So This Is What Victory Looks Like?
By Scott Ritter
July 08, 2009 "Truthdig" -- JULY 07, 2009 --- Fireworks lit up the Baghdad sky on the evening of June 30th, signaling the advent of “National Sovereignty Day.” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared the new holiday to commemorate the withdrawal of American combat troops from the Iraqi capital and all other major urban centers, although thousands of “advisers” would remain in the cities, embedded with Iraqi forces. The celebration transpired inside a city that has been radically transformed over the past six years. Even with American combat forces ostensibly withdrawn, Baghdad remains one of the most militarized urban areas in the world. It wasn’t always so. When I was in Baghdad during the 1990s, I was struck by the lack of an overt military presence for a nation purported to be governed by one of the world’s worst militaristic dictatorships.
Of course, in the city areas housing Saddam Hussein, his family and inner circle, and the seat of government, one would see green-clad soldiers of the Special Republican Guard standing watch over the gates controlling access into and out of these islands of power and privilege. But in the rest of the city—the vast majority of the city—there was no military presence. Traffic police stood on little islands in the middle of busy intersections, keeping the bustle of a modern city moving along at a brisk pace. There were soldiers in uniform around, but they carried no weapons, being on leave from their duties in Iraq’s conscript military. Just like their fellow servicemen in other cities around the world, they would enjoy a day or two walking the streets and markets of Baghdad, taking in the sights and sounds, grabbing a glass of tea, a quick meal and the sight of pretty girls neatly attired in Western-style dress.
Let there be no doubt, Iraq was a police state, and the streets of the city were also filled with agents and informers of the regime, quick to detect any hint of rebellion or insurrection. Telephone calls were listened in on and conversations illicitly recorded in the hope of finding evidence of dissent. And when dissent was found, the forces of repression would mobilize quickly to crush it—secret police and paramilitary forces for small incidents, and the battalions of Special Republican Guard for larger threats. But Baghdad, like Mosul and other major cities, was also a place where someone—whether resident, visitor or even U.N. weapons inspector—could leave his or her home or workplace in the evening and travel freely without fear of endless roadblocks, checkpoints, car bombs and firefights.
One could take in a street market in what was then known as Saddam City (today we call it Sadr City), the Shiite-dominated neighborhood in the northeast corner of Baghdad. Or grab a kebab in Karrada, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in the center of town. Or visit the shopping districts of Monsouriyah, or tour the gold-domed mosques in Khadamiyah (Shiite) or across the Tigris River in Adamiyah (Sunni). The quality of the Baghdad-Iraq experience fluctuated given the state of the economy (U.N. sanctions crippled Iraq from 1991 until 1996, when the controversial oil-for-food program breathed new life into what had become a stagnant existence). But whether the shelves in a given shop were full or empty, one thing remained constant—Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq functioned in a manner more in keeping with the open societies of Europe, and less like the municipality under siege that exists today.
Baghdad survives now as a city defined not by its thousands of years of history, but rather segregation brought on by policies of deliberate ethnic cleansing. The city is now a checkerboard of neighborhoods walled off from one another by giant concrete-block dividers installed by American troops in an effort to keep Iraqis from killing one another, a phenomenon born from ethnic and religious differences which have violently come to a head in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Once we get beyond the pageantry and spectacle of the deception that is taking place in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities “formerly” occupied by U.S. troops, the pretense of progress is difficult to sustain.
Iraqi soldiers, primarily Shiite troops loyal to the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister al-Maliki, are everywhere. They man checkpoints and mini-garrisons throughout the city and constantly patrol streets and neighborhoods which function less as communities and more like tiny feudal fiefdoms. Militias, like street gangs in Western ghettos, lurk inside every walled-off zone, sometimes working with the Iraqi military, sometimes working against it. To attempt to move from zone to zone today is an exercise in futility and frustration, as well as a flagrant temptation of fate. Sunni and Shiite, Arabs and Kurds, Christians and Muslims—all used to be able to mingle freely in the streets of Baghdad. Today these diverse elements are segregated from one another, their daily existence dictated by a kill-or-be-killed mentality that manifests itself in violence and a growing diaspora of Iraqi refugees no longer able to sustain life in a city they once called home.
Many in the West continue to delude themselves into seeing progress—and therefore “victory”—when in fact the situation in Iraq has only regressed. It is in vogue for Western journalists, pundits and government officials to compare and contrast conditions in Baghdad today with those that existed in 2007, when the U.S. began its “surge” of military forces into the urban areas of Iraq in an effort to quell violence that had reached epidemic proportions. There is no debate over the fact that the level of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere throughout Iraq has dropped dramatically since the surge was instituted. But the cost paid by Iraqi society, shredded by ethnic cleansing and segregation, raises the question of whether or not the alleged “cure” is any better than the “disease” it purports to address. One thing is certain: Iraq remains a very sick patient. The U.S., in designing a surge that addressed only the most visible symptoms of the problems which ravage Iraq in the post-Saddam era, has created a false sense of accomplishment when in fact the underlying conditions that caused the violence prior to the surge still exist. It’s like a cancer temporarily stunned into remission by a drug that weakened the body and now is being withdrawn without actually curing anything. The Shiite-Sunni schism has only worsened, and there is increasing risk that the Arab-Kurd disagreement over oil rights will escalate from a war of words into something more violent.
The absolute failure of the surge is even more evident when one considers conditions inside Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003. There is simply no serious benchmark by which one can make a viable argument for improvement. Even the Bush administration stopped the pretense that we had brought democracy to the country. Stability is now the term of choice, and when one compares the situation in Iraq circa February 2003 to today, the facts scream out loud and clear that Iraq is far more unstable in its present condition than when governed by Saddam Hussein.
Take oil, the commodity that was going to pay for the invasion and guarantee the political and economic future of Iraq. Not only is the Iraqi government divided on how to move forward with a new legal framework designed to encourage foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, but the billions of dollars already spent on Iraq’s oil industry since the U.S. invasion have actually produced less oil per day than when Saddam was in power—and one must keep in mind that Saddam’s Iraq suffered under crushing economic sanctions.
The number of Iraqi refugees has more than quadrupled since the invasion. Some 500,000 Iraqis had fled the abuses of the Saddam regime, while today more than 2 million Iraqis have been compelled to leave the country as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation. Another 2 million have been forced from their homes and are internally displaced.
Unemployment is rampant. Iraq’s health care system is in tatters, as is its education system. But apparently these figures are meaningless in the face of the one major statistic the Twitter-crazed Western media seems to have fallen in love with: There are nearly 18 million cell phones in use in Iraq today, up from a mere 80,000 when Saddam Hussein governed. The fact that most of these phones operate with intermittent or nonexistent service is irrelevant. Iraq has cell phone coverage. God Bless America.
It is wishful thinking to believe that the Iraqi military and paramilitary forces under the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki will be able to hold the ruins of Iraqi society together without major U.S. intervention. The sad reality is not only that Baghdad is a far more militarized city today than at any time under Saddam Hussein, but the United States has assumed the role of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard. American soldiers are now an iron fist lurking on the edges of the city, waiting to be called in to crush any sign of rebellion or insurrection. That our role has so readily transformed from liberator to occupier should come as a surprise to no one.
In 1999 I warned Americans that a war between Iraq and the United States would appear on the surface to be deceptively easy. I predicted that a force of no more than 250,000 troops (we actually did it with less—about 200,000 troops deployed either in Iraq or in theater) would require less than a month (the U.S.-led attack began on March 19, and Baghdad was occupied on April 9), and would result in relatively few casualties (139 American military personnel died in action from March 20 through May 1, 2003). The easy part, I noted, would be getting rid of Saddam Hussein. The hard part would be securing victory in the aftermath of Saddam’s demise. And this task, I warned, would be made even harder, indeed virtually impossible, by the fact that the U.S.-led invasion would lack any justification under international law, especially if a case for war were to be cobbled together using U.N. weapons inspections and Iraqi WMD as an excuse. The U.S. did invade, and the rest is history.
The incompetence, corruption and futility of the U.S. occupation of Iraq are matters of record. America has failed in Iraq, a fact many Americans recognized when they voted for change in 2008 by electing Barack Obama over John McCain. And yet today these same Americans appear to be as self-deceiving as those who supported George W. Bush’s attempts to spin the tragedy of the American experience in Iraq as something noble and worthy of support. To date, the war in Iraq has cost more than 4,300 American service members their lives. Tens of thousands more have been physically wounded or permanently scarred by the psychological horror of participating in the Iraqi conflict. We’ve stopped seriously trying to count the number of Iraqi dead, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to more than a million.
Even before the U.S. “withdrawal” from Baghdad, acts of violence in that city and elsewhere were on the rise. There is little doubt that the many Iraqi enemies of the government of al-Maliki will soon try to flex their muscle. Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is all but assured. Some Iraqi military units will, at least initially, perform well; others will not. Neighborhoods once secured by U.S. occupiers will fall out of the control of central Iraqi authority. The more the Iraqi military tries to suppress this dissent, the more the dissent will grow. Though major U.S. combat forces are currently out of Baghdad, there is little doubt that there will soon be a call for their return, in force, either to respond to an ambush of a U.S. convoy supplying the American Embassy enclave in central Baghdad or to bail out the Iraqi military when it fumbles its effort to suppress the opponents of the government.
Iraq, for President Obama and his military leaders, is a lose-lose situation. There is no path toward military victory there today. With American forces out of the major urban areas of Iraq, the next step for Obama is to complete the planned withdrawal on schedule, with most U.S. forces leaving Iraq in 2010. This will be impossible to accomplish if America finds itself sucked back into the urban centers of the country to maintain the false perception of stability created through the surge.
The biggest challenge in Iraq facing the Obama administration is not to fall victim to the need to be seen as victorious. Victory today can be measured only in terms of mitigating the consequences of failure. There will be no “Battleship Missouri moment,” with the forces of a defeated Iraqi insurgency lined up to formally surrender. Instead, America will have to deal with the reality that, no matter how we spin facts, President Bush’s ill-advised Iraqi adventure has ended in defeat. Whether this defeat is memorialized with imagery reminiscent of the U.S. retreat from Saigon, with helicopters pulling the last occupiers from the roofs of the American Embassy in Baghdad (unlikely), or repeats the pathos of the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, with a convoy of American troops crossing over into Kuwait in orderly fashion (more likely), there is no victory to be had in the classic sense.
In one of the last patrols conducted by U.S. forces before the formal withdrawal from Baghdad, four American soldiers lost their lives. The patrol itself was wholly symbolic—a show of force and will at a time when every military reason for the patrol had ceased to exist—a tragic yet fitting analogy for the entire U.S. military presence in Iraq. No more American troops need to die, or be physically or psychologically maimed, participating in futile “last patrols” designed to salvage the reputations of politicians. There are those who will argue for sustaining the failed military misadventure in Iraq out of a misplaced sense of national pride and honor. President Obama must confront his own ego and hubris and accept the fact that in order to secure a lasting legacy as a peacemaker he will need to ride out the short-term criticism.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
An open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama / A golden opportunity to accomplish the mission.
Monday, 04 May 2009
An open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama / A golden opportunity to accomplish the mission.
Praise be to Allah, Peace and prayers upon our Prophet Mohammed and all the prophets, after all:
A group of Americans created a myth named “terror” and have changed and applied its meaning whenever they so desire. They planned their corrupt war on Iraq based on lies and fallacies in order to assert control over the sources of energy and maintain the security of Israel according to the Greater Middle East plan. This has put America in a serious and difficult situation, and the results are:
On Iraq:
Turned a country known for its’ peaceful coexistence between citizens, scientific progress, absence of illiteracy, free health care and free education; to a divided, scary, and backward country. The occupation and sectarian militias killed 4% of the Iraqi people, made 8% of Iraqi women widows, orphaned 16% of Iraqi children, abandoned 15% and detained more than 2%. 40% of the professors left the country, 84% of the universities were looted and the illiteracy rate has reached 30%. About 76% of Iraqis do not have healthy water, 54% of households are living in poverty and unemployment has exceeded 50%. With the current level of government corruption, Iraq is now at the top of the list of most corrupt government administrations in the whole world. The environment was destroyed and Iraq has became a country which depends on imports as it does not produce anything. Drugs are widespread across the streets after Bush's democracy, while prior to the invasion Iraq was a drug free country. The security situation has continually deteriorated, kidnappings and extortion has spread. All of this was aimed at destroying the social relations between Iraq’s ethnic groups and changing its demographics and population ratios. As an example the percentage of Sunni Arabs is at least 42% but centers in America infiltrated by Chalabi and others loyal to Iran passed a lie that the percentage of Sunni Arabs is 20%. So what did they want to do with the rest of the sunni arab ?,The percentage of Sunni Arabs in the state institutions was limited to 6%!
The Bush administration dissolved the army and replaced it with corrupted sectarian troops and security services which do not adhere to the professional nature of their work. They also imposed a distorted constitution to disrupt the country and disperse its people. They dissolved the state’s institutions and established a political process that has produced a sectarian government loyal to Iran, following its orders with some of its leaders having Iranian origins and loyalties. In this dark political environment Maliki combines dictatorship with sectarian intolerance. He publicly claims reconciliation but keeps being an Authoritarian and in the shadows his sectarian militias, some of which he was leading commit the most heinous crimes with the blessing of U.S. troops. He then puts them under government cover to gloss over their past crimes and facilitates them to commit more crimes in a formal capacity. So today the Iranian project is proceeding with Sunni bloodshed, codified within the laws of the State and protected by government troops.
The human rights situation has reached the worst proportions with torture becoming a systematic, normal procedure for the occupation and its government. The horrible prisons both known and unknown are filled with innocent people who were taken in with treachery, which is forbidden in all sects, policies and laws, and some of them have spent years without charge or trial, while others have died or were killed under torture in Iraqi and American prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Jadriya; these are some of the results of the evil occupation.
On America:
The Unipolarity which America worked for decades to achieve has collapsed, and it has lost its position in the world. Its economy has slumped and fallen into the trap of financial crisis; its repercussions that will last for a long time. Some countries revolted against America and it was not able to support its allies. It has wasted huge amounts of taxpayers money which would have been more sensibly spent on scientific programs, human security, world peace and the preservation of the environment. Billions of reconstruction funds were stolen in the largest fraud of the modern era with coordination between the leaders of the Green Zone and the large American companies which specialize in occupying countries, and bringing down regimes; all to keep the wealth flowing into the pockets of those warlords and vampires.
The number of deaths suffered by the occupation troops has exceeded forty thousand and the number of injured has exceeded ninety thousand; and those who survived were not able to survive the wounds of madness, mental disorder and the types of diseases that has result to committing suicide. This outcome was not recorded by the U.S. Army before, It’s really a terrible situation.
Still America’s national security is threatened, the world has more fear and panic, and explosions happen everywhere, increasing day by day. The interests of America made as appeals to states and individuals, have shown America stumbling in its policies, starting from Afghanistan to Darfur, Iran ,Pakistan, Iraq and Palestine. Bushs' allies were defeated in both the House of Representatives and Senate elections and ultimately in the Presidential elections. The attacks of the resistance were the reason behind this as the American people chose to vote and support policies of withdrawal and change.
Master of the White House:
The arrogance and stupidity of the previous administration whose president announced on this day in the first year of occupation that “Mission Accomplished”, gave Iran influence that may enable it to dominate oil resources without the loss of a single dollar or firing a single bullet. It must change, and dealing effectively with the "Iraqi quagmire" should not be done with patchwork and short term solutions, but with changing the American policy in Iraq. The most important solution to the great mistakes committed by the Bush administration is the reversal of the current "ethnic sectarian" political process, and leaving the leadership of the country to its loyal sons, and note that your own advisers and assistants see that the political process in Iraq since April 2003 is completely wrong and can not be repaired or patched up and that the best solution lies in its complete abolition. Worrying from that procedure is untrue, and those who defended their religion, country and the rights of their people are the ones who own the right to decide the fate of their country, not those who shared in the destruction of the country and killing of its people.
The first decade of this century witnessed a huge reversal in the values of humanity and exposed the falsehood of what the Americans themselves call for in their literature and speeches. America acquired the hatred of the nations of the eastern and the western world, and what the CIA gained from illegal and secret operations like kidnapping civilians, torturing detainees, spying on people, involvement in scandals contrary to law and morality, and drug trafficking in cooperation with the gangs that produce them, has caused a revival in the cultivation of cannabis to increase seven folds in Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation. All the aforementioned problems show the great corruption in the most important system you have, where the officials took advantage from their position in (countering terrorism) and (reconstruction) and other cases, overlooked American laws and human morality, and smeared their institutions through the spilling of blood, and the commitment of sins and crimes. Although a positive step along this route was gained from the recent announcement of abolishing torture in interrogations, changing the name of "fighting terrorism" and seeking to close down Guantanamo Bay prison; we hope that this will begin a change for truth and substance and not just in name and form only.
