Time to stand up for what you believe

Clouds, Mountains and Waterfalls - A Trip to Sikkim

2010-11-11T09:32:00.002Z

That we were not going to stay back in Kolkata during the festive season (the Durgapuja holidays in October) was decided in August. Unfortunately, almost every other resident of Kolkata apparently made the same decision, and we couldn't find anything better than a wait-listed ticket on the train. The initial plan was to visit Arunachal Pradesh (on the far north-eastern border of India) - places like Tawang, Bhalukpong. Infact, I purchased the train tickets with Arunachal in mind - departing from Kolkata on Kanchanjungha express on 15th October, and coming back on the same train from Guwahati on 22nd.

But that didn't happen. No where in Arunachal we could manage to find accommodations, and had to scupper the plan. I thought of Bhutan, but that seemed to be too costly. And then I started thinking about Sikkim, especially North Sikkim, where I wanted to go since I saw some photos of the Gurudongmar Lake. So the final plan was to visit Gurudongmar via Gangtok, and then the Yumthang Valley and then Pelling (in West Sikkim) on our way back. I started searching for travel operators in that area - mainly for North Sikkim - because you cannot drive up there in normal cars, and managed to find one operator, Tibet Tours & Travels, who run their own chain for Fortuna Hotels at Lachen and Lachung. They have a 2night/3days tour of North Sikkim, covering Gurudongmar, Yumthang, Katao and Zero Point, starting from Gangtok and coming back to Gangtok at the end. You just have to reach Gangtok and they will (or are supposed to) take care of the rest. Damayanti, a friend of mine, was planning the same trip too, and we thought of sharing the vehicle cost. We started sending all the necessary documents (required for the permit to enter North Sikkim), and the holidays came up - our train tickets still on the waiting list.

I had a booking on Jaidada (the AC Volvo service to Siliguri), but took a chance on the Indian Railways Tatkal booking - and luckily was able to get confirmed berths on Kanchankanya express on 15th October - leaving Kolkata at night, and reaching New Jalpaiguri in the morning next day.

15th was the Ashtami. For the past three days, the electronic media had been screaming about the unimaginable festive crowd - millions out on the street - causing gridlocks for vehicles. There were news about people not being able to catch flights or trains because of huge traffic congestion on the streets of Kolkata. A bit scared and tensed, we started off from out place at around five in the evening, although the scheduled departure time (for the train) was half-eight. Did someone say "huge traffic congestion"? Well, normally it takes an hour to reach the station from my place, and on that day, we made it in 35 minutes. And found a fully crowded waiting lounge - because it seems all the other travellers were as careful as me. So we sat there - trying to kill the remaining three hours somehow - in that crowded waiting lounge, with two unstoppable kids, who seem to have roller-skates fitted on their feet...Why isn't there a Noble Prize for being patient?

The first living thing we met on the train was a rat - even before any other co-passenger. As soon as I dumped my rucksack on the side-berth, it ran out from beneath the seat, dodged between our feet and soon vanished. I wasn't that suprised - because only a few days back my parents went to the Valley of Flowers, and had an encounter with a similar species on the Hemkund express. But that one was probably a bit lazy one as my mother smashed it with her sandal (my dad actually took a snap of it, and keeps it as a part of his screensaver). The bottomline was - I had to change my plan of storing the rucksack beneath the seats, and with the risk of breaking my neck, I had to lift them up on the upper bunk.

There's no dining car on Kanchanjungha express, and we had our dinner with the homemade "puri and sabzi" and fell asleep. The train reached New Jalpaiguri on 16th morning, delayed by around half-an-hour.

(to be continued...)

An appeal for Bhopal

2010-06-11T06:46:00.000+01:00

I am sure all of you know about the injustice in Bhopal. The punishment for killing 20,000+ people in the world's worst industrial disaster has been reduced to the equivalent of a road accident. Seven persons, who knowingly approved cost-cutting measures compromising the safety and disaster mitigation in the plant, have been let off on bail.

India lives cannot and should not be seen as cheap. Please fax the Prime Minister directly to let him know what you think. Click here: http://action.bhopal.net/fax.php

People around the world are angry. Angry at the Indian Government for betraying its people; angry that the world's largest democracy has succumbed to the power of the corporation.

LET THIS ANGER AND OUTRAGE NOT GO TO WASTE.

Take action for justice in Bhopal, and to reclaim our democracy. Send a fax to the PM and let him know what you feel.

http://action.bhopal.net/fax.php

A Walk In The Clouds

2010-06-07T11:20:00.011+01:00

The British used to call Cherrapunjee "the Scotland of the East" - and only a visit would justify the reason. Most tourists tend to visit Shillong (the capital of Meghalaya) and make a day-trip to Cherrapunjee to see the landscape and few waterfalls. But that is not how you could get the complete taste of this mesmerizing place. You need to stay there - at least for a couple of days, if not more. You need to venture around on the narrow winding routes over the hills. You need to lose yourself inside the clouds. You need to walk in the rain and look at the silver drops of water hanging on the fern leaves just after a shower. Only then you would be able to "see" Cherrapunjee - otherwise it would remain as just another trip to some remote place, nothing more than that.

3rd June, 2010

Waking up in the middle of the night was a pain as always. But to catch the flight at 6.10AM, we had to reach the airport by 5.00AM, and for that we had to start from home at 4.00AM. The flight was uneventful and we reached Guwahati at around half-past eight in the morning. We took a taxi to Shillong. Usually it takes about three and half hours for the 120km distance, but some ongoing roadwork before Jorabat (at Assam-Meghalaya border) created a huge traffic snarl and it was raining as well. The road beyond Jorabat (Shillong Road, NH-40) was beautiful - winding between the smooth green hills of Meghalaya. We stopped at Bara Pani (a reservoir) just before Shillong - there isn't much water though, but still it's worth a stop. We reached Shillong at around 1PM and took another taxi towards Cherrapunjee.

This stretch of the Shillong Road was spellbinding - and I can only compare it with the Highlands (of Scotland) - waves of green vacant land on both sides, hills, free-flowing water creating picturesque waterfalls alongside the road. We crossed a small bridge (named after a king of Cherrapunjee) and we were in front of the Dympep Valley - a lush green gorge lying for miles after miles on the left side of the road, with chunks of white clouds hanging down in the valley, sometimes climbing up the hills...Beyond this valley and the green canyon lies Cherrapunjee (Sohra) Town.

We were going to the Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort at Laitkeynsiew village - another 15 km beyond the Sohra town, almost in the middle of nowhere. This stretch of the road, though narrow and winding between steep hills and valley, was stunning, as if we became a part of an immense picture. And it was almost no-man's land - you won't see any people till you reach the resort. And the resort? A picturesque lodge surrounded by the clouds on the top of the last hills of India beyond which you can clearly see the flooded plains of Sylhet (Bangladesh). It rained just a while ago, and little droplets of water were falling off the lush green fern leaves on the side of the road, few bottle-brushes were blooming inside a small cemetery, and water was flowing by the side of the village road like a tiny river...

4th June, 2010

I woke up at the sound of the alarm at 5AM in the morning hoping to see the sun coming out of the clouds. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy. At other places (say Lolegaon or Rishap) this would have been annoying - but not here. We've come here to lose ourselves in the clouds, and discover the romancing rain. It started to rain soon - first drizzles, then slowly heavier, and then like a white curtain all around us. We put on our raincoats and went out to the village below the resort - on a narrow road winding through the village with only a handful people in and out of the small houses. Water flowed over the road, Rik and Riti started splashing over the water and Rik named the flow "Chhota Pani" (or Small River, an opposite of Bara Pani). After a while we came back inside the resort with our so-called "weatherproof" walking shoes completely soaked...

The owner of the resort, Mr. Denis P. Rayen (a Tamilian who married a local lady and settled here, and helped the local economy) said that the rain will stop at around noon, and we decided that we'd trek to the nearest Living Root Bridge (approximately two and half kilometres and takes 4 hours) after lunch. We started at 1PM, and soon after crossing the tiny villages, the path turned towards the forest and downwards along the hill (technically, a mountain - nearly 1000m above the MSL). The path was actually a set of steep, narrow and non-uniform lichen-covered stone stairs with a dense forest on both sides laid out by the local people. And the recent rains made them even more slippery. My shoes started slipping soon and I wasn't able to step fully on the stairs as they were quite narrow. And we soon discovered that whatever Woodlands say, those "walking boots" were not all-terrain at all. I slipped few times, and was having trouble going down those steep steps because of my torn knee ligaments. And possibly, my confidence level wasn't as high as it used to be because of the recent remarks made by the doctor treating my knee. I fell over a couple of times - extremely lucky to escape fatality. It was drizzling when we started - so we had our raincoats on, but they were becoming more and more uncomfortable. We took the raincoats off and I was amazed to find that my shirt was completely soaked with sweat as if it was just washed in water. All the raincoats were packed inside my rucksack, and we started to walk. But it became impossible to step properly on the slippery stones with those shoes on - and so the shoes came off too, increasing the weight of my rucksack. Walking was easier with just the socks on, but the feet started hurting as we were moving on a very uneven surface. Rik though, didn't face any problem what-so-ever - may be because of his less weight, or may be because of his flexible shoes, and Riti was so tired that she fell asleep on our guide's shoulder. And watching him walk down that path with Riti on his shoulders was scary. We lost count of the number of steps and kept on going down and down - our legs tiring, and there was less and less light because of the dense forest and the clouds...Ultimately, after almost two and half thousand steps (yes, that's right - almost equivalent to climbing down the Empire State Building, could be even more as the steps were steeper) we reached the "Living Root Bridge".

It was fascinating - the bridge. The little stream below the bridge was even more so. We sat on a set of stones and watched that mesmerizing scene for a while, and then started climbing up the Empire State Building again...I don't know how I managed it, but I could feel the lack of strength and balance on my knee - my 85 kilos, plus the heavy rucksack, cloud, rain, lichen-covered steep steps, bare feet - all combined to create a fatal combination. But it was worth it. The experience was unforgettable - raw nature at its best - the scenery, the weather, the surroundings - it was something to remember for ever. It was Lothlórien - almost, and we were the hobbits eagerly waiting to get a glimpse of Lady Galadriel...

After-effect: After two days, even now, my legs are as heavy as lead. And I'm suffering from stairs-phobia. I'm still climbing stairs in an awkward way - but that's never going to stop me from going there again. May be some time not so far...

5th June, 2010

Our condition became evident as soon as we got up in the morning. Both of us had legs as heavy as lead, and they simply refused to go for another walk in the morning. This was our last day at the resort and we booked a taxi which would take us for a sight-seeing around Cherrapunjee and then drop us at our hotel in Shillong. Heavy rain had started by then and we were afraid that we might miss most of the views. But again the rain slowed down at around 10AM and we started on our journey back to Shillong.

I should write few lines about the resort at this point. It's a family-owned resort, run by Mr. Denis, his wife and their daughter. Few girls from the nearby villages work here as cooks and cleaners. Young men work as guides. The guide, who took us to the Living Root Bridge, studies in the 10th Std. and works as a guide during his free time. The resort literally helps the nearby villages economically, as this is the only place where tourists can stay beyond Cherrapunjee town. Some village youths take part in a cultural programme at the resort during the evenings - singing Khasi (local dialect) songs, sometimes famous English and Hindi songs too - which helps them earn a little extra. Mr. Denis has been working with the Government of Meghalaya to promote tourism at Cherrapunjee - before that, most people used to come on a day-trip, and that too just to the town. The thing that we liked most was a personal touch - either Mr. Denis or his daughter would look after the guests personally, talk to them during lunch/dinner time, have a leisurely chats at other times, bid farewell to each individual guest - something that we don't see anymore in the corporate chain hotels. The cost of food may have been a bit on the higher side - but I wouldn't expect anything different at such a place "in the middle of no-where."

The taxi took us to several view points around Cherrapunjee - and we had mesmerizing views of the hills, the greenery, the flowers, the rain, the majestic waterfalls, the flooded plains of Sylhet and our all-around partner - the cloud. But even with the cloud, we didn't miss a single thing. Wherever we went, the rain and cloud soon cleared - just to unravel the beauty for us and us only - and then covered everything again when we left. The Daithlen Falls was the only thing we couldn't go to - as the road was closed for vehicles. And at the Nohkalikai Falls (the highest in India, 4th highest in the world), we really thought that we won't be able to see anything and will have to leave with only the sound of the falls. But as we were coming out, the lady at the counter called us back - we rushed to the view point - and saw the cloud has started to lift. Soon it was clear again - and we could see the majestic Nohkalikai jumping a thousand feet from the top of the cliff...

After Nohkalikai, we started our journey back to Shillong. The cloud didn't allow us to get another glimpse of the Dympep valley. But the tiny waterfalls on the side were even more beautiful after two days of rain. Just before entering Shillong, we took a small diversion to the Elephant Falls, one of the famous tourist attractions near Shillong. And then we went straight to the Pinewood Hotel. The hotel looked majestic, built by the British during the Raj, but a severe lack of maintenance is turning it into a mess - a little care would have turned it into a paradise.

6th June, 2010

Nothing much to write about the day. We checked out of the hotel in the morning and went to the Shillong Peak - a famous tourist attraction, but after what we had seen at Cherrapunjee, this looked pretty ordinary. The twin falls - Beadon and Bishop - didn't impress as well. We would have visited the Don Bosco Museum if we had time - but that particular thing was short - and we had to rush to Guwahati airport (another four hour drive from Shillong) to catch our flight. Finally, we reached home at around 11PM in the night - tired, but satisfied. Cherrapunjee didn't hide herself and showed us the raw beauty of nature...

Newcastle fans launch takeover campaign

2009-11-11T05:40:00.001Z

From The Times, another one from George Caulkin...

The emails were dispatched at 2am on Tuesday morning. All 40,000 of them, which the Newcastle United Supporters Trust [NUST] believes might just make it the biggest-ever mail-out to football fans. In spite of the bleary-eyed hour, within the first 20 minutes, 120 people had signed up for more information and pledges of financial backing had come from as far afield as Australia.

There was a humbling message from an orphanage in Ghana, where the NUST have previously sent Newcastle shirts to disadvantaged children, kids whose lives put notions such as sport, victory and defeat into its proper perspective, with an offer to invest £5. In emotive terms, a value could not be placed on their gesture and at that moment, their challenge felt that bit more manageable.

Eight hours later, the NUST officially launched a six-week campaign to raise awareness about their ‘Yes We Can‘ proposal to buy Newcastle United from Mike Ashley. Organisers stood on the Millennium Bridge their backs to a mural on the exterior of the Baltic art gallery. “Victory to the miners,” it read. “Victory to the working class.” It felt like a symbolic message.

Their scheme is bold and it has to be, but it has not been formulated on the back of a cigarette packet. Over the past few months and weeks, they have spoken to fans‘ groups, local businesses (it is understood that Barry Moat, whose recent takeover attempt failed, is not one of them), institutions and politicians about the viability of their project and how to take it forward. As they put it, “It’s about reclaiming our football club for the city".

They mean business. About £35,000 will be spent on an advertising campaign, the initial aim of which is to raise enough money (£10million would be a decent start) to demonstrate their intent to larger investors who, the NUSC insists, are already committed in principle. And, indeed, to Ashley. They have, they say, some impressive partners on board, whose identities will be revealed over the coming days.

The ultimate goal is fan ownership of Newcastle, a model operated, famously, by Barcelona, but also elsewhere, with a president voted for by members who would themselves be able to stand for election to the trust’s board. It will require investment from individuals, from a minimum £1,500 in cash or the reallocation of pension funds. All of that information can be found here.

Could it work? Yes. Will it? That, of course, is the £80m question (or however much Ashley now values Newcastle at), and it is not coincidental that the NUST have appropriated Barack Obama’s optimisitc, against-the-odds campaign slogan for last year’s American presidential election: ‘Yes we can’. What cannot be doubted is that they are good, decent, serious people who adore their football club.

A lot has been written and said about Ashley’s stewardship of Newcastle (even he has called it “catastrophic”). Most depressing about it is that alternatives have dissolved away. Aside from apathy or anger for the sake of it, only one remains. What follows is a brief chat with Mark Jensen, editor of the respected fanzine The Mag, who is acting as a spokesman for the campaign.

What is ‘Yes We Can’ all about?

MJ: “Everybody has seen the protests, both verbal and visible, against Mike Ashley and what’s happened at the club, but it’s not just about him. For years before him, the club wasn’t run in the way it should have been in most people’s eyes and the biggest protest comes now: the fans are leading the way in looking to buy the club. It sounds very ambitious, but everything we’ve done in the last few months behind the scenes - the research we’ve done with businesses and supporters - leads us to believe that it's definitely achievable. We’re putting the final touches to the business plan and this six-week campaign will see us advertising in the local media and doing various events to raise awareness. The first base is to get a seat at the table whereby representatives can negotiate with Mike Ashley the full amount to buy the club then that would become the target. In private, we've been meeting with very, very credible local businesses and people. They’ve assured us that as long as the fans have the appetite to raise X amount, they’ll come in behind it and make this all a reality.”

How do you persuade people that buying the club is a viable proposition?

MJ: “You only have to go back to 1997, when the club was floated on the Stock Market: the fans bought 10 per cent of the club then and, actually, the offer was oversubscribed. They were prepared to raise money then. The point has been reached now where everybody who is willing and able to could and should invest in the club. We’ve got an opportunity for Newcastle United to be the shining light in this country, as to how a club should be run. That’s the carrot being dangled in front of everybody; as well as having a club that could hopefully go on to win things, it would also be run in the right way and for all the right reasons. It isn’t just a few fans expecting to turn up and the run the club. It’s about fans giving the platform whereby fans, businesses and local institutions could all invest to make a viable club and then appoint people who could run it on a day-to-day basis. Nobody could tell me that what we’ve got in mind wouldn’t end up being better than what we’ve got now.”

So it’s about giving the club back to the city?

MJ: Reclaiming it, yes. That’s it in a nutshell. People are so fed up. But it’s been unbelievable this season. If you’d told me in the summer that Newcastle would be averaging crowds of more than 40,000 in these circumstances ... People are showing their opposition to Mike Ashley but also showing their support for the team and there was no better example of that than on Saturday. The atmosphere was brilliant and we were playing Peterborough United with nearly 44,000 people there. It was more than Liverpool had at home in the Premier League on Monday night. If anybody asks ‘how can Newcastle be a success in the future?’, that tells you everything. The fans desperately want to go and support their team and this is their opportunity to have much more than that.”

Newcastle are top of the league, but how perilous is the club’s position away from that?

MJ: “In the short-term you can look at the results and how we’re doing in the Championship and think that things aren’t too bad, but the more games we win and the more that promotion becomes a reality, the more it looks as though we would have to buy pretty much a whole new team. Judging on their past performances, I don’t think anybody would have faith in Ashley or Derek Llambias to successfully do that. People have been hoping that some white knight would be out there, but they have to accept that it’s very unlikely to happen. And that’s how we once felt about Ashley, too. He’s proved to be anything but. Maybe the salvation for Newcastle United is with the people who care most about it, ordinary fans and business people.

You’re asking for a big financial commitment from people. What guarantees do they have that their money will be looked after properly?

MJ: “Firstly, it’s not a case of fans looking after other fans’ money. It’s about appointing proper professional people, the best people possible, to do that job. As things stand, is Derek Llambias the best qualified person to be in control of the money that comes into the club now? I think we know the answer to that. We would emulate what successful clubs have done and learn from them - up until now, Newcastle haven’t done that and that’s why we’ve ended up in this position.

So you have substantive people waiting in the background who will become involved?

MJ: “Yes. Newcastle is a damaged brand - that’s one of those phrases we have to use these days - it’s a business and to be successful on the pitch, it has to be successful off it. There are very, very credible people from the local business community - names that people will recognise - who are committed to coming on board. But they need the fans to show they’ve got the appetite to do their bit and then, together, we can turn the club around. Maybe it wouldn’t work for those businesses to come in by themselves. Why can’t we create something much bigger and better than just expecting local businessmen to come in and do everything? Why shouldn’t we do our bit and, potentially, have a really sound, long-term investment in a club we all invest in week after week?

Long-term is the key, isn’t it?

MJ: “How quickly things can happen will depend on how many people respond. We’ve sent out 40,000 emails to names we’ve collected over the last few months and we’ve already had a very good response from them. The financial plan will be ready in six to seven days’ time, whereby people will have all the information they need as to how they can go about making an investment. We’ll be pointing towards independent financial advisors, because the level of investment possible depends on individual circumstances, but if it’s right for them, hopefully they’ll come on board. The committee members are all putting money into it - it's not throwing money down the drain, it’s about investing in what could be a great club again and a very successful business.”

Babbling of my two-year old daughter...

2009-10-05T09:58:00.003+01:00

I love Kevin Keegan, love him

2009-09-30T05:10:00.002+01:00

Seven years in that city made it my home - even now when I'm away from it. I queued up in front of the gates at St. James' when Keegan returned. I took my six year old son to a reserve game where he had a glimpse of the King at the stands and he still talks about it. From thousands of miles away, I open the fanzine pages first thing in the morning. I haven't seen a premier league game since the beginning of the season, but check out the championship results on a match day even from my mobile phone - such is the "pull" of this city.

Following is another excellent piece from George Caulkin - about my home and my home town football club, and the man who won't be forgotten...

I love Kevin Keegan, love him

- George Caulkin

I love Kevin Keegan, love him. I don’t love him because he has been attempting to wrest compensation from Newcastle United and I certainly don’t love him because I’ve got a Messiah complex (and it would be greatly appreciated if somebody, anybody, took notice of that). I don’t love him because he left the club at a difficult moment a year ago, nor do I love him because he has held his tongue since doing so.

Before anyone gets any funny ideas, I love other football people, too.

In no particular order, I love Niall Quinn, Steve Gibson and I ****ing love Peter Reid. I desperately love Sir Bobby Robson, I love Alan Shearer and I’ve got a feeling that I’m going to love Steve Bruce and Darren Bent. I’m pretty damn keen on Steve Harper and Gareth Southgate. I love Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. I love my home.

But this is a column about Keegan, who has been thrust back into the headlines recently. I loved him as a player, the belief that everything begins with hard work, the (Mag)Pied Piper qualities he demonstrated at St James’ Park. I love him because of his approach to football, the freedom he nurtured in his teams, the self-respect. When he returned as manager, I love it that the first thing he did was fumigate the dressing-rooms.

After he dragged Newcastle off their knees, I loved 1992-93, when the side shimmered with neat, quick, triangular football and were promoted as champions. I loved it because Keegan urged supporters to gaze at the stars and believe anything was possible. I love it even more now, because so much of football feels hemmed in. I loved it that the glorious mania prompted rogue sightings of Roberto Baggio in Wallsend chipshops.

I loved it when Keegan opened Newcastle’s training ground to fans and hundreds of them turned up. From a professional point of view, I loved it that he welcomed reporters to Maiden Castle every day, where they could tap players on the shoulder and, if they agreed, talk to them. From a personal point of view, I loved it because one of those players became my best man, even if our friendship lasted longer than my marriage.

I loved hearing about Keegan’s powers of persuasion, convincing Robert Lee that Newcastle was closer to London than Middlesbrough and then moulding him into an England international. I didn’t care that his tactical prowess was mocked, because he made players feel like gods and somehow prompted them to overachieve. I loved his unshakeable faith in attacking football.

I loved the headlong tilts at the title, the acquisitions of Les Ferdinand, David Ginola and Shearer. I wish that Newcastle had grasped the championship ahead of Manchester United, although I loved that season anyway and never winning anything but singing regardless is now ingrained as a defining feature of those born with a black-and-white lifetime sentence.

I didn’t love it when he took his leave of Tyneside in 1997, although I understood it. In the space of five years, the club had been transformed beyond all recognition and in the rush to embrace the City, they would be transformed further. I never loved the Hall or Shepherd families, although like many people, I was blindsided by the ambition, the changes to the ground and convinced myself that the shares, dividends and salaries were forgivable.

In the face of widespread bewilderment - including my own - I loved it when Keegan came back to Gallowgate in January 2008. Anybody who was present in the city on that heady day will have felt something similar; a veil lifting, eyes opening, hearts beating. It had not been that way for a very long time and this was a reminder that football could be fun, impetuous, beautiful, mad.

