I now have a copy of the letter John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt sent to the board of the Chicago Global Affairs Council after it cancelled their September appearance there under political pressure. The letter follows, below.

A couple of comments. This is a sad business. Two distinguished profs who have both spoken at the Council before are disinvited regretfully/squeamishly by a respected professional friend, and informed that they might only speak if someone else comes to counter their statements. The old "context" argument used against Rachel Corrie and everyone else. Your views are too toxic to be heard unless we "balance" them.

Walt and Mearsheimer point out that Michael Oren spoke at the Council earlier this year on Middle East matters without "context." Oren is a neoconservative who made aliyah to Israel in the 70s and who served as an officer in the Israeli army. John Mearsheimer served as an officer in the United States Air Force. Let us be very clear about this: A former officer in the Israeli Army who lives in Israel (and has lately served in the Israeli Reserves) may hold forth about our policy in the Middle East, but a former officer in our Air Force has no place to do the same. You don't have to be a nativist to find this mindboggling. Mearsheimer and Walt are all for Oren speaking, they just want to be able to speak too. And just compare the literary and analytical work of Oren and Mearsheimer; there is no comparison. Oren is a polemicist, Mearsheimer a serious student of American policy. Deeply dispiriting. Where is Alan Dershowitz, to decry the censorship?

I'm upset. I tell myself that this just shows how afraid the other side is of the truth, but face it, they're winning. Last night my wife said at dinner that I am "paying a price" for my views on the Middle East. I have a long career as a journalist. I lost a blog-job earlier this year over these issues, I can't get paying assignments to write about these matters; and they are all that I care about, as my country fumbles through the aftermath of 9/11 and Iraq. I sense some of that same sorrow in the Walt and Mearsheimer letter that follows. At the peaks of their careers, they have devoted themselves to these policy issues out of some sense of duty; and they're not being allowed to speak. It appears from the letter that a friendship has ended: the authors' with Marshall Bouton. How long before the country wakes up from this madness?


___________________________________________

August 5, 2007

[Addressed, individually, to board members of the Council, and to members of Council committees]

We are writing to bring to your attention a troubling incident involving the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. We do so reluctantly, as we have both enjoyed our prior associations with the Council and we have great respect for its aims and accomplishments. Nonetheless, we felt this was an episode that should not pass without comment.

On September 4, 2007, our book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most highly respected publishers in the United States. Through our publisher, the Council issued an invitation for both of us to speak at a session on September 27, 2007. We were delighted to accept, as each of us had spoken at the Council on several occasions in the past and knew we would attract a diverse and well-informed audience that would engage us in a lively and productive discussion.

On July 19, while discussing the details of our visit with Sharon Houtkamp, who was handling the arrangements at the Council, we learned that the Council had already received a number of communications protesting our appearance. We were not particularly surprised by this news, as we had seen a similar pattern of behavior after our original article 'The Israel Lobby' appeared in the London Review of Books in March 2006. We were still looking forward to the event, however, especially because it gave us an opportunity to engage these issues in an open forum.

Then, on July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was cancelling the event. He said he felt "extremely uncomfortable making this call" and that his decision did not reflect his personal views on the subject of our book. Instead, he explained that his decision was based on the need "to protect the institution."  He said that he had a serious "political problem," because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the Council. "This one is so hot," Marshall maintained, that he could not present it at a Council session unless someone from "the other side," such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League was on stage with us. At the very least, he needed to present "contending viewpoints."  But he said it was too late to try to change the format, as the fall schedule was being finalized and there would not be sufficient time to arrange an alternate date. He showed little interest in doing anything with us in 2008 or beyond.

Several comments are in order regarding this situation.

