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With the tourists frightened away by Kashmir’s separatist struggle, the famous Dal Lake is slowly succumbing to pollution.

By Jason Overdorf – GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
Updated: July 29, 2009 08:38 ET

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar’s Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India’s British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.

The boats’ garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.

Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.

“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”

In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar’s growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.

Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.

These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal’s banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.

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By Robert Mackey

Last Saturday, after 36 weeks of training, 178 women became the first female members of India’s Border Security Force. According to a report in The Deccan Herald, after two more weeks of “specialised tips on advanced combat,” the women will be deployed to help guard the country’s borders. Last week, The Indian Express reported that the female officers will be used primarily to frisk women who cross India’s borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh, but it noted that they will also take part in night patrols.

To judge by this recruiting video made by the force, the women have let themselves in for a life of nonstop adventure, almost impossible to distinguish from a Bollywood action movie:

India’s Border Security Force in Action – Part 8

According to statistics published on the Border Security Force’s Web site, shootouts with Islamist militants along the frontiers with Pakistan and Bangladesh are a routine part of the job. The force, known as the B.S.F. in India, claims to have killed 4,814 “militants/extremists” since 1990, and captured 11,790 more. During this period, the B.S.F. Web site says 1,375 border guards were killed.*

While the Mumbai attacks last November illustrate that India is indeed threatened by militant groups, reports from both sides of the 2,000-mile border fence the country is building along its frontier with Bangladesh suggest that at least some of those killed by the force may have just gotten too close to one of its 80,000 armed guards.
There is also evidence that the actual number of people killed may be higher than the tally on the B.S.F. Web site. Last August, Reuters reported that the director-general of the force said that his men had killed 59 people trying to cross the border between India and Bangladesh in the previous six months. The B.S.F. chart records just 29 deaths for all of 2008.

NY Times Blog for more

Channel 4 report on Indian Security Forces AtrocitiesBright Cove for more

Abuses by India’s Border Security Force; Questions about Media Coverage

Via the New York Times blog, The Lede, I’ve been looking at a number of links regarding India’s Border Security Force (BSF). The starting point for the coverage in the Times was the news in the Deccan Herald that 178 women have, for the first time, joined the force. But the real story The Lede blogger, Robert Mackey, is interested in are the numerous reports of abuses by the BSF, specifically the killing of unarmed people on both sides of the India-Bangladesh border, including both Bangladeshis and Indian citizens. The Lede embeds the following BBC Channel 4 report on the abuses, which is pretty horrifying:

There is obviously a huge problem when the BSF can shoot unarmed people with impunity. But this report by Jonathan Rugman also has some problems, which need to be addressed.

First, how big a problem is it? The numbers are a little confusing. The BSF itself reports 5000 “militants/extremists” killed since 1990, but there is pretty clear evidence that they are under-reporting total deaths (perhaps they simply aren’t reporting deaths of unarmed people at all). For the Channel 4 reporter at least, it was relatively easy to find many villagers on both sides of the border with relatives who had been killed — who were obviously not “militants/extremists.”
That said, there are some problems in the story above, and in Robert Mackey’s blog post about it. One is the inclusion of footage from a “BSF Recruiting video” by both reporters. In fact, you can see the video on YouTube, and it seems highly unlikely to me that “Kashsoldier,” the author of the video, is putting together his various amateur videos for official Indian military use. I wonder why they think his videos are official recruiting videos? Amy I missing something? (Would the Indian armed forces really be using American heavy metal music to recruit Indian soldiers?)

http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005883.html#comments

(The following comments and the above accompanying reports and videos have been submitted by a reader.)

Via the New York Times blog, The Lede, I’ve been looking at a number of links regarding India’s Border Security Force (BSF). The starting point for the coverage in the Times was the news in the Deccan Herald that 178 women have, for the first time, joined the force. But the real story The Lede blogger, Robert Mackey, is interested in are the numerous reports of abuses by the BSF, specifically the killing of unarmed people on both sides of the India-Bangladesh border, including both Bangladeshis and Indian citizens. The Lede embeded the BBC Channel 4 report on the abuses, which is pretty horrifying.

By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries.

They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past — including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that “[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, “Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.” And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that “[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

“America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.”
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

“Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.”

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, “Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe.” According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush’s imperial adventures — if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history — to the extent that we even know what it is.

Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories — the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Tomdistpatch for more

Dispatches by Evan Osnos, July 31, 2009

Imagine, for a moment, how it might sound to turn on the news one day and hear that the head of the A.C.L.U. had vanished from his home in the predawn hours. Or, think how America might be different today if a pesky young Thurgood Marshall had been silenced using an obscure tax rule and kept out of the courts.

