Tuesday, January 07, 2020

Excellent Opportunity To Not Retaliate

Iran had to do something and it did. But there are no casualties. And this is an excellent opening for the US to not retaliate.

The other powers that are actively trying to help de-escalate should be allowed to play their roles.

This thing has to be steered to dialogue.

Trump replaced NAFTA with something that looks and smells like NAFTA. Perhaps Trump would like to cut a nuclear deal with Iran.

Restraint Would Be A Good Idea
Trump-Khameini Tit-Tat: This Is Not Looking Good
The Strong Case For No War
Suleimani Episode: Bizarre Turn Of Events
Trump's Suleimani Move: Politically Bad
Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation (2)
Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation



The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule Is Here Unstable and impeached, the president pushes the U.S. toward war with Iran. ........ NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error.) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation. ...... The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this......... Defense officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. ....... James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. ........ presented Trump with the possibility of killing Suleimani as the “most extreme” option on a menu of choices, and were “flabbergasted” when he picked it. ........ “His maximum pressure policy has failed,” Nasr said of Trump. “He has only produced a more dangerous Iran.” ....... ISIS benefits from the breach between Iraq and America. “ISIS suicide and vehicle bombings have nearly stopped entirely,” said Brett McGurk, who until 2018 was special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. “Only a few years ago, there were 50 per month, killing scores of Iraqis. That’s because of what we have done and continue to do. These networks will regenerate rapidly if we are forced to leave, and they will again turn their attention on the West.” ....

an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.



GOP Rep. Michael Waltz Says Iranian Missile Attack Could Be Sign of ‘Future De-Escalation’ “If they are hitting infrastructure, that could be a signal that while they had to respond, they did so in a way that would lead to some type of future de-escalation.”

Opinion: How inevitable is war with Iran? war with Iran is not to the president’s advantage. .... Trump has only one strategic imperative in 2020, and that’s vindication in an impeachment trial and reelection. A messy, all-out — and if the past is any guide unwinnable — war that results in skyrocketing oil prices, a meltdown in financial markets, economic dislocation and a surge in U.S. deaths at Iranian hands will not help him at the ballot box. ......

Like Trump, Khamenei in Tehran wants to stay in power. He’s a crafty leader committed to expanding Iran’s regional reach, but his main objective is survival of the Islamic Republic and regime maintenance.

...... The drone attack on the second most powerful man in Iran and in a third country was an act untethered from any coherent, long-term strategy. ..... The killing has not made Americans more secure or limited Iran’s regional influence. What it has done is cripple the U.S.-Iraqi relationship, strengthen Iran’s power in the region and undermine the fight against Islamic State.

Oil prices soar after Iran attacks airbases housing US troops in Iraq Iran used ballistic missiles from inside Iraq, indicating a significant escalation. ..... A spike in oil prices could deal a blow to the world economy, which is already struggling from weak manufacturing activity. Dow (INDU) futures tumbled more than 300 points, or 1.2%, late Wednesday.

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Restraint Would Be A Good Idea

In business, they say, don't throw your good money after bad.













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Trump-Khameini Tit-Tat: This Is Not Looking Good

This is yet another escalation, larger than the last attack this is a response to. This is not looking good.

Iran fires missiles at Iraqi bases hosting U.S. troops attack with tens of ballistic missiles on Al Assad military base ..... We warn all allied countries of the U.S. that if attacks are launched from bases in their countries on Iran, they will be a target of military retaliation. ..... more than a dozen ballistic missiles against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq ...... at Al-Assad and Irbil. ...... Attacking the U.S. directly, and not through proxies, would be an extremely bold move for Iran ..... most analysts argued Tehran would not take any steps it believed would lead to war with the U.S. ...... Iran has threatened "more crushing responses" if the U.S. retaliates with another attack. Trump, meanwhile, threatened to strike 52 Iranian sites if Tehran took action like it has tonight.