For similar reasons, I loved it when Keegan said the following in an interview with this newspaper: “I want people to dream about their football club. They should, we should all be dreamers at heart. Some people are the opposite and say ‘we can’t do that’, but when you ask them why, they can’t give a reason. Well, I say, ‘Why not?’”. He talked about “unfinished business” and I think he believed he could charm and cajole Mike Ashley.

I detested the way Keegan was treated. Having embraced Geordie sentimentality and appointed a man who dealt in dreams, Ashley strapped his manager into a straitjacket. He brought in Dennis Wise as executive director (football), roles were not defined with any clarity, Keegan was slapped down in public and ultimately left when - allegedly - players were signed without his approval. It was nonsensical and, this time, not in a good way.

The last 12 months have not been kind to Keegan, but that is not his fault. When Sam Allardyce was sacked as manager, his contract was settled within days, but a dispute over whether Keegan resigned or was pushed has meant a long, bitter process. As Newcastle struggled and then suffered relegation, it was natural that some sympathy would swing against him, although he has not been able to speak out. He remained silent in the face of briefings against him.

Keegan stood up for principle; managers should manage. The man Ashley hired might have been weathered by his experiences with England - I would term his decision to step down as honest, not weak - but he had always used his power as a bargaining chip (Freddy Shepherd claims to have letters of resignation from him framed on his toilet wall). For better or worse, he then stood up for what he thinks he is owed.

What I hate is that a day before the Premier League arbitration panel which has been hearing Keegan’s case was due to break up and consider their verdict, a story leaked that Newcastle would be threatened with administration should their former employer win. Derek Llambias, the managing director, had already stated publicly that such a measure was not being considered and the timing felt both risible and transparent.

A source close to the takeover saga at Newcastle (some doubt the veracity of ‘sources’ or ‘insiders’, but there are people who will only speak to journalists on the basis of anonymity - honest), insists that Keegan’s claim is not a concern within Seymour Pierce, the bank charged with handling the club’s sale, and that Barry Moat’s bid is ongoing. But 12 months on - four after their demotion - and suddenly administration is an issue!

For all their heartening success on the field since August, Newcastle is still a club being run by men asleep at the wheel, full of contradiction and questions; a club where ‘Malaysian’ businessmen, who Seymour Pierce said had made no contact with them, can be shown around the ground, where Ashley and Llambias can heap praise on Shearer and then let him dangle. And too many other things, whether before or afterwards.

I will love Kevin Keegan whatever result the independent panel come to. I will love him for reasons which Ashley and Llambias could never understand, because he gave uplift to Newcastle, hope and inspiration, he made a region sparkle and people smile. I do not, for a single moment, suggest that he is perfect, but his team came close to perfection. If circumstances ever allow it, I would love to think he’ll discuss it all.

I love him because of something Robson once wrote. “What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses or the marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city.”

He has human flaws. He might, indeed, have material interests. But Keegan always dealt in love.

Newcastle fans are misery-seekers, not glory-hunters

2009-08-12T06:22:00.003+01:00

From The Times - another spot-on from George Caulkin.

Newcastle fans are misery-seekers, not glory-hunters

George Caulkin

It was some time during the late 1990s - a decade which featured the Light Brigade beauty of Kevin Keegan’s title challenge and two losing FA Cup finals - that some Newcastle United supporters of my acquaintance reached a conclusion which altered the tone of their day- to-day existence: they would win nothing during their lifetimes. All the available scientific evidence, all the heartache, offered sustenance to their argument.

At a stroke, weight was lifted from their shoulders. Tension slipped away. It was a eureka moment, a discovery which allowed football to be football again. Sometimes there is a point to embracing the unembraceable and, in this instance, there was a logic to it. If you take as your starting point that a football club will never lift a trophy then ... well, you can never truly be disappointed, can you?

Not winning something is now as much ingrained in the Newcastle psyche as the Cup-heroics of the 1950s, Jackie Milburn, black and white stripes and Alan Shearer. It is part of who they are, part of the celebration and, to digress a little, it is also why criticism of their fans for being impatient or demanding is so witless and inaccurate. Glory-hunters? Through no fault of their own, those who follow Newcastle are misery-seekers.

Those friends of mine, while accepting that any quest for silverware was doomed at the outset, had different expectations. They wanted to belong, to feel pride in their city, sing themselves hoarse and enjoy a few drinks. And if the impossible was to happen and Newcastle won a cup, they would happily have torn up their pie charts, pointed to the margin of error in any statistical undertaking and reveled in it.

You may have noticed the use of the past tense. One of those friends has had enough. Midway through last season - post Joe Kinnear and pre Shearer - he stopped going to the match. He’d been a season-ticket holder since school (more than 20 years), but now has a young family to look after. The equation was a complex one - it cost too much money and too much embarrassment - but, purely and simply, he could not do it any more.

Within his circle, the decision caused arguments and distress; give up Newcastle and you give up your essence. But then, a few weeks ago, another one dropped out. He would not be renewing his seat. Because, fundamentally, the conclusion they reached ten years ago has changed.

Following Newcastle now means an acceptance that of all the possible scenarios, the least edifying and most unpleasant will happen. That pain, the loss of faith during the last few seasons, had become too much to bear.

In the long-term, it is not a life-affirming ethos. Perhaps not all supporters accept it and the fact that more than 25,000 people have bought season tickets this summer points to a remarkable level of tolerance, but, in the short-term, it is probably sensible. This has been a summer of limbo, of rot, of waiting, of stasis, and the final outcome may well herald further disillusion.

I spoke to the director of another football club the other day. As usual, the conversation eventually turned to recent events at St James’ Park (it is not only the media who are obsessed with Newcastle). He had met Mike Ashley a few times and actually liked him, although he was less complimentary about his acolytes. “From what I've seen, I think he's a decent bloke. I just wish that one day he would wake up and make a go of things up there,” he said.

Surely it is too late now. Ashley has been incapable of stringing two good decisions together and the outcome has been utterly destructive.

He arrived preaching the long-term and then sacked Sam Allardyce. He tapped into Newcastle’s emotions by appointing Kevin Keegan and then tied his hands together. He recognised the need to have a football department, but chose Dennis Wise to lead it.

He accepted reality last autumn and decided to sell the club. But Joe Kinnear as an interim manager? He took the club off the market, promised to communicate more with supporters and then did nothing of the sort. He vowed to run a dangerously spendthrift club on a sound financial footing, but made a profit in the transfer market when the team was in dire need of strengthening.

Finally, he brought in Shearer, who could do little to prevent Newcastle’s slide into the Coca Cola Championship, but restored discipline to the training-ground, provided a link with fans and reviewed of all playing matters at the club. Ashley admitted his mistakes and said that hiring Shearer was his “best decision”. He then ignored him, putting out the for sale signs, not wishing to leave new owners in the same position he inherited. It has been a compendium of disaster.

The result, three months down the line, is that Newcastle still have no manager and have bought no new players. The season is now underway.

With the transfer market closing at the end of this month, there is only a tiny window of opportunity for Barry Moat or any other potential bidder for the club to influence matters at the club. Once that opportunity disappears, there is no incentive to push through a purchase.

Those friends who still intend to troop up to Newcastle’s ground every other weekend - and who will be there against Reading on Saturday - have already accepted that Ashley will own the club for at least another year. They believe that David O’Leary will be appointed manager (and, make no mistake, this is what Ashley intends to do should Moat not find the money). They hate the idea, but what can you do?

For now, they will put up with it, but discussions about what being a Newcastle fans entails are now commonplace. It feels unsustainable.

The performance of the team during the 1-1 draw at West Bromwich Albion offered some hope and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, something positive may happen in the next few days. But nobody is betting on it.

This is Ashley’s Newcastle. Things can always get worse.

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Tynesiders have been too forgiving so far with Mr. Ashley. I wonder what would have happened if this was my hometown Kolkata. I can surely say - all his Sports Direct outlets would have been mobbed, shut down - no one would work in those outlets, and he probably would never dare to step in the city. Actually, this is exactly what he deserves.

Come on Mr. Ashley - do us (and yourself) a favour and leave.

The Bobby Robson I knew and loved | Football - Times Online

2009-08-03T13:11:00.002+01:00

The Bobby Robson I knew and loved | Football - Times Online

Spend time in his company and you grasped why all those footballers revelled under his leadership, says George Caulkin

Robson inspired loyalty and adoration because his spirit was both real and transferable

George Caulkin

To the end, he carried with him a sense of enchantment; wonder that life had offered him such a rich experience, disbelief that people should love him and venerate him in the way they did.

If it was not for the physical manifestations, you would never have known that illness had touched him, because Sir Bobby Robson was not defined by the cancer growing inside him. He was defined by energy, enthusiasm and curiosity. By enchantment.

There were flashes of frustration when the frailty of his body prevented him from driving, or playing golf or tending to his garden, but questions about his health would invariably meet with the same response. “I’m all right,” he would say. “I’m all right.”

And then, with barely a pause, he would manoeuvre the conversation towards its inevitable destination. “So what’s happening at Newcastle, then?” Perhaps it was courage or perhaps it was a by-product of his age and upbringing among Co Durham mining stock. Or perhaps it was just some sorcerer’s life-affirming quality that could persuade the eyes and brain that they were being deceived. Yes, he looked poorly, yes, he was grappling with a fatal disease, but no, it would not claim him. He had an aura of indefatigability. Whatever the evidence, we thought he was invincible.

Spend time in his company and you grasped why all those footballers revelled under his leadership. Take away the nous, the years of accumulating tactical knowledge, his technical qualities as a coach and manager and you were left with an expansive personality that illuminated its surroundings. When you walked away, a bit of his sparkle clung on. It was the quality of a talisman, an Everyman.

Flags were at half-mast at St James’ Park yesterday, just as they were at the Stadium of Light, the home of Sunderland, Newcastle United’s great rivals. Red-and-white shirts mingled with black-and-white in the ground Robson first visited with his father during the Second World War and which was opened to allow supporters to pay their respects.

The sun at lunchtime was warm and blissful and the grass a tempting shade of green. Pull your boots on, son.

Tyneside has witnessed much disillusion and despair in recent months, but this was different. You could feel the history, hear the echo of past glories. Looking across the turf towards the Gallowgate End, the head spun tipsily at the expanse of dynamic space, where not all that long ago, Robson’s team had graced the Champions League. It felt like a football club. Finally, once again, it felt like a football club.

Families sat in the Leazes End engrossed in quiet contemplation. A woman in a Middlesbrough top gazed at the banks of scarves and shirts that had been looped around seats. Just as Sir Bobby straddled the generations — he had watched Albert Stubbins and worked with Alan Shearer — he was a unifying figure, of his region and also far beyond it. Here was proof, in monochrome and colour.

There had been more last Sunday and in the same place, when 33,000 people had defied the financial and, in Newcastle terms, sporting recession to watch a friendly match between England and Germany, organised to benefit the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation and in honour of its patron. It had been a near thing, but Robson had made it, receiving a tumultuous reception as he was pushed around the pitch in a wheelchair.

Robson fulfilled his final fixture, just as against the advice of his family and doctors, he had fulfilled a commitment to attend his own annual charity golf day in Portugal a few weeks ago. Those closest to him made their arguments, rolled their eyes and ultimately accepted what they always knew: he would not be told. Not when he had given his word, not when he had a challenge to complete. Call it principled stubbornness.

You do not get to where Sir Bobby got — to England, to Barcelona, to the Premier League — without sharp elbows, without necessary hardness, but he maintained his dignity, his relish and warmth. He inspired loyalty and adoration because his spirit was both real and transferable. It rubbed off.

He felt and nurtured passion, for football, for Newcastle, for hard work, for the goodness in people, for life.

His achievements in the sport are detailed elsewhere and so, too, are the wider responses to his death, but, even so, please excuse the personal nature of what follows. It is an attempt to contextualise, but also to explain the reactions Sir Bobby could dredge from you, even in a profession such as this one, where cynicism is often rampant. It is also something else: a love letter.

When I joined The Times as their North East football writer in 1998, Robson was a contributor to the newspaper. He was a hero of mine; I’d followed him to Langley Park infants school and, like him, supported Newcastle. When he was appointed as the club’s manager the next year, Oliver Holt, who then ghost-wrote his column and is now the Daily Mirror’s respected chief sports writer, bequeathed the task to me, an act of journalistic generosity that leaves me indebted for several lifetimes.

A relationship would develop, but initially it was about getting a story, pressing him for news, for stronger comments, predominantly about England. But over time and without noticing, the parameters shifted.

Listening to him speak and putting his thoughts into words provoked different motivations. I wanted to do him proud and make him proud. I wanted my efforts to be worthy of him.

It was not such an onerous challenge, because his voice was so distinctive, his turn of phrase so lyrical — although I remember one telephone conversation we had, up against the paper’s deadline, when he was simultaneously talking to Lady Elsie, his wife; he kept calling her “son” and me “love” — but it did not often happen that way.

Few people, never mind football people, make you operate solely from the heart. Last year, he asked me to assist him with a book about Newcastle — the city and the club. Even the request made me weep. It also prompted fear, not only because his autobiographies had been written so beautifully, but because it would form part of his legacy.

To call it the proudest, happiest and most terrifying episode of my career is a gross understatement.

Over the course of last summer, we met regularly at the Copthorne Hotel on Newcastle’s quayside, or at his home in Urpeth, Co Durham. Usually accompanied by Judith Horey, Sir Bobby’s wonderful, longstanding personal secretary, we would sit and chat about his childhood, the memories of Stubbins and Jackie Milburn, his first job down the pit. It was an extraordinary privilege.

The final chapter of Newcastle, My Kind of Toon centred on Sir Bobby’s lengthy tussle with cancer and how it inspired him to establish the foundation that bore his name. “I’ve had a great life, I really have,” he wrote. “When I look back on everything I’ve done and seen, the experiences I’ve had, the myriad colours and memories, I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been ill.

“I’ll puff out my chest and say to Elsie, ‘I’ve been fit all my life, I have’. She’ll look at me as if I’m daft. ‘Bobby, what are you talking about? You’ve had cancer five times’. She’s right, of course, but it rarely interrupted my work and never detracted from my enjoyment of living. If you’re 2-0 down at half-time, what do you do? You look at where the game is going wrong and why and what you’re going to do about it.”

The Foundation has raised more than £1.6 million for anti-cancer projects under the NHS banner, including a specialist research centre at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital. As ever, the messages from donors were humbling: “You were an inspiration to so many, a true local hero. Rest in peace Bobby”; “Always smiling, passionate and a true gentleman, a credit to England & the world of football”; “In memory of Bobby and my dad”; “My grandad has started treatment at the Freeman. He is very similar to Sir Bobby — a kind-hearted Geordie”.

Typically, he was uncomfortable about the use of his name, that it somehow suggested arrogance. “Why would people want to give money to me?” he said. The answer came not only in the big cheques from powerful friends, but when he went to matches at Newcastle, Sunderland or the Riverside Stadium and left with his pockets bulging with £5 and £10 notes, given by those who could afford no more.

He threw himself into it. Behind the scenes, the likes of Lady Elsie, Judith and Liz Luff, the one-woman publicity machine, toiled assiduously for the foundation, but it would have been worthless without Robson’s determination to drive it forward, even when the news about his own wellbeing was dispiriting and, later, calamitous. He would not miss meetings or engagements, he could not contemplate letting people down.

Self-pity was never an issue and neither, amazingly, was bitterness, in any aspect of his existence. His departure from Newcastle in 2004 was a source of anger, but that quickly faded, even as he watched the club he rebuilt unravel so disastrously. You can get dizzy searching for turning points at Newcastle, but Sir Bobby’s dismissal equated to a moment when soul was lost and respect dissipated.

But hate withered inside him; it had no fertile ground on which to grow. Instead, he reverted to his youth, travelling from Urpeth to St James’ when his health allowed, black-and-white scarf around his neck, relishing the occasion and the atmosphere. As things grew worse, he felt only sadness. When you relayed the latest gossip — usually negative — he would tut and shake his head, but he was forever optimistic.

He was eager for Shearer or, before he accepted the same post at Sunderland, for Steve Bruce to be appointed Newcastle’s next permanent manager; like him, they understand the rhythms of the North East, the yearning, the pride, the special, crazy beauty. Bruce was among the men who travelled to Sir Bobby’s home on Thursday for a last and quiet farewell.

Yet, despite the circumstances, solemnity does not quite fit. “Cancer takes no account of colour — black-and-white or red-and-white, orange or purple, young or old, male or female, weak or strong, we’re all the same,” the old pitman wrote in My Kind of Toon. “I’m desperately proud that a facility in Newcastle, my city, my father’s city, the city where football burrowed deeper into my body than any disease ever could, will bear my name, but more than that, I’m honoured and touched by the response our appeal has had across the region and beyond.

“Yes, I was born into a black-and-white world. But as my last great challenge draws to a close, I am more convinced than ever that we are surrounded by light, not darkness.”

Robson would have been touched by yesterday’s release of emotion; touched, embarrassed and faintly quizzical. Are they talking about me? He would have loved the warm words from football men such as Sir Alex Ferguson and Niall Quinn and he would love it even more if Newcastle could scrape a victory away to West Bromwich Albion next Saturday. He would have loved the cricket score, too.

Apologies are due, again, because this has been a rambling, incoherent sort of tribute — although I hope I’ve got the names right — and Sir Bobby did not take kindly to slackness. There was so much I wanted to tell him, to thank him for, to explain how it felt to be near him, to listen to, to appreciate and learn. He has gone now, but the same feeling lingers: I’m still desperate to make him proud.

Extraordinary life of a coal miner's son

2009-07-31T11:04:00.002+01:00

At the time when Newcastle United's future hangs on a thread, courtesy a couple of incompetent fools, this came not as a shock - because it was inevitable - but as a blow to the million fans across the world - for here was a man whose heart and soul was his hometown club. RIP Sir Bobby. From The Independent -

Sir Bobby Robson was a man who never knew when he was beaten.

On the football pitch, disappointment simply spurred him on to greater things; off it, even a prolonged battle against cancer could not diminish his zest for life or the game which occupied so much of his 76 years.

Robson's death has robbed English football of one of its most enduring characters, a player who was good enough to represent his country on 20 occasions before losing his place to Bobby Moore, but a man who made an even bigger name for himself as a manager.

He had his regrets - but for Diego Maradona's infamous "Hand of God" goal in 1986 and the width of a post in Turin four years later, he might have matched Sir Alf Ramsey's achievement of winning the World Cup.

His failure to claim a trophy during a thrilling five-year spell in charge at Newcastle, the club he supported as a boy, left a yawning gap, while the old Division One title twice only just eluded him as unfashionable Ipswich threatened to upset the natural order.

However, Robson will be remembered as a man who made the impossible seem possible, a quality which endeared him to directors, players and fans wherever he went.

But while he lived out his dreams at Wembley Stadium, the Nou Camp and St James' Park, his character was formed in far more humble surroundings.

Robert William Robson was born in County Durham on February 18, 1933 and grew up in Langley Park.

Life at the coal face was not for him - indeed, he was an apprentice electrician when his big chance came along in the shape of a professional contract at Fulham at the age of 17.

He made 344 appearances and scored 77 goals in two spells at Craven Cottage either side of a six-year stint with West Brom, for whom he turned out on 239 occasions and found the back of the net 55 times.

However, for all his undoubted quality as a player, it was after making the step into management that he set out on the road to worldwide fame.

It was not always straightforward - his first job with Vancouver Royals in Canada ended in failure, while he learnt of his sacking as Fulham boss after just 10 months from a newspaper billboard.

But his career was launched in earnest at Portman Road when in January 1969, he was appointed Ipswich boss to begin a love affair which lasted until his dying day.

Robson transformed a sleepy corner of Suffolk into a major seat of domestic and European football, winning the FA Cup in 1978 and the UEFA Cup three years later.

It was little wonder the Football Association turned to Robson after Ron Greenwood's departure as England manager, and although it was a wrench, he could not ignore his country's call.

The injustice of Maradona's intervention and the penalty shoot-out misery which ended the nation's dreams in the semi-finals at Italia 90 never lost their sting for Robson, an nor really did the knowledge that, had he lifted the trophy that summer, his contract would not have been renewed.

But in characteristically philosophical fashion, Robson threw himself into club management again, cutting his teeth in European football Holland with PSV Eindhoven, whom he guided to the Dutch title in his first season in charge.

From there, he continued his education in Portugal with Sporting Lisbon and then Porto with the help of young interpreter Jose Mourinho, who would later follow him to Spanish giants Barcelona before himself moving on to greater things.

Louis van Gaal's arrival in Catalonia signalled the end of Robson's reign and a stop-gap appointment which took him back to PSV for a year seemed to have brought an end to an illustrious career.

However, at the age of 66, the one job he simply could not turn down came his way after desperate Newcastle chairman Freddy Shepherd turned to him in the wake of Ruud Gullit's disastrous reign on Tyneside.

Against the odds, he dragged a club which had flirted with relegation into the upper reaches of the Premiership and beyond that, into the Champions League with a thrilling brand of football which had Tyneside buzzing as it had during the heights of the Kevin Keegan era.

But crucially, the long-awaited silverware never arrived and in August 2004, Shepherd decided the time for change had come.

Robson, who had been knighted for his services to football in 2002, was deeply wounded by his departure, but yet again, refused to be sidelined, and after being linked with a series of managerial posts, accepted Steve Staunton's invitation to assist him with the Republic of Ireland.

But having already survived two bouts of cancer, he was struck down by a brain tumour in August 2006 and complications for once knocked him sideways before he was given the all-clear.

When asked about Robson, Shepherd once commented: "He's a one-off. When they made him, they threw the mould away. There certainly isn't another one."

Robson transcended eras, somehow managing to rationalise the relative innocence of his own playing days with the excesses of the modern game and the challenge of coaching and motivating multi-millionaires.

Today, he finally had to admit defeat in his last battle of all, but he did so having established himself as one of the most successful managers of his generation, a figure of international standing and an unabashed enthusiast to the last.

Not bad for the son of a County Durham coal miner.

Geordie Boy to Lead The Geordie Nation

2009-04-02T13:17:00.005+01:00

How I miss Newcastle today. Even from quite a few thousand miles I can feel the pulse of the Geordie Nation - I can see men, women and children in black and whites flocking around the gates of St. James' Park - just as they did a year ago when The King came back. Since then, they have been betrayed most cruelly...the season collapsed, and now the dream is back from despair - I miss the feel of that dream.

Here's an article from The Independent -

Shearer: 'I love this club and I believe I can help it'

As the Newcastle hero takes charge, Michael Walker reports on why he might just achieve the impossible

Thursday, 2 April 2009

They say that you should judge a man by the company he keeps – and so, when Alan Shearer makes his return to Newcastle United this afternoon, it might be worth considering the men either side of the Geordie hero as he trots up the steps into St James' Park once more. Shearer is perceived as dull and wooden by many but those who know Shearer well know a different individual – and by having Iain Dowie and Paul Ferris alongside him, Shearer is making an immediate statement.

Shearer left school in Gosforth in 1986, aged 16, to become an apprentice footballer at Southampton. He had one CSE – in English – and no interest in academia. When he sits down with Dowie and Ferris to discuss the immediate future at a football club seemingly hell-bent on hysteria, Shearer will be talking to an engineering degree student in Dowie and in Ferris a qualified barrister who has a masters degree in the history of ideas. One thing even Shearer's critics acknowledge: he is no mug.

There cannot be many more academically qualified former footballers than Dowie and Ferris, and though in time – if this eight-game spell is a success – Shearer will bring in more obvious Newcastle figures such as Rob Lee, he has in the first instance shown an ability to recognise the differing talent of others and to delegate.

That is a start. What Shearer then brings to the Newcastle dressing room – any dressing room – is a personality that fills it (not the one who looks vaguely uncomfortable on Match of the Day) and inspires it.

As Sir Bobby Robson said when recommending Shearer for the post: "Alan will make a very good manager – he's got clout. Alan might not have any experience but he knows what the club is all about, he knows the supporters, he knows how they feel and he'd be dedicated to it."

