Chris Hedges's Blog, page 134

Ellen DeGeneres and the American Psychopath

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article for this publication called, “The Liberal Rehabilitation of George W. Bush Is Complete,” and so it’s my regrettable duty to inform Ellen DeGeneres that her palling around with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game Sunday—and her subsequent sanctimonious defense of such as a gesture of benevolent friendship meant to heal our fractured, angry nation—is too late. Michelle Obama’s Werther’s Original has melted away, and there’s nothing left but dry mouths and hacks.

It would be easy to get angry at Ellen’s hollow gesture of comity, the post-relevant liberal trailblazer sharing her nachos with America’s most prominent living homophobe, warmonger and torturer, the man who presided over what remains the greatest orgy of murderous violence in this not-as-young-as-it-used-to-be century, the heckuva-job glad-hander who sleepwalked through the deaths of perhaps 1,800 people—many of them, horrifically, by drowning—in one of the most terrible natural disasters in American history, a virulent racist who defeated another sainted American cretin, John McCain, in a South Carolina primary by accusing him of miscegenation.

But what is American public life, and especially American political liberalism, if not a perpetual Operation Paperclip—the post-war intelligence operation to smuggle useful Nazis into America so they could build us weapons against the next, bigger threat? The periods of moral convalescence vary, but the next looming national catastrophe always appears on the horizon, and the former persona non grata, who has bided his or her time by doing something respectable like sucking salaries out of think tanks or semi-retiring in laconic politeness to a family compound, slink back at the first sign the new vulgarities are even more outré and intolerable than his or her own vulgar outrages.

People will tell you—in the case of Ellen and George—that it is primarily an element of ruling class solidarity, that the millionaires and billionaires will always have more in common with each other than with you. There is certainly some truth there, but how then to explain the you-go-girl cheering of so many fans of Michelle Obama, or Ellen? It cannot be simply a matter of that old American pathology, personally misidentifying with people vastly richer than oneself through a form of aspirational Stockholm syndrome.

Nor is it a symptom of America’s evangelical morality, with its fundamental belief in the power and ubiquity of personal redemption. We all know that there is no one meaner and more unforgiving than someone who believes they’ve been forgiven for their trespasses and redeemed for their sins, including the ones they haven’t gotten around to committing just yet.

But the more fundamental problem is that Americans are too nice. That may seem like a paradox, since we are a country that blithely bombs the world and then weeps with self-pity and affronted dignity when the little people we just stomped on fail to forgive us for tearing out their fingernails. In fact, our niceness is itself a symptom of the moral obliviousness that permits us to enact atrocities in the first place. Niceness is not friendliness, not hospitality, not charity and not goodness. Niceness is the blank grin on the face of the psychopath: it is the public enactment of all the forms of love and kindness without the troublesome burden of loving anyone or treating people with kindness.

This is what an Ellen DeGeneres is really getting at when she brags about being friends with those who have “different beliefs.” It is not a matter of actual emotional attachment to any system of values, and it’s certainly not a matter of transcending minor political squabbles to form some approximation of a community. We are all friends with people who have different beliefs. It is quite literally nothing to brag about. For all the now-clichéd talk of America sorting itself ever more by affect and affinity group, pretty much every social person has friends with beliefs that differ—in ways large and small—radically from their own.

Rather, she is saying that it is more personally and professionally convenient just to be nice to whatever person happens to be in the same grandstand for the same spectacle of large men grievously injuring each other. It is not that there are disparate values to be bridged in order to form a diverse and tolerant society. Instead, it is hankering after the ease of a society in which there is no necessity to form a core of values beyond the practical calculation of personal and social advantage.

In 2003, not long after George W. Bush declared “major combat operations” to be over in Iraq, American soldiers kidnapped and detained an Iraqi woman not much older than Ellen DeGeneres. They took her from Samarra to Tikrit, where they forced her to stir human shit, which they set on fire with lighter fluid. When she told them she could stir no longer, a “sergeant came up to [her] and whispered in [her] ear, ‘If you don’t, I will tell one of the soldiers to fuck you.’”

Well, that is indeed a regrettable episode, but I’m sure everyone learned a valuable lesson, and it is certainly not—16 years later—a reason to be rude to the guy responsible.

White House Impeachment Letter Sparks Constitutional Crisis

President Donald Trump and his administration will not participate in the Congressional impeachment inquiry, the White House announced Tuesday, setting up a constitutional crisis in the conflict between two ostensibly co-equal branches of government.

“There is no legal basis for Trump’s position,” tweeted NBC analyst Katie Phang. “Hard stop.”

“The Trump administration’s flat refusal to cooperate with congressional oversight is, itself, impeachable,” tweeted Vox‘s Ezra Klein.

Robert Reich: Centrists Simply Cannot Win the 2020 Election

This piece originally appeared on RobertReich.Org.

I keep hearing that the Democratic primary is coming down to someone who’s “electable” versus someone who has “ideas.”

This is pure nonsense. Beating Donald Trump requires getting out the vote. And in order to get people to turn out and vote, a presidential candidate has to be inspiring. Which means big ideas, a vision of an America that could become a reality if we all got behind it, a sense of where we need to be heading.