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India At A Turning Point

The growing instances of attacks on minorities, capture of democratic institutions, repression of academic freedom, hounding of social activists, frequent internet blackouts, intimidation of the media, the brisk rewriting of history, increasing embrace of digital surveillance, promotion of a brand of toxic ultranationalism under which critics of the government are branded unpatriotic and “antinational”, and the cult of a supreme leader, have for some time now worried Indians who value democracy. Modi’s latest policy initiatives have only added to the growing fears that India is being pushed deeper into authoritarianism, intolerance and chaos.


The Hindu nationalist government of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is embarking on two programmes that together could leave many of the country’s 200 million Muslims disenfranchised – just as the predominantly Muslim Rohingya were stripped of citizenship in Myanmar in 1982, leaving them stateless and vulnerable to abuse that led to their massacre in 2016 and subsequent exodus......... The NRC in Assam disenfranchised 1.9 million people, most of whom have never known any other place as their home. It was poorly implemented, resulted in detentions, suicides and penury, and destroyed lives and families, especially the poor, who are neither protected by the privilege of “documents” to establish their ancestry nor have the resources for legal recourse. ..... With its consistent politics of Muslim-bashing to consolidate its Hindu support base, the BJP has made no bones about its intention to remake India as a majoritarian state. The party sees Modi’s back-to-back national electoral victories as the stamp of popular consent on this project. ...... China’s all-powerful President Xi Jinping might still have rivals in his party – Modi has none in his. If there is any entity Modi answers to, it is the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation, of which Modi was once a foot soldier....... Federal investigative agencies act almost as a party unit, conducting raids on political gadflies and Modi’s old enemies with the same frequency and efficiency that Chinese agencies once did for Xi when he was waging his anti-corruption campaign and cementing power. As a result, an unusual climate of fear pervades the circles of power and beyond in New Delhi today, more befitting a totalitarian regime than the world’s biggest democracy....... Kashmir has been under lockdown for five months after the Modi government in August abolished its special constitutional status of semi-autonomy. Internet services remain shut down and its top leaders are still in jail, but the Supreme Court has shown no urgency in dealing with the petitions challenging the validity of Delhi’s actions. With the citizenship protests as well, it has yet to act even as reports of deadly police crackdowns on protesters and Muslim neighbourhoods pour in from BJP-ruled states and the body bags pile up. ...... India’s mainstream media for the most part has been browbeaten into submission while new media outlets sympathetic to a Hindu-first world view have emerged. High-profile editors with an independent streak have been mostly forced out. Most of the new crop of top editors, especially in television, are so openly partisan that a government with a more sophisticated approach to propaganda would actually be embarrassed by their cloying adulation......

Few prominent newspapers or television channels dare to challenge the Modi administration’s stated position.

..... The result of all this is a mainstream media landscape where some of the news organisations have come to resemble a more excitable version of the usually staid Chinese state media – and are sometimes more unabashedly fawning and fearful of the political leadership than in China. Newspapers and websites that show signs of independence are denied advertisements and slapped with libel suits, while their journalists are intimidated........ Vicious troll armies allied with the Hindu supremacist cause are just as well-funded and ubiquitous as China’s wumao – the “50 Cent Army” hired to swing public support towards the Communist Party – but far more sinister, with their rape and murder threats.

India last year fell two more places on the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. From 80th in 2002, it now ranks 140th out of 180 territories, behind South Sudan, Myanmar and Palestine.

......... In the first four years after coming to power in 2014, the Modi administration spent about US$700 million on advertisements. The prime minister’s face features prominently in most of these, beaming out from the front pages of national dailies or smiling benignly at passers-by at traffic intersections and petrol pumps........ His online warriors make and unmake trends on social media every day, troll his critics and amplify his admirers. Bollywood falls over itself to please him and sports stars vie for his attention. School students are asked to write essays on his courage, college students are expelled for writing protest letters. If Xi has “Xi Jinping Thought”, Modi has the far more interactive Mann ki Baat, or From the Heart – his own radio programme. For all the reams written on Xi’s personality cult, they are not a patch on the one built around Modi. ....... The fact is, for all the hype around the BJP’s irreversible political hegemony, it will never be the Communist Party of China. Just as China is stuck with one party, India is stuck with many.........