"I got a call over the weekend off Derek Llambias [managing director] and Mike Ashley and I went round for a chat," said Shearer. "They asked if I would take charge for the remaining eight games and I asked for a little time to think and spoke to a few people. It's a club I love and I, like many thousands of people, desperately don't want the club to go down and I will do everything I can to try to prevent that. It's a tough situation and I feel deeply for this club. I believe I can help it along with the players. This is for an eight-game spell, I'm looking no further than that."

What Dowie brings is coaching experience. Dowie is known and trusted but his choice is proof of Shearer's sometimes unpredictable nature. In Ferris's case, there is vast experience of football and Newcastle United, for whom he first played as a 16-year-old in May 1982. As Gary Speed put it yesterday, what Shearer has already done is reveal his "common sense".

Speed, a former Newcastle team-mate, golfing partner and close friend, is not unbiased, but Speed describes the sudden Newcastle-Shearer development as "the best thing that could have happened at this time. Imagine what the atmosphere is going to be like against Chelsea on Saturday. That is down to one man. There is a lot of talk about experience and lack of it, but how do you get it? What I'd say is that management is about leadership and character and Alan has that. He is not the man you see on the telly, but then it's not just Alan Shearer who is restrained when on TV."

The Alan Shearer that former playing colleagues know is someone who was one of the lads off the pitch. Shearer has long been fully aware of his market rate, and has transformed the fabled sheet metal-worker's son into a multimillionaire, but while always at the back when it came to running exercises in training, Shearer was to the front when Newcastle players were having nights out on the Quayside and elsewhere.

However, unless you count decking Keith Gillespie outside a bar in Dublin on one Newcastle socialising trip as reckless, Shearer has managed to stay away from the more lurid headlines that afflicted footballers, several of whom were colleagues at Newcastle. Those who know him say the common sense kicks in. He is acutely aware that he is not just the "Al" his mates know, but the public figure who is Alan Shearer.

He understood this quickly. Given his ferocious match-defining abilities, Shearer could easily have got carried away in an era when celebrity culture was beginning to infect football, but he was aware from the earliest England and title-winning days at Blackburn Rovers of the weight of his opinion. Shearer's words can cause tremors like few others' in English football and that is one reason why he became set on hiding behind a device even he called "Shearer-speak".

Among friends that iron curtain comes down and as he wades into the water of management, with its press conference treadmill, Shearer will be expected to give away little pieces of himself. But it will be little by little.

And yet amid that caginess, there is a gambler – and a romantic – to add to the professional public figure and streetwise football man.

It is not just that Shearer has an interest in horseflesh that can lead him into the betting ring: when he made the two most important football decisions of his playing career, on each occasion Shearer shunned the favourite's option of joining Manchester United. In leaving Southampton in 1992, where he and Dowie overlapped for a year, Shearer famously spurned Alex Ferguson for Kenny Dalglish at Blackburn; in leaving Blackburn four years later, Shearer bought into Kevin Keegan's vision at Newcastle rather than, again, Ferguson's trophy parade at Old Trafford. This is not ruthless career progression, this is speculation.

And it went sour. Sitting alone with Shearer at St James' one day late in 1998, he reflected that, with Keegan's departure six months after his arrival, his first bad injury and then Dalglish's dismissal, he was not experiencing "the dream sold to me by Kevin Keegan". It was a difficult period at the club and the rumour of his imminent sale was unrelenting. His tone was downbeat. It felt that a wrong choice had been made at the end of Ewood Park and that the greatest striker of his generation, arguably the greatest English player of his generation, would go unfulfilled. Shearer's response to that notion was: "The club is unfulfilled, not just me. And I'm part of this club."

Although there were excellent Champions League days under Bobby Robson, a record number of goals for the club and an unforgettable testimonial night, that reply remains almost a Newcastle motto.

Shearer is now in a position to change that. But only if his impact is instant. There is a belief that due to the state Newcastle have got themselves into, Shearer is in a win-win situation even if the club is relegated. But a couple of losses soon change opinion. Shearer may be football-smart, possess common sense and natural clout, but this is still a gamble. It is another one featuring Newcastle United.

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All the best Newcastle - I'll see you on Saturday from few thousand miles away.

Kolkata to Chilika - a travelogue

2009-01-30T06:15:00.008Z

Not many people do long drives in India - for one because you have a wide range of options for public transport - trains, buses, planes, and secondly because you don't get roads like the UK motorways or the US Interstates. Driving is a hassle here, irrespective of the newly built Golden Quadrilateral - a network of high quality roadways connecting the four corners. And that's why this first attempt of mine to drive all the way to the Chilika Lake (in Orissa) from Kolkata, a total distance of around 1200km (up and down) was unnerving to say the least. But I gathered some courage and took tips from other travellers on the Team-BHP forums and planned for the trip.

23rd January, 2009 - Kolkata to Rambha (Chilika)

It took us almost four hours till one in the morning to pack our bags after coming back from work at half-eight in the evening. And you can imagine why. It's just a couple of dresses for me and my wife, but for the kids you need a bagful of clothes. Add to that a bag of nappies, babyfood, snacks for the long drive, travel utensils contained in a bag from the National Trust (UK), two camera backpacks, a tripod and what not! The rear boot of the car (it's not a big car, a small Suzuki Swift VXi) was full, the front passenger seat packed with bags, and with three passengers (my wife, and two kids - Rik and Riti) at the back, we managed to start at six in the morning, with eyes still sleepy - an after effect of staying up till late for packing and waking up at four in the morning. It was almost quarter past seven when we hit the Bombay Road (NH6) past the Kona Expressway after filling up the tank.

The roads were still fairly empty - the tourists haven't started yet. It took us less than an hour to reach Kolaghat where we were stuck in the age-old traffic congestion because of the ongoing roadwork on a bridge which has been converted into a one-way route. They stop vehicles on both sides and release one side at a time, and it results in huge queues of vehicles which grow worse as the day breaks. You'll find vendors selling tea, coffee, snacks and what not right on the highway. We had our morning tea there, and luckily didn't have to wait for more than half-an-hour in the queue. The road was empty beyond Kolaghat again (I guess most tourists take the route towards Digha and Mandarmoni beach) and we reached near Kharagpur shortly. The NH60 starts there and runs towards Balasore - it's a nice concrete road like in the UK and fairly empty. We had our breakfast in a dhaba near Belda where the people were still cleaning their front-yard at half-nine. After crossing Belda, we reached Daton, after which Orissa starts. The first halt was Jaleswar, where the Orissa Goverment perform an "official theft" from all private registered cars with non-Orissa numberplates. Aparently, from November 1, 2008, they have implemented a law whereby all private vehicles coming into Orissa will have to pay a road tax based on the unladen weight of the car, and the minimum period of this tax is six months - even though you are going for a holiday of may be three or four days - which I think is ridiculous. I've seen some complaints about this on the Team-BHP forums and I tried to argue with the taxman, but had to give up because the rest of the travellers on other vehicles started paying out the tax, which was more of an extortion than a legal tax. But I must acknowledge that the taxman was really cool-headed as he kept on smiling and repeating the law infront of around twenty odd angry travellers swearing at him. I've atleast been able to force him to provide me with a copy of the law with his name and designation, and am thinking of filing a PIL (which people say is quite easy to file, although I have no idea what happens after that).

Anyways, we lost about an hour at the checkpost because of the arguement, and it was around eleven when at last we started on our way towards Balasore. And the normal Indian roads take over from there - a stretch of 60km from Balasore to Bhadrak. If you are only used to UK motorways, then you might find this stretch shocking, but for us, it was okay - especially because we got used to Jessore Road (NH34) which is the only way to my in-law's place. It was nothing worse than NH34, except for thirty odd diversions. The worrying bit was the driving habit of some people - throughout Orissa you'll see the four-lane NH5 being used a two parallel roads, with vehicles moving up and down on both sides - irrespective of what all the rules and your driving sense says:-) Good road starts again after Bhadrak, and we increased our speed, reaching Panikoili at around 2pm, where we had our lunch with alu paratha and kadhai paneer. Feeding the kids is always troublesome and time-consuming, and we could only start at quarter past three, with still 40km to go till Cuttack and then around 30 km till Bhubaneswar and then 100 more kilometres from there.

During all this time, it was mayhem inside the car. Whatever toy or book Rik takes, Riti will grab for it, and the reverse is also true. And if she can't get it, she will let out her patented scream, which is sort of deafening to say the least. If one falls asleep, the other doesn't like it. If Rik sleeps, then Riti climbs up on his shoulder and scream - "Iiiiiiiik Iiiiiik", and if Riti falls asleep, then Rik complains - "Why is she sleeping, when will she get up?" And if both are awake, it's a mayhem - a shouting match. After Cuttack, both fell asleep, and it was peace at last, with my ears getting a much needed rest. Sumana too was half asleep by that time. I stopped after crossing Bhubaneswar and had a cup of tea - it was already half-past five, almost twelve hours since we started, with still about 90km to go and it was getting dark. The road beyond Balugaon was again two-lane, and quite bumpy and broken at places. We crossed few hills on our way which looked fairly scenic but we didn't have time to stop and enjoy the view. It was pitch dark beyond Balugaon, and vehicles from the opposite side were coming with their lights on the full-beams (another menace on the roads here - they don't have any consideration for the others). Some drivers would lower their beam when you flick once, most won't care. In fact, a lunatic trucker rushed towards our car when I flicked and as I tried to save ourselves, our left wheels went out of the paved road onto the ground about six inches below the road level with the chasis getting rubbed on the road making a horrible screeching noise. Anyways, I had to be extra careful after that, and reached the OTDC Panthanivas at Rambha (Chilika) at quarter to eight - total time taken a little less than fourteen hours (ofcourse with a total stoppage time of nearly four hours) and a total distance of approximately 590km.

The Panthanivas was tidy and well maintained - good people and clean rooms with large balconies on the lake side. We were dead tired and simply dropped on the bed after a quick dinner.

24th January, 2009 - Rambha and nearby

I slept with an alarm set on the mobile - with an intention to watch the sun rising over the Chilika lake. At six in the morning, I woke up with my psiatic nerve swollen again - the sky was getting lighter - but it was foggy. My wife decided to watch the sunrise from the balcony and took her post there with her camera, and I walked down to the lake-side. The sun started rising soon after, and people started flocking there - wrapped in sweaters, scarves and monkey-caps (even though it was fairly warm, with the temperature at about 22/24 degrees) - trying to capture the sunrise on their fancy point-and-shoots with their flashbulbs! This was the first time I set my DSLR to the RAW mode and took quite a few snaps - and they seemed rather good.

I came back to our room, had a shower and took our breakfast of toasts-jam-butter-eggs and tea. Then I went to find out about boats for the tour of the lake. The manager of the lodge said that their boats will take us to five nearby islands - but we decided to take the boat on the next day, as firstly we were short of cash (they'd only accept cash) and secondly, it was already late in the morning, and it won't probably be that good on the lake. We thought of driving towards Satapada instead, and see if we can take a boat to the dolphin-spot. We lost an hour because of the unwanted drive to Balugaon to get some cash from the cash machines (the nearest ones) and coming back from there.

A small road went out of NH5 at a place called Pallur Junction towards Satapada. We started on that road and soon after we entered the most remote villages I've ever seen since my childhood visit to Ramnagar, Birbhum - my grandma's birthplace. Narrow roads swerved between muddy houses with thatched roofs and I think not many cars take that route - because people were looking surprised. After lots and lots of turns, we reached the end of the road - Satapada was still 5km, but across the waterway. The next vessel would arrive after two hours - so we decided to take a local fishing boat and go towards the other islands. The boat took us to an island called the Rajhansa (meaning The Swan) - which holds a forest department villa - and a beach which happened to be the most solitary beach I've ever seen. There was miles and miles of golden sand, with not a single piece of dirt anywhere to be seen - and no people other than the four of us - and lots of yellow crabs, who seemed quite camera-shy, and scurried down towards the water as soon as I reached within twenty feet of them. Rik was half-drenched with a wave coming upon him, and Riti started crying - I guess she was scared of the waves and the sound...and didn't come down of her mum's shoulder.

After spending some time on the beach we took the reverse route on the boat again - and got to see the setting sun. The sun was the only worthwhile thing to watch on first day at Chilika - and nothing else - except a swamp - and yes, that solitary beach at Rajhansa. It was almost eight in the evening when we drove down that swerving road again to Panthanivas - had our dinner with chapati, fried potatoes, dal and fish-curry. We planned to take a short boat trip the next morning for bird watching and then drive towards our next stop at Konark.

25th January, 2009 - towards Konark

We again woke up early, had our shower and breakfast and walked down to the jetty to take a ride on a Panthanivas speed boat to the nearby islands. The boat needed to be pushed out of the shallow waters to let the propeller move freely. Even there, the water wasn't too deep and one can see the bottom quite clearly - it would probably be chest height at the most. We saw the Breakfast Island which is a small house built on the lake for the kings to have their breakfast; then an island with some caves which have some deities now; the Bird Island - where we couldn't see a single bird. We were able to see some birds, mostly seagulls on the water, but they all flew away with the boat approaching because of the noise from the boat. And the boat was bouncing so hard that I wasn't able to take proper shots at the birds with the tele lens on my camera. It doesn't make much sense to go bird watching in Chilika - probably Bharatpur is a better bet. And for us it was quite disappointing, because we have been to the Ferne Islands and Seahouses on the North Sea coast where you won't be able to see much of the land because of so many migratory birds.

We came back from the boat trip and started towards Konark, back again on NH5, now driving northwards. The original plan was to take the road towards Puri/Konark from Khurda Road, but the Panthanivas manager suggested another bypass (Jamjat or something like that), midway between Balugaon and Bhubaneswar, and unfortunately, we took that route.

The road practically doesn't exist - you'll only see potholes all over the place with few bits of original asphalt remaining. I could very well realize why Sheikh Ahamad Ali made Mujataba tie a turban on his head during his epic journey from Peshwar to Kabul - the only thing was we didn't have the turbans on our head. You can only go upto 20kmph at the most on the road, with the car swaying dangerously from side to side - almost like a boat, sometimes tilted on one side as if it would topple at the slightest touch. And this went on for about 55-60km, with dust and potholes being our only companions on the road. And then we ended up on the original road toward Puri, the same one which starts at Khurda Road, and diverts at Pipili, and way better than the road so far. We turned towards Puri and just before Puri we took the Marine Drive towards Konark and finally reached Konark at half past three in the afternoon - around five and half hours from Rambha, delayed by at least an hour and half because of the terrible bypass.

And the crowd at Konark was shocking. I've been to the Sun Temple when I was a kid, and as far as I can remember, there were only a few tourists at that time. Now, it seemed almost like the Book Fair in Kolkata with people everywhere. In fact, if you wish to take some snaps of the Sun Temple itself in peace, you'll be disappointed. I tried for hours, but couldn't take a single snap of the sculpture of the Sun God - instead had to satisfy myself with photos of the rest of the temple. We had a guide, but the guy was busy pointing to certain special sculptures (depicting scenes from the Kamasutra) and asking me to explain them to my wife. And, at last finding a place to try out their legs, Rik and Riti made us run behind them all the time...

The OTDC Yatrinivas at Konark was awful. The rooms were dirty, the bathroom shabby - with loose fittings almost out of their sockets. I asked the room service to send two cups of tea, and they probably noted the wrong room number - whatever they did we didn't get the tea. We ordered food at the restaurant at 9pm, and instead of the promised 20 minutes, we got the food at 10pm, and by that time, Riti fell asleep. To keep Rik awake, I let him watch Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Cartoon Network - but a couple came in and prompty changed the channel to Star Plus and started watching a wretched award ceremony, totally oblivious of the fact that several kids were watching the Harry Potter movie. We returned to our room at eleven, packed our bags as much as we could so that we could start early in the morning on our way back home - stopping at Bhubaneswar to visit the Lingaraj Temple.

26th January, 2009 - back towards Kolkata

I commented "poor" in almost all points on the comment book and the receptionist asked me why. And I vented my anger from the last night on him. We started from Konark at eight in the morning on our ay towards Bhubaneswar. There isn't much to write about the journey except for the farce about fuel. 26th January is a National Holiday, and all the petrol pumps were closed for the day. But, ofcourse people woule need fuel - especially it was a long weekend and there were loads of tourists - on cars and buses. Some people were selling petrol and diesel filled in cans and bottles infront of the closed pumps right before the eyes of the police, and that too at a higher price - and travellers were being forced to buy. This is called an emergency service, and the same excuse was used to implement ESMA to break the legitimate strike by the petroleum workers just a few days back, but on the other hand, no one cares about the black market created because of the national holiday.

I drove at around 60kmph with the AC at the minimum to save as much fuel as I could. When I started, I had enough fuel to drive upto Kharagpur, and if I couldn't get any more, we'd have to spend the night somewhere. We reached Bhubaneswar at around 10am. You can't take any cameras or mobile phones inside the Lingaraj Temple - and I felt cheated because I couldn't take any pictures, although, the temple had exquisite sculptures. You see, I'm not religious at all - in fact I'm an atheist - but I visit such places just to see the paintings and sculptures and to be able to take pictures of them. While coming out of the temple, I saw that wretched notice - "Non-hindus are not allowed inside the temple" - and my anger started growing and I made a few comments about the notice being extremely racist - and the guards became curious about me. We started from Bhubaneswar at around eleven, driving in the same manner as before - within 60kmph, minimal AC - and finally saw some open pumps after Cuttack where I refilled and was back on road full speed. And again, it was the same mayhem in the car - the shouting match - Iiiiiik etc. - bit of crying too - and we reached Kolaghat at around 7pm in the evening and was stuck in an immense congestion due to that one-way bridge. It took about an hour to get clear of the congestion - we stopped at a dhaba for our dinner with chapati and tarka - and finally rached home at 9.30pm. At last. Total distance covered - 1467km. Time to plan the next trip.

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The Israel Lobby

2008-11-26T11:35:00.005Z

I found this interesting article from the London Review of Books. Worth reading for anyone interested in the Middle East affairs.

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.

The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’

Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.

Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):

Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.

Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.

Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.

The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.

Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.

Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.

Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’

The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.

The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.

One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.

It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.

Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.

The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

10 March

Cricket - Once More

2008-11-10T09:23:00.004Z

It's two down and three to go. Two of India's best cricketers and one of the "Fab Four" have left the game for good, three remains. It will never be the same again for us who watched them build a team which challenged for the superiority. I stopped writing about cricket and even following the game since the infamous episode about Greg Chappel. But, the departure of these two calls for another post - this time a piece from Cricinfo by Peter Roebuck.

The many sides of Sourav

Sometimes a rebel, often a creative force, always in the thick of it, Ganguly has been a many-layered character, and his career an astonishing one.

November 6, 2008

Gangles was fun. Every now and then a fellow feels like tearing off his shirt and waving it around like Mick Jagger with a microphone. Of all places, Sourav Ganguly responded to the urge at Lord's, holiest of cricketing holies. So much for decorum. He might as well have burped in St Paul's. Every now and then a fellow feels an insult coming on. Ganguly was rude to Steve Waugh, captain of all Australia, the mightiest foe of them all. So much for deference. Typically it started as a misjudgment and became an amusement that turned into a strategy.

Ganguly did not mind directing the fire at himself. What could they do? Bowl bumpers? Already every fast bowler worth his salt had tried to knock off his head. He had no lordly lineage but he walked and talked as he pleased, not exactly trying to provoke opponents but unwilling to deny himself. He did not give much ground to the modern game, with its fitness and diving and running between wickets and morning training and all that rot. It was brave of him to remain apart, for it left him exposed to ridicule, forced him to justify himself. But Ganguly was not scared of the pressure. Perhaps he needed the extra pressure the way a veteran car needs a crank. And, just in case, he had the populist touch. If Anil Kumble was the colossus, Sachin Tendulkar the champion, Rahul Dravid the craftsman, VVS Laxman the sorcerer, then Ganguly was the inspiration.

It has been an astonishing career. Some men prefer to follow a predictable path and their stories tell of a slow rise to the top and an equally measured decline. To that end instinct is subdued, contention avoided and risk reduced. That has been altogether too dull for Ganguly. Throughout he has toyed with his fate, tempting it to turn its back on him so that once again he could surprise the world with a stunning restoration. Something in him rebelled against the mundane and the sensible. He needed his life to be full of disasters and rescues, and comebacks and mistakes and memorable moments. To hell with the prosaic. At heart he is a cavalier, albeit of mischievous persuasion.

Taken as a whole, his contribution has been a triumph. It is no small thing for a boy from Kolkata to make it in Indian cricket. Till then local players were regarded as soft touches, and Ganguly himself was so categorised in his early days. Whereas the Mumbai-ites had risen through a rigorous system and the outstation boys had fought every inch of the way, the Bengalis seemed to lack the toughness required to make the grade. Ganguly changed all that. Indeed it was one of the many tasks he set himself. Always he has pitted himself against presumption and always he has prevailed.

Heavens, he even managed to time his departure as sweetly as ever he did any cover-drive. Before the series began he disarmingly announced that these four Tests against Australia were going to be his last. At a stroke his announcement put an end to speculation that he might lose his place. Ganguly is shrewder than he pretends. Just for a day or so it seemed that he might not get his way as reports spread of indiscreet remarks supposedly made about Robin Uthappa's hair, but Ganguly disowned the comments, even the splendid one about "every Tom, Dick and Harry" playing in the team. And so, once again, he lived to fight another day. Mind you, he let them hang in the air for 72 hours! That was typical Ganguly: at once the hero and the villain.

To some extent his manner has distracted attention from his cricket. Above all he has been a fine player whose career tells of determination and perseverance. As a batsman he played numerous influential innings. Often he was at his best on the game's greatest stages (including Lord's, where he first made his mark) or when the chips were down. Then he could concentrate. In less stressful times his batting could be flashy, with shots vaguely executed and the outcome left to the gods. Ganguly was not a collector of runs but a match player. Such men cannot be judged only in terms of tallies.

As captain he was an uplifting figure prepared to stand up for his players. It is easily forgotten that his captaincy started with Indian cricket at its lowest ebb. Hereabouts India was extremely lucky to have at its disposal a superb group of senior players untouched by those dire events, and a new captain free from the insecurity and greed that had undone his predecessor. Accepting money from grubby sources was, one sensed, beneath Ganguly. He just did not move in those circles or think along those lines.

Not that Ganguly alone deserves all the credit for India's swift recovery. Around him could be found a resolute and principled bunch of cricketers. They needed someone to blow the bugle and Ganguly obliged. That is leadership. Alone among the cricketing nations, his Indian side repeatedly troubled the Australians. Under his leadership the team prevailed in England, daring to bat first on a Headingley greentop. Indeed the very image of Indian cricket changed - a process started by Sunil Gavaskar and completed by Ganguly and companions. No longer does anyone talk about timidity against fast bowling or languishing overseas. Driven in varying degrees by pride and professionalism, the now-departing generation acknowledged these weaknesses, confronted them and corrected them.

Always Ganguly was in the thick of it. No matter how often he was discarded he bounced back. No matter how frequently his cricketing obituary was written he found a way back into the team. At times he seemed to relish the headlines forecasting his imminent and final downfall. He is not by nature defiant. It is too petty an emotion. Just that he liked to prove doubters wrong. Criticism spurred him on. Otherwise he was inclined to become lethargic. He revelled in his reputation as an independent man who lived and played by his own lights.

He is not a man easily pinned down. Although it is never wise to suppose a man can be caught in a single adjective, it is much easier with his contemporaries. To watch Rahul Dravid or Virender Sehwag or Anil Kumble play is to know a large part of them. Ganguly liked to keep people guessing. Perhaps it is his background. Is it possible that the son of a wealthy businessman might have had some reservations, even embarrassment, about becoming a professional cricketer? Deep down Ganguly belonged to the old days, not so much of aristocracy as of ease. He cast himself as a sportsman, a player of games, and on the surface did not take it too seriously. And yet the fires of competition burned hot.

