Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, in his accustomed role as unofficial surrogate CIA spokesman, has thrown light on how the CIA under its new director, David Petraeus, helped craft the screenplay for this week's White House spy feature: the Iranian-American-used-car-salesman-Mexican-drug-cartel plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

In Thursday's column, Ignatius notes that, initially, White House and Justice Department officials found the story "implausible." It was.

But the Petraeus team soon leapt to the rescue, reflecting the four-star-general-turned-intelligence-chief's record of pandering to those determined to blacken Iran, no matter how flimsy the "evidence." Not that much better was to be expected from Petraeus - given his disingenuous record in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, given his new perch (not to mention his sainted status in Official Washington and in the Fawning Corporate Media), this is very bad news indeed.

Before Ignatius's article, I had seen no one allude to the fact that much suggesting that important evidence about this crime-stopper tale had come from the CIA. In public, the FBI had taken the lead role, presumably because the key informant inside a Mexican drug cartel worked for U.S. law enforcement via the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Petraeus ex Machina

However, according to Ignatius, "One big reason [top U.S. officials became convinced the plot was real] is that CIA and other intelligence agencies gathered information corroborating the informant's juicy allegations and showing that the plot had support from the top leadership of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the covert action arm of the Iranian government."

Ignatius adds that, "It was this intelligence collected in Iran" that turned the "implausible" into plausible, but he offers no example of what that intelligence was. He only mentions a recorded telephone call on Oct. 4 between Iranian-American cars salesman Mansour Arbabsiar and his supposed contact in Iran, Gholam Shakuri, allegedly an official in Iran's Quds spy agency.

The call is recounted in the FBI affidavit submitted in support of the criminal charges against Arbabsiar, who is now in U.S. custody, and Shakuri, who is not. But the snippets of that conversation are unclear, discussing what on the surface appears to be a "Chevrolet" car purchase, but which the FBI asserts is code for killing the Saudi ambassador.

Without explaining what other evidence the CIA might have, Ignatius tries to further strengthen the case by knocking down some of the obvious problems with the allegations, such as "why the Iranians would undertake such a risky operation, and with such embarrassingly poor tradecraft."

"But why the use of Mexican drug cartels?" asks Ignatius rhetorically, before adding dutifully: "U.S. officials say that isn't as implausible as it sounds."

But it IS as implausible as it sounds, says every professional intelligence officer I have talked with since the "plot" was somberly announced on Tuesday.

The Old CIA Pros There used to be real professionals in the CIA's operations directorate. One - Ray Close, a longtime CIA Arab specialist and former Chief of Station in Saudi Arabia - told me on Wednesday that we ought to ask ourselves a very simple question:

"If you were an Iranian undercover operative who was under instructions to hire a killer to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, D.C., why in HELL would you consider it necessary to explain to a presumed Mexican [expletive deleted] that this murder was planned and would be paid for by a secret organization in Iran?

"Whoever concocted this tale wanted the 'plot' exposed ... to precipitate a major crisis in relations between Iran and the United States. Which other government in the Middle East would like nothing better than to see those relations take a big step toward military confrontation?"

Another point on the implausibility meter is: What are the odds that Iran's Quds force would plan an unprecedented attack in the United States, that this crack intelligence agency would trust the operation to a used-car salesman with little or no training in spy craft, that he would turn to his one contact in a Mexican drug cartel who happens to be a DEA informant, and that upon capture the car salesman would immediately confess and implicate senior Iranian officials?

Wouldn't it make more sense to suspect that Arbabsiar might be a double-agent, recruited by some third-party intelligence agency to arrange some shady business deal regarding black-market automobiles, get some ambiguous comments over the phone from an Iranian operative, and then hand the plot to the U.S. government on a silver platter -as a way to heighten tensions between Washington and Teheran?

That said, there are times when even professional spy agencies behave like amateurs. And there's no doubt that the Iranians -like the Israelis, the Saudis and the Americans -can and do carry out assassinations and kidnappings in this brave new world of ours.

Remember, for instance, the case of Islamic cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who was abducted off the streets of Milan, Italy, on Feb. 17, 2003, and then flown from a U.S. air base to Egypt where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year.

In 2009, Italian prosecutors convicted 23 Americans, mostly CIA operatives, in absentia for the kidnapping after reconstructing the disappearance through their unencrypted cell phone records and their credit card bills at luxury hotels in Milan.

Then, there was the suspected Mossad assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a hotel in Dubai on Jan. 19, 2010, with the hit men seen on hotel video cameras strolling around in tennis outfits and creating an international furor over their use of forged Irish, British, German and French passports.

So one cannot completely rule out that there may be some substance to the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador.

And beyond the regional animosities between Saudi Arabia and Iran, there could be a motive -although it has been generally absent from American press accounts -i.e. retaliation for the assassinations of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and generals over the last couple of years within Iran itself.

