Month: March 2010

Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world. Petraeus was so disturbed by a recent trip to the Middle East that he asked a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen, and asked that the region be made part of his command:

The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow … and too late." The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders.

"Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling," a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. "America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding." But Petraeus wasn't finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to Mullen requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command — or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged  in the region's most troublesome conflict.

Unless and until the US actually uses real leverage against the Netanyahu government, it will continue to work against American interests and endanger American lives.

"I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist," – Andy McCarthy, National Review.

Tapper asks the question: does Netanyahu's contempt for the US administration and continued expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem put US troops at risk elsewhere in the war on terror?

Well, it won't work to balance the budget, even after two generations. Paul Krugman:

What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population.

Naturally, Ryan’s response to these revelations has been a hissy fit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which has always, in my experience, been impeccably honest and careful in its work — does the point by point rebuttal.

At some point, fiscally conservative Republicans, if there are any real ones left, are going to have to deal with raising taxes. Just call it following Reagan and Bush I, if you really can't bring yourself to give Clinton any credit.

What is happening in Germany with respect to the Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis right now is what happened in America after the first revelations came out of Boston. Instead of the Boston Globe, we have the Süddeutsche Zeitung. What's staggering to me is the Vatican response – which is the same as the Boston church's first reponse. Even now, even after all we have learned and seen this past decade, their response is to say it is primarily part of a campaign to vilify the Pope. Yes, despite hundreds of claims of sexual abuse against children, it's the Pope who's the real victim here:

In a note read on Vatican Radio on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was “evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.” He added, “It is clear that those efforts have failed.” 

Again, it is the reputation of the church and the Pope they care about first, not the welfare of children. In today's developments, the entire question of whether celibacy might have something to do with the stunted sexual and emotional development of priests (you think?) – let alone whether the repression and oppression of homosexuality contributes to psychological damage – has been ruled out of bounds of legitimate discussion by the Vatican:

Several prominent prelates — in Germany and at the Vatican — shot down any suggestion that the celibacy rule had anything to do with the scandal, a point echoed Sunday by the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. "It's been established that there's no link," said the article by Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi, an emeritus professor of canon law and psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. "First off, it's known that sexual abuse of minors is more widespread among lay people and those who are married than in the celibate priesthood,'' he wrote. ''Secondly, research has shown that priests guilty of abuse had long before stopped observing celibacy."

First: blame others before taking responsibility; second: a total non-sequitur. Has it occurred to Versaldi that the repressed, contorted sexual teaching of the church leads so many priests, gay and straight, directly into dysfunctional and, yes, disordered sex lives, alone or with others? Does he realize that forcing gay Catholic kids to hate themselves and then to seek refuge in a celibate priesthood as a cover for their unconquerable nature is just asking for later breakdowns and acting out, with teens and kids as the victims? Does he understand that straight men, denied any relationships with women their own age, can get stunted emotionally, fail to see women as equals, and are thereby less capable in many cases of proper pastoral care and sexual misconduct?

But what staggers me is once again the immediate, visceral circling of the wagons – when what is being revealed – again! – is a pattern of criminal abuse, aided and abetted by a powerful elite, led by the Pope himself. If this were a secular institution, the police would move in and shut it down.

We need a statement from the Pope explaining what he knew and didn't know about the abuse of children – and the protection of child-abusing priests – under his direct authority in Regensburg and Munich. His position does not render him above the law – or above taking personal responsibility for the crimes he was duty-bound to discover and prosecute and for the priests he did not remove from their positions of power.

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI speaks to a priest during a visit to the San Giovanni della Croce Parish in Rome on March 7, 2010. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty.)

Trnava, Slovakia, 11.50 am

Wow. Did I get a blast from readers for posting the map that was merely designed to illustrate the current Israeli government's indifference to the US and apparent determination to annex all of Jerusalem and the West Bank permanently. The main and valid criticism is that vast parts of the map designated 'Palestinian" were actually just desert and run as public lands by the Ottomans and the Brits. The map, I'm told, has been used by anti-Zionists, but my intent was to show just how an apartheid system could become inevitable, if it isn't already, if current policy continues. So below is what a reader proffers as a less inflammatory map. Think of it as the difference between the cruder red and blue maps in US elections, and the maps that show shades of purple in every state. It's also clearer about land-ownership.

One thing apposite to the current attempt to force Palestinians out of parts of East Jerusalem and give their homes to extremist Israelis, celebrating the mass murder of Muslims at prayer, and to build Jewish settlements there as rapidly as possible, is that Jerusalem was 84 percent Arab in 1946 and well within Palestinian authority under the partition plan the Palestinian Arabs rejected. It is undoubtedly true that Palestinian and wider Arab refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist has been a huge part of this problem – arguably the central reason for this conflict. But it remains true to my mind that the current Israeli government needs an attitude adjustment, and soon.

 

Rod Dreher has an enjoyable rant against the worst:

I have a perverse fascination with ugly churches. They're supposed to lift our eyes toward heaven, and to help us connect to God. It is vitally important for churches to be beautiful, no matter what style (and many different styles can be beautiful … though not all styles are). Given the stakes, when churches fail aesthetically, they fail epically. Consider Our Lady of Chernobyl, in suburban New York, or the Florida church complex that looks like an bologna ziggurat sculpted by Oscar Mayer, next to a giant tortilla warmer. This is what happens when people forget what church architecture and design is for, and when insecure clergy and church lay leadership get fugaboo'd and intimidated by architects who want to make a Statement.

Jonah Lehrer has a guess:

I've been recently been reading some interesting research on close, interpersonal relationships (much of it by Ellen Berscheid, at the University of Minnesota) and I'm mostly convinced that there's a fundamental mismatch between the emotional state we expect to feel for a potential spouse – we want to "fall wildly in love," experiencing that ecstatic stew of passion, desire, altruism, jealousy, etc – and the emotional state that actually determines a successful marriage over time.

Berscheid defines this more important emotion as "companionate love" or "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined." Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, compares this steady emotion which grows over time to its unsteady (but sexier and more cinematic) precursor: "If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together."