Peace and Justice Post

Source: London Review of Books, October 18, 2007

Jim Holt

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

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Foreign Policy In Focus

Adil E. Shamoo and Bonnie Bricker | October 19, 2007

“We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people.” Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that’s the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.

Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, has declared that “…the Iraq war is largely about oil” in his recently released memoirs. “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are,” said the Republican Senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel to law students of Catholic University last September. “They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”
Yet, although anti-war activists decried the “blood for oil” connection from the beginning of the war, no honest conversations have occurred in the public to involve Americans in this discussion.
This is the debate that Americans should be having: on the one hand, America’s economy is fueled by our use of energy to run our lives–fueling our cars and SUVs, our industry, our homes. The United States uses 25 % of the world’s oil and but we’re only 4% of the world’s population.
We like to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and we love the freedom of choosing to use as much energy as we want. We also don’t like anyone telling us that we have to change our ways. If we keep using energy the way we always have, we’re going to need a dependable source of it to ensure that our children and grandchildren have access to the same way of life. But we have competitors for oil in the world marketplace–China, especially–and many argue that if we don’t lock up Middle Eastern oil for ourselves now, we won’t have it for our use in the very near future. That will mean paying even more for energy and allowing other nations to rev up their economic engines at our expense.
On the other hand, the cost of ensuring this oil supply is a hefty one. Americans are losing lives. A generation of veterans will be suffering through the vast wounds of this war. Our actions in Iraq have led to as many as a million Iraqi deaths and many more wounded, and displaced 4.4 million Iraqis. We have, in the name of “The War on Terror”, created so many U.S. enemies around the world, that our college-age students sew Canadian flags on their backpacks when abroad in the hopes of disguising their American identities. As a result of this war, many Americans have come to accept that U.S. policy will include the moral and ethical disruptions of war–even when we have not been attacked by the people we invade, but rather are invading a weakened nation for the resource we desire.
Americans deserve this discussion so we can decide who we are and how we wish to solve this problem. Is it feasible or naïve to think we can use alternative energy sources instead of oil to address our needs? Is it possible to change our habits and our lives to accommodate lower energy needs- or will too many Americans reject any change in habit? And finally, are we really the noble Americans we like to think that we are, if we allow death and destruction of this magnitude to occur in our name? I’m still waiting to hear the honest debate from our presidential candidates, from our media, and even with our friends and neighbors.

Bonnie Bricker is a teacher and contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. Adil E. Shamoo, born and raised in Baghdad, is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He writes on ethics and public policy. He is an analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. Both authors can be reached at: ashamoo@umaryland.edu.

The Washinton Post, October 19, 2007

By Bill Gertz

Mullen

U.S. military forces are capable of conducting operations against Iran if called on to bomb nuclear facilities or other targets, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday.

“From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve to respond if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do, and so I don’t think we’re too stretched in that regard,” Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters when asked if current operations had worn out U.S. forces.
Adm. Mullen said he has been concerned over the past year and a half with Iranian leaders’ statements of intentions, Tehran’s support for bombers in Iraq and Iran’s covert drive for nuclear weapons.

“All of which has potentially a very destabilizing impact on a part of the world, a region of the world which is struggling in many ways already,” he said in his first press conference since becoming chairman Oct. 1. “So they’re not being helpful.”
Defense and military officials have been preparing U.S. forces within striking distance of Iran. The forces would be dominated by Navy and Air Force weapons and forces since Army and Marine Corps forces are focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Continued . . . 

Daily Mail, October 20, 2007

By Fiona Barton

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was assassinated, an MP claims today.

Campaigning politician Norman Baker believes Dr Kelly, who exposed the Government’s “sexed-up” Iraq dossier, was killed to stop him making further revelations about the lies that took Britain to war.

He says the murderers may have been anti-Saddam Iraqis, and suggests the crime was covered up by elements within the British establishment to prevent a diplomatic crisis.

‘Murdered’: Weapons’ expert David Kelly

The LibDem MP, who gave up his front bench post to carry out his year-long investigation, makes his claims in a book serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail today and next week. The official Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly ruled in 2004 that he slashed one of his wrists with a garden knife and took an overdose after being “outed” as the mole who revealed the flawed argument for invading Iraq.

