Rachelle Marshall

The al-Kurd family, whose house was taken over by Jewish
settlers (standing in doorway), sits in the courtyard of their home
in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Arab East Jerusalem, Dec. 2,
2009. AFP PHOTO/AHMAD GHARABLI

Our posture with Israel has weakened, our hope to strengthen the Palestinians has fallen back, and our credibility in the Arab world has been damaged. We are the victims of events rather than masters of events. —Robert Malley, Clinton administration peace negotiator, The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2009.

What we are doing here is evil. —Rachel Corrie in a letter from Gaza to her mother shortly before she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003.

What Rachel Corrie referred to as “evil” was America’s support for Israel despite its crimes against the Palestinians, crimes she was witnessing at first hand in Gaza. The “special relationship” with Israel that guarantees such support has been a constant of U.S. foreign policy since 1967 and is a relationship in which Israel is the sole beneficiary and often the stronger partner. Watching to make sure this policy remains in place is a powerful pro-Israel lobby that most elected officials dare not oppose. President Barack Obama’s pre-election vow to abide by the “special relationship” virtually assured Israeli leaders they could rely on Washington’s full diplomatic, military, and financial support even if they openly defy its wishes.

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Jeb Sharp

Former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad
Mossadegh steps off a plane, in August 1953.

The US and Iran Part I - The 1953 Coup

In 1979 the political scientist Mark Gasiorowski was a young graduate student. He was transfixed by the revolution in Iran. And he was blown away by its anti-American flavor.

Gasiorowski: "I was really drawn to this phenomenon and wondered why did the Iranians hate us so much. What is it that we've done that created this tremendous animosity?"

Gasiorowski discovered that the 1953 coup was at the heart of Iranian attitudes toward America. He's been studying it ever since. The story has never been that well known in this country. Gasiorowski says at the time it happened, the coup was unprecedented in US foreign policy.

Gasiorowski: "It was really a milestone. It was the first major covert operation by the CIA. It was regarded as a great success. And it was replicated repeatedly subsequently."

To understand how the 1953 coup came about, you have to consider Iran's history. And picture the country on a map. The crucial Persian Gulf lies on its southern border. The former Soviet Union looms to the north. Iran has a strong Persian identity, and a majority Shia Muslim population. Its history has always distinguished it from the countries around it. New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer discovered that when he first went to Iran.

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S. Fred Singer

Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes -- all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources -- not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.

These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias -- quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion -- that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result.

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