Sprey-Cockburn Report

Did Fukushima Meltdown Increase Infant Death Rates in the United States?

Attached below is an extremely important report written by my friends Alexander Cockburn and Pierre Sprey.  They describe on the ramifications of the still unfolding Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan — specifically, its impact on infant death rates in the United States, and in so doing they also discovered the disastrous state of radiation monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Alexander needs no introduction, nor should Pierre, but for those who do now know of him, Pierre is a brilliant statistician/engineer.  He was a key member of the design teams that shaped the enormously successful F-16 and A-10 combat aircraft and he is founder and key sound engineer of the innovative Mapleshade recording studio, renowned for the quality of music among audiophiles.  Pierre approaches statistics in the exploratory empirical tradition that allows the universe of data observations help to shape the hypothesis under test.  Moreover, he does this in a rigorously unbiased way that ends up milking the maximum real (as opposed to spurious) information out of the data.  His analyses are not only elegant and brilliantly simple, they can be awe-inspiring to the analytically inclined. [Pierre's technique is very similar the Exploratory Data Analysis philosophy pioneered by the renowned statistician John Tukey, an accessible description of which can be found here.]

In this case, Pierre constructed a simple statistical test (the Mann-Whitney U Test — explained in the technical addendum I have appended to the end of the Sprey-Cockburn Report) to determine if and how infant death rates in the United States changed after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

I urge readers to study this very important report carefully, especially those of you who are infatuated with the idea of building a carbon-free economy, because a carbon-free economy means many more nuclear power plants.

The Sprey-Cockburn Report appeared in the subscriber edition of Counterpunch.  The editors kindly gave me permission to distribute it.  While the free Counterpunch website is a source of much useful information on an incredibly wide range of subjects, the juiciest morsels of investigative journalism are usually reserved for paid subscribers … I strongly recommend that readers subscribe, it will be worthwhile, even if you are interested in only one article out of every six.

Chuck Spinney

Nice France

Where did the Radiation Plumes from Japan Touch Down?

The Fukushima Disaster and Infant Death Rates in the U.S.

· At Least 19 Cities in Harm's Way

· Why EPA Monitoring is a Joke

By Pierre Sprey with Alexander Cockburn

CounterPunch, Volume 18 no 13, July 1-31, 2011 

[Subscriber edition — distributed with permission of editors]

CounterPunch has established that in the eight weeks after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima complex in Japan on March 11, infant mortality in 19 U.S. cities increased by 35 per cent.

   In the course of this review, conducted by CounterPunch's statistical consultant, Pierre Sprey, it also became clear that the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring system, known as RadNet, is hopelessly inadequate to assess the effect on U.S. public health of a nuclear accident either overseas or here in the Homeland. EPA's routine sampling is laughable, with sampling frequency and geographic coverage that are hopeless for tracking radiation exposures of concern to public health. EPA's extra sampling following disasters like Three Mile Island or Fukushima can, at best, identify only a tiny fraction of the significant touchdowns of the concentrated radiation plumes from an accident site.

   This past June, to check on a Sherman and Mangano piece on the CounterPunch website showing elevated infant deaths in eight cities in the Pacific Northwest post-Fukushima, we asked CounterPunch's statistical advisor Pierre Sprey to review data available from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the form of weekly deaths of infants of one year or less in 122 reporting cities across the U.S.A. This is the only available database where one can get numbers bearing on very recent mortality trends within a week or so after the deaths occurred. Most other mortality databases are not published within a year or more of the events covered.

   In June, Sprey reviewed data from all eight cities mentioned in the Sherman/Mangano article, as well as the three remaining Pacific area CDC-reporting cities to the north of these eight: San Jose, Santa Cruz, Fresno, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane and Boisie. Sprey found that the four northernmost Pacific Northwest cities of these eleven- Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane - showed remarkably significant results.

   During the ten weeks before March 11 the four cities suffered 55 deaths among infants less than one year old. In the ten weeks after Fukushima 78 infants died - a 42 per cent increase, one that is statistically significant. To confirm once again that these results were not due to seasonality, Sprey compared the infant deaths in the ten weeks after Fukushima to the deaths in the equivalent ten weeks a year earlier. The results were almost identical with the ten weeks before Fukushima in 2011. Within the equivalent ten weeks of 2010, 53 infants died in these four cities.

   The post-Fukushima deaths are 47 per cent higher than they were in the same period a year before - once again, statistically significant. If you add the equally far north city of Boise, Idaho, to the four-city sample, the results remain almost unchanged.

Such results are not as surprising as they seem: Chernobyl was associated with similar spikes in infant mortality at various distant locations in Europe. Even though our northern Pacific coast is 4,500 miles from Fukushima, significant localized concentrations of radioisotopes are to be expected because the meltdown's radiation plumes carried by the Pacific's westerly winds, much like pollution plumes and ash plumes elsewhere, did not disperse uniformly with distance - contrary to the equations used by all atmospheric computer modelers. In fact, actual observations of radiation dispersal after Chernobyl or volcanic ash dispersal after any notable eruption, including the recent Icelandic eruptions, always show that the particles disperse in unpredictable and surprisingly concentrated plumes, which touch down occasionally and with high concentrations at great distances from the source.

   In his June review on our website, Sprey pointed out that an important line of inquiry would be to correlate the sampled cities' infant death results with contemporaneous measurements of radiation levels in the drinking water, and possibly the milk supplies in nearby areas. In that review, Sprey selected the four Northwest city samples because he was trying to analyze the data from all CDC-reporting cities within a geographically consistent area that might have been exposed to Japanese radiation. 

   Now Sprey, with the help of CounterPunch researcher Jed Bickman, has widened his purview and sharpened his selection criteria to include more cities. He looked for cities specifically defined by elevated radiation levels near them, using EPA iodine-131 measurements as the indicator of a nearby plume touchdown. Locations in the EPA RadNet database showing significantly raised iodine-131 in any air, rain or drinking water sample (or significantly raised strontium-89 in a milk sample) within the 20 days following Fukushima were selected. If any of the 122 cities reporting weekly mortality to the CDC was nearby or within 100 miles or so downwind of one of these RadNet locations, this was taken as an indicator that the reporting city could have been exposed to a radioactive plume touchdown. Note that, as discussed at greater length below, the EPA RadNet samples are so sparse in time and space - days or weeks apart and often hundreds and hundreds of miles between monitoring sites - that the vast majority of actual plume touchdowns across the country almost certainly remained undetected. 

