers for documenting war crimes she denies ever took place? Or claiming that the murder and beatings of humanitarian aid volunteers in international waters constitutes legitimate self-defense?

Indeed, when it comes to this critical issue in foreign affairs, Boxer is closer to her right-wing Senate colleague Jim DeMint (R-SC) than she is to the liberal Pat Leahy (D-VT), closer to the fundamentalist Christians United for Israel than the liberal Churches for Middle East Peace, closer to the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation than the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, and closer to the rightist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now.

This is not about the supposed power of “the Israel Lobby.” Any right-wing lobby will appear all-powerful if there is no progressive counter-lobby. Boxer takes the positions she does not because AIPAC forces here to do so against her will, but because she can get progressives to campaign for her, donate money to her, and vote for her anyway regardless of her contempt for human rights and international law. She and other right-wing Democrats will not change unless and until liberal groups stop labeling them “progressive heroes.” Peace and human rights activists in the 1980s ended US support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the Salvadoran junta by refusing to support Democrats who, like Boxer, defended war crimes by right-wing allies and trashed human rights activists who exposed them. As a result, a number of them lost their re-election campaign and were replaced in the subsequent election by progressives, while others, fearing the same fate, changed their positions.

Progressives routinely find themselves having to support candidates who are less than perfect. Indeed, no one can support perfection under the current system. However, it is profoundly disappointing that, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, there are still prominent Democrats who do refuse to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention and other basic tenets of international law, such as the UN Charter’s recognition of the inadmissibility of any country expanding its territory through military force. You can’t get more fundamental than that. Indeed, that principle is the foundation of the post-WWII international legal system, which Boxer appears to be doing her damndest to undermine. In short, progressives here in California who refuse to back Boxer are not “single-issue” voters, for this is not about a single issue: these are fundamental principles at the heart of international law and human rights.

And, however one may choose to vote in the California Senate race come November, to label Barbara Boxer as the “progressive hero of 2010” is just plain wrong.

Congress Defends Murder of American Peace Activist and Other War Crimes

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Despite revelations from a detailed investigation by a special commission of the United Nations Human Rights Council confirming that Israel committed war crimes, the overwhelming majority of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress remain on record defending the Israeli attack as legitimate self-defense. This is particularly striking given evidence presented in the report that five of the nine people killed, including a 19-year-old US citizen, were murdered – shot execution-style by Israeli commandos.

In a letter to President Barack Obama dated June 17, 329 out of 435 members of the US House of Representatives announced that they “strongly support” Israel’s May 31 attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters, which resulted in the deaths of nine passengers and crew and injuries to scores of others. Similarly, a June 21 Senate letter – signed by 87 out of 100 senators – went on record “fully” supporting what it called “Israel’s right to self-defense.”

The House letter insisted that “Israeli forces used necessary force as an act of self-defense and of last resort.” Similarly, the Senate letter refers to the murders of passengers and crew resisting the illegal boarding of their vessel in international waters as a situation where the Israeli raiders were “forced to respond to that attack” when they “arrived” on the ship.

If these members of Congress believe that a foreign government has the right to murder an American peace activist on the high seas, it inevitably raises questions as to how they might react to the murder of peace activists by local, state or the federal government here at home.

There were other troubling aspects of these letters as well.

The House letter urged President Obama “to remain steadfast in defense of Israel” in the face of the near universal international condemnation of this blatant violation of international maritime law and other legal statutes, which the signatories referred to as “a rush to unfairly judge and condemn Israel.” The Senate letter condemned the near unanimous vote of the UN Human Rights Council for what it called “singling out” Israel, even though no other country in recent memory has attacked a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters. Both letters called upon the United States to veto any resolution in the UN Security Council criticizing the Israeli attack.

The Senate letter also claimed that the widely supported effort to relieve critical shortages of food and medicine in the besieged Gaza Strip was simply part of a “clever tactical and diplomatic ploy” by “Israel’s opponents” to “challenge its international standing.”

Many of the key arguments in the letters were misleading and, in some cases, factually inaccurate.

The Israeli government had acknowledged prior to the writing of the letter that the extensive blockade of humanitarian goods was not necessary for their security, but as a means of pressuring the civilian population to end their support for Hamas, which won a majority of legislative seats in the most recent Palestinian election. In addition, the Israeli government announced a significant relaxation of the embargo two days after the letter was written. Despite this, the House letter claimed that the purpose of the blockade was “to stop terrorists from smuggling weapons to kill innocent civilians,” thereby placing this large bipartisan majority of the House even further to the right than Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s rightist coalition.

There was no mention in the letter than no such weapons were found on board any of the six ships hijacked by the Israelis nor on the previous eight ships the Free Gaza Campaign had sailed or attempted to sail to the Gaza Strip. In addition, even though the ships had been thoroughly inspected by customs officials prior to their disembarkation, the House letter claimed that had the Israelis not hijacked the ships, they would have “sailed unchecked into Gaza.”

Similarly, according to the Senate letter, Israel’s naval blockade was necessary “to keep dangerous goods from entering Gaza by sea” and falsely claimed that the intent of the Israeli blockade was “to protect Israel, while allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.” Particularly striking is the fact that, despite that the International Committee of the Red Cross and a broad consensus of international legal experts recognize that the Israeli blockade of humanitarian goods is illegal, the Senate letter insisted that the blockade “is legal under international law.”

The House letter also claimed that the other ships were “commandeered peacefully and without incident,” even though on the other ships, despite completely nonviolent resistance, passengers were tasered and brutally beaten and were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets. Similarly, the Senate letter insisted that, in spite of these potentially fatal beatings and other assaults, “Israeli forces were able to safely divert five of the six ships challenging the blockade.”