In some respects he has been a rebel, against the expectations of his origins, against dutiful modern ways, against the patronising of his country. But he is too large a figure to be motivated by anything as shrivelling as anger. Rather he has been a creative force in the game. As a batsman he was full of neatly executed strokes. It was not in his nature to brutalise the ball. Nor was he a poet caressing it with a delicate touch. Neither extreme attracted him in the slightest. Instead he stroked the ball, guiding it between fieldsmen or lifting it over their heads. It looked effortless but some men like to hide the strain.

He has an unusual and unconventional mind. Often he will make the remark that raises eyebrows, causes people to stop and think. After all the hullabaloo of the travesty in Sydney, his stepped back and said that it had shown "how desperately the Australians want to win". All India was in a rage and yet a part of him respected that unbridled determination to prevail. He saw the meaning of the whole thing. Indeed he must have taken satisfaction from it. Australia has worked themselves into a lather over beating India. The rivalry had been largely his creation. And India had stood its ground. He had played his part in that as well.

Ganguly was at his most effective against the Australians. Somehow he sensed that the two nations had a lot in common, though they knew it not. But he felt that his players were unduly intimidated by the reputations and muscularity of these opponents. Accordingly he set out to convince them that the Aussies were human and could be beaten. In India he turned up late for the toss, a cheekiness that began as an accident and became an amusing tactic. It worked. The Australians became riled and started to play the man and not the ball. They had fallen into Ganguly's trap. His players could see that he was neither scared nor scarred, and enjoyed plucking the giant's beard. As captain Ganguly understood the value of gestures, the importance of appearances.

By no means, though, was it all gestures. Ganguly was the real thing, or else he could not have carried his players along with him. In Australia in 2003-04 he knew that his struggling team needed him to lead the way in the critical hour with a captain's innings and in Brisbane he promptly produced a rousing, valorous hundred on a lively pitch against a rampant attack. It was this performance that confirmed, once and for all, that Ganguly was not as fragile as he seemed. A twig can be snapped but not even a tempest can uproot a tree. It also secured the respect of his initially reluctant opponents, who know a fighter when they see one. As far as the Aussies were concerned, Lord Snooty had earned his stripes. It is one thing to talk, quite another to follow up with deeds.

And now he leaves the scene. Although he has batted with silky serenity in this series, it is the right time to go. A man has only so many struggles in him. A player's supporters have only so many battles in them. Perhaps in the last few days of his career he will play his part in India's greatest cricketing feat, the downing of Australia not by miraculous deed but sustained ruthlessness. If so it will be no more than he deserves. Ganguly has been neither a genius or a saint or a great batsman, but he has served with distinction and leaves Indian cricket in a much better state than he found it.

Klueless

2008-10-31T07:21:00.003Z

A long time ago, I started doing the Neutral Riddle puzzle. It was addictive to say the least, but unfortunately I couldn't complete it - level 41 was just too much. This time, I found another one - Klueless - similar sort of puzzle, addictive again, and you can't stop till you complete it. And after three days, I am not klueless anymore - and that IS satisfying:-)

If you are interested in such puzzles, I'd say what are you waiting for? Get, set and go. The feeling at the end is the reward.

All the best!!!

Eat footy, sleep footy, drink only Newcastle Brown

2008-05-02T14:34:00.010+01:00

When just a few days are left of my days in this city, which has been no less than a home to me, here's what I feel - and will always feel for this place...

The time has come when my six year's attachment with this dusty old town is about to end. Amidst the boring life of packing my bags, clearing my desks and getting ahead with the project work, the only attraction - rather the only tension - is where in the English Premier League will the black and white football team of this black and white city will end the season. I've seen people playing football at other places - I can count atleast four to five teams around London playing in the EPL - but there's something different here. Week in, week out, the ninety minutes run by the eleven black and white players of the team at St. James' Park - the most prominent feature in the city's skyline - is not just another football match to the people of the Tyneside. It may be just a recreation for the Southerners, but beyond the north-south divide, at Tyneside or Wearside or Teesside, football is the means of going head to head with London. Of these, the philosophy of the Tyneside stands out - it's way better to lose after giving the opponent a big scare - than to hide behind the defence and save a match. Football is entertainment - as Keegan said few weeks ago - Southerners go to the West End for a theatre or the Opera - after a hard week, for the working class of of the Tyneside, football and tens of cans of beer provide the entertainment.

A few months ago - the Tyneside were terribly dissapointed after the team manager boasted a good performance when the team drew 0-0 with Stoke City at the Britannia Stadium - for months, they have been dissatisfied with the spineless display of their team. Soon after the first leg, the manager was gone which started the now-familiar soap opera of associating famous names - such as "the Special One" Mourinho, or someone else. At Southampton, a friendly old taxi driver informs me that it's "Arry" Redknapp who's going to be the next manager. It goes on for some days - then - on the evening of the 2nd leg match with Stoke City at St. James' Park, things change. No one was that confident anymore - but it will all change because of a two-line text message from the club - which said "The King is back, more to follow." There's one man whom the whole of Tyneside recognises as the King - and that man is Kevin Keegan. On my way home from the University, I saw a different city - may be the people of Ayoddha celebrated in a similar fashion when Ram returned to his kingdom after 14 years. It didn't take much long for tens of thousands of people to queue up infront of the gate of St. James' Park. When the suddenly rejuvenated Newcastle team were scoring their first of the four goals, the majority of the spectators were still trying to locate the King at the Directors' Box. The Chronicle wrote on the following day - "The Return of The King - Kev Comes Back to Settle Unfinished Business". At a reserve game, I saw thousands of kids - seven-eight years old - jumping with joy after seeing Keegan at the stands. Craze? Madness? But why?

My stay in this city during the past six years taught me why. I know from where this emotion comes. To an outsider, it might appear to be madness, but once you start knowing this place, you know that behind this emotion, there are the dreams of all these people - the dream of being back to the haydays when Newcastle was compared to Peru...

It's not a new town you know - it dates back to the Roman era - the ruins of the Hadrian's Wall, built by the Roman Emperror Hadrian still be seen at the eastern end of the town. After the Romans, the place became a part of the strong Anglo-Saxon kingdom and came to be known as Monkchester. It was destroyed several times due to war and floods - and during the times of Robert Curthose, on the ruins of Monkchester stood up Novum Castellum - Newcastle. The golden era started during the industrial revolution - mainly due to the huge supply of coal around the area - in Durham, Ashington, Northumberland. People started saying "Carrying coals to Newcastle" - that was around 1538AD. Heavy engineering industries, ship building industries ruled the place, and Newcastle competed with the likes of Manchester and Liverpool - but that was a long time ago. Tyne has changed its course a number of times since then - the affluence of the Tyneside has been washed down in the dark and muddy waters of Tyne. The last coalmine shut its doors just a few years ago. Two years ago, the closure of the Swan Hunter, the last shipyard on the Tyne, signalled the death of the ailing ship building industry. The growing North-South Divide made Newcastle look like the asthmatic patient who desparately wants to stand up and be counted like it did years ago - but doesn't have any means to stand up. The Millenium Bridge or the Science City are only recent developments - but the recent past only shows the history of ruins, and the dying industries. There was a time when the Swan Hunter shipyard was full of dust from the boots of no less than 45000 workers - around 1600 ships were built here - some of them now-famous - today when I drive past the yard, the towering cranes resemble a haunted graveyard - the rude awakening to the North-South Divide. And within this haunted house, for the past few decades, the Geordie pride is revolving around the eleven black and whites running at the St. James Park. "The Geordie nation, that's what we're fighting for. London's the enemy! You exploit us, you use us" - the direct effect of the North-South Divide, and the beginning of the well-calculated financial gamble of Sir John Hall. The beginning was astonishing too - with the fans' favourite Kevin Keegan as the Manager. Kevin picked up the ruins of the club when it was down at the wrong end of the 2nd Division and brought them back to the first - and the following years still remains fresh in the minds of the Geordie faithfuls.

"Micheal Martin, the editor of the True Faith fanzine, recalls his own Geordie blood stirring as Keegan's rejuvenated side galloped into the breakaway Premier League. 'John Hall tapped into something latent, the pride and the apartness of the north-east. Newcastle was depressed; industries like mining and shipbuilding had been destroyed. We bought into the idea of the club as the flagship of revival.'" [The Guardian, 8th February, 2006]

The Hall family made a fortune by spreading the Geordie-nation dream - season tickets, replica shirts were selling like hotcakes - the entire Tyneside dreaming about the glorydays dressed themselves up in black and whites - from the cute four year old to the ailing eighty year old - even though the last trophy was back in 1969. Keegan was partly successful in providing some pillars to the dreamworld - the performance of the black and whites during the mid-nineties won't be forgotten even by the staunchest of the Cockneys - and the Tyneside responded by naming Keegan as "The King." The Hall family may have seen the club as the cash-cow, but it remained the flagship of survival within the minds of the thousands of fans. From the Hall family to a PLC, now to a new owner - the time has changed, but the Geordie pride and the pashion haven't diminished a bit. From the parents, the baton has been transferred to their children, and will be transferred to their children - generation after generation...

There is a considerable body of literature on the aspects of football and society - the rivalry between the two Glasgow clubs - Celtic and Rangers is not just a footballing rivalry - rather the roots lie in the battle between the IRA and the Unionists in Northern Ireland - the green and white Celtic shirts and the green Ireland flags at the Ibrox are testaments of this history. Research into football and society says "The psychological satisfaction that people gain from “football” victories, related media coverage, social events, wearing the respective team colours and identifying with the emblems and symbols, which represent hundreds of years of history as well as everyday realities, is immense" - which is the case between Celtic and Rangers, and here at the Tyneside. This is the feeling which correlated the 1911 IFA Shield victory of Mohun Bagan over the (British) East Yorkshire Regiment with the ongoing Indian Freedom Movement against the British - the same feeling turned Newcastle United into the Geordie flagship of revival. It's the same at the Wearside, or at the Teesside. The three cities of the North-East of England have been clinging to their football clubs for the past few decades. They are the children of the North-South Divide.

There's a famous ditty which dates back to 1653 -

"England's a perfect world; has Indies too.
Correct your maps; Newcastle is Peru."

It used to point to the affluence of the entire Northumberland area - comparing the place with the Peru of the Aztecs and the Mayas - at a time when Newcastle and Sunderland were coming out of the darkness of the medieval ages to the lights of civilization, courtesy of the mining and the shipbuilding industries. "The alleged mists of barbarism and backwardness had been swept away by the winds of economic and social change. The growth of the coal industry since 1560 had had a profound impact; a rural world of corn-laden mules and cottage collieries had been transformed into England's first industrial landscape, dominated by coal-filled wagons, pit-heads, and the great wharfs of the Tyne and Wear. Newcastle and Sunderland had grown into major centres surrounded by prospering agricultural hinterlands aided by the recent enclosure of fields. Newcastle was England's third largest city, with a population of 12,000 in 1660, and had been described in 1633 by William Brereton--widely travelled in Britain and the Low Countries--as 'beyond all compare the fairest and richest town in England, inferior for wealth and building to no city save London and Bristol'. North-east England was anything but a backwater, and for some, Newcastle was a place of fine living, wining and dining: a true capital of culture." [Cattle to Claret: Scottish economic influence in North-East England, 1660-1750: Matthew Greenhall]

And in 2008, the North-east of England is an alien territorry to many Southerners - dying industries, foggy skies - it resembles a backward polluted backwater to the affluent Cockneys in the South. Stuart Jeffries wrote in the Guardian - "There is something different, not just about Newcastle and its football club, but about the north-east. Newcastle's like Liverpool - only more so - and nothing in the rest of England quite prepares you for it." The people are used to what the Southerners might think and are proud about their area and the history - the place is different, because they think it is - "pride in immutability and apartness are Geordie sentiments." This inward pride creates a platform of immense solidarity, a deep fellow-feeling, which is not just about the football club - but covers everything that is local - Northern Rock, for example. When Northern Rock collapsed, the local newspaper, The Journal, ran a big appeal - "In the past 10 years 1,520 organisations have received £175m from the Northern Rock Foundation. NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO HELP" - I can't think of any place in the world where people would think so fondly about a financial institution. It may be even more impossible to believe - for those who are alien to this place - that people really responded to the appeal by opening new accounts when others in London were queueing infront of the counters to get their money back. Crazy, is the other name of Geordie.

And, crazy, is the other name of a Bengalee too - crazy and emotional Bengalee - and that's what I am, and no wonder, I fall for it. Watching and living with the people in thse six years turn me into an almost-Geordie Bengalee - I eat and drink and sleep the football here - in my blog, I keep a link to Newcastle United right beside my childhood favourite Mohun Bagan - I shout while listeing to the match on the radio - when the black and whites lose, the delicious eveing meal seems rotten. On the day of Alan Shearer's testimonial match, when the town dresses up in black and whites, I too put on a Newcastle United's black and white shirt. Sometimes, I walk with my six-year old black and white dressed "Junior Magpie" to watch a game at the stadium...

Only a few more weeks - at the end of which I'll take a huge chunk of my life in the past six years woven within those two black and white shirts - and written within the two Geordie dictionaries - from which I've also learnt to say "How'ay man, ya'aalreet?"

Crossed the final hurdle, at last...

2008-02-25T15:53:00.004Z

I passed my viva last week, and it was sheer joy, a sense of relief, a feeling that I can never explain in words. This is to acknowledge the love and cheer and encouragement from everyone -

"I remember the day I first came to Newcastle to attend the interview for an RA position in the myGrid project. Newcastle was in stark contrast with the town of Gaithersburg, Maryland, where I used to live and work for Verizon Communications Inc. at Silver Spring. It was the middle of January - cold and cloudy and dark, and the wind from the North Sea almost blew me away. It was hard to make a decision about leaving the job in the US to join academia. Today, when I look back, I know, I was right. I have now spent more than five years in Newcastle, the longest period at one place since I left home in 1997 to join the software industry. And I can say that Newcastle has been nothing less than a home to me. It is like my hometown Calcutta - a city, which slowly grows around a person - Newcastle has grown all around me. And I owe it to Professor Paul Watson, Professor Pete Lee and Dr. Anil Wipat - who extended the first welcome to me. I owe my gratitude to the City of Newcastle, the university, all members of staff in the School of Computing Science, my friends within and outside the university, for the warmest five years I have stayed here, despite the chilling weather.

Professor Paul Watson was my supervisor and I could not have come this far without his constant guidance and support. Apart from always managing to get some funds to keep me employed as an RA without which I couldn't have continued with my PhD, he has provided me with valuable guidance and insights throughout the course of research. On numerous occasions when I was struggling to find the right approach, regardless of his busy schedule as the Director of the North East Regional e-Science Centre, Paul has been tireless in his attempts to make me focus on the problem from the correct angle. No word is sufficient to express my gratitude to Paul.

I would like to thank Professor Pete Lee and Dr. Aad van Moorsel, who were the two other members of my thesis committee for their valuable suggestions during and after the thesis committee meetings which acted as inputs to my work. Dr. Jim Smith is another person who has been a close friend in these five years and have always helped me when I faced any problem, be it regarding any architectural aspect of my work, or any silly question about LaTeX. I am indebted to Jim for his help and support whenever I asked for. Dr. Savas Parastatidis, who is now at Microsoft Research, was a source of inspiration during the years I was able to work with him. All the long discussions I had with him regarding the architecture of Web Services have contributed a lot towards my knowledge and the research. I must not miss mentioning about the support I received from the Computing Officers, especially Jim Wight and Gerry Tomlinson, who have always listened to my requests about new softwares on the cluster and helped me in configuring my experimental setup, which sometimes required Jim to bypass security rules of the Computing Cluster for the external computers I used during my experiments.

A large section of the work presented here was the result of collaborative research between Newcastle and Manchester Universities. I wish to thank my colleagues from Manchester, especially Professor Norman W. Paton, Dr. Alvaro A. A. Fernandes, Dr. Tasos Gounaris, Steven Lynden and Dr. M. Nedim Alpdemir, who unfortunately left for his country a couple of years ago, for all the active collaboration and support I received from all of them. Another part of the research, the development of the dynamic service oriented framework, was based on collaborative research as well, and I wish to thank Dr. Chris Fowler, Charles Kubicek, John Colquhoun for their valuable contributions.

I can not forget the amount of support I received from my family during this entire journey. My parents, Mrs. Binata Mukherjee and Mr. Prabhat Mukherjee have inspired me to dream since I was a child. And I am extremely indebted to them, and I hope that these three letters, if I am able to achieve them, will fulfil a part of their dreams. I can never express enough gratitude for the support I received from my sister, Dr. Nandini Mukhopadhyay, who has constantly encouraged me, at times pushed me - when I used to get frustrated. One person needs a special mention here, and that is my wife, Sumana, who never fell short in supporting me in every step, and was not shy in sacrificing her perfectly good job in the US, when I decided to join academia in the UK to pursue my dreams. Our little boy, Rik, has been my source of joy at home and our newborn daughter, Riti, has been another source of inspiration during the last few months of my work.

Finally, I would like to thank EPSRC, who have funded the major projects I have worked in, and my colleagues at OGSA-DAI for their valuable support during the course of research."

Howz that

2008-02-05T09:59:00.001Z

One of the most interesting job descriptions I've ever seen -

PARENT

Job Description

This is hysterical. If it had been presented this way,
I don't believe any of us would have done it!!!!

POSITION :
Mom, Mommy, Mama, Ma
Dad, Daddy, Dada, Pa, Pop

JOB DESCRIPTION :

Long term, team players needed, for challenging
Permanent work in an
Often chaotic environment.
Candidates must possess excellent communication
And organizational skills and be willing to work
Variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends
And frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to
Primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities!
Travel expenses not reimbursed.
Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES :

The rest of your life.
Must be willing to be hated, at least temporarily,
Until someone needs £5.
Must be willing to bite tongue repeatedly .
Also, must possess the physical stamina of a
Pack mule
And be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat
In case, this time, the screams from
The back garden are not someone just crying wolf.
Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges,
Such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets
And stuck zippers.
Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and
Coordinate production of multiple homework projects.
Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings
For clients of all ages and mental outlooks.
Must be willing to be indispensable one minute,
An embarrassment the next.
Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a
Half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices.
Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.
Must assume final, complete accountability for
The quality of the end product.
Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and
Janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION :

None.
Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills,
So that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE :

None required unfortunately.
On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION :

Get this! You pay them!
Offering frequent raises and bonuses.
A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because
Of the assumption that college will help them
Become financially independent.
When you die, you give them whatever is left.
The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that
You actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS :

While no health or dental insurance, no pension,
No tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and
No stock options are offered;
This job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth, unconditional love,
And free hugs and kisses for life if you play your cards right.

** AND A FOOTNOTE ?

THERE IS NO RETIREMENT -- EVER!!! **

Book Review - Impasse in India

2007-06-13T10:05:00.000+01:00

I stumbled upon this review of Martha C. Nussbaum's book "The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future" (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 403 pp., $29.95) by Pankaj Mishra, and this seems fascinating. This book is now on my "must read" list - although I do not know when I'll be able to do that...

Impasse in India

By Pankaj Mishra

Last summer Foreign Affairs, Time, Newsweek, and The Economist highlighted a major shift in American perceptions of India when, in cover stories that appeared almost simultaneously, they described the country as a rising economic power and a likely "strategic ally" of the United States. In 1991, India partly opened its protectionist economy to foreign trade and investment. Since then agriculture, which employs more than 60 percent of the country's population, has stagnated, but the services sector has grown as corporate demand has increased in Europe and America for India's software engineers and English-speaking back-office workers.^[1] In 2006, India's economy grew at a remarkable 9.2 percent.

Dominated by modern office buildings, cafés, and gyms, and swarming with Blackberry-wielding executives of financial and software companies, parts of Indian cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon resemble European and American downtowns. Regular elections and increasingly free markets make India appear to be a more convincing exemplar of economic globalization than China, which has adopted capitalism without embracing liberal democracy.

However, many other aspects of India today make Foreign Affairs' description of the country—"a roaring capitalist success-story"—appear a bit optimistic. More than half of the children under the age of five in India are malnourished; failed crops and debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade.^[2] Uneven economic growth and resulting inequalities have thrown up formidable new challenges to India's democracy and political stability. A recent report in the International Herald Tribune warned:

Crime rates are rising in the major cities, a band of Maoist-inspired rebels is bombing and pillaging its way across a wide swath of central India, and violent protests against industrialization projects are popping up from coast to coast.^[3]

Militant Communist movements are only the most recent instance of the political extremism that has been on the rise since the early Nineties when India began to integrate into the global economy. Until 2004 the central government as well as many state governments in India were, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it in her new book,

increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condone and in some cases actively support violence against minorities, especially the Muslim minority. Many seek fundamental changes in India's pluralistic democracy.

In 1992, the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party) gave early warning of its intentions when its members demolished the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in North India, leading to the deaths of thousands in Hindu–Muslim riots across the country. In May 1998, just two months after it came to power, the BJP broke India's self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing by exploding five atomic bombs in the desert of Rajasthan. Pakistan responded with five nuclear tests of its own.

The starkest evidence of Hindu extremism came in late February and March 2002 in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat. In a region internationally famous for its business communities, Hindu mobs lynched over two thousand Muslims and left more than two hundred thousand homeless. The violence was ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in which a car was set on fire, killing fifty-eight people. Nussbaum, who is engaged in a passionate attempt to end "American ignorance of India's history and current situation," makes the "genocidal violence" against Muslims in Gujarat the "focal point" of her troubled reflections on democracy in India. She points to forensic evidence which indicates that the fire in the train was most likely caused by a kerosene cooking stove carried by one of the Hindu pilgrims. In any case, as Nussbaum points out, there is "copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned by Hindu extremist organizations before the precipitating event."

Low-caste Dalits joined affluent upper-caste Hindus in killing Muslims, who in Gujarat as well as in the rest of India tend to be poor. "Approximately half of the victims," Nussbaum writes, "were women, many of whom were raped and tortured before being killed and burned. Children were killed with their parents; fetuses were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women to be tossed into the fire."

Gujarat's pro-business chief minister, Narendra Modi, an important leader of the BJP, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. The police were explicitly ordered not to stop the violence. The prime minister of India at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seemed to condone the killings when he declared that "wherever Muslims are, they don't want to live in peace." In public statements Hindu nationalists tried to make their campaign against Muslims seem part of the US-led war on terror, and, as Nussbaum writes, "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier for them to use this ploy."

A widespread fear and distrust of Muslims among Gujarat's middle-class Hindus helped the BJP win the state elections held in December 2002 by a landslide. Tens of thousands of Muslims displaced by the riots still live in conditions of extreme squalor in refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Hindu extremists involved in the killings of Muslims move freely. Though denied a visa to the US by the State Department, Narendra Modi continues to be courted by India's biggest businessmen, who are attracted by the low taxes, high profits, and flexible labor laws offered by Gujarat.^[4]

Describing the BJP's quest for a culturally homogeneous Hindu nation-state, Nussbaum wishes to introduce her Western readers to "a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." Nussbaum claims that "most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter." She hints that at least part of this myopia must be blamed on Samuel Huntington's hugely influential "clash of civilizations" argument, which led many to believe that the world is "currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America."

Nussbaum points out that India, a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, doesn't fit Huntington's theory of a clash between civilizations. The real clash exists

within virtually all modern nations —between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the... domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.

She describes how Indian voters angered by the BJP's pro-rich economic policies and anti-Muslim violence voted it out of power in general elections in 2004. Detailing the general Indian revulsion against the violence in Gujarat and the search for justice by its victims, she highlights the "ability of well-informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality." Insisting on the practical utility of philosophy, Nussbaum has often attacked the theory-driven feminism of American academia. "India's women's movement," she claims, "has a great deal to teach America's rather academicized women's movement." She is convinced that from India "we Americans can learn a good deal about democracy and its future as we try to act responsibly in a dangerous world."

Nussbaum thus casts India's experience of democracy in an unfamiliar role: as a source of important lessons for Americans. Such brisk overturning of conventional perspective has distinguished Nussbaum's varied writings, which move easily from the ideas of Stoic philosophers to international development. Few contemporary philosophers in the West have reckoned with India's complex experience of democracy; and even fewer have engaged with it as vigorously as she does in The Clash Within.