   Using this approach, Sprey selected 19 cities showing evidence of being near a touchdown within 20 days of the Fukushima disaster. Five proved to be Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Boise, the cities already examined in the June analysis. Five more from the Sherman/Mangano study also met the criteria: Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley. New cities added were Long Beach, Las Vegas, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Denver and, surprisingly, three cities in Florida - St. Petersburg, Tampa and Jacksonville. 

   Sprey took infant deaths during the eight weeks after the Fukushima disaster on March 11 (weeks 11 through 20 of 2011) and compared them to two control samples. One control sample was the deaths during the identical eight-week period from a year earlier (weeks 11 through 20 of 2010), and the second was the eight-week period in 2011 just before Fukushima. 

   Sprey found that, when compared to 2010, infant mortality in the 19-city sample increased by a statistically significant 35 per cent. The raw numbers are 305 infant deaths in the eight weeks after Fukushima and 226 deaths for the same eight-week period in 2010. Comparing the 305 post-Fukushima deaths to the 259 infant deaths in the eight weeks just before the meltdown yielded a statistically significant 18 per cent increase.

The percentages are not quite as large as the percentage increases for the four-city sample of the June review, but statistical reliability has increased considerably, because the sample almost doubled the number of cities and quadrupled the number of deaths included.

As Sprey reviewed the data available, he was astounded at the sampling inadequacy of EPA's RadNet, all that the United States has available to monitor the exposure and health risks of large masses of people during a nuclear accident - most importantly during a domestic power plant accident where far more Americans would be at risk than from Fukushima. 

Radiation does not disperse according to any model. Plumes move unpredictably. Thus, the only way to monitor is to have a network which is geographically dense enough, and to sample often enough that it doesn't miss a lot of plume touchdowns. And the sampling frequency needs to be adequate for each of the ways in which the public could be exposed to harmful radiation: through drinking water, milk, rain, and airborne particles. 

As stated at the outset, EPA's RadNet is hopelessly inadequate. For an example, Sprey looked up what the RadNet database had collected for the decade 2001 to 2010 in the most populous state in the union, California.

Air: first, consider airborne isotope results across 10 years for the entire state of California, measuring six isotopes of concern for public health: iodine-131 and five others (in EPA lingo, these are called air filter samples). Across the entire decade, there were only 11 readings, all of them conducted on one day, December 31, 2009 - and only one sample for each of 11 cities on that day. 

Milk: in a decade, EPA took only six readings for all of California, one in Los Angeles, and five samples in San Francisco.

Rain: EPA measured only gross gamma radiation and a short list of isotopes, which doesn't include iodine-131 or strontium-89, both of prime interest for public health after a nuclear power plant accident. Over the decade, rain sample readings were taken only once a month, and only at one site in all of California: Berkeley till March 2004, then Richmond from March 2004 to June 2010. After June there are no readings, because either EPA failed to update the database or lost interest. 

   Drinking water: this is a major health concern because a city's drinking water exposes citizens to radioactive particles washed into the system from across an entire watershed. Only three cities received any drinking water readings at all. In Los Angeles, EPA took one isotope reading a year but only for iodine-131, cesium-137 and tritium. Tritium measurements of interest only to detect if a thermonuclear explosion has taken place, are useless, and iodine has an eight-day half-life, so it disappears long before the next one-a-year sample is taken. In Richmond, EPA measured drinking water once a year, but only for seven years of the decade. Berkeley made do with three years. 

   In New York State the situation is just as bad. In all of New York, air filter isotope readings were taken on just one day, December 31, 2009. For drinking water isotopes, EPA measured one sample per year in only three cities: Albany, Niagara Falls, and Syracuse. New York City had no drinking water readings for the entire decade.

For rain, there were monthly readings at two places in New York State: Yaphank and Albany. New York City's rain remained unmonitored. 

For milk: over the decade, three milk samples were measured for Buffalo and two for Syracuse; New York City milk drinkers were left to fend for themselves.

Amid these appalling deficiencies, EPA thumps its chest proudly for its small network of about 125 "near-real time," continuously monitoring stations across the U.S.A. - stations that measure gamma radiation as continuous graphs (at infrequent intervals, these stations also send in air sample filters for the conventional laboratory air-isotope readings discussed above). Typical continuous gamma graphs from these stations provide little or nothing of public health interest, because they consist only of very small perturbations above a steady background level. EPA claims, however, that slightly atypical perturbations can alert EPA scientists that something unusual is happening. Then, by comparing the recorded gamma particle counts in each of ten bands of energy levels, trained technicians are said to get good indications of what radioactive isotope may be the source. 

  The catch? EPA's continuous gamma monitoring database doesn't disclose when scientists have determined that an unusual event has occurred, what isotope was identified, or what action was taken. In other words, EPA's years and years of stored gamma graphs yield nothing of interest to anyone outside EPA, neither public health officials nor the public. CP

 

Pierre Sprey has been a consulting statistician for EPA studies in air and water quality monitoring and related health effects and a principal member of the Pentagon's concept design teams for the F-16 and A-10. He is now running Mapleshade, his record label that sets new standards for sound quality and manufactures pioneering cables, vibration control devices and other upgrades for perfectionist audio systems. 

—————

Technical Addendum

CS Note: I asked Pierre Sprey for a technical description of the statistical test used to determine the significance of his results.  For the statistically inclined, attached below is Pierre’s description of the Mann-Whitney U test.  Used properly, it is an extremely powerful non-parametric or distribution free test [a good textbook explaining the power and use of these kinds of statistical tests is James Bradley's classic Distribution-Free Statistical Tests ]:

“The appropriate  distribution-free test is the Mann-Whitney U test for comparing the medians of two different samples (the samples can be of different size and don't even have to have the same underlying distribution). It tests the hypothesis that the median week's death count for the 19 cities during the 10 weeks after meltdown is to the median week for the 10 weeks before (or, alternatively, the same 10 weeks one year earlier). The alternate hypothesis is that the "after" sample is greater.

