Brad Delong hates communism, isn't clear on why

I'm still not posting much these days.  Not that anything is wrong, but recently I've found myself too angry at U.S. policy in the Middle East for it to be healthy for me to concentrate on it.

In the meantime, I've been leaving minor comments on other blogs, and I'm still putting here comments that blog owners decide they don't want their readers to see.

Here's one from Brad DeLong's blog.  DeLong republished a book review from years ago where he criticizes Eric Hobsbawm for not sharing his hatred of communism and writing a book that reflects Hobsbawm's admiration of communism's ideals rather than DeLong's animus.

I admit I don't have a good understanding of Brad DeLong's animosity against communism.

I'd define communism, or the common thread of DeLong's examples of communism, as redistributionist non-democracy.

DeLong makes the empirical observation that redistributionist non-democracies have led to bad outcomes.

The question still remains, what part of the bad outcomes results from flaws of redistributionism, what part results from non-democracy and what part results from the capitalist world's executing a conflict with them?

DeLong seems, but not explicitly, to assign all of the blame for the bad outcomes on redistributionism.

He doesn't assign the all of the blame explicitly because it would be silly to claim that none, none of the problems in Cuba or even North Korea are caused by the US' and its allies' efforts against those countries.

Also the US has paid to overthrow democracies, and has plenty of money to continue to do so.  DeLong seems to leave out of his story that at least part of the non-democratic tendencies of redistributionist governments has been a defensive reaction to the US and the capitalist world's tactic of funding and elevating opposition forces to destabilize their countries.

DeLong clearly thinks "communism" is evil.  But he isn't clear what part of it.  From DeLong we see that communist governments just so happen to have led to bad outcomes, but DeLong does not show that these bad outcomes are ultimately caused by a philosophical defect rather than circumstance.

In fact, what exactly is the philosophical defect, if there is one?

Beyond that, as an American, DeLong greatly benefits from the place the United States has in the hierarchy of nations.  There is something self-interested, and maybe sinister, about his claim that countries that challenge the hierarchy of nations he benefits from are engaging in unmitigated evil.

Hillary Clinton and Juan Cole lying about Egypt

Juan Cole blocks comments that present him as hostile to Egyptian democracy really because there is no argument.  For him it is best to pretend such comments never existed.  It is what I'd do if I supported a colonial relationship between the US and Egypt, but would have to reconcile that with US values that purport to oppose such relationships.  Below is an adaptation of a post that has been blocked.

The establishment press in Egypt, al-Ahram (“The Pyramids”), reported cautiously on the meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi (from the Muslim Brotherhood party).

1. It noted that Clinton affirmed the US desire that the Egyptian military go to its barracks and leave elected civilians in charge.

About point 1- The United States provides Egypt's military with $1.5 billion per year. Beyond that, Egypt's parliament, when it existed was to be denied access to Egypt's military budget, including the US contribution to it.

1a - If Hillary Clinton was not lying about some desire to see the military relinquish political power, did she say that the $1.5 billion that she certified was in the US' interest to provide so that the US could retain leverage over Egyptian policy is at risk? Not publicly.

1b - If the military wants its budget to be secret from the people of Egypt, the US still could directly tell Egyptians and their elected officials of its contribution unilaterally. The US, according to Cole, is claiming to want civilians to be in charge, but won't even tell civilians who is getting the billion dollars a year it is spending for policy leverage.

The discrepancy between how the US acts regarding its payments to Egypt's dictatorship and the asserted US desire to allow elected Egyptians to control Egyptian policy indicates that the claimed desire is just a falsehood. A lie.

6. She said that the current constitutional crisis over the Supreme Administrative Court’s and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’s dismissals of the elected parliament, and Morsi’s attempt to reinstate it, was a matter of internal Egyptian politics in which the US would not interfere.

About point 6 - The US will not interfere?  The US gives one side of this dispute, the side that has never won an election, $1.5 billion per year.  The people of Egypt and their elected officials have no idea where the money is going. That's interference. Why even tell such a transparent lie?

The US just wants a few things from Egypt: Keeping trade flowing through the Red Sea and Suez Canal; the security of Israel; the security of Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf States… (Did I say, ‘the security of Israel?)

Of the items in the list of things the US wants from Egypt, one stands out as particularly difficult to achieve if the government is accountable to the people of Egypt rather than to the Obama administration. US opposition to Egyptian democracy is mostly due to that one item, security for Israel, and less importantly due to an irrational Islamophobia that pervades the US foreign policy community.

I also want to point out that as of today, Clinton has no reason to meet with Morsi about Israel as Egypt's president has no foreign policy making authority.  Instead Egyptians who are on her payroll, like Tantawi and like Mubarak before Tantawi, set that policy as modern colonial subjects of the United States.

