Peace and Justice Post

War In Iraq, December 25, 2007

By JOSCHKA FISCHER

Things aren’t going well in Afghanistan. Sometime at the turn of 2001-2002, the Bush administration concluded that the stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan was no longer its top priority and decided to bet instead on military-led regime change in Iraq.

Afghanistan can thus rightly be seen as the first victim of the administration’s misguided strategy. But the Bush administration is not the sole culprit for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. It was NATO’s job to ensure the country’s stability and security, and thus NATO’s weak general secretary and the European allies, especially Germany and France, share the responsibility for the worsening situation. Yet, despite all the difficulties, the situation in Afghanistan, unlike that in Iraq, is not hopeless. There was a good reason for going to war in Afghanistan in the first place, because the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, originated there.

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To all our readers, peace activists and

defenders of human rights

Season’s Greetings, Eid Mubarak

and a Merry Christmas.

War In Iraq, December 19, 2007

by Bahlol Lohdi

Hamid Karzai is the grandson of Khair Mohammed of the village of Karz, not far from Kandahar. He was an indigent member of the Popalzai tribe with a large family who migrated to Kandahar seeking a better life. Normally, when a Pashtun is of noble stock he’s known by a patronym, but more humble tribal members do not have that privilege. Therefore, perforce they resort to descriptive names like Karzai, Pashto for “born in Karz.”

Not finding adequate employment opportunities in Kandahar, Khair Mohammed moved his family to Kabul. There he prospered because Kabul lacked hotels, so the nobility of Kandahar visiting Kabul were invited to stay at Khair Mohammed’s modest home. They provided him with money to buy provisions for their stay with him, and Karzai’s grandmother cooked their food and took care of their laundry.

Soon, Khair Mohammed came to the attention of the government as an ideal source of intelligence about the situation in Kandahar, garnered from the conversations of his paying Kandahari guests. His loyal service to the government resulted in his being given a deputy-head post in one of the government departments. He became known as “Mueen Khairo Jan,” a term of contempt, for the Kandaharis had realized the extent of his perfidy.

Karzai’s father, Ahad Karzai, benefited from Mueen Khairo Jan’s connections and was admitted to the lower social circles of the Afghan royal family. He became one of the numerous court jesters. However, Ahad was dimwitted and insolent enough once to crack a joke at the expense of a minor royal family member. He was rewarded by being crowned with a crystal ashtray and, bleeding profusely, dismissed – obviously Ahad Karzai did not appreciate the fact that a royal appointment to the Afghan parliament didn’t raise him to the status of someone who could poke fun at even minor royalty. His son, the British-ennobled Sir Hamid Karzai, seems to suffer from the same predilection to the folie de grandeur that afflicts parvenus and predisposes them to inappropriate behavior and comments. His public clash with U.S. President George Bush regarding Iran is just one of the more well-known examples of Hamid “Jan” Karzai’s public faux pas.

During the Soviet occupation, Ahad Karzai joined “the usual suspects” in Peshawar. Where there was money to be made, the Karzais were bound to congregate.

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Foster’s Daily Democrat (New Hampshire)

By GRETYL MACALASTER

Article Date: Friday, December 21, 2007

Veteran CIA analyst and daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern discusses “Inside INTELLIGENCE: Behind the headlines on the Iran ‘Threat’, our Constitutional Crisis, Prisoner Treatment and September 11th” Monday night at the Portsmouth Public Library. (Aaron Leclerc/Staff photographer)

PORTSMOUTH — The evidence for impeachment of the president and vice president is overwhelming, former CIA analyst and daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern told a room full of people at the Portsmouth Public Library Monday night.

McGovern, who provided daily briefings for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as other high ranking officials during his 27 year CIA career, said he has witnessed a “prostitution of his profession” as the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“Don’t let anyone tell you the President was deceived by false intelligence … they knew,” McGovern said.

For the next 40 minutes, he relayed a series of events leading up to 9/11 which illustrate the President’s desire to go to war with Iraq well before 9-11, that reliable CIA evidence showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was presented to the administration and the “facts were fixed” in order to legitimize the invasion.

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truthout.org , December 18, 2007

By Pierre Haski
Rue89

At a different time, we could have considered the results of the Conference of Paris on Palestine as excellent news. Over $7 billion was committed to the Palestinians, when less than $6 billion was expected. So the international community has pledged itself to action to allow this Palestinian state – the name of which is pronounced before it has even emerged – to be born.

