Peace and Justice Post

By David Orchard | Global Research, February 23, 2008

The Harper government is seeking to prolong Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan. So far, Canada has spent six years, billions of dollars, 78 young lives (many more wounded) and inflicted unknown casualties on that country.

The terms used to describe our occupation and ongoing war are remarkably similar to those used over a century ago by colonial powers to justify their ruthless wars of colonization. Then, it was the white man’s burden to “civilize” the non-whites of the Americas, Africa and Asia. As cub scouts we were taught Kipling’s unforgettable prose about the “lesser breeds,” but nothing about the real people who paid horrendous costs in death, suffering, destruction and theft of their land and resources.

Today, we are involved in a “mission” in Afghanistan to “improve” the lives of women and children, to install “democracy,” to root out corruption and the drug trade.

Waging war with bombs and guns is not helping women or installing democracy. It is, however, strengthening the Afghan resistance — hence our increasingly shrill cries for more help from NATO.

The U.S. is involved in a similar “mission” in Iraq. So far, over a million Iraqis — many of them children — have died, some two million have fled the country, another two million are “internally displaced,” untold hundreds of thousands wounded in an endless war waged by the world’s most advanced military almost entirely against civilians.

The toll of dead, wounded and displaced for Afghanistan is not being published.

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What We Still Don’t Know About That Minot Nuke Incident

CounterPunch, Feb. 25, 2008

By DAVE LINDORFF

A new report on the August 30 incident in which six nuclear-armed advanced cruise missiles were effectively “lost” for 36 hours, during which time they were, against all regulations, flown in launch position mounted on a pylon on the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress, from Minot AFB in North Dakota across the continental US to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, has left unanswered some critical questions about the event.

Directed by retired Air Force Gen. Larry D. Welch, the task force’s Report on the Unauthorized Movement of Nuclear Weapons found plenty wrong with the way the US military handles its nuclear weapons, but appears to have dealt lightly with the specific incident that sparked the inquiry-only giving it a few paragraphs.

According to the report, when nuclear-capable missiles are placed onto a pylon assembly (in the case of the B-52, these pylons can hold six missiles), procedures call for a clear distinction to be made as to whether they are armed with nuclear weapons or with dud warheads. In the storage bunker, pylons with dud warheads are supposed to be encircled with orange cones like those used by highway repair crews, and placards announcing that the warheads are duds are supposed to be hung on all four sides. This reportedly was not done, leaving no distinction between one pylon containing six nuclear-armed missiles, and two others that had missiles carrying nukes.

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swissino.ch, Feb. 25, 2008

By Andrew Gray

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States expects to have about 140,000 troops in Iraq even after completing a planned drawdown of combat forces in July, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The forecast, which prompted swift criticism from Democrats, means there will still be 8,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq than when President George W. Bush ordered a surge of extra forces in January 2007 to curb violence.

Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director of operations for the U.S. military’s Joint Staff, also said it was too soon to predict if troop numbers could go below the pre-surge level of 132,000 any time this year.

“In Iraq, we’re now projecting approximately 140,000 troops there in July,” Ham told reporters at the Pentagon.

“There certainly is full expectation that there will be further reductions,” he said. “When those will begin and at what pace they will continue — it’s premature at this point to talk about that.”

There are currently some 158,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

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GETTY

Hillary Clinton highlights her foreign policy experience while campaigning in Washington yesterday

By Leonard Doyle in Washington | The Independent, Feb 26, 2008

With her back against the wall, Hillary Clinton has been accused of turning to the sort of smear tactics more commonly associated with Republicans, in an attempt to block her opponent Barack Obama from getting the Democratic nomination. Over the weekend her campaign allegedly circulated a photograph of Mr Obama wearing the turban and traditional dress of a Somali elder.

For the past year the Obama team has been fighting back against a whispering campaign that he is a dangerous Muslim. Mr Obama was born a Christian and attends a United Church of Christ congregation in Chicago. Whoever is responsible for the release of the photograph, ahead of votes in Texas and Ohio next week, it appears to be an attempt to use rumour and innuendo to derail Mr Obama’s buoyant campaign.

Mr Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said: “On the very day that Senator Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election. This is part of a disturbing pattern that led her county chairs to resign in Iowa, her campaign chairman to resign in New Hampshire, and it’s exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties and diminishes respect for America in the world.”

Mr Obama’s foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, who worked on Bill Clinton’s National Security Policy staff, said the circulation of the photograph was divisive and suggested “that the customs and cultures of other parts of the world are worthy of ridicule or condemnation”.

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China View, Feb. 25, 2008

GAZA, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) — The spokesman of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) Ayman Taha said Monday that President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t represent all the Palestinian people.

The spokesman told reporters in Gaza that “Abbas will only represent Ramallah, if a peace settlement is reached with Israel. We are certain that there will be no (peaceful) settlement (with Israel) amid the status of division that the Palestinians have now.”