There should be as a follow-up the files of CIA ,torture ,the abuses of human rights and the stolen funds; all of which should affect the U.S. and Iraqis officials alike, and what the Minister of Justice recently announced is a step in the right direction.
We believe that the justice of Almighty Allah is going to pursue the criminals and they will not escape from the punishment in this life nor in the hereafter. We believe that the more injustices you have, the greatest of Almighty Allah's wrath and wrath of his worshipers. Also we believe that the end of the powerful nations comes when they reach the peak of injustice and tyranny. Do you like that Muslims face you with this? Where Almighty Allah is their helper especially in these times where the nation prepared for Jihad and to fight the assassins, and when the righteous and the servants of Allah are obedient; the heroes who experienced terrible warfare took over the leadership of Jihad and they are on the rise, whom the messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) promised them that they will still have the victory till the Day of Resurrection. In the nation there are those righteous ones whom Allah listens to their prayers, and doesn’t ignore their requests and shows anger for their anger and is pleased with their satisfaction, so can you feel secure that those oppressed gain retaliation from the God of all creatures who help the oppressed and accept his prayer and promise to gain him the victory no matter how long it takes? However, if we see goodness from the American people we will treat them well, otherwise who have been oppressed Allah will make him victorious.
Master of the White House:
Islam, our religion, gives everyone their rights, forbids all kinds of injustice, ensures justice for all human beings and aims to disseminate good virtues and ethics ,and the achievement of human security and peace for all people. This same religion necessitated us to resist the occupation by all legitimate and possible means and tofaceany attempt to eliminate our presence, deform our identity, rob our wealth or waste our rights. So we defend our religion and country by doing our legitimate duty and exercising our legal rights, and we consider this a great and noble honor. We all reject the designation of the resistance fighters as terrorists, because the terrorist is the one who occupied the country and destroyed it, and it is enough to the resistance its trust in God, its absolute belief in the justice of its cause; and its people and nation recognition of its right.The source of power of the nations is that it is right and the intention to live in freedom and dignity. The country that does not have freedom is not considered a country, regardless of the case. We recognize that no nation was able to rise but only after struggling through the fire of pain, and having patience during the misfortunes, difficulties, murder and hunger, costs much less than accepting the humiliation and submission. So if you want peace then end the occupation and return to the people their rights and sovereignty so that the dialogue will be a method to reach an understanding, not the injustice and aggression. What we are concerned about in the decision of withdrawing the American troops is that this withdrawal is real and confirmed, and that there are no exceptions or additions that cause it to be unreal ,continuation of occupying Iraq and avoidance of responsibility in repairing destruction and leaving without securing compensation for those who suffered by the occupation and its effects will only increase the hatred of America. This hatred will continue with the generations, and the facts of history confirm the end of occupation and the defeat of the occupier, however long it takes.The Iraqi resistance can change the situation whenever it wants,it saved a lot of power to the days of the withdrawal, when your troops will be in the most vulnerable situation unless reaching an agreement with the resistance regarding this.
The apology to the Iraqi people, recognition of their right of resistance and handing over the country to its people is the least of your duties towards Iraq. The international community will waste much time and cause a lot of bloodshed by relying on the warlords and traders of corruption before it finds itself at a fait accompli. Dealing with the resistance as a liberation force is the most efficient way to build a fair political system away from the culture of sectarianism and elimination.
Master of the White House:
The Islamic nation possesses more than 60% of the worlds energy source. It has great potential and elements of strength qualifying it to be a key partner in shaping the worlds image, forming its future and making good relationships with other world countries in accordance with the mutual interests between them in order to achieve human security and we will not adopt an unequal policy.So we call upon you and the American people (if there is a just stance for the good of mankind) to return a just balance to the international relations.and to make a new plan for America in order to protect its vital legitimate interests in our Arab and Islamic world. This policy should rely on mutual interests, respecting others, returning the rights to their owners, and removing the injustice formed as a result of the wrong policies at all levels.And to look with eyes of justice to our peoples' legitimate hopes and interests, and do not abuse the interests of our nation and to deal with the true power that was created by the current circumstances. The time of the pawns that you used to move in order to insure your interests has passed, and a new power has emerged that has attracted the Arab and Islamic streets around it to move it in accordance with its goals and strategies so that it can end the crisis and build a better prosperous society.
We are a nation that loves goodness for everyone, one of the best orders of Allah is giving advices to his creatures. Allah has sent the prophets and messengers and there is no greater advice than the advice between the slave and his Lord. The slave must meet Allah and Allah must judge his slave as the Almighty says: (Then shall we question those to whom our message was sent and those by whom we sent it). As for this world its matter is muddy, the biggest one in it is small, the goal of its matter is wealth and leadership,the one who seeks leadership aims to become like pharaoh who Allah drowned in the sea to take revenge on him. The one who seeks wealth aims to be like Qarun whom Allah opened up the ground under him where he will stay until the day of judgment as a punishment for the harm he caused to prophet Moses (peace be upon him).And these are the commandments of the Christ and the prophets before and after him (peace be upon them), all ordered to worship Allah, the pursuit of the hereafter and to be reluctant to go after this worldly life. When the matters of this world used to be ignoble, the greatest thing the leader can offere to his people is knowledge, religion, and observing the things that make them closer to Allah and the conversation in other matters was built around certain manners. The wise ones have asserted that recognizing the greatness of the Islam and that the world has not come across a religion better than it and the evidences require that it must be followed. You know that the religion of Allah is not based on one’s feelings or the parents' traditions, however the wise one looks at what the prophets brought and worships Allah with the correct belief and good work. If the anyone cannot show all of what is inside him to everyone, then he must benefit from it as much as he can. By achieving the worship of Allah, respecting the prophets, spreading of justice, correcting the wrongs, staying away from oppression and crimes will be the biggest guarantee in achieving American national security and the security of the world. The Almighty says: ("It is those who believe and confuse not their beliefs with wrong - that are (truly) in security, for they are on (right) guidance.")
Master of the White House:
Your humanitarian and ethical responsibilities necessitate you to stand with the oppressed nations as we watch with observing eyes at your statements and decisions like your speech in the Turkish parliament. We see that you are at the beginning of the wayso do not give up on your promises to the Americans and other peoples. Allah says: (Then shall anyone who has done an atom's weight of good, see it! * And anyone who has done an atom's weight of evil, shall see it.) You have asked Turkey to make peace with its history for an incident that has not been proven. We ask America to make peace with the present which has filled the earth with injustice. My purpose is to address you in what is best to help you look at the knowledge, follow what is right and do what is needed to be done. If you have who you can trust in his judgement and faith then research with him the sources of knowledge and the truths about religion and do not be like the imitators who do not hear or comprehend. You should ask Allah for help and ask him for guidance and say: Oh Allah show me what is right and help me follow it, show me what is wrong and help me to avoid it and say: Oh Allah the lord of Gabriel, Michael, Israfeel, creator of the heavens and earth, Knower of what is senn and unseen, you judge between your slaves about their decisions, guide me to the truth, by your will you guide who you wish to the right path. Only two things will help you in this world and the hereafter: one of them is for you in particular, which is your knowledge in science and religion, to discover what is right and remove the doubts and worshiping Allah as he ordered for this is better for you than the wealth of this world and it is what Allah sent all his prophets for. The second is for you, your people and for the Muslims- removing the oppression, ending the occupation, accepting responsibility of paying compensations, releasing the prisoners and being good to them. All the prophets have ordered for general mercy and a lot of goodness (for they were sent only as mercy to mankind). You know that the Muslims are the best able to reward the good and bad actions than anyone else, whoever they fight woe be unto him. The president must be knowledgeable and knows the famous epics in old and recent history, still a small number of Muslims can defeat many more, so how is it now when Allah the Almighty has blessed the Muslims with many armies, strong leaders, high morals and their willingness to do what makes them closer to Allah the almighty. their belief that Jihad is the best act of worship ,and their certainty of what the prophet has promised with victory and reward. In this nation the love to sacrifice is not understandable,and there is more to be said,but that is enough for the message.
Allah is responsible for helping those who do good things and makes it easy to say and do what is good for people and make their ending a good one,Praise be to Allah,prayers be upon his prophets espiceally Mohamed,and peace be upon all the prophets.
The Emir of The Islamic army in Iraq
1st of March 2009.
An open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama / A golden opportunity to accomplish the mission.
Praise be to Allah, Peace and prayers upon our Prophet Mohammed and all the prophets, after all:
A group of Americans created a myth named “terror” and have changed and applied its meaning whenever they so desire. They planned their corrupt war on Iraq based on lies and fallacies in order to assert control over the sources of energy and maintain the security of Israel according to the Greater Middle East plan. This has put America in a serious and difficult situation, and the results are:
On Iraq:
Turned a country known for its’ peaceful coexistence between citizens, scientific progress, absence of illiteracy, free health care and free education; to a divided, scary, and backward country. The occupation and sectarian militias killed 4% of the Iraqi people, made 8% of Iraqi women widows, orphaned 16% of Iraqi children, abandoned 15% and detained more than 2%. 40% of the professors left the country, 84% of the universities were looted and the illiteracy rate has reached 30%. About 76% of Iraqis do not have healthy water, 54% of households are living in poverty and unemployment has exceeded 50%. With the current level of government corruption, Iraq is now at the top of the list of most corrupt government administrations in the whole world. The environment was destroyed and Iraq has became a country which depends on imports as it does not produce anything. Drugs are widespread across the streets after Bush's democracy, while prior to the invasion Iraq was a drug free country. The security situation has continually deteriorated, kidnappings and extortion has spread. All of this was aimed at destroying the social relations between Iraq’s ethnic groups and changing its demographics and population ratios. As an example the percentage of Sunni Arabs is at least 42% but centers in America infiltrated by Chalabi and others loyal to Iran passed a lie that the percentage of Sunni Arabs is 20%. So what did they want to do with the rest of the sunni arab ?,The percentage of Sunni Arabs in the state institutions was limited to 6%!
The Bush administration dissolved the army and replaced it with corrupted sectarian troops and security services which do not adhere to the professional nature of their work. They also imposed a distorted constitution to disrupt the country and disperse its people. They dissolved the state’s institutions and established a political process that has produced a sectarian government loyal to Iran, following its orders with some of its leaders having Iranian origins and loyalties. In this dark political environment Maliki combines dictatorship with sectarian intolerance. He publicly claims reconciliation but keeps being an Authoritarian and in the shadows his sectarian militias, some of which he was leading commit the most heinous crimes with the blessing of U.S. troops. He then puts them under government cover to gloss over their past crimes and facilitates them to commit more crimes in a formal capacity. So today the Iranian project is proceeding with Sunni bloodshed, codified within the laws of the State and protected by government troops.
The human rights situation has reached the worst proportions with torture becoming a systematic, normal procedure for the occupation and its government. The horrible prisons both known and unknown are filled with innocent people who were taken in with treachery, which is forbidden in all sects, policies and laws, and some of them have spent years without charge or trial, while others have died or were killed under torture in Iraqi and American prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Jadriya; these are some of the results of the evil occupation.
On America:
The Unipolarity which America worked for decades to achieve has collapsed, and it has lost its position in the world. Its economy has slumped and fallen into the trap of financial crisis; its repercussions that will last for a long time. Some countries revolted against America and it was not able to support its allies. It has wasted huge amounts of taxpayers money which would have been more sensibly spent on scientific programs, human security, world peace and the preservation of the environment. Billions of reconstruction funds were stolen in the largest fraud of the modern era with coordination between the leaders of the Green Zone and the large American companies which specialize in occupying countries, and bringing down regimes; all to keep the wealth flowing into the pockets of those warlords and vampires.
The number of deaths suffered by the occupation troops has exceeded forty thousand and the number of injured has exceeded ninety thousand; and those who survived were not able to survive the wounds of madness, mental disorder and the types of diseases that has result to committing suicide. This outcome was not recorded by the U.S. Army before, It’s really a terrible situation.
Still America’s national security is threatened, the world has more fear and panic, and explosions happen everywhere, increasing day by day. The interests of America made as appeals to states and individuals, have shown America stumbling in its policies, starting from Afghanistan to Darfur, Iran ,Pakistan, Iraq and Palestine. Bushs' allies were defeated in both the House of Representatives and Senate elections and ultimately in the Presidential elections. The attacks of the resistance were the reason behind this as the American people chose to vote and support policies of withdrawal and change.
Master of the White House:
The arrogance and stupidity of the previous administration whose president announced on this day in the first year of occupation that “Mission Accomplished”, gave Iran influence that may enable it to dominate oil resources without the loss of a single dollar or firing a single bullet. It must change, and dealing effectively with the "Iraqi quagmire" should not be done with patchwork and short term solutions, but with changing the American policy in Iraq. The most important solution to the great mistakes committed by the Bush administration is the reversal of the current "ethnic sectarian" political process, and leaving the leadership of the country to its loyal sons, and note that your own advisers and assistants see that the political process in Iraq since April 2003 is completely wrong and can not be repaired or patched up and that the best solution lies in its complete abolition. Worrying from that procedure is untrue, and those who defended their religion, country and the rights of their people are the ones who own the right to decide the fate of their country, not those who shared in the destruction of the country and killing of its people.
The first decade of this century witnessed a huge reversal in the values of humanity and exposed the falsehood of what the Americans themselves call for in their literature and speeches. America acquired the hatred of the nations of the eastern and the western world, and what the CIA gained from illegal and secret operations like kidnapping civilians, torturing detainees, spying on people, involvement in scandals contrary to law and morality, and drug trafficking in cooperation with the gangs that produce them, has caused a revival in the cultivation of cannabis to increase seven folds in Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation. All the aforementioned problems show the great corruption in the most important system you have, where the officials took advantage from their position in (countering terrorism) and (reconstruction) and other cases, overlooked American laws and human morality, and smeared their institutions through the spilling of blood, and the commitment of sins and crimes. Although a positive step along this route was gained from the recent announcement of abolishing torture in interrogations, changing the name of "fighting terrorism" and seeking to close down Guantanamo Bay prison; we hope that this will begin a change for truth and substance and not just in name and form only.
There should be as a follow-up the files of CIA ,torture ,the abuses of human rights and the stolen funds; all of which should affect the U.S. and Iraqis officials alike, and what the Minister of Justice recently announced is a step in the right direction.
We believe that the justice of Almighty Allah is going to pursue the criminals and they will not escape from the punishment in this life nor in the hereafter. We believe that the more injustices you have, the greatest of Almighty Allah's wrath and wrath of his worshipers. Also we believe that the end of the powerful nations comes when they reach the peak of injustice and tyranny. Do you like that Muslims face you with this? Where Almighty Allah is their helper especially in these times where the nation prepared for Jihad and to fight the assassins, and when the righteous and the servants of Allah are obedient; the heroes who experienced terrible warfare took over the leadership of Jihad and they are on the rise, whom the messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) promised them that they will still have the victory till the Day of Resurrection. In the nation there are those righteous ones whom Allah listens to their prayers, and doesn’t ignore their requests and shows anger for their anger and is pleased with their satisfaction, so can you feel secure that those oppressed gain retaliation from the God of all creatures who help the oppressed and accept his prayer and promise to gain him the victory no matter how long it takes? However, if we see goodness from the American people we will treat them well, otherwise who have been oppressed Allah will make him victorious.