But there has been close to zero persuasive evidence coming from the main source of information - officials of the Justice Department, which like the rest of the U.S. government has long since forfeited much claim to credibility. The experience of the last decade has done irreparable harm to the reputation of U.S. officials regarding telling the truth.

Even the New York Times, always eager to support Israel and blacken Iran, has taken a skeptical stance in reporting and commenting on this latest caper. It will be interesting to watch, in the days ahead, whether that well warranted skepticism erodes or disappears, as the always-anonymous U.S. officials peddle what evidence they have. Am I being maudlin, or hopelessly nostalgic, to recall the days when Americans could assume that Washington was telling the truth and only the "bad guys" lie?

Petraeus's 'Intelligence' on Iran

The public record also shows that former Gen. Petraeus has long been eager to please the neoconservatives in Washington and their friends in Israel by creating "intelligence" to portray Iran and other target countries in the worst light.

One strange but instructive example comes to mind, a studied, if disingenuous, effort to blame all the troubles in southern Iraq on the "malignant" influence of Iran.

On April 25, 2008, Joint Chiefs Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, told reporters that Gen. Petraeus in Baghdad would give a briefing "in the next couple of weeks" providing detailed evidence of "just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability." Petraeus's staff alerted U.S. media to a major news event in which captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.

Oops. Small problem. When American munitions experts went to Karbala to inspect the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing that could be credibly linked to Iran.

At that point, adding insult to injury, the Iraqis announced that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had formed his own Cabinet committee to investigate the U.S. claims and attempt to "find tangible information and not information based on speculation." Ouch!

The Teflon-clad Petraeus escaped embarrassment, as the David Ignatiuses of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) conveniently forgot all about the promised-then-canceled briefing. U.S. media suppression of this telling episode is just one example of how difficult it is to get unbiased, accurate information on touchy subjects like Iraq - or Iran - into the FCM.

Obama, Holder, Clinton: Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name

As for Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, some adult adviser should tell them to quit giving hypocrisy a bad name with their self-righteous indignation over the thought that no civilized nation would conduct cross-border assassinations.

The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has been dispatching armed drones to distant corners of the globe to kill Islamic militants, including recently the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki for the alleged crime of encouraging violence against Americans.

Holder and Obama have refused to release the Justice Department's legal justification for the targeted murder of al-Awlaki whose "due process" amounted to the President it was okay to put al-Awlaki's name on a secret "kill-or-capture" list. (The "capture" part seems to have become "quaint" and "obsolete." Some will remember that those were the adjectives used by Alberto Gonzales, one of Holder's predecessors, to describe provisions of the Geneva Conventions.)

Holder and Obama have also refused to take meaningful action to hold officials of the Bush administration accountable for war crimes even though President George W. Bush has publicly acknowledged authorizing waterboarding and other brutal techniques long regarded as acts of torture.

Who can take at face value the sanctimonious words of an attorney general like Holder who has acquiesced in condoning egregious violations of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. criminal code, and international law - like the International Convention Against Torture? Were shame not in such short supply in Official Washington these days, one would be amazed that Holder could keep a straight face, accusing these alleged Iranian perpetrators of "violating an international convention."

America's Founders would hold in contempt the Holders of this world and the faux-legal types doing his bidding. The behavior of the past two administrations has been more reminiscent of George III and his sycophants than of James Madison, George Mason, John Jay and George Washington, who gave us the rich legacy of a Constitution, which created a system based on laws not men.

That Constitution and its Bill of Rights have become endangered species at the hands of the craven poachers at "Justice." No less craven are the functionaries leading today's CIA.

What to Watch For

If Petraeus finds it useful politically to conjure up more "evidence" of nefarious Iranian behavior in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, Lebanon or Syria, he will. And if he claims to see signs of ominous Iranian intentions regarding nuclear weapons, watch out.

Honest CIA analysts, like the ones who concluded in late 2007 that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003 and had not resumed that work, are in short supply. And most have families to support and mortgages to pay.

Petraeus is quite capable of marginalizing them, or even forcing them to quit. I have watched this happen to a number of intelligence officials under a few of Petraeus's politics-prone predecessors. As a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, I worked under nine CIA directors, most of whom - with the notable exceptions of Bill Casey and his protege Bobby Gates - resisted pressure to conjure up "evidence" to support White House policy. Sadly, more recent CIA directors have made that exception the rule.

Malleable careerists can be found in any organization, and promoted, so long as they are willing to tell more ominous - if disingenuous - stories like the latest tale one about the Iranian-American-used-car-salesman-Mexican-drug-cartel-Saudi-ambassador plot. One is initially inclined to laugh all this off. But the situation with respect to Iran can get very dangerous in a hurry.

Israel's leaders would require but the flimsiest nihil obstat to encourage them to provoke hostilities with Iran. Netanyahu and his colleagues would expect the Obamas, Holders, Petraeuses (and the Hillary "obliterate-Iran" Clintons) of this world to "fix the intelligence and facts" (a la Iraq) in order to "justify" swift "retaliation" against Iran, should it rise to the bait of some Israeli-inspired provocation.

