When asked about the possibility of prosecuting Bush administration officials for criminal activity, Obama yesterday said: "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

If the criteria is not looking backward, then why prosecute the people held in Gitmo at all? Why prosecute anyone? Why try to go after Bin Ladin?

http://husseini.org/2009/01/prosecuting-bush-the-fallacies.html

Jimmy Carter,the last democrat I voted for.Nice man,good heart, very bad president.The CRA of 1977,gas lines,the Iran embassy fiasco,inflation and outrageous mortgage rates.He made Reagan possible,so I guess we owe him a thank you.He had great intentions but like many of the homes he built for habitat for humanity they crumbled like the failed ideology he stood for.

Wow. Attacked on two fronts! I must have said something inappropriate? I'll deal with the easy one first:

tommy1733, I'm really hurt that a guy who doesn't believe anyone should ever use harsh language has called me 'naive'. Actually, I am not that naive on this one, though. You are naive if you do not realize that Iran, or maybe more properly Persia is a root culture, and as such has as deep ties to as many people, maybe more, than the root cultures in China and in the Middle East.

It's also, for that reason, a hated culture by the peoples of the Mediterranean and surrounds, the current expounder of that hatred may be Israel, but before Israel, it was Rome, and before that Greece. Go watch '300' and see. I don't think the 'non-naive' set, such as yourself, realize to what extent a large swath of Asia would see a war on Iran as a war on brown people, to say nothing of the people who look up quizzically whenever, on this board recently, for instance, people try to say that the forever hatred of the West is the Jews, without ever noticing how many Europeans and Americans sat down to a breakfast of croissants this morning.

They hang gay children there? Well, the Japanese say Americans eat prisoners of war, too. Perhaps China should be a model for them, since you aren't upset by commerce with China? After all, they jailed their AIDS doctors, throw Falun Gong adherents out of windows and burn them to death, and send the families of executed prisoners a bill for the bullet used in the execution. And the Pakistanis bury women alive. And Rejali documents electrotorture (torture by hooking up magnetos to peoples body parts and turning the crank) in the 21st century by Canadians.

Iran as an ally, a partnership of equals, would be invaluable. Consider where it is located, and the strong attachments it can form with surrounding nations, not to mention what we could get culturally from a well formed democratic state there. We created such a partnership of their traditional rivals, Western Europe, after their genocidal world-threatening spree in the twentieth century, and were not threatened by multiple nuclear powers, thriving cultures and economies, and premier universities.

There are an awful lot of countries for whom the goals are a return to former intellectual and cultural glory, and equality with the great nations in diplomacy, and little else (except internal economics). Going through another decade without learning how to deal with that is like putting off dealing with global warming. Iran would be a good place to start. Great change always comes out of crisis, we need to start with a traditional enemy to make this particular change.

And now on to maureenodonnell:

ondelette, the Christians you describe are nothing like any Christians I know. Perhaps you should clarify that this is an American variant of Christianity just as your American democracy seems more like a plutocracy than the idealised USA as propounded by your founding fathers. Are you even aware that there's a world beyond America and that there are Maronite Christians in Lebanon, Orthodox Christians in Greece and also in Russia........The world is much more complex than the children's picture book that is interminably suggested by far too many Americans.

You're right. I, being a dumb American, don't know anything about anything except 'children's picture book' views of the world. I'm sorry. You mean you're a Christian and you aren't trying to take over our banks and media? Well, I'll be!

to maintain security [is] job number 1 for a US President

__________________________________

wbgonne apparently considers that refuting the above-cited line, which reads like bad teevee ad copy, is proof positive of "loony left"ism.

The quoted mandate may well be teevee hero Jack Bauer's job number 1, and a teevee/movie Action Hero President might adopt it as a slogan, comparable to Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here".

Otherwise, it reads like something a bright kindergartener might have announced in response to a question from Art Linkletter.

Obama may have his reasons for countenancing simplistic and primitive opinions and attitudes-- i.e., adopting and endorsing most of the Global War on Terror rhetoric devised and disseminated by his monstrous predecessor-- but this forum ought to be a bastion of resistance to the Dumbing-Down-- and Dumbed-Down of Amerika.

