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Updated: added Democracy Now!
MoxNewsDotCom
March 17, 2010
on vodpod: Is The U.S. Incapable Of Standing Up To Israel? pt.1
Pt 2
on vodpod: Is The U.S. Incapable Of Standing Up To Israel? pt.2
***
The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story
by Mark Perry
Foreign Policy
March 13, 2010
On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East, arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it “too old, too slow … and too late.”
[…]
***
Updated
Report: Petraeus Warns Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mullen that Israel Is Jeopardizing US Security Interests
Democracy Now!
March 17, 2010
Veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author Mark Perry reports that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team of senior military officers in January to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perry reports that the briefers told Mullen that “Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region.”
more videos:
Demonstration against the separation wall in the West…
Palestinian anger spills onto East Jerusalem streets
Palestinians Clash With Police In East Jerusalem Over Re-opening Of Hurva Synagogue
Press TV-News Analysis-West Bank Lockdown-03-15-2010
Press TV-News Analysis-Gaza’s 1000 days-03-14-2010
Joe Sacco: Massacres in Palestine’s History
Does Israel Want A Two-State Solution?
GRITtv: Max Blumenthal: Israel, the GOP, & Coffee Party
see
A ‘Regrettable’ Event in East Jerusalem By Noam Chomsky
Israeli army chief visits Turkey to hold talks on Iran’s nuclear program
Oren, White House deny ‘crisis’ quotes | JTA – Jewish & Israel News
Pastor John Hagee Denounces Goldstone Report in Jerusalem
Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot by Chris Hedges + Don’t Come to Bi’lin Again
The fight against Israeli “impunity”
Biden blasts housing starts as ‘undermining’ trust By Ron Kampeas
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Get it through your thick heads…Israel does NOT want peace until it has ethnically cleansed the entire area and has taken over all of Palestine. Thumbing their nose at everyone…as usual
You sound like an antizionist (jew?).
Do you think Israel should exist, or that they should just be airlifted from Palestine to… maybe Baja? (With their walls…).
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While it’s extremely exciting to see such commonsense material in the media and political ‘mainstream’, material that however commonsense it may be, has been rigidly excluded from open conversation, and while we need to take advantage of this opening as much as we possibly can, we also need to maintain an awareness of the larger picture. Mark Perry seems to maintain the studied, yet ridiculous, academic naivete of the ‘serious’ insider alterna-journalist, does he really expect us to believe that Mullen and the White House were in fact shocked and stunned at the ‘news’ that Israel’s actions can affect the safety of our troops and the way Arab nations see us?
!!!!!
Oh of course not! So let’s be real. What stunned Mullen and the WH? What stunned them was that Petraeus was obviously making a big time political move, and a very, very shrewd one. This guy Petraeus plays an even more wickedly clever political game than Obama does. He saw an opening – more and more Americans feeling restive and uneasy about Israel – and he went for it. That gives us an unexpected opening, but it DOESN’T change anything about our Middle East policy. We are the only ones who can change that policy. So let’s charge through the opening that has suddenly occured in the ‘consensus’ of the political-media establishment as best we can, but let’s not be fooled by those who spin absurd and credulous tales about a ‘change’ in US-Israel relations. This is nothing but a spate of 2012 positioning. And it looks like a big win for Petraeus. Obama will be forced to back down publicaly, is a humiliation his political career will likely not recover from. Policy will roll on as before, but now when things get ugly, as they surely will, Petraeus will look like the hero no matter what.
None of that should matter to us. To us, this is a chance to try to breech the political-media establishment stonewall on Mideast issues and nothing more than that.
Gee, what I meant to say, amidst my garbled words, is that all that has happened here is that Petraeus made a big political move. It’s a brilliant, daring and chancy POLITICAL move by Petraeus, and it has created a breech in the ‘mainstream consensus’ to stonewall any commonsense about the Middle East. That creates an opportunity for us, an opening, but this opening will not last and it will not change policy. So we need to try to take advantage of it while it is there, and if we succeed, we MIGHT even be able to bust it wide open.
And here is a point we should belabor in our letters to editors, etc.: how did what was unmentionable in polite circles a few days ago, the notion of fairness in our dealings with Israel and Palestine, suddenly become ‘mainstream’, seemingly just because a general said it? We’ve seen this again and again where yesterday’s reviled viewpoint overnight gets annointed as acceptable just because it became convenient for some political or economic faction.
This is an opening. It happened because of conflicting political ambitions amongst the ‘elites’. But it’s up to us to go through that opening.