***

That comment criticizes the fact that Juan Cole is misleading his readers by affirming the blatant lie that the US is somehow on the sidelines in the dispute between the pro-US dictatorship and the voters of Egypt who in every election, three so far totalling eight rounds, have supported Islamists or ideologically allied coalitions. Of course it will not be posted, but that is very low on the list of Cole's moral deficiencies.

The United States is an evil nation.  Juan Cole, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are evil people, the modern equivalents of Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill.  85 million Egyptian people should not have accountable government because they might jeopardize the desire of fewer than six million Jewish people in Israel to avoid losing their enforced political majority state the way White South Africans did. It is anti-Arab bigotry.  It is anti-Muslim bigotry. It is what the United States stands for, on behalf of Israel.

But since I'm here, I'd like to go over the US' relationship with Egypt since Barack Obama took office.

As historical background, we'll start with Egypt's previous colonial ruler, the British empire, and its plans to grant Egypt "independence" except over areas of policy where it chose to retain control:

When at last the combined forces of the occupying army and the Interior Ministry were able to quell months of strikes and protests, the British were compelled to reconsider their position towards Egypt. The eventual outcome of that process was the unilateral decision in March 1922 to grant Egypt a qualified independence. Although the country would be governed thereafter as a constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan.

Coming to the Obama presidency, we'll recall when Obama was asked directly during his first year in office if he considered Hosni Mubarak a dictator and said he would not call him that because he approved of Mubarak's role in the region, particularly regarding Israel.

Justin Webb: Do you regard President Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler?

President Obama: No, I tend not to use labels for folks. I haven't met him. I've spoken to him on the phone.

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very difficult thing to do in that region.

Joe Biden said the same thing as protesters filled Tahrir Square.

JIM LEHRER: The word -- the word to describe the leadership of Mubarak and Egypt and also in Tunisia before was dictator. Should Mubarak be seen as a dictator?

JOE BIDEN: Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.

And I think that it would be -- I would not refer to him as a dictator.

Then we'll look at a commitment the pro-US dictatorship made to the US press, that it would not allow Egypt's voters to set foreign policy. The New York Times reported the commitment with an approving and reassured tone.

The new majority is likely to increase the difficulty of sustaining the United States’ close military and political partnership with post-Mubarak Egypt, though the military has said it plans to maintain a monopoly over many aspects of foreign affairs.

Next we'll look at Jimmy Carter who met Egypt's dictatorship and afterwards told reporters that the military relinquishing control over all areas of policy would be "excessive".

“ ‘Full civilian control’ is a little excessive, I think,” Mr. Carter said, after describing a meeting he had Tuesday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, leader of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF. “I don’t think the SCAF is going to turn over full responsibility to the civilian government. There are going to be some privileges of the military that would probably be protected.”

Lastly we'll look at Hillary Clinton's certification that US contributions to Egypt's military should continue specifically because those contributions advance US policy interests.

Pursuant to section 7041(a)(1)(C) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2012 (Div. I, Pub. L. 112–74) (‘‘the Act’’), I hereby determine that it is in the national security interest of the United States to waive the requirements of section 7041(a)(1)(B) of the Act with respect to the provision of Foreign Military Financing for Egypt, and I hereby waive this restriction.

So that now, when we see the unelected dictatorship decree that elected officials do not have control over foreign policy we are seeing this pro-US dictatorship keeping a promise it already made to Americans, it is trying to fulfil the role Great Britain hoped to achieve with its nominally independent colony of Egypt a century before, and it is pursuing the policies that Barack Obama applauded Egypt's previous dictatorship for pursuing.

This is the light in which we should see the defense of US commentators such as Juan Cole of the dictatorship's dissolving of the elected parliament. The fact of the matter is that the US, like Juan Cole, ultimately does not want to see Egyptian policy made by the Egyptian people.  They are clumsily if blatantly lying to themselves and to anyone who will listen to them about their position.

If there are bright sides, they are that Egypt, despite the US, may well be making progress toward independence and also that it is becoming easier to see through American lies about the Middle East. But Cole, Clinton and Obama, according to the US' own professed values, should be ashamed and disgusted with themselves.

Syria: A foreign-supported insurgency according to the New York Times

I've written earlier that no sovereign state can accept any of its territory being denied to its security forces.  The US massacre in Waco was an application of that principle. The US government killed the men, women and children there because it would not allow even that compound to be out of reach of government forces.

The New York Times has sourced the CIA admitting what honest observers have understood from the beginning, that foreign sources hostile to Syria's government are arming an insurgency there.  I'll just leave this here so it may be easier to find later.

A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.

Nuances and lies by omission: Juan Cole on Egypt

I don't mean to pick on Juan Cole.  He just illustrates a typical American approach to the Middle East.  He is not worse than average for the US commentary community.  He may well be better than average.

On the other hand, like most Americans, including we now see Barack Hussein Obama, he is bigoted against Islam.  He is adamant that regardless of the expressed decisions, opinions and preferences of the Egyptian people,  Muslims must one way or another be prevented from setting policy in Egypt.