And yet, this international consensus is dictated less by optimism than by fear. The fear of seeing the Middle East sink inexorably into crisis once again and of seeing despair push Palestinians into the arms of the most extremist movements. If money donors meeting in Paris needed a booster shot, the photos of Gaza Saturday, where more than 300,000 Palestinians demonstrated to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the birth of the Islamist movement Hamas, should have sufficed.

This show of force by Hamas haunted the minds of those attending the Conference of Paris: it is the symbol of the failure over the last fifteen years to find a peaceful negotiated arrangement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The belated reawakening of diplomacy, and particularly that of a United States stuck in its war in Iraq, finds a changed Middle East.

Yesterday, Paris celebrated President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. But last summer, the PA was driven out of the Gaza strip manu militari by Hamas’s men, and about a third of the Palestinian population today escapes its control and is not ready to come back to it either. So there we see the limitations on the aid promised in Paris yesterday.

Three weeks ago, in Annapolis in the United States, Palestinians and Israelis committed to negotiate the modalities of the birth of a Palestinian state before the end of 2008. But for that to happen, interlocutors able to implement the decisions taken are required. That point is valid for the Israeli side, where Ehud Olmert’s fragile government must show itself capable of evacuating the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and of lifting the hundreds of military road blocks that thwart a viable state.

And, in spite of the significant sums announced yesterday, it’s true on the Palestinian side. The goal of the international community’s money is to strengthen the stature of a Palestinian Authority largely discredited at home. And the PA will have to demonstrate its ability to act more effectively than in the past. But even that will not suffice to change the context in the Gaza Strip, where one and a half million inhabitants are sunk in poverty and imprisonment under the impact of the Israeli blockade – and of a war that threatens to flare up at any moment.

It’s a vicious circle: no development without peace and no peace without a political agreement. The Conference of Paris billions may help, but they are not sufficient in themselves to guarantee a positive outcome in this last-chance salvage effort.

Foreign Policy In Focus

Stephen Zunes | December 20, 2007

It has been 21 months since John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt published their article “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in The London Review of Books and four months since their publication of a book by the same name. Their main arguments are that unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government has harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East and that American organizations allied with the Israeli government have been the primary influence regarding the orientation of U.S. Middle East policy. As a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in the United States role in the Middle East, I certainly had no disagreements with their first contention. I took strong exception to their second, however.

There is no denying that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in limiting the broader public debate. However, I found it incredibly naïve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East would be significantly different without AIPAC and like-minded pro-Zionist organizations. In response to what I saw as a rather simplistic and reductionist understanding of U.S. foreign policy by these prominent center-right international relations scholars, I wrote the article The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is It Really?

While most the criticisms of Mearsheimer and Walt’s article came from right-wing apologists of the Israeli government, many long-time critics of U.S. support for Israeli occupation, repression, colonization and related policies against their neighbors raised concerns as well. My article became one of the more widely-circulated and detailed critiques from the left.

My analysis drew profoundly negative reaction from those who insisted that it was not oil interests, military contractors, ideological imperialists, and related powerful sectors of America’s ruling class who were responsible for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other tragic manifestations of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but was instead the responsibility of a rich cabal of Jews who manipulated the Bush administration to engage in policies it would not have otherwise supported. I was denounced for propagating left-wing “lies” and “myths” by examining some of the broader structural, ideological, economic and institutional inherencies in U.S. foreign policy instead of acknowledging that it was all the fault of the Jews.

Just as the hysterical reaction from right-wing Zionist circles seemed to some to vindicate Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments that an all-powerful Israel Lobby stifles legitimate debate about U.S. policy toward Israel and the broader Middle East, the reaction to my critique seemed to some to vindicate the notion that those who put the blame on the Israel Lobby are prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book certainly does not fall into the anti-Semitic rants of many of their supporters. Like their original article, however, the book is still fundamentally flawed.

Continued . . .

The Huffington Post

Peter Dreier | Posted December 21, 2007

Just a week before Christmas, President Bush gave corporate America two big presents. On Tuesday, his Federal Communications Commission changed the rules to allow the nation’s giant conglomerates to further consolidate their grip on the media by permitting them to purchase TV and radio stations in the same local markets where they already own daily newspapers. As a gift to the country’s automobile industry, Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency ruled Wednesday, over the objections of the agency’s staff, that California, the nation’s largest and most polluted state, and 16 other states, can’t impose regulations to limit greenhouse gases from cars and trucks that are stronger than the federal government’s own weak standards.

So far, no major politicians or editorial writers have labeled these actions “class warfare,” although this is precisely what Bush is engaged in — helping the already rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Class warfare is, in fact, the very essence of Bush’s tenure in the White House. In thousands of ways, big and small, Bush has promoted the interests of the very rich and the largest corporations. Corporate lobbyists have the run of the White House. Their agenda – tax cuts for the rich and big business, attacks on labor unions, and the weakening of laws protecting consumers, workers and the environment from corporate abuse – is Bush’s agenda.

