A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Washington strongly backs brutal Saudi regime

Posted: 23 May 2011

Because selling deadly weapons is the best way to show America’s real commitment to democracy in the Arab world:

On the same day President Obama pressed again for peace in the Middle East, the Associated Press reminded us that the United States cannot help itself from flooding the region with the instruments of war, reporting that the nation is “quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale’’ with Saudi Arabia.
How vast? The part that has been highly publicized is the new $60 billion arms sale made to the Saudis because of the ongoing threat of Iran. The deal sends Saudi Arabia 84 new F-15s and upgrades to 70 F-15s. It also sends them about 180 Apache, Black Hawk, and Little Bird helicopters, as well as anti-ship and anti-radar missiles. In officially announcing the sale last fall, Andrew Shapiro, the US assistant secretary of state for political affairs, said the sales were part of “deepening our security relationship with a key partner with whom we’ve enjoyed a solid security relationship for nearly 70 years.’’
But there are other emerging aspects of the security relationship the Obama administration is not so candid about. The AP also reported on an obscure project to create a special elite security force that would fall under the US Central Command. The force would have up to 35,000 members “to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites.’’ It would be separate from Saudi Arabia’s military and its national guard and would involve tens of billions of dollars in additional military contracts. But no official of the Pentagon, the State Department, or the Saudi embassy would go on the record to discuss the program.
The sheepishness of the Pentagon was mirrored by Obama’s failure to mention Saudi Arabia once in his speech Thursday at the State Department. Obama urged fresh Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, praised the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, harshly denounced Libya and Syria, and cajoled Yemen and Bahrain to loosen up on their people. Obama criticized in general the “corruption of elites’’ and pushed for women’s rights in health, business, and politics. He said, “the region will never reach its full potential when more than half of its population is prevented from achieving their full potential.’’

Iraq war isn’t ending; it’s being rebranded as a privatised conflict

Posted: 23 May 2011

NPR reports:

 
A U.S. Army helicopter brigade is set to pull out of Baghdad in December, as part of an agreement with the Iraqi government to remove U.S. forces. So the armed helicopters flying over the Iraqi capital next year will have pilots and machine gunners from DynCorp International, a company based in Virginia.
On the ground, it’s the same story. American soldiers and Marines will leave. Those replacing them, right down to carrying assault weapons, will come from places with names like Aegis Defence Services and Global Strategies Group — eight companies in all.
All U.S. combat forces are scheduled to leave Iraq by year’s end, but there will still be a need for security. That means American troops will be replaced by a private army whose job will be to protect diplomats.
Already, the State Department is approving contracts, but there are questions about whether it makes sense to turn over this security job to private companies.
Overseeing the armed personnel is Patrick Kennedy, a top State Department official.
“I think the number of State Department security contractors would be somewhere in the area of between 4,500 and 5,000,” Kennedy says.
That’s roughly the size of an Army brigade, and double the number of private security contractors there now.
The State Department has an in-house security force, but it has just 2,000 people to cover the entire world. They handle everything from protecting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to guarding embassies and consulates.
Kennedy says for a tough job like Iraq, he needs help.
“In a situation like this, where you have a surge requirement that exceeds the capability of the State Department, it is normal practice to contract out for personnel to assist during those surge periods,” he says.
But the State Department has a shaky record overseeing armed guards. A recent congressional study found that many contractor abuses in Iraq were caused by those working for the State Department, not for the Pentagon.

More minds switching onto the Serco curse

Posted: 23 May 2011

All power to this campaign:

The public’s health will be at risk if the preferred cleaning company for the new Fiona Stanley Hospital gets the $3.2 billion job, the union representing hospital workers claims.
United Voice president Dave Kelly claims services company Serco run “dirty and dangerous” hospitals which could endanger people’s health.
Serco say hospitals the company looks after are clean and healthy and rejected claims their services weren’t up to scratch.  It labelled the union’s allegations as “mischievous”.
The union today released a report showing Serco failed to meet standads in six out of eight wards at a UK hospital last year.
“Here is an independent government assessment of Serco’s cleaning standards in UK hospitals and they’ve come up wanting,” Mr Kelly said.
“If those cleaning standards are repeated at Fiona Stanley, patients here in Western Australia will certainly see an increase in the number of superbug infections.”
But Serco spokesperson said the report referred to dust that was discovered in a hard-to-reach area.
“The comments related to some dust, fluff and grit in hard to reach areas such as behind a sluice machine,” the spokesperson said.

Of course, Serco is now facing an increasing barrage of criticism over its various work practices (and pro-privatisation governments are equally under scrutiny for falling in love with the multinational).
But such companies can always find some sympathetic journalists to spin issues their way. Enter Michael Stutchbury in Murdoch’s Australian with a nice puff story for the poor, struggling Serco:

The political Left and the public sector unions typically resist ending government monopolies. But the “progressive” approach of privately run jails may startle tough-on-crime conservatives.
The head of Serco’s London-based think-tank arm, Gary Sturgess, suggests that private prisons have been the “great success story” of contracting out. That’s partly because government jails have been so bad.
“In the English-speaking world, the public sector has not done a terrifically good job at managing prisons,” says Sturgess, who was cabinet secretary for the NSW Liberal Greiner government two decades ago. “They are not areas of best practice in public service delivery.”
But it’s also because the contained prison environment can be tightly managed by private contractors and closely monitored by governments and inspectors. The risks and costs of prisoners reoffending traditionally are borne by government. The issue is whether private providers can use financial incentives to take on some of this risk and cut through the contested social and criminological theories about what works best to reduce recidivism.