Cole has two agendas when reporting about Egypt.  One is to rationalize his and the US' continued support for the pro-US dictatorship as it directly opposes the principle of democracy.  For this he blames the Muslim Brotherhood for running in elections the dictatorship administered and for petitioning for and accepting positions on the ballots that were given by the dictatorship according to the rules in place at the time. 

Funnily Cole and those who think like him sometimes say democracy is about more than elections.  In the context of a group he supports voiding an election and dismissing the Parliament because he and it did not like the outcome, there is no principle in democracy as important as respecting the outcome of the election. There may be more than that, but without that, there is no democracy.  In justifying this action, Cole opposes democracy.  If there is more to democracy than elections, by breaking the principle of respecting voter outcomes, Cole is rejecting all there is to democracy more than elections as well.

His second agenda is to divert attention away from the US' role in the war currently being waged against Egypt's voters.  He lists the actors in this conflict, and the US is never one.  The US' opposition to democracy contradicts the US' founding values.  It cannot be justified or supported within the American moral system.  Instead the US' role can only be actively ignored.  For example, mentioning or even asking if the US has any impact on the situation will result in comments being blocked or deleted at Cole's website.

Cole's supporters have convinced themselves that Cole is telling a nuanced story, one that entirely leaves out any discussion of the US in favor of mostly ridiculous and certainly unsupportable assertions about the motives of the dictatorship and its opponents. He'll say he has no proof of US influence over the dictatorship.  He presents no proof though, that the military believes the Muslim Brotherhood is supported by the US.  Nobody he quotes ever said that.  He presented without proof his theory that the Brothers would conspire with the military against the people of Egypt.

So anyway Cole has this dual agenda regarding Egypt, to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power regardless of the will of the people of Egypt and to downplay the role the US plays in its client dictatorship withholding power from Egypt's elected representatives if Egypt's voters do not agree with Cole that the Muslim Brothers pose some threat to democracy.  Comments that challenge these agendas will not make it to his page.  But hiding from them will not make them go away.

Following is a comment that Cole immediately blocked, responding to his idea that all sides, the Muslim parties who were sent to Parliament with a majority and the US-supported dictatorship that opposes that majority are equally trying to "steal bases" as in a US baseball game.

Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood tried to stack the committee writing the constitution with its members, then acquiesced when the courts intervened. There is no real penalty for at least trying to put your interest above that of the nation, and the feeling seems to be that you should try, and then back down if there is an uproar. (I think this metaphor of trying to steal bases is better for trying to understand the political situation in Egypt than the idea that it is a game with no rules at all).

And where is the US embassy?  Are we pretending the US suddenly has no influence on what has been a client dictatorship for over three decades?

Now if the elected representatives of the Egyptian people don't determine what proportions there should be in the constitutional assembly, who should? You? On what basis?

The Egyptian military's budget is kept secret from the Egyptian people.  Including the US' contributions to that budget.  Keeping it secret after a supposed transfer of power to civilian leadership is a primary demand of the pro-US military dictatorship.

Why would the Barack Obama administration not disclose to the Egyptian people where these funds that supposedly are given as aid to them are going?

This is not about stealing bases.  One side has shown a willingness to abide by the expressed majority of the Egyptian people, though that side may not have taken Juan Cole's concerns fully into consideration.

The other side, is not willing to abide by the expressed will of the majority of Egyptians.  That is the side supported by the United States, Barack Obama and whose anti-democratic policies are being rationalized by Juan Cole.

Juan Cole, like Barack Obama, you are a colonialist

A quick reaction to Juan Cole's most recent article in support of the pro-US dictatorship's voiding of Egypt's Parliament and its new assertion that it will write the constitution without any input from any elected body. Definitely not something he would publish, but I wrote it nonetheless.

If it is true that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Muhammad Mursi, really has won the election, SCAF will likely craft a constitution reducing the president’s powers. But this step can in the nature of the case only be provisional. Nor would it in and of itself necessarily be such a bad thing for the president’s powers to be reduced somewhat. (Some elected provincial governors and mayors and judges independent of the president and his party would serve Egypt well).

I get no sense from writing like this that we're talking about a pro-US dictatorship dissolving a legitimately elected parliament because it did not like the non-fraudulently reached outcome of the election.

You obviously disagree with the people of Egypt about the amount of influence Muslim parties should have in Egypt's political system. It looks a lot like the Obama administration agrees with you. Not one word from anywhere in the US government that the billion dollars per year that the US inserts into Egypt's military establishment with no civilian oversight and that the Egyptian people are not privy to details of is at risk because of these recent actions.

But the word for the belief that your ideas of what party should rule supersedes the beliefs of the people being ruled is colonialism. Mr. Cole, you are a colonialist.