Master of the White House:
Islam, our religion, gives everyone their rights, forbids all kinds of injustice, ensures justice for all human beings and aims to disseminate good virtues and ethics ,and the achievement of human security and peace for all people. This same religion necessitated us to resist the occupation by all legitimate and possible means and tofaceany attempt to eliminate our presence, deform our identity, rob our wealth or waste our rights. So we defend our religion and country by doing our legitimate duty and exercising our legal rights, and we consider this a great and noble honor. We all reject the designation of the resistance fighters as terrorists, because the terrorist is the one who occupied the country and destroyed it, and it is enough to the resistance its trust in God, its absolute belief in the justice of its cause; and its people and nation recognition of its right.The source of power of the nations is that it is right and the intention to live in freedom and dignity. The country that does not have freedom is not considered a country, regardless of the case. We recognize that no nation was able to rise but only after struggling through the fire of pain, and having patience during the misfortunes, difficulties, murder and hunger, costs much less than accepting the humiliation and submission. So if you want peace then end the occupation and return to the people their rights and sovereignty so that the dialogue will be a method to reach an understanding, not the injustice and aggression. What we are concerned about in the decision of withdrawing the American troops is that this withdrawal is real and confirmed, and that there are no exceptions or additions that cause it to be unreal ,continuation of occupying Iraq and avoidance of responsibility in repairing destruction and leaving without securing compensation for those who suffered by the occupation and its effects will only increase the hatred of America. This hatred will continue with the generations, and the facts of history confirm the end of occupation and the defeat of the occupier, however long it takes.The Iraqi resistance can change the situation whenever it wants,it saved a lot of power to the days of the withdrawal, when your troops will be in the most vulnerable situation unless reaching an agreement with the resistance regarding this.
The apology to the Iraqi people, recognition of their right of resistance and handing over the country to its people is the least of your duties towards Iraq. The international community will waste much time and cause a lot of bloodshed by relying on the warlords and traders of corruption before it finds itself at a fait accompli. Dealing with the resistance as a liberation force is the most efficient way to build a fair political system away from the culture of sectarianism and elimination.
Master of the White House:
The Islamic nation possesses more than 60% of the worlds energy source. It has great potential and elements of strength qualifying it to be a key partner in shaping the worlds image, forming its future and making good relationships with other world countries in accordance with the mutual interests between them in order to achieve human security and we will not adopt an unequal policy.So we call upon you and the American people (if there is a just stance for the good of mankind) to return a just balance to the international relations.and to make a new plan for America in order to protect its vital legitimate interests in our Arab and Islamic world. This policy should rely on mutual interests, respecting others, returning the rights to their owners, and removing the injustice formed as a result of the wrong policies at all levels.And to look with eyes of justice to our peoples' legitimate hopes and interests, and do not abuse the interests of our nation and to deal with the true power that was created by the current circumstances. The time of the pawns that you used to move in order to insure your interests has passed, and a new power has emerged that has attracted the Arab and Islamic streets around it to move it in accordance with its goals and strategies so that it can end the crisis and build a better prosperous society.
We are a nation that loves goodness for everyone, one of the best orders of Allah is giving advices to his creatures. Allah has sent the prophets and messengers and there is no greater advice than the advice between the slave and his Lord. The slave must meet Allah and Allah must judge his slave as the Almighty says: (Then shall we question those to whom our message was sent and those by whom we sent it). As for this world its matter is muddy, the biggest one in it is small, the goal of its matter is wealth and leadership,the one who seeks leadership aims to become like pharaoh who Allah drowned in the sea to take revenge on him. The one who seeks wealth aims to be like Qarun whom Allah opened up the ground under him where he will stay until the day of judgment as a punishment for the harm he caused to prophet Moses (peace be upon him).And these are the commandments of the Christ and the prophets before and after him (peace be upon them), all ordered to worship Allah, the pursuit of the hereafter and to be reluctant to go after this worldly life. When the matters of this world used to be ignoble, the greatest thing the leader can offere to his people is knowledge, religion, and observing the things that make them closer to Allah and the conversation in other matters was built around certain manners. The wise ones have asserted that recognizing the greatness of the Islam and that the world has not come across a religion better than it and the evidences require that it must be followed. You know that the religion of Allah is not based on one’s feelings or the parents' traditions, however the wise one looks at what the prophets brought and worships Allah with the correct belief and good work. If the anyone cannot show all of what is inside him to everyone, then he must benefit from it as much as he can. By achieving the worship of Allah, respecting the prophets, spreading of justice, correcting the wrongs, staying away from oppression and crimes will be the biggest guarantee in achieving American national security and the security of the world. The Almighty says: ("It is those who believe and confuse not their beliefs with wrong - that are (truly) in security, for they are on (right) guidance.")
Master of the White House:
Your humanitarian and ethical responsibilities necessitate you to stand with the oppressed nations as we watch with observing eyes at your statements and decisions like your speech in the Turkish parliament. We see that you are at the beginning of the wayso do not give up on your promises to the Americans and other peoples. Allah says: (Then shall anyone who has done an atom's weight of good, see it! * And anyone who has done an atom's weight of evil, shall see it.) You have asked Turkey to make peace with its history for an incident that has not been proven. We ask America to make peace with the present which has filled the earth with injustice. My purpose is to address you in what is best to help you look at the knowledge, follow what is right and do what is needed to be done. If you have who you can trust in his judgement and faith then research with him the sources of knowledge and the truths about religion and do not be like the imitators who do not hear or comprehend. You should ask Allah for help and ask him for guidance and say: Oh Allah show me what is right and help me follow it, show me what is wrong and help me to avoid it and say: Oh Allah the lord of Gabriel, Michael, Israfeel, creator of the heavens and earth, Knower of what is senn and unseen, you judge between your slaves about their decisions, guide me to the truth, by your will you guide who you wish to the right path. Only two things will help you in this world and the hereafter: one of them is for you in particular, which is your knowledge in science and religion, to discover what is right and remove the doubts and worshiping Allah as he ordered for this is better for you than the wealth of this world and it is what Allah sent all his prophets for. The second is for you, your people and for the Muslims- removing the oppression, ending the occupation, accepting responsibility of paying compensations, releasing the prisoners and being good to them. All the prophets have ordered for general mercy and a lot of goodness (for they were sent only as mercy to mankind). You know that the Muslims are the best able to reward the good and bad actions than anyone else, whoever they fight woe be unto him. The president must be knowledgeable and knows the famous epics in old and recent history, still a small number of Muslims can defeat many more, so how is it now when Allah the Almighty has blessed the Muslims with many armies, strong leaders, high morals and their willingness to do what makes them closer to Allah the almighty. their belief that Jihad is the best act of worship ,and their certainty of what the prophet has promised with victory and reward. In this nation the love to sacrifice is not understandable,and there is more to be said,but that is enough for the message.
Allah is responsible for helping those who do good things and makes it easy to say and do what is good for people and make their ending a good one,Praise be to Allah,prayers be upon his prophets espiceally Mohamed,and peace be upon all the prophets.
The Emir of The Islamic army in Iraq
1st of March 2009.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11
A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq.
By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
April 26, 2009 "The Independent" -- The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."
In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?
Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.
A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.
Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.
He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.
The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.
What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.
In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.
By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
April 26, 2009 "The Independent" -- The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."
In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?
Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.
A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.
Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.
He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.
The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.
What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.
In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The sources of Arabs’ Shame
The sources of Arabs’ Shame
Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia
By Dr. Abbas Bakhtiar
January 15, 2009 "Tehran Times" Jan 12, 09 - Israel is continuing its bombing of workshops, administrative buildings, roads, bridges, fuel depots, prisons, schools and mosques; killing and injuring large number of civilians in one of the world’s most impoverished and densely populated areas of the world.
The Israelis are following their old method of destroying everything that makes a society a society, the infrastructure. The collective punishment of the Palestinians for what Hamas or Islamic Jihad is supposed to be doing or has done, reminds one of the collective punishments that Nazis meted out in the occupied areas in Eastern Europe during the WWII.
International Red Cross just issued a statement condemning Israel for its brutality against civilians. There are several things that seem to have shocked the Red Cross. In one episode after several days of heavy pressure from the Red Cross, several ambulances were allowed to enter a neighborhood to evacuate the injured civilians. In one house they found 12 bodies all civilians and mostly women and children. They also found four very young children still alive next to their dead mothers, too weak to stand. They have been holed-up in the same house for close to 4 days.
Apparently the whole neighborhood was full of dead and injured civilians with Israeli forces only 80 meters away. According to the Red Cross the Israeli forces knew of the situation and not only didn’t do anything to help the civilians, but also were stopping Red Cross from providing assistance. Representative of the Norwegian Red Cross’ People’s Action calls this a war crime.
But this is only the tip of the ice berg. The Israeli forces have begun to use civilians as human shields. According to Amnesty International Israeli forces occupy civilian houses and keep the civilians as hostages on the first floor, while they position their soldiers on the second floor; ensuring that any fire on the house (especially with anti-tank or RPG missiles) kills the civilians as well.
In yet another report, the United Nations condemned Israel for targeting civilians. The head of the UN agency in Gaza running the school that was attacked by Israel forces categorically rejected the claim by Israel that Hamas fighters were in or even near the school. Israel bombed the UN run school, killing 43 children and injuring 100.
Israel also targets ambulances and humanitarian relief convoys in Gaza. According to UN, at least one Palestinian was killed when UN relief convoy came under fire from Israeli forces. “The attack took place as the lorries traveled to the Erez crossing to pick up supplies that were to have been allowed in during a three-hour ceasefire.”
The atrocities committed by Israel is a genocide of a conquered people. Gaza is a concentration camp and no amount of PR can reduce the magnitude of this horrible crime against humanity and decency.
But Israel is Israel. She has shown that cruelty is in her nature. Here I am talking about the successive Israeli governments and not Israeli people in general. I am sure there are many in Israel that if became aware of what really is happening would not approve of it. This of course excludes the settlers and the Zionist movement. These groups like the South African white supremacists consider others to be inferior to them; or that they have the God given right to do as they please.
But states seldom are representative of their people. It is the elite and / or the governing class that makes the decisions. The state of Israel is determined to never allow the Palestinians to have a viable state. The maximum that they are willing to allow is some form of Bantustan (South African) or North American reservation (for Native Americans). With carte blanche from U.S. and most of the European powers, Israel has been implementing this policy. Setting-up such a system takes many years. People’s spirit has to be crushed through collective punishment, economic strangulation and above all excessive and continuing violence. This has to continue for many years so the people lose hope of ever achieving anything more than what is on offer.
This of course cannot be done without the approval of other countries. Israel has the approval of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States. In addition, because of her U.S. connections, she has managed to get a nod and a wink from the Europeans as well. So with this carte blanche in hand she has set forth to change the “reality” on the ground in her favor.
By systematically settling extremists in the middle of populated Palestinian areas, she has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state almost impossible. A simple look at the map of the Palestinian territories resembles a Swiss cheese, with pockets of densely populated Palestinian areas surrounded by settlements and their protective military garrisons.
The violence both official (state sponsored) and unofficial (settlers) has been incessant. Couple this violence with economic strangulation and you will see the reasons behind the Palestinians’ anger and frustration. Any resistance is automatically branded as an act of terrorism and punished with even more violence, with U.S. and Europeans cheering the Israelis on the side lines.
If you recall when Georgia invaded the Russian protected enclave of Abkhazia, and met Russian counter attack, the whole Western world with U.S. at its head condemned Russia. Pushing for UN action and even sending warships with “humanitarian” supplies. Russians did not commit one thousandth of the Israeli atrocities and we had the Georgian president and other politician talking day and night about the horrible things the Russians were doing.
Yet today we have U.S. and European governments sitting silently watching this genocide taking place without doing anything. U.S. even vetoes resolutions condemning Israeli actions, forgetting that no peace is ever made possible by killing so many innocent women and children.
But whenever a power tries to relocate a group of people by force, the Newton’s Third Law of Motion comes into effect. Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that if you try to imprison a person that person will try to break out. If you try to subjugate a people they will resist. This is the underlying causes of most liberation movements. The same applies to the Palestinians. They are resisting. We can agree or disagree with their methods, but theirs is a reaction to actions taken against them; we call this self-defense.
Israel is trying to push Palestinians into submission and in the process forcing many to leave the occupied territories. They are trying to show the Palestinians that they are alone and resistance in the face of an overwhelming force is suicide. Israel has tried this tactics before and has failed. The children that had to stay with their dead mothers for four days will not forget. The starved people of Gaza are not going to forget this barbarity; and neither shall the people of honor and conscious, regardless of their nationality, Israelis included.
But as for one of those who have followed the Israel’s actions for the past 30 years, I can say that I didn’t expect anything different from Israel. The lies and deceits are all too familiar to fall for again. The current Israeli action in Gaza was not a reaction to the recent event, but planned a year ago. Just read the New York Times article in which among others they interview a senior Israeli military officer.
Israel is now trying to portray herself as a nation that is defending itself, while the truth is that Israel is a cruel occupying power trying to force a people out of their land. And this is being done with the help of some Arab nations; the very same nations that constantly talk about Arab and Muslim solidarity. These nations are: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
------ The Arab collaborators ---------
The often asked question, when it comes to the Palestinians, is about the role of Arab countries in the Palestinian struggle for freedom. The people not familiar with the political landscape of the area often see the Middle East as two camps, Arab countries on one side and Israel on the other. The reality is totally different. Israel has seldom been alone. Beside its usual American, French, British and other staunch allies, she has had the hidden backing of several Arab countries.
For close to 30 years now, many Arab countries have been collaborating with Israel; some like Egypt (gained independence: 1922) and Jordan (gained independence: 1946) openly while others like Saudi Arabia (founded: 1932), UAE (founded: 1972) and Kuwait (founded: 1961) from behind the scenes.
The reasons for this collaboration vary from country to country but they all have one thing in common: the rulers of these countries are all dictators and need foreign protection from their own people. Some such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and UAE were put in power by the British. The founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz bin Saud (the kingdom is name after him) was put in power by the British. The same goes for the others, except Egypt which experienced a coup by the army officers in 1952 resulting in the ousting of the monarchy and the accompanying British influence.
But the Western influence returned with Anwar Sadat. All these countries are dictatorships and all are under pressure from their people. What they cannot accept is any democratically elected form of government in their mist. They fear that if an Arab government becomes democratic they may have to become one themselves, hence losing power.
One of the things that they love about Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is that he won the election not by popular vote but by popular method of rigging the election; something that these Arab leaders understand and respect.
In contrast Hamas really represented the aspiration of the people. Soon, Mahmood Abbas term as president is over and he had to stand for re-election something that he would surely lose. In contrast Hamas really won the municipal elections in 2005 and the Parliamentary election in 2006. The elections were supervised by international observers, many from Europe, and U.S.
Palestinians were fed-up with the corrupt regime of Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah. They wanted to clean house. But as soon as Hamas took over, the U.S. and the Europeans put an embargo on Hamas. Israel closed the borders and refused to let anything into Gaza. Egypt also did the same.
What is not mentioned much in the media is that this was done with the complete approval of the Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. After all, Egypt could have opened its border for transfer of food and fuel.
Muslim Brotherhood has a branch or related organization in Jordan as well. Egypt and Jordan are worried that should Hamas survive and show its resistance, their people may get the idea that they can also resist the tyrannical rule of these despots. One must not forget that Muslim Brotherhood represents the only serious challenge to the Mubarak’s rule in Egypt.
---- Egypt -------
The 81 year old Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has been “president” since 1981 (28 years). He has won every election with a comfortable majority. He is much loved by his secret services. Prior to every election he arrests and imprisons all the opposition, ensuring a “clean” election.
Torture is so widely used and accepted in Egypt that U.S. out sources torturing of some its prisoners to Egypt. This alone should tell you volumes about the nature of Mubarak’s rule. He is now trying hard to crown his playboy son as his successor. But the Americans are not so sure if the son is capable of keeping the 80 million Egyptians in line and is therefore looking for alternative candidates.
The head of the feared main secret service is one of the prime candidates along with some of the top generals. Challenging him is the Muslim Brotherhood organization, enjoying grass root support from all sections of the Egyptian society including lawyers, doctors, judges and student associations. ?????????? Not surprisingly, U.S. and Israel call Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.????????????
By all accounts, the Muslim Brotherhood be it in Jordan, Egypt or the occupied territories such as Gaza runs a clean operation, running many charity organizations and providing services to the poor and the needy. As such wherever they are, they pose a threat to the corrupt regimes, since they provide an alternative to the people of that area.
----- Jordan------
King Abdullah II of Jordan, born of a British mother, educated in the West, including the Jesuit Center of Georgetown University, was brought to power by the CIA. His Uncle was a long time crown prince, yet after his father died in a U.S. hospital, Madeline Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of Estate flew to Jordan to inform the Jordanians that the King on his death bed had changed his will and named his son Abdullah as his successor. The new king Abdullah II married the Princeton graduate Lisa Halaby, the daughter of the former head of Pan American Airlines. She is now called Queen Noor; Noor meaning Light in Arabic.
The majority of this Kingdom of 5 million people are Palestinians who are not very friendly to this King. In 1967 there was a Palestinian uprising (led by PLO) against King Hussein (ruled: 1952-1999, the father of the current king), which resulted in heavy casualties among Palestinians.