The test works by rank ordering all 20 weeks taken together, then looking at T, the sum of the rank positions only in the "after" sample of weeks. From this you calculate U as follows:

 U = n₁ n₂ + {n₁ (n₁ + 1)/2} – T , where n₁ and n₂ are the sizes of the first and second samples respectively.

In this case, the two sample sizes to be compared are equal (i.e., 10). The distribution of U is known (as long as you know the two sample sizes) so you can look it up in a table of the U-statistic to get the significance level. The reason the distribution of ranks (properly normalized) is known and invariant is because ranks are a distribution-free measure. Think of it this way: the chance of the second sample value you draw having the 5th largest rank doesn't in any way depend on the distribution of the actual sample value itself.”

How the GOP Became a Death Cult

My good friend Werther provides some high octane fuel to get you through the day.

Zombies on the March

How the GOP Became a Death Cult

By Werther*

Electric Politics, 18 July 2011

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2011/07/zombies_on_the_march.html

Does anyone still remember the GOP of the chowder and marching society, Jell-O salads, Buicks, and cloth coats? Is it conceivable that a Republican could have written the following? —

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.

But the Republican Party of 2011 is not your grandfather's GOP, not by a long shot. To be sure, the party always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King! Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well)! Paul Broun! Patrick McHenry! Virginia Foxx! Louie Gohmert! The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

The Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets (the rest of their platform is essentially window dressing):

1. They solely and exclusively care about their rich contributors, and have built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash, intended to con the booboisie. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family (net worth: $86 billion) or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses.

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging war, they can never match GOP stalwarts such John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia — a nuclear-armed state — during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? — "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts" who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. If we are to believe Eric Cantor, a majority of House Republicans will not vote to raise the debt ceiling; yet these are the same people who just passed a defense appropriations bill that increases spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

3. Gimme that old time religion. Pandering to religious nuts is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the Religious Right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did this toxic stew of beliefs come completely to displace Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is our view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of empiricism in America) is the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes — at least in the minds of followers — all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long-espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some downscale whites vociferously defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter — God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass — and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely-inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an immanent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist, and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there is no debt ceiling problem is Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? — we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

But while the rank and file of the faithful believe, deludedly, in whatever nonsense they believe, their tactical allies and paymasters may be playing a more cynical game. Behind a lot of crazy movements in history there were rational actors who made money off them (Krupp and I.G. Farben vis-à-vis the Nazis, etc.). We may be wrong to blithely assume the "business community" is unanimously supporting an increase in the debt ceiling. There could be vultures who are pushing a default so they can buy up the pieces at a fire-sale price. What else could explain all the money the Koch brothers are pumping into Michele Bachmann's campaign?

The sleep of reason breeds monsters.
----------* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

Posted by Werther on July 18, 2011 4:34 PM

Obama's Game: Inflating Expectations but No Follow Thru

President Obama is in trouble at home and around the world.  The common denominator in his problems is his failure to follow through on the expectations (promises of change) he recklessly excited.  The threat of an expectations/reality mismatch unravelling his presidency was always implicit in his election strategy (see my last paragraph of "How Obama Won.").  Today the effects of this mismatch are coming home roost, as can be seen in the mounting alienation of his domestic political base in the United States by continuing the Clinton/Bush neoliberal politicies.  But, those effects are also coming home to roost grand strategically, as can be seen his plummeting popularity abroad, particularly in the Arab World, as shown in the attached survey by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation, where he has done nothing to change the Three Pillars of Middle East Policy. 

ARAB ATTITUDES, 2011

Conducted by Zogby International, Analysis by James Zogby

Arab American Institute Foundation

The full report can be downloaded from this link:

http://aai.3cdn.net/5d2b8344e3b3b7ef19_xkm6ba4r9.pdf

Executive Summary   

• After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia).
• The continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and U.S. interference in the Arab world are held to be the greatest obstacles to peace and stability in the Middle East.
• While many Arabs were hopeful that the election of Barack Obama would improve U.S.-Arab relations, that hope has evaporated. Today, President Obama's favorable ratings across the Arab World are 10% or less.
• Obama's performance ratings are lowest on the two issues to which he has devoted the most energy: Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.
• The U.S. role in establishing a no-fly zone over Libya receives a positive rating only in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but, as an issue, it is the lowest priority.
• The killing of bin Laden only worsened attitudes toward the U.S.
• A plurality says it is too early to tell whether the Arab Spring will have a positive impact on the region. In Egypt, the mood is mixed. Only in the Gulf States are optimism and satisfaction levels high.

Why the Big Green Spending Machine Keeps Spending

Perpetual Motion

Why the War Machine Keeps on Running

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 5 July 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney07052011.html

Villefranche, France.

The United States has always meddled in other people's affairs. For those readers who think this statement is an exaggeration, I urge them to peruse the chronology of interventions compiled by the Congressional Research Service. This historical predilection for meddling, however, grew enormously in depth and breadth during the Cold War, and to make matters worse, it is now clear that it exploded after the end of the Cold War.

The Bush-Obama perpetual war on terror is now the longest and second most expensive war in US history, exceeded only in cost by WWII, even if one removes the effects of inflation from the comparison. And this war comes on top of the incessant warmongering during the 1990s, including the bombing of air defense sites in Iraq, the drive by shootings with cruise missiles in the Sudan and Afghanistan, and the bombing in Bosnia and Kosovo during the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession. Anyone who opposes the meddling and warmongering is labeled an isolationist by the defenders of the status quo, like Senators McCain, Graham, and Lieberman. But this is absurd name calling, as Sheldon Richmand cogently explains in this essay. This absurdity of the isolationist label has a long lineage dating back to the misrepresentations by so-called 'internationalists -- ironically,by mostly liberal democrats -- of the foreign policy views of Senator Robert A. Taft in the 1940s and 1950s.(here)

Today, the United States is locked in a throes of perpetual war, and our politics are dominated by its political handmaiden, perpetual fear. If you doubt this, just think about the recent expansion of drone assaults to Libya and Somalia or your next invasive pat down in an airport or the continuation of the onerous Patriot Act. Some critics believe perpetual war is driven primarily by the lust for empire. No doubt, empire lusting is a factor, but for the reasons I explained in The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, I believe perpetual war is primarily the issue of a deadly mutation of domestic politics, particularly the imperative to prop up a sclerotic Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) -- a political-economic faction that lost its raison d'être when the Cold War ended, and now needs the perpetual threat of war, to pump money through it, if it is to survive and flourish on its own terms, at the expense of others.