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The Electronic Intifada, 19 December 2007

Hannah Mermelstein,

Israeli border police run to to stop a demonstration of Palestinians upset by the controversial and ongoing Israeli excavations near the al-Aqsa mosque. (Anne Paq/MaanImages)

I am feeling optimistic about Palestine.

I know it sounds crazy. How can I use “optimistic” and “Palestine” in the same sentence when conditions on the ground only seem to get worse? Israeli settlements continue to expand on a daily basis, the checkpoints and segregated road system are becoming more and more institutionalized, more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are being held in Israeli jails, Gaza is under heavy attack and the borders are entirely controlled by Israel, preventing people from getting their most basic human needs met.

We can never forget these things and the daily suffering of the people, and yet I dare to say that I am optimistic. Why? Ehud Olmert. Let me clarify. Better yet, let’s let him clarify:

“The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights. As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

That’s right, the Prime Minister of Israel is currently trying to negotiate a “two-state solution” specifically because he realizes that if he doesn’t, Palestinians might begin to demand, en masse, equal rights to Israelis. Furthermore, he worries, the world might begin to see Israel as an apartheid state. In actuality, most of the world already sees Israel this way, but Olmert is worried that even Israel’s most ardent supporters will begin to catch up with the rest of the world.

“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,” he told Haaretz, “because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

Perhaps Olmert is giving American Jews too much credit here, but he does expose a basic contradiction in the minds of most American people, Jewish and not: most of us — at least in theory — support equal rights for all residents of a country. Most of us do not support rights given on the basis of ethnicity and religion, especially when the ethnicity/religion being prioritized is one that excludes the vast majority of the country’s indigenous population. We cannot, of course, forget the history of ethnic cleansing of indigenous people on the American continent. But we must not use the existence of past atrocities to justify present ones.

I am optimistic not because I think the process of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Israel/Palestine is going to end tomorrow, but because I can feel the ideology behind these policies beginning to collapse. For years the true meaning of political Zionism has been as ignored as its effects on Palestinian daily life. And suddenly it is beginning to break open. Olmert’s comments last week are reminiscent of those of early Zionist leaders who talked openly of transfer and ethnic cleansing in order to create an artificial Jewish majority in historic Palestine.

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Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, December 22 / 23, 2007

By Andy Worthington

In the last week, while the media’s attention has focused on the release of two Sudanese humanitarian aid workers from Guantánamo, the 13 Afghans who were flown to Kabul at the same time have barely been mentioned. The reasons for this oversight are clear: firstly, because one of the Sudanese ex-detainees, Adel Hamad, a hospital administrator, had become something of a celebrity after his enterprising lawyers posted a video about his case on YouTube, which prompted a group of campaigners to establish a website devoted to his plight; and secondly, because Hamad and his compatriot, Salim Adem, were released on their return, and various reporters were able to meet them.

No such luxuries were reserved for the Afghans. Few of their stories are known at all, and on their return to Afghanistan they were promptly imprisoned in a wing of Pol-i-Charki, Kabul’s main prison, which was recently refurbished by the US authorities. The oversight is disturbing because, for the most part, the stories of the Afghans demonstrate colossal ineptitude on the part of the US military and Special Forces in Afghanistan, at least equivalent to the failures of intelligence that led to the capture of Adel Hamad and Salim Adem. In addition, the imprisonment of these men in a prison wing refurbished by the US authorities raises uncomfortable questions about the role of the US military in Afghanistan, over six years after the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

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RINF.com, December 22, 2007he CIA has purposely impeded the Sep. 11 Commission’s inquiry by withholding interrogation videos, say the two chairmen of the panel.

The CIA ‘clearly obstructed’ the Commission’s investigation, said Lee H. Hamilton.

“I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong,” said Thomas H. Kean, other Chairman of the Commission.

A CIA spokesman has claimed that the commission staff members never specifically asked for the videos.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelicow, the panel’s former executive director, recounts a meeting on December 2003 between Hamilton and George Tenet, then the director of the agency.

In the meeting, Hamilton told Tenet that the CIA should provide all relevant documents even if the Commission had not specifically asked for them.

According to the memorandum, Tenet in response to Hamilton made no mention of the videotapes of interrogations.

The memorandum reiterates that federal law penalizes anyone who knowingly and willfully withholds or covers up a material fact from a federal inquiry or makes any false statement to investigators.

MHE/RE