Good Enough Democracy for Egypt by Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's press statement on Egypt's move to dissolve Egypt's legitimately elected Parliament.

QUESTION: Can we do it the reverse? I’m sorry. Scott and I always do this, get it a little confused. But in any case, thank you, Madam Secretary. I’d like to start out with Egypt, please. What is your reaction to dissolving parliament? Is this a step backwards?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, with regard to Egypt, we are obviously monitoring the situation. We are engaged with Cairo about the implications of today’s court decision. So I won’t comment on the specifics until we know more. But that said, throughout this process, the United States has stood in support of the aspirations of the Egyptian people for a peaceful, credible, and permanent democratic transition. Now ultimately, it is up to the Egyptian people to determine their own future. And we expect that this weekend’s presidential election will be held in an atmosphere that is conducive to it being peaceful, fair, and free. And in keeping with the commitments that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces made to the Egyptian people, we expect to see a full transfer of power to a democratically elected, civilian government. There can be no going back on the democratic transition called for by the Egyptian people. The decisions on specific issues, of course, belong to the Egyptian people and their elected leaders. And they’ve made it clear that they want a president, a parliament, and a constitutional order that will reflect their will and advance their aspirations for political and economic reform. And that is exactly what they deserve to have. Let me also note that we are concerned about recent decrees issued by the SCAF. Even if they are temporary, they appear to expand the power of the military to detain civilians and to roll back civil liberties.

No going back? They are trying to dissolve the elected parliament!  Clinton clearly hopes to see the pro-US dictatorship remain in effective control of Egyptian policy - annulling elections whose results are unfavorable to the US' regional agenda while calling that "a president, a parliament, and a constitutional order that will reflect their will and advance their aspirations for political and economic reform".

The US, Barack Obama, Juan Cole and the Pro-US Dictatorship's Coup in Egypt

Some things about Egypt:

1) This is a coup against the elected government of Egypt. The Islamists did not write the laws or administer the voting process. Nor did they behave fraudulently or illegally when they participated in the electoral process.

What the dictatorship said is that the process they designed and administered went against their rules. They are only saying this because they do not like the outcome and any election ever in the world could be voided on a similar pretext if a deciding party that does not like the outcome is motivated to do so.

We can ignore the pretext. The pro-US dictatorship, that is accountable to Barack Obama, has overturned an election result that Barack Obama did not like.

2) There is absolutely no possibility, given the relationship between the US and Egypt's pro-US dictatorship that the US Embassy did not at least receive advance warning of this coup and it almost certainly offered advanced support for this coup. Between then and now, in the unlikely event support had not been offered before, it certainly has been offered since.

3) The United States can and should publicly take the position that the election was competed in fairly according to the rules in place at the time and the elected parliament legitimately represents the people of Egypt until they lose an election according to the fair rules in place at the time of a future election.

The United States will not do this only because the US has pure contempt for the ideal of democracy in the Middle East if democracy can result in governments that might threaten to force Jewish people to lose their enforced political majority state the way White South Africans lost their enforced political majority state.

4) I have not yet read responses from US commentators such as Juan Cole but what I expect to see is muted disapproval and for them to stretch to present any way possible to blame the Islamists for this. These commentators share Barack Obama's contempt for democracy in the Middle East and his racist and religiously bigotted idea that accountable government for over 80 million Egyptians is less important than an enforced political majority state for for fewer than six million Jewish people.

Barack Obama's puppet dictatorship dissolves Egyptian parliament

I was not long ago asked what Barack Obama would or should do if he, his administration and the United States did not hold the rights of the people of Egypt in contempt for the sake of Israel.

The answer is that the open portion of the United States' influence over Egypt is conducted through more than $1 billion per year in aid that is given to the pro-US military dictatorship.  The people, journalists and elected representatives of Egypt are prevented from see how this money is secretly disbursed.  Barack Obama can and should, right now, commit that any and all US funds allocated to Egypt be done openly.

He will not, but that's because Barack Obama prefers that the over 80 million people of Egypt live in a dictatorship to ensure that the fewer than six million Jewish people of Egypt never suffer the indignity White South Africans suffered, in losing their enforced political majority state. This is racism and religious bigotry.  Barack Hussein Obama is an anti-Arab racist and an anti-Muslim religious bigot.  A disgusting president of a disgusting country, according to his and his country's own professed values.

Obama's puppet dictatorship is now dissolving the only institution of Egypt's government legitimately elected by Egypt's people.

Egypt's High Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that the Political Disenfranchisement Law, which had been referred to it by the Presidential Elections Commission, was unconstitutional. In the same session, the court found the election of one third of parliamentary seats, reserved for individual candidates, unconstitutional.

As such, the run-off presidential election between former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq and Freedom and Justice Party leader, Mohamed Mursi is to go ahead as planned, with balloting scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. On the other hand, the election of one third of parliamentary seats has been rendered null and void. Parliament is expected to be suspended until new elections are held for these seats.