In March 2018, the BJP and its allies ruled 21 of the 29 Indian states. They now control just 15.

........ In his book The Argumentative Indian, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen traces the historical roots of the country’s democracy in the rich tradition of public arguments and debates that “make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India”. ...... Sample this 19th century Bengali poem by social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, which says: “Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be; Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.” .........If only Modi had paid more attention to Hong Kong.

After a torrid December, how will India’s Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and the BJP fare in 2020? Such widespread protests have not occurred in the last few decades. “Somewhere, this is affecting Modi’s popularity, bit by bit”

India’s slowing economy takes deadly turn, but Modi’s in denial
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The Strong Case For No War

Even if everything Trump is saying about Suleimani is true (and that is not the case), it does not make sense to spend a few trillion dollars to go to war with Iran. That would be like taking a US Army to a one on one knife fight. The US Congress has every right to make sure the Iran War does not happen. A full-fledged war with Iran will give the global economy a heart attack. The world could be back in the 1930s, and we would see a Trump on every island on earth.

Trump's threats to Iraq totally discredit his arguments as to why economic sanctions need to be imposed upon Iran. Iraq is a sovereign country. The US troops are in Iraq because they got invited in by the sovereign government of Iraq, duly elected, mind you. Looks like that welcome is over. A better political mind could have seen this coming.

Two parliaments have voted to give a clear message to Trump. That is enough. Trump has to listen. Iran War is not an option. Trump can not legitimately go to war with Iran.





Here's what could be lost if Trump bombs Iran's cultural treasures If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with. ......... With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s....... Iran has a long Christian history, particularly associated with Armenia at its northwestern border. Three of the oldest churches in the region are Unesco world heritage sites. Vank Cathedral, near Isfahan, was built by Armenians fleeing the Ottoman wars in the 17th century. The interior is a riotous patchwork of frescoes and gilded carvings.



“They said it’s a draft. OK, it’s a draft. But we received it. As a state, how are we supposed to act? We should get a second letter to clarify so we can clarify to our people too,” Abdul-Mahdi, who resigned in November but has stayed on in a caretaker role, said, according to the Agence France-Presse. “If I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me, how are we supposed to proceed?” ...... In a prerecorded television address he insisted the US would have to leave....... “We have no exit but this, otherwise we are speeding toward confrontation,” Abdul-Mahdi said, adding that Iraq would have to take a “historic decision” to implement the expulsion. “Otherwise we will not be taken seriously,” he added.
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Monday, January 06, 2020

Suleimani Episode: Bizarre Turn Of Events

Restraint can look like you are doing nothing. But restraint is a lot of hard work, it is a great skill.

Emotions are running high on both sides. There is great chance at graver error. But one hopes the forces of de-escalation are out in full force.

Although it can also feel the air weighs in with the next irrational move. It could be from either side.



Trump's Suleimani Move: Politically Bad
Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation (2)
Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation



Tehran insisted that it remains open to negotiations with European countries and maintains that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon. Russia today urged parties to the Iran nuclear deal to treat salvaging the agreement as a 'priority', calling on European partners to fulfil their obligations. Germany also joined France and Britain in urging Iran to refrain from taking 'further violent actions or support for them'. 'It is crucial now to de-escalate,' Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson said in a joint statement last night. EU foreign ministers will hold emergency talks on the Iran crisis on Friday, diplomats said today. The United Nations' atomic watchdog agency says its inspectors are continuing to monitor and verify Iran's nuclear activities.
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Could It Be Bernie?



