November 29, 2007
John Edwards Interview
video no longer available
Keith talks to John Edwards about the CNN Republican debate and the fact that heaven forbid the Republicans had to answer one question from someone from the other party and his Presidential campaign.
By James Petras
11/29/07 “ICH“
Introduction
Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight and mount instead a diplomatic assault? Leonard Fein (Forward November 7, 2007)
As the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, opposing a new Middle East War. While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig, November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict, attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a more stringent and accurate assessment pits the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate. There is a great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they concern the future of America.
Recent History of the Civilian Militarists versus Anti-War Movements
Over the past seven years, the civilian militarists in the executive branch and Congress have resoundingly defeated any and all efforts by Congressional critics and anti-war leaders to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, the peace movement has practically vanished from the streets – in large part a product of its own self-destruction. The great majority of anti-war leaders opted for Democratic Party-electoral politics, a strategy that led to the successful election of a pro-war Democratic majority. The retreat of the anti-war movement turned into a full-scale rout when the government moved toward a new war with Iran: the Zionist-influenced half of the peace movement refused to join forces to oppose the Iran war agenda – heavily influenced by their loyalty to Israel and its shrill cries of an ‘existential’ danger from non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons and dependent on ‘liberal’ Zionist donors.
Along with the capitulation of the anti-war leaders and absence of any ‘street politics’, liberal Democrats, or what passes for them, fell into line with the Israel First Democratic congress-people pushing for an increasingly bellicose political agenda toward Iran. The White House, especially the Vice President’s office were fully in tune with the Israel Firsters and the ZPC ‘keeping the military option’ on the table and priming the US forces in the Gulf for offensive action. Within the military and the intelligence services strong opposition emerged to an attack on Iran.
American Military Versus the ZPC Fight over Middle East Wars
The battle between the civilian militarists (Zion-Cons) in the Pentagon and the military brass took place, in large part, behind closed doors: From the beginning, the military was severely handicapped in so far as they could not engage in public debate. The military elite did not possess an army of lobbyists, activist ideologues and the entire mass media apparatus to promote their point of view. The ZPC-Israel Firsters’ Wars-For-Israel crowd did have all of these ‘resources’ in abundance, and they used them to the maximum in a spiteful and arrogant fashion, when the occasion arose – such as when military officers testifying before Congress questioned the war-to-be in Iraq. Zion-militarists like Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz and their influential cohort baited the military for having ‘the most advanced arms and refusing to use them’, of being fearful of expending troops to defend US security interests in the Middle East, of being ultra-cautious when audacity and preemptive action was necessary. The Israel-Firsters, who not only never risked a broken fingernail on any battlefield, deprecated the generals to increase their power to order them around through their servile operatives in the Rumsfeld Pentagon, Vice President’s Office and in Bush’s National Security Council. The Zion-Cons’ arm-chair military strategists have absolutely no qualms in sending US troops to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran to enhance Israeli regional power because 99.8% of the rank and file troops are not of their kin and kind. On the contrary they ridicule the US military precisely to prosecute wars and avoid the loss of Israeli-Jewish lives, resulting from an Israeli attack on Iran to enhance its power in the Middle East.
Israel-Firsters Win Round One
For all of the above-enumerated reasons, the Israel-Firsters overcame the doubts and questions on the war by the military in the run-up to and continuation of the Iraq War. The ZPC’s success in launching the war over military objections was largely due to their control over US civilian institutions and the primacy of these institutions over any and all military political dissent. However the ZPC was not content with repressing civilian dissent, they aggressively repressed and silenced any opposition from within the military: General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army saw his career destroyed when he questioned US policy on the eve of the Iraq invasion. Two years later, General Peter Pace was denied a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he rejected claims by the White House and the ZPC that Iran was supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgents. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was retired following his call for the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, which he later described as “a nightmare with no end in sight”. General John Abazaid followed. Captains and Colonels in the Pentagon who disagreed with the lies and fabrication of ‘intelligence’ by the Zion-Cons in the Pentagon leading to the Iraq invasion were marginalized and/or silenced. Zion-Cons in the Pentagon marginalized CIA intelligence reports that didn’t fit in with their war propaganda– these studies were-written, cut and spliced to serve their ends. The Zion-Cons in the Pentagon established a parallel ‘intelligence’ office under their exclusive control (Office of Special Planning) and placed ‘one of their own’, Abraham Shumsky, in charge.
In the Zion-Con charge to push the US into a new war with Iran, they (along with Vice President Cheney) have successfully delayed and forced the rewrite of a collective report by various intelligence agencies, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, because it had to fit in with their war plans.
The humiliating defeats and gratuitous public insults which the victorious ZPC inflicted on the US military has had the effect of raising the back of senior officers in the run-up to a military attack on Iran. The military is going public and fighting back with biting open criticism of the White House and Zion-Con war planners. The underlying deep and widespread hostility of the high-ranking military officials has nothing to do with Zion-Con charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ and everything to do with the destruction, demoralization and discredit of the US military which has resulted from following Zion-Con war policies in Iraq.
The US armed forces have crumbled and decayed as the Iraq occupation and counter-insurgency progresses into its 6th year. Over half of the officers are refusing to re-enlist, recruiting quotas are not being reached except by drastically lowering standards, and morale of on-duty reservists is at it’s lowest because of extended tours of duty. Black enlistment has dropped precipitously. Despite the war being portrayed by President Bush and Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Olmert as for Israel’s national survival, American Jewish war-time enlistment is at its lowest in almost a century. Public sentiment for the military has declined sharply since the war, exacerbated by Zionist (Richard Perle, Frederick Kagan, Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk) charges of incompetence against American military occupation forces. The loss of prestige, enlistment and the increasing over-stretch of the army and the abrasive and domineering way in which the Zion-Cons denigrate active US military commanders has raised their ire. At one point in an interview, General Tommy Franks referred to Zion-Con, ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith as ‘the dumbest bastard I ever knew’.
Round Two: American Military Versus Israel-Firsters: The Iran War
Recognizing how they were outgunned by the Zion-Con monopoly of public space for political discussion in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the military has gone public. Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM (Central Command) has launched a series of interviews designed to counter-Zion-Con war propaganda. He has formed an anti-War-With-Iran alliance with senior military officers, Secretary of Defense Gates and sectors of the intelligence services not under Zion-Con influence (Financial Times Nov. 12, 2007 p.1). The Secretary of Defense is not a reliable ally to the officers opposed to an Iran war, since he is notorious for caving in to ZPC pressure when his post in under threat.
Every major Israeli public spokes-person has at least raised the issue of a sneak attack (translation: ‘preventive war’ in Zion-speak) and many are in favor of an immediate attack. Reliable sources in Israel claim that war preparations are already advanced. Fabricating ‘existential threats’ to Israeli existence, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has spoken forcefully even … shrilly, about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ – a much repeated, deliberate mistranslation of the Prime Minister’s reference to Israel (more reliable translations refer to ‘the regime currently occupying Jerusalem disappearing into history’).
While Israeli officials have placed war with Iran as their second most important priority on their foreign policy agenda, by far their highest priority is convincing and manipulating the US to carry out the war and save Israel the enormous economic cost and loss of Israeli lives. The Israeli state has made its war policy the central task for their agents and their apparatus in the US. The ZPC has taken up the Israeli line with a vengeance. Several hundred full-time functionaries from all the major Jewish organizations have visited and ‘advised’ Congress that bellicose support for a war against Iran is the primary way to demonstrate their unconditional defense of Israel’s ‘survival’ and guarantee campaign financing from their wealthy political donor base. Over the past year, several major daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines from the New York Times through Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and the entire yellow press (NY Post, New York Sun, The Daily News) has published reams of propaganda articles fabricating an Iranian nuclear threat, demonizing Iran and its leaders and calling for the US to bomb Iran and eliminate Israel’s ‘existential’ (the most nauseating and overused cliché) threat. Several thousand op-ed pieces have been written parroting the Israeli war-line by a small army of Zionist academics and think tank propagandists. Breathless and vitriolic, the Israel Firsters claim that ‘time is running out’, that Iran’s pursuit of diplomacy is a ploy for inaction, that Iran’s well-documented openness to negotiations is a trick. Venomous attacks are launched against Europeans for not pursuing the military option; Germany is slandered as following in the footsteps of the Nazis because its industries and banks still do business with Iran. US critics of the ZPC’s pursuit of an Iranian war for Israel are accused of being ‘soft on terrorism’, appeasers, and almost always labeled as overt or covert ‘anti-Semites. The massive, sustained and one-sided dominance by the ZPC of the Iranian war narrative has been successful. US public opinion surveys show over half (52% according to a Zogby Poll) of the US public is in favor of offensive bombing of Iran. Thus speaks the State of Israel via its overbearing politically dominant Fifth Column to the American People: The purpose of the USA is to serve and sacrifice for the greater good (and power and wealth and dominance) of Israel.