There is little sign that these Ivy-League geniuses have the remotest idea of what war with Iran would look like. There is ample evidence - and a long trail of past precedent - to suggest that nothing would suit Israel's increasingly isolated and beleaguered leaders better than getting the U.S. embroiled in hostilities with Iran.

The strategic trend, particularly since the Arab spring, has been decidedly negative of Israel. And Netanyahu and his hard-Right colleagues might well have an inflated idea regarding the U.S. capability, after more Iranian "provocation," to move swiftly enough to stem inevitably damaging retaliation.

Many observers have come to see Israel's leaders as increasingly desperate. They may well adopt an attitude of What's to Lose? - so long as America is on their side. If this is the case, the Israeli government may not hesitate for much longer to risk sucking the United States into the kind of conflict that, short of a massive commitment of resources and/or a few tactical nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Israel could almost surely not win.

It would be the kind of war that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like minor skirmishes.
(c) 2011 Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

ON YOM KIPPUR eve last week, when real Jews were praying for their lives, I sat on the seashore of Tel Aviv, thinking.

It was my first Yom Kippur without Rachel, and the dark water reflected my mood.

I was thinking about our state, the State of Israel, in which I have, so to speak, a founder's share.

Will it endure? Will it be here in another 100 years? Or is it a passing episode, a historic fluke?

When asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai famously replied: "It's too early to tell."

The Zionist Revolution - and that's what it was - started more than a hundred years after the French one. It is certainly much too early to tell.

ONCE, IN a more cheerful mood, I told my friends: "Perhaps we are all wrong. Perhaps Israel is not really the final shape of the Zionist enterprise. Like the planners of every great project, the Zionists decided first to build a 'pilot', a prototype, in order to test their scheme. Actually, we Israelis are only guinea pigs. Sooner or later another Theodor Herzl will come by and, after analyzing the faults and mistakes of this experiment, will draw up the blueprint of the real state, which will be far superior."

Herzl 2 will start by asking: where did Herzl 1 go wrong?

Herzl 1 visited Palestine only once, and that only for the express purpose of meeting the German emperor, whom he wanted to enlist for his enterprise. The Kaiser insisted on seeing him at the gate of Jerusalem, listened patiently to what he had to say and then purportedly commented to his aides: "It's a grand idea, but you can't do it with Jews!"

He meant the Jews he knew - the members of a world-wide religious-ethnic community. Herzl intended to turn these into a modern-style nation, like the other modern nations of Europe.

Herzl was not a profound thinker, he was a journalist and dramatist. He - and his successors - saw the necessary transformation as basically a question of logistics. Get the Jews to Palestine, and everything will fall into place automatically. The Jews will become a normal people, a people ("Volk") like other peoples. A nation among nations.

BUT THE Jews of his day were neither a people nor a nation. They were something rather different.

Whilst anomalous in 19th century Europe, the Jewish Diaspora was quite normal 2000 years earlier. The large-scale social structure of that time was a network of Diasporas - autonomous religious-ethnic entities dispersed throughout the "civilized" (Mediterranean) world. The ruling empires - Persian, Alexandrine, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman - recognized them as the natural fabric of society.

Nations in the modern territorial sense were then inconceivable. A Jew in Jerusalem did not belong to the same society as a Hellenist in Caesarea, only a hundred miles away. A Christian man in Alexandria could not marry the Jewish girl next door, but she could marry a Jewish man in far-away Antiochia.

Since then, Europe has changed many times, until the emergence of the modern nations. The Jews did not change. When Herzl looked for a solution to the "Jewish problem", they were still the same ethnic-religious Diaspora.

No problem, he thought, once I get them to Palestine, they will change.

BUT AN ethnic-religious community, living for millennia as a persecuted minority in a hostile environment, acquires a mentality of its own. It fears the "Goyish" government, the source of unending evil edicts. It sees everyone outside the community as a potential enemy, unless proven otherwise (and even then). It develops an intense sense of solidarity with members of its own community, even a thousand miles away, supporting them through thick and thin, whatever they do. In their helpless situation, the persecuted dream of a day of revenge, when they can do unto others as others have done unto them.

All this pervades their world-view, their religion and their traditions, transmitted from generation to generation. Jews have prayed to God for centuries, year after year, on Pesach eve: "Pour your wrath upon the Goyim..."

When the Zionists started to arrive and founded the new community, called the "Yishuv" (settlement), it seemed that Herzl had been right. They started to behave like the embryo of a real nation. They discarded religion and despised the Diaspora. To be called "exile Jew" was the worst possible insult. They saw themselves as "Hebrew", rather then Jewish. They started to build a new society and a new culture.

And then the awful thing happened: the Holocaust.

It brought all the old Jewish convictions back with a vengeance. Not only the Germans were the guilty, but all the nations who looked on and did not lift a finger to save the victims. So all the old beliefs were true after all: the whole world is against the Jews, we must defend ourselves whatever it takes, we can only rely on ourselves. The attitude of the Yishuv towards Jewishness and the Diaspora was a terrible mistake, we must repent and embrace everything we despised only yesterday: Jewish religion, Jewish traditions, the Jewish Shtetl.