The distorting powers of domestic political faction (described elegantly by James Madison in Federalist Paper #10) and executive warmongering were the two great fears of the Framers of the Constitution. The Constitution's system of checks and balances was designed around the idea of preventing the rise of an all-powerful domestic faction and curbing the power of the executive to unilaterally declare war. The emergence of the Cold War, especially with Truman's signing NSC-68 in August 1950, which established the political template for equating military strategy to arms production and economic policy to Military Keynesianisim, institutionalized the MICC as a permanent player in the US political economy.

It is clear the Framers of the Constitution would have considered the MICC to be the most dangerous of all factions, because the MICC has seamlessly synthesized both of their fears: It is an all-powerful domestic faction whose self interest is to promote war or the perpetual threat of war.

Why do I use the modifier "all powerful"?

One need only to consider the conditions surrounding the current paralysis in our government to sense the MICC's ubiquitous power: Today, what's left of our constitutional system cannot muster the political will to stop the ongoing succession of wars, despite polls suggesting a majority of Americans want these wars to stop. Nor will Congress make a significant reduction in the defense budget, even though it is at a post-WWII high, there is no superpower threat to justify this level of expenditure, only a small part of the defense budget is funding the ongoing wars, and there is now a political majority in favor of cutting federal spending to reduce the deficit. Moreover, the President and Congress cannot or will not stop either the war or the defense spending binge despite the facts that (1) there is widespread knowledge of horrendous waste and excessive profiteering in the defense budget; (2) it is a well established fact that a dollar of defense spending creates fewer jobs than just about any other kind of spending, yet job creation is the central need of a stagnating American economy poised on the cusp of a double dip recession; (3) the fact that the members of Defense Department hold the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution in contempt, because they can not and will not account for how they spend the money Congress appropriates for it -- a refusal that occurs despite the fact that every member of the Defense Department has taken a sacred oath to uphold and defend the Constitution; and (4) the members of Congress either refuse or are afraid to exercise their duty to enforce that accountability under the powers assigned to it under Article 1 of the Constitution.

And why is the government paralyzed?

The political system is paralyzed for the simple reason that the gamesters in the MICC have deliberately paralyzed it by playing the defense power games which I have explained here and here. On the other hand, the iron triangle of a large standing military, an outsized industrial base of defense contractors, and their network of wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress is less of a simple conspiracy than an emergent complex adaptive system that self organizes its order by processing the flow of money through itself and expels disorder -- taking the form of paralyzing those trying to control it -- into its environment. The MICC in its current form (i.e., a large standing military, a large contractor base, and its widespread congressional patronage network) cannot survive without war or the threat of war to lubricate the continuing money flow it requires like a body requires food for energy. The entire structure in its current form cannot survive or reform itself for the simple reason its defense contractor wing knows full well it cannot convert to the production of commercially viable products at competitive prices. So without a paralysis of the larger governing system system, the MICC could not protect and add to the money flowing through it, and without that continuing money flow, the whole self-organizing edifice of the MICC -- a large standing military, a huge contractor base, and hundreds of wholly owned legislators to dutifully shovel money to their districts -- would collapse into chaos, which some believe would bring down the US economy, which brings us full circle to the political entropy flowing out of the military Keynesianism that has grown and prospered since 1950, when President Truman signed NSC-68.

NSC-68 portrayed itself as a strategic blueprint for a long term confrontation with the Soviet Union. But it was first and foremost a plan for a huge weapons development and production program, and while its authors, led by arch cold warrior Paul Nitze, claimed to have compared the military and economic capabilities to the Soviet Union to the United States, NSC 68 rested on the intellectual bedrock of military Keynsianism.

In fact, language of NSC-68 asserted that increases in Pentagon spending would "increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes," In effect, the authors of NSC-68, generalized the peculiar experience of WWII, by making an unconstrained claim that the defense build up would create so much economic stimulus that it would pay for itself -- in effect, promising a free lunch.

NSC 68 was more a marketing document than a strategy; it did not even contain any specific cost estimates or economic analysis to justify its claim of a free lunch. But by equating strategy to a weapons buildup, NSC 68 established the template for strategic planning that transformed George Kennan's political theory of containment into a military strategy grounded on weapons R&D and production.  Such an approach to "strategy" was realistic in one sense: it fit the domestic economic needs of the defense-dependent manufacturers, like the aircraft companies who needed federal subsidies to survive, as a hand fits a glove.

While Truman did not reject NSC-68, he sat on it. Then, on June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and gave Truman the opportunity to approve NSC-68, and the MICC was off to the races.

-----------------

Cross-posted from Counterpunch.

Errata: The attached essay is slightly different from the one published in Counterpunch. It contains a few minor editorial changes. More importantly, the second reference to George Kennan in the penultimate paragraph was incorrect and has been deleted.  A change that has no effect on the argument.  Finally, urls for supporting information are included. CS.

The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion

Cross posted from Counterpunch

June 22, 2011

From Serbia to Libya

The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney06222011.html

Vieux Port, St Raphael, France

At the end of May the British press was filled with stories headlined "Gaddafi to be told to stand down or face Apache attack." As of this writing, the Apaches have attacked, but Gaddafi has not stood down.

The Apache threat is a case study in the sterile but financially lucrative marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes by precision guided weapons. What passes for a war strategy in Libya is now a comic opera starring NATO as an understrength, self-referencing techno bully, who acts as if he is now so fearsome that he does not even need a carrot to go with his stick.