Even though the Israeli government has never entered Gaza to disperse aid to the people of that territory since the start of the siege years earlier and reputable relief organizations have documented that the Israelis had routinely refused to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip, these House members claimed that Israel had offered to “disperse the aid … directly to the people of Gaza.” And, despite the fact that the five aid ships that Israel had allowed to dock in Gaza in previous months had distributed their humanitarian cargo directly to those in need, the senators claimed that it would have otherwise gone “into the hands of corrupt Gaza officials.”

Learning what actually transpired in the tragic incident was apparently of little interest to the 87 senators who signed the letter defending the attack. Despite the whitewash in the internal Israeli investigation, the senate letter supported Israel’s alleged intention to carry out “a thorough investigation of the incident,” insisting that Israel “has the right to determine how its investigation is conducted.” This comes in spite of a public opinion poll that showed a clear majority of Americans – including 65 percent of Democrats – favored an international inquiry over allowing Israel alone to investigate the circumstances of the attack.

Senate Again Undermines Obama’s Middle-East Peace Efforts

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Once again, as President Barack Obama began pressuring the right-wing Israeli government to freeze the expansion of its illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, leading Congressional Democrats have joined in with Republicans to try to stop him.

Recognizing that increased Israeli colonization on occupied Palestinian land would seriously threaten the viability of an independent Palestinian state that could emerge from the peace talks and thereby make the process worthless, and recognizing that he would lose any popular mandate to continue negotiations under such conditions, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to withdraw from the negotiating table. As a result, Obama has been trying to get the rightist Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to extend the partial freeze on new construction of the Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In an apparent effort to undermine administration’s efforts, Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Robert Casey joined with Republican senators Johnny Isakson and Richard Burr in preparing a letter to President Obama that criticizes Abbas’ threat to withdraw from the talks while completely ignoring the threatened resumption of Netanyahu’s illegal colonization drive that would prompt it. According to the letter, “…it is critical that all sides stay at the table. Neither side should make threats to leave just as the talks are getting started.”

There is no mention in the letter that Netanyahu should abide by commitments of previous Israeli governments to freeze the settlement drive nor is there any mention of the five UN Security Council resolutions and the 2004 World Court decision calling on Israel to withdraw from the already-existing settlements. Instead, they praise the right wing prime minister for “not abandon(ing) the talks.”

It appears that Boxer and the other initiators of the letter decided that rather than emphasize the importance of both sides refraining from taking actions that would undermine the credibility of the negotiations, they were determined to put the U.S. Senate on record putting all the blame for the possible collapse of the talks on the Palestinians and none on the Israelis.

In response to international calls for pressure on Israel to live up to its international legal obligations to withdraw from Palestinian territories seized in the June 1967 war in return for security guarantees, the letter also insists that the United States “not to attempt to impose an agreement on the two parties,” and – despite the gross asymmetry in power between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians under occupation – that a peace settlement must be “embraced by both sides.”

The letter was strongly criticized by the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now and praised by the right-wing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC.)

Back in April, Boxer and Isakson initiated another letter, which was signed by 76 senators (half of whom were Democrats), to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implicitly rebuking President Obama for challenging Israel on its illegal settlements, insisting that “differences are best resolved amicably and in a manner that befits longstanding strategic allies.” The letter, which criticized the Palestinians for conditioning talks on a settlement freeze, insisted that “Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the U.S. and Israel.”

Ironically, despite the efforts of senators like Boxer, Russ Feingold, Patty Murray and others who have signed such letters to undermine President Obama’s peace efforts in the Middle East, liberal groups like Democracy for America and MoveOn have recently been praising Boxer, Feingold, Murray, and other signatories as “progressive heroes” deserving support for their re-election.

It is hard to get excited about defeating Republican challengers, however, when incumbent Democrats embrace the same right-wing foreign policy and try to undermine President Obama when he tries to do something right.

Iraq: The Democrats’ War

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The ongoing presence of over 50,000 US troops, many thousands of civilian employees and tens of thousands of US-backed mercenaries raises serious questions over the significance of the partial withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. The August 31 deadline marking the “end of US combat operations in Iraq” is not as real or significant a milestone as President Obama implied in his speech. Indeed, hearing for the umpteenth time that the US has “turned a corner” in Iraq, it makes one think that the country must be some kind of dodecahedron.

Nevertheless, with all the attention on the supposed withdrawal of US combat forces, it is important to acknowledge the forces that got us into this tragic conflict in the first place.

It was not just George W. Bush.

Had a majority of either the Republican-controlled House or the Democratic-controlled Senate voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion or had they passed an alternative resolution conditioning such authority on the approval of the use of force from the United Nations Security Council, all the tragic events that have unfolded as a consequence of the March 2003 invasion would have never taken place.

The responsibility for the deaths of over 4,400 American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the waste of nearly one trillion dollars of our national treasury and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism that has come as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq rests as much in the hands of the members in Congress who authorized the invasion as it does with the administration that requested the lawmakers’ approval. Indeed, the October 2002 resolution authorizing the invasion had the support of the majority of Democratic senators, as well as the support of the Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate.

On this and other web sites – as well as in many scores of policy reports, newspaper articles, academic journals, and other sources – the tragic consequences of a US invasion of Iraq and a refutation of falsehoods being put forward by the Bush administration to justify it were made available to every member of the House and Senate (see, for example, “The Case Against a War with Iraq”). The 2002 vote authorizing the invasion was not like the vote on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution on the use of force against North Vietnam, for which Congress had no time for hearings or debate and for which most of those supporting it (mistakenly) thought they were simply authorizing limited short-term retaliatory strikes in response to a specific series of alleged incidents. In contrast, with regard to the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Congress had many months to investigate and debate the administration’s claims that Iraq was a threat as well as the likely implications of a US invasion; members of Congress also fully recognized that the resolution authorized a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation and a subsequent military occupation for an indefinite period.