If Bernie wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, he will be the nominee. And it will be a watershed moment for US politics. I do think he stands a chance to win in November. His thoughts are no longer considered fringe.

Bernie Sanders will emerge like a Ronald Reagan for the left and left of center. He will realign US politics for a generation. The Republican Party could spend a generation being defensive about the climate crisis.

I think the turning point for Bernie 2020 was when AOC basically became his running mate. That changed things. AOC 2028?

Bernie has moral clarity, and his time perhaps has come.

It is interesting that America wants to become more like China, and China wants to become more like America. That is a reference to the Hong Kong protests. That middle ground exists in Finland.

Where does it say in Marxist thought that the president of a country can not be directly elected by the people? Where does it say that free speech is a problem? The Chinese Communist Party needs to look at the data out in the streets of Hong Kong.



Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Bernie, Cybersecurity, Pete, TV, Warren
Trump: Morally Lost And Confused?
Impeachment Maneuvers Expose America
"Extreme Inequality Is Like Economic Pollution"
Finland: Capitalist Paradise?
History In Fast Forward Motion Right Now



President: Bernie Sanders
Vice President: Elizabeth Warren
Shadow Vice President: AOC
Attorney General: Kamala Devi Harris
Secretary Of Urban Affairs (and 2028 AOC running mate): Pete Buttigieg
Secretary Of Labor: Andrew Yang
UN Ambassador: Tulsi Gabbard

Inequality And Climate Change Are Existential: A Blueprint For Survival
Towards A World Government
AOC 2028  





One Year in Washington Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reshaped her party’s agenda, resuscitated Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and hardly has a friend in town. ...... The corridors of Capitol Hill are a marbled monotony, with Oxford heels clacking around corners indistinguishable from one another, white walls, oaken doors, and a steady rhythm of rectangular congressional nameplates. ........ Except for one. At the very end of a hallway in Cannon Office Building is an explosion of affirmation cribbed onto thousands of Post-it notes, a neon-green-and-pastel-pink flower bursting outward. Go there at the right time, Hill aides say, and you can see groups of people, usually women, often young, weeping at the sight of it........ “I love you from Maine! Keep on with your fierce, informed queen of a self!,” wrote Mikala from Bangor on a pink Post-it. “AOC! Seeing you is seeing me! I live in Michigan, but you are my representative. Adelante!,” says one on white signed (with a heart) from Kristen on August 1. “Dear AOC. Continue to scare old white men,” adds another.......

She was recently ranked the fourth-most-tweeted-about politician in the world, beating out every Democrat running for president.