In effect, the British press said NATO forces were telegraphing their punch. NATO was about to deploy eight attack helicopters, four British Apaches and four French Tigers, armed with Hellfire precision-guided missiles, like those fired from US Predator drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya. The Hellfires were to be targeted against Qaddafi's forces besieging the Libyan city of Misrata in a desperate hope that that Qaddafi's forces would crumble or withdraw their support from him.

The psychology described in these reports was not an aberration; it reflects a techno-dependency that comes straight out of the US playbook. In fact, the US version of technological supremacy eliminates the need for cleverness in a military strategist. The mental labors of a Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Grant, or a Manstein are no longer needed, because they can be displaced by silver bullets spit out by machines. All that is needed in a 'strategist' is the ability to construct coarse threats, even when, as in the case of Libya, the bullies making those threats are manifestly out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.

This kind of primitive thinking proves again the extent to which NATO has bought into the flawed US ideology that its technological advantage gives it the ability to coerce all opponents into doing their bidding, even though NATO's European forces can not afford to waste money on a scale remotely approaching that of the US. You would think a European planner would understand this economic limitation, if not the fallacy of ideology itself. After all, the European planners in NATO have seen this nonsense before -- in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The central idea in the compound theory of precision-guided coercion is a marriage of the military theory of techno-war, especially the use of high tech surveillance systems and precision-guided weapons, to the political theory of coercive diplomacy. This marriage is more a product of the Pentagon's advocates of techno-war than the go-along bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom. The Pentagonians sold the succession of Presidents after 1990 on the idea of combining the cold-war inspired theory of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) with post-cold war foreign policies. The RMA (not to mention the Apache attack helicopter) was originally conceived for fighting the tank-heavy forces of the Warsaw Pact on the North German plain, although the roots of using precision guided weapons and surgical strikes can be traced back to the disgraced theory of gradual escalation in Vietnam and the theory of daylight precision bombing in WWII.

Its contemporary reincarnation was spearheaded by William Perry over a twenty year period between the mid 70s and mid 90s. Perry, a quintessential military-industrial operator, equally at home in the Pentagon, the boardroom, or in the lecture halls at Stanford University, got the ball rolling during the height of the Cold War when he was Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the late 1970s during the Carter Administration, and then he sealed it into the post-cold war mindset when he was Deputy Secretary and Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. The Reaganauts merely followed his script during the interregnum in the 1980s by blindly pouring money into high-cost programs he worked so hard to start during the 1970s.

In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact evaporated, the threat of a peace dividend terrified the Pentagon, the contractors, and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress. Perry helped save the day by twisting old cold-war ideas into their contemporary form by combining the military theory of precision strikes to the political theory of coercive diplomacy that had become so attractive to the self-styled foreign policy elite housed in think tanks and academia, awaiting their calls to government service. Most of these 'elites' are trained in political science (itself an oxymoron), have little or no military experience, are technological illiterates, and lust after the policy jobs in the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom -- in short, they are perfect consumers of the fools gold produced by the technically savvy alchemists of the MICC, like Perry and his ilk.

Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment (sticks that would sometimes be accompanied by carrots, but not necessarily) will ineluctably persuade an adversary to act in a way that we would deem acceptable. There is, for example, no carrot in the case of Qaddafi, where Nato is trying to coerce him into leaving office, so NATO can send him to the dock in the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Some choice! In theory, the precision guidance technologies give the military a capability to carefully calibrate the coercion by surgically striking selected targets with so-called precision-guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage. Hi-tech surveillance systems would enable target identification and selection and then monitor the effects of the surgical strikes -- thus reducing strategy to a cybernetic negative feedback control system, a conception not unlike
that of a common household thermostat.

This marriage of primitive pop psychology with the simplistic promises of hi-tech weapons makes war look easy, safe, and cheap -- and therefore easy to sell to Presidents with little or no military experience but who are under political pressure to do something 'decisive.' These benefits quickly became evident in the United States' increasing addiction to pointless drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs in the 1990s -- e.g., bombing a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, or destroying an Al Qaeda obstacle course in Afghanistan, not to mention the endless attacks on Iraq's air defense sites in the 1990s. This mode of thinking is now clearly evident in NATO's operations against Qaddafi in Libya.

The military dimension of this theory was eagerly adopted by the US foreign policy elite during the 1980s and 1990s, because it mechanized their simplistic theories of coercion by giving them a tool to play their game. Madeline Albright, in particular, as Clinton's Secretary of State, became addicted to coercive diplomacy in the Balkans, backed up by tit-for-tat surgical strikes. According to General Colin Powell's memoirs, she once almost gave him an aneurism by demanding, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Albright and Perry got their first chance to strut their stuff in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in September 1995. While they claimed it was a stunning success, and notwithstanding the uncritical acceptance of these claims by the mainstream media, the results were ambiguous, to put it charitably.

Some might argue I am being unfair. Surely, the damage done in 11 days by the 708 guided weapons striking 48 target complexes forced Slobodan Miloševic to the bargaining table at Dayton. Did that not prove, to paraphrase Richard Holbrooke's remarks to the annual convention of the Air Force Association in 1996, that more bombing leads to better diplomacy?

That argument, however, ignores the decisive effects of Operation Storm, the August 1995 Croatian ground offensive that cleansed the Krajina of more than 200,000 Serbs and changed the situation on the ground in Bosnia by cutting the Bosnian Serb supply lines. It also fails to consider that all the belligerents were exhausted and needed a rest. Nevertheless, the lesson the marriage partners wanted to learn, namely that a weak-willed Miloševic would respond predictably to precision-guided coercion, did have one effect: It set the stage for the gross miscalculation at the so-called Rambouillet peace conference.

This can be seen in an intelligence analysis of Miloševic's psychology in late 1998 and early 1999. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 1998 (quoted in the Washington Post of April 8,1999) said, "Miloševic is susceptible to outside pressure. He will eventually accept a number of outcomes [in Kosovo], from autonomy to provisional status with final resolution to be determined, as long as he remains the undisputed leader in Belgrade." An interagency report coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1999 (reported in the April 18, 1999 New York Times) went even further, saying "After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers [Miloševic] will quickly sue for peace."