Violating International Legal Covenants

Those who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq did so despite the fact that it violated international legal conventions to which the US government is legally bound to uphold. The resolution constituted a clear violation of the United Nations Charter that, like other ratified international treaties, should be treated as supreme law according to Article VI of the US Constitution. According to articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, no member state has the right to enforce any resolution militarily unless the UN Security Council determines that there has been a material breach of its resolution, decides that all nonmilitary means of enforcement have been exhausted and then specifically authorizes the use of military force.

This is what the Security Council did in November 1990 with Resolution 678 in response to Iraq’s ongoing violations of UN Security Council resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Kuwait, but the Security Council did not do so for any subsequent lesser Iraqi violations. The only other exception for the use of force authorized by the charter is in self-defense against armed attack, which even the Bush administration admitted had not taken place.

This effective renunciation of the UN Charter’s prohibition against such wars of aggression constituted an effective repudiation of the post-WW II international legal order. Alternative resolutions, such as one authorizing force against Iraq if authorized by the UN Security Council, were voted down by a bipartisan majority.

Concerned Scholars and Strategic Analysts

Members of Congress were also alerted by large numbers of scholars of the Middle East, Middle Eastern political leaders, former State Department and intelligence officials and others who recognized that a US invasion would likely result in a bloody insurgency, a rise in Islamist extremism and terrorism, increased sectarian and ethnic conflict, and related problems. Few people I know who are familiar with Iraq have been at all surprised that the US invasion became such a tragedy. Indeed, most of us were in communication with Congressional offices and often with individual members of Congress themselves in the months leading up to the vote warning of the likely consequences of an invasion and occupation. Therefore, claims by leading Democratic supporters of the war that they were unaware of the likely consequences of the invasion are completely false.

The resolution also contained accusations that were known or widely assumed to be false at that time, such as claims of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. A definitive report by the Department of Defense noted that, not only did no such link exist, but that no such link could have even been reasonably suggested based on the evidence available at that time.

The resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq was “actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.” In reality, Iraq had long eliminated its nuclear program, a fact that was confirmed in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1998, four years prior to the resolution.

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The resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq at that time continued “to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability.” In reality, as the US government now admits, Iraq had rid itself of its chemical and biological weapons nearly a decade earlier and no longer had any active chemical and biological weapons programs. This likelihood that Iraq no longer had operational chemical or biological weapons was brought to the attention of members of Congress by a number of top arms control specialists, as well as Scott Ritter, the American who headed UNSCOM’s efforts to locate Iraq’s possible hidden caches of chemical and biological weapons, hidden supplies or secret production facilities. As I have written elsewhere, academic journals, testimony by arms control inspectors, newspaper articles, reports from independent think tanks and countless other sources in the months leading up to the Congressional authorization vote provided a plethora of evidence suggesting that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament and was not a threat to its neighbors, much less the United States.

No Evidence

Virtually all of Iraq’s known stockpiles of chemical and biological agents had been accounted for, and the shelf life of the small amount of material that had not been accounted for – which, as it ends up, had also been destroyed – had long since expired and was therefore no longer of weapons grade. There was no evidence that Iraq had any delivery systems for such weapons, either. In addition, the strict embargo of that country, in effect since 1990, against imports of any additional materials needed for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), combined with Iraq’s inability to manufacture such weapons or delivery systems themselves without detection, made any claims that Iraq constituted any “significant chemical and biological weapons capability” as claimed in the resolution transparently false to anyone who cared to investigate the matter at that time. Indeed, even the classified full version of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, while grossly overestimating Iraq’s military capability, was filled with extensive disagreements, doubts and caveats regarding President Bush’s assertions regarding Iraq’s WMD, WMD programs and delivery systems.

The House and Senate members who now claim they were “misled” about Iraq’s alleged military threat have failed to explain why they found the administration’s claims so much more convincing than the many other reports made available to them from more objective sources that presumably made a much stronger case that Iraq no longer had offensive WMD capability. Curiously, except for one excerpt from a 2002 National Security Estimate released in July 2003 – widely ridiculed at the time for its transparently manipulated content – not a single member of Congress has agreed to allow me or any other strategic analyst any access to any documents they claim convinced them of the alleged Iraqi threat. In effect, they are using the infamous Nixon defense from the Watergate scandal, claiming that, while they have evidence to vindicate themselves, making it public would somehow damage national security. In reality, if such reports actually exist, they are clearly inaccurate, outdated and are in regard to a government no longer in existence and would, therefore, be of no threat to national security if made public.

International Opposition

The US invasion of Iraq was opposed by virtually the entire international community, including Iraq’s closest neighbors, who presumably had the most to be concerned about in terms of any possible Iraqi military threat. However, the members of Congress who voted to authorize the invasion were determined to make the case that the United States – with the strongest military the world has ever known and thousands of miles beyond the range of Iraq’s alleged weapons and delivery systems – was so threatened by Iraq that the United States had to launch an invasion, overthrow its government and occupy that country for an indefinite period.

This shows a frighteningly low threshold for effectively declaring war, especially given that, in most cases, these members of Congress had been informed by knowledgeable sources of the widespread human and material costs which would result from a US invasion. It also indicates that they would likely be just as willing to send American forces off to another disastrous war again, also under false pretenses. Indeed, those who voted for the war demonstrated their belief that:

the United States need not abide by its international legal obligations, including those prohibiting wars of aggression;
claims by right-wing US government officials and unreliable foreign exiles regarding a foreign government’s military capabilities are more trustworthy than independent arms control analysts and United Nations inspectors;
concerns expressed by scholars and others knowledgeable of the likely reaction by the subjected population to a foreign conquest and the likely complications that would result should be ignored; and, faith should instead be placed on the occupation policies forcibly imposed on the population by a corrupt right-wing Republican administration.
As a result, support for the 2002 Iraq war resolution is not something that can simply be forgiven and forgotten.