The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew, maintained that the Jewish religion had died 200 years ago, and that the one thing that linked the Jews all over the world was the Holocaust.

Right from its founding, the State of Israel became the Holocaust-state. But we are not a helpless ghetto anymore - we have powerful armed forces, we can indeed do unto others as others have done unto us.

The old existential fears, mistrusts, suspicions, hatreds, prejudices, stereotypes, sense of victimhood, dreams of revenge, that were born in the Diaspora, have superimposed themselves on the state, creating a very dangerous mixture of power and victimhood, brutality and masochism, militarism and the conviction that the whole world is against us. A ghetto with nuclear weapons.

CAN SUCH a state survive and flourish in the modern world?

European nation-states have fought many wars. But they never forgot that after a war comes peace, that today's enemy may well be tomorrow's ally. Nation-states remain, but they are becoming more and more interdependent, joining regional structures, giving up huge chunks of their sovereignty.

Israel cannot do that. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Israelis believe that there will never be peace. Not tomorrow, not in a hundred years. They are convinced that "the Arabs" are out to throw us into the sea. They see mighty Israel as the victim surrounded by enemies, while our "friends" are liable to stick a knife in our back any time. They see the eternal occupation of Palestinian territories and the setting up of belligerent settlements all over Palestine as a result of Arab intransigence, not as its cause. They are supported in blind solidarity by most of the Jews around the world.

Almost all Israeli parties, including the main opposition, insist that Israel be recognized as the "nation-state of the Jewish people". This means that Israel does not belong to the Israelis (the very concept of an "Israeli nation" is officially rejected by our government) but to the worldwide ethnic-religious Jewish Diaspora, who have never been asked whether they agree to Israel representing them. It is the very negation of a real nation-state that can live in peace with its neighbors and join a regional union.

I HAVE never labored under any illusions about the magnitude of the task my friends and I set ourselves decades ago. It is not to change this or that aspect of Israel, but to change the fundamental nature of the state Itself.

It is far more than a matter of politics, to substitute one party for another. It is even far more than making peace with the Palestinian people, ending the occupation, evacuating the settlements. It is to effect a basic change of [or "in"] the national consciousness, the consciousness of every Israeli man and woman.

It has been said that "you can get the Jews out of the ghetto, but you can't get the ghetto out of the Jews." But that is exactly what needs to be done.

Can it be done? I think so. I certainly hope so.

Perhaps we need a shock - either a positive or a negative one. The appearance here of Anwar Sadat in 1977 can serve as an example of a positive shock: by coming to Jerusalem while a state of war was still in effect, he produced an overnight change in the consciousness of Israelis. So did the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993. So did, in a negative way, the Yom Kippur war, exactly 38 years ago, which shook Israel to the core. But these were minor, brief shocks compared to what is needed.

A Second Herzl could, perhaps, effect such a miracle, against the odds. In the words of the first Herzl: "If you want it, It is not a fairy tale."

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about Occupy Wall Street. She said to me "This is what I've been waiting for my whole life." I told her I feel exactly the same way.

The only difference is that she's in her early twenties, and I'm in my early fifties.

I'm not sure which is better. She's had an entire lifetime full of nothing but the downsizing of her country, and the theft of her future. The only two presidents a person her age could have had any mature appreciation of were George W. Bush, the thief and liar, and Barack Obama, another thief and liar. She has never known an America that wasn't reeling under the assault of Wall Street plutocrats and the kleptocrats they hire to do their bidding in Washington.

On the other hand, people her age could at most have suffered with the pain of being under this siege for a mere five years or so, unless they happen to have been astonishingly attentive and precocious preteens. My generation, on the other hand, has been living this nightmare for three solid decades now, through Republican abominations and - in many ways, worse - Democratic as well. We have known indisputably throughout this era that a better country is not just a pretty aspiration or a theoretical proposition. We know that because we once lived there. I'm glad I had that experience. But, that said, carrying around the heartache of observing our national suicide by greed for more than thirty years' time has also been a painful, soul-numbing burden I wouldn't wish on anyone.

I don't know what will come of Occupy Wall Street, and its brother an sister movements in cities across the world. On the one hand, this is the most hopeful development I've seen since the dark finale to the year 1980 gave us Ronald Reagan and took away John Lennon. On the other, I've learned through ugly experience and hard-won (and, the more cynical amongst us might say, belated) wisdom not to expect too very much from purported agents of sweeping change. Consider the last two of note. Egyptians rose up and threw off their own violent kleptocracy through mass action. Less than a year later, the military rules the country and is repressing dissent using the same bloody tactics of the prior regime. Closer to home, we've got a Wall Street occupation of a rather different sort than the one in Zuccotti Park. The guy who - when he wanted something from us 99 percenters - spoke passionately of change and hope and the fierce urgency of now, has instead allowed Wall Street to occupy our White House, and has delivered to millions of hurting Americans a substitute program of no change, crushed hope, and the tepid lethargy of whenever.