Nussbaum, who has frequently visited India to research how gender relations shape social justice, is particularly concerned about the situation of women in contemporary India. She sensitively explores the colonial-era laws that, upheld by the Indian constitution, discriminate against Muslim women. She describes how Gujarat, which has had economic growth but has made little progress in education and health care, became a hospitable home to Hindu nationalists. She details, too, tensions within the Indian diaspora, many of whom are Gujarati, whose richest members support the BJP. She reveals how the BJP initiated India's own culture wars by revising history textbooks, inserting in them, among other things, praise for the "achievements" of Nazism.

Her interviews with prominent right-wing Hindus yield some shrewd psychological insights, particularly into Arun Shourie, an economist and investigative journalist who, famous initially for his intrepid exposés of corruption, became a cabinet minister and close adviser to BJP prime minister Vajpayee. She suggests that the anti-Muslim views of Shourie, who is otherwise capable of intelligent commentary, may owe to "something volatile and emotionally violent in his character...something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it might not be a threat."

In a chapter that forms the core of the book, she examines the ideas and legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, founding fathers of India's democracy. Her admiration for Tagore and Gandhi is deep. However, she offers only qualified praise for Nehru, India's resolutely rationalist first prime minister. Nussbaum laments that Nehru neglected "the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society"—a failure that she thinks left the opportunity wide open for the BJP's "public culture of exclusion and hate."

According to Nussbaum, Nehru may have been good at building formal institutions, but it was Gandhi who gave a spiritual and philosophical basis to democracy in India by calling "all Indians to a higher vision of themselves, getting people to perceive the dignity of each human being." She approves of Gandhi's view that only individuals who are critically conscious of their own conflicts and passions can build a real democracy. In fact, much of Nussbaum's own rather unconventional view of democracy in this book derives from the Gandhian idea of Swaraj (self-rule), in which control of one's inner life and respect for other people create self-aware and engaged rather than passive citizens. The "thesis of this book," she writes in her preface, is

the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality.

However, Nussbaum's strongly felt and stimulating book deepens rather than answers the question: How did India's democracy, commonly described as the biggest in the world, become so vulnerable to religious extremism?

Ideological fanaticism stemming from personal inadequacies, such as the one Nussbaum identifies in Arun Shourie, is certainly to blame. But as Nussbaum herself outlines in her chapter on Gujarat, religious violence in India today cannot be separated from the recent dramatic changes in the country's economy and politics. The individual defects of Indian politicians only partly explain the great and probably insuperable social and economic conflicts that give India's democracy its particular momentum and anarchic vitality.

Richard Nixon once said that those who think that India is governed badly should marvel at the fact that it is governed at all. In a similar vein, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha asks in his forthcoming book India After Gandhi, "Why is there an India at all?"^[5] For centuries India was not a nation in any conventional sense of the word. Not only did it not possess the shared language, culture, and national identity that have defined many nations; it had more social and cultural variety than even the continent of Europe. At the time of independence in 1950, much of its population was very poor and largely illiterate. India's multiple languages—the Indian constitution recognizes twenty-two—and religions, together with great inequalities of caste and class, ensured a wide potential for conflict.

Given this intractable complexity, democracy in India was an extraordinarily ambitious political experiment. By declaring India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, the makers of the Indian constitution seemed to take the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity more seriously than even their European and American counterparts. African-Americans got voting rights only in 1870, almost a century after the framing of the American Constitution, and American women only in 1920. But all Indian adults, irrespective of their class, sex, and caste, enjoyed the right to vote from 1950, when India formally became a republic.

What was also remarkable about the Indian Republic was that it came about with a minimum of political agitation. The Indian political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out that democracy in India came as a gift to the Indian masses from the largely middle-class and upper-caste leaders of the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. It was a byproduct rather than the natural consequence of the anti-colonial movement.^[6]

Modern India's founding fathers, who preferred a secular democratic system, appear to have been great political idealists and visionaries. However, they were also pragmatists, and they couldn't have failed to see how democracy, which was viewed in India as inseparable from the promise of social and economic justice, and the official ideology of secular nationalism were necessary means to contain the country's many sectarian divisions. A former prime minister of India once defined his job as "managing contradictions"; this onerous task, as much moral as political, has remained the responsibility of ruling elites in democratic India.

From the very beginning, India's leaders faced the problem of instituting a secular and democratic state before the conditions for it—an adequately large secular and egalitarian-minded citizenry, and impartial legal institutions—had been met. A secular political culture couldn't be created overnight, and in the meantime citizens with political demands could only organize themselves in overtly religious, linguistic, and ethnic communities. As the experience of Iraq most recently shows, when citizens have few opportunities of participation in political life, a concept of democracy based on elections and the rule of the majority can deepen preexisting ethnic and religious divisions.

Sectarian tensions had opened up even in the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. Muslims suspicious that the secular nationalism of the Congress was a disguise for Hindu majoritarian rule demanded and eventually received a separate state, Pakistan. The promise of democracy also didn't prove sufficient in Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority and where one of Nehru's closest friends, Sheikh Abdullah, grew disillusioned with what he perceived as Hindu dominance over the province. On the whole, however, the Congress, helped greatly by the moral prestige of Gandhi and Nehru, succeeded in becoming a truly pan-Indian party in the first two decades after independence, able to appease the potentially conflicting interests of Muslims and low-caste Dalits as well as upper-caste Brahmins.

Nehru's suspicion of businessmen— shaped as much by the European distrust of capitalism between the wars as by India's forced deindustrialization by the British East India Company— committed him to state control of prices, wages, and production, and to strict limits on foreign investment and trade. These measures, which were aimed at both protecting the Indian poor from exploitation and creating India's industrial infrastructure, checked economic inequality, even if, as Nehru's critics allege, they distributed poverty more than they shared wealth.

As democratic ideals and beliefs took root among the Indian masses, the extraordinary consensus Nehru had created around his own charismatic figure and the Congress Party was always likely to fracture. Nehru's successor, Indira Gandhi, veered between populist and authoritarian measures, such as the "Emergency" she declared in 1975; but she failed to stem the decline of the Congress as a pan-Indian party. Powerful regional and caste-based politicians were no longer content to broker votes for an upper-class elite within the Congress, and wanted their own share of state power; during the Eighties many hitherto imperceptible political assertions became louder, turning into what V.S. Naipaul in a book published in 1990 termed "a million mutinies now."

The decade saw the rise of new caste- and region-based political coalitions. Fundamentally unstable, they emerged and collapsed just as quickly. In 1989, the attempt by one of these coalition governments to placate low-caste discontent through affirmative action—for example, reserving a portion of government jobs for members of these castes—angered and alienated many upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. Already disillusioned by the Congress, they turned to supporting the upper-caste-dominated BJP, which until the late Eighties had been a negligible force in Indian politics.

Hoping to replace the discredited Congress as India's ruling elite, the BJP realized that it would have to create another kind of moral and ideological authority. And so, claiming that secular nationalism was a failure, it offered Hindu nationalism, arguing that just as Europe and America, though officially secular, were rooted in Christian culture, so India should revive its traditional Hindu ethos that Muslim invaders had allegedly defiled.

Remarkably, the BJP, while doing away with one plank of Indian democracy, couldn't abandon the rhetoric of political equality. Aware that the party couldn't achieve a parliamentary majority without low-caste votes, its leaders were at pains throughout their anti-Muslim campaigns to present Hindu nationalism to low-caste Hindus as an egalitarian ideology. (The presence of Dalits in Gujarat's lynch mobs attests to their success.)

The liberalization of the economy under Congress's leadership in 1991— through such measures as eliminating tariffs and restrictions on private business—created a new constituency for the traditionally pro-business BJP: the rising middle class in urban centers. Declaring that it would restore India to its long-lost international eminence, the BJP also acquired what Nussbaum calls "a powerful and wealthy US arm": a generation of rich Indians who while living abroad seek to affirm their identities through the achievements of their ancestral land. It was largely owing to the support of the Hindu middle class—the BJP has rarely done well in rural areas—that Hindu nationalists managed, after a string of successes throughout the Nineties in provincial elections, to gain power within a coalition government in New Delhi in 1998.

Six years of the BJP's rule brought about deep shifts in Indian politics and the economy. There was accelerated economic growth, especially in information technology and business-processing services such as call centers. It was also around this time that the faith—first popularized in America and Britain during the Reagan and Thatcher years—that free markets can take over the functions of the state spread among many Indian journalists and intellectuals.

Ideology-driven globalization of the kind the BJP supported, which reduced even the government's basic responsibility for health care and education, further complicated the promise of political equality in India. The world economy had its own particular demands—for example for software engineers and back-office workers—that India could fulfill. And while the country's comparative advantage in technically adept manpower has benefited a small minority, it has excluded hundreds of millions of Indians who neither have nor can easily acquire the special skills needed to enter the country's booming services sector. Many of these Indians live in India's poorest and most populous states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh in the north, Orissa in the East, and Andhra Pradesh in the south. Their poor infrastructure—bad roads and erratic power supply—as well as high crime levels make them a daunting investment prospect.

Thus, even as the economy grew in urban areas, preexisting inequalities of resources, access to information, skills, and status came to be further entrenched within India. The country's prestigious engineering and management colleges now seek to set up branches outside India, but, according to a survey in 2004, only half of the paid teachers in Indian primary schools were actually teaching during official hours.^[7] Europeans and Americans head to India for high-quality and inexpensive medical care while the Indian poor struggle with the most privatized health system in the world.

Nevertheless, the BJP campaigned in the 2004 elections on the slogan "India Shining." Its success was predicted by almost all of the English-language press and television. As expected, urban middle-class Hindus, who had been best-placed to embrace new opportunities in business and trade, preferred the BJP. However, the majority of Indians, who had been left behind by recent economic growth, voted against incumbent governments, unseating, among others, many strongly pro-business ruling politicians in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (of which Bangalore is the capital city).

In the elections of 2004, Indian Communist parties performed better than ever before. The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, had built its election campaign around the travails of the ordinary Indian in the age of globalization. Much to its own surprise, the party found itself in power, with Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, as prime minister.

Singh and his Harvard-educated finance minister P. Chidambaram were among the technocrats who initiated India's economic reforms in 1991. Their second stint in power has disappointed international business periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times as well as much of the English-language press in India, which complains periodically that economic reform in India has more or less stalled since 2004. But given the mandate it received from the electorate, Singh's government has little choice but to appear cautious. The rise in inflation that accompanies high economic growth proved fatal for many governments in India in the previous decade, most recently in the state of Punjab where the ruling Congress lost to a coalition, prompting Sonia Gandhi to publicly ask the central government to show greater sensitivity to the plight of poor Indians.

The government's hands are already tied by rules of free trade inspired by such international institutions as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Thousands of cotton farmers in central India have killed themselves, escaping a plight that Oxfam in a report last year claimed had been worsened by their "indiscriminate and forced integration" into an "unfair global system" in which the agricultural products of heavily subsidized farmers in the US and Europe depress prices globally. Unable to persuade the United States to cut its subsidies to American farmers, the Indian commerce minister spent much of his time at the WTO's Doha Round of talks in July 2006 watching the soccer World Cup.

Unlike China, India can only go so far in creating a "business-friendly climate"—the very limited ambition of many politicians today. In China, lack of democratic accountability has helped the nominally Communist regime to give generous subsidies and tax breaks to exporters and foreign investors. The swift and largely unpublicized suppression of protesting peasants has also made it easier for real estate speculators acting in tandem with corrupt Party bosses to seize agricultural land.^[8]

In India, however, the government's efforts to court businessmen are provoking a highly visible backlash from poorer Indians who feel themselves excluded from the benefits of globalization. Plans to relax India's labor laws —in other words, to import the hire-and-fire practices of American companies—have provoked strong protests from trade unions. In recent weeks, the government has been forced to reconsider its plan to set up Chinese-style Special Economic Zones for foreign companies after the project ran into violent opposition from farmers facing eviction from their lands.^[9]

Such intense mass agitations in India have helped magnify the growing contradictions of economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu nationalism.

The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless peasants, is what has led to militant Communist movements of unprecedented vigor and scale—Prime Minister Singh recently described them as the greatest internal security threat faced by India since independence in 1947.^[10] These Mao-inspired Communists, who have their own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa.

Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of the country they live in. Affluent Indians are helped in this relocation—as much psychological as geographical—by the English-language press and television, which, as a report in the International Herald Tribune put it, "has concocted a world —all statistical evidence to the contrary—in which you are a minority if not fabulously rich."^[11]

Nussbaum is right to say that the "level of debate and reporting in the major newspapers and at least some of the television networks is impressively high." In fact, India is one of the few countries where print newspapers and magazines, especially in regional languages, continue to flourish. But the most influential part of the Indian press not only makes little use of its freedom; it helps diminish the space for public discussion, which partly accounts for what the philosopher Pratap Mehta calls the "extraordinary non-deliberative nature of Indian politics."

On any given day, the front pages of such mainstream Indian newspapers as The Hindustan Times and the Times of India veer between celebrity-mongering—Britney Spears's new hair-style—and what appears to be "consumer nationalism"—reports on Indian tycoons, beauty queens, fashion designers, filmmakers, and other achievers in the West. Excited accounts of Tata, India's biggest private-sector company, buying the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus make it seem that something like what The Economic Times, India's leading business paper, calls "The Global Indian Take-over" is underway. Largely reduced to an echo chamber, where an elite minority seems increasingly to hear mainly its own voice, the urban press is partly responsible for a new privileged generation of Indians lacking, as Nussbaum points out, any "identification with the poor."

The stultification of large parts of the Indian mass media is accompanied by the growing presence of a new kind of special interest in Indian politics: that of large corporations. Close links between businessmen and politicians have existed for a long time. But unlike in the United States, the electoral process in India was not primarily shaped by the candidates' ability to raise corporate money. Compared to the US Congress, the Indian parliament was relatively free of lobbyists for large companies. This began to change during the rule of the Hindu nationalists, who proved themselves as adept in working with big businessmen as in holding on to its older constituency of small merchants and traders. A recent opinion poll in the newsmagazine Outlook reveals that growing public distaste for politics feeds on the intimacy between politicians and businessmen.

Nussbaum terms "surreal" the "mixture of probusiness politics and violence that characterizes the BJP." But this doesn't seem so surreal if, briefly reversing Nussbaum's gaze, we look at "democracy and its future" in the United States. Many of Nussbaum's American readers would be familiar with the alliance between right-wing politics and religion, or with how powerful business elites advance their interests under the cover of ultranationalism and religious faith.

Unlike the situation in India, democracy in America has not been largely perceived as a means to social and economic egalitarianism. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party's victory in midterm elections in November 2006 suggests widespread disquiet over inequality in America, which has grown rapidly against a backdrop of corporate scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, extravagant executive pay, dwindling pensions and health insurance, and increased outsourcing of jobs—including to India—by American companies looking for cheap labor and high profits.^[12]

Examining the state of American democracy in his new book, Is Democracy Possible Here?, Ronald Dworkin asserts that "the level of indifference the nation now shows to the fate of its poor calls into question not only the justice of its fiscal policies but also their legitimacy."^[13] The challenge before India's political system is not much different: how to ensure a minimum of equality in an age of globalization as international business and financial institutions deprive governments of some of their old sovereignty, empower elites with transnational loyalties, and cause ordinary citizens to grow indifferent to politics.

In a recent book, the distinguished American political scientist Robert A. Dahl offers an optimistic vision in which "an increasing awareness that the dominant culture of competitive consumerism does not lead to greater happiness gives way to a culture of citizenship that strongly encourages movement toward greater political equality among American citizens." Dahl points out that "once people have achieved a rather modest level of consumption, further increases in income and consumption no longer produce an increase in their sense of well-being or happiness."^[14]

This awareness is not easily achieved in a culture of capitalism that thrives on ceaselessly promoting and multiplying desire. But it may be imperative for Indians, who, arriving late in the modern world, are confronted with the possibility that economic growth on the model of Western consumer capitalism is no longer environmentally sustainable. One billion Indians, not to mention another billion Chinese, embracing Western modes of work and consumption will cause irrevocable damage to the global environment, which is strained enough at having to provide resources for the lifestyles of a few hundred million Americans and Europeans.

Fortunately, a large majority of poor and religious Indians do not live within the modern culture of materialism; they are invulnerable to the glamour of the CEO, the investment banker, the PR executive, the copywriter, and other gurus of the West's fully organized consumer societies. Traditional attitudes toward the natural environment make Indians, like the Japanese, more disposed than Americans to pursue happiness modestly.^[15] And almost six decades after his assassination, Gandhi's traditionalist emphasis on austerity and self-abnegation remains a powerful part of Indian identity.

Gandhi saw clearly how organizing human societies around endless economic growth would promote inequality and conflict within as well as between nations. He knew that for democracy to flourish, it "must learn," as Martha Nussbaum puts it, "to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others."

Gandhi's ethical vision of democracy seems more persuasive as the social costs of the obsession with economic growth become intolerable. Responding to another wave of mass suicides of farmers in July 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made it clear that only a small minority in India can and will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption." Singh exhorted his countrymen to abandon the "wasteful" Western model of consumerism and learn from the frugal ways of Gandhi, which he claimed were a "necessity" in India.^[16] The invocation of Gandhi by a Western-style technocrat sounds rhetorical. But it may also be an acknowledgment that there are no easy ways out of the impasse—the danger of intensified violence and environmental destruction —to which globalization has brought the biggest democracy in the world.

Notes

^[1] Though the service sector employs only 23 percent of the population, it accounts for 54 percent of India's GDP.

^[2] Somini Sengupta, "On India's Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide," The New York Times, September 19, 2006.

^[3] Anand Giridharadas, "Rising Prosperity Brings New Fears to India," International Herald Tribune, January 26, 2007.

^[4] See Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "Gujarat's Guru," Outlook, January 29, 2007.

^[5] Ramachandra Guha, India After Gan-dhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (to be published by Ecco in August 2007), p. 15.

^[6] Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. 5.

^[7] Jo Johnson, "Poor Turn to Private Schools," Financial Times, January 13, 2007.

^[8] Dramatically increasing investment in education and health care and withdrawing tax breaks to foreign businessmen in their latest budget proposals, China's new leaders seem to be trying to check growing inequalities and social unrest in their country. See "Getting Rich," London Review of Books, November 30, 2006.

^[9] Somini Sengupta, "Indian Police Kill 11 at Protest Over Economic Zone" The New York Times, March 15, 2007.

^[10] Jo Johnson, "Leftist Insurgents Kill 50 Indian Policemen," Financial Times, March 15, 2007.

^[11] See also Siddhartha Deb, "The 'Feel-Good': Letter from Delhi," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2005.

^[12] For a vigorous assertion of growing economic populism in America, see James Webb, "Class Struggle: American Workers Have a Chance to Be Heard," The Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2006.

^[13] Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 118.

^[14] Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. x, 106.

^[15] Renée Loth, "Japan's Energy Wisdom," International Herald Tribune, March 26, 2007.

^[16] "Refarmer Manmohan," The Economic Times, July 3, 2006.

An Article from The Guardian - Fascist America

2007-04-24T14:15:00.000+01:00

Here is a thought-provoking article from The Guardian -

Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

The Redirection

2007-02-27T09:49:00.000Z

This is an article by Seymour M. Hersh from The New Yorker where he talks about the new policies of the Bush Administration on the so-called "war on terror" -

THE REDIRECTION

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)

The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.

The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.”

“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,” he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”

The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however, that closer ties between the United States and moderate or even radical Sunnis could put “fear” into the government of Prime Minister Maliki and “make him worry that the Sunnis could actually win” the civil war there. Clawson said that this might give Maliki an incentive to coöperate with the United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

Even so, for the moment, the U.S. remains dependent on the coöperation of Iraqi Shiite leaders. The Mahdi Army may be openly hostile to American interests, but other Shiite militias are counted as U.S. allies. Both Moqtada al-Sadr and the White House back Maliki. A memorandum written late last year by Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, suggested that the Administration try to separate Maliki from his more radical Shiite allies by building his base among moderate Sunnis and Kurds, but so far the trends have been in the opposite direction. As the Iraqi Army continues to founder in its confrontations with insurgents, the power of the Shiite militias has steadily increased.

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

President George W. Bush, in a speech on January 10th, partially spelled out this approach. “These two regimes”—Iran and Syria—“are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq,” Bush said. “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

In the following weeks, there was a wave of allegations from the Administration about Iranian involvement in the Iraq war. On February 11th, reporters were shown sophisticated explosive devices, captured in Iraq, that the Administration claimed had come from Iran. The Administration’s message was, in essence, that the bleak situation in Iraq was the result not of its own failures of planning and execution but of Iran’s interference.

The U.S. military also has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq. “The word went out last August for the military to snatch as many Iranians in Iraq as they can,” a former senior intelligence official said. “They had five hundred locked up at one time. We’re working these guys and getting information from them. The White House goal is to build a case that the Iranians have been fomenting the insurgency and they’ve been doing it all along—that Iran is, in fact, supporting the killing of Americans.” The Pentagon consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been captured by American forces in recent months. But he told me that that total includes many Iranian humanitarian and aid workers who “get scooped up and released in a short time,” after they have been interrogated.

“We are not planning for a war with Iran,” Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary, announced on February 2nd, and yet the atmosphere of confrontation has deepened. According to current and former American intelligence and military officials, secret operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine operations targeting Iran. American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

The ambiguity of Rice’s reply prompted a response from Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, who has been critical of the Administration:

Some of us remember 1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our government lied to the American people and said, “We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia,” in fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee. So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the President is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous.

The Administration’s concern about Iran’s role in Iraq is coupled with its long-standing alarm over Iran’s nuclear program. On Fox News on January 14th, Cheney warned of the possibility, in a few years, “of a nuclear-armed Iran, astride the world’s supply of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy, prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the world.” He also said, “If you go and talk with the Gulf states or if you talk with the Saudis or if you talk with the Israelis or the Jordanians, the entire region is worried. . . . The threat Iran represents is growing.”

The Administration is now examining a wave of new intelligence on Iran’s weapons programs. Current and former American officials told me that the intelligence, which came from Israeli agents operating in Iran, includes a claim that Iran has developed a three-stage solid-fuelled intercontinental missile capable of delivering several small warheads—each with limited accuracy—inside Europe. The validity of this human intelligence is still being debated.

A similar argument about an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction—and questions about the intelligence used to make that case—formed the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Many in Congress have greeted the claims about Iran with wariness; in the Senate on February 14th, Hillary Clinton said, “We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President, what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.”

Still, the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of the President. In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

In the past month, I was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and possible regime change.

Two carrier strike groups—the Eisenhower and the Stennis—are now in the Arabian Sea. One plan is for them to be relieved early in the spring, but there is worry within the military that they may be ordered to stay in the area after the new carriers arrive, according to several sources. (Among other concerns, war games have shown that the carriers could be vulnerable to swarming tactics involving large numbers of small boats, a technique that the Iranians have practiced in the past; carriers have limited maneuverability in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, off Iran’s southern coast.) The former senior intelligence official said that the current contingency plans allow for an attack order this spring. He added, however, that senior officers on the Joint Chiefs were counting on the White House’s not being “foolish enough to do this in the face of Iraq, and the problems it would give the Republicans in 2008.”

PRINCE BANDAR’S GAME

The Administration’s effort to diminish Iranian authority in the Middle East has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia and on Prince Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser. Bandar served as the Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them. Senior White House officials have made several visits to Saudi Arabia recently, some of them not disclosed.

Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focussed on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.”

In a royal family rife with competition, Bandar has, over the years, built a power base that relies largely on his close relationship with the U.S., which is crucial to the Saudis. Bandar was succeeded as Ambassador by Prince Turki al-Faisal; Turki resigned after eighteen months and was replaced by Adel A. al-Jubeir, a bureaucrat who has worked with Bandar. A former Saudi diplomat told me that during Turki’s tenure he became aware of private meetings involving Bandar and senior White House officials, including Cheney and Abrams. “I assume Turki was not happy with that,” the Saudi said. But, he added, “I don’t think that Bandar is going off on his own.” Although Turki dislikes Bandar, the Saudi said, he shared his goal of challenging the spread of Shiite power in the Middle East.