Don’t be fooled. This primary is not a contest between someone who’s electable and someone who has big ideas. Big ideas are essential in order to be electable.

Something else I’m hearing is that the contest is between someone who’s a moderate and a candidate who’s on the left.

Well, that’s rubbish. All the babble about moderate or left assumes we’re back in the old politics where the central question was the size of government.

But today the real contest is between the people and the powerful – the vast majority of Americans versus an oligarchy that’s amassed most of the nation’s wealth and power.

That small group of hugely wealthy and powerful people got a giant $2 trillion tax cut from Trump and his Republican enablers, and they want to pay for it by trashing Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

The oligarchy would rather we fight among ourselves for the scraps they’ve left behind than see what’s really happening. Divide and conquer: Middle class against poor, white against black, native-born American against immigrant, Christian against Muslim. That way we don’t see that they’ve been looting America.

Trump’s followers don’t see he’s really a tool of the oligarchy, doing their bidding, reorganizing America so they accumulate even more wealth and power. And as long as we fight among ourselves, we don’t join together and reclaim our economy and our democracy.

One final thing I’ve been hearing is that we should go back to the way it was before Trump. That’s baloney.

The way it was before Trump brought us Trump. The way it was before Trump was an economy rigged for the benefit of the few, stagnant wages, socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else, a health care system whose co-payments and deductibles were out of control and still didn’t cover 30 million Americans, and big money controlling our politics.

No, we don’t want to go back to the way it was before Trump. We have to go forward.

So don’t accept false choices about who’s electable versus who has ideas, who’s moderate versus who’s on the left, or whether we need to go back to the way it was before Trump.

In reality, what’s going to beat Trump are new ideas that mobilize America, that let Americans see what the wealthy and powerful who bankroll Trump have done to this nation, and get us looking forward to what America should be rather than backward to an America that was never as good as it could be.



Trump’s Syria Policy Could Be a Gift to ISIS

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

Tessa Fox at Al Jazeera writes that Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. special operations forces from northern Syria in expectation of a Turkish invasion could throw the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia cultivated for the past four years by the U.S. into confusion. Moreover, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army may make a bid to take the gas and oil fields of Deir al-Zor province, currently under SDF control (SDF’s major and only really important component is the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurdish paramilitary. As a result of all this turmoil, the some 12,000 ISIL terrorists now locked up in containment camps could well escape. Many of them are from abroad and might make their way back home to plot further terror.

These alarms are being raised virtually everywhere except in the White House and in Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palaces.

Although for the moment, Trump just pulled out the 50 U.S. troops up near the Syrian border with Turkey, and the U.S. apparently still has about 1,000 military personnel in the Kurdish region of Syria, Trump says he wants to bring them all out. Doing so without any plan whatsoever for the aftermath is typical of Trump but could turn into a disaster.

The British are alarmed and are saying that they will have to withdraw their several hundred special operations forces from northeast Syria if the U.S. gets out since they depend on America for logistics, transport, rescue operations, etc. Trump’s departure, in other words, will create a reverse snowball effect where the anti-terror coalition will shrink to nothing without the American commitment.

The Kurdistan Regional Government expressed the profoundest fears that if 12,000 ISIL fighters got loose, they would also threaten the security of Iraq, not just Syria. Until the liberation of Mosul on July 21, 2017, the KRG was daily threatened by ISIL violence. I had a friend who was in Kurdistan then and would go down to the border and could actually see the black flags flying menacingly.

For his part, Erdogan says that his government is studying the best ways to ensure that jailed ISIL operatives do not escape.

This statement is not reassuring, since it is way past the time to study and prepare for this issue on the part of Turkey, if it is planning to invade Syria. Arabi21 quotes Turkish analyst Oktay Yilmaz saying that the Americans had used this ISIL business as a pretext to go into Syria and then to give away a third of Syria to a terrorist organization. This sort of “analysis” is common in Turkey, where many government officials and journalists just can’t seem to see ISIL as the enemy even as they vastly exaggerate the danger to Turkey of some 2 million Syrian Kurdish post-socialists (who have not actually committed any terrorism). I mean, I think what ISIL did to Paris or Brussels or Kabul or Mosul might somehow have gotten on TV news in Turkey.

So the likelihood that ISIL will be any sort of priority for the Turkish government is extremely low, and I wouldn’t bet on those ISIL terrorists remaining in their cells.

 

Closing the ‘Death Gap’ Between the Rich and Poor

Rich Americans are much more likely to live into their 70s or 80s than poor Americans, new research shows.

The new report from the Government Accountability Office, commissioned by Senator Bernie Sanders, shows how wealth inequality translates to lower life expectancy for working Americans.

Sanders and others have offered a number of federal proposals to reverse these trends — from canceling student debt to a wealth tax on multi-millionaires. But what can local communities do to close the death gap on their own?

One idea is to leverage the resources of big local institutions like hospitals and universities, which are often the largest employers in their communities. When these institutions confront economic disparities outside their walls, real change can happen.

A hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is doing just that by addressing predatory payday lending in the city.

Payday loans are taken out against a future paycheck and are typically used to cover necessities like rent, food, and utilities. This booming industry drains more than $240 million each year from Louisiana workers’ pockets, according to the Louisiana Budget Project.

Payday loan interest rates in the Baton Rouge area rank among the highest in the nation — think up to 1,043 percent APR for a $50 loan. Their storefronts are concentrated in the city’s low-income and majority African-American neighborhoods.

When a bill to regulate the industry failed in the Louisiana statehouse, Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center stepped in. The hospital partnered with a local financial institution, a community nonprofit organization, and a local Catholic charity office to create a community-based micro-lending alternative to payday lending.

Launched in summer 2018, The Faith Fund has generated 210 loans for a total of $253,779, saving individuals and their families approximately $760,000 in fees and interest charges. To receive a loan, applicants are required to meet with a financial adviser for a free financial wellness check-up.

There are plans for the fund to expand beyond an initial pilot and reach more people who struggle to pay for basic needs.

The Faith Fund plans to advance its work by meeting with workers at local businesses and conducting a series of “lunch and learns,” according to James Hunter, executive director of the Fund.

This strategy will allow them to meet people where they are, while providing a service that is needed throughout the community. And by educating community members about their options for reducing debt, the Fund can bridge the wealth divide that exists in Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge shows the power of the approach in a poor urban area, but the approach can work in rural areas too. An NPR report from earlier this year found that 40 percent of rural Americans surveyed reported having difficulty paying for food, housing, and routine medical bills.

To address housing insecurity in rural communities it serves, Catholic Health Initiatives, now part of CommonSpirit Health, has invested in affordable housing.

The organization recently issued loans totaling nearly $2 million to support an affordable housing development that will preserve 268 homes in Mississippi, and provided $500,000 to the Rural Community Assistance Corporation to expand access to special needs housing and affordable housing in rural areas.

Projects like these won’t solve the death gap alone — government support and solutions are sorely needed. But they demonstrate new ways of thinking about how to address health and wealth gaps that are widening across the country.

We need to create new institutions like this that are designed and programmed to put community health and well-being above the drive for profit — and have a real chance at increasing the survival rate for poor Americans.

Recuperating Sanders Says He May Slow Down Campaigning Pace

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Bernie Sanders began reintroducing himself to the 2020 campaign on Tuesday, venturing outside his Vermont home to say that he doesn’t plan on leaving the presidential race following last week’s heart attack — but that he may slow down a frenetic pace that might have contributed to his health problems.

“We were doing, in some cases, five or six meetings a day, three or four rallies and town meetings and meeting with groups of people. I don’t think I’m going to do that,” Sanders told reporters when asked what his schedule may look like going forward. “But I certainly intend to be actively campaigning. I think we’re going to change the nature of the campaign a bit. I’ll make sure that I have the strength to do what I have to do.”

Pressed on what that meant, Sanders replied: “Well, probably not doing four rallies a day.”

Sanders’ campaign has said he will be at next week’s Democratic presidential debate in Ohio. But it hasn’t commented on if or when he’ll resume campaigning before that — or what his next steps will be. NBC News announced it would air an “exclusive” interview with Sanders, his first since the heart attack, on Wednesday.

His health problems come at a precarious time, since Sanders was already facing questions about being the oldest candidate seeking the White House, and he has seen his recent poll numbers decline compared to 2020 rival Elizabeth Warren, his chief competitor for the Democratic Party’s most-progressive wing.

Sanders, a Vermont senator, also recently shook up his campaign staff in Iowa and New Hampshire, which kick off the presidential nominating process.

“I must confess, I was dumb,” Sanders said in front of his house, speaking in soft, calm tones with his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, looking on behind him. “Thank God, I have a lot of energy, and during this campaign I’ve been doing, in some cases, three or four rallies a day all over the state, Iowa, New Hampshire, wherever. And yet I, in the last month or two, just was more fatigued than I usually have been. And I should have listened to those symptoms.”

Supporters privately conceded that the timing of the heart attack — which came just as the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump was escalating — helped limit the political fallout. But they also acknowledge that he will have to more directly address lingering health concerns then, if not before.

And they hinted changes would be coming to better keep their candidate healthy.

“We’re going to look at everything — the whole campaign in its totality — and make adjustments where necessary,” said national campaign co-chair Nina Turner, who spoke with Sanders at length on Tuesday during a call with his four national co-chairs. “But make no mistake: Sen. Bernie Sanders is as committed — more so, even more now than he always has been, if that’s even possible.”

Last week began on a high note when Sanders announced that he’d raised $25.3 million during the year’s third quarter, more than Warren and any other Democratic presidential hopeful. But word of that was overshadowed hours later Tuesday, when Sanders was at a campaign event in Nevada, experienced chest discomfort and was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a heart attack.

Doctors inserted two stents to open up a blocked artery in his heart. Sanders left the hospital on Friday and flew home to Vermont the following morning.