This is certainly a setback in the people of Egypt's struggle for government that is accountable to them instead of to Barack Obama, the United States and indirectly to Israel, as well as a setback for the aligned struggle of the rest of the over 150 million people in US colonies of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others.

The people of Egypt over the last year have demonstrated, fairly consistently, that they intend to be ruled by a government that reflects their own beliefs and values instead of the US President's.  I expect, despite this setback, for them to ultimately issue effective responses.

David Frum: A country can reject Israel, or it can enrich uranium, but not both

I came across this over at RaceForIran and thought I'd leave it here in case I want to find it later. It does not need too much explanation or comment.

MR. SADJADPOUR: Ray, you made a reference to domestic politics in the conclusion of your comments. And there’s a quote from David Frum, who was President Bush’s former speechwriter, that I think really captured the conundrum of U.S. policy toward Iran. And he said that – he said, a country can enrich uranium and it can reject Israel’s existence, but it can’t do both at the same time. This is the reality of domestic American politics.

This is Karim Sadjadpour, a relatively mainstream member of the US foreign policy community claiming to have heard a quote from David Frum. I did not find the quote in a google search myself. I am confident that Sadjadpour did not make this quote up out of any hatred of Jews or of Israel. Far more likely either he's paraphrasing in a way that caused the quote to elude the first few pages of google's results or Frum made the statement in a forum that was not archived in text form on the internet.

Americans typically just simply lie about the relationship between Israel and the US demand that Iran not enrich and the US' broader demand that Iran not have capabilities that it admits are legal for other countries such as Japan and Brazil. So it is refreshing to see it expressed openly here.

I'll note of course, that the NPT does not say anything about rejecting Israel as a basis for denying technology. It instead says that nuclear technology is to be available to signatories "without discrimination". Sadjadpour also quotes former US official Henry Kissinger telling the type of lie that Americans like to tell about the Middle East.

Kissinger said, quote,"There are few nations in the world with whom the United States has more common interests and less reason to quarrel than Iran."

No. Kissinger knows better. He's just used to speaking to very naive and self-deluded audiences. Very quickly I'll present a poll that shows the reason the US has a quarrel with Iran:

18. Level of agreement - The state of Israel is illegitimate and should not exist.

Strong Agreement: 51.9%
Mild Agreement: 14.6% (total agree, 66.5%)
Neutral: 21.1%
Mild Disagreement: 4.6%
Strong Disagreement: 3.9% (total disagree 8.5%)

A poll of US citizens would produce a drastically opposed result. This is pretty much the entire dispute between the United States and Iran. The United States is committed to attempting to weaken, to any degree that it can, any government of Iran that reflects the values of the Iranian people.

Similarly the United States, including under Barack Obama, is committed to preventing, to any degree that it can, control of foreign policy in the current US colonies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others, from falling under the control of bodies accountable to the values of the people of those countries.

There is really little question that if he could, Barack Obama would restore an unrepresentative colonial-style dictator like the Shah to power in Iran. That being impossible, he'll gladly break the letter and the spirit of the NPT for Israel's benefit. He represents what can only be described as an evil colonialist nation. A nation very similar in effective terms to the British Empire of 200 and 100 years ago, especially regarding the Middle East.

But back to Frum and to Sadjadpour's analysis of the US political system. They are both right, though neither seems to have thought through the implications of their statements. If they had, it is doubtful that they would have made the statements quoted above. Kissinger seems as if he does understand what Sadjadpour calls the conundrum of US policy toward Iran, a conundrum which extends to non-Jewish countries throughout Israel's region. Kissinger in a typically American way, would rather say things he knows are not true than face implications of the role the US is committed to play in the Middle East on Israel's behalf.

You don't actually believe the Saudi Egyptian "crisis" is over protests in front of the embassy, do you?

While Egypt is not yet independent, it does seem to be making steps in that direction. The modern colonial pro-US dictatorship has bowed to the will of the Egyptian people on the Suez gas issue because it did not want the issue to be active at the very time the dictatorship and the Obama administration are hoping to have a constitution written that would allow US control of Egyptian foreign policy to continue with a democratic veneer.

But somehow, some way, for decades, Saudi Arabia has found a way to be in some level of conflict with every group in the Middle East that opposes Israel. This time it is the voters of Egypt.

We will know that the string of colonies that the United States maintains in the Middle East on Israel's behalf has collapsed when we see voters elect a representative government in what is now called Saudi Arabia and that government has the power to control policy.

This is what the Barack Obama administration has pledged to train and equip a 30,000 person force to prevent. This is why Barack Obama is a disgusting person, measured by the professed founding values of the United States.

So a few things about this supposed crisis where Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador and closed its embassy. First, Saudi Arabia is not independent. If Barack Obama did not want it to happen, it would not have happened. Second, the purpose of these theatrics is to discredit the idea of popular influence over foreign policy, not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world, especially in the US colonies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, UAE and others.