The clearest and most vicious Zion-Con counter-attack against the US military’s harsh reaction to their leading us into the Iraq War came from a predictable ultra-Zionist think-tank, the Foreign Policy Research Center (FPRC) run by Ilan Berman, a close collaborator with the Israeli extremist Likud leader Netanyahu. Speaking at a meeting co-sponsored by the FPRR and the Reserve Officers Association on October 15 2007 entitled “Mind the Gap”: Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America, senior fellow Frank Hoffman attempted to turn senior military officers’ criticism of the disastrous Zion-Con authored Iraq War into a sinister military plot: “The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging ‘stab-in-the-back’ thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact (sic) and code of conduct (sic) that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy (the Zion-Cons) and the dedicated servants (the military) we ask to carry it out. (Dereliction of Duty Redux? see
www.fpri.org/enotes/200711.hoffman.derelictionofdutyredux.html). Hoffman attempts to deflect military and public anger at the enormous damage in morale, recruitment and lives which the Zion-Con war policies have inflicted on the US Armed Forces by invoking an abstract entity: “Our collective failure (sic) to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security” (ibid)
Obfuscating Zionist control over war policy, Hoffman instead refers to “civilian” control over the military as being “constitutionally, structurally (?) and historical well-grounded.” This is nonsense: there is no provision, article or clause in the American Constitution which states that the military should submit to civilian power subordinate to a foreign state.
After a vacuous general discussion of civilian-military relations in the lead-up to the Zion-Con designed Iraq War, Hoffman then tries to paint the military critics of Zion-Con Donald Rumsfeld as attacking an innovative defender of civilian supremacy over the military – even as he embraced wholesale torture techniques and violated every principle of the Geneva Convention of War and US Military Code of Conduct toward prisoners and civilians. Hoffman turns up the Zion-Con venom against military officers who dared to question Rumsfeld’s application of Israel’s illegal and totalitarian technique of colonial warfare in Iraq. He then launches a diatribe against the professional competence of senior military advisers, “who failed to provide military counsel because they were intimidated ‘yes men’ or who failed to recognize the complexity of war” (ibid). Berman’s prodigy, Hoffman, makes a case that the Zion-Con ‘masters of Iraq war policy’ were not responsible for the disastrous war – it was the military officers “who failed to provide candid advice, who fail in their duty to their immediate superiors and stay in their posts (who) are guilty of dereliction of duty to the President, the Congress and their subordinates.” (ibid) The same Zion-Cons who drove out and forced the resignation of American generals who had dissented with Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Rumsfeld are now judged and condemned for dereliction of duty by the same Zion-Cons.
The Zion-Cons follow the Goebbels principle: ‘The Big Lie repeated often enough can convince the stupid masses.’
The Berman-Hoffman FPRC counter-attack against American military officers speaking truth to power is a limp effort to deflect attention from the Zion-Con policymakers’ treasonous behavior and their role in degrading the US military. The FPRC document blaming the military and unnamed civilians (exclusively non-Zionist) for the Iraq debacle is one of the numerous variants on the same theme by Zionist academic militarists justifying the power of the ZPC in the name of civilian supremacy, without spelling out the national loyalties of the ‘civilian’ masters of career military officers.
According to a detailed report published in the Financial Times (November 12, 2007), the US military is not buying the Zion-Con line: “Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said that while dealing with Iran was a ‘challenge’ a military strike was not in the offing.” (Page 1 and 9) Backed by many active senior officers and numerous retired generals, Fallon has dismissed the Zion-Con intellectuals and propagandists as ignorant war-mongers. In his own words: “It astounds me that so many pundits and other s are spending so much time yakking about this topic (of a military attack on Iran)” (FT: November 12, 2007 p.9).
In direct repudiation of the ZPC’s frenetic campaigning for economic sanctions leading to a military attack, top US military officials and even Secretary of Defense Gates have for the time being blocked the military option. Addressing the Zionist strategy of sequential wars against Israel’s enemies (Iran, Syria, Lebanon), Fallon stated: “It seems to me that we don’t need more problems”. His remarks are understood to reflect the views of the majority of senior officers in the Middle East combat zone but not Bush’s politically ambitious General Petraeus, who worked with his Israeli-Mossad partners (in Northern Iraq “Kurdistan”) in training and arming the Kurdish militia death squads – Peshmerga.
Retired Generals Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar, both former heads of CENTCOM, have pointed their fingers at the menace of the Zion-Cons and Israel-Firsters in the government. According to Gen. Hoar, “There is no doubt that an element in the government wants to strike Iran. But the good news is that the Secretary of Defense and senior military are against it” (FT November 12, 2007). The forced and voluntary retirement, including the indictment and jailing of some highly placed Zion-Cons in the Pentagon, White House, Treasury and State Departments have weakened their stranglehold over US policy in the White House. The top Zion-Con policymakers who have left or are in jail include Rumsfeld (Gentile Zionist), Wolfowitz, Feith, Franklin, Shumsky, Perle – in the Pentagon; Irving Libby, Wurmser, Ari Fleicher, Frum in the White House and many others too numerous to name.
While the Zion-Cons retain power in the higher circles of government, at this moment, they are not able to run roughshod over their military critics and opponents as they did in the run-up to the Iraq war. In part this is because of the horrendous situation resulting from their war in Iraq, which has undermined their credibility and turned the vast majority of the US public against their war. Equally the Zion-Cons’ war and the disastrous impact of a prolonged (5 year) urban guerrilla resistance on the US Armed Forces, in terms of loss of personnel, morale, junior and senior officers and the over-extension of the US military to the detriment of the defense of the US Empire’s interests around the world has served as a ‘wake-up call’ for senior military command.
Drawing on their experience from the invasion of Iraq, few if any accept the Israeli-Zion-Con ‘evaluations’ of the outcome and response to a military attack. They remember too well the optimistic propaganda put out by Zionist academic ideologues like Kagan and Cohen that the ‘Iraqis will celebrate and welcome American forces into Baghdad as liberators’.
According to a report in the Financial Times, retired General Zinni speaking for the many active senior officers says ‘even a limited American attack could push Teheran to retaliate in a number of ways such as firing missiles at Israel, Saudi oilfields and US bases in Iraq, mining the Straits (sic) of Hormuz and activating sleeper terrorist cells around the world.” (FT op cit). He concluded by pointing out, “It is not a matter of a one-strike option. It is the classic question of… ‘and then what’?”. A more circumspect criticism of the Iran war reasoning has been voiced by Admiral Mike Muller. He objected to the US-Israeli agents “putting the military option on the table”. Admiral Muller added, “We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now. We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.”(FT Op Cit).
One of the biggest dangers in forcing the US into a war with Iran is an Israeli sneak air attack, in which it destroys Iranian military installations causing Iran to retaliate against the US, Israel’s ally, main financier and armaments supplier. An Israeli air strike is not the only war provocation – the Mossad is deeply in involved in training Kurdish commandos to carry out terrorist cross-border attacks from Iraq, killing Iranian civilians and soldiers, bombing military installations and collecting intelligence, hoping to provoke a large-scale Iranian military response against ‘Kurdistan’. Iranian retaliation against Mossad trained Kurdish terrorists could then be twisted by Zion-Con ideologues and their ‘political elements in Washington’ (to quote Admiral Fallon) into a major invasion of Iraq, with the hope of convincing the Bush White House to ‘counter-attack in defense of our troops in Iraq’.
The Israeli regime and its Fifth Column in the United States have been pressing for unilateral intervention against Iran, preferably military, ever since 2003. The Daily Alert, mouthpiece of the 52 biggest Jewish organizations (The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations) has published scores of articles each week, characterizing the Europeans as ‘foot draggers’, ‘weak on Iran’, ‘playing down’ or ‘failing’ to take serious the ‘existential threat to Israel’. The US Zion-Cons have their own ‘State Department’ and ‘overseas’ missions, with their own ‘foreign policy-makers and spokespeople’. They meet with European, Asian and Latin American heads of State in the US or during ‘visits’ overseas, mobilizing advising, organizing and strengthening Zion-Con outposts throughout Europe and beyond. Their international reach has succeeded in a number of important decisions and appointments, most notably in Brussels and in Sarkozy’s appointment of Zionist fanatic Bernard Kouchner as France’s Minister of Foreign Relations. In a rather crude and undiplomatic show of Zionist loyalty immediately upon taking office, Kouchner declared France to be in favor of a military option against Iran. He was later pressured to retract, but Sarkozy, who himself is no minor league Israel supporter, has echoed Kouchner’s line. One of Kouchner’s first acts was to travel to American-occupied Iraq to express his personal support for the occupation. As a result of Israeli and Zion-Con pressure on the White House, France, Germany and England have all supported the escalation of sanctions against Iran…the Zionist strategy of ‘strangle the economy now and bomb later’.
