March 2013 – Page 31

Barack Obama vs George Washington, Ctd

Just how “eternal” and “unbreakable” is our alliance with Israel? Rashid Khalidi explores as much in his new book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. Scott Horton asked Khalidi “what, precisely, was dishonest about the American role” in the peace process:

The United States claimed not only to be an honest broker between Palestinians and Israelis — Condoleezza Rice uses precisely these words in a document I quote in the book — it also claimed to be working for peace between them. Neither claim was true. The United States has been bound by a 1975 memorandum of understanding to the prior coordination of its positions on this issue with Israel, which it has faithfully done ever since then. This has been interpreted in practice to mean that Israel has effective veto power on what the United States can propose regarding the Palestine issue.

And since Camp David in 1978, the United States has allowed Israel to dictate the low ceiling for what the Palestinians can aspire to. This ceiling was established by Menachem Begin in 1978, as laid out in documents I cite in the book, and that has not changed since: Israel will never accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state; it will never stop expanding its settlements or give up control of land, water, or Jerusalem. And every deal brokered by the United States since then, and indeed the status quo that emerged from the Oslo Accords and that we are living with today, is completely consonant with Begin’s schema. That is neither honest, nor for that matter brokering: It is acting as “Israel’s lawyer,” as Aaron David Miller accurately put it, quoting Henry Kissinger.

There was a moment when Obama first took office when the US regaining the role of an actual honest broker seemed possible again. For the first time, a West Bank Palestinian leadership really had emerged that helped Israel’s security and governed with relative efficiency. For the first time, we had an American president with real and new credibility to reset relations with the Arab and Muslim world, after a decade of dangerous polarization. Netanyahu and the American Jewish Establishment, Democrats and Republicans, deliberately and strategically killed that moment and if it had been possible, would have ended Obama’s presidency in four years to send a message that no US president dare do such a thing in future. They sure spent enough money trying to accomplish that. But having failed to end his presidency, they still managed to neuter it on this question.

And that, it seems to me, became the premise of the visit to Israel.

An American president, having tried to meet the Palestinians and Israelis at the mid-point, is now doing what he actually has to do, given that Israel controls US foreign policy in the Middle East. He has to beg, flatter, charm and seduce the Israeli people as his only way of having any impact on that part of the world. He has to accede to Netanyahu’s conditions for talks, which is the continuation and acceleration of settlements in ways that make a two-state solution impossible. He has to give up reaching out to the Muslim world in a new way in a new era. Israel and its lobby succeeded in spectacular fashion, out-maneuvering and humiliating the US president, and erasing any credibility he had with the Arab and Muslim world. In the last four years, despite an historic opportunity for proactive change, they made sure no US president could jeopardize, or do more than mildly delay, the permanent establishment of the real project: a Jewish state in line with fundamentalist principles rather than present realities, a Jewish state that in practice is wiping Palestine – and its Arab inhabitants – off the map.

Obama’s rhetorical skills are all he has left. That he has used them to such effect in Israel is a testament, it seems to me, that he has not given up and feels a core duty to his own country not to give up on the single most important issue rendering the US’s relationship with the Muslim and Arab world eternally toxic. This is a president, re-capitalized by a re-election, trying again, knowing, as he surely must, that he will fail again. His role now will be to act as cover for another pre-emptive war against alleged weapons of mass destruction.

I admire Obama’s perseverance. I admire the audacity of his hope. I admire those Israelis and Americans, Jewish and Gentile, who understand why he is right about the settlements and right about a two-state solution. I share his admiration for the state of Israel, its extraordinary achievements, its raucous democracy, its economic renaissance. I supported Israel for as long as I felt it had no real partner for peace. But I have learned the hard way that none of this really means anything or can lead to anything. As long as the settler movement has rock-solid overwhelming support in the US Congress, which, whatever platitudes are uttered, it de facto does, and the project of Greater Israel is also backed by a large swathe of fundamentalist America, we are past the point of no return. The facts on the ground have achieved what they were designed to achieve: wiping the entire idea of Palestine off the map.

Maybe secretary of state Kerry believes he can thread this needle. My view, arrived at through exhaustion and despair these last four years, is that the needle has already been threaded. And Greater Israel will be as “unbreakable” as America’s support for it; and the president who ran against dumb wars will be forced to start a new one because of it. He has now done what his conscience and unfathomable optimism requires of him, and mercifully erased the smear that he is somehow hostile to Zionism or to the Jewish people. He is sane enough not to try much more. If someone is intent on hanging himself, even the best of friends cannot prevent it.

(Photo: In this handout photograph supplied by the Government Press Office of Israel (GPO), U.S. President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu place their arms around each other during a visit to Mount Herzl on March 22, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. By Kobi Gideon/GPO via Getty Images)

Should Trans Surgery Be Covered? Ctd

Readers continue to debate the topic:

Private insurance companies will fight tooth and nail to deny any surgery performed by a plastic surgeon. I just put down $8,000 of my own and raised $4,500 from friends and family to pay for a breast reduction that I’ve been denied three times in 10 years by three different insurance companies. And ask parents how hard cleft palate surgeries are to get covered. In a time where skyrocketing costs are cutting into insurance profits, they will do whatever they can get away with to reduce their payments to providers. If they can call it cosmetic (in my case this determination was done with no transparency by a board of non-physicians) they can deny it, and the popular opinion of plastic surgery gives them cover.