“It wasn’t a major heart attack. He had a minor heart attack. The stents will be extremely helpful in terms of blood flow. I assume he’ll be far more vigorous,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, a Sanders’ confidante and former executive director of National Nurses United. “Heaven help the opposition.”

His campaign noted that he had $33.7 million in cash on hand in the quarter that ended last month and, on Monday, he released a plan to impose stricter campaign finance limits. The plan was in the works for weeks before Sanders took ill, advisers say, but they declined to comment on the effectiveness of campaigning via press release — simply issuing policy statements without a candidate out there campaigning to back them up. Surrogates have taken Sanders’ place on the campaign trail in the meantime, including Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who visited New Hampshire on Saturday.

Sanders has been active in recent days communicating with his staff and broader network of longtime supporters. Those who have spoken to him say he is quick to shout down questions about his health, insisting that he’s fine — and that he vowed to remain committed to the 2020 race in a Monday conference call with his entire campaign staff.

Supporters also say the campaign has seen a surge in fundraising while he recuperates — though it hasn’t released figures to quantify that.

Sanders said Tuesday that he would be meeting with the cardiologist on a regular basis and getting some checkups, but that his main doctor is in Washington, meaning he didn’t have a physician in Vermont, “let alone a cardiologist.” He previously promised to release his medical records and reiterated that, saying, “We will release them at the appropriate time.”

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Peoples reported from New York. Weissert reported from Washington.

Constitutional Collision: Trump Won’t Cooperate in Impeachment Probe

WASHINGTON — The White House declared Tuesday it will not cooperate with what it termed the “illegitimate” impeachment probe by House Democrats, sharpening the constitutional clash between President Donald Trump and Congress.

Trump attorneys sent a letter to House leaders bluntly stating their refusal to participate in the quickly moving impeachment investigation.

“Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it,” White House Counsel Pat Cipollone wrote.

The White House is currently objecting that the House did not formally vote to begin the impeachment inquiry into Trump. It also claims that Trump’s due process rights are being violated and is attacking the conduct of House intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has insisted the House is well within its rules to conduct oversight of the executive branch under the Constitution regardless of a formal impeachment inquiry vote.

Schiff, commenting before the White House letter was released, said, “For this impeachment inquiry we are determined to find answers.”

The Constitution states the House has the sole power of impeachment, and that the Senate has the sole power to conduct impeachment trials. It specifies that a president can be removed from office for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” if supported by a two-thirds Senate vote. But it offers little guidance beyond that on proceedings.

The White House letter marks the beginning of a new strategy to counter the impeachment threat to Trump: Stall. Obfuscate. Attack. Repeat. Trump aides have been honing their approach after two weeks of what allies have described as a listless and unfocused response to the impeachment probe.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump intensified his fight with Congress by blocking Gordon Sondland, the U.S. European Union ambassador, from testifying behind closed doors about the president’s dealings with Ukraine.

Sondland’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client was “profoundly disappointed” that he wouldn’t be able to testify. And Schiff said Sondland’s no-show was “yet additional strong evidence” of obstruction of Congress by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that will only strengthen a possible impeachment case.

The House followed up Tuesday afternoon with subpoenas for Sondland’s testimony and records.

As lawmakers seek to amass ammunition to be used in an impeachment trial, the White House increasingly believes all-out warfare is its best course of action.

“What they did to this country is unthinkable. It’s lucky that I’m the president. A lot of people said very few people could handle it. I sort of thrive on it,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “You can’t impeach a president for doing a great job. This is a scam.”

A whistleblower’s complaint and text messages released by another envoy portray Sondland as a potentially important witness in allegations that the Republican president sought to dig up dirt on a Democratic rival in Ukraine and other countries in the name of foreign policy.

Pelosi said thwarting the witness testimony on Tuesday was an “abuse of power” in itself by the president.

A senior administration official told reporters that no additional witnesses under its purview will be permitted to appear in front of Congress or comply with document requests, saying the policy under the current circumstances is that the administration will have “a full halt” because “this is not a valid procedure” for an impeachment inquiry. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s position.

The letter mounts a sweeping and aggressive attack on the House proceedings and signals a battle ahead over whether the president is receiving the legal protections he and his lawyers believe he deserves.

The White House is claiming that Trump’s constitutional rights to cross-examine witnesses and review all evidence in impeachment proceedings extend even to House investigations, not just a potential Senate trial. It also is calling on Democrats to grant Republicans in the House subpoena power to seek evidence in the president’s defense.

The White House letter came as a federal judge heard arguments Tuesday in a separate case on whether the House had undertaken a formal impeachment inquiry despite not having taken an official vote and whether the inquiry can be characterized, under the law, as a “judicial proceeding.”

That distinction matters because while grand jury testimony is ordinarily secret, one exception authorizes a judge to disclose it in connection with a judicial proceeding. House Democrats are seeking grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as they conduct their impeachment inquiry.

“The House under the Constitution sets its own rules, and the House has sole power over impeachment,” Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, told the court.

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Eric Tucker contributed.