The Zion-Cons’ weakness is relative: Although they no longer can purge (or ‘retire’) or silence senior military officers opposed to their Mid East Wars for Israel, they are extremely effective in discrediting any and all impartial international bodies and reports which fail to support the Israeli line that Iran represents an ‘existential threat’ to its survival (code language for ‘challenges or resists Israel’s drive to dominate the region’). Predictably taking their cue from the Israeli foreign office’s dismissal of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency’s report (November 15, 2007) which documented that Iran had no nuclear arms program and no capacity to construct a nuclear weapon at least for the next five years, the ZPC unleashed a mass media propaganda campaign attacking the IAEA chairman as a ‘pro-Iranian’ agent (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007). At the same time the news ‘reports’ used ‘potted quotes’ from the Report, mentioning only the IAEA ‘reservations’ and the ‘questions unanswered’ and ‘issues not addressed’. US Senator from Tel Aviv, Joseph Lieberman combined both a distorted (or blatantly falsified) version of the IAEA Report and a vicious attack on its Chief, El Baradei, claiming that the Report ‘made it clear (sic) that Iran was still hiding (sic) large parts of its nuclear program’ (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007). A careful or even casual reading of the IAEA Report shows not a single paragraph, line or word stating that Iran was ‘hiding large parts of its nuclear program’ as Lieberman accused. Ever mendacious, Lieberman, who had publicly called for an immediate military attack on ‘Iran, Iraq and Syria’ just days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, viciously attacked El Baradei for ‘writing in the report that Iran was cooperating and for not recommending a new round of sanctions’. In other words, the Zion-Cons with their mediocre academic mouth-pieces can save the UN, the IAEA and El Baradei’s time and money in site visits and delicate radiologic and satellite monitoring by handing over the Israeli Foreign Office’s pre-packaged ‘press’ handouts or ‘sexed-up intelligence reports’. The Zion-Cons make up in zeal what they lack in fact: Cooking up threats and telling the eager world that Iran is not cooperative and should be heavily sanctioned, starved or bombed into submission. The Zion-Cons follow the guidelines of the Jewish state’s agenda, to turn Iran into a Gaza Strip of deprivation and desperation.
The Israeli dismissal of the UN report on Iran, and the Zion-Con falsification of its contest and attack on its chief negotiator, El Baradei, was echoed by the While House and the Zion-colonized Congress. With a lack of originality characteristic of US Middle East policy-makers, they also cited the potted quotes from the IAEA Report to justify harsher sanctions and a greater degree of confrontation. The purpose is to provoke a breakup of the dialog long established between the IAEA and Iran. The Zion-Con-White House strategy is to implicate the IAEA in their savage attacks on Iran, and via harsher economic sanctions end Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA. Having forced the IAEA out they would then accuse Iran of rejecting dialog and cooperation with the United Nations. This contrived scenario (like the earlier phony claims that ‘Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors’) would set the stage for a US-British led military attack under the pretext that all diplomatic approaches failed to deter Iran’s nuclear program which the IAEA denied had any military component. It ill behooves anyone to actually consult the IAEA website and read the reports’ favorable account of Iran’s willing cooperation in providing site visits, documents and responses in answer to many of the key issues raised by the IAEA, the US and the EU. The report ultimately refutes the major accusations cooked up by the Zion-Cons and their political assets in the White House, State Department and Congress. The most important information contained in the IAEA Report is that its inspectors found no evidence of any Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons.
US Military-Israel-Firsters: Fundamental Issues in Dispute
There are at least 5 fundamental issues in dispute between senior American military officials and ZPC:
These include (1) the nature of the Iranian threat: The ZPC argues that Iran represents an immediate deadly threat to the US, Israel, Iraq and the Gulf States. The American officers do not see the Iranians as a threat because they have engaged the Iranians in stopping the flow of arms and fighters to the Iraqi resistance; they recognize Iranian positive diplomatic overtures to all the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia; the US armada in the Persian Gulf is confident they can act as a deterrent to any Iranian attack; and finally the US Central Command know they are in the Persian Gulf facing Iran because of the White House’s provocative offensive strategy – and that Iran has not demonstrated anything but a defensive capability. Senior American officers view favorably Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer “to discuss with Arab nations a plan to enrich uranium outside the region in a neutral country such as Switzerland.”(Dow Jones News Service in Saudia Arabia, quoted in BBC News November 18, 2007). Not a single major television or print media in the US ran the Iranian president’s offer – as would be predictable in our Zionized media.
(2) Uranium Program The Israelis, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, and among the top five nuclear powers, argue that Iran, which does not have a single nuclear weapon or even a weapons program, is an ‘existential (sic) threat’ to Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. This is one argument that the ZPC have used to convince the Democratic Party majority in Congress, the White House and the pro-Israel wing of the US Peace Movement to escalate economic sanctions and keep the ‘military option’ on the table.
The only problem is that most European, Asian, African and Latin American diplomats, experts, the majority of world public opinion and most senior American officers don’t buy Israel’s shrill disinformation. All legal experts who have given a perfunctory look at the non-proliferation agreement (NPA) insist that there is absolutely no clause or article prohibiting uranium enrichment. Intelligence experts and US military report that Iran at the earliest may have sufficient enriched uranium by 2010 and may be able to produce a low-yield weapon by 2010-2015. The job of the ZPC, pursued at full speed, is to bury the NPA under mountains of fabrications, arguing that enriching uranium itself is a violation of ‘international law’. The purpose of this attempt to concoct a full state of belligerency is to escalate US and Israeli attacks on Iran and hasten the timing of a surprise, offensive onslaught. This is exactly the reason why American intelligence briefings and IAEA reports have aroused the fury of Israel and its operatives in the US and their calling for El Baradei’s dismissal.
Iranian Arms to Iraq: The US Military and CENTCOM have repeatedly denied, especially in light of another ZPC onslaught to the contrary, that the Iranian government is supplying arms, especially roadside mines or IEDs to Iraqi ‘terrorists’ and its allied militia forces. Contrary to the assertion of the leading Israeli spokes-people in the US Senate, the US military categorically denies that the IEDs are made in Iran, having discovered bomb-making factories in Iraq and from interrogation and actually studying the construction and contents of the IEDs.
Zionist-colonized Senators led by Hillary Clinton have followed the lead of Israeli Senatorial Spokesman Joseph Lieberman, rather than consulting with the American military, and are mouthing the rhetoric of Iranian arms killing American soldiers (FT November 12, 2007 p.9). Following the Lieberman-Israeli-ZPC propaganda blitz, the US Senate voted in favor of the Lieberman-Kyle resolution naming Iran’s principle border defense force, the Republican Guard, a ‘terrorist organization’, moving one step closer to an attack. The hollowness of this resolution is reflected in the fact to not one of any of the US’s servile allies chose to follow its lead in denouncing the Republican Guard. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the Israeli-ZPC colonization of the US congress than on questions of war and peace, when the legislature is more likely to follow the dictates of Israeli propagandists than to consult its own senior military officials.
Consequences of an attack on Iran: The main concern of the ZPC and its political clients in the White House and Congress is that an attack on Iran will secure the safety of Israel, eliminating a ‘mortal enemy’, preventing ‘another Holocaust’ and stopping a ‘new Hitler’. In pursuit of this policy, Israel’s US agents have repeatedly blocked every open-ended Iranian effort to cooperate with the US against the Taliban, Al Queda and other ‘terrorists groups’ as is profusely documented by two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration’s National Security Council, Hiliary Mann and Flynt Leverett,. (see ‘The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know’, Esquire Magazine, November 2007). Every Iranian offer of unconditional negotiation and cooperation with the US to fight terrorism, as the US defines it, was rejected by key extremist Zion-Cons in the Pentagon (Feith), the Vice President’s office (Irving Libby), the National Security Council (Elliott Abrams and the President’s National Security Adviser (Stephen Hadley, a zealous Gentile Zion-Con among the brotherhood). The Zion-cons paint a picture of an air attack which would simultaneously blow up all Iranian nuclear research facilities, infrastructure, airfields, military bases and ports…preventing any and all Iranian counter attacks against US strategic interests in the region. They further embellish their totalitarian vision by arguing that the Islamic republic would be overthrown by a populace grateful to the Americans for bombing their country, destroying its infrastructure and killing thousands. The Neo-Cons’ infantile delusions then lead them to project the emergence of a pro-Western Iranian secular state favorable to American occupation of the Middle East and, of course, wholeheartedly renouncing any ‘existential’ threats to the ‘survival’ of its new ally, Israel.