Democrats’ Responsibility

The Democrats who voted to support the war and rationalized for it by making false claims about Iraq’s WMD programs are responsible for allowing the Bush administration to get away with lying about Iraq’s alleged threat. For example, Bush correctly noted how “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate – who had access to the same intelligence – voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” In a speech attacking anti-war activists, Bush noted, “Many of these critics supported my opponent [Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry] during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: ‘When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat, to our security.'”

The resolution also claimed that “the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States … or provide them to international terrorists who would do so … combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself.” In other words, those members of the House and Senate who supported this resolution believed, or claimed to believe, that an impoverished country, which had eliminated its stockpiles of banned weapons, destroyed its medium and long-range missiles and eliminated its WMD programs more than a decade earlier and had been suffering under the strictest international sanctions in world history for more than a dozen years, somehow threatened the national security of a superpower located more than 6,000 miles away. Furthermore, these members of Congress believed, or claimed to believe, that this supposed threat was so great that the United States had no choice but to launch an invasion of that country, overthrow its government and place its people under military occupation in the name of “self-defense,” regardless of whether Iraq allowed inspectors back into the county to engage in unfettered inspections to prove that the WMD, WMD programs and weapons systems no longer existed.

It’s also important to recognize that not everyone in Congress voted to authorize the invasion. There were the 21 Senate Democrats – along with one Republican and one Independent – who voted against the war resolution. And 126 of 207 House Democrats voted against the resolution as well. In total, then, a majority of Democrats in Congress defied their leadership by saying no to war. This means that the Democrats who did support the war, despite being overrepresented in leadership positions and among presidential contenders, were part of a right-wing minority and did not represent the mainstream of their party.

Despite this, the Democratic Party has largely rewarded their right-wing minority who did support the war. Since casting their fateful vote and making their false statements about WMD, Harry Reid (D-Nevada) was elected senate majority leader, John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) has been selected to head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has been selected to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the House, Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) was elected House Majority leader and Howard Berman (D-California) was selected to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And, in 2004, after the lies which led up to the war had already been exposed and US occupation troops were being dragged down into a bloody counterinsurgency war, the Democrats chose to nominate two pro-war senators – Kerry and John Edwards (D-North Carolina) – as their presidential and vice presidential candidates, both of whom at that time continued to defend their vote to authorize the invasion and to continue prosecuting the war. As a result, many anti-war Democrats refused to support their party’s nominees, resulting in their narrow defeat.

The Obama Administration

To his credit, Barack Obama – then an Illinois state senator who had no obligation to take a stand either way – took the initiative to speak at a major anti-war rally in Chicago in October 2002. While his future rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden were making false and alarmist statements that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was still a danger to the Middle East and US national security, Obama had a far more realistic understanding of the situation, stating: “Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors.”

Recognizing that there were alternatives to using military force, Obama called on the United States to “allow UN inspectors to do their work.” He noted, “that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Furthermore, unlike the Iraq war’s initial supporters, Obama recognized that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Understanding the dangerous consequences to regional stability resulting from war, Obama accurately warned that “an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”

Indeed, he referred to it as “a dumb war” and “a rash war,” nothing less than a “cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

It was this prescience, contrasted with Hillary Clinton’s blind support for the Iraq war, that played a decisive role in Obama upsetting her for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. Indeed, as a candidate for president, Obama promised that not only would he end the Iraq war, he would “end the mindset that led to the Iraq war.”

Unfortunately, the majority of President Obama’s appointees to key positions dealing with foreign policy – Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Dennis Blair, Janet Napolitano, Richard Holbrooke and Rahm Emanuel – have been among those who represent that very mindset.

Their support for the invasion of Iraq was not simply a matter of misjudgment. Those who supported the war demonstrated a dismissive attitude toward fundamental principles of international law and disdain for the United Nations Charter and international treaties which prohibit aggressive war. They demonstrated a willingness to either fabricate a nonexistent threat or naively believe transparently false and manipulated intelligence claiming such a threat existed, ignoring a plethora of evidence from weapons inspectors and independent arms control analysts who said that Iraq had already achieved at least qualitative disarmament. Perhaps worst of all, they demonstrated an incredible level of hubris and stupidity in imagining that the United States could get away with an indefinite occupation of a heavily populated Arab country with a strong history of nationalism and resistance to foreign domination.

Nor does it appear that they were simply fooled by the Bush administration’s manufactured claims of an Iraqi threat. For example, Napolitano, after acknowledging that there were not really WMD in Iraq as she had claimed prior to the invasion, argued, “In my view, there were lots of reasons for taking out Saddam Hussein.” Similarly, Clinton insisted months after the Bush administration acknowledged the absence of WMD that her vote in favor of the resolution authorizing the invasion “was the right vote” and was one that, she said, “I stand by.”

Clearly, then, despite their much-touted “experience,” these Obama appointees demonstrated, through their support for the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, a profound ignorance of the reality of the Middle East and an arrogant assumption that peace, stability and democratic governance can be created through the application of massive US military force.

Given that the majority of Democrats in Congress, a larger majority of registered Democrats nationally and an even larger percentage of those who voted for Obama opposed the decision to invade Iraq, it is particularly disappointing that Obama would choose his vice president, chief of staff, secretary of state, secretary of defense, secretary of Homeland Security and special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan from the right-wing minority who supported the war.

The most striking examples of Obama’s betrayal of his anti-war constituency have been his appointments to the influential positions of vice president and secretary of state.

Biden

It is difficult to overestimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a US invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on August 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.

As Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector, noted at the time, “For Sen. Biden’s Iraq hearings to be anything more than a political sham used to invoke a modern-day Gulf of Tonkin resolution-equivalent for Iraq, his committee will need to ask hard questions – and demand hard facts – concerning the real nature of the weapons threat posed by Iraq.”

It soon became apparent that Biden had no intention of doing so. Biden refused to even allow Ritter himself – who knew more about Iraq’s WMD capabilities than anyone and would have testified that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament – to testify. Ironically, on “Meet the Press” in 2007, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi WMD by insisting that “everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them.”

Biden also refused to honor requests by some of his Democratic colleagues to include some of the leading anti-war scholars familiar with Iraq and Middle East (myself included) in the hearings. These involved both those who would have reiterated Ritter’s conclusions about nonexistent Iraqi WMD capabilities as well as those prepared to testify that a US invasion of Iraq would likely set back the struggle against al-Qaeda, alienate the United States from much of the world and precipitate bloody, urban, counterinsurgency warfare amid rising terrorism, Islamist extremism and sectarian violence. All of these predictions ended up being exactly what transpired.

Nor did Biden even call some of the dissenting officials in the Pentagon or State Department who were willing to challenge the alarmist claims of their ideologically-driven superiors. He was willing, however, to allow Iraqi defectors of highly dubious credentials to make false testimony about the vast quantities of WMD materiel supposedly in Saddam Hussein’s possession. Ritter correctly accused Biden of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and … using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration’s lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a US invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of WMD years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a US invasion of that oil rich country. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process had led to the elimination of Iraq’s WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. During Senate hearings on Iraq in September of that year, Biden told Ritter, “As long as Saddam’s at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction.”

Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, “The only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone.” He told the Marine veteran, “it’s going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down.”

When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton’s proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were “beyond your pay grade.” As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam’s failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.

In the face of widespread skepticism over administration claims regarding Iraq’s military capabilities, Biden declared that President Bush was justified in being concerned about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of WMD. Even though Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons arsenal by the mid-1990s, Biden insisted categorically in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war resolution that Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons. Even though there is no evidence that Iraq had ever developed deployable biological weapons and its biological weapons program had been eliminated some years earlier, Biden insisted that Saddam had biological weapons, including anthrax and that “he may have a strain” of small pox. And, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1998 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted Saddam was “seeking nuclear weapons.”

Said Biden, “One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” He did not believe proof of the existence of any actual weapons to dislodge was necessary, however, insisting that “If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” He further defended President Bush by falsely claiming, “He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss a new inspection regime. He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation.”

In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, which gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world at the time and circumstances of his own choosing, Biden claimed, “I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur.”

It is also important to note that Biden supported an invasion in the full knowledge that it would not be quick and easy and that the United States would have to occupy Iraq for an extended period, declaring, “We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after.”

Despite all this, Obama offered him the vice presidency and has given him a leading role in his administration’s foreign policy.

Clinton

The most critical foreign policy appointment is that of secretary of state. For this position and despite enormous skepticism regarding the war among most State Department veterans, President Obama chose Clinton, one of the Senate’s most outspoken supporters of Bush’s Iraq policy. In order to justify her vote to authorize the US invasion of Iraq in October 2002, despite widespread and public skepticism expressed by arms control experts over the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had somehow rearmed itself, Senator Clinton was insisting that Iraq’s possession of biological and chemical weapons was “not in doubt” and was “undisputed.” She also falsely claimed that Iraq was “trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

Nonexistent WMD were not the only false claims Clinton made to justify a US invasion of Iraq. For example, she insisted that Saddam had given aid, comfort and sanctuary to al-Qaeda terrorists

Even after US forces invaded and occupied Iraq and confirmed that Iraq did not have WMD, active WMD programs, offensive delivery systems or ties to al-Qaeda as she and other supporters of the war had claimed, Clinton defended her vote to authorize the invasion anyway. As a result, she essentially acknowledged that Iraq’s alleged possession of WMD was not really what motivated her vote to authorize the war after all, but was instead a ruse to frighten the American people into supporting the invasion. Her actual motivation appears to have been about oil and empire.

During the first four years following the invasion, Clinton was a steadfast supporter of Bush administration policy. When Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) made his first call for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in November 2005, she denounced his effort, calling a withdrawal of US forces a big mistake. In 2006, when Senator Kerry sponsored an amendment that would have required the redeployment of US forces from Iraq in order to advance a political solution to the growing sectarian strife, she voted against it. She came out against the war only when she began her presidential campaign, recognizing that public opinion had turned so decisively in opposition that there was no hope of her securing the Democratic nomination unless she changed her position.

She has also decried Iran’s “involvement in and influence over Iraq,” an ironic complaint for someone who voted to authorize the overthrow of the anti-Iranian secular government of Saddam Hussein despite his widely predicted replacement by pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalist parties. She also went on record repeating a whole series of false, exaggerated and unproven charges by Bush administration officials regarding Iranian support for the Iraqi insurgency, even though the vast majority of foreign support for the insurgency had come from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, and that the majority of the insurgents are fanatically anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite.

Where’s the Hope?

A foreign policy team like this in charge raises serious questions as to whether Obama – despite his admirable anti-war position during the period leading up to the invasion – can really get us out of Iraq. His August 31 speech failed to condemn the decision to go to war or the politicians of both parties who lied about the alleged Iraqi threat.

Nor is it likely that the US Congress, the leadership of which is largely composed of pro-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans, will provide pressure to accelerate the withdrawal or demand that all troops be out by next year as promised. The way the Democratic Party has essentially rewarded those who made possible the needless sacrifice of American lives, treasure and credibility in the world leaves little incentive for those like Clinton, Biden, Kerry, Reid, Feinstein, Berman and Hoyer to get us out of Iraq and little disincentive for leading us into another senseless and tragic war.

http://www.truth-out.org/iraq-the-democrats-war63120

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/11-4

The Other Oil Spill

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Leading congressional Democrats are outraged at British Petroleum and others responsible for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But that stands in sharp contrast to their outspoken support of those responsible for a major oil spill in the eastern Mediterranean in 2006, the largest in that region’s history.