On Obama, AIPAC, occupation, revolutions and the status-quo

Posted: 22 May 2011

So much discussion about the latest elaborate dance between the US under Barack Obama and Israel. In many ways, little has changed over the years, as Washington occasionally talks tough with Israel but then never does anything more. Words are cheap in the Middle East, especially as the occupation deepens every day. And, as if most Muslims see America being on the side of the democratic angels in the Arab Spring.
Akiva Eldar in Haaretz:

Appearing before the annual conference of AIPAC, the American pro-Israel lobby, is what all candidates for president of the United States dream about. It’s their big chance to attract the Jewish vote and Jewish contributions. It’s the setting where they can reap the benefits of declarations of loyalty to Israel, elegantly bypassing anything that might rile supporters. That’s where, 16 years ago, Republican candidate Bob Dole announced a legislative initiative, at an inopportune moment, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in one of the low points in the peace process.
No American president or presidential candidate has ever told this large Jewish audience of supporters of Israel the truth. Until yesterday, that is. Obama did not go to the AIPAC conference to iron out differences between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He went there to settle misunderstandings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
…
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used to liken Israel’s participation in negotiations on the future of the territories to cattle being led through the corral to the slaughterhouse. When Netanyahu returns home, he will have to decide once and for all if he is ready to lose the support of an American president who yesterday went into the lion’s den or enter the corral of negotiations that in the end, and perhaps even from the beginning, will threaten him with political slaughter. Netanyahu’s choice not to attend yesterday’s convention session may indicate which direction he will choose.

Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:

For decades, Israel has been a bipartisan cause on Capitol Hill. It will remain so for a while, but Netanyahu is, through his pedantic and pinched behavior, helping to weaken Israel’s standing among Democrats. Why is this so important? Because Israel has no friends left in the world except for the United States (and in fairer weather, Canada, Australia and Germany). As it moves toward a confrontation with Iran, it needs wall-to-wall support in America. You would think that Netanyahu, who is sincere in his oft-stated belief that Iran poses quite possibly the greatest danger Israel has ever faced, would be working harder than he is to ensure Democratic, and presidential, support, for this cause.

Ahdaf Soueif in the Guardian:

This wasn’t slipping poison into the honey; it was smearing chemical sweeteners on to toxic pellets. Barack Obama listed what he sees as his country’s “core interests” in my country Egypt and my region; his country’s “core principles” governing how it will act towards us, and his policies to promote US interests within the frame of US principles. Let’s translate the US president’s description of his “core interests in the region” into effects on the ground:
“Countering terrorism” has implicated (at least) Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the US’s extraordinary rendition programme, turning our governments into torturers for hire and consolidating a culture of security services supremacy and brutality that is killing Syrian protesters today and manifests itself in Egypt as a serious counter-revolution.
“Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons” highlights consistent US double standards as Arab nuclear scientists are murdered, the US threatens Iran, and Israel happily develops its illicit arsenal.
“Securing the free flow of commerce” has meant shoving crony capitalism down our throats, bribing governments to sell our national assets and blackmailing us into partnerships bad for us.
“Supporting Israel” has led to land, resources and hope being stolen from Palestinians while Egypt becomes their jailer and dishonest broker, losing its credibility and self-respect.
Obama has all the information above; he knows that Hosni Mubarak’s dedication to delivering US “core interests” is why the Egyptian millions demanded his departure, why Tahrir proclaimed him an “agent of America and Israel”, and why he is now under arrest.
The blame is not all with America. We had a regime that was susceptible, that became actively complicit; assiduously finding ways to serve US and Israeli interests – and ruin us. But: we got rid of it. Peaceably, with grace and within the law. We Got Rid of It.
So when Obama says, “We will continue to do” the things described above, it’s a challenge. When he adds, “with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they are essential to them” – it’s obfuscation and an insult to every citizen across the world – including Americans – who followed our revolutions with empathy and with hope.

Joseph Massad in Al-Jazeera English:

The problem with US policy in the Arab world is not only its insistence on broadcasting credulous US propaganda – easily fed to Americans, yet with few takers elsewhere in the world – but also that it continues to show a complete lack of familiarity with Arab political culture and insists on insulting the intelligence of most Arabs, whom it claims to address directly with speeches such as Mr Obama’s.
…
Opposition to the United States and Israel in fact is something espoused by the peoples of the Arab world, not by their leaders, who have been insisting for decades that the US and Israel are the friends of Arabs. Indeed the people of the region have been the only party that insisted that US policies and domination in the region and constant Israeli aggressions are what make these two countries enemies of the Arab peoples, while Arab rulers and their propaganda machines insisted on diverting people’s anger toward other imagined enemies, which the US conjured up for the region, while making peace with Israel.
Obama’s attempt to deny the hatred that Arabs feel towards the United States and Israel because of the actions of these two countries is nothing short of the continued refusal of the United States and Israel (not of Arabs) to take responsibility for their own actions by shifting the blame for the horrendous violence they have inflicted on the region onto their very victims. When Obama and Israel call on Arabs to take responsibility for the state of the region and not blame the US and Israel for it, what they are essentially doing is to refuse to take responsibility for what they have inflicted on Arabs.
Arabs have clearly taken responsibility and have been trying to remove the dictators that the US and Israel have supported for decades – and which they continue to support. The only parties refusing to take responsibility here are the United States and Israel. Obama’s speech, sadly, continues this intransigent tradition.

The battle for Misurata in Libya

Posted: 22 May 2011