At around 5 A.M. on Wednesday, Chinese authorities visited the home of Xu Zhiyong, a prominent legal scholar and elected legislator in Beijing, and led him away. He has not been heard from again. Unless something changes, he is likely to stay away for a long time, with or without formal charges. Anyone with an interest in China, its economy, its place in the world, or the kind of future it will fashion, please take note: This is a big deal.

Xu might not have reached Marshall status yet, but he is as close as China gets to a public-interest icon. He teaches law at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He has also run the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal aid and research organization that worked on many of China’s path-breaking cases. He and his colleagues had investigated the Sanlu milk scandal, in which dangerous baby formula harmed children’s health, and assisted people who had been locked up by local officials in secret undeclared jails. All of those activities are emphatically consistent with the goals of the Chinese government, even if they angered the local bureaucrats who were caught in the act.

Xu has never set out to undermine one-party rule; he is enforcing rights guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution. He has enough faith in the system that he joined it: in 2003, he ran for and won a seat as a legislator in his local district assembly, one of the few independent candidates to be elected in an open, contested election. He even received the recognition, rare among activists, of being profiled last year in a Chinese newspaper. “I have taken part in politics in pursuit of a better and more civilized nation,” he said at the time. “I am determined to prove to the citizens across the country that politics should be desirable.”

New Yorker for more

Canada has already banned the plastic additive BPA—so why hasn’t the U.S.?

BY REBECCA CLARREN

THE LABEL OF YOUR FAVORITE soup pledges superhealthy contents: organic, low-fat and free of nonhydrogenated oils. But look again: The soup’s can or plastic tub itself may be toxic.

Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to harden plastics, is ubiquitous, showing up in baby bottles, the lining of canned foods and beverages, dental sealants, water bottles and thousands of other household products. BPA, which mimics some hormones, can leach into food and water. At even tiny amounts it can trigger cell changes that may be devastating over time. Studies have found that exposure to BPA increases the risk of breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, infertility and, in infants, adverse developmental and neurological effects. And most of us have been exposed: Ninety-three percent of the more than 2,500 adults and children tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2003 and 2004 had BPA in their urine.

Last year, Canada banned BPA from baby bottles. But in August, the Bush administration-run FDA ruled that current levels of BPA exposure posed no health risk. The assessment ignored approximately 250 independent studies, including those conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, relying instead on two industry-financed studies. Large portions of the FDA’s assessment contained the same language as reports written by companies that use BPA in their products. Furthermore, the FDA panel’s chair, Martin Philbert, had just months before received a $5 million donation to his research center from a former medicalsupply manufacturer who had spent years fighting government regulation of pollutants and who is a vocal supporter of BPA.

Consumer and environmental groups hope that the Obama administration—which chose former New York health commissioner Margaret Hamburg as the new FDA head— might follow Canada’s lead, especially in light of research published in January in Environmental Health Perspectives finding that BPA stays in the body much longer than previously thought. That allows it more time to damage cells, increasing the risk of disease. So far, however, the FDA has not overturned its controversial ruling: In early December, it announced it would instead invest in further study.

“It’s so egregious; the FDA is leaving consumers to be the continual guinea pigs of BPA exposure,” says Urvashi Rangan, a Consumers Union senior scientist. “The FDA continues to stand by a 20-year-old standard that is not based in the current understanding of science. In terms of taking steps to protect public health, they’re asleep at the wheel.”

In lieu of agency action, politicians are attempting a partial ban of BPA. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation this spring to outlaw BPA in food and beverage containers. At least 19 states are also considering banning the chemical from certain products sold in their jurisdictions.

In the meantime, concerned consumers can look for an increasing number of toys, water bottles and children’s products labeled BPA-free. To avoid the BPA-laden resin inside most cans, switch to buying frozen or fresh vegetables (Eden Foods, an exception, uses an alternative plant-based coating on the inside of their canned beans). Use powdered baby formula instead of liquid. If you do use plastics, look for those with recycling numbers 1, 2 or 5 and avoid numbers 3 (PVC) or 7 (polycarbonate). When heating foods, avoid all plastics and stick to porcelain, glass or stainless steel (I’m a fan of Pyrex). A recent study indicates that BPA may leach into plastic water pipes, so place filters on your drinking-water taps.

The FDA may not be doing its job yet, but as consumers and citizens, we can do ours. Call your legislators; urge them to get down to the hard business of protecting our future.

