TOP TEN SIGNS OBAMA IS COASTING

I'm an early and avid supporter of Barack,
and am worried about the following:

10. He's losing momentum

9. He's losing focus

8. Has become boring, re-uses same stories

7. Complains about questions

6. Didn't prepare sufficiently for last debate

5. No meat & potatoes on his menu for the
working class.

4. has gotten careless (dumb remarks about
people being "bitter."

3. hasn't put Rev. Wright issues to rest once
and for all.

2. Uses same speech over and over

1. Hillary is gaining!

None of the above gives me any joy. His coasting
is understandable, but risky. He's been cam-
paigning tirelessly for over a year, and he's
ahead. You can't campaign tirelessy for a year.
Eventually you tire. Then you coast.

You get boring when you have a dynamite
speech and keep giving it over and over. The
"we're winning, don't change anything" rule
kicks in and the tortoise starts gaining on the
hare. That gets scary because momentum is
particularly critical in the final stages of a race.
If you lose it running uphill you are in danger
of stalling. When you lose momentum, who-
ever is trailing you picks it up. They get fresh
wind in their sails (read money), new excite-
ment, and energy.

Barack definitely needs new speeches with
more meat and potatoes for the underclass
who are rightly discouraged (but not bitter).
He has to really care more than Hil pretends
to. Her phoniness must be exposed, not by
him, by surrogates with meticulous attention
to her and Bill's pro-corporate record that she
is so (selectively) proud of.

Obama needs a conspicuous panel of promi-
inent economists like Robert Reich to openly
advise him on boosting employment, and a
similar prominent panel of military experts
like Generals Odom and Zinni, to lay out a
detailed plan for Iraq, Iran, and Afghan-
Pakistan. Both the economic and military
plans should be openly discussed and argued
for the remainder of the campaign.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

JIMMY CARTER

Here are a couple of letters I've written to local
papers concerning Carter's controversial meeting
with a Hamas leader. To The Oregonian, I
wrote: "It's interesting to compare your 4/22/08
editorial denigrating Jimmy Carter and his latest
peace efforts, to the editorial on Carter in Haaretz
(4/14/08). Israel's leading paper (often critical of
its government's policies) is appreciative of Carter's
efforts, sees them as positive, and lauds him for
his wisdom, dedication to peace, and integrity, all
of which you call into question. Maybe they know
something we don't?"

To the Albany Democrat-Herald I wrote: "A car-
toon in the Democrat-Herald of 4/23/08 showed
Jimmy Carter handing Israel a bomb from Hamas.
This implied either 1) Carter is helping terrorists
attack Israel, or 2) He's too dumb to know what
he is doing. These are both opinions pushed by
the Israel lobby here in the U. S. and commonly
parroted by the mainstream press. In contrast,
Haaretz, the leading paper in Israel ran an edi-
torial (www.haaretz.com) on 4/14/08 thanking
Carter for his many efforts over the years in
behalf of peace, and for his long friendship with
Israel. It noted that he deservedly received the
Nobel Peace Prize for those efforts. It justly
lauded him for his wisdom, dedication, and
integrity as an honest broker. Who do you
suppose knows the situation better: our press
or theirs?

Carter is right, of course, in insisting that any
meaningful peace talks between Israel and the
Palestinians must include the legally elected
heads of the Palestinian government. Haaretz,
and in fact, most Israelis agree with that, but
not their government.

It should be noted that our (and Israel's) charge
that Hamas is led by terrorists falls on deaf ears
in the Muslim world. They are required by their
religion to resist by any available means the
illegal occupation of Muslim lands by non-Muslims.
Which right, of course, we reserve for ourselves.
We were struck on 9/11 and immediately struck
back in force. Does that make us terrorists?

If terrorism is defined as violence employed against
civilians to achieve political objectives, then Israel
has been using it longer and more savagely against
the Palestinians than vice verse. If you are interes-
ted in the history, see Edward W. Said's The
Question of Palestine (for the short version), or
Sami Hadawi's masterpiece, Bitter Harvest, for the
full treatment. Both writers are (or were) exiled
Palestinians and are now deceased. They were
scholars of international repute and impeccable
integrity. Said had a long, distinguished academic
career, and taught at both Harvard and Columbia.

"Terrorism" is a meaningless political label used to
refer to enemies. Israel delivers its U. S. made
bombs in U. S. made and supplied planes and
rockets, so we don't consider that "terrorism."
But of course it is, just the same. There is no
difference morally between bombs delivered by
air-mail, and those hand carried and delivered
in person. Carter condemns both equally, and
rightly so, and for that he is vilified. Yes, sports
fans, we are aiding and abetting Israeli terrorism
just as much as Iran aids and abets Hamas. We
need to get honest and get real if we want to
really solve anything.

