Some excellent opinion pieces.

Al Jazeera has put up a number of excellent opinion pieces today.

Dominic Strauss Kahn
I had some suspicion that DSK being charged with Rape might be politically motivated, though I had assumed it was more likely to be Sarkozy's doing than anyone else's. Now I do not suggest the victim is lying, just that the timing is suspicious, Elliot Spitzer was found to be a user of prostitutes at a very fortuitous time for the GOP but he had actually committed that crime for instance. These two pieces examine this possibility from different angles:

Danny Schechter looks at The Financial world as a hypsexualised environment and examines how intelligence agencies and banks who were not fond of some of the things DSK was saying might have exploited already known about "foibles" to shut down a potential threat.

Pepe Escobar expands on just why DSK could have needed neutralising pointing out that he was trying to make the IMF slightly less of a machine designed to carve up the world for the benefit of a plutocratic elite. As Escobar highlights the endorsement of Joseph Stiglitz could well have lead the financial elite to get rid of him.

This does not of course mean DSK did not commit rape, it just means a lot of very powerful people had reason to have him disgraced. On a more positive note it strongly suggests Noam Chomsky is a really decent guy, hes been a thorn in the right's side for decades and they haven't gotten anything to stick to him.

Obama's Speech
I haven't read or watch the whole speech so I can't really offer much comment but reading around the apparent Israeli chagrin at the 1967 borders proposal (something the UN has always endorsed) one realises that Obama has given Israel all they could really want in that speech. Still no harm in acting angry and hoping for more.

Richard Falk looks specifically at how the speech favours Israel and examines within this context what Palestinians can do.

Joseph Massad looks at how the speech impacts US Imperial policy in the middle east depressingly but not surprisingly he finds it to be a lot of hypocrisy and a continued pursuit of the status quo. The point about Obama giving a speech for the West and specifically for America is an interesting one. Sure the US has always been insular but given Obama's popularity and prominence as a non-white Western leader and the clear political awakening going on in the Middle East to be so tone deaf to the views and opinions of Arabs is unwise. I mean sure he probably assumes he can use violence and financial coercion to force the Arabs back under dictatorships but it never hurts to at least pretend not to be a monster.

Miscellaneous

I probably wont link this unless I do it here so here we go. Jonny sent me this and it's an article in an Indian newspaper about how China has pledged to protect Pakistan from future US incursions. Now you'd think that would be big news, but no, the western media obviously don't want to get too stuck into the regional political situation. America and friends are saving Afghanistan from Muslims or something and no other nation really exists in that scenario.

Tarak Barkawi examines how accusations of "radicalisation" are being used to attack freedom of speech at universities. He also broaches the subject of neo-liberalisation of University management.

Finally there is a review of a book by Francis Fukuyama, he who is mocked over the misinterpretation of his statements regarding the "end of history". It is a critique of the anti-state sentiment of right wingers in both the US and the UK. Such a prominent conservative making such a strong case against neo-liberal ideology is I think noteworthy and worth keeping an eye on. Then again, maybe he'll be arrested for an embarrassing crime within the next couple of weeks.

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead Part 2.

Probably to your surprise I am doing a second posting about this today. To start off with I recommend two Alternet articles: This one lays out the more mainstream concerns of the aftermath of Bin Laden's death and this one gives a reasonable assessment of how OBL's death doesn't really improve the lives of most Americans one bit.

Now on to some more speculation.

4)I'm going to couch this in terms of TV but thats because I've been watching a lot of it today. The "death" of Osama Bin Laden, a figure who as aforementioned had been reduced to little more than occasional obscure audio messages of dubious provenance, could've been prompted for another reason. TV shows often have an arc across a season in which the protagonists of the show face a particularly dangerous foe. While some opponents last for longer its general a good idea to cycle through villains. When first introduced a villain has mystery and that leads them to be more scary and unpredictable, so an interesting and engaging character. Over time though a villain will often become well known and, well, familiarity breeds contempt. On top of that if a foe lingers for a long time the show can start to slow down and you have increasing difficulty explaining why your protagonists can't deal with them.

Can you see through my elaborate metaphors? Yes, Osama as a concept of evil, a rallying cry and justification for certain foreign policy decisions had really run its' course and was starting to make the American Empire look weak, with all those trillions of dollars spent on defence they couldn't kill one guy? Plus as has been pointed out Americans now care more about the economy than being afraid of brown bogey men. Obviously the old method of keeping Americans scared has run out and a new one rolled out. Otherwise they might start asking questions the elite don't want asked.


5) Following on from that a similar reason for wrapping up the threat of Bin Laden could well be due to extremely pressing foreign policy concerns elsewhere. After all the song and dance made about the danger he posed until he was dead it was really quite hard to shift foreign policy focus. That may well be why Obama was so focused on killing him, he has shown himself to be a traditional US Imperialist and likely wants to move away from the strange neo-con crusades of the W Bush White house.

