Have Turkey and Brazil temporarily prevented a US war on Iran? The deal involves shipping low-enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 20%-enriched uranium from Europe.

The WaPo hews disgustingly to the US line; in an article titled "Iran creates illusion of progress in nuclear negotiations," the journo admits "The best hope for U.S. officials is Iranian intransigence... Iran now must present a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna explaining the details of the transaction, which U.S. officials privately hope will begin the process of unraveling it." Well isn't that we all hope for? Heaven forbid the US failed to escalate sanctions or start a war.

Would Obama accept such a thing? "Obama administration officials reacted coolly[.]"

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Chomsky denied entry to Israel/OPT. He was to speak at Bir Zeit University.

The New York Times is portraying old cold warrior Robert Gates as a military budget-cutting maverick today, fighting against Congressional corruption and the bloated defense corporations for the sake of the common American! He bravely fends off irate calls from the Capitol and K Street! F-22s have been cancelled, and threatening noises made about aircraft carriers and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. What's his game? It is true that an increasingly large proportion of US imperial murder is conducted via unmanned, sky-borne death machine. Maybe this is a practical move.

The NYT's concern with military cost-cutting extends to the health care of retirees: "Active-duty military and their families rightly do not pay for health care. But what retirees pay — $460 annually per family — has not risen in 15 years. Mr. Gates said that many retirees earn full-time salaries on top of their military retirement pay and could get coverage through their employer. We owe our fighting forces excellent care, but this is a time when everyone must share the burden." As we know, NYT editorialists are the type of people who like to share burdens.

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USAID has been paying to build the Apartheid road in Israel and the Occupied territories, despite US promises six years earlier not to.

Jonathan Cook says, with obvious irony, "The US agency’s involvement in building a segregated West Bank road infrastructure would run counter to Washington’s oft-stated goal, including as it launched 'proximity talks' last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. "

Mr Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road infrastructure wanted by Israel.

"What happens is that USAid presents a package deal of donations for infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads it does not want."

He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said, following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

The Palestinian Authority is now scrambling to look like it's paying attention.

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"Tropical" diseases are apparently also common in poor (especially minority) communities in the US, and apparently could be cheaply dealt with: "Mass distributions could control or eliminate most neglected tropical diseases from the Caribbean at an estimated cost of $20 million per year for five years." The extent of the problem in the US is not fully known. Meanwhile, the war on AIDS is falling apart. Donors are focusing their money on cheaper diseases to treat.

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Japanese people are not generally thrilled with the American bases, which they may associate with approximately 200,000 accidents and crimes involving U.S. soldiers, in which 1,076 Japanese civilians have died since 1952. Okinawans are anxious to remove one of several bases, Futenma Air Force Base, from their island, which they associate with fatal car crashes and rapes, but prime minister Yukio Hatayama is having trouble living up to his promises to do so. 59% of Japanese voters say he should resign if he can't work it out. (If you want to see some real ugly Americans, look at the comments on that one.) The beginning of this interview with Chalmers Johnson has a little more background on the bases in Okinawa. "After research, you discover that the rate of sexually violent crimes committed by our troops in Okinawa leading to court-martial is two per month!"

Jeremy Scahill has obtained a tape of a speech Erik Prince gave (and demanded it not be recorded) detailing Blackwater's plans.

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Eitan Bronstein of Zochrot has a message for Palestinians on Nakba Day: don't give up on the right of return.

While we're on Palestine, I recently finished a pretty long article by Gabriel Ash of Jews sans frontieres on boycott, divestment, and sanctions, spelling out in detail a few things I'd long felt but couldn't have pieced together as coherently. Putting aside that boycotting Israel is morally the right thing to do, he places Israeli state violence in the context of the development of neoconservative dogma and neoliberal economic hegemony.

In broad strokes, the elite in Europe and the US, as usual, want to destroy the welfare state and accrue maximum profits to themselves. (Beautiful description of the welfare state: "After WWII, the specter that used to haunt Europe was invited to sit at the table and given a small plate in return for no longer moving furniture at night.") To propose doing this straight out is a dangerous tactical mistake, but to cut back on services and civil liberties in the context of a war on terror/immigrants/Muslims is much easier. These useful fictions are propped up by acceptance of Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. This in turn is a liberalized instance of one of the Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt's theories, the essentiality for a ruler to have an existential enemy in order to mobilize the state against and create a "state of exception" in which normal parliamentary procedures can be abrogated and power grasped directly. To advocate a general hatred of Muslims is too reactionary a view to gain mainstream acceptance, but to voice concern that these people, being ever so different, can be absorbed into and coexist outside of liberal democracy allows one to capitalize on racist fears under the cover of humanist language.

Thus besides the profit that accrues from business relations with Israel and the original appeal to the British of a sort of "Western" advance base against the barbarian hordes of Asia, the continued European defense of the indefensible and collaboration with the siege is part of a wider ideological agreement. This is a continuation of a similar strategy that the capitalist elite used in the early twentieth century, when eastern European Jews were supposedly the Trojan horse bringing Bolshevism to the West.

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I had a number of further things I wanted to talk about, but this window has been open for a while, so I should just post.