The Rambouillet "Accord" aimed to give Miloševic a chance to defend his honor. That NATO's demands were unacceptable should be no surprise. Like the infamous Austro-Hungarian diktat to Serbia in 1914, they were blatant infringements on Serbia's national sovereignty. The Accord's military implementation annex (Appendix B) proposed to give NATO forces "free and unimpeded access throughout the FRY" [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo], immunity from "arrest, investigation or detention," and authorized NATO to "detain" Serbian individuals and turn them over to unspecified "appropriate authorities."

The plan backfired. Miloševic did not react predictably like a mechanical thermostat, but chose instead to escalate rapidly by unleashing his forces in Kosovo -- whereupon the "carefully calibrated" limited bombing campaign aimed at changing one man's behavior exploded into a general war against the Serbian people. NATO had expanded the target list to include the Serbian power grid and civilian infrastructure, the war settled into a grinding siege of attrition, and planners worried about running out of cruise missiles. The conduct of the bombing campaign was shaped more by the speed with which targets got through the approval cycle than by any strategy linking a particular target's destruction to a desired tactical or strategic effect. As a result, NATO bombers effectively destroyed the economic infrastructure of a tiny nation with an economy smaller than that of Fairfax County, Virginia.

U.S. military planners had predicted that a "precision" bombing campaign would force the Serbs to capitulate in only two to three days, but the air campaign ground on for seventy-nine days. At war's end, U.S. forces had flown only 15 per cent as many strike sorties as in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, but had expended 72 per cent as many precision-guided munitions and 94 per cent as many cruise missiles.

When it was over, NATO intelligence determined that only minute quantities of Serbian tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and trucks—all high-priority targets—were destroyed, in part because the Serbs fooled our complex surveillance and precision guidance technologies with simple decoys. There are even reports that they used cheap microwave ovens as decoys to attract our enormously expensive radar homing missiles. Serbian troops marched out of Kosovo in good order, their fighting spirit intact, displaying clean equipment and crisp uniforms, and in larger numbers than planners said were in Kosovo to begin with. Moreover, the terms of Serb "surrender," which the undefeated Serb military regarded as a sellout by Serbian president Miloševic, were the same as those the Serbs agreed to at the Rambouillet Conference, before U.S. negotiators led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright inserted a poison pill (in the form of the
military annex mentioned above) to queer the deal.

Of course, the weapons makers love the marriage of high-cost precision weapons to coercive diplomacy, because it generates an astronomical need for a never ending flow of money into their financial coffers with orders for new weapons, even when the quantity of those weapons decreases. Congressmen love it because the money and patronage continues to flow to their districts. So, the economic result is what we in the Pentagon used to call a self-licking ice cream cone. And the cone has become particularly tasty in the age of perpetual small wars we have created after the Cold War ended in 1991. [Readers interested in the domestic causes of this perpetual war are referred to my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War.]

Will precision guided coercion get lucky and eventually work for NATO in its pissant operation in Libya?

Perhaps. After all, Qaddafi's forces are tiny, ill equipped and poorly trained. They can not possibly be compared in terms of effectiveness to the Serb Army in the 1990s. On the other hand, England and France cannot afford to waste money on the scale of the US. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the theory will work in Libya: it did not and has not worked in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the decapitations of Saddam and Osama were done the old fashioned way via lots of detective work coupled with by activities that looked more like those of a police SWAT team than a military combat operation. In any case, it is not at all clear that these decapitations are silver bullets that achieve anything beyond soothing our pride. The Pentagon and its wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress certainly do not want these decapitations to end the perpetual war. Indeed, Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is madly trying to legislate the
idea that the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda has mutated and the long war will continue for the foreseeable future.

If the marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes succeeds in Libya, its proponents will trumpet it as a canonical proof of their theory. If it fails again like it did in Kosovo, it won't matter. There will be no divorce in the US, and the union will live on and grow richer. The high-cost of precision guided coercion may bankrupt England and France and reduce the foreign market for US weapons, but that is a small price to pay. It will not affect the money flowing into the coffers of the US Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex. That is because new, more-expensive weapons are always on the drawing board to discount any failures in the present weapons. In this way, the promise of new technology repeatedly washes the inconvenient truth of history from what is left of the critical faculties of the mind.

No one will question what is a patently silly way of thinking, because, as the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd used to say, 'the real strategy is don't interrupt the money flow, add to it' -- and that always works like a charm in Versailles on the Potomac, if not Brussels.

Franklin "Chuck" Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Obama and Palestine

Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of the Netanyahu - Obama spectacle of late May. The Author, William R. Polk, has kindly granted me permission to distribute it.

Polk is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Middle East as well as the general politics of insurrection.  He was the  member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East during the Kennedy Administration.  Upon leaving government service, he became Professor of History and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.  He was called back to the White House during the 1967 Arab-Israel war to write a peace treaty and still later, at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meyer, he negotiated the Suez Canal ceasefire with the Egyptian government. His short book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq is one of the very best books on the subject of guerrilla warfare and insurrection that  I have ever read.

Polk’s essay is no sound byte, and it should be studied carefully.  Essentially, he addresses the question What will it take to get Obama to move decisively on the Arab-Israeli issue? 

He takes the reader on a wide ranging, deeply informed, historical journey.  He does not end on an optimistic note, but with a suggestive comparison of imperatives implicit in the situation now facing President  Obama to those facing President Charles De Gaulle in the 1950s and early 1960s with regard to the crisis in Algeria.  To be sure there are many differences, but it is an interesting insight, if not carried too far.  Polk clearly recognizes this limitation and does not read too much into it ... his point is limited to the political imperatives on decision makers to change a policy involving occupation that is clearly not in a nation’s interest.

Whereas De Gaulle faced decisive pressure to act, Polk concludes that Obama does not yet face the pressures needed for decisive action, even though a course correction is definitely in US interests.  He ends by saying it will take some kind of catastrophic event to jar things loose.

He is probably right, but one lesson 9-11 ought to have taught us is that while catastrophic events do trigger policy changes, those changes do not always place a nation on a salutary pathway into the future.