Personally I think it all comes back to how fucked up our health paradigm is. We treat illness instead of treating for wellness. We ask whether you are sick enough to need intervention instead of asking what wellness would look like for you and trying to get there. Plastic surgeons don’t really fit the paradigm, with one notable exception: reconstruction after mastectomy. Unpack that one alongside trans top surgery and tell me you don’t see a double standard.

Another has a very different perspective:

Andrew, I find it hard to believe you (a conservative?) could even remotely consider transgender surgery a “health condition” that society should consider worthy of financial support. Never mind the lazy (but valid) arguments about where the trans justification leads us: “I really feel that I was born a big dick kind of guy; unfortunately, my testosterone levels were a bit low during puberty. My HMO should pay for my enlargement surgery.” We need to narrow the definition of healthcare, not expand it, in order to ensure basic coverage for everyone.

The Cardinal Whose Lovers Finally Had Enough

Here’s more detail of a fascinating story on the breakdown of the clerical gay closet. The men who exposed Scotland’s highest Roman Catholic figure had been aware of his orientation for years. One was very close:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien had a long-standing physical relationship with one of the men whose complaints about his behaviour sparked his downfall as leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland. The man left the priesthood in the middle of the last decade but rejoined and is living on the continent in a post the cardinal helped him secure. The complainant is known to have been in regular telephone contact with Cardinal O’Brien until recently and was a frequent visitor to St Benets, his official residence in Edinburgh’s Morningside.

So a cardinal in a same-sex relationship who publicly declared the idea of marriage equality as “madness” finally saw his elaborate house of cards collapse under the weight of massive hypocrisy:

Another source said: “These guys, we now know, were part of an inner circle. In the 30 years since these allegations took place there’s been ample time to complain. The Cardinal has had a huge profile for the past decade. But the door wasn’t just shut on them, it was bolted in the past 18 months.

“I believe they wanted to silence O’Brien – as he’s about to do another conclave, and make a huge deal of it. As he’s retiring, a decision’s been taken to go public and take him down.” Another said: “If you’re asking me to describe what this is about in one word, it’s revenge. I’ve no doubt the allegations did take place in the 1980s but they’ve come out to – destroy O’Brien.”

It’s a crack in the Catholic clerical closet – but look how long the news took to break and how egregious the hypocrisy had to be in order for the truth to come out. I’m against outing people in public life. But there are cases of such extreme hypocrisy, where such a vast gulf between private beliefs and public rhetoric almost requires people of conscience to speak out.

Quote For The Day

“When a broadcasting executive gets out of bed in the morning, before his foot hits the floor, his thoughts are ratings. ‘What are my ratings?’ Not unlike Wall Street people, who get their—and CEOs, their first thought is the price of their stock,” – Phil Donahue, reflecting on his firing from MSNBC for being too anti-war.

An Experiment With An Expiration Date? Ctd

Like Fallows, Ezra is afraid to get invested in products that Google might kill. In response, Drum identifies why Google’s failed products are particularly disruptive:

Ever since the birth of the PC, you’ve taken a risk when you buy a new product. If it succeeds, it’ll be around for a long time. If it doesn’t, it will die. Google isn’t breaking any new ground here.

What’s different is that Google’s products are all cloud-based. When Google Reader goes away on July 1, that’s it. It’s gone. If it were an ordinary bit of software that I’d installed on my PC, this wouldn’t be a problem. It would keep on working for years even if it never got another update. I’d need to replace it eventually—because of an OS upgrade or a desire for new features that finally got too strong—but I’d probably have years to work that out.

What Iraq Should Have Taught Us

Marc Lynch notes that Iraq War retrospectives “have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans.” The problem with this American-centric commentary:

The real story of the American departure is how little it mattered. That’s in part because the United States was never as necessary or wanted as Americans liked to believe. There’s no question that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, for one, made himself indispensible to Iraqi politics through his tireless and effective diplomatic efforts. But as Charles De Gaulle famously (if apocryphally) said, the graveyards are full of indispensible men. Outside players can marginally affect faraway countries for a short time and through tremendous exertion, but their efforts are always refracted through local politics and rarely last. …

Here’s what we should have taken away from the Iraq withdrawal: The U.S. departure just didn’t change very much, and the United States keeping its troops there longer wouldn’t have made much difference. But such a lesson is incompatible with our deeply ingrained strategic narcissism, and thus will not likely be learned.

A Right To Resell

Earlier this week, SCOTUS ruled that Americans have the right to re-sell books bought abroad. Jerry Brito explains the case:

Supap Kirtsaeng, a student at Cornell who was originally from Thailand, realized that the exact same textbooks that were going for over a hundred dollars in the U.S. were available for peanuts back home. So, he asked his friends and family in Thailand to go to bookstores and buy the textbooks, ship them to him in the U.S., and he sold them on eBay for a profit. These were not pirate or knock-off goods; they were the real deal published by the Asian subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons and stamped “not for resale.”