In addition, the Kingdom is currently full of Iraqi refugees who resent the King’s help to the Americans in invasion of their country. On top of all this, we have the Muslim Brotherhood which tries hard to abolish the monarchy. King Abdullah relies heavily on the U.S. support and backing for staying in power. King Abdullah also sees a natural ally in Israel, a country that can come to its aid in case of another uprising.
---Saudi Arabia (House of Saud)------
I don’t have to tell you much about Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is run by the 84 year old, ailing Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud. His personal wealth is estimated at $21 billion USD. He rules a clan of 8000 princes who in turn rule the country. Saudi Arabia is the centre of corruption in the Arab world. The Saudi rulers corrupt everything with their money. Lacking the necessary mental power or physical courage, they try to stay in power by subterfuge, lies, and deception.
They fund the real extremists on the one hand while portraying themselves as the protectors of the Western interest on the other. They preach intolerance and xenophobia to their people decrying the Western decadence, while spending a lot of time enjoying the life in the West. They pay the West for protection against their own people and they pay the extremists to do their fighting elsewhere. Saudi rulers are indeed the worst of them all.
House of Saud is also the financier of the so called “Arab Moderates” and extremism that they cause. House of Saud financed the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. They later financed the Taliban. They also paid the Saddam Hussein to fight Iran. Then they paid the Americans and Egyptians to fight Saddam Hussein. They are the financiers of death and misery. They finance anything, anywhere, as long as this reduces the threat to their illegitimate rule.
They are currently financing the civil war in Somalia, bandits in Baluchistan and God knows what else. They are detested by their own people and neighbors yet loved by Bush, Cheney and the oil companies. As long as they provide the money and oil the U.S. is willing to tolerate them. And guess what? Muslim Brotherhood hates the House of Saud too. This makes them a threat and hence has to be dealt with.
---- The Collaboration -------
As can be seen each country has a good reason to eliminate Hamas, but each is restrained by its population. Israel has no such a restrain imposed on it. She not only can wage a terrible war, but also get assistance from Arab countries. Indeed it is the second time (the first was the Lebanon invasion of 2006) that Israel is getting open and solid support from these Arab countries. The invasion of Gaza was discussed in Egypt before its implementation. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are Israel’s active partners.
Egypt is actively involved in stopping all aids from getting to Palestinians in Gaza save a token few trucks. These few trucks are allowed to go through so they can be filmed and shown to Egyptian people. All demonstrations are banned and all Egyptian volunteers for Gaza are either arrested or sent back.
There are hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the Muslim world that are willing to go to the aid of the Palestinians, but the Egyptian authorities don’t allow them passage. Egyptians even stop medical aid from passing through their territories.
This is part of a report from Associated Press:
“RAFAH, Egypt: Frustration is mounting at Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip, where many local and foreign doctors are stuck after Egyptian authorities denied them entry into the coastal area now under an Israeli ground invasion.
Anesthesiologist Dimitrios Mognie from Greece idles his time at a cafe near the border, drinking tea and chatting with other doctors, aid workers and curious Egyptians.
""This is a shame,"" said Mognie, who decided to use his vacation time to try help Gazans. He thought entering through Egypt, which has a narrow border with the Hamas-ruled strip, was his best bet.
""That in 2009 they have people in need of help from a doctor and we can go to help and they won't let us. This is crazy,"" he added.”
In addition there are many Iranian cargo planes full of food and medicine which have been sitting on the tarmacs in Egypt for days waiting for permission to deliver their cargo. Egyptians even denied the medical aid sent by the son of the Libyan President Qaddafi to land in Egypt.
One thing is clear: these three countries do not want the Israelis to fail in their mission of totally destroying Gaza. Hosni Mubarak said so himself. The daily Haaretz reported that Hosni Mubarak had told European ministers on a peace mission that Hamas must not be allowed to win the ongoing war in Gaza.
As Egypt physically aids the Israeli military by denying food, fuel and medicine to the civilians, The House of Saud helps Israel by giving her time and diplomatic cover. When Israel started its invasion there was an immediate call for an Arab summit. Saudi Arabia and Jordan (along with Egypt of course) delayed the summit.
The Saudis along with the UAE said that they had another meeting to attend to and therefore Palestinian issue had to wait. After a few days when the summit was eventually held, they issued the same old statements. Yet this time same as the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, they blamed the victims.
In a statement Saudi Arabia blamed Hamas for Israel's continuing offensive in the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia, after blaming Hamas, declared that it will not even consider an oil embargo on Israel’s supporters. She then again blamed Hamas.
By this time, the three Arab countries along with Kuwait and UAE began singing the old song: international community is not doing anything about the catastrophe that is taking place in Gaza. It seems that these Arab tyrants have no shame at all. This reminds me of a quote from Marquis De Sade (1740-1814): “One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.”
These Arab leaders (many are indeed too old to blush) are complicit in the murder of so many civilians, especially young children. According to Agence France-Presse, quoting the medics on the ground, fully one third of all people killed have been children. How can these Arab leaders justify this to their people?
The answer is that they cannot. Israel knows this and for the second time can show the Arab street that their leaders are nothing but a bunch of old hypocrites. These Arab leaders are now exposed and can do nothing but to cooperate fully with Israel and U.S. What stand between them and their people’s rage is their army and secret services; which in turn are supported by U.S.
Israel has cleverly exposed these leaders for what they are: collaborators of the worst kind. These Arab leaders have brought an unimaginable shame to their people. To quote Lucien Bouchard: “I have never known a more vulgar expression of betrayal and deceit. Our hope is now with the people of these countries to clean this stain from their honor.”
Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia
By Dr. Abbas Bakhtiar
January 15, 2009 "Tehran Times" Jan 12, 09 - Israel is continuing its bombing of workshops, administrative buildings, roads, bridges, fuel depots, prisons, schools and mosques; killing and injuring large number of civilians in one of the world’s most impoverished and densely populated areas of the world.
The Israelis are following their old method of destroying everything that makes a society a society, the infrastructure. The collective punishment of the Palestinians for what Hamas or Islamic Jihad is supposed to be doing or has done, reminds one of the collective punishments that Nazis meted out in the occupied areas in Eastern Europe during the WWII.
International Red Cross just issued a statement condemning Israel for its brutality against civilians. There are several things that seem to have shocked the Red Cross. In one episode after several days of heavy pressure from the Red Cross, several ambulances were allowed to enter a neighborhood to evacuate the injured civilians. In one house they found 12 bodies all civilians and mostly women and children. They also found four very young children still alive next to their dead mothers, too weak to stand. They have been holed-up in the same house for close to 4 days.
Apparently the whole neighborhood was full of dead and injured civilians with Israeli forces only 80 meters away. According to the Red Cross the Israeli forces knew of the situation and not only didn’t do anything to help the civilians, but also were stopping Red Cross from providing assistance. Representative of the Norwegian Red Cross’ People’s Action calls this a war crime.
But this is only the tip of the ice berg. The Israeli forces have begun to use civilians as human shields. According to Amnesty International Israeli forces occupy civilian houses and keep the civilians as hostages on the first floor, while they position their soldiers on the second floor; ensuring that any fire on the house (especially with anti-tank or RPG missiles) kills the civilians as well.
In yet another report, the United Nations condemned Israel for targeting civilians. The head of the UN agency in Gaza running the school that was attacked by Israel forces categorically rejected the claim by Israel that Hamas fighters were in or even near the school. Israel bombed the UN run school, killing 43 children and injuring 100.
Israel also targets ambulances and humanitarian relief convoys in Gaza. According to UN, at least one Palestinian was killed when UN relief convoy came under fire from Israeli forces. “The attack took place as the lorries traveled to the Erez crossing to pick up supplies that were to have been allowed in during a three-hour ceasefire.”
The atrocities committed by Israel is a genocide of a conquered people. Gaza is a concentration camp and no amount of PR can reduce the magnitude of this horrible crime against humanity and decency.
But Israel is Israel. She has shown that cruelty is in her nature. Here I am talking about the successive Israeli governments and not Israeli people in general. I am sure there are many in Israel that if became aware of what really is happening would not approve of it. This of course excludes the settlers and the Zionist movement. These groups like the South African white supremacists consider others to be inferior to them; or that they have the God given right to do as they please.
But states seldom are representative of their people. It is the elite and / or the governing class that makes the decisions. The state of Israel is determined to never allow the Palestinians to have a viable state. The maximum that they are willing to allow is some form of Bantustan (South African) or North American reservation (for Native Americans). With carte blanche from U.S. and most of the European powers, Israel has been implementing this policy. Setting-up such a system takes many years. People’s spirit has to be crushed through collective punishment, economic strangulation and above all excessive and continuing violence. This has to continue for many years so the people lose hope of ever achieving anything more than what is on offer.
This of course cannot be done without the approval of other countries. Israel has the approval of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States. In addition, because of her U.S. connections, she has managed to get a nod and a wink from the Europeans as well. So with this carte blanche in hand she has set forth to change the “reality” on the ground in her favor.
By systematically settling extremists in the middle of populated Palestinian areas, she has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state almost impossible. A simple look at the map of the Palestinian territories resembles a Swiss cheese, with pockets of densely populated Palestinian areas surrounded by settlements and their protective military garrisons.
The violence both official (state sponsored) and unofficial (settlers) has been incessant. Couple this violence with economic strangulation and you will see the reasons behind the Palestinians’ anger and frustration. Any resistance is automatically branded as an act of terrorism and punished with even more violence, with U.S. and Europeans cheering the Israelis on the side lines.
If you recall when Georgia invaded the Russian protected enclave of Abkhazia, and met Russian counter attack, the whole Western world with U.S. at its head condemned Russia. Pushing for UN action and even sending warships with “humanitarian” supplies. Russians did not commit one thousandth of the Israeli atrocities and we had the Georgian president and other politician talking day and night about the horrible things the Russians were doing.
Yet today we have U.S. and European governments sitting silently watching this genocide taking place without doing anything. U.S. even vetoes resolutions condemning Israeli actions, forgetting that no peace is ever made possible by killing so many innocent women and children.
But whenever a power tries to relocate a group of people by force, the Newton’s Third Law of Motion comes into effect. Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that if you try to imprison a person that person will try to break out. If you try to subjugate a people they will resist. This is the underlying causes of most liberation movements. The same applies to the Palestinians. They are resisting. We can agree or disagree with their methods, but theirs is a reaction to actions taken against them; we call this self-defense.
Israel is trying to push Palestinians into submission and in the process forcing many to leave the occupied territories. They are trying to show the Palestinians that they are alone and resistance in the face of an overwhelming force is suicide. Israel has tried this tactics before and has failed. The children that had to stay with their dead mothers for four days will not forget. The starved people of Gaza are not going to forget this barbarity; and neither shall the people of honor and conscious, regardless of their nationality, Israelis included.
But as for one of those who have followed the Israel’s actions for the past 30 years, I can say that I didn’t expect anything different from Israel. The lies and deceits are all too familiar to fall for again. The current Israeli action in Gaza was not a reaction to the recent event, but planned a year ago. Just read the New York Times article in which among others they interview a senior Israeli military officer.
Israel is now trying to portray herself as a nation that is defending itself, while the truth is that Israel is a cruel occupying power trying to force a people out of their land. And this is being done with the help of some Arab nations; the very same nations that constantly talk about Arab and Muslim solidarity. These nations are: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
------ The Arab collaborators ---------
The often asked question, when it comes to the Palestinians, is about the role of Arab countries in the Palestinian struggle for freedom. The people not familiar with the political landscape of the area often see the Middle East as two camps, Arab countries on one side and Israel on the other. The reality is totally different. Israel has seldom been alone. Beside its usual American, French, British and other staunch allies, she has had the hidden backing of several Arab countries.
For close to 30 years now, many Arab countries have been collaborating with Israel; some like Egypt (gained independence: 1922) and Jordan (gained independence: 1946) openly while others like Saudi Arabia (founded: 1932), UAE (founded: 1972) and Kuwait (founded: 1961) from behind the scenes.
The reasons for this collaboration vary from country to country but they all have one thing in common: the rulers of these countries are all dictators and need foreign protection from their own people. Some such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and UAE were put in power by the British. The founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz bin Saud (the kingdom is name after him) was put in power by the British. The same goes for the others, except Egypt which experienced a coup by the army officers in 1952 resulting in the ousting of the monarchy and the accompanying British influence.
But the Western influence returned with Anwar Sadat. All these countries are dictatorships and all are under pressure from their people. What they cannot accept is any democratically elected form of government in their mist. They fear that if an Arab government becomes democratic they may have to become one themselves, hence losing power.
One of the things that they love about Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is that he won the election not by popular vote but by popular method of rigging the election; something that these Arab leaders understand and respect.
In contrast Hamas really represented the aspiration of the people. Soon, Mahmood Abbas term as president is over and he had to stand for re-election something that he would surely lose. In contrast Hamas really won the municipal elections in 2005 and the Parliamentary election in 2006. The elections were supervised by international observers, many from Europe, and U.S.
Palestinians were fed-up with the corrupt regime of Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah. They wanted to clean house. But as soon as Hamas took over, the U.S. and the Europeans put an embargo on Hamas. Israel closed the borders and refused to let anything into Gaza. Egypt also did the same.
What is not mentioned much in the media is that this was done with the complete approval of the Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. After all, Egypt could have opened its border for transfer of food and fuel.
Muslim Brotherhood has a branch or related organization in Jordan as well. Egypt and Jordan are worried that should Hamas survive and show its resistance, their people may get the idea that they can also resist the tyrannical rule of these despots. One must not forget that Muslim Brotherhood represents the only serious challenge to the Mubarak’s rule in Egypt.
---- Egypt -------
The 81 year old Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has been “president” since 1981 (28 years). He has won every election with a comfortable majority. He is much loved by his secret services. Prior to every election he arrests and imprisons all the opposition, ensuring a “clean” election.
Torture is so widely used and accepted in Egypt that U.S. out sources torturing of some its prisoners to Egypt. This alone should tell you volumes about the nature of Mubarak’s rule. He is now trying hard to crown his playboy son as his successor. But the Americans are not so sure if the son is capable of keeping the 80 million Egyptians in line and is therefore looking for alternative candidates.
The head of the feared main secret service is one of the prime candidates along with some of the top generals. Challenging him is the Muslim Brotherhood organization, enjoying grass root support from all sections of the Egyptian society including lawyers, doctors, judges and student associations. ?????????? Not surprisingly, U.S. and Israel call Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.????????????
By all accounts, the Muslim Brotherhood be it in Jordan, Egypt or the occupied territories such as Gaza runs a clean operation, running many charity organizations and providing services to the poor and the needy. As such wherever they are, they pose a threat to the corrupt regimes, since they provide an alternative to the people of that area.
----- Jordan------
King Abdullah II of Jordan, born of a British mother, educated in the West, including the Jesuit Center of Georgetown University, was brought to power by the CIA. His Uncle was a long time crown prince, yet after his father died in a U.S. hospital, Madeline Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of Estate flew to Jordan to inform the Jordanians that the King on his death bed had changed his will and named his son Abdullah as his successor. The new king Abdullah II married the Princeton graduate Lisa Halaby, the daughter of the former head of Pan American Airlines. She is now called Queen Noor; Noor meaning Light in Arabic.
The majority of this Kingdom of 5 million people are Palestinians who are not very friendly to this King. In 1967 there was a Palestinian uprising (led by PLO) against King Hussein (ruled: 1952-1999, the father of the current king), which resulted in heavy casualties among Palestinians.
In addition, the Kingdom is currently full of Iraqi refugees who resent the King’s help to the Americans in invasion of their country. On top of all this, we have the Muslim Brotherhood which tries hard to abolish the monarchy. King Abdullah relies heavily on the U.S. support and backing for staying in power. King Abdullah also sees a natural ally in Israel, a country that can come to its aid in case of another uprising.
---Saudi Arabia (House of Saud)------
I don’t have to tell you much about Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is run by the 84 year old, ailing Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud. His personal wealth is estimated at $21 billion USD. He rules a clan of 8000 princes who in turn rule the country. Saudi Arabia is the centre of corruption in the Arab world. The Saudi rulers corrupt everything with their money. Lacking the necessary mental power or physical courage, they try to stay in power by subterfuge, lies, and deception.
They fund the real extremists on the one hand while portraying themselves as the protectors of the Western interest on the other. They preach intolerance and xenophobia to their people decrying the Western decadence, while spending a lot of time enjoying the life in the West. They pay the West for protection against their own people and they pay the extremists to do their fighting elsewhere. Saudi rulers are indeed the worst of them all.