On the issue of the consequences of an attack on Iran, the US military is totally at odds with the Israeli-ZPC propaganda. Senior military officials based on real estimates on the ground and from hard data from intelligence experts, estimate that Iran will be in a position to retaliate and cause enormous immediate and long-term damage to strategic US and global interests. CENTCOM estimates that Iran will set-off air to sea missiles aimed at the US fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf and land-to-land missiles destroying oil production sites in the Gulf States, creating a major world oil shortage, doubling oil prices and provoking a world recession as energy scarcities paralyze production. Secondly the Iranians will send several tens of thousands of its elite forces across the border into Iraq, joining with its Iraqi Shia allies to overrun US bases and endanger the lives of the 160,000 US troops currently in Iraq. This would undermine the entire Iraq war effort, inflicting a strategic defeat and further undermine US military capacity in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Thirdly the Iranians will be able to easily block the Strait of Hormuz so that one third of the Middle East’s oil shipments will be paralyzed.
Fourthly, military intelligence estimates that Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ in Asia, Africa, Europe and perhaps in North America will be activated and engage in ‘big impact’ terrorist missions. Whatever the likelihood of this scenario, it is clear that the US military anticipates major protests and perhaps even the violent overthrow of its clients in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.
Zion-Cons have neither countered military intelligence estimates with any credible counter-facts, nor even seriously considered the likely disastrous consequences affecting the US, Europe and Asia: They only consider Israel’s ‘security’ and its regional ambitions. No Zionophile or Zion-Con has considered the enormous costs in terms of US lives and damage to the fragile economy and society of a full scale third prolonged war. In effect, the Zion-cons will kill their own US goose, which has laid golden eggs for Israel for almost 6 decades. It is an example of the Zion-Cons’ supreme arrogance and sense of their own power that they feel they can plunge the US into a Third Asian war which will devastate the US economy and cause world-wide energy scarcity, and still secure their yearly ‘tribute’ of $3 Billion Dollars foreign aid for Israel as well as guaranteeing oil for Israel by diverting it from the needs of American consumers and industries. It is clear that in doing a cost-benefit analysis on a US attack on Iran, Israeli and ZPC operatives have approvingly figured that the costs are on the US side of the ledger and the benefits are for the Israelis. Were it known, American public opinion might disapprove.
The main difference is that the US does not have a comparable Washington Power Configuration in Tel Aviv to influence Israeli policy to match the Jewish state’s Zionist Power Configuration which shapes and influences US Middle East policy.
Military-Zioncon: Punch and Counter-Punch
By the end of 2007 it is clear that the US military, led by CENTCOM Commander, Admiral William Fallon and Security of Defense Gates, have successfully, if temporarily contained the strenuous Israeli-Zion-Con military thrust to war. Though Gates backtracked under ZPC pressure and later denied that he had taken the military option ‘off the table’. In response, the Zion-Cons launched an end-around tactic by intensifying their efforts to impose a global economic blockade to strangle the Iranian economy. The Zionized White House has pressured and secured the whole-hearted support of Gordon Brown of Great Britain, and Sarkozy of France for a set of economic sanctions that will in effect rupture all dialog with the IAEA. This is the strategic goal of the Zion-Cons: no dialog, no diplomacy, and blockaded economy, ripe for Anglo-French-American bombing. The Zion-cons have shrewdly avoided a head on confrontation with Fallon and his allies. They recognize that a bruising battle in which they might expose their Fifth Column credentials and in which their ‘anti-Semitic’ slanders against a popular patriotic American general might backfire by finally arousing a silent, latent anti-Zionist majority to speak out. Since the military would be called upon to carry out the military option which it strongly opposes, the Zion-Cons turn to their automatic, rubber-stamp majority in the US Congress and especially their most zealous Zionists in the federal bureaucracy. Treasury Department functionary Levey has devoted all of his working time browbeating, banning and blacklisting any and all businesses and banks dealing directly or indirectly with Iran or its trading partners.
Judeo-Centrism: From Ghetto Defense to Imperial Ambitions
One of the driving forces of the Zionist Power Configuration’s accumulation of political power is their ability to totally displace pre-existing non-Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations from influence in the Jewish community over the past 60 years. Secondly the formation of the ZPC resulted from the unification and centralization of a vast array of disparate groups and local community organizations around a single dominant political issue: unconditional and total support for a foreign power, Israel, with a kind of intolerant religious fervor which in the past burnt dissenters in public displays of piety and today hounds them from public office. In the past and in the recent period, there was a popular Yiddish saying in evaluating public policy: ‘Is it good for the Jews?’ This narrow, parochial viewpoint had special meaning at a time when Jews were a persecuted minority trying to maximize their security and minimize risks in relatively closed societies. In recent times, in certain New York intellectual circles, it was part of a jocular repertoire designed at one and the same time to recall an earlier identity and to mock some of the overweening pretensions of new rich upstarts, especially real estate billionaires who displace and exploit low-income and minority tenants while making generous contributions to Israel.
But what was defensive and perhaps justified in an earlier era has become a deadly practice in the context of affluence, political power and organizational cohesion. A Judeocentric view of the world, which sees the embodiment of ‘what’s good for the Jews’ in providing unconditional support to an aggressive colonial state (Israel), has become a formula for disaster. In the new context where Jews represent almost a quarter of US billionaires and occupy high positions of government decision-making, the dominant Zionist discourse and practice has resulted not in defensive measures protecting a persecuted minority but offensive actions prejudicing the American majority. In the case of Iraq, it has led to the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians and the displacement of many millions more. In the US it has resulted in milking the US taxpayers annually for well-over $3 billion dollars to subsidize an Israeli-Jewish population with an annual per capita income of $30,000 and universal health care. The Judeo-centric view as interpreted by the Israel-Firsters has led to the sacrifice of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq. In the US, Judeocentric narrative has led to the denial of our democratic rights, our freedom to debate our Zionist problem, and the ZPC’s support for Israel’s pursuit of Middle East dominance through American military power. Judeocentrism is not the ideology or practice of the great majority of US Jews, even less a rising number of young, better-educated Jews with no deep ideological ties to Israel. But Judeocentrism is the perspective which guides the organized, active minority driving the major Zionist organizations and their billionaire camp followers. And it is always the organized, zealous and well-financed minority, which assumes ‘legitimate’ claim to speak ‘for the community’ – despite the protests of numerous un-organized Jewish intellectual critics.
Conclusion
The deepening and all-important conflict between the pro-Israel warmongers and the anti-war American senior officers is reaching a bitter climax. As the US military disintegrates under prolonged colonial warfare, the ZPC intensifies its campaign for a third war for Israel and against Iran, a war which will totally shatter the US military forces.
The fundamental question emerging for most senior officers, in private gatherings and informal discussions is ‘Who commands our Commander in Chief?’ The deep animosity of US senior active military officers frequently erupts at the ZPC’s careless and callous disregard for American lives. They disdainfully refer to the Zion-Con policymakers as ‘arm-chair military strategists’ who never fought a war, never shot or been shot. At one level, the senior military officers are appalled by the ignorance of the Zion-Con military ‘experts’ and policy-makers featured by the Zion-Con controlled mass media. One of the most frequent military criticisms is that the Zion-Con policy-makers don’t have an‘exit strategy’ – attributing it to their lack of knowledge or strategic thinking. In reality, the lack of Zion-Con concern for a realistic exit strategy is because the Zion-Cons are concerned (in light of Israel’s priorities) only with an entry policy, namely degrading the invaded countries’ military and economic potential. Secondly the Zion-Cons do not have an exit strategy because they believe the US should stay, colonize, build bases and engage in a prolonged war for a chimerical total victory.
The question of ‘who commands the Commander in Chief’ goes to the entire core of our constitutional order, because it raises the deeper question of ‘who defines the national interests’ for which the military are fighting? If as we have documented, the ZPC has effectively colonized the White House and Legislative Branches (and the Justice Department and the appointment of an ultra-Zionist Attorney General Michael Mulkasey and Israel-First Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff), to serve the interests of a foreign power (Israel) in what sense does a colonized political system serve the interests of a democratic public? Does there exist a primary condition that makes it possible to speak of a democracy, namely national self-determination, de-colonization necessary for the re-democratization of American political institutions?