Last, Saudi Arabia settling onto the side of Israel in opposition to Egypt's voters is more likely than not to ultimately backfire. It reflects more negatively on Saudi Arabia's membership in the US/Israeli Middle East colonial structure than it does on the people of Egypt protesting an unjust and politically motivated prosecution of an Egyptian.

Pre-independence Egypt takes step to cancel secret gas supply deal to Israel

Egypt is not yet free from the control of US colonialism, but there are hopeful signs that it may be moving in that direction. On example is that the pro-US military dictatorship may be surrendering in its fight against the people of Egypt over the secret gas supply deal it has with Israel.

CAIRO (AP) — The head of the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company said Sunday it has terminated its contract to ship gas to Israel because of violations of contractual obligations, a decision Israel said overshadows the peace agreement between the two countries.

It is interesting that some Americans and Israelis seem to have a very broad understanding of Egypt's obligations under its peace treaty. I've seen Egypt's participation in the siege on Gaza described as compliance with its peace treaty, though I'm certain there is no term in the treaty ratified in 1979 that mandates Egypt's behavior in this siege that intensified in 2006. There is a good chance that in secret, Mubarak has reached other later agreements with Israel, but a future democratically accountable Egyptian government will not be bound by those. It is also interesting that Israel insists the price of the gas is fair, but refuses to say what that supposedly fair price is. Of course this refusal makes its vehement assertions of its fairness doubtful.

Israel insists it is paying a fair price for the gas. Israel's electricity company has been warning of possible power shortages this summer, partly because of the unreliability of the natural gas supply from Egypt.

...

Under the 2005 deal, the Cairo-based East Mediterranean Gas Co. sells 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas to the Israeli company at a price critics say is set at $1.50 per million British thermal units — a measure of energy.

We are still not seeing the behavior of an independent Egypt that is accountable to the people it governs. Egypt's relationship with Israel will certainly be a campaign issue in the presidential elections that are coming this summer. Possibly the Obama administration may succeed in directing the current pro-US dictatorship to keep its commitment to prevent foreign policy from coming under popular control after any partial transfer of power. But if the Obama administration fails, which seems very possible, then an Egypt that does not respect Mubarak's corrupt secret agreements with Israel on the gas issue and probably many other issues will mark a drastic change in Israel's relationship with its region.

Hassan Nasrallah: The only solution is one state where Muslims, Jews and Christians live in peace in one democratic state

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDLXPpooA18

I have not even finished watching this video when I'm posting this, but Hassan Nasrallah appeared on Jullian Assange's Russian talk show "The World Tomorrow" and the first question was "what is your goal". The answer is that Nasrallah does not want to kill anyone, does not want to treat anyone unjustly, but wants one democratic state.

Time 1:25 - 3:20

Assange:
What is your vision for the future of Israel and Palestine? What would Hezbollah consider victory? If you had that victory, would you disarm?

Nasrallah:
The state of Israel is an illegal state. It is a state that was established on the basis of occupying the lands of others, of usurping the lands of others, of controlling by force the lands of others, of committing massacres against the Palestinians who were expelled and this includes Muslims and Christians too.

So, for this reason, justice remains on the side, where even if ten years pass, the progress of time does not negate justice. If it is your house and I go occupy it by force it doesn't become mine in 50 or 100 years just because I'm stronger than you and I've been able to occupy your house. That doesn't legalize my ownership of your house. At least this is our ideological view and legal view and we believe that Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people.

But if we wanted to combine ideology and law and political realities and relations on the ground we should say that the only solution is we don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to treat anyone unjustly. We want justice to be restored to them and the only solution is the establishment of one state, one state on the land of Palestine in which the Muslims and the Jews and the Christians live in peace in a democratic state.

Any other solution would simply not be viable and wouldn't be sustained.

One of the bases on which US imperialism in the Middle East depends is that Muslims are not able to speak for themselves. Assange allowing Nasrallah to answer this question and others himself translated into English may well be a more important and damaging blow to the US Middle East imperial project than all of the previous wikileaks releases.

Is US imperialism ending? Kwasi Kwarteng thinks so. He may be wrong.

I've come across a New York Times op-ed by Kwasi Kwarteng, a member of the British parliament of Ghanaian descent. He expresses the idea that the United States is unable and unwilling to be a colonial power the way Britain was 100 years ago. He may ultimately be proven right about the US being unable to maintain its empire, and in much of the world he is arguably right about the US not being fully committed to empire. But in the region of the world where the United States is most active as a colonial power, the Middle East, he is completely wrong if he thinks there is any ambivalence about US control of policy in direct opposition to the ideas of democracy, popular accountability and local control.

Here is a link to the piece.

America’s position today reminds me of Britain’s situation in 1945. Deep in debt and committed to building its National Health Service and other accouterments of the welfare state, Britain no longer could afford to run an empire.