REBECCA CLARREN, an investigative journalist, is a 2009 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow. She writes for various national magazines about environmental health issues from Portland, Ore.

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The US envoy said it was unclear if the military had defeated the Taliban in the region or simply driven them underground.

By Liam Stack
posted July 30, 2009 at 8:28 am EST

Pakistan has declared its three-month anti-Taliban offensive in the Swat Valley a success, claiming to have killed more than 1,800 militants. But on Wednesday US special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke cast doubt on whether the push had actually achieved its goal: defeating the Taliban.

Pakistan launched the offensive in late April, after the Taliban flouted a peace deal signed in February and took control of the area, setting off alarm bells in Washington. Mr. Holbrooke’s remarks were a rare expression of doubt over Swat by a member of the Obama administration, which has praised Pakistan’s effort. They indicate a growing sense of worry that rather than crushing the Taliban, the offensive may have simple pushed the fighters underground.

“We don’t know exactly to what extent the Pakistani Army dispersed or destroyed the enemy,” Holbrooke told reporters on Wednesday, after returning from Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to Reuters. “The test of this operation is, of course, when the refugees return. Can they go home? Are they safe? And we’re just going to have to wait and see.”

Most of the Swat Taliban’s top commanders, including leader Mullah Fazlullah, have “escaped the Pakistani government’s operation,” reports the Long War Journal, a blog that follows Pakistan, citing a Taliban spokesman.

At the same time, large numbers of the two million refugees who fled the fighting in Swat are making their way home, reports the Financial Times. Government figures say as many as 40 percent of those internally displaced by the fighting may be returning.

CS Monitor for more

HT Political Bureau, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, July 31, 2009

Unable to quarrel with the philosophy of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Pakistan policy of ‘trust but verify’, the Opposition on Thursday focused its criticism on the inclusion of Balochistan in the Indo-Pak joint statement of July 16.

Refusing to accept the government’s explanation, Opposition parties walked out of Lok Sabha on the second day of the discussion on the statement.

After three explanatory statements by the PM in the last 15 days, the Balochistan reference remains a thorn in the government’s side. Pakistan has been accusing India of fomenting ethnic tension there, a charge India has always denied.

The Opposition insisted India walked into Pakistan’s trap by allowing a reference to it in the statement while the government explained it is proof that India has nothing to hide.

The government strained to explain its position on Balochistan on a day it found oblique support from US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who refused to endorse the Pakistani position, and Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani lauded Singh’s “statesmanship”. Holbrooke did not endorse the Indian position either.

Hindustan Times for more

Multiple sclerosis patient succeeds in arguing that it is a breach of her human rights not to know whether her husband will be prosecuted if he accompanies her to Swiss clinic Dignitas

Afua Hirsch guardian.co.uk,

Debbie Purdy, 45, who has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, with husband, Omar Puente. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters

Debbie Purdy has won a significant legal victory in the House of Lords which lawyers are describing as a turning point for the law on assisted suicide.

Purdy, 46, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, succeeded in arguing that it is a breach of her human rights not to know whether her husband, Cuban jazz violinist Omar Puente, will be prosecuted if he accompanies her to Swiss clinic Dignitas where she wishes to die if her condition worsens.

The decision – the last ever by the law lords before they recommence work as justices of the new supreme court in October – went further than expected in Purdy’s favour, lawyers say.

Ordering the director of public prosecutions to issue a policy setting out when those in Puente’s position can expect to face prosecution, the court ruled that the current lack of clarity is a violation of the right to a private and family life.

“It’s a complete victory,” said Saimo Chahal, partner at Bindmans who represented Purdy. “I always knew we would have to go to the House of Lords to get a judgment that was reasoned and considered.”
Purdy’s two previous attempts to request a policy from prosecutors failed after the courts said the current situation was lawful.

Despite at least 115 British people already known to have travelled abroad for an assisted suicide, with an average of two a month since 2002 and despite scores of police investigations, not a single family member has been prosecuted.

A report last month from campaign group Dignity in Dying, which has supported Purdy’s case, warned that a further 34 Britons were in the final stages of travelling abroad for the same purpose.

Earlier this month renowned British conductor Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his wife Joan, 74, joined those who have ended their lives at Dignitas. Their death, watched by their children Caractacus, 41, and Boudicca, 39, is still the subject of a police investigation.

Guardian for more

CounterPunch Diary

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president and his secretary of state disclose president Obama, in the dawn of his first term, already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts by senior members of his own cabinet.

