Does America Put Israel's Interests Above Its Own?

The Christian Science Monitor and others have called attention to a new study by two professors arguing that due to the influence of the Israeli lobby in the United States, America puts Israel's interests ahead of its own.

This encourages me to think that I'm not paranoid and not anti-Semitic. There really is something to worry about. This comes on the heels of the criminal investigation of spying activities by AIPAC. The AIPAC scandal involves Iran, and it's well known that Israel wants the US to be tough on Iran.

For the record, here is the full text of the article on the Harvard web site.

What will Sen. Saxby Chambliss Do to Tammy Duckworth?

I have still not recovered from what Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss did to former Democratic Senator Max Cleland. Chambliss called Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran, soft on defense because he opposed certain portions of the homeland defense bill (which has turned out to be a mess).

Tammy Duckworth, who is running for a House seat as a Democrat in Illinois, is a double amputee, wounded in Iraq, just the sort of person Chambliss hates. I don't know why Georgians would elect a Senator who hates people wounded while fighting for America, but Chambliss fits the bill. I don't know why Republicans would give him, a man who despises military veterans, a position having anything to do with defense, but they made him a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a sign of why things are going so badly in Iraq.

There is no mention in Chambliss' Senate biography that he ever served in the military, although he was the right age to have been drafted at the peak of the Vietnam war, graduating from college in 1966 and completing law school in 1968. I graduated from college in 1967 and was drafted after my first year of law school (at the University of Georgia) in 1968. How did Chambliss avoid the same fate?

I hope Tammy Duckworth gets elected and one day kicks Chambliss in the rear end with one of her prosthetic feet. She is probably too nice to do that, but Chambliss deserves it for what he did to Cleland.

What about the Ships?

Everybody in Congress is happy because Dubai has ceased trying to manage US ports, as reported by the Washington Post, for example.

But what about the ships that dock in the US ports, now to be managed by an American entity? Most of the ships plying the oceans fly flags of convenience. They are registered in foreign countries and thus are under the jurisdiction of some of the world's most unreliable countries, Liberia, for example. They do this to escape the regulation of more advanced, civilized countries.

So what's the point of making sure the managers of American ports are American, when almost all of the ships are foreign, and are regulated by some of the most lenient, undiscriminating countries in the world? They are flagged in these countries, because of more lenient regulation, just as most large American companies incorporate in Delaware, because it is more "friendly."

The bottom line is that the Dubai/P&O port management fiasco, is just that. The US will be no safer, because Congress is not really serious about making ports safer, by for example, inspecting more containers arriving on these unregulated, foreign flagged ships.

Brazil Ready to Start Uranium Enrichment

The Mercury News reports a Knight Ridder story that Brazil is about to start up its own uranium enrichment plant, probably putting it ahead of Iran in this technology. Having spent two years, twenty years ago, trying to discourage Brazil from doing this, I am somewhat disappointed. The good news is that Brazil, unlike Iran, is cooperating closely with the IAEA. Then, there are the lessons we could learn from Brazil's nuclear program.

For me, it's that you have to be a reliable supplier and work closely with countries that have nuclear reactors. I've described it earlier, but Brazil had no intention of developing the full nuclear fuel cycle when it purchased its first nuclear reactor from Westinghouse in the US in the 1970s, mainly as a hedge against the oil shortages gripping the world then. Just as the reactor was about to go on line, the US refused to sell fuel for it, as the Arabs were refusing to sell oil then. Senator John Glenn passed a law requiring "full scope safeguards" (equivalent to NPT membership) on all nuclear activities in a country before the US could sell nuclear fuel to it. Brazil said this was changing the terms of the agreement after the agreement had already been concluded and after Brazil had spent about a billion dollars on its reactor. Brazil got so mad that it has spent the last 30 years developing a fuel cycle, so that its nuclear reactor supplied power will not be subject to the whims of the US and its allies.

Beating people (like Iran and North Korea) about the head and shoulders is likely to be counterproductive, as it was in Brazil, unless we are willing to back up our demands with military force, as we did in Iraq. The poor planning and execution in Iraq, however, may have taught protential proliferators a lesson that to counter US pressure you need to develop a bomb. This may be the lesson of Bush's current trip to India, which seems to have gotten a "get out of jail free" card from Bush after developing nuclear weapons. See this briefing on how Clinton viewed the Glenn amendment for his trip to India.

Another project that Brazil started during the 1970s oil crisis, developing ethanol automobile fuel from sugar cane, has also been successful, putting Brazil far ahead of the US in this technology, which Bush just recently indentified as important (30 years after Brazil).