The split between Shiites and Sunnis goes back to a bitter divide, in the seventh century, over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad. Sunnis dominated the medieval caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, and Shiites, traditionally, have been regarded more as outsiders. Worldwide, ninety per cent of Muslims are Sunni, but Shiites are a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, and are the largest Muslim group in Lebanon. Their concentration in a volatile, oil-rich region has led to concern in the West and among Sunnis about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent”—especially given Iran’s increased geopolitical weight.

“The Saudis still see the world through the days of the Ottoman Empire, when Sunni Muslims ruled the roost and the Shiites were the lowest class,” Frederic Hof, a retired military officer who is an expert on the Middle East, told me. If Bandar was seen as bringing about a shift in U.S. policy in favor of the Sunnis, he added, it would greatly enhance his standing within the royal family.

The Saudis are driven by their fear that Iran could tilt the balance of power not only in the region but within their own country. Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its Eastern Province, a region of major oil fields; sectarian tensions are high in the province. The royal family believes that Iranian operatives, working with local Shiites, have been behind many terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, according to Vali Nasr. “Today, the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States. You’re now dealing with an Iran that could be nuclear-capable and has a standing army of four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.” (Saudi Arabia has seventy-five thousand troops in its standing army.)

Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”

The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.

Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.

This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”

The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.”

In the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved, the U.S. government consultant told me. First, Israel would be assured that its security was paramount and that Washington and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states shared its concern about Iran.

Second, the Saudis would urge Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party that has received support from Iran, to curtail its anti-Israeli aggression and to begin serious talks about sharing leadership with Fatah, the more secular Palestinian group. (In February, the Saudis brokered a deal at Mecca between the two factions. However, Israel and the U.S. have expressed dissatisfaction with the terms.)

The third component was that the Bush Administration would work directly with Sunni nations to counteract Shiite ascendance in the region.

Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)

Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, depicted the Saudis’ coöperation with the White House as a significant breakthrough. “The Saudis understand that if they want the Administration to make a more generous political offer to the Palestinians they have to persuade the Arab states to make a more generous offer to the Israelis,” Clawson told me. The new diplomatic approach, he added, “shows a real degree of effort and sophistication as well as a deftness of touch not always associated with this Administration. Who’s running the greater risk—we or the Saudis? At a time when America’s standing in the Middle East is extremely low, the Saudis are actually embracing us. We should count our blessings.”

The Pentagon consultant had a different view. He said that the Administration had turned to Bandar as a “fallback,” because it had realized that the failing war in Iraq could leave the Middle East “up for grabs.”

JIHADIS IN LEBANON

The focus of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, after Iran, is Lebanon, where the Saudis have been deeply involved in efforts by the Administration to support the Lebanese government. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is struggling to stay in power against a persistent opposition led by Hezbollah, the Shiite organization, and its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has an extensive infrastructure, an estimated two to three thousand active fighters, and thousands of additional members.

Hezbollah has been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 1997. The organization has been implicated in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty-one military men. It has also been accused of complicity in the kidnapping of Americans, including the C.I.A. station chief in Lebanon, who died in captivity, and a Marine colonel serving on a U.N. peacekeeping mission, who was killed. (Nasrallah has denied that the group was involved in these incidents.) Nasrallah is seen by many as a staunch terrorist, who has said that he regards Israel as a state that has no right to exist. Many in the Arab world, however, especially Shiites, view him as a resistance leader who withstood Israel in last summer’s thirty-three-day war, and Siniora as a weak politician who relies on America’s support but was unable to persuade President Bush to call for an end to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. (Photographs of Siniora kissing Condoleezza Rice on the cheek when she visited during the war were prominently displayed during street protests in Beirut.)

The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer. A donors’ conference in Paris, in January, which the U.S. helped organize, yielded pledges of almost eight billion more, including a promise of more than a billion from the Saudis. The American pledge includes more than two hundred million dollars in military aid, and forty million dollars for internal security.

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting “to hijack the state,” but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. “Salafis are sick and hateful, and I’m very much against the idea of flirting with them,” he said. “They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly.”

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government.

In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father’s assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.”

According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian.

In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. “We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here,” he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict.”

The official said that his government was in a no-win situation. Without a political settlement with Hezbollah, he said, Lebanon could “slide into a conflict,” in which Hezbollah fought openly with Sunni forces, with potentially horrific consequences. But if Hezbollah agreed to a settlement yet still maintained a separate army, allied with Iran and Syria, “Lebanon could become a target. In both cases, we become a target.”

The Bush Administration has portrayed its support of the Siniora government as an example of the President’s belief in democracy, and his desire to prevent other powers from interfering in Lebanon. When Hezbollah led street demonstrations in Beirut in December, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called them “part of the Iran-Syria-inspired coup.”

Leslie H. Gelb, a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Administration’s policy was less pro democracy than “pro American national security. The fact is that it would be terribly dangerous if Hezbollah ran Lebanon.” The fall of the Siniora government would be seen, Gelb said, “as a signal in the Middle East of the decline of the United States and the ascendancy of the terrorism threat. And so any change in the distribution of political power in Lebanon has to be opposed by the United States—and we’re justified in helping any non-Shiite parties resist that change. We should say this publicly, instead of talking about democracy.”

Martin Indyk, of the Saban Center, said, however, that the United States “does not have enough pull to stop the moderates in Lebanon from dealing with the extremists.” He added, “The President sees the region as divided between moderates and extremists, but our regional friends see it as divided between Sunnis and Shia. The Sunnis that we view as extremists are regarded by our Sunni allies simply as Sunnis.”

In January, after an outburst of street violence in Beirut involving supporters of both the Siniora government and Hezbollah, Prince Bandar flew to Tehran to discuss the political impasse in Lebanon and to meet with Ali Larijani, the Iranians’ negotiator on nuclear issues. According to a Middle Eastern ambassador, Bandar’s mission—which the ambassador said was endorsed by the White House—also aimed “to create problems between the Iranians and Syria.” There had been tensions between the two countries about Syrian talks with Israel, and the Saudis’ goal was to encourage a breach. However, the ambassador said, “It did not work. Syria and Iran are not going to betray each other. Bandar’s approach is very unlikely to succeed.”

Walid Jumblatt, who is the leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and a strong Siniora supporter, has attacked Nasrallah as an agent of Syria, and has repeatedly told foreign journalists that Hezbollah is under the direct control of the religious leadership in Iran. In a conversation with me last December, he depicted Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, as a “serial killer.” Nasrallah, he said, was “morally guilty” of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the murder, last November, of Pierre Gemayel, a member of the Siniora Cabinet, because of his support for the Syrians.

Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.

Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. “I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyptians”—whose moderate Sunni leadership has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades—“won’t like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don’t take on Syria we will be face to face in Lebanon with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win.”

THE SHEIKH

On a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out suburb a few miles south of downtown Beirut, I got a preview of how the Administration’s new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hiding, had agreed to an interview. Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah’s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda. (The government consultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah’s battle with Israel last summer turned him—a Shiite—into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war.

Nasrallah, dressed, as usual, in religious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to remain there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-day war. Nasrallah has since said publicly—and repeated to me—that he misjudged the Israeli response. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.”

Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”

He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.

In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. “If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings,” he said. “But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time.” He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year.

Nasrallah further insisted that the street demonstrations in Beirut would continue until the Siniora government fell or met his coalition’s political demands. “Practically speaking, this government cannot rule,” he told me. “It might issue orders, but the majority of the Lebanese people will not abide and will not recognize the legitimacy of this government. Siniora remains in office because of international support, but this does not mean that Siniora can rule Lebanon.”

President Bush’s repeated praise of the Siniora government, Nasrallah said, “is the best service to the Lebanese opposition he can give, because it weakens their position vis-à-vis the Lebanese people and the Arab and Islamic populations. They are betting on us getting tired. We did not get tired during the war, so how could we get tired in a demonstration?”

There is sharp division inside and outside the Bush Administration about how best to deal with Nasrallah, and whether he could, in fact, be a partner in a political settlement. The outgoing director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, in a farewell briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in January, said that Hezbollah “lies at the center of Iran’s terrorist strategy. . . . It could decide to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in the event it feels its survival or that of Iran is threatened. . . . Lebanese Hezbollah sees itself as Tehran’s partner.”

In 2002, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, called Hezbollah “the A-team” of terrorists. In a recent interview, however, Armitage acknowledged that the issue has become somewhat more complicated. Nasrallah, Armitage told me, has emerged as “a political force of some note, with a political role to play inside Lebanon if he chooses to do so.” In terms of public relations and political gamesmanship, Armitage said, Nasrallah “is the smartest man in the Middle East.” But, he added, Nasrallah “has got to make it clear that he wants to play an appropriate role as the loyal opposition. For me, there’s still a blood debt to pay”—a reference to the murdered colonel and the Marine barracks bombing.

Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites.

“The most important story in the Middle East is the growth of Nasrallah from a street guy to a leader—from a terrorist to a statesman,” Baer added. “The dog that didn’t bark this summer”—during the war with Israel—“is Shiite terrorism.” Baer was referring to fears that Nasrallah, in addition to firing rockets into Israel and kidnapping its soldiers, might set in motion a wave of terror attacks on Israeli and American targets around the world. “He could have pulled the trigger, but he did not,” Baer said.

Most members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities acknowledge Hezbollah’s ongoing ties to Iran. But there is disagreement about the extent to which Nasrallah would put aside Hezbollah’s interests in favor of Iran’s. A former C.I.A. officer who also served in Lebanon called Nasrallah “a Lebanese phenomenon,” adding, “Yes, he’s aided by Iran and Syria, but Hezbollah’s gone beyond that.” He told me that there was a period in the late eighties and early nineties when the C.I.A. station in Beirut was able to clandestinely monitor Nasrallah’s conversations. He described Nasrallah as “a gang leader who was able to make deals with the other gangs. He had contacts with everybody.”

TELLING CONGRESS

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”

The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.”

The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general.

“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities.

Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.”

Cricket again...

2007-02-19T10:32:00.000Z

During the past few years, I kept losing the interest in the game possibly due to the extreme abundance of cheap publicity and undeserved wealth - and last year's fiasco in the Indian cricket team, courtesy Greg Chappell and a bunch of clowns in the BCCI Selection Committe, acted as a catalyst and made me totally indifferent in cricket.

But it's the World Cup time, and may be for a month or so, I'm back in the cricket business...

Rahul, a co-blogger pointed me to this nice article about the fiasco I was talking about earlier. So, thanx to him, and enjoy the article.

My Name Is Red

2007-02-01T10:26:00.000Z

Yesterday I got hold of some of Orhan Pamuk's (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006) best known works - namely - My Name Is Red (Benim Adim Kirmizi), Snow (Kar), The Black Book (Kara Kitap), and Istanbul - Memories And The City. And unbelievably, they were priced at just £4 each in Amazon!!!

I've started reading "My Name Is Red" - the book which brought the Nobel. And the first few chapters fascinated me.

Mauren Freely wrote in the New Statesman: "More than any other book I can think of, it captures not just Istanbul's past and present contradictions, but also its terrible, timeless beauty. It's almost perfect, in other words. All it needs is the Nobel Prize."

And there it was - the Nobel Prize...

And the first few chapters I have read so far were always reminding me of Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"...

A tactical drubbing?

2007-01-19T09:38:00.000Z

On Wednesday, 17th January, I felt ashamed to be a Newcastle United fan while watching the FA Cup 3rd round replay at St. James' Park against Birmingham City - it was pathetic, disgraceful to say the least. None in the team had an apetitie for winning, rather, none actually seemed to be willing to play, and Newcastle lost 1-5, to a Chamionship side, humiliating themselves and all the fans infront of everyone.

And today, 19th January, the Belgravia Group withdrew from the take-over talks.

The script, if you look closely would seem to be -

(1) Belgravia wants to takeover the club
(2) Shepherd doesn't want to let go
(3) Newcastle lose pathetically to create a shock - and the players didn't seem to have any willingness to play (let alone win), and,
(4) Belgravia withdraws...

Just a coincidence? Is it only me who is seeing things? Call me paranoid, but where millions and millions of pound are involved, a tactical loss is nothing. After all, who cares about the fans?

The Dirty XI

2006-12-11T16:15:00.000Z

I decided to create a fantasy football team comprising of quality players from the English Premer League with a dirty or unsporting attitude towards the game. Actually I got the inspiration after watching some players in the Premier League resorting to all sorts of possible tricks to gain advantage, but never being picked up or punished for these - the star of the show probably is Christiano Ronaldo (Manchester United). As of now, I am still undecided about some positions, and any help in completing the team is welcome.

So, here goes the list (formation 4-4-2, for now) -

Goal: Jens Lehman (Arsenal, a complete lunatic)

Defense: Lucas Neil (Blackburn Rovers), Ben Thatcher (Manchester City, almost a killer), ?, ?

Midfield: Morten Gamst Pedersen (Blackburn Rovers, who can forget his palmed goal against Newcastle last season), Christiano Ronaldo (Manchester United, Academy Award winner for Best Actor category for the past few seasons), Arjen Robben (Chelsea - best supporting actor), and Cesc Fabregas (Arsenal, unquestionably talented, but...)

Strikers: El Haj Diouf (Bolton, perhaps the dirtiest scum in football), Didier Drogba (Chelsea, "sometimes I dive, sometimes I don't" - his (in)famous quote)

Manager: Arsene Wenger (Arsenal, whinging is his forte)

Substitiues:

? (goalkeeper)
Joey Barton (Manchester City, sorry mate, your butt isn't worth showing off)
Robbie Van Persie (Arsenal, another cool diver)
Robbie Savage (Blackburn Rovers)
?

Okay - now I need help to fill up the rest of the places...

An Article from The Guardian

2006-12-11T11:51:00.000Z

At least in America they understand the notion of cultural difference - on The Guardian, Monday December 11, 2006 - something to think about.

The US is not free from Islamophobes, but nor is it a racially monolithic culturally static state like Tony Blair's Britain

Gary Younge in Minneapolis
Monday December 11, 2006

Afew weeks ago, Washington-based radio host Jerry Klein announced his own very radical plan to assuage public fears of terrorism. All Muslims, he suggested, should be branded with a crescent-shaped tattoo or be forced to wear a red armband. The phones rang off the hook. The first caller said Klein was "off his rocker". The next thought he was a genius. "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country," the caller said. "They are here to kill us."

And so it went on, with Klein being praised or pilloried, until he finally confessed that the whole thing was a hoax to see how deep the rivers of American Islamophobia ran. "I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his listeners. "It's beyond disgusting."

When it comes to popular prejudice and state repression, the Muslim experience in the US does not seem to have differed much from the rest of the western world since September 11. Klein was pushing at an open door. A Gallup poll this summer showed that 39% of Americans supported requiring Muslims in the US, including American citizens, to carry special identification. In 2005 the Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair) recorded a 30% increase in the number of complaints received about Islamophobic treatment.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace, and later sought 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these produced a single terrorism conviction.

According to a Pew research survey this year, Muslims are viewed less favourably in the US than in Russia, Britain and France. There has been progress. Last month Minneapolis elected the nation's first Muslim congressman - an African-American convert, Keith Ellison. But with each advance come new challenges. There is a brouhaha over Ellison's request to swear an oath on the Qur'an.

But while many Muslims here looked to Europe in the hope that it might provide a counterbalance to America's disastrous foreign policy, they also look across the Atlantic in horror at the experiences of their co-religionists. There lies the paradox: the country that has done more than any other to foment Islamic fundamentalism abroad has so far witnessed relatively little of it at home. "Europe is not coping well with the emergence of Islam," says the executive director of Cair, Nihad Awad. "It has taken a long time for them to accept that Islam is part of its future and also part of its past."

The different experiences have emerged partly, it seems, because the Muslim communities on either side of the Atlantic are so different. The patterns of migration have differed. A large proportion of Muslims who came to America arrived with qualifications and were looking for professional work. As a result, they are generally well educated and well off. According to a recent study by the Journal of Human Resources, the wages of Arab and Muslim workers in the US fell by 10% in the years following the terror attacks; but they are still better paid and better educated than non-Muslims.

In Britain, the overwhelming majority of Muslims came from former colonies to live in poor areas and do low-paid work, and they remain the most economically impoverished. In 2004 Muslims had the highest male unemployment rate in Britain, at 13% - three times the rate of Christians. Meanwhile, 33% had no qualifications - the highest proportion of any religious group.

In the US, most Muslims had been keeping their heads down. "Before 9/11, Muslims were all too happy to be building homes and families," says Ali Jaafar, who runs a medical research company in Minneapolis. "Afterwards, they were doubly shocked. First by the attacks themselves and then to see their neighbours turn against them. After 20 or 30 years, we realised it was not the place we thought it was." To many Muslims in Britain, their neighbours reacted just as they thought they would. Bradford had gone up in flames several months before 9/11 and the BNP was already making a comeback.

Yet it is notable that when Tony Blair lectures Muslims about integration, as he did last week, the issue of economic alienation barely ever arises. How are people supposed to integrate culturally when they cannot move professionally, economically or even geographically? Just over 50 years ago, the US supreme court banished the "separate but equal" policies that segregated state schools here; it seems Britain is embracing a dogmatic version of its antithesis - "united but unequal".

"There do not seem to be many opportunities for people to integrate into the economy [in Europe]," says Fedwa Wazwaz, a board member of Minneapolis's Islamic Resource Centre. Wazwaz had arrived at al-Amal school in suburban Minneapolis to pick up her daughter, Maryam. On the wall in an office hangs a T-shirt asking "Got Islam?" - a play on a popular milk commercial - while a poster invites entrants for the Qur'an competition.

This private Muslim school is the only one of its kind in Minnesota. Wazwaz, who is originally from Jerusalem, does not regard her desire to send Maryam there as one of segregation but as one of "preserving some sense of Islamic identity for the child". "Everybody needs a sense of their identity," she says.

In a country where every national group gets its own day, complete with a parade, flags and delicacies from the home country, there is greater scope for understanding the difference between autonomy - a distinct cultural space base from which people interact with the rest of society; and segregation - where people seek to separate themselves from the mainstream. To qualify your national allegiance through ethnicity, race or religion is not necessarily regarded as diluting it (unless you're Mexican and demanding immigration rights).

The Britishness currently on offer from New Labour, however, comes in just two flavours: Anglo and Saxon. Thus are the limits of the political class's understanding of cultural hybridity, rendering Britain a racially monolithic, ethnically pure and culturally static state into which non-white and non-Christian people can either adapt, or from which they should be banished.

"Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain Britain. Conform, or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed," Blair said. Quite what one does with the hate-mongers who were born here - whether they are the jihadists or the BNP - is difficult to fathom.

Finally, American identity is rooted in something more than mythology. Blair seeks to transform "values" that are evolving and contested into those that are "essential" and "common", by the power of rhetoric alone. Americans can reach for something more substantial - the constitution. "There are built-in constitutional rights that are guarantees," says Awad. "We have to work hard to protect our rights as citizens and also to safeguard the constitution."

You would be hard pressed to find a Muslim here who is optimistic. Yet American identity is not something they are threatened with but an ideal they want the rest of the country to live up to. "There is a road map," says Jaafar "It may be difficult, but we are getting there."

My footnote - the comments should not be missed.

An Article from The New Yorker

2006-07-26T10:52:00.000+01:00

I can't help but share this article about Pete Seeger...

The New Yorker
April 17, 2006

THE PROTEST SINGER

Pete Seeger and American folk music.

BY ALEC WILKINSON

It was the ambition of the singer and songwriter Pete Seeger, as a child, in the nineteen-twenties, to be an Indian, a farmer, a forest ranger, or possibly an artist, because he liked to draw. He went to Harvard, joined the tenor-banjo society, and studied sociology in the hope of becoming a journalist, but near the end of his second year he left, before taking his exams, and rode a bicycle north from New York through New England. He was tall and thin and earnest and polite. He would make a watercolor sketch of a farm from the fields, then knock on the farmhouse door and ask if he could trade the drawing for a meal.

In the nineteen-forties, Seeger was a member of a group called the Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie. The name derived from their belief that many farming homes had two books: a Bible and an almanac. The Almanac Singers appeared mainly at strikes and at rallies held to support the rights of laborers. Seeger says that they were "famous to readers of the Daily Worker," the newspaper of the Communist Party. When the Almanac Singers broke up, Seeger played on his own for a while, then became a member of the Weavers, whose version of "Goodnight Irene," by Leadbelly, was, for thirteen weeks in 1950, the best-selling record in America. The Weavers quit playing in 1952, after an informant told the House Un-American Activities Committee that three of the four Weavers, including Seeger, were Communists. (Seeger knew students at Harvard who were Communists and, with the idea in mind of a more equitable world, he eventually became one himself.) Following the informant's testimony, the Weavers found fewer and fewer places to work. Seeger and his wife, Toshi, decided that Seeger should sing for any audience that would have him. They printed a brochure and sent it to summer camps, colleges, schools, churches, and any organization that they thought might be sympathetic. Seeger began engaging in what he calls "guerrilla cultural tactics." Arriving in a town he'd been hired to play in, he'd call the local radio station, where the disk jockey, remembering the Weavers, would usually invite him to talk on the air. Seeger would discuss his concert, then play that night, and be gone before anyone had time to object. In towns where his appearances were more widely publicized, he grew accustomed to pickets with signs saying things such as "Khrushchev's Songbird." In "How Can I Keep from Singing," a biography of Seeger, David Dunaway writes that a poll conducted during the period by Harvard said that fifty-two per cent of the American people thought Communists should be put in jail.

A promoter brought the Weavers back together in 1955 for a concert at Carnegie Hall—he had told each of them that the others wanted to do it. The concert sold out, and they began performing together again. Seeger left them in 1957. One of the songs from their catalogue, "Pay Me My Money Down," the lament of an indignant sailor, appears on "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," Bruce Springsteen's new record, which will be released on April 25th. The other songs on the record are versions of folk songs that Seeger recorded and tended to sing on his own.

Springsteen began listening to Seeger in 1997, when he was asked to provide a song for a Seeger tribute record. To choose one, he told me, he "went to the record store and bought every Pete record they had. I really immersed myself in them, and it was very transformative. I heard a hundred voices in those old folk songs, and stories from across the span of American history—parlor music, church music, tavern music, street and gutter music. I felt the connection almost intuitively, and that certain things needed to be carried on; I wanted to continue doing things that Pete had passed down and put his hand on. He had a real sense of the musician as historical entity—of being a link in the thread of people who sing in others' voices and carry the tradition forward— and of the songwriter, in the daily history of the place he lived, that songs were tools, and, without sounding too pretentious, righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness. At the same time, Pete always maintained a tremendous sense of fun and lightness, which is where his grace manifested itself. It was cross-generational. He played for anyone who would listen. He played a lot for kids. When I set the musicians up in my house to make this record, and we started playing Pete's songs, my daughter said, 'That sounds like fun—what is that?'"

Seeger typically performed with the simplest instrumentation—by himself, with banjo and guitar, and, in the Weavers, with another guitar player. Springsteen is accompanied by drums, bass, piano, guitar, accordion, banjo, double fiddles, horns, and backup singers. His versions include more references than Seeger's did—Dixieland, Gospel, stringband music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll among them. It is as if folk music, temporarily dormant, had been revived in a more populist and modern form. "The Seeger Sessions" does not include any songs that Seeger wrote, such as 'Turn! Turn! Turn!" which was a No. 1 record for the Byrds in 1965. Springsteen recorded "If I Had a Hammer," but felt that it asserted itself too forcefully among the other songs, possibly because it was so well known. The songs he chose, he said, are "ones that I heard my own voice in. When you're going through material that way, you're always trying to find your place in the story. With the songs I picked, I knew who those characters were, and I knew what I wanted to say through them to transform what we were doing. That's your part in the passing down of that music. You have to know what you're adding. Every time a folk song gets sung, something gets added to that song. Why did I pick Pete Seeger songs instead of songs by the Carter Family or Johnny Cash or the Stanley Brothers? Because Pete's library is so vast that the whole history of the country is there. I didn't feel I had to go to someone else's records. It was very broad. He listened to everything and collected everything and transformed everything. Everything I wanted, I found there."