House of Saud is also the financier of the so called “Arab Moderates” and extremism that they cause. House of Saud financed the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. They later financed the Taliban. They also paid the Saddam Hussein to fight Iran. Then they paid the Americans and Egyptians to fight Saddam Hussein. They are the financiers of death and misery. They finance anything, anywhere, as long as this reduces the threat to their illegitimate rule.
They are currently financing the civil war in Somalia, bandits in Baluchistan and God knows what else. They are detested by their own people and neighbors yet loved by Bush, Cheney and the oil companies. As long as they provide the money and oil the U.S. is willing to tolerate them. And guess what? Muslim Brotherhood hates the House of Saud too. This makes them a threat and hence has to be dealt with.
---- The Collaboration -------
As can be seen each country has a good reason to eliminate Hamas, but each is restrained by its population. Israel has no such a restrain imposed on it. She not only can wage a terrible war, but also get assistance from Arab countries. Indeed it is the second time (the first was the Lebanon invasion of 2006) that Israel is getting open and solid support from these Arab countries. The invasion of Gaza was discussed in Egypt before its implementation. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are Israel’s active partners.
Egypt is actively involved in stopping all aids from getting to Palestinians in Gaza save a token few trucks. These few trucks are allowed to go through so they can be filmed and shown to Egyptian people. All demonstrations are banned and all Egyptian volunteers for Gaza are either arrested or sent back.
There are hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the Muslim world that are willing to go to the aid of the Palestinians, but the Egyptian authorities don’t allow them passage. Egyptians even stop medical aid from passing through their territories.
This is part of a report from Associated Press:
“RAFAH, Egypt: Frustration is mounting at Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip, where many local and foreign doctors are stuck after Egyptian authorities denied them entry into the coastal area now under an Israeli ground invasion.
Anesthesiologist Dimitrios Mognie from Greece idles his time at a cafe near the border, drinking tea and chatting with other doctors, aid workers and curious Egyptians.
""This is a shame,"" said Mognie, who decided to use his vacation time to try help Gazans. He thought entering through Egypt, which has a narrow border with the Hamas-ruled strip, was his best bet.
""That in 2009 they have people in need of help from a doctor and we can go to help and they won't let us. This is crazy,"" he added.”
In addition there are many Iranian cargo planes full of food and medicine which have been sitting on the tarmacs in Egypt for days waiting for permission to deliver their cargo. Egyptians even denied the medical aid sent by the son of the Libyan President Qaddafi to land in Egypt.
One thing is clear: these three countries do not want the Israelis to fail in their mission of totally destroying Gaza. Hosni Mubarak said so himself. The daily Haaretz reported that Hosni Mubarak had told European ministers on a peace mission that Hamas must not be allowed to win the ongoing war in Gaza.
As Egypt physically aids the Israeli military by denying food, fuel and medicine to the civilians, The House of Saud helps Israel by giving her time and diplomatic cover. When Israel started its invasion there was an immediate call for an Arab summit. Saudi Arabia and Jordan (along with Egypt of course) delayed the summit.
The Saudis along with the UAE said that they had another meeting to attend to and therefore Palestinian issue had to wait. After a few days when the summit was eventually held, they issued the same old statements. Yet this time same as the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, they blamed the victims.
In a statement Saudi Arabia blamed Hamas for Israel's continuing offensive in the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia, after blaming Hamas, declared that it will not even consider an oil embargo on Israel’s supporters. She then again blamed Hamas.
By this time, the three Arab countries along with Kuwait and UAE began singing the old song: international community is not doing anything about the catastrophe that is taking place in Gaza. It seems that these Arab tyrants have no shame at all. This reminds me of a quote from Marquis De Sade (1740-1814): “One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.”
These Arab leaders (many are indeed too old to blush) are complicit in the murder of so many civilians, especially young children. According to Agence France-Presse, quoting the medics on the ground, fully one third of all people killed have been children. How can these Arab leaders justify this to their people?
The answer is that they cannot. Israel knows this and for the second time can show the Arab street that their leaders are nothing but a bunch of old hypocrites. These Arab leaders are now exposed and can do nothing but to cooperate fully with Israel and U.S. What stand between them and their people’s rage is their army and secret services; which in turn are supported by U.S.
Israel has cleverly exposed these leaders for what they are: collaborators of the worst kind. These Arab leaders have brought an unimaginable shame to their people. To quote Lucien Bouchard: “I have never known a more vulgar expression of betrayal and deceit. Our hope is now with the people of these countries to clean this stain from their honor.”
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A Message from a Gazan to the World
Gaza is Sinking in a River of Blood:
A Message from a Gazan to the World
By Mohammed Fares Al Majdalawi
January 12, 2009 "Commondreams" --- I want to write about the suffering of my people and my family in these days of siege against the people of Gaza. 888 people have been killed and more than 3700 injured. The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to allow ambulances to go to Zeitoun area, so those who are injured become those who die; a premeditated and purposeful violation of human rights.
In my house we can't get basic needs. No food. No bread. No fuel. No future. Yesterday, my father went to the bakery at 5 AM. He waited 5 hours to get one loaf of bread, which is not enough for my family because there are 11 of us. So today it was my turn. I went to all the bakeries -- all were closed.
There is no safe place we can go. We cannot communicate with our relatives and friends -- networks are down as missiles rain on our homes, mosques and even hospitals.
Our life is centered around the burials of those who have died, our martyrs, At night our camp, Jabalya Refugee Camp, is a ghost town, with no sounds other than those of Israeli military aircraft.
There is a horror in every minute and it is clear especially in the lives of children. For example, there were five sisters in one family killed from the Israeli occupation while they stayed in their home. But there are 800,000 other children in Gaza, all afraid, all waiting for someone or something to help them. They are caught in a prison that is becoming a concentration camp. Every day we sleep and open our eyes to the Israeli crimes of killing children and women and destroying civilians' homes. My words are unable to convey my feelings about this life in Gaza.
I have two messages to the world, to those who claim they love peace and seek freedom.
Imagine your life consisting of no electricity, destroyed homes, the sounds and strikes of missiles, day and night, and the only hunger as great as that for food is the hunger for an end to this occupation and siege. Imagine it is not just you but your children and your family who tell you through their eyes and cries: "We are afraid of the missiles." "We cannot sleep." "We may never sleep again." Imagine you are the dam and the river of blood has turned into a flash flood. How long could you stand it?
We wouldn't have to stand it any longer if the world stood with us. If they demanded an end to the siege and the killings and demolition of houses for our children. If they demanded assistance reach the people through rallies and sit-ins.
Finally, I invite you to come to Gaza and see the Holocaust. Because despite the siege, the barriers, the killing of my people and homes, and the total destruction of our lives by the Israeli occupation, they can not and will not kill the will of our people for equality and justice.
Mohammed Al Majdawali is a university student, member of Al-Assria Children's Library, and volunteer with Middle East Children's Alliance. He lives in Jabalya Refugee Camp with his family and aspires to be a professional filmmaker.
To help MECA send more medical aid to Gaza for thousands of sick and injured people living under siege, www.mecaforpeace.org
A Message from a Gazan to the World
By Mohammed Fares Al Majdalawi
January 12, 2009 "Commondreams" --- I want to write about the suffering of my people and my family in these days of siege against the people of Gaza. 888 people have been killed and more than 3700 injured. The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to allow ambulances to go to Zeitoun area, so those who are injured become those who die; a premeditated and purposeful violation of human rights.
In my house we can't get basic needs. No food. No bread. No fuel. No future. Yesterday, my father went to the bakery at 5 AM. He waited 5 hours to get one loaf of bread, which is not enough for my family because there are 11 of us. So today it was my turn. I went to all the bakeries -- all were closed.
There is no safe place we can go. We cannot communicate with our relatives and friends -- networks are down as missiles rain on our homes, mosques and even hospitals.
Our life is centered around the burials of those who have died, our martyrs, At night our camp, Jabalya Refugee Camp, is a ghost town, with no sounds other than those of Israeli military aircraft.
There is a horror in every minute and it is clear especially in the lives of children. For example, there were five sisters in one family killed from the Israeli occupation while they stayed in their home. But there are 800,000 other children in Gaza, all afraid, all waiting for someone or something to help them. They are caught in a prison that is becoming a concentration camp. Every day we sleep and open our eyes to the Israeli crimes of killing children and women and destroying civilians' homes. My words are unable to convey my feelings about this life in Gaza.
I have two messages to the world, to those who claim they love peace and seek freedom.
Imagine your life consisting of no electricity, destroyed homes, the sounds and strikes of missiles, day and night, and the only hunger as great as that for food is the hunger for an end to this occupation and siege. Imagine it is not just you but your children and your family who tell you through their eyes and cries: "We are afraid of the missiles." "We cannot sleep." "We may never sleep again." Imagine you are the dam and the river of blood has turned into a flash flood. How long could you stand it?
We wouldn't have to stand it any longer if the world stood with us. If they demanded an end to the siege and the killings and demolition of houses for our children. If they demanded assistance reach the people through rallies and sit-ins.
Finally, I invite you to come to Gaza and see the Holocaust. Because despite the siege, the barriers, the killing of my people and homes, and the total destruction of our lives by the Israeli occupation, they can not and will not kill the will of our people for equality and justice.
Mohammed Al Majdawali is a university student, member of Al-Assria Children's Library, and volunteer with Middle East Children's Alliance. He lives in Jabalya Refugee Camp with his family and aspires to be a professional filmmaker.
To help MECA send more medical aid to Gaza for thousands of sick and injured people living under siege, www.mecaforpeace.org
Sunday, January 11, 2009
British MP George Galloway: "Victory To The Palestinian Resistance"
See the Video here http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21709.htm
"The Palestinian People Will Never Surrender"
Meeting: Palestine Solidarity Campaign - STOP THE WAR ISRAEL OUT OF GAZA - at Friends Meeting House, 173 Euston Road London NW1 2 BJ
"The Palestinian People Will Never Surrender"
Meeting: Palestine Solidarity Campaign - STOP THE WAR ISRAEL OUT OF GAZA - at Friends Meeting House, 173 Euston Road London NW1 2 BJ
Monday, January 05, 2009
Living on Borrowed Time in a Stolen Land
By Gilad Atzmon
January 04, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- Communicating with Israelis may leave one bewildered. Even now when the Israeli Air Force is practicing murder in broad daylight of hundreds of civilians, elderly persons, women and children, the Israeli people manage to convince themselves that they are the real victims in this violent saga.
Those who are familiar intimately with Israeli people realise that they are completely uninformed about the roots of the conflict that dominates their lives. Rather often Israelis manage to come up with some bizarre arguments that may make a lot of sense within the Israeli discourse, yet make no sense whatsoever outside of the Jewish street. Such an argument goes as follows: ‘those Palestinians, why do they insist upon living on our land (Israel), why can’t they just settle in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or any other Arab country?’ Another Hebraic pearl of wisdom sounds like this: ‘what is wrong with these Palestinians? We gave them water, electricity, education and all they do is try to throw us to the sea’.
Astonishingly enough, the Israelis even within the so-called ‘left’ and even the educated ‘left’ fail to understand who the Palestinians are, where they come from and what they stand for. They fail to grasp that for the Palestinians, Palestine is home. Miraculously, the Israelis manage to fail to grasp that Israel had been erected at the expense of the Palestinian people, on Palestinian land, on Palestinian villages, towns, fields and orchards. The Israelis do not realise that Palestinians in Gaza and in refugee camps in the region are actually dispossessed people from Ber Shive, Yafo, Tel Kabir, Shekh Munis, Lod, Haifa, Jerusalem and many more towns and villages. If you wonder how come the Israelis don’t know their history, the answer is pretty simple, they have never been told. The circumstances that led to the Israeli Palestinian conflict are well hidden within their culture. Traces of pre-1948 Palestinian civilisation on the land had been wiped out. Not only the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians, is not part of the Israeli curriculum, it is not even mentioned or discussed in any Israeli official or academic forum.
In the very centre of almost every Israeli town one can a find a 1948 memorial statue displaying a very bizarre, almost abstract, pipe work. The plumbing feature is called Davidka and it is actually a 1948 Israeli mortar cannon. Interestingly enough, the Davidka was an extremely ineffective weapon. Its shells wouldn’t reach more than 300 meters and would cause very limited damage. Though the Davidika would cause just minimal harm, it produced a lot of noise. According to the Israeli official historical narrative, the Arabs i.e., Palestinians, simply ran away for their lives once they heard the Davidka from afar. According to the Israeli narrative, the Jews i.e., ‘new Israelis’ did a bit of fireworks and the ‘Arab cowards’ just ran off like idiots. In the Israeli official narrative there is no mention of the many orchestrated massacres conducted by the young IDF and the paramilitary units that preceded it. There is no mention also of the racist laws that stop Palestinians[1][1] from returning to their homes and lands.
The meaning of the above is pretty simple. Israelis are totally unfamiliar with the Palestinian cause. Hence, they can only interpret the Palestinian struggle as a murderous irrational lunacy. Within the Israeli Judeo- centric solipsistic universe, the Israeli is an innocent victim and the Palestinian is no less than a savage murderer.
This grave situation that leaves the Israeli in the dark regarding his past demolishes any possibility of future reconciliation. Since the Israeli lacks the minimal comprehension of the conflict, he cannot contemplate any possible resolution except extermination or cleansing of the ‘enemy’. All the Israeli is entitled to know are various phantasmic narratives of Jewish suffering. Palestinian pain is completely foreign to his ears. ‘Palestinian right of return’ sounds to him like an amusing idea. Even the most advanced ‘Israeli humanists’ are not ready to share the land with its indigenous inhabitants. This doesn’t leave the Palestinians with many options but to liberate themselves against all odds. Clearly, there is no partner for peace on the Israel side.
This week we all learned more about the ballistic capability of Hamas. Evidently, Hamas was rather restrained with Israel for more than a long while. It refrained from escalating the conflict to the whole of southern Israel. It occurred to me that the barrages of Qassams that have been landing sporadically on Sderot and Ashkelon were actually nothing but a message from the imprisoned Palestinians. First it was a message to the stolen land, homes fields and orchards: ‘Our beloved soil, we didn’t forget, we are still here fighting for you, sooner rather than later, we will come back, we will start again where we had stopped’. But it was also a clear message to the Israelis. ‘You out there, in Sderot, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Tel Aviv and Haifa, whether you realise it or not, you are actually living on our stolen land. You better start to pack because your time is running out, you have exhausted our patience. We, the Palestinian people, have nothing to lose anymore’.
Let’s face it, realistically the situation in Israel is rather grave. Two years ago it was Hezbollah rockets that pounded northern Israel. This week the Hamas proved beyond doubt that it is capable of serving the South of Israel with some cocktail of ballistic vengeance. Both in the case of the Hezbollah and the case of the Hamas, Israel was left with no military answer. It can no doubt kill civilians but it fails to stop the rocket barrage. The IDF lacks the means of protecting Israel unless covering Israel with a solid concrete roof is a viable solution. At the end of the day, they might be planning just that (link).
But this is far from the end of the story. In fact it is just the beginning. Every Middle East expert knows that Hamas can seize control of the West Bank within hours. In fact, PA and Fatah control in the West Bank is maintained by the IDF. Once Hamas takes the West Bank, the biggest Israeli population centre will be left to the mercy of Hamas. For those who fail to see, this would be the end of Jewish Israel. It may happen later today, it may happen in three months or in five years, it isn’t matter of ‘if’ but rather matter of ‘when’. By that time, the whole of Israel will be within firing range of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israeli society will collapse, its economy will be ruined. The price of a detached villa in Northern Tel Aviv would equal a shed in Kiryat Shmone or Sderot. By the time a single rocket hits Tel Aviv, the Zionist dream will be over.
The IDF generals know it, the Israeli leaders know it. This is why they stepped up the war against the Palestinian into extermination. The Israelis do not plan upon invading Gaza. They have lost nothing there. All they want is to finish the Nakba. They drop bombs on Palestinians in order to wipe them out. They want the Palestinians out of the region. It is obviously not going to work, Palestinians will stay. Not only they will they stay, their day of return to their land is coming closer as Israel has been exploiting its deadliest tactics.
This is exactly where Israeli escapism comes into play. Israel has passed the ‘point of no return’. Its doomed fate is deeply engraved in each bomb it drops on Palestinian civilians. There is nothing Israel can do to save itself. There is no exit strategy. It can’t negotiate its way out because neither the Israelis nor their leadership understand the elementary parameters involved in the conflict. Israel lacks the military power to conclude the battle. It may manage to kill Palestinian grassroots leaders, it has been doing it for years, yet Palestinian resistance and persistence is growing fierce rather than weakening. As an IDF intelligence general predicted already at the first Intifada. ‘In order to win, all Palestinians have to do is to survive’. They survive and they are indeed winning.