You won't see this sort of thing espoused in most mainstream discussions of Middle Eastern politics, at least outside of Israel, but in all seriousness, one thing worth considering when thinking about the relationship between Israel and the US is the possibility that what Israel really seeks — what it craves — is involuntary restraint.

I don't mean that somewhere in a secret government file in Jerusalem is a policy document that embodies some weirdly erotic fixation on being controlled. Israelis have a hugely complex relationship with their own national project, not all of it liminal, and it's that subterranean aspect of Israeli self-identity to which I refer.

The Israeli experience, for reasons partly but not wholly within their control, has been one of long-lasting mass psychosocial traumatic stress. Burned into Israeli identity, and more deeply into 20th century Jewish identity, is the stark horror of last-ditch survival in the face of annihilation. Any person, or people, with such a deeply ingrained pattern of experience always seeks to re-enact it, over and over, potentially indefinitely.

(It's left as an exercise to the reader to consider the mass behavioral reflexes of other nations and groups of people, and the experiences and events that might have engendered them.)

The problem facing Israelis, psychologically, is that they're no longer the ones being pushed around. They have a first-world military and first-world wealth vastly in excess of anything surrounding them. They have (as another letter writer astutely pointed out) a highly successful nuclear weapons program that has been going on for decades unmolested and has by now likely produced an arsenal equal to that of any of the world's second-tier nuclear powers. For a tiny country whose greatest want is peace with its neighbors, that's a lot of bang.

There are only two ways to deal with a contradiction like that. One is to come to terms — painfully, as all such reckonings are — with the fact of Israeli predominance, if not outright hegemony. The other — far more appealing in the short term — is to remain in a state of denial and do everything in your power to preserve your status as a threatened state.

So you provoke what active enemies you still have at every opportunity. If all they can deliver is pathetic resistance, sound and fury and a few clumsy explosives, you take what you can get, magnify it, and use it as an excuse for intermittent defensive retaliation of the sort of that echoes the (now mythologized) experiences of your national youth.

Likewise, there's something comforting in the Israeli (and to some extent American) view that Israel is the pugnacious go-getter that would really, really kick everyone's ass if only its well-meaning but benighted (or worse) friend the United States didn't keep it in check. It's very convenient to be able to swear (to your enemies, but also to yourself) that you'd have had those bastards if someone else hadn't been holding you back. So much of Israeli-American relations, especially on the right wing, amount to taking deliberately extreme positions and indulging in a lot of eye rolling as one "has to" give up on forceful, vigorous action and "settle for" something tame and banal (and, often, still far more belligerent than is warranted — sometimes counterproductively so).

And rather than ever — ever — admit that you're the major regional nuclear power and that your national quest for strength and security has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of your founders — indeed, succeeded a long time ago — you continually reinforce this idea that you have nuclear rivals. If the only people who will listen are the Americans (who, for their own similar reasons, always love to tell themselves stories of shadowy nuclear enemies), well, that's okay — the US is still the one ally any nation really needs, if it can't get any others.

The counterexample of course is the peace with Egypt. Knowing that it would stand as an enduring, and perhaps eventually compelling, example of the strength through peace that is achievable from Israel's maturity as a state, the right wing fought tooth and nail against it. In the US, AIPAC in particular, quite well aware that it would refute their implicit claim that anything of benefit to Israel must come through them or not at all, bitterly opposed Carter's efforts and never forgave him.

It's absurd to think that anyone truly devoted to the actual Zionist project of a secure, robust Jewish state could oppose the landmark treaty that advanced that goal as much as any other single diplomatic action since 1948. In just the same way, the people who continue to advocate endless war as the natural, inevitable, justified condition of the Israeli state and its people are perhaps the worst threats Israel now faces.

If the US ever intends to seriously bring about real peace for Israel, it must embrace its role as the restrainer and play it out to its logical conclusion. If and when that day comes, despite all the kicking and screaming to come out of the right wing's desperate denial, I think Americans will be surprised by how relieved the people of Israel really are.