So far the only effective resistance to colonization has comes from the US military. The military is a non-democratic, hierarchical institution but an institution representative of the public’s opposition to colonial encroachments.
What would normally be considered the prime movers challenging Zion-Con colonization, namely the President, Congress, the political parties or even the antiwar movements have abdicated their responsibilities — they have been in part or whole colonized and neutralized.
By default, it has fallen to senior military commanders who reject being commanded by the ZPC at the service of Israel. Paradoxically, it is the military, which has taken over the struggle against an offensive war with Iran, a struggle where the American peace movement has failed. It is the military, which has challenged the Zion-Con agenda, where the Congress has been corrupted and capitulated for reasons of campaign financing, political blackmail and double loyalty.
Where does that leave us, as democrats and anti-colonists?
We should be able to have both an independent de-colonized and democratic America, governed by patriotic Americans. But suppose we have to choose between de-colonization led by the military or a corrupt colonized electoral system – what should be done?
The ideal solution would be a revitalized civil society including secularist citizens, non-fundamentalist Muslims and Christians, and non-Zionist Jews, organized in an anti-war, anti-colonial movement and political parties allied with patriotic officers to ‘re-found the republic’. The purpose would be to establish a republic to ‘defend the heartland’ from fires, floods, economic pillage, terrorists, ecological predators and foreign agents acting on behalf of alien regimes. Can it happen? We shall see. What is becoming clear however is that the anti-colonial imperative is growing stronger by the day, if it doesn’t come from below, it may have to come from above.FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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Dandelion Salad
By Carol Davidek-Waller
11/29/07 “ICH”
Clearly the nation has turned against Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush. Their approval ratings are the lowest of any elected leaders in American history. We are weary of war and bled white from profligate spending and larceny. Our civil rights have been severely restricted and crimes have been committed. A once peaceful world stands on the brink of turmoil.
As the 2008 elections draw near, it’s tempting to look upon regime change as an end to our long night. We would like to believe that a change of face in the Oval Office would repair the damage done by the current administration. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Without investigation and impeachment, electing a new president will only serve to codify the unprecedented and illegitimate power stolen from the Congress and the American people. The powers of a dictator will be passed on like an Olympic torch where they will reside with the next president.
The nation has been wounded in its beating heart. The president is no longer obligated to uphold and defend the Constitution or obey and execute the laws of the land. We no longer have the full protection of the Bill of Rights. Our elected leaders are no longer bound to tell the truth. These wounds will continue to fester until they are cleansed by a strong dose of sunlight.
Failure to impeach is a threat to our national security. In the same way that we cannot expect our nation to be secure if we don’t understand what threatens us beyond our borders, we cannot expect the nation to be secure if we don’t understand and check what threatens us from within. The excesses of our own government can become a far greater threat than terrorism.
Articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney were filed several months ago and the majority of Americans favor impeachment. Congress has refused to act. They even turned a blind eye when Rep. Dennis Kucinich read out the well-document charges against Cheney on the floor of the House and demanded action.
The charges against Cheney are chilling. They outline in stark relief the peril our nation faces when even one man exercises unrestrained power; even a man whose office is purely ceremonial. How could so much damage be done in such a short time? Why has no one stopped him?
Elections give us an opportunity to choose our representatives and leaders. They do not and were never meant to address the gross abuses of power, war crimes, felonies and fraud that Cheney and Bush have engaged in. Impeachment not elections gets top billing in the Constitution.
Elections will not address the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands who have died in an unnecessary war nor honor their sacrifice. Elections will not prevent your government from spying on you without cause or restore your right to privacy. They will not prevent you from being incarcerated or having your assets seized because one man, the president, says so. Elections will not prevent you from being tortured or flown to another country to be tortured. Elections will not keep your own military from being used against you. They will not restore the rule of law or the integrity of the Judiciary. They will not restore the balance of powers. Elections will not prevent this nation or any other from making war at will or stealing another nation’s resources. They will not restore the delicate balance of the global community, shattered by broken treaties and unchecked lust for domination and power.
Elections will not prevent a president Clinton from declaring you an enemy combatant and shipping you off to Guantanamo. They won’t prevent a president Obama from sweeping up Americans and holding them indefinitely on his word alone. They won’t prevent a president Guiliani from illegally and immorally murdering millions of Iranians for no legitimate reason. They won’t prevent a president Romney from seizing your home and assets because he alleges you are impeding operations in Iraq. It won’t prevent a president Thompson from exempting himself, his entire administration and his political supporters from the rule of law. It won’t prevent any president from leaving the nation unprotected by ignoring or rewriting the intelligence to suit his or her political agenda. Elections won’t guarantee that anyone you elect to lead or represent you has to tell you, the congress or the judiciary the truth.
Under the Constitution, we have the right to know if our elected leaders are doing their jobs or abusing the power of their office.
When serious allegations are made, it is our right to have public investigations that are immune to state secrets and executive privilege.
We have a responsibility as citizens to act on that information.
There is no more important work for congress to do. You cannot build anything on a weak foundation. Unscrupulous men and women have damaged the very foundation of our nation: the Constitution is the very bedrock upon which the order and legality of our nation rests. These same people have suspended the rule of law by which we govern ourselves. They assert that the government is theirs to do with as they wish. We cannot let that stand.
The genius of the Constitution is that it contains the remedy for its own healing, it’s own restoration. That remedy is impeachment. Not elections. Impeachment.
Carol Davidek-Waller is a news junkie and an avid blogger. http://resetnow.blogspot.com – http://cdw-ithink.blogspot.com
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
By Carolyn Baker
11/29/07 “ICH”
Vulture restructuring is a purging cure for a malignant debt cancer. The reckoning of systemic debt presents regulators with a choice of facing the cancer frontally and honestly by excising the invasive malignancy immediately or let it metastasize through the entire financial system over the painful course of several quarters or even years and decades by feeding it with more dilapidating debt. Henry Liu, “The Pathology Of Debt“
Carolyn Baker Reviews Danny Schechter’s e-book SQUEEZED (Click on link to Download) Continue reading
The value of the dollar continues to decrease. With the mortgage mess and high oil prices, Americans are feeling the pinch. But, as the U.S economy struggles, economies and businesses worldwide are also feeling the effects. Will the Euro be the new world currency? Or will the holiday shopping season be just what the dollar needs to bounce back?
SOURCES: Al Jazeera English, Qatar; Asia Today, China; KBS News, South Korea; DW, Germany; TV5, France; Once Noticias, Mexico; NBC News, U.S.
Nov. 29, 2007
By Robert Fisk
ICH
11/29/07 “The Independent“
Haven’t we been here before? Isn’t Annapolis just a repeat of the White House lawn and the Oslo agreement, a series of pious claims and promises in which two weak men, Messrs Abbas and Olmert, even use the same words of Oslo.
“It is time for the cycle of blood, violence and occupation to end,” the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. But don’t I remember Yitzhak Rabin saying on the White House lawn that, “it is time for the cycle of blood… to end”?
Jerusalem and its place as a Palestinian and Israeli capital isn’t there. And if Israel receives acknowledgment that it is indeed an Israeli state – and in reality, of course, it is – there can be no “right of return” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled (or whose families fled) what became Israel in 1948.
And what am I to make of the following quotation from the full text of the joint document: “The steering committee will develop a joint work plan and establish and oversee the work of negotiations (sic) teams to address all issues, to be headed by one lead representative from each party.” Come again?
We went through all these steering committees before – and they never worked. True we’ve got a date of 12 December for the first session of this so-called “steering committee” and we have the faint hope from Mr Bush, embroidered, of course, with all the usual self-confidence, that we’re going to have an agreement by 2008. But how can the Palestinians have a state without a capital in Jerusalem? How can they have a state when their entire territory has been chopped up and divided by Jewish settlements and the settler roads and, in parts, by a massive war?
Yes of course, we all want an end to bloodshed in the Middle East but the Americans are going to need Syria and Iran to support this – or at least Syrian support to control Hamas – and what do we get? Bush continues to threaten Iran and Bush tells Syria in Annapolis that it must keep clear of Lebanese elections, or else…
Yes, Hizbollah is a surrogate of Iran and is playing a leading role in the opposition to the government of Lebanon. Do Bush and Condoleezza Rice (or Abbas or Olmert for that matter) really think they’re going to have a free ride for a year without the full involvement of every party in the region? More than half of the Palestinians under occupation are under the control of Hamas.