So hope is not always a good bet. Who therefore knows what will happen on the streets of Manhattan in the coming weeks and months? At some point, The Man may decide he's had just about enough of this truth-telling shit, thank you very much, and sweep the place clean. Don't want to be giving the ordinary folks watching at home too many ideas, y'know? If that happens, other possibilities immediately arise. Maybe the folks on the street resist. Maybe if they do, lots and lots of people come running to their side to stand up both for what they're protesting and for their very right to protest. Maybe a police sweep could be the best thing that could happen, causing the movement to metastasize in a swelling of national support. It could all get very interesting, very quickly. Or not.

I dunno. Here's what I do know, however, and why I allow myself to once again risk being hopeful: This is the first time in a very long time that we've had any honest content to our national political discourse. All else follows from there, and thus this is the crucial first step, the sine qua non for any chance whatsoever of righting the badly listing ship of state. If we cannot identify our true maladies, we cannot possibly hope to treat them.

And we have been doing neither for a very long time. The most astonishing and depressing aspect of our era is (or, perhaps, has been) the fact that, at the very time when conditions are such that one could almost not possibly write a script more favorable to the rise of a robust politics of the left in America, precisely the opposite has been happening. What left there is left in the country has been moribund, its heartbeat barely detectable. Meanwhile, what is described as the left, operating under the banner of the Democratic Party, has shown itself every bit as capable of whoring for capital as the other party, though it swims even deeper in the cesspool of treason by pretending it is still the party of the people. And then there's right, which has absolutely gone insane by increments over these last three decades. I don't know if my young friend quite believes me when I tell her that the rhetoric and policies of a Cheney or a Bachmann or even a Romney would have been inconceivable (except, by definition, as fringe lunacy) in Gerry Ford's 1970s. But they would indeed have been just that. We have traveled very far from that world.

In any case, think about it. Suppose you were asked to play 'Sim America' and create from whole cloth the conditions you thought most likely to produce a vibrant political left, rising up to reform the country, as it did during the 1930s and 1960s. What factors might you include in your blueprint? How about a nation riddled with economic insecurity at best and widespread real suffering at worst? Check. Rampant and unremitting unemployment? Check. A rapacious class of financial predators and wealthy plutocrats who have taken every penny of economic growth for themselves over the last three decades, leaving only stagnation for the rest of us? Check. A distribution of wealth so skewed toward the rich that it would embarrass Zimbabwe? Check. A political class completely unresponsive to the needs of the people and devoted instead to serving the gluttonous pigs whose money puts them in office? Check. A massively broken health care system devoted to profits instead of health? Check. Endless government spending of taxpayer money to bail out the disastrous bets of sociopathic Wall Street nihilists and their destruction machines, combined with zero support for ordinary citizens struggling with ballooning debt and underwater mortgages? Check. A generation of downsized middle-aged workers who know they will never again be able to restore the basic economic stability they once enjoyed? Check. A generation of young people looking ahead to lives of lousy jobs (when any at all can be found), lousy pay, massive debt, massive taxes to pay for previous borrowing, epic environmental destruction, endless wars, and living at home with their parents rather than starting families of their own? Check. A discredited far-right previous government whose crony capitalist policies made profound and direct contributions to all of the above? Check.

And, if none of those items seem alone sufficient to generate a vibrant progressive response, how about all of them (and lots more), all at once? Check, check, double-check, and checkmate. Here is the check for a lovely meal of greed, theft, war and planetary destruction held in your honor. Or at least at your expense. What, you don't want the bill?

I can hardly think of better conditions for the rise of a New New Left. But what do we get, instead? The freaking Tea Party!! Like I said, this is the single most depressing characteristic of our time (and because of the deep and broad array of repugnant choices for that loathsome title, that's saying a lot). It's like, even when you win you still lose.

But maybe, at long last, things are finally turning around with the advent of the Occupy movement, and people will at last get it. And maybe they'll figure out who the real enemy is, and act accordingly. Unfortunately, however, even that prospect involves a longer term solution. Consider that the best case scenario for January 2013 is that the hopelessly hapless Barack Inc. Obama will once again be inaugurated as president. And that even if he can't get Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner and Robert Gates to be in his administration because they're all too busy making money, he will most assuredly be getting people like that. Don't expect to see a Paul Krugman or a Joseph Stiglitz or a Paul Volcker on Obama's team any more than he appointed Elizabeth Warren to run the Consumer Protection Bureau or went for the public option in his health care obombination. And that's the 'best' case scenario. Far more likely will be a Scary Perry or a Ken-Doll Romney taking the oath that day.