First, since the publication of our original article on the Israel lobby, we have appeared either singly or together at a number of different venues, including Brown University, the Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University, Cornell University, Emerson College, the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Georgetown University, the National Press Club, the Nieman Fellows Program at Harvard University, the University of Montana, the Jewish Community Center in Newton, Massachusetts, and Congregation Kam Isaiah Israel in Chicago. In all but one of these venues we appeared on our own, i.e., without someone from the "other side."  As one would expect, we often faced vigorous questions from members of the audience, which invariably included individuals who disagreed in fundamental ways with some of our arguments. Nevertheless, the back-and-forth at each of these events was always civil, and quite a few participants said that they benefited from listening to us and to our interlocutors.

Second, the Council has recently welcomed speakers who do represent a "contending viewpoint," and they have appeared on their own. Consider the case of Michael Oren, an Israeli-American author, who appeared at the Council on February 8, 2007, to talk about 'The Middle East and the United States: A Long and Complicated Relationship'.  Oren has a different view of U.S. Middle East policy than we do; indeed, he gave a keynote address at AIPAC's annual policy conference this past spring that directly challenged our perspective. We believe it was entirely appropriate for the Council to have invited him to speak, and without having a representative from an opposing group there to debate him. The Council has also welcomed a number of other speakers on this general topic in recent years, such as Dennis Ross, Max Boot and Rashid Khalidi, and none of their appearances included someone representing a "contending view."

One might argue that our views are too controversial to be presented on their own. However, they are seen as controversial only because some of the groups and individuals that we criticized in our original article have misrepresented what we said or leveled unjustified charges at us personally, such as the baseless claim that we (or our views) are anti-Semitic. The purpose of these charges, of course, is to discourage respected organizations like the Council from giving us an audience, or to create conditions where they feel compelled to include "contending views" in order to preserve "balance" and to insulate themselves from external criticism.

In fact, our views are not extreme. Our book does not question Israel's right to exist and does not portray pro-Israel groups in the United States as some sort of conspiracy to "control" U.S. foreign policy. Rather, it describes these groups and individuals, both Jewish and gentile, as simply an effective special interest group whose activities are not substantially different from groups like the NRA, the farm lobby, the AARP, or other ethnic lobbies. Its activities, in other words, are as American as apple pie, although we argue that its influence has helped produce policies that are not in the U.S. national interest. We also suggest that these policies have been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well, and that a different course of action would be better for both countries. It is not obvious to us why such views could not be included in the Council's schedule.

Although we find it somewhat unseemly to refer to our own careers, it is perhaps worth noting that we are both well-established figures with solid mainstream credentials. We are fortunate to occupy chaired professorships at distinguished universities, and to have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We have both held important leadership positions at Chicago or Harvard, each of us serves on the editorial boards of several leading foreign policy journals (such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy), and we have both done consulting work for U.S. government agencies. Given our backgrounds, the idea that it would be inappropriate for us to appear on our own at a Council session seems far-fetched.

Finally, and most importantly, we believe that the decision to cancel our appearance is antithetical to the principle of open discussion that underpins American democracy, and that is so essential for maximizing the prospects that our country pursues a wise foreign policy. In essence, we believe this is a case in which a handful of people who disagree with our views have used their influence to intimidate Marshall into rescinding the Councilâ?Ts invitation to us, so as to insure that interested members will not hear what we have to say about Israeli policy, the U.S. relationship with Israel, and the lobby itself. This is not the way we are supposed to address important issues of public policy in the United States, and it is surely not the way the Council normally conducts its business. This is undoubtedly why Marshall, who is a very smart and decent man, felt so uncomfortable calling us to say that the event had been cancelled. He knew this decision was contrary to everything that the Council is supposed to represent.

The Chicago Council is obviously under no obligation to grant us a venue, and we are not writing in an attempt to reverse this decision. But given the importance of the issues that are raised in our book, we are genuinely disappointed that we will not have the benefit of open exchange with the Council's members, including those who might want to challenge our arguments or conclusions. The United States and its allies, including Israel, face many challenging problems in the Middle East, and our country will not be able to address them intelligently if we cannot have an open and civilized discussion about U.S. interests in the region, and the various factors that shape American policy there. Regrettably, the decision to cancel our appearance has made that much-needed conversation more difficult.