Reading the speeches – especially the joint document – it seems like an exercise in self-delusion. The Middle East is currently a hell disaster and the President of the United States thinks he is going to produce the crown jewels from a cabinet and forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran – and Pakistan, for that matter. The worst element of the whole Annapolis shindig is that once again millions of people across the Middle East – Muslims, Jews and Christians – will believe all this and will then turn – after its failure – with fury on their antagonists for breaking these agreements.
For more than two years, the Saudis have been offering Israel security and recognition by Arab states in return for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. What was wrong with that? Mr Olmert promised that “negotiations will address all the issues which thus far has been evaded”. Yet the phrase “withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories” simply doesn’t exist in the text.
Like most people who live in the Middle East, I would like to enjoy these dreams and believe they are true. But they are not. Wait for the end of 2008.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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Outside the Middle East Peace Conference (video)
11.28.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
Dandelion Salad
By Juan Cole
11/29/07 “ICH”
Not Invading and Occupying other Countries Branded ‘Isolationism’
In a new low of despicable looniness, at the Republican debate in St. Petersburg, John McCain equated those Americans who want to stop militarily occupying Iraq with Hitler-enablers. He actually said that, saying that it was ‘isolationism’ of a sort that allowed Hitler to come to power.
It gives a person a certain amount of faith in one’s fellow Americans that McCain was booed by the Republican crowd for this piece of calumny. Comparisons to Hitler should be automatic grounds for a candidate to be disqualified from being president.
But then McCain is the same person who joked about bombing Iran. He thinks that killing all those children from the air would be funny?
McCain also repeated his standard lie that Iraqis would attack the United States if US troops were withdrawn from that country. He contrasted the Vietnamese Communists, who, he said, just wanted to build their workers’ utopia in Vietnam once the US left, with Iraqis, who he continues to confuse with Usamah Bin Laden (a Saudi living far from Iraq who never had anything to do with Iraq).
Of course, back in the early 1970s, if you had asked McCain, he would have said we have to fight the Vietnamese because of the Domino effect, and if we lost there then International Communism would be in our living rooms. Now, he says the Vietnamese Communists weren’t expansionist at all, and just wanted socialism in one country.
So then, John, if that was true and there was never any danger of a domino effect, why did we sacrifice 58,000 US lives and kill a million to two million Vietnamese peasants? You just admitted we weren’t in any danger from them, even if they defeated us.
But since you were wrong about the domino effect with regard to Vietnamese Communism (which I remember arguing in a class debate as a teenager in 1967 was just a form of nationalism), how do we know you aren’t just as wrong or wronger about your fantastic Muslim domino theory? After all, international communism was a big important political movement to which many governments adhered. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand scruffy guys afraid to come out of their caves, who don’t even have good sleeping bags much less a government to their name.
McCain is so confused that he thinks Shiite Iran is supporting “al-Qaeda.” When I think that people who say these crazy things serve in the US senate and are plausible as presidents of our Republic, I despair a little. (When I see a nut job like Tancredo on the podium, he of ‘let’s nuke Mecca,’ I despair a lot, but that is a different story.)
McCain also insisted that we never lost a battle in Vietnam. He still doesn’t understand guerrilla war. What battle did the French lose in Algeria? You don’t lose a guerrilla war because you lose a conventional set piece battle. Then it would be a conventional war and not a guerrilla one. You lose it because you cannot control the country and it is too expensive in treasure and life to go on staying there.
Ron Paul was only allowed to reply briefly to McCain’s outrageous and mean-spirited diatribe. Although the transcript says he was applauded for saying that it was only natural that the Iraqis would want us out of their hair, just as we wouldn’t want somebody invading and occupying us– I heard a lot of booing in response to that point.
At another point, Paul made the point that the quiet parts of Iraq — the Shiite deep south and the Kurdistan area in the north– are the places where there are no foreign troops to speak of. Unfortunately, he forgot the name of the Kurds and seemed to get confused, so I’m not sure he got the point across.
Here is the exchange.
“McCain: . . . I just want to also say that Congressman Paul, I’ve heard him now in many debates talk about bringing our troops home, and about the war in Iraq and how it’s failed.
(Applause)
And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. We allowed…
(Applause)
We allowed …
(Audience booing)
Cooper: Allow him his answer. Allow him his answer, please.
McCain: We allowed — we allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.
(Audience booing)
And I want to tell you something, sir. I just finished having Thanksgiving with the troops, and their message to you is — the message of these brave men and women who are serving over there is, “Let us win. Let us…
(Applause)
Cooper: We will — please. We will get to Iraq…
(Applause)
All right. Let me just remind everyone that these people did take a lot of time to ask these questions, and so we do want direct questions to — the answers. We will get to Iraq later, but I do have to allow Congressman Paul 30 seconds to respond.
Paul: Absolutely. The real question you have to ask is why do I get the most money from active duty officers and military personnel?
(Applause)
What John is saying is just totally distorted.
(Protester shouts off-mike)
Paul: He doesn’t even understand the difference between non- intervention and isolationism. I’m not an isolationism, (shakes head) em, isolationist. I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel. But I don’t want to send troops overseas using force to tell them how to live. We would object to it here and they’re going to object to us over there.
(Applause)”
The rest is here. This is what Ron Paul said about Iraq:
“Paul: The best commitment we can make to the Iraqi people is to give them their country back. That’s the most important thing that we can do.
(Applause)
Already, part of their country has been taken back. In the south, they claim the surge has worked, but the surge really hasn’t worked. There’s less violence, but al-Sadr has essentially won in the south.
The British are leaving. The brigade of Al Sadr now is in charge, so they are getting their country back. They’re in charge up north — the Shia — the people in the north are in charge, as well, and there’s no violence up there or nearly as much.
So, let the people have their country back again. Just think of the cleaning up of the mess after we left Vietnam. Vietnam now is a friend of ours — we trade with them, the president comes here.
What we achieved in peace was unachievable in 20 years of the French and the Americans being in Vietnam.
So it’s time for us to take care of America first.
(Applause)”
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute. Visit his website http://www.juancole.com/
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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All of Ron Paul’s replies at YouTube Debate (video)
YouTube Rep Debate (videos) + Who Won the Debate Poll?
Debate: Ron Paul & John McCain Get Into It On The War (video)
After the Rep Debate: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell + Ron Paul VP Question (videos)
By Mike Whitney
11/29/07 “ICH”
The United States is on its way to losing the war in Afghanistan. The eventual defeat will be political not military. Public sentiment is shifting in Europe. The people have had enough. They want to get out. When European troops withdrawal from Afghanistan; NATO will gradually unravel and the Transatlantic Alliance will collapse. That will be a disaster for America. The US will again be isolated by two great oceans. But not by choice. America’s days as an empire will be over.
That’s why the US perseveres in Afghanistan even though there is nothing to gain. Pipelines corridors will continue to be blocked by enemy fighters for the foreseeable future. The guerrilla war will intensify. American fatalities will mount. Political opposition at home will grow.
The Taliban can’t be beaten. They’ve already taken over more than half the country and they are steadily advancing on the Capital. By next spring, there’ll be fighting in the neighborhoods of Kabul, just like there is now in Baghdad. American troops will be barricaded in little Greenzones spread across the countryside. Karzai will be locked away in the Presidential Palace surrounded by American mercenaries. There’ll be no more foolish talk about “democracy” and “women’s rights”. The air war will escalate causing more and more civilian casualties. Protests will break out in the cities and tribal leaders will call for an end to the occupation. Politicians in Germany and France will demand a timetable for withdrawal. Most of these things are already happening.
There’s no policy in Afghanistan and there never has been. Reconstruction is a myth and security is non-existent. The country is a failed, narco-state governed by warlords and drug kingpins. Women are nearly as bad off as under the Taliban.
“Every month dozens of women commit self-immolation to end their desolation,” says Afghan Parliament member, Malalai Joya. Bush didn’t invade Afghanistan to liberate women anyway. It was all a hoax. Bush believed that Taliban would recognize America’s superior firepower and run for the hills. They did. But now they’re back. And the tide has turned. The Taliban have regrouped, filled their ranks with new recruits, and now they’re stronger than ever. Morale is high. The world’s best-equipped, high-tech war machine is being beaten by a ragtag collection of medieval-minded fundamentalists armed with muskets and sabers. It’s a bigger fiasco than Iraq.