Israeli leaders understand it all. Israel has already tried everything, unilateral withdrawal, starvation and now extermination. It thought to evade the demographic danger by shrinking into an intimate cosy Jewish ghetto. Nothing worked. It is Palestinian persistence in the shape of Hamas politics that defines the future of the region.
All that is left to Israelis is to cling to their blindness and escapism to evade their devastating grave fate that has become immanent already. All along their way down, the Israelis will sing their familiar various victim anthems. Being imbued in a self-centred supremacist reality, they will be utterly involved in their own pain yet completely blind to the pain they inflict on others. Uniquely enough, the Israelis are operating as a unified collective when dropping bombs on others, yet, once being slightly hurt, they all manage to become monads of vulnerable innocence. It is this discrepancy between the self-image and the way they are seen by the rest of us which turns the Israeli into a monstrous exterminator. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from grasping their own history, it is that discrepancy that stops them from comprehending the repeated numerous attempts to destroy their State. It is that discrepancy that stops Israelis from understanding the meaning of the Shoah so can they prevent the next one. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from being part of humanity.
Once again Jews will have to wander into an unknown fate. To a certain extent, I myself have started my journey a while ago.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1][1] Jews only law of return- http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/Law of Return 5710-1950
read more- http://www.australiansforpalestine.com/press_room/briefing/papers/BriefingPaperNo35_17Aug07_TheLawofReturncopy.pdf
January 04, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- Communicating with Israelis may leave one bewildered. Even now when the Israeli Air Force is practicing murder in broad daylight of hundreds of civilians, elderly persons, women and children, the Israeli people manage to convince themselves that they are the real victims in this violent saga.
Those who are familiar intimately with Israeli people realise that they are completely uninformed about the roots of the conflict that dominates their lives. Rather often Israelis manage to come up with some bizarre arguments that may make a lot of sense within the Israeli discourse, yet make no sense whatsoever outside of the Jewish street. Such an argument goes as follows: ‘those Palestinians, why do they insist upon living on our land (Israel), why can’t they just settle in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or any other Arab country?’ Another Hebraic pearl of wisdom sounds like this: ‘what is wrong with these Palestinians? We gave them water, electricity, education and all they do is try to throw us to the sea’.
Astonishingly enough, the Israelis even within the so-called ‘left’ and even the educated ‘left’ fail to understand who the Palestinians are, where they come from and what they stand for. They fail to grasp that for the Palestinians, Palestine is home. Miraculously, the Israelis manage to fail to grasp that Israel had been erected at the expense of the Palestinian people, on Palestinian land, on Palestinian villages, towns, fields and orchards. The Israelis do not realise that Palestinians in Gaza and in refugee camps in the region are actually dispossessed people from Ber Shive, Yafo, Tel Kabir, Shekh Munis, Lod, Haifa, Jerusalem and many more towns and villages. If you wonder how come the Israelis don’t know their history, the answer is pretty simple, they have never been told. The circumstances that led to the Israeli Palestinian conflict are well hidden within their culture. Traces of pre-1948 Palestinian civilisation on the land had been wiped out. Not only the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians, is not part of the Israeli curriculum, it is not even mentioned or discussed in any Israeli official or academic forum.
In the very centre of almost every Israeli town one can a find a 1948 memorial statue displaying a very bizarre, almost abstract, pipe work. The plumbing feature is called Davidka and it is actually a 1948 Israeli mortar cannon. Interestingly enough, the Davidka was an extremely ineffective weapon. Its shells wouldn’t reach more than 300 meters and would cause very limited damage. Though the Davidika would cause just minimal harm, it produced a lot of noise. According to the Israeli official historical narrative, the Arabs i.e., Palestinians, simply ran away for their lives once they heard the Davidka from afar. According to the Israeli narrative, the Jews i.e., ‘new Israelis’ did a bit of fireworks and the ‘Arab cowards’ just ran off like idiots. In the Israeli official narrative there is no mention of the many orchestrated massacres conducted by the young IDF and the paramilitary units that preceded it. There is no mention also of the racist laws that stop Palestinians[1][1] from returning to their homes and lands.
The meaning of the above is pretty simple. Israelis are totally unfamiliar with the Palestinian cause. Hence, they can only interpret the Palestinian struggle as a murderous irrational lunacy. Within the Israeli Judeo- centric solipsistic universe, the Israeli is an innocent victim and the Palestinian is no less than a savage murderer.
This grave situation that leaves the Israeli in the dark regarding his past demolishes any possibility of future reconciliation. Since the Israeli lacks the minimal comprehension of the conflict, he cannot contemplate any possible resolution except extermination or cleansing of the ‘enemy’. All the Israeli is entitled to know are various phantasmic narratives of Jewish suffering. Palestinian pain is completely foreign to his ears. ‘Palestinian right of return’ sounds to him like an amusing idea. Even the most advanced ‘Israeli humanists’ are not ready to share the land with its indigenous inhabitants. This doesn’t leave the Palestinians with many options but to liberate themselves against all odds. Clearly, there is no partner for peace on the Israel side.
This week we all learned more about the ballistic capability of Hamas. Evidently, Hamas was rather restrained with Israel for more than a long while. It refrained from escalating the conflict to the whole of southern Israel. It occurred to me that the barrages of Qassams that have been landing sporadically on Sderot and Ashkelon were actually nothing but a message from the imprisoned Palestinians. First it was a message to the stolen land, homes fields and orchards: ‘Our beloved soil, we didn’t forget, we are still here fighting for you, sooner rather than later, we will come back, we will start again where we had stopped’. But it was also a clear message to the Israelis. ‘You out there, in Sderot, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Tel Aviv and Haifa, whether you realise it or not, you are actually living on our stolen land. You better start to pack because your time is running out, you have exhausted our patience. We, the Palestinian people, have nothing to lose anymore’.
Let’s face it, realistically the situation in Israel is rather grave. Two years ago it was Hezbollah rockets that pounded northern Israel. This week the Hamas proved beyond doubt that it is capable of serving the South of Israel with some cocktail of ballistic vengeance. Both in the case of the Hezbollah and the case of the Hamas, Israel was left with no military answer. It can no doubt kill civilians but it fails to stop the rocket barrage. The IDF lacks the means of protecting Israel unless covering Israel with a solid concrete roof is a viable solution. At the end of the day, they might be planning just that (link).
But this is far from the end of the story. In fact it is just the beginning. Every Middle East expert knows that Hamas can seize control of the West Bank within hours. In fact, PA and Fatah control in the West Bank is maintained by the IDF. Once Hamas takes the West Bank, the biggest Israeli population centre will be left to the mercy of Hamas. For those who fail to see, this would be the end of Jewish Israel. It may happen later today, it may happen in three months or in five years, it isn’t matter of ‘if’ but rather matter of ‘when’. By that time, the whole of Israel will be within firing range of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israeli society will collapse, its economy will be ruined. The price of a detached villa in Northern Tel Aviv would equal a shed in Kiryat Shmone or Sderot. By the time a single rocket hits Tel Aviv, the Zionist dream will be over.
The IDF generals know it, the Israeli leaders know it. This is why they stepped up the war against the Palestinian into extermination. The Israelis do not plan upon invading Gaza. They have lost nothing there. All they want is to finish the Nakba. They drop bombs on Palestinians in order to wipe them out. They want the Palestinians out of the region. It is obviously not going to work, Palestinians will stay. Not only they will they stay, their day of return to their land is coming closer as Israel has been exploiting its deadliest tactics.
This is exactly where Israeli escapism comes into play. Israel has passed the ‘point of no return’. Its doomed fate is deeply engraved in each bomb it drops on Palestinian civilians. There is nothing Israel can do to save itself. There is no exit strategy. It can’t negotiate its way out because neither the Israelis nor their leadership understand the elementary parameters involved in the conflict. Israel lacks the military power to conclude the battle. It may manage to kill Palestinian grassroots leaders, it has been doing it for years, yet Palestinian resistance and persistence is growing fierce rather than weakening. As an IDF intelligence general predicted already at the first Intifada. ‘In order to win, all Palestinians have to do is to survive’. They survive and they are indeed winning.
Israeli leaders understand it all. Israel has already tried everything, unilateral withdrawal, starvation and now extermination. It thought to evade the demographic danger by shrinking into an intimate cosy Jewish ghetto. Nothing worked. It is Palestinian persistence in the shape of Hamas politics that defines the future of the region.
All that is left to Israelis is to cling to their blindness and escapism to evade their devastating grave fate that has become immanent already. All along their way down, the Israelis will sing their familiar various victim anthems. Being imbued in a self-centred supremacist reality, they will be utterly involved in their own pain yet completely blind to the pain they inflict on others. Uniquely enough, the Israelis are operating as a unified collective when dropping bombs on others, yet, once being slightly hurt, they all manage to become monads of vulnerable innocence. It is this discrepancy between the self-image and the way they are seen by the rest of us which turns the Israeli into a monstrous exterminator. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from grasping their own history, it is that discrepancy that stops them from comprehending the repeated numerous attempts to destroy their State. It is that discrepancy that stops Israelis from understanding the meaning of the Shoah so can they prevent the next one. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from being part of humanity.
Once again Jews will have to wander into an unknown fate. To a certain extent, I myself have started my journey a while ago.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1][1] Jews only law of return- http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/Law of Return 5710-1950
read more- http://www.australiansforpalestine.com/press_room/briefing/papers/BriefingPaperNo35_17Aug07_TheLawofReturncopy.pdf
The Rotten State of Egypt is too Powerless and Corrupt to Act
By Robert Fisk
January 04, 2009 "The Independent" -- There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.
Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?
To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.
Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.
The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.
There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.
And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."
But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.
Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness.
January 04, 2009 "The Independent" -- There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.
Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?
To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.
Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.
The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.
There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.
And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."
But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.
Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness.
Friday, January 02, 2009
The Truth About Those Hamas Rockets
By Dennis Rahkonen
January 01, 2009 "Online Journal" -- Five years ago, the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to dupe us into supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.
A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse -- the Hamas rockets case -- as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a “regime” that came to power via popular, democratic vote.
Yes, such rockets exist, but they’re little more than slingshots against Israel’s incredible military might, and they’re used out of desperation by Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.
Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.
We’ve been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?
The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for 60 years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed a justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.
Our appropriate response wouldn’t be to bomb the hell out of the nearest Canadian or Mexican city, but to collectively look into mirrors and earnestly ask ourselves, “What have we done wrong to incur their wrath?”
And then act to correct the situation.
Conscientious Israelis acknowledge that the Hamas rockets rationale is fraudulent. For instance, Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner has noted, “We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds -- which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.
“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them . . .
“This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it . . .”
As Gazan hospitals and morgues fill beyond capacity because of an ongoing air assault that cruelly began at precisely the hour when countless children were heading home from school, we’re expected to believe that small craters mostly in empty Israeli fields constitute this terrible episode’s chief sin.
Bugs bothered by sporadically impacting, glorified fireworks cobbled together in backyard garages are ludicrously supposed to be the primary problem, not human limbs and lives shattered by the most destructive weapons that military science can produce!
At any point during the past six decades, Israel could have had peace, simply by assenting to the great moral imperative of our time, namely the Palestinians’ right to their own, unitary, sovereign homeland.
Something which Israel continues to resist tooth and nail.
Two years ago, in Southern Lebanon, Israel engaged in similar bombings in civilian areas. Then, too, it maintained that only “terrorist” targets were being hit. As impartial observers finally ascertained the truth, clear evidence of enormous civilian carnage surfaced.
The Israeli leadership lied then, and it’s lying now.
There’s a veritable holocaust occurring in densely packed Gaza. Think Guernica, or the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the searing irony that comparison involves.
Apart from being an ethical travesty offending all decent hearts, it’s an unpardonable outrage to especially Arab/Islamic peoples around the world.
Witness the angry demonstrations in cities across the planet.
It takes no extraordinary analytical prowess to appreciate that, when the White House ridiculously blames what’s currently happening on “thugs” in Gaza, and when moderate Arab states adopt an accommodationist position pleasing the U.S. and Israel, a profound Arab/Islamic radicalization billows and swells.
New Osama bin Ladens are being born as innocents in Gaza are getting ripped to death by American-made Hellfire missiles, dispatched toward fleshly targets by Israeli pilots.
In fact, the almost certain, counterproductive outcome of Israel’s action makes us necessarily suspect that secret motives mistakenly judged by Tel Aviv to be worth the risk are actually at play.
Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:
1) Obscenely using de facto genocide to give the present Israeli government a “tough” image before upcoming national elections.
2) Roping Barack Obama into a harder pro-Israeli stance than Tel Aviv fears he’d otherwise take.
3) Creating a manipulated, intensely propagandized situation that would enable a desired Israeli attack on Iran.
Whatever the most deeply hidden reality, Israel’s gargantuan crime must be universally condemned in the strongest possible terms . . . and halted at once!
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
January 01, 2009 "Online Journal" -- Five years ago, the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to dupe us into supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.
A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse -- the Hamas rockets case -- as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a “regime” that came to power via popular, democratic vote.
Yes, such rockets exist, but they’re little more than slingshots against Israel’s incredible military might, and they’re used out of desperation by Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.
Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.
We’ve been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?
The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for 60 years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed a justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.
Our appropriate response wouldn’t be to bomb the hell out of the nearest Canadian or Mexican city, but to collectively look into mirrors and earnestly ask ourselves, “What have we done wrong to incur their wrath?”
And then act to correct the situation.
Conscientious Israelis acknowledge that the Hamas rockets rationale is fraudulent. For instance, Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner has noted, “We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds -- which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.
“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them . . .
“This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it . . .”
As Gazan hospitals and morgues fill beyond capacity because of an ongoing air assault that cruelly began at precisely the hour when countless children were heading home from school, we’re expected to believe that small craters mostly in empty Israeli fields constitute this terrible episode’s chief sin.
Bugs bothered by sporadically impacting, glorified fireworks cobbled together in backyard garages are ludicrously supposed to be the primary problem, not human limbs and lives shattered by the most destructive weapons that military science can produce!
At any point during the past six decades, Israel could have had peace, simply by assenting to the great moral imperative of our time, namely the Palestinians’ right to their own, unitary, sovereign homeland.
Something which Israel continues to resist tooth and nail.
Two years ago, in Southern Lebanon, Israel engaged in similar bombings in civilian areas. Then, too, it maintained that only “terrorist” targets were being hit. As impartial observers finally ascertained the truth, clear evidence of enormous civilian carnage surfaced.
The Israeli leadership lied then, and it’s lying now.
There’s a veritable holocaust occurring in densely packed Gaza. Think Guernica, or the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the searing irony that comparison involves.
Apart from being an ethical travesty offending all decent hearts, it’s an unpardonable outrage to especially Arab/Islamic peoples around the world.
Witness the angry demonstrations in cities across the planet.
It takes no extraordinary analytical prowess to appreciate that, when the White House ridiculously blames what’s currently happening on “thugs” in Gaza, and when moderate Arab states adopt an accommodationist position pleasing the U.S. and Israel, a profound Arab/Islamic radicalization billows and swells.
New Osama bin Ladens are being born as innocents in Gaza are getting ripped to death by American-made Hellfire missiles, dispatched toward fleshly targets by Israeli pilots.
In fact, the almost certain, counterproductive outcome of Israel’s action makes us necessarily suspect that secret motives mistakenly judged by Tel Aviv to be worth the risk are actually at play.
Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:
1) Obscenely using de facto genocide to give the present Israeli government a “tough” image before upcoming national elections.
2) Roping Barack Obama into a harder pro-Israeli stance than Tel Aviv fears he’d otherwise take.
3) Creating a manipulated, intensely propagandized situation that would enable a desired Israeli attack on Iran.
Whatever the most deeply hidden reality, Israel’s gargantuan crime must be universally condemned in the strongest possible terms . . . and halted at once!
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
Friday, December 26, 2008
Drunk George Tenet lashed out at Bush’s neocons
‘The Jews’ who tried to ‘pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him.'
By Think Progress
December 16, 2008 "Think Progress" -- -Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg recently picked up a copy of Patrick Tyler’s forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, which focuses on “America’s tortured relations with the Middle East.” Goldberg says that the book’s prologue contains a “whopper of a scene” featuring former CIA director George Tenet “drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar’s Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him.” Tyler reports that Tenet also “mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration” as “the Jews“:
According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, “the Jews.”