Chuck Spinney

Bandol, France

Obama and Palestine

What will make Obama willing to move on the issue? 

William R. Polk

May 29, 2011

No international problem of modern times has been more studied, commented upon and disputed than the conflict between the Zionist movement and its Israeli successors, on the one hand, and on the other, the Palestinian Muslim and Christian people.  The conflict is embedded in deep historical memories, religious beliefs and great power struggles in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.  Hardly any contemporary issue anywhere in the world is not to some degree affected by it. 

Can there be anything new to be said or done about it?    If ever there was an issue that  has played out the sequence of events predicted from the beginning, it is this one.   The British statesman, Lord Curzon put it succinctly in Biblical terms when the creation of a Jewish Home was first discussed in the British Cabinet during the First World War.  In response to the hope of one of his colleagues that Britain’s plan would be welcomed by the inhabitants, he retorted dryly that he doubted that they  would be content to be merely “hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the incoming Jewish settlers.

Britain did not credit Curzon’s dictum. Its wartime strategic needs overcame all other concerns.  Indeed, As Lord Balfour, the author of the founding document of what became Israel, the Balfour Declaration, wrote secretly to the Cabinet, “In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers  [that is, Britain itself] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in letter, they have not always intended to violate."

And, in pursuit of their own objectives,  increasing numbers of the Jewish people adopted their own myth.  Driven by vicious anti-Semitism, first from Russia and then from other European countries, they saw the danger of extinction nearly realized in Nazi Germany.  They did not consider rights of the native Palestinians any more than incoming American settlers had earlier considered those of the Native Americans.  Indeed, one of the early fathers of Zionism, Israel Zangwill, coined a description of the Palestine issue that has permeated Zionism and Jewish thought ever since: Palestine was, he said, "The land without people for the people without land."   Echoing that assessment more recently, Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said  there weren’t any Palestinians except for the Jews. If they existed at all, Palestinians were regarded as simply not comparable human beings.

But the three quarters of a million natives did not, of course, accept this definition of their status.  Most were settled villagers whose lives, culture and social organization were rooted in the land.  Their identification with land was almost mystical.  The terrace walls of one’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather, the fields in which one played as a child and in which one’s ancestors were buried, the localities where saints have been venerated and besought, all these gave rise to emotions virtually impossible for Western urban (and virtually nomadic) man to fathom.  Before their diaspora, Palestinian villagers built their genealogies physically into the layout of their neighborhoods so that placement of dwellings corresponded to family trees.  Consequently, they had not only the sort of feeling most Americans have about our homes, temporary as they are to many of us, but a more intense, more permanent, more “living” sense of relationship to the earth.  Even in the cities, people recreated their villages as autonomous neighborhoods.  Over the past sixty years, I have talked with scores of individuals who have described for me rooms, houses,  gardens, orchards, streets as vividly as though they were seeing them at that moment.  And, in retrospect and in the mind's eye of the refugees, these scenes have taken on a melancholy longing that only loss can bring.  The idea that these people did not love their land or were wandering gypsies for whom any place is as good as another is not only nonsense, but is, itself, since the Palestinians are Semites,  an ugly variety of anti-Semitism.

 For the Palestinians, from the beginning and with increasing intensity, the incoming Europeans were alien colonists intent on taking their land and destroying their society.   They were right.  Already in 1937, David Ben Gurion wrote, "we must expel the Arabs and take their places.”  His voice was not alone.  Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of “muscular Zionism” and the ideological mentor of  Israeli prime ministers  Begin, Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu, told the 1936 British Royal Commission, which was trying to find a way to satisfy both Jews and Arabs, that the Zionists would never be satisfied with anything less than all of Palestine -- "We cannot.  We never can.  Should we swear to you we would be satisfied, it would be a lie."  

                  Thus, conflict was inevitable from the beginning.  The tragic story of a century of increasing danger, conflict and misery is well known.  There are not and probably never were any obscurities.  But what may be different now is that almost everyone agrees that the problem must somehow be solved.   Indeed, even that  sense of urgency is not new:  the British, having been instrumental in creating the conflict, staked out already in 1936 what has always seemed to outsiders to be the essential element in a solution:  dividing the land between the Jews and Palestinians.  To the British,  division seemed as sensible as the traditional saying, “half a loaf is better than no bread, ”  but to both the Arabs and the Jews, partition seemed subversion of their nationhood.  Undeterred, the British set up one commission after another to figure out how to accomplish it.

The British efforts were picked up after the Second World War by the newly established United Nations.  But nothing anyone thought up made any sense:  no matter how the little land was carved up, there were just too many Palestinian natives and too few Jewish immigrants.   The best effort proposed a Palestine with an Arab population of 725,000 and a Jewish population of 10,000 while the Jewish state would have 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Arabs.  Jerusalem was to be internationalized and would contain 100,000 Jews and 105,000 Arabs.  The Jewish state, which had all the best land, was estimated to have revenues about three times that of the Arab state, but with a higher birth rate, the Palestinian population would soon have been a majority even in the Jewish state.

That dilemma was solved by the expulsion of virtually all of the Palestinians in the 1948-1949 war. 

Expulsion made Israel possible, but it did not create peace. So, one “solution” after another has been  brought forward by American statesmen and their appointees.  Some of their plans  can be regards as only bizarre, even jejune, but they are worth remembering to show how desperate has been the search for a solution and to get a measure of what President Obama would face if  today he tried to reach a solution.  

Almost everything has been proposed – dividing the waters of the River Jordan (so the states would not clash over that vital resource, the “Johnston plan”), aid programs to create a labor shortage (so the refugees could be absorbed elsewhere, the  “Lilenthal Plan”), state-to-state negotiations (so as to by-pass the Palestinians, the Carter-Begin-Sadat “Camp David Negotiation”), honoring the right of return while making it unattractive (the “Johnson plan”).  My favorite among the fantasies was the brainchild of that dour, normally practical and certainly unemotional Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.  He decided that since the Arabs and Israelis did not want to step on one another’s territory but needed to go from the various parts of their own, the frontiers should be redrawn in the form of intersecting triangles meeting at a point – over which, presumably,  each could jump, taking care not to bumb into one another!