Sincerely,

John J. Mearsheimer

R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science University of Chicago

Stephen M. Walt
Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs Harvard University
__._,_.___
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__________________
E.
from Edward Herman:
Date 15 August 2007
http://traprockpeace.org/afghanistan_bombing_081107.pdf

Francis,
This article on a bombing event in Afghanistan written by Marc Herold is painful but worth a close reading. For years  Herold has been documenting  the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, and he has shown repeatedly that the Pentagon kills civilians on a large scale, often uses new barbaric weapons in areas where civilians are numerous, and regularly lies about it. They are using Afghanistan with especial ruthlessness and as a weapons experimental zone, because it is far away and out of media sight, so that they can get away with it. But the immorality involved here is staggering. If pictures like those shown here by Herold were available to the U.S. public this murderous policy would come to a screeching halt. But the media protect the Pentagon. This recalls to my mind the fact that the Pentagon only used napalm in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war, not North Vietnam, although we were allegedly saving the south from aggression. The reason for this was that napalming the North would have led to global publicity of this ugly method of warfare­but in South Vietnam the US was an occupying power and had a puppet government, as in Afghanistan, and the media here kept quiet on this matter.
Ed

 

PS: Herold tells me that his work is published widely abroad, but not in the US.

  On that fateful afternoon of August 2nd, hundreds of people had gathered for the traditional weekly market (or ‘mela’) in Bughni (or Bagh-e-Nahi) where local people trade everything from carpets, foods, clothes, to cows. Market day there falls on Thursday, the start of Afghanistan’s weekend. Then, suddenly, the U.S. Boeing-made GBU-31, GPS-guided 2,000 pound bombs fell from the blue sky.

Panic erupted. Many villagers said they lost fathers, brothers, and children in the inferno. Others ferried their wounded to hospitals in the province, providing concrete evidence that simple civilians had been injured and massacred. Some injured were transferred to a clinic in Musa Qala, 100 kms away from Bughni; others were taken to Kandahar, 150 kms away; and yet others were brought to Lashkar Gah, 200 kms away.

 

Eyewitnesses told gruesome tales of headless bodies piled high in Bughni waiting for identification. A resident, Hafizullah, said, “It was a day of blackness. Almost everyone had lost someone. People did not know where their family members were. I saw people just sitting on the ground, staring at nothing. There was mourning everywhere.” Another resident added, “We grew tired of collecting the dead.”

 

At least 20 civilians (including an 8-yr-old boy) with shrapnel wounds were brought to the main Bost hospital in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. Three of the injured men died there. Helmand's police chief, Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said. "I can confirm there were heavy bombardments," Andiwal told Reuters by phone. "We have heard of heavy casualties too and have sent a team to investigate this." A provincial lawmaker in Kabul, Mohammad Anwar, also received reports of high civilian casualties. In the Lashkar Gah hospital, Shokhi Khan, a relative of one of the wounded, said several hundred civilians were killed or wounded in the strikes. He said people had gathered for picnics and to go to a shrine in Baghran district north of Lashkar Gah on Thursday when the raids started. Twelve wounded men were brought to a hospital in the main southern city of Kandahar, said Sharifullah Khan, a doctor there. Nasibullah, one of the wounded men in Kandahar hospital, said the bombs hit a market. He claimed there were no Taliban there at the time of the attack. An Afghan Defense Ministry said some 40 men had also been brought to hospital in the main southern city of Kandahar. Other injured persons were brought to hospitals in Sangin and Musa Qala districts.

 

Abdul Karim, a resident of Baghran, recounted, “Many died on the way. One of my sons is in Bost Hospital. I don’t think he will survive. Two other sons are in Musa Qala. Two of my cousins were killed and two more were injured.”

