Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from IPS Special Project Right Web's Militarist Monitor.

Last week, blogger and Inter Press Service correspondent Mitchell Plitnick reported that an otherwise little-noted Republican National Committee (RNC) meeting in New Orleans produced a potential foreign-policy firebomb: a unanimously adopted resolution apparently disavowing the party’s commitment to a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine and endorsing the Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories.

The relevant text reads: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that … Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.”

The curious trope that Israel is “neither an attacking force nor an occupier” harkens to an annexationist, right-wing audience that sees the West Bank in particular—or “Judea and Samaria”—as an integral part of Greater Israel, meaning the Israeli soldiers there in abundance are not properly foreigners but locals (the occupation itself notwithstanding). Proponents of this worldview often further suggest that the Palestinians themselves are “occupiers,” as implied by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich when he called Palestinians an “invented people” who had missed their “chance to go many other places.” Although Palestinian lands are considered occupied territories under international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation from the U.S. Congress when he declared, “in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”

The allusion to “one law for all people” is quite clear about the number of states the GOP would favor in the region, but it leaves unresolved questions about the final status of Palestinians. Would they be fully absorbed and assimilated into a democratic Israel, or would they live on as second-class citizens, a potential Arab majority in an officially Jewish state? Might they be expelled from the region altogether?

Plitnick himself speculated that the RNC activists “do not understand the implications of their resolution and that it would mean either the end of Israel as a Jewish state or would necessitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank.” Indeed, an RNC spokesman played down the report, noting that the official platform, which currently calls for “two democratic states living in peace and security,” can only be formally amended at the presidential nominating convention. But the unanimous one-state resolution speaks volumes about the attitudes of the GOP base toward Israel-Palestine.

One wonders why the party would seek to downplay this shift away from the two-state formula, which is already apparent in deed if not word. In addition to the party’s grassroots, its presidential candidates (at least the ones who aren’t Ron Paul) have been utterly unshy about advocating a pro-settlement policy in the West Bank that would render a viable two-state solution completely unworkable. 

In addition to his other impolitic remarks, for example, Gingrich has expressed his support for “development in the [occupied] areas” as a way for the Israelis to “[maximize] their net bargaining advantage”—acknowledging but not condemning the fact that the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories makes good-faith negotiation about the division of land impossible. Mitt Romney has criticized President Barack Obama for supposedly going “to the United Nations to criticize Israel for building settlements” in the West Bank, despite the fact that the Obama administration actually spent considerable diplomatic capital to veto a UN resolution condemning the settlements in defiance of its own stated policy. Most curiously, Rick Santorum has claimed—and repeatedly refused to clarify—that “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians.”

Perhaps the GOP’s reluctance to embrace its own one-state bent is purely tactical. If the party can continue to claim support for a stagnant “peace process” geared toward the eventual creation of a Palestinian state—all the while supporting the settlement program that has fatally hamstringed recent negotiations—it can continue to place the onus on Palestinians to recognize Israel’s “right to exist” as “a Jewish state,” and even to end their supposed “war on Israel,” as though these were the crucial stumbling blocks. Nominally clinging to the two-state formula enables Republicans to shirk tougher questions about the fate of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza that would inevitably arise should the party fully back a one-state solution.

Of course, if even the right-wing Israeli government is unwilling to own its positions on these matters, one could hardly expect better of today’s Republican Party.

(A personal post today.)

Not that they're related, but the more or less concurrent rise of libertarian Ron Paul and demise of prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens give one pause. The sympathy that this author, as a progressive, feels for libertarians' anti-war stance parallels that I feel for atheists' anti-religion stance. But I not only lack sympathy for, but am fundamentally opposed to, what motivates those beliefs on both their parts.

Libertarians' opposition to war is motivated by the belief that that a state should keep its gaze and its money within its own borders, no matter the carnage overseas. Atheists' opposition to religion is motivated by the lack of belief in -- however one cares to describe it -- God, a higher power, or a greater intelligence.

My opposition to war is primarily for humanitarian reasons -- death, dismemberment, incineration, all that fun stuff. Among the many reasons for my aversion to most organized religions is the proprietorship they exercise over the concept of God (which, in my estimation, is emphatically not a personal God -- maybe only an organizing principle). Not to mention the wars they wage in His name -- which is where we came in: the twain where progressives and libertarians meet. 

Where atheists and I part ways is the deep faith in the greater intelligence and an afterlife (for most, a way station for rebirth) that I've evinced over the course of my spiritual* practice.

Still, in the end, libertarians and atheists get something right, while conservatives and religions next to nothing.

*A word that I've never been comfortable with because of its pretentiousness, but you get the point.

Cross-posted from Mondoweiss.

From the New York Times article "Foreign Aid Set to Take a Hit in U.S. Budget Crisis" (emphasis added):

The House appropriations subcommittee, controlled by Republicans, proposed cutting the administration’s request by $12 billion, or 20 percent, to $47 billion, with $39 billion for operations and aid and $7.6 billion for the contingency account for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan . . .

The Republicans also attach conditions on aid to Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinians, suspending the latter entirely if the Palestinians succeed in winning recognition of statehood at the United Nations. However, one of the largest portions of foreign aid — more than $3 billion for Israel — is left untouched in both the House and Senate versions, showing that, even in times of austerity, some spending is inviolable.

Paul Mutter is a graduate student at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Cross-posted from Other Words.

India has the military-industrial complex all figured out. So does Saudi Arabia. Neither of them has one. Who needs to build weapons when you can simply buy them at a discount elsewhere? Not that anyone really needs so many weapons anyway, but it's still a lot cheaper to tap the competitive arms market for a few specific items than to build a massive infrastructure to keep churning out whole arsenals for yourself.

So God bless the Indians and the Saudis. They're smarter than we. We can't stop cranking out aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, bombers, tanks, aerial refuelers, phosphorous bombs, nuclear devices, rockets, and other must-have military consumer goods that are driving us to the poorhouse. It's a lot like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. We don't know how to stop.

Up until now this was not a big worry. Weapons manufacturers have historically pulled a lot of strings in Congress, and there are usually plenty of votes that can be traded to protect every state's pet products. But now signs of nervousness are showing up at the edges of the debate. Those crazy Republicans brought the nation to the edge of default. No one thinks the GOP gives a fig about either default or excessive military spending, but in their posturing Republican lawmakers may have unleashed something they can't control.

Read the rest at Other Words.

At Huffington Post, William Hartung writes:

Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee. . . . led by Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH) seem . . . to be afraid that the modest but important New START nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia is somehow going to sap the strength of the United States, unless it is accompanied by massive new investments in nuclear weapons facilities along with bombers, submarines, and ballistic missiles.

Their version of the Fiscal Year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, scheduled to be debated on the House floor this week, Hartung reports, includes amendments such as:

• A provision delaying the reductions called for in New START until the Secretaries of Defense and Energy certify that a 10-year,185 billion plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal is on track;
• A provision barring funds to "retire, dismantle or eliminate" any nuclear weapon until new factories to produce plutonium and uranium components of nuclear weapons are at full capacity, a process that could take until 2024 or longer;
• A provision preventing the president from reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal below levels approved in New START, even if there is a chance to achieve security-enhancing reductions without a formal treaty.

Hartung calls these amendments "obnoxious, dangerous and questionable." I would add laughable and damaging to their credibility. But Republicans' main concern is moving that Overton Window right in order to make their most extreme policies visible within the parameters of national debate.