On July 13 and 15 of that year, as part of a major bombardment of the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon, Israeli planes bombed the fuel tanks for the Jiyeh power plant on the coast near Beirut, releasing 10,000–15,000 tons of oil. A giant oil slick spread northward by Mediterranean currents, contaminated the Lebanese and Syrian coasts, and went as far as Turkey and Cyprus. Meanwhile, large deposits of the densest parts of the heavy oil dropped to the seabed to form black toxic mats, destroying sea life below.

The ongoing Israeli navy blockade of the Lebanese coast made an emergency response impossible in the critical early hours and days of the disaster. Israeli airstrikes in the immediate area kept firefighters and others away from the disaster site, while damaged roads and bridges from other airstrikes prevented crews and equipment from dealing with the growing spill. With the support of both parties in Congress, the Bush administration blocked efforts at the United Nations to impose a ceasefire for another five weeks. Full-scale operations to contain and clean up the spill therefore did not get underway until well into August, by which time the spill had already stretched hundreds of miles. As a result, two months after the spill, only 3 percent of the oil had been cleaned up. Indeed, it took a full six months before the spill was even contained. It took a full year before most of the beaches had been cleaned, primarily by local young volunteers.

Legacy of the Spill

Lebanese Environmental Minister Yacoub Sarraf called the spill “the biggest environmental disaster in Lebanon’s history.” Scientists, fishermen, and activists were particularly concerned for local marine ecosystems. Eggs from bluefin tuna, a species already driven to the edge by overfishing, are particularly sensitive to such contamination. The oil covered the beaches just as endangered sea turtles were hatching, killing an untold number of hatchlings.

The costs of the disaster, in terms of fishing, tourism, and cleanup, have been estimated at up to $200 million. Although the United States provided Israel with the jets and ordinance that caused the oil spill, the U.S. government refused to contribute more than $5 million to the cleanup effort.

The environmental damage was not restricted to the oil spill. The total fuel capacity of the storage tanks at the Jiyeh plant was approximately 75,000 cubic meters. None of the oil was salvaged, meaning that what did not spill into the sea or seep into the ground burned up. The blaze lasted 10 days, sending toxic fumes into the surrounding area, including greater Beirut, with a population of over two million residents. Plumes of black smoke were visible for over 40 miles. Ash deposits covered a wide area, more than a foot deep in some places.

Contrasting Reactions in Congress

Congressional Democrats in large part recognized the extent of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and were outspoken in their denunciation of BP and others responsible. For example, Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-IL) declared that “the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf region is one of biblical proportions, and the economic and emotional toll on the people there is beyond devastating,” insisting that the “responsible parties must be held accountable.” Similarly, Diana DeGette (D-CO) declared, “This is a massive environmental disaster that we are really going to be living with and dealing with for many years to come…We’re really going to have to hold BP’s feet to the fire and make sure businesses are adequately compensated.” Other members of Congress were clear that they would insure that those at fault would be held responsible, with Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) declaring that “it is important that BP be held fully accountable for their negligence” and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) insisting, “We need to make companies pay.”

Yet when the victims of a massive oil spill are not the predominantly white residents along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, but instead are Arabs living in the eastern Mediterranean, their perspective is very different. Shakowski, DeGette, Clyburn, and DeLauro — along with the overwhelming majority of their House Democratic colleagues — joined their Republican counterparts in not only refusing to demand Israel be held accountable, but actually defending the Israeli assault. Like most targets of the Israeli war on Lebanon that summer, the Jiyeh power plant and its fuel tanks had no relation with the militant group Hezbollah, the alleged target of the Israeli attacks. Just two days after the bombing and the resulting oil spill, however, the U.S. House of Representatives — in a resolution that passed by a 410-8 vote, referred to the Israeli attacks as “appropriate action[s] to defend itself.” Congress even went as far as claiming that such attacks against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure were “in accordance with international law.”

Such an assertion runs counter to a broad consensus of international legal authorities, however. For example, Amnesty International concluded, after extensive research and analysis that included a review of Israeli interpretations of the laws of war, that the “Israeli forces committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes.” The International Red Cross, long recognized as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, declared that Israel violated the principle of proportionality in the conventions as well as the prohibition against collective punishment. Similarly, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour — who served as a prosecutor in the international war crimes tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia — noted how the Israeli government was engaging in war crimes and Jan Egeland, head of United Nations relief operations, referred to the “disproportional response” by Israel to Hezbollah’s provocations — such as the attack on the Jiyeh power plant — as “a violation of international humanitarian law.”

The House resolution also insisted that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, which grants the right of self-defense. None of the congressional offices I contacted, however, was able to explain how this kind of environmental warfare constituted legitimate self-defense. Furthermore, a reading of the UN Charter reveals that Article 33 requires all parties to “first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice,” which Israel had refused to do. John B. Larson (D-CT), speaking in reference to Republican apologists for the major oil companies, declared, “I don’t know how anyone could side with the CEO of BP over the victims of the Gulf oil spill at a time like this.” He has been unable to explain, however, how he and his fellow Democrats could side the Israeli government in this heinous act of environmental warfare.

Political Fallout?

Interestingly, the willingness by such congressional representatives to accept such large-scale environmental destruction and other war crimes as legitimate acts of self-defense did not prompt any major environmental groups or other key liberal constituencies to withdraw their support. Instead, leading environmental groups endorsed the re-election of scores of Democratic supporters of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, essentially communicating that politicians who defend serious acts of ecological sabotage need not worry about the political consequences of their actions.

