The now familiar scenes of enraged protesters waving fists at cameras, en route to acts of sacred vengeance, cannot be understood apart from the theology that undergirds such passion. ”God is great!” the Koran says, and Muslims in the streets seem to take that to mean that the deity is a being of such infinite supremacy that any offense against it must itself be experienced as infinite, requiring an infinite rage in God’s behalf.

God, it seems, is understood to be a feudal potentate whose honor, once slighted by nefarious human actions, can only be restored by counterbalancing nefarious reactions. This theology, not particular to Islam, is rooted in the various mythologies of monotheism, some of which tend to portray the deity itself as jealous of its glory, ready to take offense.

Thus, as James puts it, ”crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fanciful slight upon the God.” Such theology has ”conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind.”

But what if ”God is great!” does not mean God is a transcendent king, alert to trespass by lesser beings? The Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggests that the common phrase is mistranslated, and that what it actually means is ”that God is greater than anything we can conceive of Him as.”

In this radical otherness, kingship is as irrelevant an image as serfhood, and the idea of offending such a deity does not apply. Greatness is not the point. Nor is defending it. ”As soon as God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory,” James concludes, religious fanaticism ”ceases to be a danger.”

James Carroll | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press.

I’m reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers’ shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers’ shops - and don’t even care.

Last week’s visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush’s bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning “democracies” of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as “the greatest strategic challenge” facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that “contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States”.

As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria’s not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: “What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?” As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush “believes in self-determination only if he’s doing the determining … The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.” And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.

Robert Fisk | Independent/UK (read more. . .)

The U.S., not Iran, is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

In a Jan. 11 Financial Times article, a senior U.S. official is quoted as saying: “The time has come to blow the whistle on a country that is in non-compliance with the non-proliferation treaty,” Hallelujah! Someone is finally going to blow the whistle on U.S. violations of the treaty.

Oops — the official was talking about Iran. And the official was wrong — Iran is not in violation of the treaty. It is the U.S. and the other nuclear powers on the U.N. Security Council that are in non-compliance with the complete disarmament requirement of the treaty.

U.S. media again falling for and spreading lies

The U.S. is hyping a case against Iran based on many of the same lies it used to build the case for attacking Iraq. And the mainstream U.S. media have essentially ignored the fact that the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.

The date of his fatwa was Aug. 9, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. But the U.S. claims Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. Does this sound familiar? Given the Bush administration’s lack of credibility, we should be very wary of this claim. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Ron Forthofer | Daily Camera (read more. . .)

But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. As a Sunni city north of Baghdad, it is likely that ethnic cleansers planned the attack as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns, and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.

What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden Dome follows an historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite battles, are engaging in their own, anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called “the Jerusalem of Kurdistan.”

It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated, and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife’s edge.

Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won’t be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the US invasion of Iraq and America’s deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn’t spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.

Robert Dreyfuss | TomPaine.com (read more. . .)

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign U.S. foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the “long war” now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush’s butt in 2004.

Bush was the principal author, along with his straight-shooting Vice President, and now he is hoisted by his own fear-mongering propaganda. The basic hysteria was invented from risks of terrorism, enlarged ridiculously by the President’s open-ended claim that we are endangered everywhere and anywhere (he decides where). Anyone who resists that proposition is a coward or, worse, a subversive. We are enticed to believe we are fighting a new cold war. But are we? People are entitled to ask. Bush picked at their emotional wounds after 9/11 and encouraged them to imagine endless versions of even-larger danger. What if someone shipped a nuke into New York Harbor? Or poured anthrax in the drinking water? OK, a lot of Americans got scared, even people who ought to know better.

So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?

Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus. So do a lot of the politicians merrily throwing spears at him. He taught them how to play this game, invented the tactics and reorganized political competition as a demagogic dance of hysterical absurdities, endless opportunities to waste public money. Very few dare to challenge the mindset. Thousands have died for it.

William Greider | TheNation (read more. . .)

Though the obvious “Wise Men” figures of this moment, like the elder Bush’s confidant Brent Scowcroft, remain out in the cold when it comes to the younger Bush’s Iraq policies, business leaders are one group that might yet be turned by a cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War. In their report, Stiglitz and Bilmes consider, among other factors, how the war has hurt the economy by increasing global and domestic insecurity while contributing to a boost in oil prices. Outside of a few energy companies and defense contractors that continue to directly benefit, America’s corporations have generally been adversely affected by these costs. A significant number of corporate leaders have begun complaining about a damaged Brand America and a chilled climate for doing business abroad. Certainly, business leaders have reason to doubt that a neoconservative foreign policy works in their favor, and they may yet decide to cut their losses. If some CEOs and other executives reevaluate their allegiance to the White House — becoming more vocal supporters of realism in Republican foreign policy or even of the Democratic Leadership Council’s multilateral brand of corporate globalization — the turn could make the discussion about the war in upcoming electoral contests significantly more contentious.