 

When the claim that no civilians had been bombed could no longer be sustained, a back-up lie was floated by the military, playing upon general public ignorance. Charlie Mayo was the carrier. "It is interesting there were no females," said British Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Mayo in Helmand Province, suggesting the wounded adult males may have been Taliban fighters. "We are very confident we hit a large meeting of Taliban and they are very sore about it."
 
But the village of Bughni has long been a Taliban-controlled area where no doubt Sharia prevails and women simply do not attend public gatherings or go out shopping (hence no female victims). Who are you fooling, Lt-Col. Charlie Mayo?
 

The local (Afghan) attempt at obfuscation was a little less subtle. General Zahir Azimy of the Afghan Defense Ministry put forth the U.S-pleasing lie – no evidence whatsoever offered - that a large gathering of Taliban attending a public execution had been bombed, killing over 100 Taliban and three senior commanders including Commander Mansoor Dadullah. Azimy added, "According to our sources, there were 150 people killed, maybe less, but not more," he told a news conference. "If there were civilian casualties, they were very limited and should not exceed 10."[7] Since the attack, Mansoor Dadullah has given several media interviews. The evidence of very high civilian casualties is incontrovertible now. How many more accounts from residents are needed? How many more gruesome photos of injured young boys and old men? The general needs to go back to the drawing boards (or U.S. tutorials).

 

Are these persons Taliban?

 

 
 

http://traprockpeace.org/afghanistan_bombing_081107.pdf

 

Several family members who accompanied the bombing victims seeking treatment gave accounts describing their personal situation. Haji Hakim Jan, 27, said the U.S. bombs killed four of his brothers. Jan added, “I had another brother of mine and an eight-year-old sister wounded in the bombing.” He said that such deaths alienate civilians from Western troops and make people join the Taliban resistance.[8]

The attention by the mainstream corporate media to twenty-one captured South Korean evangelists as compared to the Afghan civilians slaughtered in Helmand is revealing. The villagers of Bagh-e-Nahi are indeed very sore in ways more than one about what happened between 3-4 P.M. on August 2nd. But then, of course, Afghan civilians killed by the US/NATO are bad bodies, unlike dead South Korean civilians who are good bodies. The U.S. Pentagon, the U.S. corporate press, and Human Rights Watch only “see” and count good bodies.


[1] at http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123063263
 
[2] Emphasis added by the author.
[3] Something I have explored in my essay, ““Grab News Headlines, Isolate Bombed Area and Stonewall:  U.S. Military’s Virtual Reality about Afghan Civilian Casualties. A Case Study of the U.S. Assault upon Hajiyan” (May 28, 2006) at: http://www.traprockpeace.org/marc_herold_hajiyan_24may06.pdf
[4] I examined earlier U.S. operations in Baghran in “Et Plus Ca Change…Patterns of Death and Deceit in Afghanistan,” Cursor.org (March 10, 2003) at http://cursor.org/stories/morethingschange.htm
[5] U.S. and NATO bombs rained down before upon civilians in Baghran in February 2003 (see my “A Rain of Bombs,” in Frontline at http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2319/stories/20061006000306100.htm ) and in June 2006 (see http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/GuAhmadmotherandfather.htm ).
 
[6] Mark Sauer, “Precision JDAMs Can Pack Big Punch: On-Board Systems Guide Air-to-Surface Weapons,” San Diego Tribune (March 21, 2003) at http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030321-jdam01.htm
 
[7] Hamid Shalizi, “Few Civilian Deaths from Afghan Bombing – Officials,” Reuters (August 4, 2007) at http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSISL7315720070804?feedType=RSS

[8] Abdul Qodus, ”Afghans Check Reports of Civilian Bombing Deaths,” Reuters (2:23 PM EDT August 3, 2007)


_________________
F.
from Dahr Jamail :
Date: 18 August 2007
Subject: Water crisis is killing untold numbers in Iraq.
http://DahrJamailIraq.com
(c)2007 Dahr Jamail.

by Ali al-Fadhily

[BAGHDAD, Aug 17 (IPS) - The collapse of Iraq's infrastructure has created a worsening water crisis that is killing untold numbers of Iraqis.]