There actually is one better scenario, and this is again why the Occupy movement represents a breath of genuine hope (as opposed to the merchandised, fast-expiring kind Obama peddled in 15-second TV spots in 2008). Our solutions no longer reside, if they ever did, in the ballot box. The Republicans are a sheer criminal enterprise, whose entire function is to redistribute wealth from the rest of us to already wealthy elites. But the Democrats are actually worse, because they do exactly the same thing, while trading on the party's past reputation for representing the public interest. For my money (which, along with yours, is precisely what is at stake), Obama and Clinton and their ilk in Congress have betrayed me and the country more than, say, any of the Dicks - Cheney, Armey or Nixon. You expect the asshole kid on the playground to live up to his reputation. It hurts a lot more when your best friend is the one sticking in the knife.

No, while there will still be elections and presidents and a new Congress, no matter who those people are in 2013, they will all be cut from the same cloth, and I guarantee you that you can't afford that frock. This country is going to have pretty much go all Egypt on the ruling class to have any hope of changing what fundamentally ails us. That doesn't mean the Constitution has to be shredded and new institutions of government created. It just means that, at the end of the day, the people in government must be responsive to the public interest, not the oligarchy's.

That's a hugely tall order in many ways. But, on the other hand, context is everything. People are fed-up now, and growing increasingly sick of being subjected to a steady diet of bogus wars, gay-bashing or empty platitudes in the place of real solutions to real problems. There is a giant vacuum today in American politics, which will only grow dramatically in scale about two years or so into a Republican administration's term. But political nature abhors a vacuum, and the opportunity today for a genuine set of people-first politics to attract votes (whether as a third party or through a hijacking of the Democratic Party) has not been greater in decades. More and more, Americans are coming to the realization that the choice between Democrats and Republicans is the political equivalent to the choice between Goldman Sachs and Citibank. That is to say, none at all. And more and more they will demand a real alternative, if only from sheer desperation.

I don't think the American political class will see such a development coming, any more than they did in Egypt, and any more than they are able to grapple with Occupy Wall Street. It's been alternately amazing, amusing, sickening and predictable to observe the reaction that these demonstrations have engendered among our ruling class and their stable of media bots, including the obligatory condescending tropes about dirty hippies and clueless youth occupying the park. That's fine with me. I hope the powers-that-be continue to stand by, establishing a record for themselves of befuddlement and contempt, so that there's no ambiguity whatsoever about which side they were on when the chips were down, and so that they can all the more rapidly and definitively be transformed into the powers-that-were.

Their critiques have been fast and furious, so much so that, golly, it almost seems like the establishment needed to find something for which to criticize the movement, even if they had to invent it. I'm sure the Eric Cantors and New York Timeses of this world would never be so nefarious and disingenuous as to do something like that, of course. But it sure seemed that way, especially as you hear the ubiquitous critique that the folks in Zuccotti Park "don't have a message."

Gee, you think? I mean, if ten thousand people march around the Pentagon, what do you think that could mean? That they want an increase in Social Security benefits? A longer baseball season, perhaps? If thousands of blacks march on Selma, what do you suppose is their demand? Deregulation of derivative trading? A ban on cloning? And if thousands decide to occupy Wall Street, what ever might one imagine is the reason they are there in particular? Because lower Manhattan has the best falafel stands?

Still can't figure it out, Masters of the Universe and talking head plastic media arbiters of American culture? How about this for a hint: The protesters keep chanting, "We are the 99 percent! We are the 99 percent!" What could that possibly mean? Yes, it's true that there are no leaders for you to coopt, jail or ridicule, and we know that makes you, er, uneasy. Yes, there is a manifest absence of manifestoes with forty-seven point plans full of tax reform schemes and new educational testing initiatives. But even you pompous blow-dried blow-hards in your gated communities should be able to get the general gist of what we're saying, that we in the 99 percent are sick and tired of being exploited and thrashed for the sake of satiating the pathological greed of the one percent.

Even if you have no brains inside your immaculately coifed heads, you should still be able to decipher that no-brainer. Unless, of course, the problem is that you just don't want to. Take for example the fine specimen of a regressive columnist Mark Steyn, who writes for the Orange County Register (of course), and just recently scribbled this dribble: "My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on the "We are the 99%" websites have real problems. However, the "Occupy" movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protesters are as mired in America's post-war moment as their grandparents: One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in "environmental restoration." Hey, why not? It's only a trillion."

What Mr. Steyn doesn't want you to notice (among many other things), and what most of his readers won't in fact notice, is the basic lie at the heart of his dismissive assertion. What got us "into this hole" is precisely the opposite of what he suggests. It wasn't some liberal Frankenstein experiment gone shatteringly awry that wrecked the country, but, quite to the contrary, it was in fact the dismantlement of the liberal experiment of the mid-twentieth century, a program that had been so successful that it created a massive and wealthy middle class in America far beyond anything that had ever existed anywhere in the world prior to that time. But regressives decided to take it apart, and over the last thirty years they've won every policy battle on every question of political economy, from taxes to trade to labor relations to regulation to privatization to deficits and beyond.