Meanwhile, paying no attention to these flights of fancy, the Israelis steadily took over the land and today have incorporated about 78% of the former British mandate.  Additionally, they have effective control, with walls, fortresses, check points, garrisons and settlements over much of what the original UN decision designated as part of the Palestinian state.  While the Israeli settlement policy is a direct violation of international law and is in defiance of a number of United Nations resolutions, Israel has created not only a physical presence – with about 650,000 settlers living on the West Bank -- but also a political position  that would take great courage to dismantle. 

 Now, President Barack Obama has waded into the fray.  So what is he trying to do and how serious is his effort?

We cannot read his mind, but what we know is that he has made a series of statements.  As some of his critics have said, Obama will talk, even talk bravely as well as eloquently,  but he will not act.   Writing in The New York Review of Books this month, David Bromwich observed that throughout his public career, Obama “has a way of retreating into vagueness at just the point where clarity matters most…and has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy.”  Others believe his inaction is politically shrewd:  to win the next election he needs the votes and money of American supporters of the current Israeli government and its powerful lobby, AIPAC.    And then there is the prospective charge of anti-Semitism.

American academics, journalists and politicians today fear the charge of anti-Semitism as acutely as they used to fear the charge of pro-Communism.

Not fearing that charge,  Israelis evidently are more able to discuss America’s relationship to Israel than are Americans.  Reacting to the  Congress’  fawning and uncritical response to Binjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week,   the prominent Israeli statesman, former Knesset member and peace advocate, Uri Avnery,  was revolted by the sight of  “members of the highest legislative bodies of the world’s only superpower, flying up and down like so many yo-yos, applauding wildly, every few minutes or seconds, the most outrageous lies and distortions of Binjamin Netanyahu...The most distressing part of it was that there was not a single lawmaker – Republican or Democrat – who dared to resist.”  The blogger Mitchell Plitnick, chided that Congress, thoroughly beholden to AIPAC and completely indifferent to the best interest of not only the Palestinians but also Israel and their own  country, cheered the home team as it defeated the President of the United States…The home team, in this case, was Netanyahu.”   And, on the day after the speech, Ben Caspit of the Israeli newspaper Maariv, wrote that “Those who are scared of peace yesterday got their wish.  Those who are scared of war will be a lot more scared today.’

The domestic American political reality, of which Obama is obviously aware, is that Israel is above political discussion.  So, regardless of his obvious dislike of Netanyahu and his apparent belief that Israeli policies are not only wrong but dangerous to America,  he promised that massive American economic and military aid – regardless of the state of the American economy – will not only be continued but will be increased.  So, it appears to me almost certain that Obama will not grasp the Palestine nettle. 

Obviously,  that is what Netanyahu also believes.  So the Israeli response, from an advance copy of Obama's speech, was for Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak to authorize the building of still more settlement housing.  In a sense, this was a gratuitous act.  Netanyahu/Barak did not need to snub or insult Obama.  But, perhaps they felt that they needed to reaffirm the now traditional Israeli strategy -- their predecessors  first explained it  to me in the 1960s -- of building  "facts on the ground."  They have now done such a complete job of it that they want Obama to believe, and probably believe themselves, that no Israeli government can  change the geography of settlement on the West Bank because Israel's settler population won't let it.  

So, what will happen?

To move toward a prediction, I find it suggestive to compare Obama’s position on Palestine today with French President Charles De Gaulle’s position on Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s.  While there are obvious differences, there are similarities that cast light on possible policies today, and perhaps tomorrow.

                                                     

What is similar, of course, is that both men recognized that a situation had arisen that was dangerous to their countries.  Obama has been told even by such different and opposing advisers as Secretary Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus that the Palestine problem is the major cause of the terrorist threat to America.   And therefore, that the Israeli refusal to move toward compromise peace settlement is against American national interests.  Yet, the President is unwilling to risk moving to enforce a solution.   So far, at least, he can afford inaction.

In terms of personality, Obama is no De Gaulle, but De Gaulle was not a determined leader until France came to the brink of civil war and to the edge of losing its civic culture.    He saw that his regime risked being over thrown and perhaps himself be murdered  if he did not act.    Remember that  Paris was then ringed by anti-aircraft cannon and De Gaulle feared an army putsch.  So he went secretly off to Germany to assure himself of the army and the loyalty of the Paratroop leader General Jacques Massu before he moved.  Then, once he made up his mind to get out and was sure of his military base, he sent the army --  with tanks, artillery and bombers -- into "European" Algiers to crush the opposition to his decision.

Simply put, the situation had become so grave that De Gaulle was forced to assert French national interest.  Could any aspect of  Israeli-American relations reach such a level? 

Apparently not, because it did not when in 1967 the Israeli Navy and Air Force attacked and tried to sink an American naval vessel, hitting it with some 821 cannon shells, thousand pound bombs and napalm shells and firing five torpedoes.  They killed 34 US Naval personnel and wounded 171 others.  If  President Lyndon Johnson did not then feel under severe pressure, it is understandable why President Obama does not feel under pressure from events and policies far less damaging to American security today.

However, he may feel about Netanyahu personally or the Israeli suppression of the Palestinian version of the Arab spring – which closely resembles what he so opposes in Libya and Syria, firing into the ranks of peaceful demonstrators – he reverses President Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum by talking  eloquently but carrying a small stick. 

While I presume Obama believes that America has a compelling national interest in bringing about negotiations, Israel is determined not to heed his warnings.  Indeed, Netanyahu and his Likhudniks have given the settlers -- Israel’s version of De Gaulle’s enemies, the Pieds-noirs  of Algeria – a veto on negotiations.  They have now created an iron wall of "facts on the ground" that they believe Moses himself could not have moved.  Thus, Obama on May 13 accepted the resignation of his negotiator, Senator George Mitchell and apparently does not intend to appoint a successor. 

Viewing these events, Netanyahu  felt strong enough to throw down the gauntlet to Obama, daring him to pick it up – his  timing is perfect, his  supporters are lined up, his critics in America are scattered and unable to reach a mass audience.  It will take, I believe, some really catastrophic event to change the parameters.  A speech will not do it.