A footnote in Tyler’s book says that Tenet “initially denied staying at Prince Bandar’s palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool.” “He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill,” reports Tyler.
By Think Progress
December 16, 2008 "Think Progress" -- -Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg recently picked up a copy of Patrick Tyler’s forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, which focuses on “America’s tortured relations with the Middle East.” Goldberg says that the book’s prologue contains a “whopper of a scene” featuring former CIA director George Tenet “drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar’s Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him.” Tyler reports that Tenet also “mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration” as “the Jews“:
According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, “the Jews.”
A footnote in Tyler’s book says that Tenet “initially denied staying at Prince Bandar’s palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool.” “He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill,” reports Tyler.
Monday, December 15, 2008
In Praise Of Muntather Al Zaidi
In Praise Of Muntather Al Zaidi
By Layla Anwar
December 15, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- -- Bush bidding his last goodbyes in occupied Baghdad. Bush the president of the United Asses reaping the fruits of his labor and that of his American people from my Beloved.
Bush congratulated his stooges, the extra-large Zionist/Kurdish buffoon Talabani and the other Kurdish pimp Barazani. The puppet Tareq Al-Hashemi who was all smiles, and guess whom Bush kissed on the cheeks ? None other than the son of a bitch from Iran, A.Al-Hakeem, head of the Supreme Iranian Butt Council and head of the Badr death squads, whose hands are inundated with the blood of innocent Arab Iraqis.
The criminal psychopath, Bush last stop, was at a press conference with his other puppet, the sectarian dictator, from Iran, PM Nuri Al-Maliki.
And whilst Bush was pontificating from his ass, Muntather Al-Zaidi, a 28 years old journalist, a leftist, from the independent anti-occupation, anti-sectarian TV, Al-Baghdadia, stood up and threw not one shoe but TWO pair of shoes at Bush, calling him at the top of his voice YA KALB - YOU DOG.
Al Jazeera's excellent news anchor the IRAQI Layla Al-Sheikhly was the only one to report the slur and insult to the President of the United Asses. His last visit indeed and a souvenir from a patriotic Iraqi. Subsequent news censored the insult - YA KALB-YOU DOG.
Let me tell you more about Muntather Al-Zaidi. Muntather was kidnapped, tortured and humiliated and when released he resumed his work as a journalist at the Baghdadia TV. He graduated from Baghdad University in Journalism and was active pre-2003 in the Iraqi Federation /Student Union and was/is known to be a vehement opposer to the dual occupation of my Beloved.
One of his colleagues confirmed that Muntather came to the press conference late, and his other colleagues from the same TV station had preceded him way before. This other colleague also confirmed that they had to stand for hours for stringent security checks before being allowed to enter the press hall.
Muntather as a dignified Iraqi, used the only weapon available to him - HIS SHOES.
He threw the first one with such dexterity, Bush ducked and within seconds he threw the second one and aimed right above that bastard's head and landed smash into the American flag. I think that Muntather was hoping to aim the other shoe at Maliki, the puppet.
Needless to say about 5 men or more, dressed in civil clothes and some of them were American dogs, threw themselves on this HERO Muntather. Amidst the stupor and shouts, I could hear his screams while he was being kicked, his hair pulled, and his face scratched...
We all watched it and Mom and I burst into tears, tears of happiness and tears of grief.
Happiness because Muntather filled us with hope, hope that there are still brave heroes left in Iraq. Mom even called him the Salah El-Deen Al Ayubi /the new Saladin.
A historical moment in the Iraqi tragedy indeed and during Bush's last visit !
A historical moment that will be recorded as the ultimate humiliation to any American president and to the "American Empire" hahahahahahaha.
We were also filled with grief and recited the Fateeha, because we knew that Muntather Al-Zaidi signed his own death warrant. This guy is finished.
Mom added that he will be tortured first, most probably with shoes before his execution.
Muntather Al-Zaidi was aware that the consequences of such an act will bring the wrath of the sectarian Shiites and zionists Kurdish puppets and that of the Americans on his head. But he risked it anyway...like a TRUE IRAQI HERO giving his occupier the ultimate humiliation next to the military defeat of America - because America has been DEFEATED in Iraq.
Yes, you dirty motherfuckers, NO VICTORY for you in IRAQ. No victory as long as people like Muntather exist...
I therefore urge all people of conscience, in particular Journalists without Borders, any syndicate or union of journalists anywhere in the world, to mobilize themselves for the release of Muntather before he gets executed.
I will leave you with an Iraqi song by Bassem Al-Ali singing for the Iraqis, all of the TRUE Iraqis, saying : You, Iraqi don't bow your head down and don't kneel. All the others will be defeated.
Down with America and her "Iraqi" stooges - government, individuals and groups !
Long Live the Iraqi Resistance. Long Live Iraq !
Please visit An Arab Woman Blues
By Layla Anwar
December 15, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- -- Bush bidding his last goodbyes in occupied Baghdad. Bush the president of the United Asses reaping the fruits of his labor and that of his American people from my Beloved.
Bush congratulated his stooges, the extra-large Zionist/Kurdish buffoon Talabani and the other Kurdish pimp Barazani. The puppet Tareq Al-Hashemi who was all smiles, and guess whom Bush kissed on the cheeks ? None other than the son of a bitch from Iran, A.Al-Hakeem, head of the Supreme Iranian Butt Council and head of the Badr death squads, whose hands are inundated with the blood of innocent Arab Iraqis.
The criminal psychopath, Bush last stop, was at a press conference with his other puppet, the sectarian dictator, from Iran, PM Nuri Al-Maliki.
And whilst Bush was pontificating from his ass, Muntather Al-Zaidi, a 28 years old journalist, a leftist, from the independent anti-occupation, anti-sectarian TV, Al-Baghdadia, stood up and threw not one shoe but TWO pair of shoes at Bush, calling him at the top of his voice YA KALB - YOU DOG.
Al Jazeera's excellent news anchor the IRAQI Layla Al-Sheikhly was the only one to report the slur and insult to the President of the United Asses. His last visit indeed and a souvenir from a patriotic Iraqi. Subsequent news censored the insult - YA KALB-YOU DOG.
Let me tell you more about Muntather Al-Zaidi. Muntather was kidnapped, tortured and humiliated and when released he resumed his work as a journalist at the Baghdadia TV. He graduated from Baghdad University in Journalism and was active pre-2003 in the Iraqi Federation /Student Union and was/is known to be a vehement opposer to the dual occupation of my Beloved.
One of his colleagues confirmed that Muntather came to the press conference late, and his other colleagues from the same TV station had preceded him way before. This other colleague also confirmed that they had to stand for hours for stringent security checks before being allowed to enter the press hall.
Muntather as a dignified Iraqi, used the only weapon available to him - HIS SHOES.
He threw the first one with such dexterity, Bush ducked and within seconds he threw the second one and aimed right above that bastard's head and landed smash into the American flag. I think that Muntather was hoping to aim the other shoe at Maliki, the puppet.
Needless to say about 5 men or more, dressed in civil clothes and some of them were American dogs, threw themselves on this HERO Muntather. Amidst the stupor and shouts, I could hear his screams while he was being kicked, his hair pulled, and his face scratched...
We all watched it and Mom and I burst into tears, tears of happiness and tears of grief.
Happiness because Muntather filled us with hope, hope that there are still brave heroes left in Iraq. Mom even called him the Salah El-Deen Al Ayubi /the new Saladin.
A historical moment in the Iraqi tragedy indeed and during Bush's last visit !
A historical moment that will be recorded as the ultimate humiliation to any American president and to the "American Empire" hahahahahahaha.
We were also filled with grief and recited the Fateeha, because we knew that Muntather Al-Zaidi signed his own death warrant. This guy is finished.
Mom added that he will be tortured first, most probably with shoes before his execution.
Muntather Al-Zaidi was aware that the consequences of such an act will bring the wrath of the sectarian Shiites and zionists Kurdish puppets and that of the Americans on his head. But he risked it anyway...like a TRUE IRAQI HERO giving his occupier the ultimate humiliation next to the military defeat of America - because America has been DEFEATED in Iraq.
Yes, you dirty motherfuckers, NO VICTORY for you in IRAQ. No victory as long as people like Muntather exist...
I therefore urge all people of conscience, in particular Journalists without Borders, any syndicate or union of journalists anywhere in the world, to mobilize themselves for the release of Muntather before he gets executed.
I will leave you with an Iraqi song by Bassem Al-Ali singing for the Iraqis, all of the TRUE Iraqis, saying : You, Iraqi don't bow your head down and don't kneel. All the others will be defeated.
Down with America and her "Iraqi" stooges - government, individuals and groups !
Long Live the Iraqi Resistance. Long Live Iraq !
Please visit An Arab Woman Blues
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History
A Historic Moment:
The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History
By James Petras
“I have a vision of Americans in their 80’s being wheeled to their offices and factories having lost their legs in imperial wars and their pensions to Wall Street speculators and with bitter memories of voting for a President who promised change, prosperity and peace and then appointed financial swindlers and war mongers.” An itinerant Minister 2008
December 08, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics. For reasons completely foreign to the emotional ejaculations of his boosters, it is a historic moment: witness the abysmal gap between his ‘populist’ campaign demagoguery and his long-standing and deepening carnal relations with the most retrograde political figures, power brokers and billionaire real estate and financial backers.
What was evident from even a cursory analysis of his key campaign advisers and public commitments to Wall Street speculators, civilian militarists, zealous Zionists and corporate lawyers was hidden from the electorate, by Obama’s people friendly imagery and smooth, eloquent deliverance of a message of ‘hope’. He effectively gained the confidence, dollars and votes of tens of millions of voters by promising ‘change’ (implying higher taxes for the rich, ending the Iraq war and national health care reform) when in fact his campaign advisers (and subsequent strategic appointments) pointed to a continuation of the economic and military policies of the Bush Administration.
Within 3 weeks of his election he appointed all the political dregs who brought on the unending wars of the past two decades, the economic policy makers responsible for the financial crash and the deepening recession castigating tens of millions of Americans today and for the foreseeable future. We can affirm that the election of Obama does indeed mark a historic moment in American history: The victory of the greatest con man and his accomplices and backers in recent history.
He spoke to the workers and worked for their financial overlords.
He flashed his color to minorities while obliterating any mention of their socio-economic grievances.
He promised peace in the Middle East to the majority of young Americans and slavishly swears undying allegiance to the War Party of American Zionists serving a foreign colonial power (Israel).
Obama, on a bigger stage, is the perfect incarnation of Melville’s Confidence Man. He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East on behalf of a foreign country. He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising you that better days are ahead.
Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ leftists and academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking engagements as platforms to promote the con man’s candidacy: They described the con man’s political pitch as “meeting the deeply felt needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he spoke of ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the policies and policy makers who were the architects of our current political-economic disaster.
The Con Man’s Self-Opiated Progressive Camp Followers
The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political activities was clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized masses and the self-opiated ‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s election and after he appointed every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the top economic policy positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged imperial wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog along with the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s appointments of war mongers and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time now in order to move ‘left’ later.
Never ones to publicly admit their ‘historic’ errors, the same progressives turned to writing ‘open letters to the President’ pleading the ‘cause of the people’. Their epistles, of course, may succeed in passing through the shredder in the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.
The conjurer who spoke of ‘change’ now speaks of ‘experience’ in appointing to every key and minor position the same political hacks who rotate seamlessly between Wall Street and Washington, the Fed and Academia. Instead of ‘change’ there is the utmost continuity of policy makers, policies and above all ever deepening ties between militarists, Wall Street and the Obama appointments. True believer-progressives, facing their total debacle, grab for any straw. Forced to admit that all of Obama’s appointments represent the dregs of the bloody and corrupt past, they hope and pray that ‘current dire circumstances’ may force these unrepentant warmongers and life long supporters of finance capital to become supporters and advocates of a revived Keynesian welfare state. On the contrary, Obama and each and everyone of his foreign policy appointments to the Pentagon, State and Justice Departments, Intelligence and Security agencies are calling for vast increases in military spending, troop commitments and domestic militarization to recover the lost fortunes of a declining empire. Obama and his appointees plan to vigorously pursue Clinton-Bush’s global war against national resistance movements in the Middle East. His most intimate and trusted ‘Israel-First’ advisers have targeted Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine and Iraq.
Obama’s Economic Con Game
Then there is the contrast between the trillions Obama will shower on the financial swindlers (and any other ‘too big to fail’ private capitalist enterprise) and his zero compensation for the 100 million heads of families swindled of $5 trillion dollars in savings and pensions by his cohort appointees and bailout beneficiaries. Not a cent is allocated for the long term unemployed. Not a single household threatened with eviction will be bailed out.
Obama is the trademark name of a network of confidence people. They are a well-organized gang of prominent political operative, money raisers, mass media hustlers, real estate moguls and academic pimps. They are joined and abetted by the elected officials and hacks of the Democratic Party. Like the virtuoso performer, Obama projected the image and followed the script. But the funding and the entire ‘populist’ show was constructed by the hard-nosed, hard-line free marketeers, Jewish and Gentile ‘Israel Firsters’, Washington war mongers and a host of multi-millionaire ‘trade union’ bureaucrats.
The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely propelling a dozen strategic con artists into high office and the White House. First and foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the rage and anger of tens of millions of economically skewered and war drained Americans from turning their hostility against a discredited presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two factions political system and into direct action or at least toward a new political movement.
Secondly the Obama image provided a temporary cover for the return and continuity of all that was so detested by the American people – the arrogant untouchable swindlers, growing unemployment and economic uncertainty, the loss of life savings and homes and the endless, ever-expanding imperial wars.
Featuring Paul Volker, ‘Larry’ Summers, Robert Gates, the Clintons, Geithner, Holder and General (‘You drink your kool-aid while I sit on Boeings’ Board of Directors’) Jim Jones USMC, Obama treats us to a re-run of military surges and war crimes, Wall Street banditry, Abu Ghraib, AIPAC hustlers and all the sundry old crap. Our Harvard-minted Gunga Din purports to speak for all the colonial subjects but acts in the interest of the empire, its financial vampires, its war criminals and its Middle East leaches from the Land of the Chosen.
The Two Faces of Obama
Like the Janus face found on the coins of the early Roman Republic, Obama and his intimate cronies cynically joked about ‘which is the real face of Barack’, conscious of the con-job they were perpetrating during the campaign. In reality, there is only one face - a very committed, very consequential and very up front Obama, who demonstrated in every single one of his appointments the face of an empire builder.
Obama is an open militarist, intent by every means possible to re-construct a tattered US empire. The President-Elect is an unabashed Wall Street Firster – one who has placed the recuperation of the biggest banks and investment houses as his highest priority. Obama’s nominees for all the top economic positions (Treasury, Chief White House economic advisers) are eminently qualified, (with long-term service to the financial oligarchy), to pursue Obama’s pro-Wall Street agenda. There is not a single member of his economic team, down to the lowest level of appointees, who represents or has defended the interests of the wage or salaried classes (or for that matter the large and small manufacturers from the devastated ‘productive’ industrial economy).
The Obama propagandists claim his appointments reflect his preference for ‘experience’ – which is true: his team members have plenty of ‘experience’ through their long and lucrative careers maximizing profits, buyouts and speculation favoring the financial sector. Obama does not want to have any young, untested appointees who have no long established records of serving Big Finance, whose interests are too central to Obama’s deepest and most strongly held core beliefs. He wanted reliable economic functionaries who recognize that re-financing billionaire financiers is the central task of his regime. The appointments of the Summers, Rubins, Geithners and Volkers fit perfectly with his ideology: They are the best choices to pursue his economic goals.
Critics of these nominations write of the ‘failures’ of these economists and their role in ‘bringing about the collapse of the financial system’. These critics fail to recognize that it is not their ‘failures’, which are the relevant criteria, but their unwavering commitment to the interests of Wall Street and their willingness to demand trillions of dollars more from US taxpayers to bolster their colleagues on Wall Street.
Under Clinton and Bush, in the run up to the financial collapse, they facilitated (‘deregulated’) the practice of swindling one hundred million Americans of trillions in private savings and pension funds. In the current crisis period with Obama they are just the right people to swindle the US Treasury of trillions of dollars in bailout funds to refinance their fellow oligarchs. The White President (Bush) leaves steaming financial turds all over the White House rugs and Wall Street summons the ‘historic’ Negro President Obama to organize the cleanup crew to scoop them out of public view.