Seeger is eighty-six—he was born in May of 1919. He and his wife, Toshi, who is half Japanese, live in Beacon, New York, about sixty miles north of Manhattan. They have been married for sixty-three years. Their house is remote and surrounded by woods. Seeger chops wood almost every day and complains when he can't. The woods around the house are so clean that it is as if someone had gone through them with a broom. Trying to recall a name or a fact, he sometimes places his hand over his forehead and closes his eyes. When he speaks at any length, he tends to look into the middle distance, as if reading the words there. He has a sharp nose and full, round cheeks. His eyes are blue and heavily lidded and so small that he seems to be regarding a person from some remove. His conversation passes quickly from one subject to another, as if many things were occurring to him at once. He never aspired to a career as a singer, and he dislikes being so well known. Celebrity, he thinks, comes for most people at the expense of others, whose accomplishments are more practical and serious. He and Bruce Springsteen met several years ago, either at a tribute to Woody Guthrie or at the Grammys; Springsteen thinks the former, and Seeger the latter. Seeger is pleased that Springsteen, whom he regards as a friend, has recorded songs from his past—he thinks they're good songs, and he is gratified by the thought that people will hear them—but he is not looking forward to the mail and the attention that will follow. He has work he wants to do. He gets so many letters as it is that he can answer them only with postcards. His nature is almost unflaggingly hopeful, but a line of melancholy runs through it. Once, after a performance in Spain that didn't go well, he wrote in a journal, "I seem to stagger about this agonized world as a clown, dressed in happiness, hoping to reach the hearts and minds of the young. When newspaper reporters ask me what effect my songs have, I try and make a brave reply, but I am really not so certain."

When Seeger was younger, his singing voice fell between the range of an alto and a tenor—what he calls a split tenor. It was robust, and even in complicated passages his pitch was precise. He had a dramatic falsetto that he could deliver as a moan or a shout. He sang without vibrato or with only an occasional trace of it. His phrasing was subtle but resourceful, enough to inflect meaning and character, and to enliven a narrative, but not so much as to deflect the listener toward the singer's personality. His presence onstage was confident, offhand, and compelling, but he regarded any attention paid him as a performer to be misplaced. He considered a singer to be a tool for a song. He believes that songs can make people feel powerful when they aren't by any measure except their own determination. As a young man, he embraced the conviction that songs are a way of binding people to a cause. A piece of writing may be read once or twice; a song is sung over and over. Performing, he did not expect the audience to attend to him so much as he tried to engage them. Seeger felt that folk songs sounded best when sung by a crowd, and whenever he could he tried to persuade people to sing with him. Every word in every song he ever sang was intelligible, which had a lot to do with the force of his performances. The issue at stake, he says, between him and Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when he said that he wished he had an axe to cut the cord to Dylan's microphone, was not that Dylan had performed with electric instruments—there were no prohibitions against them, he points out; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had been hired for the festival—but that no one could hear the words to Dylan's song. "It was a good song, too," Seeger says. " 'Maggie's Farm.' " He was sure that Dylan wanted the audience to hear the words—or what would be the purpose of singing the song—and that the people in charge of the microphones were failing him.

Folk songs frequently contain every kind of trouble and harm. A lot are about shipwrecks and strikes and mine collapses and heroes dying by the hands of cowards. Often, they are songs that people sang to themselves or with their neighbors to commemorate a disaster or to give themselves courage or to console themselves for losses and defeats and suffering and hardship. Sometimes they celebrate victories, but typically there is more misfortune than triumph. They have a lot of dark corners. They don't muse so much. They don't describe life from a balcony overlooking a harbor from which the boat is departing at sunset with your sweetheart. The folk-song version of that is we-were-to-wed, but-I-killed-her-instead. They can go on and on. Dylan's recordings of songs that were ten minutes long, verse upon verse, were radical in the context of rock and roll, but he was making use of a conventional folk-music form. It is no observation of my own that Seeger did more to make people aware of folk music in the middle of the twentieth century than any other performer. Not that everyone thanked him for it. David Dunaway writes that purists often resented Seeger's influence. Folk songs, they believed, were the product of refinements made by different singers in different places. A true folksinger knew not only the way a song was sung in Kentucky but also its variations in Oklahoma and Tennessee, not to mention its antecedents in Wales. Once Seeger recorded a song, they said, his version became so widely known that it effaced the others.

Seeger hasn't made a record or sung a concert by himself for several years—his voice is no longer reliable; he thinks he overused it—but he remains an accomplished banjo player and guitarist. Last week, he recorded some tracks in his living room, with his half brother, the old-time musician Mike Seeger, and the guitarist Ry Cooder, for a project of Cooder's. In March, I heard him sing several songs for an afternoon assembly of schoolchildren in Beacon. At the assembly, I sat next to Toshi. The children sat cross-legged on the floor. The principal introduced Seeger by saying, "He's probably the person who's done more for this country than anyone else I can think of."

'You wouldn't have heard that speech fifty years ago," Toshi said.

Seeger bought his land in Beacon in 1949. He and Toshi had two small children. (Later, they had another.) They were living in Greenwich Village with Toshi's parents, and they wanted to move to the country. Seeger was thirty, and Toshi was twenty-seven. He was becoming well known as a musician, but they had no money yet to speak of. A real-estate agent showed them properties he regarded as inexpensive. "I remember a big barn at one place and a little stream and some woods," Seeger told me. "Five thousand dollars. I said no, I couldn't afford it." The agent showed them an old barn with some land for three thousand dollars. "I said I couldn't afford that, either." The agent asked, "What can you afford?" Seeger said, "How about just some land." He showed them a patch of woods on the side of a mountain set back from the river. It had been part of a woodlot attached to one of the brickyards that used to operate along the riverbank. "Hand-made bricks," Seeger said. "All the yards had mountain land above them. They'd have wood carried to the river on a sledge and turned into charcoal and bricks. This parcel had been logged clean in 1911, but it had a cliff, and no one wanted to climb it. People thought it was too steep to build on, but I climbed up here and saw that it leveled off at the top for a bit, and there was room to put a house."

Seeger brought Toshi to the top of the cliff and said, "See what a nice view we'll have." Toshi is small and dark-haired. Her gaze is direct and measuring, and she is more pragmatic than Seeger. She looked around at the brush and the trees that enclosed them and said, "View of what?" They paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars for seventeen and a half acres. That summer, they moved to the property with their children, who were one arid three, and lived in a trailer while Seeger chopped down trees. A stream ran through a ravine below their campsite. Toshi would carry her younger child on her hip and have the older one grab her skirt, and they would go down to the stream like pioneers and collect water for cooking and washing. Seeger was often gone on the weekends, working. At the end of August, he was to sing near Peekskill, fifteen miles away, on a stage in a field, at a concert to benefit the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress. The star of the concert was Paul Robeson, whose father had been a slave. Robeson had a law degree from Columbia, but he made his living as an actor and singer. He had played Othello in London and on Broadway, and he had appeared in the London stage version of "Show Boat" and, later, in the movie. In 1934, he went to Russia and became persuaded that Russian society was more just than America's. The Peekskill paper wrote that he was "violently and loudly pro-Russian." The Ku Klux Klan had a chapter in the area. Before the concert, vigilantes tore down the stage. The organizers built another stage on another lot, and the concert was rescheduled, for September 4th. Dunaway writes that, during the interval, the Ku Klux Klan sent a letter to an organization that Seeger had been part of, People's Artists, thanking it and Seeger for the seven hundred and twenty-two applications for membership it had received since the stage was destroyed.

Seeger and Toshi and their children, Toshi's father, and two friends of the Seegers drove to Peekskill for the concert. They passed men and women and children who shouted obscenities at them. There were woods on three sides of the field and a road on the fourth. Members of several unions surrounded the site so that no one could get in who wasn't supposed to be there, a means, they hoped, of keeping out the vigilantes. At the concert, a woman named Sylvia Kahn sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." "A pianist played Prokofiev, I think," Seeger said. "I played two or three songs, a country blues I learned from Woody called'T for Texas,' and I sang 'If I Had a Hammer,' for one of the first times. Paul Robeson sang for an hour. He sang 'Ol' Man River,' from 'Show Boat,' which he was famous for. He had a man standing behind him and one on either side, so that he wouldn't be hit by a sniper firing from the woods. I suppose they could have got him from the road in front, but you couldn't have someone stand in front of him while he sang."

The concert ended before nightfall—the organizers wanted everyone to be able to leave before dark. Robeson got into a car, then out the other side of it and into another and possibly into a third one. "Unless you were watching closely, you wouldn't have known what car he was in," Seeger said. Robeson's car was among the first to leave. A lot of people had arrived from Manhattan in chartered buses. Seeger left about an hour after the concert ended. When he tried to make the turn toward Beacon, a policeman diverted him. On the road were pieces of glass. "Around a corner was a young man throwing stones at each car that passed," Seeger said. "The cars were moving slowly, and he'd run right up beside them and launch the stones from four feet as hard as he could. They were about the size of a baseball. They came from piles of them that were built up beside the road. While we were singing, these people had been collecting stones."

Toshi's father put the children on the floor of the car and lay on top of them. Rocks broke all the windows except the back ones. Seeger saw a policeman farther up the road. "I stopped and shouted, 'Officer, aren't you going to do something?' All he said was 'Move on. Move on.'" When the chartered buses reached Manhattan that evening, riders told a reporter from the Times that, even as far away as Yonkers, nearly twenty-five miles, people had thrown stones at them.

Seeger drove to a campground that had showers—there was no running water at his place—and he and Toshi and her father washed the glass from the children's hair. They all had to move carefully in order not to be cut by shards that were hidden in their clothes.

When Seeger had cleared two acres, he went to the New York Public Library, on Forty-second Street, and looked up "log cabin." He planned to build a house from trees he had cut down. The Weavers were beginning to work in nightclubs. Seeger would either take an evening train to join them or drive. If he drove, he made his way back early in the morning up the West Side, and when he found a packing crate thrown out on the sidewalk he would knock it apart and take the wood home. Much of it he used to frame the roof. If he didn't drive, he would catch the night train delivering mail up the Hudson. The train stopped at each town. Seeger would sleep on the train and arrive home to have breakfast with his family.

People would visit from the city, and Seeger would hand them a shovel or a saw. He had intended, with their help, to haul logs from the woods to where he had dug the foundation, but the trees were too heavy. Instead, he found a man in Beacon with a draft horse. "His name was Watson Shannon," Seeger said. "I can still see the roof of his house from the lawn. He only died recently. How he got the draft horse here, I don't know. I guess he walked it. Anyway, he showed up in the morning, and he had a long chain. He walked up the hill from the house with the horse, and he'd wrap the chain around the log and slap the horse, and then he went running down after it, wrapping the reins around stones and tree trunks. He said once you got the horse started you didn't want it to stop."

Recently, Seeger took me through the cabin, which no one lives in anymore—he and Toshi live in a larger house built later, on the other side of a small clearing. Past the front door was a big room with tree-trunk beams, a stone fireplace, a kitchen, and a picture window. Through the window was the river, about a mile away. "That was our first extravagance," Seeger said of the window. "A hundred dollars." He stepped across the room and stood beside it. "I put up some shelves to hold records and books right here," he went on. "The baby's crib was under it. One night, we heard a terrible crash, and the shelf and all the books and records had come down on her crib. Fortunately, it was a strong oak crib." He shook his head. "That's the kind of stupid thing I've done all my life," he said plaintively. "I have taken greater risks than I should have in raising my children. I remember walking along the edge of a cliff with my son and not watching him closely. Because I could watch myself, I took it for granted that he could." He shrugged. "Anyway, my daughter's fifty-seven now."

He said that the bulk of the wood in the house was oak, but that he had also used maple and hickory. He hadn't expected ever to have enough money for electricity, so he made no allowance for the wires to enter the foundation. Three years later, to install them, he had to dig underneath it. Off the kitchen was a second room, where there was a bed and a rocking chair, some books, and another stone fireplace. "The first stonework was terrible," Seeger said, thrusting his chin toward the fireplace. "It didn't have any form or design. I made lots of mistakes. After that, I went around sketching all the old farmhouses in Westchester for their stonework, and I learned that the old masons would set their best stones at the corners and run a line between them, then build up the courses."

Several inches above the fireplace and toward one side were two stones that were smaller than the stones around them. One was about the size of a grapefruit, and the other had paving tar around it and gravel embedded like shrapnel in the tar. "They came into the car during the riot and didn't go out," Seeger said. "I thought that if I put them there I would never forget what had happened."

We closed the door on the cabin and walked over to the main house. Toshi was leaving to run errands in town. Everything we needed to make soup and salad for lunch was in the refrigerator, she said. She told Seeger that she was putting a pear tart in the toaster oven for dessert. "This is practice for Pete," she told me. "I want to be sure, in case I go join my ancestors, that he can take care of himself. I don't want to have to lower baskets of food from the heavens." Before she left, she took the phone off the hook. "It's been ringing all morning," she said.

We sat down to eat at a table by a window, with the river at our backs. Seeger began talking about his father, Charles, who was also a musician. "My father was a big influence on me," he said. Somewhat mournfully, he added, "He was overenthusiastic all his life. First about this, then about that." Seeger s older brother John told Dunaway, "The biggest danger for Peter was whether he'd be swallowed up in father's dreams."

As a teen-ager, Charles became an accomplished pianist. He liked to go to symphony concerts, and he could look at complicated scores and know what the music should sound like. "He thought the great symphonies would save the human race," Seeger said. "He thought they had something to teach us that couldn't be expressed in words." He went to Harvard, then he spent a year in Germany, and for a while he was a conductor in Cologne. While he was there, he realized that he could no longer hear the flutes and the piccolos, and that he was going deaf. He decided that he would become a composer instead. He returned to New York, where he met Seeger s mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, a violinist. Her grandfather was the headmaster of a fancy school in New York, and she had been brought up partly in Paris and Tunisia. The two of them performed together at society parties, "a soiree here, a soiree there," Seeger said.

They were married in 1911. Charles was hired to establish the music department at the University of California at Berkeley. A friend took him to the lettuce fields east of San Francisco where, Seeger said, "he saw children the same age as his own being worked to the bone," and he was never the same. When the First World War broke out, he made speeches denouncing it as an imperialist war. His wife asked him not to, but he persisted. Eventually, the university gave him an extended sabbatical, with the understanding that he wouldn't return.

"He bought a Ford Tin Lizzie," Seeger said, "a Model T, and he drove his family east. It was slow going, and on the way he got this grand scheme. He said to my mother, 'Rather than save our music for the rich people in the city, why not take it out and play it for people in the small towns?' He was going to be a one-family Chautauqua, bringing music to the workers."

Beginning in the winter of 1918, on his parents' new property in Patterson, New York, about sixty miles northeast of Manhattan, Charles carefully built a trailer to haul behind his car. It took a year and a half. Seeger turned in his chair and showed me on the wall, among a collection of family pictures, a small, shiny black-and-white photograph. Charles and his wife and the children—Seeger has two brothers—are standing on a sidewalk beside the black Model T. Behind the car is a portion of what looks a little like a covered wagon. The trailer's tires were made of solid rubber. Underneath it was a platform that could slide out to become a stage. His mother played the violin, and his father played a small organ, the kind that chaplains used in the First World War. The family slept in beds in the trailer. They left New York and drove slowly south, intending to reach Florida eventually. In Richmond, Virginia, Dunaway writes, the pavement was so hot that their tires sank into it. "The trip was a disaster," Seeger says. At night, his mother did the family's laundry in a pot of water over a fire. The night she pulled Peter, a year and a half old, from the embers was the night, he told me, she called it off.

The Seegers returned to Charles's parents' house in Patterson. For the summer, they lived in the barn. The kids would throw tennis balls against the wall and call it barn squash. At four, Seeger was sent to boarding school, he said, but he came home a year and a half later. His father had been appalled to leam that his son had had scarlet fever, and no one had told him. Charles and

Constance had in the meantime moved to Nyack, on the west bank of the Hudson. Constance wanted Seeger trained as a classical musician, but Seeger didn't care to be. When she insisted that he learn to read music, he said that he just wanted to have fun. She worried that he would grow up to be a musical illiterate. She left instruments around the house for him to find, and, by the time he was five or six, he could play songs on the organ, the marimba, the piano, and the squeezebox. 'Years later, I asked my father, "When do you think people should learn to read music?'" Seeger said. "And he told me, 'When they know what kind of music they want to play.' He said, You don't learn to read before you speak, and you don't learn to dance before you walk.'"

The librarian in Nyack gave Seeger novels by Ernest Thompson Seton, who helped start the Boy Scouts. "Camping and woodcraft," Seeger said. "The first one I really liked was called "Rolf in the Woods.' Rolf was fifteen years old in 1810. He was being beaten by his uncle, and his mother dies. He runs away and finds in the woods a wigwam with an old Indian living in it, trapping animals and exchanging their skins at the hardware store for tools and nails. The boy asks if he can stay with him, and the Indian points to a corner, and the boy falls asleep. The uncle comes along later and says, "I see you're with the Indian, I'll go get my gun," so Rolf and the Indian run off together, and they end up in the Adirondacks. Anyway, you can see how it goes."

Seeger's brother John joined the Boy Scouts, "but I thought it was for the birds," Seeger says, "saluting the flag." He bought a length of muslin and took it to a neighbor and had her sew it into a shape he could use to make a teepee. Among the photographs on the wall is one of him as a scrawny little boy, without a shirt, and holding a bow and arrow. "That's me pretending to be an Indian," he said.

When Seeger was eight, in 1927, his parents separated. His father eventually married a modernist composer named Ruth Crawford. They moved to Maryland, and began working in Washington. In 1932, Seeger was enrolled, on a scholarship, at Avon Old Farms, a boys' school in Connecticut. Briefly, to make money, he shined the other boys' shoes. He acted in the school plays: "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, and "Hamlet." "At thirteen, I played the female parts, with my hair curled and falsies," he said. He also worked on the woods crew. "There was a nice French Canadian in charge of teaching us how to sharpen the axe with a file, and how to chop without hurting ourselves. He'd go through a piece of forest and blaze trees that had to come down—a weeding process—and we'd cut them." Seeger also had his own newspaper, which he mimeographed and handed out. The playwright and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay visited the school to see a production of one other plays. "They told me that, with my newspaper, I should interview her," Seeger said. "I had never interviewed anyone famous. I didn't know what to ask. Finally I blurted out, 'What do you think of Shakespeare?' I don't remember anything else of the interview."

After three years at Avon Old Farms, Seeger went to Harvard on a scholarship. "I roomed right above the Harvard Union, which was a big dining hall, and I made a little bit of money as a waiter," he said. "Then I went to a place where I could get free meals if I washed pots." Visiting his father in the summers, he had heard rural American music and become captivated by the banjo.

As a sophomore, he failed one of his winter exams and lost his scholarship. "I wasn't sorry to leave Harvard," he said. "I was disgusted by what I considered the cynicism displayed by one of my professors. He would say, 'Every society has a spring, a winter, a summer, and a fall,' and scoff at us trying to stop Hitler. He said, 'All you can do is accommodate.' I was young and idealistic." Crossing the campus shortly before he departed, he passed one of his classmates, John F. Kennedy. "He was walking with someone who was carrying papers for him, I think, and saying something about being very annoyed at not having been able to reach someone on the phone."

His father, he said, was part of a group of musicians and composers, including Aaron Copland, called the Composers' Collective. The Composers' Collective concerned itself with writing music for strikes and unemployment lines, and for the new world order, "The closest they all got to writing real songs was when they wrote rounds," Seeger said. "My father wanted to publish a book called 'Rounds About the Very Rich.' He was fond of one that was sung in three parts, like 'Row, Row Your Boat.' It went like this." Seeger put down his fork and, with his chin raised, began to sing, "Oh, joy upon this earth/ to live and see the day/when Rockefeller senior/shall up to me and say/ Comrade, can you spare a dime?'"

Charles liked Appalachian music—Seeger said that he may have inspired Copland to write "Appalachian Spring." In any case, he introduced his son to a woman from Kentucky who called herself Aunt Molly Jackson. "She sang, 'I am a union woman/ just as brave as I can be/I do not like the bosses/and the bosses don't like me,'" Seeger said. "And that was how I began to hear folk music."

Seeger s father believed that music's most important purpose was social. For a while, he worked in Washington for the W.P.A. music project. He wrote out what he called his ten purposes of music. Seeger went upstairs to a loft where he keeps his office to look for a copy. I heard him going through papers. "What did I do with that file?" he said. "What did I do? This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Aah, here it is." He came downstairs and handed it to me. The first principle was "Music, as any art, is not an end in itself but is a means for achieving larger ends." Another was "Music as a group activity is more important than music as an individual accomplishment." He also wrote that the necessary question to ask was not" 'Is it good music?' but 'What is the music good for?'; and if it bids fair to aid in the welding of the people into more independent, capable and democratic action, it must be approved."

While I was reading, Seeger abruptly stood up and said, "I forgot the pear tart." He brought the tart to the table, then he went to the freezer and came back with a column of ice-cream containers—the Seegers had recently had a birthday party. While we ate the tart and the ice cream, we got to talking about the beautiful stone walls in the countryside around Beacon.

"In my mind's eye, there's two teenagers, and the father's saying, 'Boys, you get ten feet of wall built, or you don't get any supper,' " Seeger said. "And one of them says to the other, 'Next year I'll be fourteen, and I'm going to get a job at the factory—they pay you two dollars a week. He don't see that much money in a month.' The father says, what will I do without you? The farm will go back to forest.'"

He finished his tart and put his hands in his lap, like a penitent. "The opening of the American West meant the reforestation of the East," he said. "That's important." Then he began collecting the dishes.

Seeger's politics are of the most extravagantly conservative kind. He believes ardently in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. His interpretation of them is literal. In all his years of activism, through the movements for workers' rights and civil rights, the movement against the Vietnam War, and the ecological movement, in all of which he figured prominently, there is no conceit that he has more emphatically embraced than that all human beings are created equal. In the early and middle part of the twentieth century, such a conviction made a person not a patriot but a socialist. When Seeger moved to the country, he held a couple of meetings with a middle-aged couple, the only other Communists around, then quit the Party. "I thought it was pointless," he said. "I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization."

After lunch, we went out and looked at the river, and I could see where Seeger had been standing, in 1955, when a car arrived, and the man driving it asked if he was Pete Seeger. Then he handed Seeger an envelope and left. Seeger opened the envelope and called out to Toshi, "They've finally got around to me." He had been summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He might have cited the Fifth Amendment, as many people did, but he didn't, because doing so suggested that he had something to hide. He decided to rely instead on the protection of the First Amendment.

"Mr. Seeger, prior to your entry in the service in 1942," he was asked, "were you engaged in the practice of your profession in the area of New York?"

"It is hard to call it a profession," Seeger said. "I kind of drifted into it and I never intended to be a musician, and I am glad I am one now, and it is a very honorable profession, but when I started out actually I wanted to be a newspaperman, and when I left school—"

"Will you answer the question, please?"

"I have to explain that it really wasn't my profession," Seeger said. "I picked up a little change in it."

"Did you practice your profession?"

"I sang for people, yes, before World War II, and I also did as early as 1925."

"And upon your return from the service in December of 1945, you continued in your profession?"

"I continued singing," Seeger said, "and I expect I always will."

Then he was asked whether he had appeared at an event that had been announced in the Daily Worker.

"I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs," he said. "I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it."

They didn't. What the committee members wanted was to have him say that he had been a Communist and to give them names of others who had been, and he wouldn't. Again and again, he said, "My answer is the same as before." Eventually, they gave up.

He left the hearing knowing that he was certain to be indicted for contempt of Congress, and, on March 26, 1957, he was, by a federal grand jury, on ten counts. The indictment meant that he couldn't leave the Southern District of New York without permission. Every time he went somewhere to work, he had to send a telegram saying where he was going and how he was getting there. At one night club, the announcer introduced him by saying, "Here's Pete Seeger, out on bail." In hotel rooms, he had to check the closets to be sure that he wasn't about to be set up. According to Dunaway, a group called Texans for America persuaded textbook publishers to remove any mention of him. A woman who had him sing at a barbecue in her back yard received a summons from HUAC. He was to play two nights in Nyack. The American Legion discovered, in time to prevent the second night's performance, that the theatre had an expired license. To renew it, the owner of the theatre had to pay a fee. The town offices closed before he could, and the mayor and the clerk left town.