Thus, what Mr. Steyn and his ill ilk are desperate for you not to know is that what wrecked the country and the planet is their conservatism (or so-called conservatism - it's really regressivism). That's why they want you to forget who was in the White House when the shit hit the fan. And that the last two Democratic presidents have created White House economic teams comprised of Wall Street executives. And that taxes are far lower than they used to be, and regulation of bankers nearly nonexistent, and social programs dismantled, and job-exporting trade deals signed, and unions crushed, and on and on and on. These people appear to "not get" Occupy Wall Street because they're desperate for it to disappear. In truth, they get it thoroughly and entirely (and, deep down, they can't believe it's taken this long for it to arrive), and they know it for precisely the existential threat to their sickeningly indulgent lives of infantile greed that it absolutely is.

But just in case I'm being unduly harsh to a class of boardroom rapists and murderers and the media and political marionettes who enable their predatory agenda, let me see if I can be helpful to them and simplify the message. It's just this: "We are not your human resources." We. Are. Not. Your. Human. Resources.

The truth is, the one percent in this country sees the rest of us - not as equals, or even as human beings - but as commodities put on this earth to serve them, no different from machines or infrastructure, computers or chemicals. We are their resources, who just happen to have bodies and minds somewhat similar to their own (though of an entirely different class, of course!). Which means we're a pain in the ass because, unlike machines, we have an annoying tendency to want a moderately decent salary and time off to spend with our families, not to mention bathroom breaks on the job. What a drag, eh Thurston?! To them, we're not human beings entitled to human rights and empathetic respect. We are, instead, the frustratingly-expensive remaining elements of a wealth-production machine that cannot (yet) be replaced by computers, robots or Asian peasants.

This is - in the minds of the one percent - a pure relationship of sheer exploitation. In truth, it fundamentally differs little from slavery or patriarchy or environmental destruction. What all these systems have in common is the age-old notion of one class of people living large at the expense of other creatures' misery.

And rarely in the last century have the oligarchs and plutocrats been as successful at doing just that as they are today. Moreover, under the generous leadership of an entire political class ranging from Barack Obama to Scott Walker, they are at this moment still relentlessly attempting to destroy what little is left of American middle class prosperity in the name of unquenchable elite greed. And why not? Since when were three yachts ever enough?

What frightens these people about Occupy Wall Street - and, make no mistake, their attempts at ridicule are the purest possible expressions of their fear - is the idea that the public might actually be on to their game at last.

That a critical mass might have reached critical mass.

That we might no longer be susceptible to diversion by means of ethnic or lifestyle divisions pitting us against one another, or by foreign bogeymen and the endless national security 'crises' they are said to represent.

That we might remember that things were once better here, before we abandoned our humanity and wisdom in the name of greed and expediency and oligarchy.

That we might realize how weak the one percent actually are - just as our Egyptian brothers and sisters found out about their own kleptocracy - and that we might discover how easily toppled corrupt regimes are once exposed for what they are.

That we might demand a modest but fair share of the national wealth, and a political system in which people, not just special interest campaign contributors, actually have a voice in policy decisions.

That we might insist on a decent quality of life for ourselves, and a real future for our children.

And that we understand ourselves to be real people, with real rights, real needs and real aspirations, rather than as tools placed here for the realization of their pathologically bloated obsessive greed.

Because - Mr. Steyn, Mr. Walker, Mr. Cantor, Mr. Murdoch and, yes, Mr. Obama - however much you might stamp your feet, hold your breath, and insist otherwise:

Words matter, especially in our mediated world where the resonance of language is greatly amplified. In this spirit, among some sectors that are otherwise sympathetic with and supportive of the overall aims of the Occupy Movement, there has been an important critique advanced about the nature of "occupation" as an operative premise, oftentimes seeking to deconstruct the racialized character of the concept as it applies to the legacy of occupiers and the makeup of the movement in its present form.

This critical perspective highlights the fact that Wall Street has always been "occupied territory," tracing to its earliest days when an actual wall was erected, and even further back when the entire continent itself was taken by an occupying force that failed to recognize the humanity and validity of the original inhabitants. Most of us comprehend this reality -- namely that we largely exist on thoroughly occupied land -- even as we sometimes forget that for many of us working to "Occupy" the centers of power, we ourselves are the beneficiaries of an ongoing and unremediated occupation.

We ought not dismiss the movement because of these problematic linguistics. Still, we should inquire whether some allies -- especially people of color, who have suffered disproportionately from colonialism and occupation -- are being perceptually discouraged from participating fully in this emerging mobilization. I won't attempt to speak for them, but would instead suggest that we consider whether there are other ways of expressing the visceral sense of "taking back space" that is driving the effort. In fact, doing so can help foster the development of a deeper critique that subsumes not only obvious targets such as corporations and politicians, but also mores and values in themselves -- including those internal to the movement.