With OBL dead there is plenty of excuse to shift to other concerns. The most likely new direction is probably South America. In the past decade it has shifted from being a subdued back yard for America, something it has long been, to a largely leftist region that is rapidly gaining regional solidarity and moving away from Washington's roadmap. Still as Honduras's Coup showed countries in the region can be realigned to US interests. I have no idea if other nations will be retaken so easily but I imagine the Obama Whitehouse strongly desires to regain control of the region and its' natural resources and having an excuse to shift focus to South America from the AFPAK region is mighty handy for them.

6)Of course, just because a course of action seems to be the best one from the outside doesn't mean that is the one that'll be pursued, maybe because of info outsiders aren't privy to or maybe because of regime politics. I have absolutely no inside track or real understanding of how Obama's government functions but I would say the appointment of General Petraeus to head the CIA shows Obama maybe doesn't have total control of the direction his regime takes (to be fair there are compelling arguments for why Obama would actively choose to appoint him but thats not what I want to focus on here.) Petraeus has been a booster for invading Iran for instance which in the US Empire's current weakened state would be tantamount to suicide.

Then again, W Bush's legacy is a wide variety of ways for the US Empire to commit suicide. Going back to the issue of Pakistan I raised in Part 1 while I said it gave the US carte blanche I think that should be clarified via the can should gap. Yes you can do a thing but that does not mean you should do a thing. There are broadly justifiable actions the US could in the near future take in Pakistan but they would be exceptionally unwise to do so. As aforementioned the US is not pleased Pakistan has overthrown their client dictator. This can be rectified, as happened in Honduras and many other places, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in quite subtle ways that really don't place the US Empire under much threat even if they fail.

There are strong hints however that America is taking a much more dangerous path that OBL's death could justify ramping up. The drone bombings and incursions into Pakistan by ground troops are not subtle and are already having considerable blowback, ramping that up in a country with nuclear weapons and a large population that holds pretty fundamentalist views would be bad at any time, let alone in the midst of two ohther wars and maybe a third in Libya. Oh and of course lets not forget in the Kashmir region Pakistan shares a border with India AND China, spillover that brought those two countries into the mix could be absolutely catastrophic.

Lord knows what will actually happen.

Oh and now you've read all this heres a much more concise and better summary: http://www.explosm.net/comics/2409/ Thanks Jonny.

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead.

So Bin Laden is apparently dead. The vast majority of the media is going to take this story at face value so while they may be right to do so I'm going to look at the holes and questionable details in all this. To defend myself from the fact at least some of what I say here will look very silly in the coming months I will state this is my initial reaction to the news.

Firstly for several years the only evidence we've had that Bin Laden was alive was the odd taped audio message. Then after he was killed instead of recovering the body to put on show or at the very least have some nominally independent autopsy done his body is dumped at sea. We're almost certainly going to get pictures of the body released but creating photos of the body of someone who hardly anyone has seen for years is pretty doable for the US. More to the point if they had recovered the body so as to dump it at sea why not just hold on to it?

Secondly the timing is odd while it certainly wont hurt Obama in 2012 the election is a year and a half away, plenty of time for the right to trash and undermine the achievement or just plain focus on something else as the elation at Bin Laden's death fades away. On the other hand domestic dissent is growing, the Ryan plan is mobilising boomers' inherent selfishness and protests against austerity are ongoing across the US, most notably in Wisconsin. Now while this unrest was focused on the GOP business interests may well no want any dissent blossoming and so had a wonderfully patriotic distraction occuring. Heck protesters could be dismissed as anti-American for daring to protest at this time of national triumph.

Also a more outlandish point but one I feel worth making, we've had two big patriotic distractions that bolster the status quo and conservative entrenched interests in just a couple of days, first the Royal Wedding and now this. If one did want to distract against something pretty big happening that would upset people those would be pretty solid ways of doing it.

Thirdly this gives carte blanche for further incursions by NATO forces into Pakistan. Obama pointedly commented the attack on the compound was solely a US operation. Worse this compound was near a major Pakistani training base and in an area popular with retired members of the Pakistani military. Pakistani opposition to NATO ground incursions and Air Raids which killed multiple civilians has reached a fever pitch so some kind of justification was needed. Further though Pakistan has been very naughty recently, having the gall do things like charge CIA operative Raymond Davis with murder just because he killed a few Pakistani citizens, heck they've been very naughty for a while what with them overthrowing US puppet General Musharraf (who now lives in Britain with UK tax payer funded protection) and trying to act as a sovereign nation, using democracy to select leaders who might not favour US interests.

With the nature of the killing of Bin Laden in central Pakistan, just miles from the capital Islamabad the US is going to pretty much have a free hand to pursue regime change back to a client dictator.

There are other issues at stake but for now thats what springs to mind, I'll probably try and expand on this later in the day.