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Follow Miller on Twitter at https://twitter.com/zekejmiller and Colvin at https://twitter.com/colvinj

Twitter Rakes in Cash From Anti-Immigrant Bigots

The group’s name is bland enough: Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR). It doesn’t explain its specific position on immigration—it could want to expand or limit it, but the word reform doesn’t tell us anything either way. That meaningless name is helpful for evading scrutiny, which is perhaps why, as Alex Kotch reports in Sludge, the “prominent anti-immigrant organization has spent $934,000 on Twitter ads, and Twitter sees no problem with this.”

A little under $1 million in promoted tweets over a few years might not seem like a lot of money for Twitter, which collected $727 million in ad revenue in the second quarter of 2019 alone. However, the issue here is not about the amount spent, as Kotch explains. It’s about how the content appears to violate Twitter’s policies on ad content, which in theory bans “hateful content,” and “organizations, groups, or individuals associated with promoting hate, criminal or terrorist-related content.”

“The views of FAIR are repugnant,” James Tomsheck, who led internal affairs at Customs and Border Patrol from 2006 to 2014, told the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer in 2018. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “America’s most influential anti-immigrant organization.”

The group promotes anti-immigrant legislation at the state and national levels, and even gets involved in local matters; recently, in Frederick, Md., FAIR representatives came to local protests to support a sheriff sued for racially profiling a Latina grandmother.

In September, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that FAIR funded travel costs for 191 sheriffs across the country (including two from eastern Oregon) to attend political events in Washington, D.C., including appearances at “Badges and Angels,” which OPB described as “a press conference with the relatives of people killed by undocumented immigrants,” which FAIR refers to as “angel families.”

FAIR also has ties to white nationalist groups like VDARE and the Council of Conservative Citizens. According to Kotch, current FAIR President Dan Stein “said that the passage of [the] 1965 immigration act that ended a racist quota system limiting immigration to mostly northern Europeans was ‘a mistake.’ ”

Twitter’s ad policies state it will not accept content “intended to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category, including asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities.”

In terms of FAIR’s individual posts that might violate that stated policy, Kotch points to tweets that claim undocumented immigrants are associated with a spike in crime, and a current tweet that makes allegations about undocumented immigrants and rape.

The promoted tweet, which also includes a video, reads: “People who break the law to enter the United States are not suddenly inclined to obey it once they cross the border. And Montgomery County is a textbook case-in-point that clearly demonstrates a significant connection between illegal aliens and crime.” There are others implying that sanctuary cities are dangerous and asking that such a policy be stopped.

Kotch references at least one organization, Presente, a Latinx social justice group, that’s tried to get Twitter to stop allowing promoted tweets by FAIR. Its online petition says: “It’s one thing to try and balance free speech and hate speech, it’s entirely another to take money and promote the views of a hate group like FAIR, that exists entirely to harm and reduce the amount of immigrants in this country.”

When asked by Sludge about the ads, Twitter global director of public policy communications, Ian Plunkett, simply provided a link to the company’s ad policies and said, “We’ve nothing further to share at this time.”

 

Donald Trump’s Iran Humiliation

Exactly 17 months have passed since President Donald Trump precipitously withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action, or JCPOA. Two and a half months later, on July 22, 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech to a group of Iranian expatriates at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, California. “[T]he United States,” Pompeo said, “is undertaking a diplomatic and financial pressure campaign to cut off the funds that the regime uses to enrich itself and support death and destruction.” The crowd launched into generous applause, after which Pompeo delivered his main point. “We have an obligation to put maximum pressure on the regime’s ability to generate and move money, and we will do so.”

The Trump administration, Pompeo stated, would reimpose sanctions on Iran’s banking and energy sectors. “[O]ur focus,” he concluded, “is to work with countries importing Iranian crude oil to get imports as close to zero as possible by Nov. 4, [2018]. Zero.”

The ostensible purpose of the “maximum pressure” campaign was to get Iran to withdraw from the JCPOA and return to the negotiating table, where a new, more restrictive agreement would be crafted that eliminated its nuclear enrichment program, curtailed its ballistic missile program and reduced its influence in the Persian Gulf. However, given Pompeo’s embrace of the regime-change mantra of the Iranian expat community—a sentiment he shared with Trump’s then-national security adviser John Bolton—the “maximum pressure” campaign could only be interpreted as an act of economic warfare against Iran, as prelude to an eventual military campaign designed to remove the Shi’a theocracy that has ruled the country since assuming power in 1979. Bolton himself emphasized this when he stated in November 2018 that “[i]t is our intention to squeeze them very hard. As the British say: ‘Squeeze them until the pips squeak’.”

In April 2019, the U.S. State Department announced it would not be extending any waivers that it had granted to several of Iran’s key oil importers in an effort to ease the economic burden of being weaned off Iranian oil. “We are fulfilling our promise to get Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime the revenue it needs to fund terrorism and violent wars abroad,” a State Department fact sheet noted. The State Department was particularly concerned about Iran’s so-called “malign activities” in Lebanon in support of Hezbollah, in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad, and in Yemen in support of the Houthi rebels. The “maximum pressure” campaign was designed to starve these movements of Iranian financial support, thereby hastening the nation’s demise.

