[Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and the Middle East scholar at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the Middle East and the West-Islam relations.]

It finally happened. The Jerusalem Post has declared archeology itself anti-Semitic.

To tell you the truth, I am frankly worried about some of my colleagues who are committed Zionists having difficulty in dealing with reality in the wake of the severe difficulties facing the Zionist project in historical Palestine.

Caroline Glick’s inaccurate and angry attack on me in the Jerusalem Post reminded me again of why I am anxious about the Closing of the Zionist Mind.

Glick is actually alleging that anyone who practices critical history of the ancient world or the Middle East in general is thereby an anti-Jewish bigot. Glick, from Chicago, was a captain in the Israeli army and a judge advocate-general during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which the Israeli army brutally crushed. She seems to be going off the deep end, having made herself notorious with the sick satirical video ‘We Con the World,’ which made fun of the civilian aid workers killed by Israeli commandos on May 31 of this year (and which appears to have had some backing from the Israeli government itself)....

One time some Orthodox students approached me at a conference to say that in their reckoning, Israeli settlers on the West Bank had almost never done any harm to anyone and maybe in total had killed 14 persons, for which they were sorry. I was frankly outraged. I mean, what world did these university students live in? Had they never read even one academic book on the effects of the Israeli Occupation on the Palestinians of the Palestinian West Bank? Why invent fairy tale statistics, and what is with the passive aggressive ‘apology?’ There is something wrong with this way of thinking, and it is a kind of group think that reinforces itself in small, tight, communities of discourse....

Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the strangest things....

[Melvyn Dubofsky is Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology Emeritus, Binghamton University SUNY, and author of numerous books and essays in U.S. history, including a major history of the IWW, a biography of John L. Lewis, a study of the role of the federal government in regulating labor-capital relations, and a collection of essays on labor history under the title Hard Work.]

The following is a response to Nelson Lichtenstein’s June 7 web article, “Labor’s Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally?” Click here to read Nelson Lichtenstein’s reply.

FOR NEARLY forty years now the labor movement in the United States has been on the defensive and in decline. But for a brief moment, it appeared that the election of Barack Obama might offer labor an opportunity to revive. That moment seems to have come and gone. To recapture it, my good friend and colleague, Nelson Lichtenstein, offers labor leaders lessons from history about how to build a stronger movement.

Lichtenstein draws his primary lessons from the 1930s and 1960s. To prove that he is a realist and not a dreamer who romanticizes an unrepeatable past, Lichtenstein cites Mark Twain’s aphorism, that “History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” To which I would add, it offers no hard and fast truths.

The primary lesson that Lichtenstein derives from the past is that labor and its friends must act as “difficult and demanding allies of our president.” According to Lichtenstein, that is precisely what labor and its allies did during the 1930s and 1960s. Labor and civil rights movements, he claims, “achieved their greatest influence when the Democratic administrations in power perceived the leadership of these social movements as troublesome, unreliable, and unpredictable…” Moreover, he adds that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House advisers worried constantly about John L. Lewis, Phillip Murray, and Walter Reuther “going off the reservation.”...

Following the Vietnam War, President Jimmy Carter had his own McChrystal in the person of General John Singlaub. This General wanted American troops stationed in Korea since the fifties to be better used abroad. President Carter insisted that the American troops protecting the Korean ceasefire (The Korean War has officially never ended) were an important instrument to keep the peace in the Far East and a show of good will on America’s part. Singlaub wanted none of it and disagreed…publicly. In March of 1977, President Carter simply announced that, as his boss, he was firing General Singlaub for overstepping his bounds and failing to respect the President’s authority.

He may have been president for only 4 years a long time ago and the poster boy for humanitarianism but Jimmy Carter was once an unmistakable hard-ass.

Finally, the granddaddy of all Presidential-Top soldier confrontations came following the Second World War. President Truman already had the difficult task of replacing Franklin Roosevelt (a 4-term President) as the head of state but he also had to maintain the authority of the White House in a country where soldiers had become heroes of legend. While General Eisenhower had led the Allies to victory on the beaches of France (and would later be elected as president), General Douglass MacArthur had been the victor of the Pacific and annihilator of the Japanese Imperial Fleet. He was lauded as hero of the American people (and way of life) and hailed as a liberator in Japan. He was one of very few Generals in American History to be given four stars, the highest ranking achieved by a soldier in office. This last general however was not ready to play politician and would see the pacific as his personal responsibility. Thus when the Korean War erupted in 1950, no one else could even be considered to lead the American (NATO) forces against the Communist invasion of Korea.