One of the most important lessons of environmentalism is the understanding of the interconnectedness of the world’s ecology: that we are living on one planet. The willingness of so many Democrats in Congress to self-righteously decry the negligence of BP for causing a massive oil spill on America’s shores only to defend the wanton destruction of U.S.-provided weaponry that caused a massive oil spill on foreign shores primarily affecting people of color may be indicative of a kind of environmental racism.

If the planet is going to survive, both politicians and self-described environmental organizations must defend the environment whatever the geopolitics of a particular region and whoever the most immediate victims of its destruction may be.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/the-other-oil-spill_b_709029.html

Harry Reid’s Anti-Islamic Agenda

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The moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party could not be any more evident than in its continued support for Nevada Sen. Harry Reid as majority leader despite his decision to join the bigoted and Islamophobic campaign against the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center in New York, arguing that it “should be built somewhere else.”

This was also an apparent effort to embarrass President Barack Obama – who, in a rare example of showing some spine in the face of right-wing attacks – defended the First Amendment rights of the Muslim group. According to the president, Muslim Americans have “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” Despite the efforts of New York’s Republican mayor and the large number of 9/11 families and the city’s Christian and Jewish leaders who have defended the project, the senator representing a state nearly 3,000 miles away apparently believes he knows better.

One can only imagine the reaction by his Senate colleagues if Senator Reid he had called for a Jewish or Christian community center to be moved because some right-wing extremists were offended. The failure to call for Reid’s resignation or even denounce his statement underscores that many of his Democratic colleagues likely share his lack of tolerance toward those of the Islamic faith. As will be illustrated below, this is not the first example of Reid – or the Democrats – exposing their bigotry toward Muslims.

In many respects, Reid is emblematic of the Democratic Party’s tendency to not only refuse to ignore or resist extreme right-wing wing nuts, but to actively embrace their agenda. As a number of investigative reports have observed, the Park 51 project was a nonissue until Pamela Geller, the notorious, far-right, conspiratorial Islamophobe made it an issue, supported by the right-wing tabloid The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, a major funder of right-wing Republicans. Indeed, calls for a US invasion of Iraq and other anti-Islamic efforts were once the exclusive domain of the far right until Reid and other Democrats decided to jump on board.

Reid claims he is not against Muslims building mosques or community centers elsewhere, just not so close to the former site of the World Trade Center (WTC). It doesn’t seem to matter to Reid that the organizers of the Park 51 Center, like the vast majority of Muslims elsewhere, condemned the 9/11 attacks. The al-Qaeda cultists are no more representative of Muslims than Timothy McVeigh and his associates in the “Christian Identity” movement were representative of Christians overall, yet Reid has never expressed concern about Christian churches near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Nor does it appear relevant to Reid that the center would be on a side street one block up and a second block over from the northeast corner of the former WTC site, several blocks from the proposed memorial on the site of the former WTC, that it will not stand out amid the canyons of other buildings in downtown Manhattan and cannot even be seen from ground zero. To Reid and other anti-Muslim bigots, even that is too close.

It is noteworthy to examine the building that Reid finds so offensive: Comparable to a YMCA or a YMHA, the building would include a fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, performing arts center and food court. Though there would be a place for worship in the building, it is not a “mosque” as Reid has described it. Nor is it at ground zero.

According to Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, “It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion. It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum.” Khan went on to note that that “Three hundred of the victims [of the 9/11 attacks] were Muslim. We are Americans, too. The 9/11 tragedy hurt everybody, including the Muslim community. We are all in this together, and together we have to fight against extremism and terrorism.”

Despite some desperate efforts by some on the extreme right to falsely portray the initiator of the project as some kind of extremist by taking some quotes of his out of context and fabricating others, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has spent his career trying to promote interfaith understanding. He and other leaders of the project are from the Sufi tradition, the mystical branch of Islam that could not be more different that the Salafi extremists of al-Qaeda. Indeed, Imam Rauf has been recruited by both President Bush and President Obama to appear on behalf of the United States at international forums to challenge Islamic extremists. Yet, to Reid, this doesn’t matter. What matters, apparently, is that he is Muslim.

Reid is, no doubt, aware of all this, as he is of the recent Pew Research Centre report which determined that most Muslim Americans were “largely assimilated, happy with their lives … and decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes.”

This, however, may be what Reid objects to. As a strong supporter of US-led wars against Muslim nations in the name of fighting terrorism, perhaps he fears that allowing the moderate majority of American Muslims to have such a public face would make it difficult to support his militaristic agenda. As has been widely reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, the resistance to this decidedly moderate Islamic group establishing their cultural center is being widely circulated in predominately Muslim countries, feeding the extremists’ argument that the United States does not just oppose terrorism, but opposes Islam as a whole. The more that Muslims believe this, the ranks of extremist groups will grown and the greater the perceived threat to American interests will become, thereby allowing Reid and other hawks to use the “Islamic threat” as an excuse to invade Muslim countries, many of which contain oil and other coveted natural resources.

Invading Muslim Countries

Indeed, Reid’s Islamophobia and bigotry toward Muslims has been evident for years. For example, he was a leader among the right-wing minority of Congressional Democrats who supported President George W. Bush’s contention that the United States somehow has the right to invade Muslim countries rich in hydrocarbon resources on the far side of the world, even if they pose no threat us. In order to convince the public to support such an illegal war, Reid teamed up with the Bush administration, prominent neo-conservatives, Fox News, and some dubious Iraqi exiles in making a series of false allegations regarding Iraq’s military capability.