Seeger's trial was not held until March of 1961. The jury took an hour and twenty minutes to decide that he was guilty. He was sentenced to a year in jail. In May of 1962, an appeals court ruled that the indictment was flawed and overturned the conviction. As we stood in the yard, he quoted a line from the decision: " 'We are not inclined to dismiss lightly claims of Constitutional stature because they are asserted by one who may appear unworthy of sympathy.' " He said again, " 'Unworthy of sympathy,'" and shook his head.

Before Seeger's confrontation with HUAC, people sometimes regarded his optimism as childish, and unrealistic, as a habit of mind inconsistent with the moral rigor of a serious person. Afterward, he became a figure of undeniable stature. He had stared down jail time. He had stood amid peril for his beliefs. He had typified the principles of all the brave people he had sung about.

Here is a story told to me lately by a man named John Cronin, who is the director of the Pace Academy for the Environment, at Pace University. Cronin has known Seeger for thirty years. "About two winters ago, on Route 9 outside Beacon, one winter day, it was freezing—rainy and slushy, a miserable winter day—the war in Iraq is just heating up and the country's in a poor mood," Cronin said. "I'm driving north, and on the other side of the road I see from the back a tall, slim figure in a hood and coat. I'm looking, and I can tell it's Pete, He's standing there all by himself, and he's holding up a big piece of cardboard that clearly has something written on it. Cars and trucks are going by him. He's getting wet. He's holding the homemade sign above his head—he's very tall, and his chin is raised the way he does when he sings—and he's turning the sign in a semicircle, so that the drivers can see it as they pass, and some people are honking and waving at him, and some people are giving him the finger. He's eighty-four years old. I know he's got some purpose, of course, but I don't know what it is. What struck me is that, whatever his intentions are, and obviously he wants people to notice what he's doing, he wants to make an impression—anyway, whatever they are, he doesn't call the newspapers and say, 'I'm Pete Seeger, here's what I'm going to do.' He doesn't cultivate publicity. That isn't what he does. He's far more modest than that. He would never make a fuss. He's just standing out there in the cold and the sleet like a scarecrow. I go a little bit down the road, so that I can turn and come back, and when I get him in view again, this solitary and elderly figure, I see that what he's written on the sign is 'Peace.'"

The Middle East Today...

2006-07-18T11:35:00.000+01:00

Hezbollah, the United States and the Context Behind Israel's Offensive on Lebanon

As Israeli warplanes continue to bomb Lebanon and Hezbollah fires rockets into northern Israel we get context on the crisis with two analysts: As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese professor of political science at California State University and Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. [includes rush transcript]

As'ad AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. He runs a blog called "The Angry Arab News Service."
Chris Hedges, journalist and author. He was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author of "War is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning". Read Hedges' article, "Mutually Assured Destruction in the Middle East"

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our discussion about what’s happening in Lebanon, we turn to Chris Hedges, journalist and author, foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years, but now currently senior fellow at the Nation Institute. War Is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning is one of his books. We have also heard that the U.S. embassy in Beirut has just been evacuated, in addition to the news of Israeli ground troops moving into Southern Lebanon and an Israeli plane being shot down, a fighter jet, by Hezbollah. Chris Hedges, your response.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is the culmination of essentially five years of refusal by the Bush administration to do anything to keep alive the peace process. And what we see now is the result of that. We have left extremists on all wings -- Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli -- to dictate the language by which the conflicts are set, and that language is a language of violence. There is no other language now. And unless there is a force that steps in to try and moderate this self-immolation on the part of all of these extremist groups, the Middle East is going to spin into a death spiral, which could have disastrous consequences, not only for Lebanese, for Israelis, for Palestinians, but ultimately for us, as well.

You know, every day the conflict is ratcheted up on the part of Israel, with the news that you just read about ground troops going in, and there are fears that, you know, because Hezbollah is such an illusive target -- it’s not a conventional force -- because these sort of wild strikes and large numbers of killings, I think, are ultimately ineffective, because the weaponry that Hezbollah is now deploying is weaponry that they have not deployed in the past -- I mean, the downing of an F-16, the sinking of an Israeli gun boat, the dropping of rockets on Haifa, and we hear rumors that they may have weaponry that can reach as far as the outskirts of Tel Aviv, there is a kind of -- you know, we have opened a kind of Pandora's box, which always happens in war. And now we’re just hanging on by the tail.

AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor at California [State University], Stanislaus, visiting at UC Berkeley, you’ve just returned from Lebanon. Did you see any of this coming?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, yes, I have returned from Lebanon only a week ago or less, and I have met and interviewed a whole number of people, including the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. And I must confess to you that, no, there was nothing in the air about what was coming, and that is because these events were not planted in Lebanon and did not originate inside the country, but outside. I must begin by dissenting by the comments of Chris Hedges, and this is one of the frustrating things watching these events here in the United States, and I don't want to talk anything about the U.S. government or about the mainstream media. I want to talk about progressives and their stances, people like The Nation magazine's editorial, about the words of Chris Hedges this morning.

He talks about the death of the peace process. No, no, no. This is not because the peace process was not ongoing. This is the peace process, Mr. Hedges. This is part of what the United States has been doing since the beginning of the so-called peace process, to subcontract the subjugation of the Arabs and all those who defend against Israeli occupation in the area. I mean, he speaks about the spiral of violence, extremists on both sides. All this language is always intended to camouflage and hide and disguise the aggressor, the nature of the aggressor.

Let me put the context for this audience here, because a lot of people have been analyzing this conflict in terms of an outside conspiracy. On the right, you have people like George W. Bush, among others, blaming it all on Iran. On the left, you have people like Robert Fisk, who believe this is all about a Syrian conspiracy. Yet the truth resides in an article yesterday by Robin Wright in the Washington Post. If there is a conspiracy in all of this, it is an American, Israeli, Saudi conspiracy that has been in planning for years in order to disarm Hezbollah as part of the 1559 United Nations Security Council resolution, and we are seeing the implementation of that resolution by force.

But we have to remind the audience about something: how Israel propaganda doesn't get updated. In 1982, I barely survived an Israeli invasion of the country. Back then, the Israelis were saying, “We are not against Lebanon. We just want to expel the PLO out of Lebanon.” Now, they are saying the same, with one difference: Hezbollah is the Lebanese population here. I am from South Lebanon. I tell you that the entire population of South Lebanon stands behind Hezbollah, whether you like it or not. My 14-year-old nephew has been raised by secular leftists, like my family is, and yet he is now a passionate, enthusiastic supporter of Hezbollah. So when Israel said they want to drive them away from South Lebanon, what are they going to do? We’re talking about extermination of them?

And for people who talk about the beginning of this in the arrest and capture of these two Israeli occupation soldiers, we have to remember Israel has not been sitting idly by. Israel has been violating Lebanese sovereignty for the last several years, long after its so-called partial withdrawal from South Lebanon in May of 2000. Israel violates Lebanese earth space. They kidnap shepherds and fishermen from the area where I come from, which is Tyre, at will. Some of these fishermen never come, some of them are killed. Plus, there are demands that all the Lebanese have, including the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jail, the fact that Israel has refused over the last several years all pressures and demands to give Lebanon, through the United Nations, a list of the 400,000 land mines that Israel has planted during its occupation in that region.

And when people on the left, like the editorial of The Nation magazine this week, an awful editorial, when they speak about -- as if this is about the ideology of Hezbollah. No, when we leftists speak about what’s going on, it is not out of sympathy for the ideology of Hezbollah. First of all, Israel is not launching a war on the ideology of Hezbollah. It is launching a war, as Rania put it very eloquently, on the whole civilian population of Lebanon. This is exactly what we are talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Chris Hedges.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I certainly did not mean to imply in any way that, you know, there we should ascribe equal amounts of moral blame to each side. Israel is clearly to blame here, both in terms of what is happening in Gaza and what is now happening in Lebanon. On the other hand, this has been a long process of severe repression in Gaza and the West Bank, a kind of Africanization of the Palestinian people, reducing them to subsistence level. Gaza has become virtually a giant walled prison for 1.1 million Palestinians, and that kind of abuse, that kind of repression, in the absence of international condemnation and in the absence of any attempt on the part of the United States to intervene and create a more humane situation for the Palestinian, breeds extremism. It breeds an extremist response. And these groups attempt to give back to the oppressor, albeit on a much smaller scale, what the oppressor has been meting out to them for years and years and years.

And so, while I sympathize with the argument that was just made, I do believe that this unchecked response on the part of Israel has fueled a movement where we now have two apocalyptic groups on either side essentially speaking in the language of violence, with large numbers of innocent people caught in the middle. And this is a tragedy that I think was a long time coming. I certainly do blame -- I lay the fault of this at the feet of the Israelis.

And just as I think that Israel had a large hand in creating Hezbollah after the invasion of Lebanon, it had a very large hand in creating Hamas. When I first went to Gaza in 1988, Hamas was a very marginal force. Fatah had almost complete control of the sympathy of the populace and certainly the power structure.

So, while I don't in any way want to let Israel off the hook, I think what we have done, and essentially by our negligence, is -- and by standing aside -- and I’m speaking, of course, of the United States -- is empowered these extremist forces, and we now have a kind of Ahab-like self-immolation that is taking place in the Middle East, and there seems to be no outside power, certainly not coming from the Bush administration or Washington, willing to step in and speak with any kind of reason or sanity.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of the U.S. opposing a ceasefire in Lebanon.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is exactly the point that I’m trying to make. You know, they have essentially washed their hands and refused -- I mean, Washington is probably the one force that can step in -- and not always successfully, as we’ve seen in the past -- and bring some kind of restraint to Olmert's hand, but Washington's refusal to do that thrusts us in an incredibly dangerous environment, where there is no one to stay the hand of the Israeli government. There are no checks, there are no restraints. We don't know how far they’re going to go.

I mean, there are rumors or fears that, of course, they may actually make attacks against Syria. They buzzed -- you know, Israeli warplanes have sort of done flyovers of the house of the Syrian president, and when you listen to the rhetoric out of Jerusalem, it is all about stopping -- I’m not saying that the rhetoric is why they’re in Lebanon, but the rhetoric is about the weapon shipments that they claim are coming from Syria and Iran into Hezbollah, and that’s why they say that they are carrying out these massive air strikes and massive attacks against Lebanon.

And, you know, I think we have to be clear that this has to fail. Hezbollah is not a conventional military force. There is no infrastructure to destroy to speak of. Their rockets are -- the rockets that they fire are in caches and wooden crates lying all over Southern Lebanon. They may be able to target them after they’re fired, but we’re not fighting a conventional war. Israel is trying to fight a conventional war, but I think it’s doomed, and as the attacks continue and if there are more waves of rocket attacks -- and we think they have about 12,000, they have probably fired about 1,000 -- I mean, if these things keep coming and Israel, in their frustration, is allowed to continue to accelerate the aggression, who knows where it will go?

AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, Hezbollah is saying free Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the capture of the Israeli soldiers. Who are these prisoners?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, there are at least three prisoners that we know of. The longest serving one is a Lebanese Druze, in fact, who in the 1970s joined a Palestinian organization, because he was, like many Lebanese at the time, enthusiastic in lending out support for the Palestinians. The brother of this one, Samir Quntar, is now head of a movement that tries to bring attention to the plight of his brother. He is not a member of Hezbollah. He is a leftist, and I met him in the last trip. And his cause is well known all around Lebanon.

But it is not only about that. I mean, this is why so many people like me in the Arab world level charges of racism at many in the West, including on the left, because they seem to subscribe to the terminology, as I think your guest does, of the prevailing governments of the West, in terms of having more weight given to the frustration, to the so-called anguish of Israeli soldiers, than to the suffering of the civilian populations in Gaza and in Lebanon. When we speak about these two Israeli soldiers -- and I will not name them because I’m afraid of giving credence to the propaganda of Israel, by which all those Israeli human lives are more valuable than Arab human lives -- we should speak also about the entire nations that are held in captivity, whether it’s in Gaza or whether it’s in Lebanon today.

I don't think Israel has an intention of launching any ground troops into Lebanon, because they prefer to just bomb the hell out of Lebanon from there, and they are cutting all these bridges and roads so that, I think, rules out any possibility of invasion. And notice many people, in fact, including you, Amy, this morning, I’m afraid, you used the word “entrance,” about whether Israel will enter Lebanon. I mean, countries invade other countries, they don't enter. I mean, when Hitler went to Poland, he invaded Poland, he did not enter it. So we have to be careful about the language we use lest it lends propaganda credence to the aggressor.

I also want to say, so, for the Lebanese, there are the issues of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held without trial by Israel, the fact that Israel refused to release those prisoners -- and I must say as somebody who studies the various political movements of the region, Hassan Nasrallah, five months ago, gave a speech and he warned, he said, “If those prisoners are not released, we will try to get an Israeli soldier.” I mean, he made it very clear. And if anybody believes that Israel spontaneously improvised an invasion and bombing of the country that we are witnessing today is somebody who absolutely doesn't know anything about the nature of policymaking inside Israel.

So at this point, any language, it seems to me, that speaks about the so-called cycle of violence, like the Department of State terminology and so on, is losing an opportunity to point the finger at the party that is doing much of the violence and much of the killing, the one that is committing this aggression. The United States is not sitting idly by. The United States is not washing its hand. Its hands are dipped in the blood of the civilians of Lebanon. The United States is supporting wholeheartedly what’s going on. The footage of the children being killed in Tyre, the massacre in Marwahin, in the name of the U.S. government and many in the U.S. media, is justified self-defense.

These will have long scars. People are going to exact revenge. I mean, I know that in America we always think that Israel is the only one that is entitled to take revenge. I can guarantee you -- I mean, Chris Hedges at least admitted that Hezbollah was born within the womb, so to speak, of the Israeli invasion of 1982. It didn't exist prior to that. I guarantee you a new organization is going to be born out of the agony of the Lebanese population, and they will certainly exact revenge, against Israel, against America and against all those who supported this aggression, and when that occurs, the American population, as always, and the media will say in innocence and wonder yet again, “Why do they hate us? What have we done to them?”

AMY GOODMAN: Professor As’ad AbuKhalil, what about the response of the Arab countries?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, I think that there no doubt Arab countries are in cahoots in this particular conspiracy. There was a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo two days ago, and the minutes were leaked to the Arabic press, including to As-Safir, among others, and there was a clear intention. The Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, as well as the Saudis, primarily the Saudis, are participating in this campaign in order to disarm and weaken Hezbollah. What they don't know, however, is this is going to have reverberations that is going to affect their own stability.

Just yesterday, a group of Saudi dissidents, intellectuals from inside the country, may of whom are Shiite, released a strong denunciation of the policies of the Saudi government. Inside Egypt yesterday, a large group of the most well known Egyptian writers, intellectuals, leftists, released another statement denunciating the position of the Egyptian government, and there were demonstrations in Jordan about that. So, of course, they are part of the conspiracy that I speak of. The Arab governments are working side-by-side with the United States and with the Israelis. As far as the U.S. is concerned, and the United Nations, of course, we have too much respect for the audience to speak about these entities as if they are independent operators on the world stage.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, your last comment.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I share his frustration with Washington. On the other hand, this is the world that we live in. And a Washington that I think has always been partisan towards Israel, it’s been one of the frustrations for those of us who have spent as long as I have in the Arab world, is not a perfect scenario. On the other hand, a disengaged Washington, one that makes no attempt at all to restrain anything Israel does, that never questions this rightwing government in Israel, that never offers any kind of -- or proposes any kind of restraint is worse.

So, you know, it’s not a choice between what’s moral and immoral, it’s a choice between what’s immoral and what’s more immoral, sadly. And I think this disengagement on the part of the Bush administration, while I certainly share many of the criticisms of previous administrations, in terms of how their favoritism towards Israel, their partisanship, their failure to understand the Palestinians, I think we have entered a new area where the Bush administration has washed their hands, essentially giving Israel the green light to do anything they want, and I think the situation is much worse, and all we have to do is look at our television screens to see that.

AMY GOODMAN: There's a repeated charge that the weapons clearly -- the support clearly comes from Iran and, they say, Syria. Is this clear? Have you seen evidence presented?

CHRIS HEDGES: There is no hard evidence. I mean, you know, you have the shell casings. But let's not forget, Amy, that as bombs are being rained all over Lebanon, those weapons were made in American cities and have American markings on them, and this was something that was always made clear to me after attacks that I witnessed by the Israeli -- by Apache helicopters and F-16s in Gaza. I think that one of the things we have to remember is that Hezbollah, when matched against the might of the Israeli army, is a marginal, is virtually a nonentity, that they may be able to drop a few Katyusha rockets on Haifa, but they certainly -- to somehow equate the firepower of Hezbollah with the -- you know, it’s sort of equating a howitzer and an AK-47. There just is no match.

So, yes, there probably is support, from all we can tell, from both -- well, from Iran and certainly through Syria, in terms of a transit point. But trying to deal with Hezbollah as a conventional force and trying to bomb and occupy or destroy Lebanon as a response for the capture of these Israeli soldiers -- and let me make just one final point, this isn't the first time that Israeli soldiers have been captured. We’ve had a long and painful negotiations over kidnapped Lebanese, and Israeli has made cross-border incursions into Lebanon to capture Lebanese for years and years and years. That’s something well known to Lebanese and probably not as well known to other people.

But we had, just as in January of 2004, Israel freed 436 Arab prisoners and released the bodies of 59 Lebanese for burial in return for an Israeli spy and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers. So these kinds of negotiations over captured or kidnapped Israelis are something that we have seen in the past, and that is, of course, a more appropriate way to deal with what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Then why are they saying no to Hamas and to Hezbollah this time, saying we will we will not negotiate, when it’s known that Israel has negotiated for prisoners in the past?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, that is for, I suppose, public consumption. I mean, I think even when they make these swaps, they would often make these statements that they don't make negotiations, and then they do negotiate. I mean, one sets down a public precedent, and then what happens behind the scene, as certainly those of us who have worked in the Middle East know well, is often very different.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Chris Hedges, former New York Times foreign correspondent, he is the author of the book, War Is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning, as well as other books, also is a Nation Institute fellow. And As’ad AbuKhalil is a professor of political science at California State University, visiting professor at UC Berkeley. His blog is the “Angry Arab News Service” at angryarab.blogspot.com.

The Gypsy Life - 1

2006-06-21T16:26:00.000+01:00

The suburbs of Calcutta – in between there are a few years in Sibpur, Delhi, Helsinki, Colorado Springs, Silver Spring-Gaithersburg, and then Newcastle Upon Tyne – this is the path I have covered so far. The cycle will complete some day when I’ll be back in those suburbs of Calcutta once more…

It wasn’t Calcutta when I was a kid – it was Purba Putiary (East Putiary), South 24 Parganas. I vaguely remember the open pastures around our house, only three houses nearby including ours – miles of open space, the bamboo plants in front of our house where foxes wandered as the evening came. The nearest bus-route was about twenty minutes walk from our home. Power-cut was a regular feature those days, and then we (me, my sister, my mother, father and my grandmother) would sit in the open courtyard lit up by the dim light of a kerosene lamp…We had lots of ponds around, a little distance from our house lived Laxmi Aunty, where I used to spend most of the day – my grandfather was terribly ill during those days, even my grandmother wasn’t fully fit, and mother wasn’t able to cope up with everything – Laxmi Aunty used to take me to her place everyday. She taught me how to swim – I was only two years old then…the day my grandfather died, she took me out for a walk, and when I came back I cried – “Where’s grandfather?”

I come across a lot of stories about the bloody seventies – vaguely remember some incidents…a loud bang on the other side of the bamboo plantation, and soon after the shaking figure of a blood-soaked man coming out from there. Cops came one day, to search our home – they forcefully unloaded some old packing boxes from the loft, and accidentally broke the swallow nests…I remember the terrible noise by the baby swallows, the bigger ones swarming the house…the cops though apologized and left only after cleaning up the mess…

Twenty-four years in this place – regular twenty minutes walking to catch the school bus, later the bicycle became my friend when I joined Jadavpur University…the house became two-storied, the open spaces slowly filled up with new houses, the solitary Aurobindo Park became more like bustling Netajinagar…the ponds were gone, filled up to make space for new houses, the bamboo plantation was gone too, new faces were being seen…now I don’t even know all of them…don’t know where good old Laxmi Aunty is…it became more like a busy Housing Society where no one knew their neighbour…South 24 Parganas metamorphosed into Calcutta, with a new pin code – 700093…

Only the bus-route is still at the same place…

The final bow

2006-05-12T14:07:00.000+01:00

The geordie boy took his final bow infront of a packed St. James' Park last night.

It was something that I have never witnessed before. I wasn't able to get a ticket for Alan Shearer's testimonial match against Celtic, but I was able to feel the atmosphere on the streets. The entire city turned black and white. On my way home, I saw numerous supporters making their way to St. James' Park where their hero will kick a football for the last time. I saw the geordie pride in their eyes. And I saw the grief of losing their greatest warrior.

This city has slowly ate me up - engulfed me with the passion about the place, and the football club. I am not someone who is born and brought up in this city - I came from a far-away place. But I understood very well what it meant when Shearer said -

"I thought, `it doesn't feel quite right. I'm going to achieve my dream and go back home and play for the team I've always wanted to play for'.

"If you're not from this area or you haven't lived here I wouldn't expect you to believe that. But if you ask anyone who's lived here or does live up here, they will understand."

For the rest of my life, I will rue my misfortune, that I wasn't amongst those 52,000 when the legend bid his final farewell. But I will remember the black and white city which stood up to acknowledge the man.

(The picture of Shearer is taken from the BBC website).

Bottomline...

2006-04-21T13:36:00.000+01:00

All the nasty things that happened with Indian Cricket for the past few months actually did a world of good to me. I'm now quite dis-interested in cricket - and that's a positive sign, to me. And I think, if this whole issue has created similar feelings even in the minds of a small number of people, it's doing a whole world of good for India, its people and the world of sports - at least the madness behind cricket will decrease...

As for me - I normally don't open Cricinfo anymore, nor do I read the Rediff blogs on cricket written by so-called pundits...which gives me more time for work and reading:-)

It has done another good thing - it has shown me how obsessed the people (by people here I mean selectors, players, media-pundits, and fans) are with themselves and their own beliefs...

A liar with a mask on

2006-03-30T10:39:00.000+01:00

Doors not closed for Ganguly: Dravid (from HTCricket)

A wise man once said - "You can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Mr. Rahul Dravid, I'm afraid, has either forgot this saying, or he is just trying to act smart by portraying an image of a real (!!!) captain who thinks of the good of Indian Cricket. On the inside, he plays a different role, the role of a "yesman" to the main plotter, and on the outside? Hah. Where were you Mr. Dravid, when the chairman of the selectors boasted that whatever happens, even if Mr. X keeps scoring runs in the domestic cricket, we are not going to think about him...

Why didn't you protest, Mr. Dravid?

Legend sees a dream crushed

2006-03-23T11:17:00.000Z

Legend sees a dream crushed - from iCNewcastle

Ten years ago, this man turned down the likes of Manchester United to join his hometown club, Newcastle United. He waited ten long years to win a trophy with Newcastle - and at the end of this summer, he will retire with none. People feel sorry for him, but I don't.

Alan Shearer may not have won a trophy with Newcastle United, but what he has won is possibly the greatest trophy in the world. He has won the hearts of millions with his passion, accountability and skill. And that in my view supersedes all trophies. There will be countless football stars with their cabinets full of trophies, but many of them will not have this possession to be proud of. My four year old son, even though he does not know anything about football, pretends to be "Alan Shearer" when he is playing with his friends. That tells a lot about how people here thinks about this man.

I salute him...

Truth prevails

2006-03-20T17:46:00.000Z

An update on "History Again" - truth prevailed, at last.

US rejects 'Hindutva lessons'- The Times of India

I hope that these fundamentalists and religious bigots never get back the ground again.