For a year following Trump’s May 8, 2018, exit from the JCPOA, Iran complied with its obligations under that agreement, adhering to every restriction while imploring the agreement’s other parties to honor their commitments and ignore the newly reimposed U.S. economic sanctions. This proved increasingly difficult as the U.S. treated any nation or company that used the U.S. banking system to facilitate a transaction with Iran in violation of its terms. As a result, in May 2019, Iran began suspending its commitments under the JCPOA, something it (rightfully) claimed was permitted under the terms of the JCPOA in the case of noncompliance by a party to the agreement. (Iran claimed, with justification, that the EU was in noncompliance by failing to permit the unrestricted sale of Iranian oil to EU customers.) The U.S. responded by dispatching two B-52 bombers and an aircraft carrier battlegroup to the region, an action Bolton claimed was intended to “send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” By all appearances, it looked as if the U.S. campaign of “maximum pressure” was about to enter its final phase.

This is where the narrative gets interesting. Rather than retreat in the face of U.S. military pressure, Iran doubled down. Months before, in December 2018, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had warned that “America should know that we are selling our oil and will continue to sell our oil and they are not able to stop our oil exports. If one day they want to prevent the export of Iran’s oil, then no oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf.” At the time, the Trump administration saw Rouhani’s statement as empty bluster. It wasn’t.

On May 12, 2019, four oil tankers, including two belonging to the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia, were attacked off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. While no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, the U.S. was quick to blame Iran, which denied all responsibility. Oil prices jumped nearly 3% as a result. On June 13, two additional oil tankers were attacked while transiting the Strait of Hormuz; the U.S. claimed the vessels were attacked using limpet mines, while the crews claimed they were struck by projectiles. Again, the U.S. blamed Iran, and the Iranians denied all responsibility. Oil prices surged.

Whether or not Iran was involved, these attacks sent a clear signal to the oil-consuming world— transit through the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 18.5 million barrels a day of crude and refined products pass, representing 20% of all oil produced globally, was not guaranteed. This point was reinforced when, on June 20, Iran shot down a U.S. Global Hawk drone it claimed had violated its airspace. The loss of the $130-million reconnaissance aircraft put the U.S. on war footing, with Bolton advocating a retaliatory air strike against Iran’s air defenses and nuclear installations. The Pentagon cautioned Trump that any U.S. attack would likely result in a massive Iranian retaliation that would threaten the oil production infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the other Gulf Arab states. Trump opted not to attack, avoiding a wider war, but in doing so left open the question as to the viability of U.S. military deterrence posture in the Persian Gulf. This turned out to be precisely the answer Iran was looking for.

Saudi Arabia had always been a major factor in the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. One of the foundational requirements for a successful U.S. effort targeting Iranian oil sales was for oil markets to remain well supplied and oil inventory levels to remain consistently strong. “We have commitments from oil-producing countries,” the State Department noted in April 2019, “including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to increase oil production to offset reductions in Iranian oil exports.” On June 20, in the midst of the crisis over the downing of the U.S. drone, the special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, visited Saudi Arabia to discuss next steps. “We affirmed the Kingdom’s support for the United States maximum pressure campaign on Iran,” the Saudi Vice Minister of Defense, Khalid bin Salman, tweeted after the talks concluded, “which came as a result of continuing Iranian hostility and terrorism, and discussed the latest Iranian attacks on the Kingdom. Also discussed with the United States Special Representative for Iran the dangerous role that the Iranian regime plays in Yemen, where it neglects the humanitarian needs of the Yemeni people in favor of using the country as the main launchpad for its regional terrorism.”

The ongoing war between Saudi Arabia and Houthi rebels in Yemen has been a sore point between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, especially in the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, by henchmen operating under the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Sultan. The humanitarian crisis that has befallen Yemen as a result of the invasion in 2015 has caught the attention of a U.S. Congress no longer willing to turn a blind eye to Saudi atrocities. In March 2019, Congress voted to suspend all U.S. military aid to Saudi Arabia’s war effort in Yemen. While the measure was vetoed by Trump, the vote was a stinging rebuke to the Saudis, who had taken continuous and unobstructed U.S. military aid as a given.

But rhetoric alone does not win the day. The problem for the United States has been that its campaign of “maximum pressure” has had zero impact on Iran’s so-called “malign activities” in the region. In July 2019, Iran test fired a ballistic missile with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers. A defiant Iranian spokesperson tweeted that “Iran’s missiles are absolutely and under no condition negotiable with anyone or any country, period.”

The Iranian missile test came amid a growing crisis between Iran and the United Kingdom over the tit-for-tat seizure of oil tankers. In early July, British Royal Marines boarded and took control of the Iranian oil tanker Grace 1, claiming that its load of oil was destined for Syria in violation of EU sanctions. Iran responded by boarding and seizing the British oil tanker, Stena Impero, as it navigated the Strait of Hormuz.