Moreover, Britain, which so proudly ruled the waves a generation ago, was tired; it lacked the willpower to pursue its imperial destiny. America’s role as an imperialist is even more fragile, as it never had Britain’s self-confident faith in its own imperial destiny. Americans have always been ambivalent about the role of global hegemon.

The problem is that Israel is either not viable or just barely viable, not comfortably viable without a US empire in the region, and the US is committed to Israel being comfortably viable.

So the US is committed to an empire.

Saudi Arabia spends 2.5x what Israels spends on its military. If the voters of that country, who by a huge consensus consider Israel their primary adversary more than Iran, controlled policy then a Republic of Arabia would be militarily dominant over Israel and Israel would not be able to withstand Palestinian demands, vigorously supported externally, either for a full state (with an army) in all of the West Bank or for repatriation of descendents of the refugees.

Relatedly, what exactly is the dispute between the US and Iran based on? Why is it that Iran cannot have the nuclear capabilities Brazil can have? Without empire, the US can’t prevent Iran from reaching a position, even without any Republic of Arabia, from which it could aid the Palestinians in forcing a resolution to the dispute over Zionism that is unacceptable to supporters of Israel.

And of course, maybe most importantly, we are seeing now the US’ efforts to ensure that the voters of Egypt remain unable to direct Egypt’s foreign policy. Again empire, again Israel cannot prevent the Palestinians of Gaza from developing into a genuine strategic threat to Zionism without the an effective US empire overruling the potential voters of Egypt.

At least in the Middle East, the idea of the US as a reluctant, half-hearted or almost-voluntarily-declining empire is wrong. When Barack Obama says the US will do whatever it takes to ensure that Israel can overwhelm any potential threat, he is making as full throated and enthusiastic an endorsement of imperialism as Cecil Rhodes or Winston Churchill ever did.

How the current nuclear negotiations may look from Iran's point of view

A good way to understand the issues in the current discussions of Iran's nuclear program would be to read armscontrol.org 's history of official proposals from both sides on Iran's nuclear issue.

http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Iran_Nuclear_Proposals

That website seems to consistently make mistakes in favor of making the US/EU seem more reasonable than they have been. Notable ones are that the EU 2005 proposal would have given the each of the EU negotiators a permanent veto over Iran ever enriching uranium again, that the 2009 proposal would have possibly seen deliveries of TRR fuel over three years rather than one and ignoring the US/EU's criticism of the Brazil/Turkey proposal that it would have permitted Iran to actually retrieve its uranium if the US/EU did not ever supply TRR fuel.

My current take is that the US nuclear policy community has completely given up on preventing Iranian enrichment to 5% and is now hoping to prevent Iran from stockpiling 20% LEU.

The Russian proposal which seems to be the basis for the current discussions seems to call for freezing Iran's program where it is, including ongoing 5% enrichment I guess for as long as Iran wants. At this point, additional 5% LEU is not very strategically valuable and there is no plausible pretext to reduce Iran's stock from almost six tons to less than one any more.

I don't know if Iran will or should accept the Russian proposal. It depends, I think on how Iran perceives additional sanctions. If Iran perceives then the way a commenter over at Race For Iran named FYI does, as an opportunity to increase its independence from the West, then it will not be willing to trade anything of strategic value for it.

Elsewhere on that site we also see more details about the dispute over Parchin.

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2012_04/News_Analysis_Debate_Over_Iran_Shifts_Away_From_Attack

It looks like the West wants to test if experiments were done on explosions of natural uranium. These experiments would not violate Iran's safeguards agreement if they happened. If they did happen, it is close to certain that analogous experiments have at one time or another been performed by states in good standing such as Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Germany and others and whether or not in some sense they are illegal, any of those states would, as would be completely within their rights under the NPT, just deny the IAEA access to any facilities where such experiments occurred.

Because Iran is saying that it is willing to allow inspections if a work-plan such as the one Iran reached with ElBaradei is established that will lead to a statement that all questions have been answered - the US has simply prevented the IAEA from holding up its agreement on the previous work plan - my best guess is that Iran would be exonerated by an inspection of Parchin. But that's just a guess.

This all brings us to the question of what happens in May.

Iran pretty clearly, I think can have a deal much better than what it was willing to accept in 2005 or 2006. On the other hand, Iran has paid a lot more for its program than it had in 2005 or 2006, including five nuclear scientists who were killed probably by the US or its allies.

I think the key issues are:

1) Iran cannot allow a US veto to be imposed on future generations of Iranian leaders. Under some objective set of circumstances, such as by a set time, any limitations Iran accepts will have to be, by the explicit terms of any deal, subject to be unilaterally released by Iran.