Carter is reviled by the Israel lobby because he
called what Israel is doing in the West Bank
"apartheid." Bishop Tutu visited the West Bank,
and said, "this is apartheid." Tutu knows it when
he sees it. Israel has long been at work dividing
the West Bank into separate, disconnected Bantu-
stans. They are like the native reservations we
set aside for our own version of apartheid as
Europeans settled this continent and dispossessed
the natives. That's exactly what is happening, and
has been happening in Palestine since 1945, and
it has always been going on with our full knowledge
and complicity. That's what the Rev. Wright was
talking about! His language was wrong, but his
facts and values were straight. Straight from the
Old Testament.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

SURGING FUTILITY

The surge may be working, or not. As Dick
Cheney might say, "So?" The surge is irrelevant.
As an op-ed in The Oregonian (4/1/08) put it:
"The tactical successes connected to the troop
'surge' provided a brief lift in mood, but no
lasting change for the better." It's like beating
a dead horse, or trying to get blood from a
turnip, or whatever other metaphor you may
prefer for expressing futility.

Our fundamental error, the 900 lb. gorilla that
we continue to ignore, is that the nation we are
trying to save simply doesn't exist. Let me put
it simply, and then give you some history in
which to fit it: Iraq is not now, and never
has been a nation, in any meaningful sense
of that term. A nation is, by definition, a com-
munity that shares a common identity, culture,
and values, by general and recognized consensus.

Iraq didn't even exist as a nation of any kind before
1920. The region, known for centuries as
"Mesopotamia" was an ancient battle zone for
rival regional empires and tribal alliances, just as
it is today. Under the Ottoman Empire (1533-
1918), the area was administered as three sepa-
rate (and often antagonistic) provinces: Basra
in the South (Shia), Bahgdad in the center and
West (Sunni Arab), and Mosul in the North
(Kurds).

In the 1920s the Brits tried to force together
these incompatible provinces into one make-
believe nation, to which they gave the bogus
name "the State of Iraq." They did this without
regard for the bitter ethnic and religious
divisions between these groups, and the strong
opposition from all of them against this forced
union. It didn't take. It won't take now. Iraq
is not a nation. It never was.

It was and is entirely a fabrication existing once
in the imagination of the British Foreign Office
and, much later, in the daydreams of Tony Blair
and George Bush. There is simply no basis in
reality for this purely mental construct, and
insurmountable obstacles against it.

Saddam succeeded in holding together this false
and forced union where the British failed, for
two reasons:
a. he wasn't a foreign (read Western) occupier,
so didn't face the kind of fierce insurgency that we
inspired.
b. he understood the levers of power (violence)
in that culture, and how to manipulate the fac-
tions against each other.

So Saddam became the violence controller, the
baddest S. O. B. in the land. When we removed
him, we pulled the stopper on the violence, and
it was soon out of control. It still is, basically.
The Shia majority's leaders were always religious
clerics (as they are now). When they emerged
as men of influence in the bad old days, Saddam
had them shot. This happened to both the dads
of the current leaders of the two main Shia
militias. Their fathers had been famous Aya-
tollas. The Sunnis murdered at least 300,000
Shia (and probably a lot more) under Saddam,
which is why these Shia leaders won't reconcile
now, and won't trust Sunnis in the military or
police.

The Kurds, who are not Arabs, and don't speak
Arabic, have, for centuries, been fighting Sunni
Arabs encroaching on their territory. They have
thus tended to side with the Shia against a com-
mon enemy. They were in constant rebellion
against Saddam, which is why he gassed them.
They were never "his own people," as the Bushies
ignorantly claimed. They have their own well-
trained army (the Persh Marga) of about 140,000
troops, the approximate number of our forces
post-surge. They don't want to be part of Iraq.
There are no Iraqi flags seen in Kurdistan, and
they will fight to maintain their independence.

So the idea of a united, stable, democratic Iraq is,
and always has been, a pipedream. It has simply
never, ever, existed in any Arab country. There
is no Arab word for "democracy." In Viet Nam
we thought we would succeed where the French
had failed. We were wrong. Now we think we
can succeed where the Brits failed. Wrong again!
Hubris knows no limits, it seems.

Iraq is rare among Arab countries, in that it has a
Shia majority (60%). That majority is determined
to finally rule after bloody oppression and humili-
ation for many years by the 20% of the population
who are Sunni. The Sunnis, on the other hand,
are in denial about being the minority, and also
deny most of the brutality done by Saddam to the
Shia. So they are basically unrepentant and
defiant. They regard Shia as inferior, and not even
real Muslims. They are absolutely determined
that the Shia will not rule over them. They are
backed by many of the 85% of the Muslim
world that are fellow Sunnis. So there you have it.

Fred Kaplan, who has written a great new book on
Iraq called Daydream Believers, said on Charlie
Rose: "wars are about politics. They aren't won
until their political objectives are reached. The
road we're on in Iraq won't get us there. A large
number of Iraqis will keep fighting whether we
go or stay." The surge won't change that. That's
why it is irrelevant.