Complicating matters further was Iran’s announcement in early July that it was suspending another JCPOA-imposed limitation on its nuclear program, breaching the 3.67% cap on the level of uranium enrichment allowed under the agreement. As the world debated Iran’s suspension of JCPOA commitments, its ongoing tanker war with the U.K., and its testing of ballistic missiles, another front was opening that would test the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign like no other.

The first rumblings of trouble came in May 2019, when the Saudis reported that Houthi drones operating out of Yemen had struck a strategic oil pipeline and two oil pumping stations, causing minor damage. “This is a message to Saudi Arabia: Stop your aggression,” a Houthi spokesman declared afterward. “Our goal is to respond to the crimes they are committing every day against the Yemeni people.”

In August, as if to prove the May attacks were not a fluke, the Houthi launched an even larger attack against the Shaybah natural gas liquification facility, some 1,000 kilometers from the border with Yemen, using 10 drones. The attack, which caused minor damage, was condemned by Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the U.S. A Houthi spokesman promised “fiercer and larger attacks” against Saudi Arabia if it continued its aggression in Yemen. Left unanswered was how the Houthi were able to penetrate Saudi Arabian air defenses and strike critical oil-related infrastructure.

The Houthi attacks of the Shaybah facility were lost in a news cycle increasingly dominated by evidence of the “maximum pressure” campaign’s imminent collapse. The first sign of failure was the decision by the British to release the Grace 1, despite efforts by the U.S. to execute a warrant for arrest en rem. The British defiance of the U.S. was part of an overall posture of resentment on the part of Europe over U.S. sanctions against Iran and the resulting unraveling of the JCPOA. The growing divide between the U.S. and Europe was put on full display when French President Emmanuel Macron invited Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif to attend the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, despite having recently been singled out for sanctions by the U.S. government. While no agreement was forthcoming, the fact that Iran was talking with its European counterparts meant that negotiation, and not confrontation, was the preferred path for America’s EU partners.

This divide became even more apparent in September when the Iranians followed through on their promise to continue to withdraw from the terms of the JCPOA. While stressing that all of its actions were reversible the moment Europe came into compliance with the deal and started defying U.S. sanctions, these actions were particularly eye-opening as Iran began installing advanced centrifuges capable of more efficient uranium enrichment, closing the one-year “breakout” period that served as the foundation for the nuclear pact. (The “breakout” period is defined by the amount of time Iran would need to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for the production of a single nuclear weapon; if Iran put the new centrifuges into operation, it would shrink the “breakout window” to a matter of months, which had previously been a red line for the U.S.)

The Iranian action prompted a heated debate within the Trump administration as to how best to respond. Trump had always envisioned himself as a dealmaker and was looking for any opening to bring Iran back to the negotiating table so he could produce a new nuclear agreement. Iran had made it clear there could be no negotiations as long as the U.S. maintained its “maximum pressure” campaign. Macron and the other European leaders were lobbying Trump to come up with some sort of relief formula that could be used to bring Iran back into full compliance with the JCPOA. Trump was leaning toward sanctions relief, believing it might lead to a meeting between him and Iranian leader Rouhani during the United Nations General Assembly debate later that month. Bolton strenuously objected. On September 11, Trump fired Bolton on social media, claiming he “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions.”

Iran had one more card to play. Three days after Bolton’s dismissal, the Houthi followed up on their threat to continue attacking Saudi oil infrastructure with a bold strike on two Saudi oil processing facilities, inflicting massive damage that knocked out 50% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity, or some 6% of global oil supplies. Saudi oil production was the lynchpin to the “maximum pressure” campaign; without it, there was no means of offsetting the loss of Iranian oil production brought on by sanctions. Moreover, the ease with which the Houthi had destroyed Saudi oil production infrastructure highlighted the future of all Gulf Arab oil production should there be a general war with Iran. In one fell swoop, Iran, through its Houthi proxies, had laid bare the naked truth about the U.S-Saudi defense relationship: There was literally nothing the U.S. could do, despite investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the Saudi military, and deploying hundreds of billions of dollars more in terms of U.S. military forces into the region, to protect the life’s blood of the Saudi Kingdom—oil. The U.S. decision to deploy a single Patriot surface-to-air missile battery and three air defense radars to protect Saudi oil fields from further attack was nothing more than a face-saving measure; while both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia blamed Iran for the attack, no one could pinpoint where the attack originated from, meaning they had no idea how to defend themselves against any future incursion.

The Houthi drone attack proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Saudi Arabia, recognizing the precarious position it has found itself in, has greenlighted talks with Iran to resolve their regional differences. Despite an abortive effort to finesse a meeting between Trump and Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly, both the U.S. and Iran appear prepared to engage in negotiations once Iran’s conditions regarding the lifting of sanctions are met, something the EU strongly supports. If Trump’s goal in implementing the “maximum pressure” campaign was to eventually bring Iran to the negotiating table, then he may very well have succeeded. But history will show that it was Iran that set the conditions that brought the U.S. onboard, and not the other way around.