Obama, the Militarist, Outdoes His Predecessor
What makes Obama a much more audacious militarist and Wall Streeter than Bush is that he intends to pursue military policies, which have already greatly harmed the US people with appointed officials who have already been discredited in the context of failed imperial wars and with a domestic economy in collapse. While Bush launched his wars after the US public had their accustomed peace shattered by an orchestrated fear-mongering after 9/11, Obama intends to launch his escalation of military spending in the context of a generalized public disenchantment with the ongoing wars, with monumental fiscal deficits, bloated military budgets and after 100,000 US soldiers have been killed, wounded or psychologically destroyed.
Obama’s appointments of Clinton, General Jim Jones, dual Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel and super-Zionist Dennis Ross, among others, fit perfectly with his imperial-militarist agenda of escalating military aggression. His short list of intelligence candidates, likewise, fits perfectly with his all-out effort to “regain US world leadership” (reconstruct US imperial networks). All the media blather about Obama’s efforts at ‘bipartisanship’, ‘experience’ and ‘competence’ obscures the most fundamental questions: The specific nominees chosen from both parties are totally committed to military-driven empire-building. All are in favor of “a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world” (read ‘America’s imperial dominance in the world’), as Obama’s Secretary of State-to-be, Hillary Clinton, declared. General James Jones, Obama’s choice for National Security Advisor, presided over US military operations during the entire Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo period. He was a fervent supporter of the ‘troop surge’ in Iraq and is a powerful advocate for a huge increase in military spending, the expansion of the military by over 100,000 troops and the expanded militarization of American domestic society (not to mention his personal financial ties to the military industrial complex). Robert Gates, continuing as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, is a staunch supporter of unilateral, unlimited and universal imperial warfare. As the number of US-allied countries with troops in Iraq declines from 35 to only 5 by January 1, 2009 and even the Iraqi puppet regime calls for a withdrawal of all US troops by 2012, Gates, the intransigent, insists on a permanent military presence.
The issue of ‘experience’ revolves around two questions: (a) experience related to what past political practices? (b) experience relevant to pursue what future policies? All the nominees’ past experiences are related to imperial wars, colonial conquests and the construction of client states. Hiliary Clinton’s ‘experience’ was through her support for the bombing of Yugoslavia and the Nato invasion of Kosova, her promotion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an internationally recognized terrorist-criminal organization as well as the unrelenting bombings of Iraq in the 1990s, Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s murderous bombing of civilian centers in Lebanon…and now full-throated calls for the ‘total obliteration of Iran’. Clinton, Gates and Jones have never in their mature political careers proposed the peaceful settlement of disputes with any adversary of the US or Israel. In other words, their vaunted ‘experience’ is based solely on their one-dimensional militarist approach to foreign relations.
‘Competence’, as an attribute again depends on the issue of ‘competence to do what’? In general terms, ‘The Three’ (Clinton, Gates and Jones), have demonstrated the greatest incompetence in extricating the US from prolonged, costly and lost colonial wars. They lack the minimum capacity to recognize that military-driven empire-building in the context of independent states is no longer feasible, that its costs can ruin an imperial economy and that prolonged wars erode their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens.
Even within the framework of imperial geo-political strategic thinking, their positions exhibit the most dense incompetence: They blindly back a small, highly militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state (Israel) against 1.5 billion Muslims living in oil and mineral resource-rich nations with lucrative markets and investment potential and situated in the strategic center of the world. They promote total wars against whole populations, as is occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot be won. They are truly ‘Masters of Defeat’.
The point of the matter is that Obama appointed the ‘Big Three’ for their experience, competence and bipartisan support in the pursuit of imperial wars. He overlooked their glaring failures, their gross violations of the basic norms of civilization (of the human rights of tens of millions civilians in sovereign nations) because of their willingness to pursue the illusions of a US-dominated new world order.
Conclusion
Nothing speaks to Obama’s deep and abiding commitment to become the savior of the US empire as clearly as his willingness to appoint to the highest position of policy making the most mediocre failed politicians and generals merely because of their demonstrated willingness to pursue the course of military-driven empire building even in the midst of a collapsing domestic economy and ever more impoverished and drained citizenry.
Just as Obama’s electoral campaign and subsequent victory will go into the annals as the political con-job of the new millennium, his economic and political appointments will mark another ‘historic’ moment: The nomination of corrupt and failed speculators and warmongers. Let us join the inaugural celebration of our ‘First Afro-American’ Imperial President, who wins by con and rules by guns!
The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History
By James Petras
“I have a vision of Americans in their 80’s being wheeled to their offices and factories having lost their legs in imperial wars and their pensions to Wall Street speculators and with bitter memories of voting for a President who promised change, prosperity and peace and then appointed financial swindlers and war mongers.” An itinerant Minister 2008
December 08, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics. For reasons completely foreign to the emotional ejaculations of his boosters, it is a historic moment: witness the abysmal gap between his ‘populist’ campaign demagoguery and his long-standing and deepening carnal relations with the most retrograde political figures, power brokers and billionaire real estate and financial backers.
What was evident from even a cursory analysis of his key campaign advisers and public commitments to Wall Street speculators, civilian militarists, zealous Zionists and corporate lawyers was hidden from the electorate, by Obama’s people friendly imagery and smooth, eloquent deliverance of a message of ‘hope’. He effectively gained the confidence, dollars and votes of tens of millions of voters by promising ‘change’ (implying higher taxes for the rich, ending the Iraq war and national health care reform) when in fact his campaign advisers (and subsequent strategic appointments) pointed to a continuation of the economic and military policies of the Bush Administration.
Within 3 weeks of his election he appointed all the political dregs who brought on the unending wars of the past two decades, the economic policy makers responsible for the financial crash and the deepening recession castigating tens of millions of Americans today and for the foreseeable future. We can affirm that the election of Obama does indeed mark a historic moment in American history: The victory of the greatest con man and his accomplices and backers in recent history.
He spoke to the workers and worked for their financial overlords.
He flashed his color to minorities while obliterating any mention of their socio-economic grievances.
He promised peace in the Middle East to the majority of young Americans and slavishly swears undying allegiance to the War Party of American Zionists serving a foreign colonial power (Israel).
Obama, on a bigger stage, is the perfect incarnation of Melville’s Confidence Man. He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East on behalf of a foreign country. He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising you that better days are ahead.
Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ leftists and academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking engagements as platforms to promote the con man’s candidacy: They described the con man’s political pitch as “meeting the deeply felt needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he spoke of ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the policies and policy makers who were the architects of our current political-economic disaster.
The Con Man’s Self-Opiated Progressive Camp Followers
The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political activities was clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized masses and the self-opiated ‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s election and after he appointed every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the top economic policy positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged imperial wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog along with the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s appointments of war mongers and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time now in order to move ‘left’ later.
Never ones to publicly admit their ‘historic’ errors, the same progressives turned to writing ‘open letters to the President’ pleading the ‘cause of the people’. Their epistles, of course, may succeed in passing through the shredder in the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.
The conjurer who spoke of ‘change’ now speaks of ‘experience’ in appointing to every key and minor position the same political hacks who rotate seamlessly between Wall Street and Washington, the Fed and Academia. Instead of ‘change’ there is the utmost continuity of policy makers, policies and above all ever deepening ties between militarists, Wall Street and the Obama appointments. True believer-progressives, facing their total debacle, grab for any straw. Forced to admit that all of Obama’s appointments represent the dregs of the bloody and corrupt past, they hope and pray that ‘current dire circumstances’ may force these unrepentant warmongers and life long supporters of finance capital to become supporters and advocates of a revived Keynesian welfare state. On the contrary, Obama and each and everyone of his foreign policy appointments to the Pentagon, State and Justice Departments, Intelligence and Security agencies are calling for vast increases in military spending, troop commitments and domestic militarization to recover the lost fortunes of a declining empire. Obama and his appointees plan to vigorously pursue Clinton-Bush’s global war against national resistance movements in the Middle East. His most intimate and trusted ‘Israel-First’ advisers have targeted Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine and Iraq.
Obama’s Economic Con Game
Then there is the contrast between the trillions Obama will shower on the financial swindlers (and any other ‘too big to fail’ private capitalist enterprise) and his zero compensation for the 100 million heads of families swindled of $5 trillion dollars in savings and pensions by his cohort appointees and bailout beneficiaries. Not a cent is allocated for the long term unemployed. Not a single household threatened with eviction will be bailed out.
Obama is the trademark name of a network of confidence people. They are a well-organized gang of prominent political operative, money raisers, mass media hustlers, real estate moguls and academic pimps. They are joined and abetted by the elected officials and hacks of the Democratic Party. Like the virtuoso performer, Obama projected the image and followed the script. But the funding and the entire ‘populist’ show was constructed by the hard-nosed, hard-line free marketeers, Jewish and Gentile ‘Israel Firsters’, Washington war mongers and a host of multi-millionaire ‘trade union’ bureaucrats.
The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely propelling a dozen strategic con artists into high office and the White House. First and foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the rage and anger of tens of millions of economically skewered and war drained Americans from turning their hostility against a discredited presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two factions political system and into direct action or at least toward a new political movement.
Secondly the Obama image provided a temporary cover for the return and continuity of all that was so detested by the American people – the arrogant untouchable swindlers, growing unemployment and economic uncertainty, the loss of life savings and homes and the endless, ever-expanding imperial wars.
Featuring Paul Volker, ‘Larry’ Summers, Robert Gates, the Clintons, Geithner, Holder and General (‘You drink your kool-aid while I sit on Boeings’ Board of Directors’) Jim Jones USMC, Obama treats us to a re-run of military surges and war crimes, Wall Street banditry, Abu Ghraib, AIPAC hustlers and all the sundry old crap. Our Harvard-minted Gunga Din purports to speak for all the colonial subjects but acts in the interest of the empire, its financial vampires, its war criminals and its Middle East leaches from the Land of the Chosen.
The Two Faces of Obama
Like the Janus face found on the coins of the early Roman Republic, Obama and his intimate cronies cynically joked about ‘which is the real face of Barack’, conscious of the con-job they were perpetrating during the campaign. In reality, there is only one face - a very committed, very consequential and very up front Obama, who demonstrated in every single one of his appointments the face of an empire builder.
Obama is an open militarist, intent by every means possible to re-construct a tattered US empire. The President-Elect is an unabashed Wall Street Firster – one who has placed the recuperation of the biggest banks and investment houses as his highest priority. Obama’s nominees for all the top economic positions (Treasury, Chief White House economic advisers) are eminently qualified, (with long-term service to the financial oligarchy), to pursue Obama’s pro-Wall Street agenda. There is not a single member of his economic team, down to the lowest level of appointees, who represents or has defended the interests of the wage or salaried classes (or for that matter the large and small manufacturers from the devastated ‘productive’ industrial economy).
The Obama propagandists claim his appointments reflect his preference for ‘experience’ – which is true: his team members have plenty of ‘experience’ through their long and lucrative careers maximizing profits, buyouts and speculation favoring the financial sector. Obama does not want to have any young, untested appointees who have no long established records of serving Big Finance, whose interests are too central to Obama’s deepest and most strongly held core beliefs. He wanted reliable economic functionaries who recognize that re-financing billionaire financiers is the central task of his regime. The appointments of the Summers, Rubins, Geithners and Volkers fit perfectly with his ideology: They are the best choices to pursue his economic goals.
Critics of these nominations write of the ‘failures’ of these economists and their role in ‘bringing about the collapse of the financial system’. These critics fail to recognize that it is not their ‘failures’, which are the relevant criteria, but their unwavering commitment to the interests of Wall Street and their willingness to demand trillions of dollars more from US taxpayers to bolster their colleagues on Wall Street.
Under Clinton and Bush, in the run up to the financial collapse, they facilitated (‘deregulated’) the practice of swindling one hundred million Americans of trillions in private savings and pension funds. In the current crisis period with Obama they are just the right people to swindle the US Treasury of trillions of dollars in bailout funds to refinance their fellow oligarchs. The White President (Bush) leaves steaming financial turds all over the White House rugs and Wall Street summons the ‘historic’ Negro President Obama to organize the cleanup crew to scoop them out of public view.
Obama, the Militarist, Outdoes His Predecessor
What makes Obama a much more audacious militarist and Wall Streeter than Bush is that he intends to pursue military policies, which have already greatly harmed the US people with appointed officials who have already been discredited in the context of failed imperial wars and with a domestic economy in collapse. While Bush launched his wars after the US public had their accustomed peace shattered by an orchestrated fear-mongering after 9/11, Obama intends to launch his escalation of military spending in the context of a generalized public disenchantment with the ongoing wars, with monumental fiscal deficits, bloated military budgets and after 100,000 US soldiers have been killed, wounded or psychologically destroyed.
Obama’s appointments of Clinton, General Jim Jones, dual Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel and super-Zionist Dennis Ross, among others, fit perfectly with his imperial-militarist agenda of escalating military aggression. His short list of intelligence candidates, likewise, fits perfectly with his all-out effort to “regain US world leadership” (reconstruct US imperial networks). All the media blather about Obama’s efforts at ‘bipartisanship’, ‘experience’ and ‘competence’ obscures the most fundamental questions: The specific nominees chosen from both parties are totally committed to military-driven empire-building. All are in favor of “a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world” (read ‘America’s imperial dominance in the world’), as Obama’s Secretary of State-to-be, Hillary Clinton, declared. General James Jones, Obama’s choice for National Security Advisor, presided over US military operations during the entire Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo period. He was a fervent supporter of the ‘troop surge’ in Iraq and is a powerful advocate for a huge increase in military spending, the expansion of the military by over 100,000 troops and the expanded militarization of American domestic society (not to mention his personal financial ties to the military industrial complex). Robert Gates, continuing as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, is a staunch supporter of unilateral, unlimited and universal imperial warfare. As the number of US-allied countries with troops in Iraq declines from 35 to only 5 by January 1, 2009 and even the Iraqi puppet regime calls for a withdrawal of all US troops by 2012, Gates, the intransigent, insists on a permanent military presence.
The issue of ‘experience’ revolves around two questions: (a) experience related to what past political practices? (b) experience relevant to pursue what future policies? All the nominees’ past experiences are related to imperial wars, colonial conquests and the construction of client states. Hiliary Clinton’s ‘experience’ was through her support for the bombing of Yugoslavia and the Nato invasion of Kosova, her promotion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an internationally recognized terrorist-criminal organization as well as the unrelenting bombings of Iraq in the 1990s, Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s murderous bombing of civilian centers in Lebanon…and now full-throated calls for the ‘total obliteration of Iran’. Clinton, Gates and Jones have never in their mature political careers proposed the peaceful settlement of disputes with any adversary of the US or Israel. In other words, their vaunted ‘experience’ is based solely on their one-dimensional militarist approach to foreign relations.
‘Competence’, as an attribute again depends on the issue of ‘competence to do what’? In general terms, ‘The Three’ (Clinton, Gates and Jones), have demonstrated the greatest incompetence in extricating the US from prolonged, costly and lost colonial wars. They lack the minimum capacity to recognize that military-driven empire-building in the context of independent states is no longer feasible, that its costs can ruin an imperial economy and that prolonged wars erode their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens.
Even within the framework of imperial geo-political strategic thinking, their positions exhibit the most dense incompetence: They blindly back a small, highly militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state (Israel) against 1.5 billion Muslims living in oil and mineral resource-rich nations with lucrative markets and investment potential and situated in the strategic center of the world. They promote total wars against whole populations, as is occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot be won. They are truly ‘Masters of Defeat’.
The point of the matter is that Obama appointed the ‘Big Three’ for their experience, competence and bipartisan support in the pursuit of imperial wars. He overlooked their glaring failures, their gross violations of the basic norms of civilization (of the human rights of tens of millions civilians in sovereign nations) because of their willingness to pursue the illusions of a US-dominated new world order.
Conclusion
Nothing speaks to Obama’s deep and abiding commitment to become the savior of the US empire as clearly as his willingness to appoint to the highest position of policy making the most mediocre failed politicians and generals merely because of their demonstrated willingness to pursue the course of military-driven empire building even in the midst of a collapsing domestic economy and ever more impoverished and drained citizenry.
Just as Obama’s electoral campaign and subsequent victory will go into the annals as the political con-job of the new millennium, his economic and political appointments will mark another ‘historic’ moment: The nomination of corrupt and failed speculators and warmongers. Let us join the inaugural celebration of our ‘First Afro-American’ Imperial President, who wins by con and rules by guns!
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