Wiley sells books more cheaply in Thailand because it engages in market segmentation, a simple kind of price discrimination. In order to maximize profits, Wiley charges different prices to different consumers according to their willingness to pay. And what country or market you’re in serves as a proxy for what you’re willing to pay. This only works, though, if you can make sure that there is no arbitrage, and that’s why Wiley sued Kirtsaeng.

Brito thinks that “the Kirtsaeng decision makes it practically impossible to price discriminate, a practice that tends to make all parties better off” but that SCOTUS made “the right decision because while there’s no right to price-discriminate, there is a right to do with your property as you like.” David Post applauds the decision:

[T]he rule Wiley argued for would have given publishers a substantial incentive to move all of their manufacturing facilities (for books, and CDs, and DVDs and . . .) overseas, because they would only be able to prevent arbitrage, and maintain their price discrimination and market segmentation, with respect to those foreign-manufactured copies. It is hard to believe — impossible, actually — that Congress intended that result.

Should Kids Play With iPads?

This embed is invalid

Hanna Rosin recently chatted with developers of apps for children:

I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done at that moment—stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let her watch movies in Spanish.”

By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way.

Worse Than Hiroshima? Ctd

Many readers voice their skepticism:

Having watched that video I was strongly impacted by the imagery and claims of higher rates of birth defects, especially the claim that the levels are 14 times that of those that were observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. So I decided to look for estimates on what those levels would be, and found that the level hadn’t changed in those Japanese cities. Here’s the link I found, which includes sources in scientific literature. I’m a bit baffled why Democracy Now would relate these.

The soldier’s story could have been true though, as a heavy metal uranium is very toxic, especially to the kidneys. He might have inhaled a lot of it. (Full disclosure: I work as a research scientist in nuclear fusion computations.)

Another:

Seriously, whenever you see the name Dahr Jamail, you need to be very skeptical of the assertions that follow. Briefly, Jamail has blamed depleted uranium for health problems without any evidence at all. But it’s not hard to find actual research linking birth defects in Fallujah to the more prosaic but plenty nasty elements lead and mercury. “Uranium” and “Hiroshima” probably get more pageviews than plain old lead, but I would think that these recent victims of our past warfare would be better served by accurate reporting than by an anti-nuclear ideologue’s sensationalism.

Another wonders:

Is there really an increase in birth defects, or just an increase in reporting?

Do Iraquis traditionally just kill babies with birth defects, as is true in many parts of the world, but have recently publicized the defects for some reason? What mechanism of action is proposed to explain these effects?

There is natural uranium virtually everywhere; it’s one of the three NORM materials (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) that occur in rocks and soil worldwide, a product of the earth being formed of material produced in a supernova explosion more than 4.5 billion years ago. Everyone is exposed to it every day, more so in certain locations than in others. Depleted uranium (DU) is actually only very slightly radioactive; the uranium decay products (which are themselves much more radioactive than the uranium itself) have been removed in the uranium mining/production/enrichment process and only slowly grow back in.

If there are birth defects occurring at 14 times the rates observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then it’s not because the DU is radioactive – folks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were truly HEAVILY exposed to radiation. If Fallujah itself has a high rate of birth defects, which has not been established, then why? Why not other sites where DU munitions are tested? For example, are there high rates of birth defects in the communities surrounding Fort Irwin, California, or other areas where DU munitions are commonly tested in the continental US? How have the “tracers” who linked the putative increase in birth defects to DU, eliminated chemical contamination from other sources as the cause of the birth defects?

If birth defects are indeed caused by DU, perhaps it’s because of the chemical action of uranium somehow interfering with development (rather than due to radiation, which truly is not an issue with DU). In which case, testing on mice or other mammals would show up that effect quickly. The only way to learn anything in medicine is by randomized, double-blind testing. I’m not proposing testing on people, of course, but on animal surrogates. Why isn’t Democracy Now advocating for such testing? Could it be that their “issue” is really anti-war activism, rather than concern for the Iraqui citizenry?

It’s possible to be anti-war without being unscientific. Of course, agitprop is more effective than reason; quoting Mark Twain, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

The Smart Watch Cometh

Brian Ries is the proud owner of a Pebble:

Soon these little things will be everywhere. Both Apple and Samsung are reported to be working on their own mass-market smartwatches to hit the market later this year, and Pebble’s CEO has been mum when asked if Apple’s CEO has approached him about an acquisition. But for now, just 40,000 Pebbles have been produced, a limited run that means I’ve yet to see another “Pebbler” in the wild. …

The device itself is a fascinating, mind-opening extension of the smartphone. You wouldn’t know the inconvenience of reading your text messages on the phone retrieved from your pocket until they pop up seamlessly on the device sitting coolly on your wrist. But you wouldn’t know you had a dumbwatch until a guy on the Internet asks for some money to create something smarter, either.

(Above: Pebble’s 2012 Kickstarter video, which raised over $10 million.)