It’s not that there is already a children’s book about her, The ABCs of AOC. It’s that there is already a comic-book series about her, a young-adult biography of her, a wall calendar of her, a book of her quotes, a collection of essays about her, and even, this holiday season, a Christmas sweater with her face on it........ Ocasio-Cortez’s staff didn’t know what to do with the Post-its when they first started appearing after she was inaugurated in January 2019. It seemed possible they broke a House rule — and if not an official violation, it was a practice that, at the least, would mark her as different from the rest of the incoming class. Staff took the first batch and framed them in her office, but the notes kept coming. If anyone writes something negative or nasty, one of the myriad devotees who make the pilgrimage takes the errant note down before it can spoil the mood........ Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the first politician to become a cultural sensation, but she may be the first to do so at the very beginning of her career, when she is occupying the lowest rung of political power........... Congressman Joe Crowley’s polling had him up by more than 30 points. The weekend before the election, when typically campaigns go all-out with volunteers and visibility, Ocasio-Cortez skipped town — not something somebody who hopes to win an election does. She went to the border, where news was just emerging that the Trump administration was locking up migrant children and separating them from their parents. The visuals of the candidate, dressed in all white, pleading with border guards through a fence to remember their humanity, were striking. Two mornings later, Ocasio-Cortez woke up anonymous for the last morning in her life. ...... “I can’t go outside anymore. I miss being able to go out to dinner. I miss anonymity. I have to send my boyfriend out to get groceries. There has been a shift in chores.” ........ The Congressional Black Caucus, in particular, was put off by her association with Justice Democrats, the young campaign operatives — co-founded by Ocasio-Cortez’s then chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti — who powered her win and have made it their mission to replace the Democratic Party’s moderates with a younger and more liberal group of lawmakers. Black lawmakers believed (not entirely incorrectly) that this meant the group was coming for some of them. In the press, CBC members accused Justice Democrats of being privileged gentrifiers with little respect for what it had taken them to gain political power. ...... She said that her colleagues consider her an unseen force in every primary this cycle, when in fact she has made endorsements in just two races. Meanwhile, it is the moderates who have put up more challengers to liberal incumbents than the other way around. “As a consequence of my victory, many people are inspired to run for office, and in a body where 70 percent of the seats are safe red or safe blue, that de facto means a lot more primaries. A lot of members think I’m like a Koch brother.” ....... House leadership sees the past summer as having been a turning point and believes that Ocasio-Cortez is now sufficiently chastened. She’s showed up for the job she was elected to do — coming prepared to committee meetings and hearings (like when she cornered Mark Zuckerberg on running misleading ads on Facebook), sponsoring 15 pieces of legislation (most notably the Green New Deal), and missing only two of 701 roll-call votes. ........ I spoke with dozens of House and New York City governmental officials, some of whom disagree with her politics and have reason to dislike her personally, and they all said that she shows up to meetings unusually attentive, taking notes and asking detailed questions and writing personal follow-up emails. That even in House caucus meetings, as members call one another “Congressman this” or “Congresswoman that” but casually call her “Alexandria,” she gets to know her ideological enemies’ home lives and interests...... I think people are surprised at how not-strident she comes off.” ...... The Green New Deal, for all its vagueness — it was a resolution and a statement of principles and not a piece of legislation — set up a new tentpole in the debate. More than a hundred Democrats signed on as co-sponsors, including a handful of moderates whom House progressives have been trying to push left for years, as did every major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, including Joe Biden...... a statewide run, probably for the Senate, is likelier. That would mean challenging Chuck Schumer in 2022 or Kirsten Gillibrand in 2024........ She and her advisers are aware of her almost unprecedented situation: a wildly popular woman of color with the confidence of Pete Buttigieg, if not his demographic advantages. If she ran for president, they say, she would run to win ...... 80 percent of young people think the federal government should address climate change, that over 70 percent say the wealthy should pay higher taxes, and that some of the highest percentages ever recorded call their politics far left or liberal ...... Post-millennials are majority nonwhite in 13 states and in nearly 40 percent of the nation’s largest metro areas; they are close to majority nonwhite nationwide....... And Ocasio-Cortez is all of these things: Latina, liberal, “authentic,” fluent in social media and popular culture. Outspoken lefties have come and gone before, but often they were like Bernie or, before him, Ralph Nader: rumpled, grouchy, hectoring. For leftists, politics used to be something to avoid, a corrupting drag on the purity of activism. Ocasio-Cortez has changed that. ...... Ocasio-Cortez is still in regular contact with leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, and she has quiet dinners with the volunteers who worked on her campaign, the people who called her Alex until they were told, after the election, that it would be better if they stuck to Alexandria — dinners in which they promise to not Instagram anything with her. So far, no one has.......

a political supernova

..... her effort to abolish ICE is central in a district where half the population was born in another country. ...... “Here’s this guy in a then-Republican state, a quite conservative state, and he wins by a handful of votes to become mayor of Burlington. And by the time he becomes senator, Vermont is crazy-blue. And a lot of that has to do with his time there. And I said, ‘So how’d you do this?’ And he said that he and different grassroots movements in Vermont spent decades doing political education. And they took on the long-term project of turning a red state blue.” ..... I think if a state like Tennessee or West Virginia can go from blue to red in our lifetime, I think it can go back,” she told me



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