At the superficial level Obama is presiding over an undisciplined administration; on a more realistic and sinister construction, he is facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois .

The great danger to Obama posed by Biden’s and Clinton’s “time bombs” (a precisely correct description if we call them political, not diplomatic time bombs) is not international confusion and ridicule over what precisely are the US government’s policies, but a direct onslaught on his presidency by a domestic Israeli lobby that is so out of control that it renders ridiculous Obama’s puny attempt to stop settlements–or to curb Israeli aggression in any other way.
Take Joe Biden. Three weeks ago he gave Israel the green light to bomb Iran, only to be swiftly corrected by his boss. At the time it seemed yet another,somewhat comical mile marker in a lifetime of gaffes, perpetrated in the cause of self-promotion and personal political advantage.

But Biden’s subsequent activities invite a darker construction. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s Moscow visit, the air still soft with honeyed words about a new era of trust and cooperation, Biden headed for Ukraine and Georgia, harshly ridiculing Russia as an economic basket case with no future. In Tbilisi he told the Georgian parliament that the U.S. would continue helping Georgia “to modernize” its military and that Washington “fully supports” Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO and would help Tbilisi meet the alliance’s standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow, pledging sanctions against any power rearming Georgia.

Georgia could play a vital, enabling role, in the event that Israel decides to attack Iran’s nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is diplomatically and geographically challenging. On the other hand, Georgia is perfectly situated as the take-off point for any such raid. Israel has been heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia’s armed forces. President Saakashvili has boasted that his Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili and also Temur Yakobashvili , the minister responsible for negotiations over South Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding “Both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews.”

On the heels of Biden’s shameless pandering in Tbilisi, Secretary of State Clinton took herself off to Thailand for an international confab with Asian leaders and let drop to a tv chat show that “a nuclear Iran could be contained by a U.S. ‘defense umbrella,’” actually a nuclear defense umbrella for Israel and for Egypt and Saudi Arabia too.
The Israel lobby has been promoting the idea of a US “nuclear umbrella” for some years, with one of its leading exponents being Dennis Ross, now in charge of Middle Eastern policy at Obama’s National Security Council. In her campaign last year Clinton flourished the notion as an example of the sort of policy initiative that set her apart from that novice in foreign affairs, Barack Obama.
From any rational point of view the “nuclear umbrella” is an awful idea, redolent with all the gimcrack theology of the high cold war era, about “first strike”, “second strike”, “stable deterrence” ,“controlled escalation” and “mutual assured destruction”, used to sell US escalations in nuclear arms production, from Kennedy and the late Robert McNamara(“the Missile Gap”) to Reagan (“Star Wars”).
Indeed, as one Pentagon veteran remarked to me earlier this week, “the Administration’s whole nuclear stance is turning into a cheesy rerun of the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, all based on a horrible exaggeration of one or two Iranian nuclear bombs that the Persians may be too incompetent to build and most certainly are too incompetent to deliver.”

The Biden and Clinton “foreign” policy is: 1) to recreate the same old Cold War (with a new appendage, the US versus Iran nuclear confrontation) for the same old reasons: to pump up domestic defense spending; and 2) to continue sixty years of supporting Israeli imperialism for the same reasons that every president from Harry to Dubya (perhaps barring Ike) did so: to corner Israel lobby money and votes. Regarding the latter, Obama did the same by grabbing the Chicago-based Crown and Pritzker family money very early in his campaign and by making Rahm Emanuel his very first appointment (the two are hardly unrelated).

So right from the start Obama was already an Israel lobby fellow traveler. The Mitchell appointment and the toothless blather about settlements were simply cosmetic, bones tossed to the increasing proportion of the American electorate that’s grossed out by the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from the Holy Land. Obama does have a coherent strategy: keep the defense money flowing and increasing, but without making so much noise as the older generation did about ancient Cold War enemies (e.g. Russia and Cuba). The F-22 — to date, the one and only presidential issue on which he’s shown any toughness at all — is in no sense a departure from keeping the money flowing, since he is indeed increasing the defense budget, in part by using the F-22 cancellation to push spending on the even worse F-35 and to hide his acquiescence to all the other pork in the Congressional defense budget.

The window for any new president to impose a decisive change in foreign policy comes in the first three months, before opposition has time to solidify. Obama squandered that opportunity, stocking his foreign policy team with tarnished players such as Ross. As the calculated indiscretions of Biden and Clinton suggest, not to mention the arrogance of Netanyahu and his political associates, the window of opportunity has closed.

Would it have been that hard to signal a change in course? Not really.

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