As the colonialist history plainly indicates, one can occupy without liberating. Occupied places can become loci of control, authoritarianism, and hierarchical power. As such, they are susceptible to being regulated and policed by those seeking to reestablish their control, as we've seen in Zuccotti Park and other Occupied sites. On the other hand, liberated spaces -- ones which have been wrested from external authorities and likewise freed from the baggage of patriarchy, racialization, classism, and other forms of creeping normativity -- cannot be so easily circumscribed, since they are only partially dependent on their address. The liberated space of a decolonized mind moves with us wherever we go, and is the most powerful form of resistance.

Challenges into Opportunities

Considering that a big part of the movement is to set up public encampments for their symbolic impact, we can already glimpse the seeds of the liberation of space rather than merely the occupation of place. While the physical location of these occupations matters, the impetus is rapidly becoming more about the desire to reframe the sociopolitical dialogue and create nodes for effective (and interlinked) organizing in communities across the nation and world. These are struggles over space, in that they address the material and cultural realms alike, and bear a resemblance to precursors such as the Hoovervilles that arose during the Great Depression -- even as we comprehend that most Occupiers do have other alternatives for actual habitation.

The movement is often branded as lacking a coherent message, but on some level the liberation of space is the message. Mass mobilizations of people defying law and authority to create autonomous zones for local assemblies, participatory democracy, consensus processes, and expressions of political solidarity are all embedded in the practice of liberated space. Likewise, a powerful statement is being made against the forces of privatization and authoritarianism, which have sought to exercise control intended to eviscerate the capacity of people to address the issues that fundamentally define their lives. A liberated space can be either public or private in its underlying legal fabric, celebrating and expanding the former while defying the latter.

The challenges posed by critiques from the left (occupation is colonialist) and the right (occupation is incoherent) are actually profound opportunities for the movement to sharpen its articulations. "Occupy Wall Street" is a fabulous catchphrase that has captured peoples' imaginations around the world. Yet now it is equally crucial to speak with more clarity about what's implicit in the slogan: decolonization, liberation, democratization, autonomy, community, dignity, and more. The effort is about reclaiming the commons, rejecting the culture of commodification of peoples and places, linking issues into a paradigmatic engagement with entrenched power, reactivating the vox populi, and creating buoyancy within the shell of a rapidly sinking ship. All of this is bound up with the inherent spatiality of the movement and its unique capacity to exist simultaneously in discontinuous yet interwoven locales.

Why This Movement Will Succeed

The combined effect of solidarity and decentralization bodes well for the success of the Occupy Movement. Of course, myriad provocateurs and party operatives are already sniffing around opportunistically to either control or decimate its potential. Pay them little mind -- their laughable attempts are the last gasps of a dying ideology that has threatened to take us all down with it. The cell-like quality of the movement mitigates against widespread infiltration and cooptation, and the staunchly leaderless posture in evidence empowers people to think and act for themselves, in concert with others, rather than being lulled into obedience or manipulated into malleability.

This movement will succeed because it has learned the lessons of history and isn't consumed with asking for concessions or fitting within the four corners of the "vast wasteland" that is the domain of demagogues and talking (corporate) heads. This movement will succeed because it is global in scope, essentially coming to encapsulate an Occupy Earth mobilization, and it taps into the conjoined interests of everyone who is not part of the international elite class that has rigged the game on every continent. This movement will succeed because people are tired of being told that they are little more than commodities to be bought and sold, molded and discarded, and stripped of rights without recourse.

Ultimately, this movement will succeed because we have no other choice but to make it so. Time is not on our side, but history might be -- every empire eventually crumbles, and exploitation is a self-defeating enterprise in the end. The urgency of the moment is palpable, and there is a strong sense that this may well be our last, best opportunity before the window of inevitability is slammed shut in our faces. The course we've been on as a culture is inherently (and intentionally) unsustainable, both socially and ecologically. Science and intuition alike tell us that the critical juncture is imminent, and that the task cannot be passed down to our descendants if we have hopes of there actually being any.

The Powers-That-Become

Thus we arrive to meet the moment, fully aware of the implications. We've cut our teeth on anti-globalization actions, anti-war demonstrations, and anti-austerity efforts. Now, it all comes together under the amorphous but palpable rubric of Occupation, and its innate sense of liberating the material and ideological spaces of our lives. Indeed, the process of liberation in itself may well be the goal, in the sense of supplanting the stagnant, deadening nature of entrenched authority. The self-anointed powers-that-be will yield to a new sense of becoming, as people elect to exercise power in their own communities rather than ceding it to remote officials with only chambers of commerce in their hearts.

We are the people, and now is the time. Words matter, and deeds even more so. We are the occupied and occupiers alike; we have been mostly preoccupied but are now reoccupying the places and spaces of our lives. We have been striving to be somebody but are steadily recognizing that this only works if we create a world in which everybody can become the person of their full potential. The power to make this happen is coming into focus, and seeing is truly believing. Our collective liberation -- and with it our capacity to help liberate one another and the balance of life around us -- eagerly awaits.
(c) 2011 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., teaches peace studies at Prescott College and serves as the executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).