But Norman Baker is convinced the scientist was murdered.

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The slaughter in Karachi is a brutal symbol of a nation blighted by political opportunism and western interference

The Guardian, Saturday October 20, 2007

Ziauddin Sardar

The dreadful carnage in Karachi is a bloody but perfect metaphor for the politics of Pakistan. The country has shown once again that political opportunism, home grown and nourished by foreign interests, is deadly for ordinary Pakistanis.

The media hyperventilation over the return of Benazir Bhutto is a clear indication not only that nothing has changed – but that no meaningful change is intended. An army general is entrenched as president for another five years. If the promised elections are held, they would be anything but fair and free, given that Bhutto is supposed to win and provide a democratic front for a military ruler. The Pakistani Taliban – whom many are blaming for Thursday night’s assassination attempts – continue their reign of terror in the northern provinces of the country, complete with suicide bombings and beheadings, with increasing impunity. The vast majority of Pakistanis feel utterly impotent and the poor and the innocent suffer the brunt of the violence unleashed by the fanatics.

Continued . . .

Source; Foreign Policy In Focus

Conn Hallinan | October 17, 2007

The great 19th-century Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli once remarked there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. It is a dictum the Bush administration has taken to heart when it comes to totaling up the carnage in Iraq: If you don’t like the numbers, just change them; and when in doubt, look ’em in the eye and lie.

For instance, according to the Department of Defense (DOD), the United States does not track civilian casualties. As former commander General Tommy Franks put it, “We don’t do body counts.”

But testimony in the recent trial of U.S. Army snipers from the First Battalion of the 501 Infantry regiment indicated the generals indeed do body counts. In a July hearing at Fort Liberty, Iraq, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other snipers felt “an underlying tone” of disappointment from their commanders when they didn’t rack up big body counts.

“It just kind of felt like, ‘What are you guys doing wrong out there?'” he testified. When the snipers started setting traps to lure in unsuspecting Iraqis, the kill ratios went up and the commanders, he said, were pleased.

The choreography the Bush administration does around casualties is aimed at creating a dance of lies and disinformation to cover up one of the worst humanitarian crises to strike the Middle East since the Mongols sacked Baghdad.

That is not an overstatement.

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Dissident Voice

by John Pilger / October 19th, 2007

In SiCKO, Michael Moore’s new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject “socialized medicine” as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were “anti-American”.

Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive farewells to Reagan when he died three years ago. “Many people believe,” said Gavin Esler on the BBC’s Newsnight, “that he restored faith in American military action [and] was loved even by his political opponents.” In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan “embodied the best of the American spirit — the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are”.

Such drivel about a man who, as president, was responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in Central America, and the rise of the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin. Reagan’s walk-on part in SiCKO is a rare glimpse of the truth of his betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore.

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CommonDreams.org

By Bill Quigley|Published, October 17, 2007

TUCSON, Arizona — October 17 — Louis Vitale, 75, a Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest, were each sentenced today to five months in federal prison for attempting to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were taken directly into jail from the courtroom after sentencing.

Fort Huachuca is the headquarters of military intelligence in the U.S. and the place where military and civilian interrogators are taught how to extract information from prisoners. The priests attempted to deliver their letter to Major General Barbara Fast, commander of Fort Huachuca. Fast was previously the head of all military intelligence in Iraq during the atrocities of Abu Ghraib.

The priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were charged with trespass on a military base and resisting orders of an officer to stop.

In a pre-trial heating, the priests attempted to introduce evidence of torture, murder, and gross violations of human rights in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Guantanamo. The priests offered investigative reports from the FBI, the US Army, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Social Responsibility documenting hundreds of incidents of human rights violations. Despite increasing evidence of the use of torture by U.S. forces sanctioned by President Bush and others, the federal court in Tucson refused to allow any evidence of torture, the legality of the invasion of Iraq, or international law to be a part of the trial.

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The Independent, October 19, 2007

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.

Mrs Clinton’s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.

Keep reading . . .