As for the public at large, polls on Iraq started showing majority disapproval as early as the summer of 2004. Antiwar opinion now regularly registers as high as 60%. John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and an expert on wartime public opinion, has argued that eroding support for Iraq matches patterns for wars in Korea and Vietnam. “The most striking thing about the comparison among the three wars is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq,” he writes in Foreign Affairs. By the start of last year, with just 1,500 American troops dead, public opinion on Iraq had dropped to depths only reached in the Vietnam War after Tet, when some 20,000 Americans had been killed.

Mueller concludes, “If history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline.”

That might be cause for celebration, if only it were the end of the story. Mueller’s formulation may sound simple, even deterministic, but the reality of withdrawal is not. True, public support for the Vietnam War never rebounded after March 1968. Yet the conflict dragged on for another five years. The ticker for that intervention kept racing higher because President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were willing to take the tragedy Johnson made and adopt it as their own. A lesson for us now is that no set pattern will guarantee a satisfying end to the situation we face, a situation in which another unpopular war threatens to stretch on for years.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of the country has already decided that the war in Iraq has become too costly. Americans have rejected the prospect of funding a massive and prolonged occupation. In that sense, we have already tipped.

Questions about the price of war keep resurfacing not because there’s a credible argument for most Americans that the price is reasonable, but because our elected officials thus far have only pushed those costs ever higher. What remains, then, is for the public to hold accountable those who would carry forward the neoconservative crusade — to make their stance a costly one in public life. What remains is for us bring the political price of war into line with the human and financial costs that we will continue to bear.

Mark Engler | TomDispatch.com (read more….)

What does it say about a nation that allows its government to spend—before counting war fighting costs—$480.9 billion attempting to secure the homeland (DoD plus $41.6 billion for all non-DoD federal spending) while it undermines community building and community assistance efforts that (1) are essential to millions of today’s most vulnerable and (2) expand tomorrow’s opportunities by broadening the scope of training for today’s youth?

It clearly says that the United States no longer cherishes the spiritual vision articulated by one of the earliest colonial “Founding Fathers”—the Puritan leader, John Winthrop—while still aboard the Arbella in 1630. In a discourse titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop wrote one of the enduring images associated with the early Puritan settlers: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” As his title suggests, Winthrop’s message to his fellow seekers is one of inclusiveness. Noting that their religious quest for freedom of conscience had a parallel secular quest for moral self-governance, he cautions the company that “the care of the public must oversway all private respects …”

He is even more explicit elsewhere in the sermon:

“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Winthrop’s “city on the hill” radiates the ideal of service to others. Because all are of the same community, they share equal rights and incur commensurate shared responsibilities for contributing to the community’s well-being. Should rights conflict with responsibilities, the spirit of community gives priority to the latter in recognition that all are equal in the light of the deity within regardless of their station and condition in this life.

Being human, even Winthrop was not immune to temptations to indulge individual rights over the community’s welfare. But neither the historical failings of the Bay Colony nor centuries of slavery, racism, and extermination of Native peoples could extinguish Winthrop’s spirit of community. In modern times, that spirit flickered in the mid-20 th century as the single-minded pursuit of personal privilege began to replace the collective responsibility of individual caring—that is, spending not just money but time in community.

This change in attitude might be regarded as a backlash against the artificial “community” created by the massive conscription of men and women (15 million) for World War II. Ironically tagged military “service,” its primary purpose had nothing to do with Winthrop’s “supply of others’ necessity.” So when this “community” dissolved at war’s end, individuals raced to make up for four lost years. In the ensuing scramble, the ethos of voluntary service faded as one facet or organizing principle of daily life and experience. The communal invitation that had served as the welcoming beacon to the city on the hill morphed into a cold reflective beam warning all who approached that the city was now a gated community, a closed bastion, “a mighty fortress.”

The 2007 budget request reinforces this shift from commitment to the inclusive community to assertion of personal privilege as the guiding tenet of the administration. Yes, there is community—if one is privileged, that is. And there is “service,” but not in its moral sense of a giving relationship between equals.

In fact, this budget, together with this year’s $70 billion supplemental for DoD, is another extension of the administration’s drive to create a fortress based on privilege within a fortress based on military might. The president and other administration officials, as well as many in Congress, constantly claim that the world changed on September 11, 2001, that there are only two realities, pre- and post-9/11. This is as specious as it is shallow.

Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) | Foreign Policy in Focus (read more. . .)