2) If we assume Iran will have six months, or some amount of months, of warning as a crisis develops that could actually lead to military action against Iran, what could Iran do with its nuclear program over that time? The stockpile Iran has of 5% LEU already gives Iran some flexibility in such a scenario, but a stockpile of 20% would give more. This is fairly unlikely to be a concern over the next three or five years but the future becomes more difficult to predict further away so flexibility over longer time frames becomes more important.

I don't think Iran is worrying about an attack from either the US or much less Israel. For an explanation, there is a pdf at the same site:

Marvin Weinbaum, scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute, recently explained in The National Interest how a “rationally thinking Iranian leadership” could even welcome the “rich dividends” that a military strike on Iranian soil could yield:

International sympathy for Iran would increase dramatically.... The hard fight for economic sanctions against Iran would, in all probability fall apart.... Washington and Tel Aviv would be lumped together as aggressors.... The continued presence of American military bases in the Gulf could become untenable.

Weinbaum sees the domestic payoff to be equally appealing to Khamenei’s hard-line regime:

An attack on the homeland could set back chances for the revival of the reformist Green Movement for at least a decade. Even the reformers have been solidly in favor of Iran retaining its nuclear program. Who now at home or abroad would dare question the regime’s argument if it decide[d] to build a bomb?

Outside the borders of the United States, incessant repetition of Washington’s intention to launch a unilateral preventive attack on Iran, if necessary, is widely construed as evidence that the United States perceives itself to be immune from international law.

Iran also still has the advantage that for whatever reason, the US refuses to publicly acknowledge an Iranian right to enrich. So the US would not be able to go over the head of the Iranian government and tell the Iranian public that 20% enrichment is what is blocking a deal, if that was the case.

The US also can be trusted to add some terms, especially such as a permanent effective US veto over the development of Iran's nuclear industry that Iran's public would reject anyway.

So maybe in May we'll get a work plan that trades Parchin for a statement that all of the IAEA's questions have been resolved and an agreement that Iran will, for some time, refrain for enriching beyond 5% or otherwise expanding its nuclear program.

Just as likely, maybe more likely, in May we'll see that the US intends for Parchin to be one more of an never-ending string of contrived questions and if so, Iran will refuse to indulge it. We'll also see that Iran, now that it has about 120kg of 20% LEU is willing to stop there, but not willing to relinquish it, even though it would have been willing to forego enriching to 20% as recently as this time in 2010.

The question is how afraid is Iran of additional sanctions. One thing to remember is that regimes in Cuba, North Korea and Iraq survived sanctions much more stringent than anything feasible for Iran. Another is that if Iran gets to the table in 2017, after the next US presidential term, reducing the stock of 20% may then be as unimaginable then as reducing the stock of 5% is now. Then the issue might be an agreement not to bring a heavy water reactor on line - which itself might be off the table two or three years later.

Whenever Iran makes a deal, it can get what it asked for in 2006, lifting sanctions - but if it gets it later, it can have traded the short term or temporary cost of sanctions for a longer term strategically valuable improvement in its nuclear position.

Iran might be magnanimous and willing to put the nuclear dispute into the past. The difference between having and not having 20% LEU, and the size of any 20% stockpile is much smaller than the difference between enriching and not enriching which was the point of dispute until this year.

Or Iran might not be as clumsy in public, but in effect adopt George W. Bush's position of "bring it on". If the West thinks it will scare Iran with sanctions and this stupid "military option on the table" stuff, what happens if Iran does not blink? I don't think there is anyone important in Iran today who thinks Iran should have taken any of the deals previously offered. It is somewhat reasonable to expect that its position in April 2013 will be better than its position today, so that making a deal today could be counter-productive.

We shall see. Iran's nuclear issue is shaping into the second most important strategic event in the Middle East today after the question of whether or not in Egypt the US will be able to maintain the pro-US colonial dictatorship's control over foreign policy contrary to local popular preference.

Hillary Clinton says US will hold Egyptian politicians accountable

Not much to say here. Clinton never held the rulers of the effective US colonies in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others, including Egypt's Mubarak accountable.

"We will watch what all the political actors do and hold them accountable for their actions," she added when asked about the Brotherhood changing plans and announcing a candidate for the May 23-24 presidential vote.

...

"We want to see Egypt move forward in a democratic transition, and what that means is you do not and cannot discriminate against religious minorities, women, political opponents," said Clinton, who did not mention the Brotherhood by name.

"There has to be a process starting in an election that lays down certain principles that will be followed by whoever wins the election. That is what we hope for the Egyptian people."

She added that she "really" hoped the Egyptian people got what they staged their uprising for, "which is the kind of open, inclusive, pluralistic democracy that really respects the rights and dignity of every single Egyptian."

The United States, on behalf of Israel, is probably today the most vigorously anti-democratic force in the world. But if Hillary Clinton respected the rights or dignity of any Egyptians, the United States would have had a different relationship with Egypt's dictatorship as soon as the Barack Obama administration came into office.