Iraq, with its famous Tigris and Euphrates rivers that run the length of the country, is now unable to provide drinking water to most of its people.

"The two rivers are still there, great as they always were, and flowing all through the year," chief engineer Ahmad Salman of the Baghdad Water Authority told IPS. "Yet Iraqis are thirsty, and we are ashamed of being engineers in the service. We have simply failed to provide our people with half of the drinking water they need."

Much of the country is suffering severe lack of water, and the small quantities supplied are not good for human use.

"I analysed the water supplied by the water authority, and the result was shocking," Dr Ibrahim Ali, a laboratory owner in Baghdad told IPS. "It is definitely not good for human consumption, and every time we analyse it we find something new that might, in time, cause death."

The doctor added, "Various kinds of bacterial pollution and germs we are finding can be as dangerous as biological weapons."

Iraqi hospitals are full of people with illnesses due to the unsafe water. Doctors at several hospitals confirmed to IPS that water is one of the worst causes of diseases, especially among children, and that some of children had died of water-borne diseases compounded by a severe lack of medicines.

These problems are exacerbated during the summer when both the quantity and quality of water are at their lowest.

"One of the reasons for this lack of water is lack of electric power and fuel for generators," a member of a local municipal council in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "We have got tired of raising our needs for the water stations because our ministers and their leaders are busy fighting over chairs so that they make as much money as possible before they are thrown away."

U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker acknowledged to reporters Jul. 19 that Baghdad residents were receiving on average only one hour of electricity a day. Before the U.S.-led invasion, Baghdad residents received 16-24 hours of electricity daily. Without electricity, water cannot be pumped to homes.

A report released Jul. 30 by the international agency Oxfam and NCCI, a network of aid organisations working in Iraq, said that eight million Iraqis, nearly one in three, were in dire need of emergency aid.

The report, 'Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq' said that 70 percent of Iraqis are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 percent in 2003, the year the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was launched. About 80 percent of Iraqis lack effective sanitation, the report said.

According to the Oxfam report, "child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 percent before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to 28 percent now." Lack of potable water is at the root of most such conditions.

"It is corruption more than anything else," an engineer at the Baghdad Water Authority, who did not wish to be named, told IPS. "The authority is full of corruption from bottom to top, and there is no way to improve the situation unless the political situation is improved by removing these corrupt officials."

An IPS correspondent was advised not to go to the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources in the face of a danger of being kidnapped by security men at the ministry.

"It is another weapon that the Americans are killing us with," 62-year-old Abu Mahmood, a carpenter from Baghdad told IPS. "No water means diseases that lead to slow, but certain death. They did it to us at the time of sanctions and now it is their chance to do it again without firing bullets and making scandals."

Few Iraqis see hope under the present government. "The problem is that we do not have a government like any other country," Baghdad resident Nabhan Mukhlis told IPS. "We should just stop complaining and surrender to the death penalty that was issued the day Americans decided to invade our country."

_________________
(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region.


_______________
G.
from George Kenney :
Date: 17 August 2007
Subject: Podcast Conversation with Dave Marash of Al Jazeera.

Dear Francis,
     It's a pity that the US cable market refuses to carry Al Jazeera English language television news. Probably that will change eventually, but it's just another indication of how cut off the US has become from the rest of the world. Ironically so, because from its US reporting Al Jazeera provides better public diplomacy and a more human face for America than anything produced at the State Department.
     For a sense of how one of Al Jazeera's Washington anchors thinks about things I talk in the podcast with my friend Dave Marash. He's an original, independent thinker and always interesting.
     If you enjoy the show, please feel free to redistribute the link. Total runtime an hour and five minutes.
Best,
g.

http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2007/08/dave_of_al_jazeera.html