The Korean War was a conflict of exchanges. One month the Americans had pushed on to the communist capital, another month South Korea was reduced to a beach on the southernmost point of the peninsula. What was described as a battle for Korean unification was in all actuality an American (NATO) capitalist South Front battling a Soviet funded and China manned Communist North Front. Not many Koreans were involved at all (except the ones dying on the fields). Macarthur became increasingly frustrated with the involvement of global communism in the affair (especially China’s). He openly started calling for Chinese withdrawal, criticizing White House pacifism and eventually promoted a plan to invade and bomb China with atomic weapons. Of course Truman could not afford to fire MacArthur but did what he could to keep him in line. He avoided open conflict with him, met many times in private with the General and issued a directive that all military officers be required to clear all public statements with the State Department and that they refrain from speaking to “newspapers, magazines and other publicity media”. MacArthur responded by not speaking with the Press, but with China instead. While President Truman worked on a ceasefire agreement, General McArthur issued an ultimatum demanding that China surrender to him personally. Enough was enough and the General was fired.

Many Presidents have struggled with high-ranking officials that appear larger than life but it always comes down to the basic structure of American democracy. Whereas both men always seem to act in the best interest of the country they serve, The President must always hold the ultimate veto because he is elected by the people. The electorate directs government and thus directs the army. Despite official statements and the pomp and circumstance that has accompanied these honourable discharges, President Truman sums up the true spirit of these confrontations with a statement to Time Magazine in December 1973: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

In conclusion, I evoke the present story of Obama versus McChrystal because another high-ranking official went against the party line this week but in North Korea. Kwon Ho Ung, Pyongyang’s envoy responsible for talks with South Korea for many years, was deemed a failure because he failed to keep worldwide opinion from turning against Kim Jong-il’s government. He was “dismissed” by firing squad on Monday. There are seemingly worse things than being dismissed in the public eye. One thing that seems obvious and omnipresent in the different ideological governments of the world: there remains a hierarchical structure in every government and a constant tension between civilian and military institutions. Whereas this results in military coups and army-conducted revolutions here and there, the American government has succeeded in maintaining the submission of military heroes to the people despite the delicate dance of egos and insidious fights for authority among the great men of the past few centuries.

Since many of the actors in my dissertation were still alive, I had an opportunity many historians lack: I could try to answer my questions by asking my sources directly. I planned a ten-day trip to Washington to talk to as many public officials, intelligence agents, and reporters as I could. Surprisingly, it was one of the journalists who proved the most unwilling to sit for an interview.

I sent a letter to Schorr, explaining my project and asking for a short interview, but heard nothing back. So I sent another. When no reply arrived, I started calling. I left polite messages on his voicemail at NPR, describing my project and my need to interview him. One day, I got a response from his assistant, saying that Mr. Schorr had received my messages, and would get in touch with me if he had time. It was not a complete refusal, so I continued to leave messages on his machine.

I should point out that I was not nearly so pushy with any of the former senators or congressmen I interviewed. But I was trained as a journalist, and I knew that journalists understood the importance of talking to sources. I was reopening a painful chapter in his life – the man had lost his job – and he had every reason to want to forget all about it. But I gambled that Schorr would be grudgingly impressed rather than annoyed by my persistence.

And I was right. On my last day in Washington, once again I started to leave a message on his machine, but this time that familiar voice interrupted me. “Well, Miss Olmsted, you’re persistent, I’ll give you that,” he said. “You have 20 minutes. Go.”

In the end, he gave me much longer than 20 minutes, and he answe‘We owe it to history to publish it.’, after the book version of my dissertation came out, I came home one day to find that voice on my answering machine. He left a long, positive message about the book, talking about what he described as our mutual interest in informing American citizens about what secret government agencies do in their name. I popped the tape out of the machine to save it. It was the best review I ever got.

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can catch him discussing it on a TomCast video by clicking here.]

Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is?  Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while.  It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.

The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.”  Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there.  Russian copters?  Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for$350 billion dollars.  And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.

Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police.  The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again.  That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots.  The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001.  As a result, the"Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.

Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million.  The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.

Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”

So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force.  That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.

But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.

1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t:  There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force.  Unfortunately, there’s a problem.  There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one.  To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters).  As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language.  (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)

Thanks to this language barrier, the U.S. can train endlessly and next to nothing is guaranteed to happen. “So far,” reports Whitlock, “only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule.”  In other words, despite the impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan Air Force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.

And this offers but a hint of how bizarre U.S. training programs for the Afghan military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it particularly odd -- or being surprised that the response to each successive piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the project. 

For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that “efforts to fully equip the increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to support these troops have not kept pace.”  Worse yet, the report fretted, it might take “up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about $600 million annually to sustain [it].”

In 2006, according to the New York Times, “a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department... found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.”  At best, stated the report, fewer than half of the officially announced number of police were “trained and equipped to carry out their police functions.” 