Despite evidence that Iraq no longer had “weapons of mass destruction,” (WMD) programs, or offensive delivery systems, and – as Obama and others recognized at the time – Iraq was not a threat to its neighbors, much less the United States, Reid voted in October 2002 to authorize a US invasion of Iraq because of what he claimed was “the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.” The Reid-backed resolution falsely accused Iraq of “continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability … [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, thereby continuing to threaten the national security interests of the United States.” Absolutely none of this was true. But to the Mormon senator from Nevada, telling the truth apparently is of little concern when convincing the country of the need to go to war against Islam. (To this day, his office insists that Reid was not lying, but was misled by “faulty intelligence.” However, they have refused to provide me or any other independent strategic analysts with any of this supposed “intelligence” he supposedly saw that supposedly said Iraq had these supposed weapons and weapons systems.)

When Sen. Joseph Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, tried to alter the wording of the war resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority, Reid, as assistant majority leader of the Senate, helped circumvent Biden’s efforts by signing on to the White House’s version. As the Democratic whip, Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the US that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization. (By contrast, a sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives – under the leadership of then-whip Nancy Pelosi – voted against the Republican resolution.)

It is highly unlikely that Reid would have supported such an invasion were the country in question not predominately Muslim. For example, he has not called for an invasion of North Korea, India, Israel, China, and other non-Muslim countries which really do have such weapons and weapons systems.

Weapons were never really the issue, however. Indeed, Redi continued to support the invasion of Iraq in early 2003 even after Iraq allowed United Nations inspectors to return and it was becoming apparent, as many arms control experts had been arguing all along, that there were no WMD to be found. Reid rushed to support Bush’s claims of his right to invade that Muslim country anyway, claiming that – despite its clear violation of the United Nations Charter – the invasion was “lawful” and that he “commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President.”

Recognizing that such explicit anti-Muslim bigotry would be unacceptable, Reid felt obliged to lie to justify his support of the US invasion of Iraq by echoing the administration’s claims that “this nation would be justified in making war to enforce the terms we imposed on Iraq in 1991” since Iraq promised “the world it would not engage in further aggression and it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

In reality, Iraq had not engaged in further acts of aggression, and it had already destroyed its WMD, demonstrating Reid’s willingness to defend the Bush administration’s lies in order to justify a US takeover of that oil-rich country.

Secondly, even if Iraq had been guilty as charged, the armistice agreement to which Reid referred – UN Security Council resolution 687 – had no military enforcement mechanisms. Furthermore, resolution 678, which originally authorized the use of force against Iraq, had become null and void once Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait. An additional resolution specifically authorizing the use of force would have been required in order for the United States to legally engage in any further military action against the Baghdad regime.

Historically, opposition leaders in the Senate have taken seriously Congress’ role under the US Constitution to place a check on presidential powers, including such illegal activities as wars of aggression. It appears, however, that since the targeted country was Muslim, Reid felt no duty to uphold his constitutional authority. Reid twice granted the fraudulently-elected Bush unprecedented war-making authority, justifying this betrayal of his constitutional responsibility by insisting that Bush was only invading Iraq out of necessity, insisting – despite evidence to the contrary – that “no President of the United States of whatever political philosophy will take this nation to war as a first resort alternative rather than as a last resort.”

The last senator from the inland west to lead the Democrats was Mike Mansfield of Montana, who served as Senate majority leader for most of the 1960s and 1970s. He courageously spoke out against the Vietnam War, not only when the Republican Richard Nixon was president, but also when Democrat Lyndon Johnson was president. Unlike Mansfield, however, who was willing to challenge the foreign policy of his own party’s administration, Reid refused to speak out even when the administration was from the opposing political party, apparently because – unlike Vietnam – the victims of the more recent US war were Muslims.

Contempt for Other Muslim Nations

Iraq is not the only area where Reid is willing to support mass violence against Muslim peoples. Reid co-sponsored a Senate resolution defending Israel’s massive onslaught on the predominantly Muslim Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 and of an earlier resolution defending the 2006 Israeli attack against predominantly Muslim southern Lebanon, wars which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 Muslim civilians. Reid directly contradicted findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various UN agencies in insisting that Israel’s attacks against civilian population centers was legal. But when it comes to killing Muslim civilians, the facts don’t matter to Reid. Just as the facts about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center don’t matter to Reid. Just as having a bigot as their leader doesn’t seem to matter to Senate Democrats.

Reid’s contempt for international legal standards was also evident in his co-sponsorship of a resolution – which fortunately never received majority support – condemning the International Court of Justice for its July 2004 decision, which held that governments engaged in belligerent occupation are required to uphold relevant provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and related standards of international humanitarian law. The case was in regard to the predominantly Muslim-populated Palestinian West Bank subjected to illegal colonization and other violations of international law by its Israeli occupiers.

Furthermore, despite a series of UN Security Council resolutions declaring Israel’s occupation, colonization and annexation of predominately Muslim East Jerusalem illegal, Reid sponsored the Jerusalem Embassy Act that insists that “Jerusalem remain an undivided city” under Israeli control. In addition, Reid has supported Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank in contravention of a series of UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from these illegal settlements.

Reid also was an initiator of a letter to President Obama defending Israel’s attack this past spring on an international humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters attempting to deliver foods and medicines to the besieged Gaza Strip, which resulted in the killings of nine participants, including a 19-year-old US citizen, who was shot at close range in the back of the head. He also insisted that the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities on international humanitarian law were wrong in asserting that the siege went well beyond Israel’s legitimate security concerns and was, therefore, illegal. Reid presumably would have not defended attacks against similar efforts to bring food and medicines to besieged Christian populations, as in the case of West Berlin during the cold war.

That the Democratic Party would choose an anti-Islamic extremist like Reid to represent them in the US Senate is yet another indication of just how far to the right the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, it is but one example of why so many Democrats will be staying home this November rather than supporting their morally bankrupt leadership.

http://www.truth-out.org/harry-reids-anti-islamic-agenda62863