The war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, is a failure of ideology. The Bush Doctrine, the National Security Strategy, and the New World Order are all in ruins. The apologists for “preemption” on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal have suddenly fallen silent. They’ve lost their voice. The bravado and chest-thumping has stopped. The Afghan resistance has succeeded where Congress, the UN and 10 million protesters failed. They stopped Bush’s army in its tracks. In time, the Americans will leave as did the Russians before them. The war is lost.
Democracy doesn’t come from the barrel of an M-16 and it can’t be dropped from 30,000 ft like a Daisy Cutter. The Bush war in Afghanistan has brought only suffering and devastation. Thousands have been killed or displaced. Vast swathes of the countryside have been contaminated with radioactive dust that collects in clouds and sweeps across the interior-plains poisoning the groundwater and spreading cancer; another tragic memento of the US occupation that will last for decades.
Afghanistan was supposed to be “the Good War”. Originally, 95% of the American people supported the invasion as the proper response to the attacks of September 11. Liberals and conservatives alike joined the rush to war. The world needed to see America’s iron-fisted wrath. It was “payback time”.
Tariq Ali called it, “A crude war of revenge”. He was right.
The buildup to the war was all glitz and showmanship; a real public relations extravaganza. The media unfurled the flags and pounded the war drums every day until the Bombay-doors opened and the plumes of black smoke began rising everywhere across Afghanistan.
Bush promised to bring them back “Dead or Alive”. We were going to “smoke them out of their caves”.
No one talks about caves anymore-or smoke. The pre-war zeal is gone. Vanished. The “hearts and minds” campaign is lost, too.
“The American war on terror is a mockery and so is the US support of the present government in Afghanistan which is dominated by Northern Alliance terrorists,” says Malalai Joya.
“Far more civilians have been killed by the US military in Afghanistan than were killed in the US in the tragedy of September 11. More Afghan civilians have been killed by the US than were ever killed by the Taliban…..The US should withdrawal as soon as possible. We need liberation not occupation.” (“The War on Terror is a Mockery”, Elsa Rassbach, Z Magazine Nov 2007)
The Bush administration has reneged on every commitment it made to the Afghan people. There was never any attempt to provide security beyond the capital. Never. The US handed over the countryside to the warlords who run their fiefdoms like Mafia Dons. There’s no freedom. There’s no safety. There’s no rule of law. It’s all a fabrication—another made-for-TV invasion that’s 99% fiction.
Last week the Senlis Council released a report saying that, “Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis in which millions face severe hardship comparable with sub-Saharan Africa”.The vast majority of Afghans are still living in grinding poverty exacerbated by the constant threat of violence. Civilian casualties are soaring and the “The security situation has reached crisis proportion.”
The Senlis Report adds that the Taliban are “gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change.”
The US has worn out its welcome. A number of independent journalists confirm that the Taliban has garnered substantial support in the South from disenchanted Afghans who’re tired of the broken promises, the lack of employment and reconstruction, and the random bombing of innocent civilians.
Last year,there were four times as many air strikes by international forces in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The rising death toll has shocked the public and turned the people against the occupying army. On Monday, 14 engineers and laborers were killed by NATO air strikes in Nuristan Province. The workers, WHO WERE HIRED BY THE US MILITARY TO BUILD A ROAD THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS WERE SLEEPING IN THEIR TENTS WHEN THEY WERE KILLED.
“All of our workers have been killed”, said Sayed Jalili. (UK Guardian)
And so it goes. The US is steadily losing its grip while the tidal wave of resistance continues to grow. Another year of frustration, and the European allies will “pack it in”. NATO be damned.
Tariq Ali explained why the United States would eventually fail in Afghanistan in a recent interview with Sherry Wolf of the Socialist Worker:
“Far from being a “good war”, Afghanistan is turning out to be a nasty, unpleasant war, and there’s no way the US or other Western forces are going to be able to stay there for too long….The situation is a total mess. The US can never win that war, and the main reason is that the Afghans don’t like being occupied. They kicked out the British in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th century, and , now, they’re fighting against the US and its NATO allies.” (“Afghanistan Today: six years of a war on Terror, Sherry Wolf, znet)
They don’t like being occupied. So leave.
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From an email as I can’t get to Greg Palast’s website right now. ~ Lo
Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million
by Greg Palast
For the Guardian On Line
It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.
Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the “businessman” was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London.
Today, Brown’s foes are calling for Mendelsohn’s resignation as chief fundraiser of the Labour Party for his admitted knowledge of £630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour.
What’s odd here are the protestations of shock at the behavior of Mendelsohn, described in the Guardian as an “ethical” lobbyist. “Ethical” my arse.
It was exactly nine years ago that Mendelsohn and his lobby firm partners were caught trading cash for access. How this Mendelsohn character ended up heading Labour Party fundraising and how he obtained the sobriquet ‘ethical’ is the real shocker.
I know a few things about this Mendelsohn. The “businessman” with the hidden recorder was me. In June 1998, joined by my recorder and a real US businessman, Mark Swedlund, who designed my elaborate corporate front, I met Mr. Mendelsohn at his tony Soho London office. There Mendelsohn confirmed what was already on tape from his partners in the lobby firm he founded, LLM.
I explained my corporate needs: some environmental rules needed bending. I hinted I was with Enron. Mendelsohn’s partner Neil Lawson told my recorder that, if I paid LLM £5,000 to £20,000 per month, “We can go to anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” Brown was at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Could the lobbyist provide concrete examples of a fix?
Easily. Here is a short list of LLM claimed accomplishments:
– Inside information on then-Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budgets.
– Tax avoided by a supermarket chain following millions donated to a New Labour pet project.
– A pass on anti-trust action against client Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
– And for Gordon Brown, a favor that the Mendelsohn team expected to redeem.
Tesco Goes Tax-Free
LLM, which stands for the founders Lucas, Neil Lawson and Mendelsohn, were about to derail Brown’s plan for a tax on car parks (”parking lots” as we say in the States). This would cost Tesco, the supermarket chain, an LLM client, £20 million annually. LLM was holding secret meetings that week in June 1998 with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit to get Tesco exempted from the proposed tax.
The tax threat went away after LLM advised Tesco to drop £11 million into funding for Blair’s odd Millennium Dome project.
[To my US readers: The Dome is a gargantuan tent costing $100 million – no kidding.]
“This government likes to do deals,” Lucas told me.
But this deal was complex, Mendelsohn said, not so simple as cash paid for a tax break. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as ‘green’,” Mendelsohn explained to me and my confederate. “Everything has to be couched in environmental language – even if it’s slightly Orwellian.” So LLM devised a set of cockamamie gimmicks for Tesco, like offering bus services to the elderly, which would paint the retailer green.
It worked. Tesco was spared the tax – though the company denies categorically that its cash dumped into the Dome bought any favors.
Message for Murdoch
The year of my paper’s original investigation (dubbed, “Lobbygate”), anti-trust authorities were looking into Rupert Murdoch’s companies’ alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street, according to Lucas, that, if Murdoch’s tabloids toned down criticism of new antitrust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation. On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union-recognition bill.
The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture” – journalists being a trying lot. However, the outcome pleased LLM clientele.
A Peek at the Budget
It also happened that on one of the days I recorded Mendelsohn’s partners, they boasted of informing an LLM client about details of Gordon Brown’s budget plans before the Chancellor’s announcement went public.
A lobbyist competing for my “business,” when asked to match the offer of inside information and deal-making held out by LLM and another New Labour firm said, “It’s appalling. It’s disturbing,” and added that he would refuse to match LLM’s services at any price.
If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest – a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).
Whether Mendelsohn, Lawson and Lucas actually pulled off all they claimed, I can’t say. Though just kids in their twenties, LLM had garnered millions in revenue, a lot of loot if for mere advice. No one seriously investigated; no one asked uncomfortable questions of Mr. Brown, Mr. Blair or the man at the center of several of these supposed “deals,” Mr. Peter Mandelson, now an EU Commissioner.
However, that Mendelsohn made these tawdry claims (or grinned at me while his partner made them), and that they were published on page one of every newspaper in the realm – part of an LLM tape broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight – one would think that perspicacious Mr. Brown would have avoided Mendelsohn like the plague.
But the PM embraced Mr. Let’s-Make-A-Deal. The reason was made clear to me by Mendelsohn himself, a man as brainy as he is cynical and wealthy. Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.
Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” – which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”
And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”
So why demand Mendelsohn’s head now? Gordon Brown is a prudent man whom, I suspect, reads a newspaper or two – and knew exactly whom he had positioned to fill his party’s coin sacks. Mendelsohn is just a gun for hire, a forgettable factotum. I wouldn’t place the blame on the hired gun, but on the man whose finger is on the trigger.
