What the fuck is Ryan C. Crocker talking about?

Crocker is the U.S.'s ambassador to Iraq--an undesirable, if not downright impossible, job, to be sure. But while he's being interviewed inside Saddam's old Republican Palace, THIS CRAZY SHIT is what he has to say about the current policy debate on withdrawal swirling in Washington:

Setting out what he said was not a policy prescription but a review of issues that needed to be weighed, the ambassador compared Iraq’s current violence to the early scenes of a gruesome movie.

“In the States, it’s like we’re in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we’re done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else,” he said. “Whereas out here, you’re just getting into the first reel of five reels,” he added, “and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.

If this is the level of abstraction that administration officials are resorting to, then no matter what George Bush says shortly in Cleveland, his Iraq misadventure is beyond doomed, and his legacy is in the toilet (as it should be).

The Washington Post's "ANGLER" series on Dick Cheney

This is David S. Addington. As Dick Cheney's lawyer, he is the scariest person in the Bush administration that you have maybe never heard of. Allow No Empires to direct you, if you haven't read it already--and we bet you haven't!--to the Washington Post's series on the underside of the Cheney vice-presidency, in four parts.

Works Consulted #3

• Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (Routledge, 2007)
• Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987)
• Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun (Anchor Books, 2000)
• Orhan Pamuk, Snow (Vintage, 2005)

Army of Islam Frees Alan Johnston

While we were busy grilling hamburgers, the Palestinian faction Army of Islam released Alan Johnston. No Empires is thrilled at this outcome, especially considering how unlikely it had seemed, and is interested to see whether it is true, as The New York Times reports, that in securing Johnston's release, "Hamas has undoubtedly given its image a boost and gained in respectability."

No Empires Misses Alan Johnston Pt. 2

Both the BBC and The New York Times recently reported that Hamas arrested "a spokesman" for Army of Islam, the Palestinian group that kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Of course, this is absolutely terrifying, considering the tape AOI recently released in which Johnston explains how his captors will kill him if any rescue attempts are made. The Hamas government has rightly made the Johnston case a major issue in its attempts to stabilize Gaza.

The article can be found here. Note that while the Times's Steven Erlanger can't come up with much negative to say about Hamas's latest attempts to free the Johnston, he adds to the end of his article a bizarrely disconnected fact-sheet of sorts on the organization and on Israel/Palestine in general, starting with information on how the Hamas government "organizes religious and charitable institutions that are also used to recruit members and sometimes armed fighters" and later outlining recent arrests of Hamas members, which of course brings the article full circle and seems to call into question whether the democratically elected Hamas government has any right to arrest anyone at all.

About six months ago, one-half of No Empires wrote a letter to the NYT editor to bemoan Erlanger'sround shoddy reportage from Israel--he's a huge fan of the bumbling, ideologically-motivated subject change evidenced above. The letter apparently couldn't pass muster at "the paper of record," and was never printed.

Both at home and abroad, this insistance on the illegitimacy of the Hamas government allows the vacuum of leadership evidenced by groups such as the AOI, as well as the Johnston kidnapping, to continue. This crisis of leadership dates back at least to the death of Yasir Arafat, if not to the era of the thoroughly-discredited Oslo accords, and it seems that despite Hamas's efforts, the situation is only getting worse. No Empires would finally like to point out that NOTHING good can come of this, particularly if Johnston is indeed killed (which, unfortunately, seems more and more likely as those on all sides get increasingly desperate).

no empires goes to washington and yonkers

from practice, and from the June 10 rally to protest the 40th birthday of the Israeli occupation.

Alistair Crooke on the future of Palestine

The current situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has been treated with (characteristic) obfuscation, over-simplification, and all-round poor analysis in the Western media. No Empires would like desperately to direct your attention to an article by former UN envoy Alastair Crooke in the most recent edition of the London Review of Books. In a timely and sober analysis, Crooke not only hits precisely on the ways in which the governments of Europe, Israel, and the United States have, since January 2006, created the conditions for recent developments; he also, accurately, characterizes Hamas and Hezbollah as "moderate Islamist groups," with specific and local political aims, and broad grass-roots popularity--a welcome respite from the blanket treatment of these movements in the Western press as "terrorist organizations" or "militant Islamist groups," or any similarly inappropriate ideological description. No Empires implores you to read Crooke's piece.