In May 2018, the myth of American military deterrence in defense of Saudi Arabia was still alive; today it lies shattered amidst the ruins of the destroyed Saudi oil facilities. Seen in this light, the collapse of the U.S. campaign of “maximum pressure” can only be interpreted as a strategic victory for Iran, and a decisive defeat for the United States.

3 Win Nobel Prize in Physics for Work to Understand Cosmos

STOCKHOLM — A Canadian American cosmologist and two Swiss scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for exploring the evolution of the universe and discovering a new kind of planet, with implications for that nagging question: Does life exist only on Earth?

Canadian-born James Peebles, 84, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, won for his theoretical discoveries in cosmology. Swiss star-gazers Michel Mayor, 77, and Didier Queloz, 53, both of the University of Geneva, were honored for finding an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — that orbits a sun-like star, the Nobel committee said.

“This year’s Nobel laureates in physics have painted a picture of the universe far stranger and more wonderful than we ever could have imagined,” said Ulf Danielsson of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selected the laureates. “Our view of our place in the universe will never be the same again.”

Peebles, hailed as one of the most influential cosmologists of his time who realized the importance of the cosmic radiation background born of the Big Bang, will collect one half of the 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award. Mayor, who is an astrophysicist, and Queloz, an astronomer who is also at the University of Cambridge in Britain, will share the other half.

The Nobel committee said Peebles’ theoretical framework about the cosmos — and its billions of galaxies and galaxy clusters — amounted to “the foundation of our modern understanding of the universe’s history, from the Big Bang to the present day.”

His work, which began in the mid-1960s, set the stage for a “transformation” of cosmology over the last half-century, using theoretical tools and calculations that helped interpret traces from the infancy of the universe, the committee said.

A clearly delighted Peebles giggled repeatedly during a phone interview with The Associated Press, recalling how he answered a 5:30 a.m. phone call from Stockholm thinking that “it’s either something very wonderful or it’s something horrible.”

“I have a peaceful life,” he said, laughing. “It’s somehow now totally messed up!”

He added that he looked forward to traveling to the Swedish capital with his wife and children to accept the prize.

“I’ve always loved Bob Dylan. I can’t forgive him for not showing up to the scene of his Nobel prize,” he said, referring to the singer-songwriter’s refusal to participate in Nobel ceremonies after he won the 2016 literature prize. “It’s very disconcerting,” he said with a chuckle.

Mayor and Queloz were credited with having “started a revolution in astronomy” notably with the discovery of exoplanet 51 Pegasi B, a gaseous ball comparable with Jupiter, in 1995 — a time when, as Mayor recalled — that “no one knew whether exoplanets existed or not.”

“Prestigious astronomers had been searching for them for years, in vain!” Mayor quipped.

The committee said more than 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way since then.

“Mayor and Queloz pioneered the path that will allow our generation to address one of the most exciting questions in science: Are we alone?” wrote Avi Loeb, chair of the Harvard University astronomy department, in an email.

“We now know that about a quarter of all stars have a planet of Earth’s size and surface temperature, with the potential of hosting liquid water and the chemistry of life on its surface,” he said.

Queloz was meeting with other academics interested in finding new planets when the press office at Cambridge University interrupted to tell him the big news: He had won the Nobel. He thought it was a joke at first.

“I could barely breathe,” Queloz told the AP. “It’s enormous. It’s beyond usual emotions. My hand was shaking for a long time. I’m trying to digest it.”

Mayor said he found out he was one of the winners “by chance” when he logged onto his computer after leaving the hotel where he had been staying in San Sebastian, in northern Spain.

Though he knew he had been nominated several times before, the Swiss professor said he was “absolutely not expecting this.”

The award follows “a long, long period of work, with colleagues. It’s a huge honor,” he told reporters after arriving in Madrid, where he was to speak at scientific events this week.

Swedish academy member Mats Larsson said this year’s was “one of the easiest physics prizes for a long time to explain.”

“If there are a hundred billion planetary systems, with maybe 10 billion planetary systems with Earth-like planets, it would be highly unlikely and against all physical theories to assume that life only developed on our planet,” he added.

The cash prize comes with a gold medal and a diploma that are received at an elegant ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel in 1896, together with five other Nobel winners. The sixth one, the peace prize, is handed out in Oslo, Norway on the same day.

This was the 113th Nobel Prize in Physics awarded since 1901, of which 47 awards have been given to a single laureate. Only three women have been awarded it so far: Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018, according to the Nobel website.

On Monday, Americans William G. Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza and Britain’s Peter J. Ratcliffe won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine, for discovering details of how the body’s cells sense and react to low oxygen levels, providing a foothold for developing new treatments for anemia, cancer and other diseases.

Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite, decided the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature prizes should be awarded in Stockholm, and the peace prize in Oslo.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced Wednesday, two Literature Prizes will be awarded on Thursday, and the Peace Prize comes Friday. This year will see two literature Prizes handed out because the one last year was suspended after a scandal rocked the Swedish Academy.

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Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Danica Kirka in London, and Christopher Chester and Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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Read more stories on the 2019 Nobel Prizes by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/NobelPrizes