The series “Lobbygate: Cash for Access” was originally published by The Observer (UK) in July 1998 by Greg Palast and Antony Barnett. For a complete history of the scandal, read, “Blair and the Sale of Britain” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Constable & Robinson 2004). Excerpt at www.GregPalast.com
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
While representatives of countries from all around the world met at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, groups of their constituents gathered outside the gates and held forth with their own positions that demonstrated the complexity of the peace process.
see
11.28.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
Warning
.
This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Selected Episode
Nov. 28, 2007
Added: November 29, 2007
see
11.27.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
Al Jazeera: Annapolis: Middle East peace deal (videos)
Annapolis Statement: “Palestinian Bantustan” by Francis A. Boyle
Bush at the Middle East Peace Summit (videos; updated)
Separate but unequal in Palestine: The road to apartheid by Mohammed Khatib
Exclusive audio: Kucinich considers GOP Ron Paul as his running mate
by Sabrina Eaton
Plain Dealer Washington Bureau
November 28, 2007 12:10PM
Thursday November 29th, 2007
Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York. He has taught at Yale Law School, lectured at Columbia Law School, and was President of the National Lawyers Guild.
see
by Guy Charron
Global Research, November 29, 2007
WSWS.org – 2007-11-28
On November 15 Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that it would not hear an appeal for refugee status by two US soldiers who, in government-military parlance, “deserted,” rather than participate in the US’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The two conscientious objectors, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, contested the decision of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRBC), later confirmed by two lower level federal courts, to reject their application for political asylum based on the illegality of the Iraq War.
Hinzman arrived in Canada in 2004 after his request for conscientious objector status was twice refused by the US Army and after learning that his battalion would be sent to Iraq.
Hinzman left no doubt as to the political nature of his actions. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction,” Hinzman declared. “They haven’t found any. They said Iraq was linked to international terrorist organizations. There haven’t been any links.”
“This was a criminal war. Any act of violence in an unjustified conflict is an atrocity.”
According to those who have studied the US military justice system, persons prosecuted for desertion—as Hinzman and Hughey will be if they are deported from Canada—usually receive prison sentences on the order of five years. But the charge of desertion carries a possible death sentence.
The previous Liberal government of Paul Martin argued before the IRBC that the legality or illegality of the war could not be used as an argument in making a claim for political asylum (refugee status). The pretext used by the government was that only the International Court of Justice at the Hague has the authority and the jurisdiction to hear arguments concerning the legality of the war.
The IRBC quickly embraced the Canadian government’s arguments and refused to admit any evidence bearing on the war’s legality at Hinzman’s refugee hearing. Subsequently, the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision to disallow Hinzman and Hughey from arguing that the Iraq war was illegal. And on this basis, the Canadian state has concluded that the two men are not at risk of “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment” for their political views and has denied them political asylum.
Habitually Canada’s Supreme Court provides no explanations when refusing to hear a case and it followed this course when it announced that it would not hear Hinzman’s and Hughey’s appeal.
The Supreme Court decision will have an immediate effect on some forty other US soldiers who have sought political refugee status in Canada and an estimated 200 others who have fled to Canada but not formally applied for refugee status.
Unless the Canadian government gives them special permission to stay in Canada—an improbable scenario given the close ties between the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Bush administration—Hinzman and Hughey and the other war resisters will be turned over to US authorities and tried for the crime of desertion because they refused to participate in the Bush administration’s illegal Iraq war.
In justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration concocted a new and patently illegal doctrine of “preventive war,” under which the US gave itself the right to attack a state if it believed it could constitute a threat to the US at some point in the future. As for the various justifications Washington gave for the war, from weapons of mass destruction to the reputed ties of the regime of Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda, they have all been exposed as lies.
The war has, moreover, resulted in untold violence and countless atrocities. According to studies by reputable agencies, the war and the accompanying destruction of Iraq society have caused the death of over one million Iraqis and the flight of millions of people from their homes and Iraq altogether.
If the Canadian government intervened in the Hinzman and Hughey cases to prevent their raising the illegality of the war, it wasn’t just to save the Bush administration from embarrassment. Ottawa feared Canada would become a haven for “war resisters” and a pole of resistance to the war. Given a different decision on Hinzman’s and Hughey’s refugee claim, thousands more might well have joined them.
According to the Pentagon’s own figures, most likely underestimated, desertion is a growing phenomenon. The US army admits that 4,700 soldiers deserted in 2006 alone, an increase of over 40 percent compared to 3,300 soldiers in 2005, and up by 80 percent compared to 2003. These figures do not include personnel from the Air Force, Navy, or the Marines. (See: US Army reports rising desertion rates)
The attitude of the Canadian government and state to the Iraqi war resisters is in sharp contrast to that which it adopted in the 1960s and early 1970s during the Vietnam War. Then some 50,000 young Americans fled the military or obligatory conscription and were given refuge in Canada.
If the decision of the Supreme Court did not hit the front pages, neither did it pass unnoticed. It was the object of articles in daily papers all over the world.
In sanctioning Hinzman’s and Hughey’s deportation and refusing to allow them to challenge the legality of the Iraq War, Canada’s highest court has officially adopted the credo of “might makes right,” tacitly affirming the legitimacy of the Iraq war and more generally wars of aggression.
The court’s decision and the Canadian government’s intervention in the war-resister case underline the fact that the Canadian state’s attitude towards international law is entirely self-interested and subordinated to the protection of the Canadian elite’s own interests. When international law comes into conflict with the Canadian government’s and state’s perceived needs, it is simply put aside without further ado.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Canadian ruling class judged that its interests lay in signing agreements and declarations to the effect that soldiers had an obligation to refuse “illegal” orders, if these went contrary to international law. The Supreme Court has effectively announced that these signatures are not worth the paper they are printed upon.
All major sections of the Canadian elite support the immigration-judicial establishment’s decision to refuse political refugee status to soldiers opposing US army orders, notwithstanding that doing so would make them complicit in war crimes. Since the beginning of this affair, newspaper editorials have portrayed Hinzman and the other soldiers as “deserters, not refugees.” It was the Liberal government of Paul Martin that intervened in Hinzman’s case to prevent him from arguing the war was illegal and this month’s refusal of the Supreme Court to hear the war resisters’ appeal was no doubt toasted in private by the Conservative government. Harper, it should be recalled, chastised the then Liberal government for refusing, at the eleventh-hour, to have the Canadian military join the US-led invasion of Iraq, because it had not been endorsed by the UN or even the US’s traditional allies.
There are two principal reasons for the Canadian elite’s rallying behind the US over the war-resister issue.
Big business fears Canada may be branded as insufficiently supportive of Washington’s wars of conquest and that this could jeopardize its access to the US market upon which 40 percent of the Canadian economy is dependent.
Secondly, Canada is involved in its own imperialist adventures, having deployed the Canadian army to Afghanistan in its biggest offensive role since the Korean War of the early 1950s. The Afghan war is greatly unpopular at home and the Canadian elite does not want to lend any legitimacy to the US war resisters for fear that their example might help give rise to a similar phenomenon in the Canadian military.
There is no question that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is implicated in war crimes in Afghanistan.
The CAF has declared that the Geneva Convention articles do not apply in Afghanistan. Recently two further government documents have come to light that show that the Canadian government knew that prisoners turned over to Afghan security forces by the CAF had been or were likely to be abused and tortured. The CAF has been regularly implicated in the murder of civilians, both by calling in air strikes and by shooting at unarmed civilians in and around Kandahar.
In Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers are paying a “blood price” so that the Canadian ruling class can be, to use the words of the CAF Chief of Staff Rick Hillier, “respected” in international bodies like NATO and so that it can “influence and shape regions and populations in accordance with our interests.”
Global Research Articles by Guy Charron
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Guy Charron, WSWS.org, 2007
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7486
Originally posted: November 27, 2007 @ 12:55
Updated: Nov. 29, 2007
Added guest speakers to the schedule.
(from an email)
Nov. 27, 2007
Please join us for “A Dialogue for Democracy” on Thursday November 29th between the hours of 11AM -1:00PM and 5PM – 9:00PM EST on www.KucinichTV.Com.
Dennis Kucnich will be holding a virtual Town Hall meeting on the importance of defending the constitution.
Thursday November 29th, 2007
KucinichTV Schedule for “A Dialogue for Democracy”
Among some of the highlights, Dennis will be talking with Melissa Etheridge about LGBTQ Issues, Cindy Sheehan and actress Frances Fisher (Titanic, Valley of Elah) about Peace, and Reverend Michael Beckwith about spirituality.
Schedule for Dialogue for Democracy
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