In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on Army and police training programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units were"assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission," while"no police unit is fully capable."  In 2009, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction reported that “only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate without international help.”  Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive) news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug taking, staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of other problems.  In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the problems: “The report called for more U.S. trainers and more money.”

This June, a U.S. government audit, again from the Special Inspector General, contradicted the latest upbeat American and NATO training assessments, reporting that “the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities.”  The usual litany of training woes followed.  Yet, according to Reuters, President Obama wants another $14.2 billion for the training project “for this year and next.” And just last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reported that new Afghan war commander General David Petraeus is planning to “retool” U.S. strategy to include “a greater focus on how Afghanistan’s security forces are being trained.” 

When it comes to U.S. training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan has proved to be Catch-22-ville, the land where time stood still -- and so, evidently, has the Washington national security establishment’s collective brain.  For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to “training” Afghans anyway.    

And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisors that money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting.  They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt.  They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.

Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the U.S. has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions.  Similarly, it’s abidingly curious that the U.S. has so far failed to train a modest-sized air force, even flying refurbished Italian light transport planes from the 1980s and those Russian helicopters, when the Soviet Union, the last imperial power to try this, proved up to creating an Afghan force able to pilot aircraft ranging from helicopters to fighter planes. 

2. Non-Exit strategies: Now, let’s wade a little deeper into the strangeness of what Whitlock reported by taking up the question of when we’re actually planning to leave Afghanistan.  Consider this passage from the Whitlock piece: “U.S. military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won't be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But [U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael R.]Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly U.S. choppers.”

In other words, while Americans argue over what the president’s July 2011 drawdown date really means, and while Afghan President Hamid Karzai suggests that Afghan forces will take over the country’s security duties by 2014, Whitlock’s anonymous “U.S. military officials” are clearly operating on a different clock, on, in fact, Pentagon time, and so are planning for a 2016-2018 target date for that force simply to “operate independently” (which by no means indicates “without U.S. support.”) 

If you were of a conspiratorial mind, you might almost think that the Pentagon preferred not to create an effective Afghan air force and instead -- as has also been the case in Iraq, a country that once had the world’s sixth largest air force and now, after years of U.S. mentoring, has next to nothing -- remain the substitute Afghan air force forever and a day.

3. Who Are the Russians Now?: Okay, let’s move even deeper into American strangeness with a passage that makes up most of the 20th and 21st paragraphs of Whitlock’s 25-paragraph piece:  “In addition,” he reports, “the U.S. Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American. ‘We would like to have some to blend in and do things,’ said a senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program.”

No explanation follows on just how -- or where -- those Russian helicopters will help “cloak” American Special Operations missions, or what they are to “blend” into, or the “things” they are to do.  There’s no further discussion of the subject at all. 

In other words, the special op urge to Russianize its air transport has officially been reported, and a month later, as far as I know, not a single congressional representative has made a fuss over it; no mainstream pundit has written a curious, questioning, or angry editorial questioning its appropriateness; and no reporter has, as yet, followed up.   

As just another little factoid of no great import buried deep in an article focused on other matters, undoubtedly no one has given it a thought.  But it’s worth stopping a moment and considering just how odd this tiny bit of news-that-won’t-ever-rise-to-the-level-of-news actually is.  One way to do this is to play the sort of opposites game that never quite works on this still one-way planet of ours.   

Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country. 

*Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well “cloaked” in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province. 

*The People’s Daily reports: Chinese special forces operatives are buying relatively late model American helicopters so that... Well, here’s one problem in the opposites game, and a clue to the genuine strangeness of American activities globally: why would the Chinese need to do such a thing (and, in fact, why would we)?  Where might they want to venture militarily without being mistaken for Chinese military personnel? 

That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Craig Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece -- no matter how obscurely nestled -- there would have been pandemonium in Washington.  Congress would have held hearings.  Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian or Chinese operatives masking themselves in our choppers.  The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated.  And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say. 

When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what’s usually described as “anti-Americanism,” we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they’re on; we comment on their over-emotionalism; we highlight their touchy “sensibilities”; and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives.    

Just the other day, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s Barnes reported that U.S. Special Operations Forces are expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly “venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.”  The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in these areas, and so Barnes writes: “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly.” 

Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to “cloak” their operations and blend in?  Or imagine just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte.  

Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the just appointed head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service turns out to be a man of “impeccable credentials” (so says CIA Director Leon Panetta).  Among those credentials are his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone warin that country’s tribal borderlands, and the way, as the Director put it a tad vaguely, he “guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable." 

Here’s the truth of the matter, as Whitlock’s piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it.  Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm.  For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers.  If we can’t imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of miles from the U.S., then we can’t begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we’re blind to our own madness. Russian helicopters, that’s nuthin’ by comparison.