Hamas, which has been controlling Gaza since June last year, is not joining the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. “In this case Abbas doesn’t represent all the Palestinian people,” added Taha.

He stressed that the only exit out of the current Palestinian crisis “is through confronting the Israeli occupation, resisting it and ending the status of internal division, but not through (a peaceful) settlement (with Israel).”

However, Abbas and his Fatah movement, the major rival for Hamas, accused Hamas movement after it seized the Gaza Strip for trying to isolate Gaza from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The Gaza Strip can never be part of any future (peaceful) settlement Abbas would reach (with Israel) because he doesn’t control Gaza anymore,” said Taha. He also said his movement favors a mutual cease-fire with Israel.

“We are in favor of any imitative or any effort exerted to serve the highest interests of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. We in Hamas will not be an obstacle to this effort,” said Taha.

Axis of Logic, February 23, 2008

By James Petras*

The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced and aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of Washington’s Middle East policy.

The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation.

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Petros Karadjias/Associated Press

Supporters of President-elect Demetris Christofias of Cyprus shouted slogans during victory celebrations on Sunday evening outside his campaign headquarters in Nicosia, the capital.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (Reuters) — The Communist Party leader Demetris Christofias won Cyprus’s presidential election on Sunday and agreed to meet the leader of the island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot community to revive reunification efforts.

The Turkish Cypriot president, Mehmet Ali Talat, called Mr. Christofias to congratulate him, and they agreed to meet “at the earliest possible date,” Mr. Talat’s spokesman said.

Mr. Christofias’s election has revived hopes of reunifying Cyprus, divided along ethnic lines since 1974, when Turkey invaded after a brief Greek-inspired coup.

Reunification efforts broke down in 2004 when Greek Cypriots rejected a United Nations plan, and Cyprus joined the European Union a short time later as a divided island.

Mr. Christofias’s supporters poured into the streets waving red party banners and Cypriot flags. He won 53.4 percent of the vote, and his right-wing rival, Ioannis Kasoulides, had 46.6 percent.

Mr. Christofias, 62, told a noisy crowd, “From tomorrow we unite our strengths. We shall work collectively and in unison to achieve reunification of our homeland.”

He will be Cyprus’s first Communist president and the only one in the 27-member European Union. Although proud to be a Communist, he says he will leave the free-market economy alone.

His party, Akel, has busts of Lenin and red flags at its headquarters but it also owns a number of large businesses on the island. It has been instrumental in electing presidents but had never fielded its own candidate.

The island’s division between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is a major obstacle to neighboring Turkey’s aspirations for European Union membership. The division also is an obstacle to better ties between NATO allies Greece and Turkey, who have come close to war over the island.

The surprise elimination of President Tassos Papadopoulos in the first round of voting on Feb. 17 raised hopes the Greek Cypriots might be ready for a deal. Turkish Cypriots, who have watched wealthier Greek Cypriots enjoy the benefits of European Union membership, welcomed the result, saying they were eager for new talks.

“We see the change as an opportunity, and we expect negotiations to start immediately and without the need for preliminaries,” said Hasan Ercakica, a Turkish Cypriot spokesman.

Initial reaction from Turkey was more lukewarm. “We are a little cautious at the moment,” said a Foreign Ministry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We have to see whether Christofias gave promises to Papadopoulos or not,” adding that Mr. Christofias “will face a sincerity test.”

The Toronto Star, Feb. 22, 2008

David M. Crane | The Toronto Star, February 22, 2008

They stood in the warm sun of the dry season. Seasoned combat veterans of years of conflict, their eyes darted nervously back and forth, glancing at me from time to time, not sure what to make of the situation they found themselves in. The breeze stirred the lush green trees of the bush upcountry in Sierra Leone, near Kabalah. United Nations peacekeepers fanned out around the perimeter nervously holding their weapons at high port.

The Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone was about to hold a town hall meeting with several hundred child soldiers who were now back in school trying to make some sense of their ruined lives. Standing before the prosecutor were murderers, rapists, mutilators and pillagers of all kinds, their average age around 15.

I took the bullhorn from one of the peacekeepers and asked them in Krio how they were all doing. They all mumbled “body fine.” I stepped among them and for almost two hours talked to them and listened to them, developing a sense of what it must be like to be a member of what I call the lost generation of children in West Africa; children forced to kill their parents and then rip their way across the countryside in a whirlwind of terror the likes of which civilization rarely has seen, if at all.

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Palestine Chronicle, Feb. 20, 2008
Riding Roughshod: How to Choose Your Neighbours

By Ingrid B Mørk – Norway

You steal their land and their water,
Destroy their hopes and their dreams,
You break their bones with bloody great stones,
`Cause nobody heeds their screams.

You can lock them up in your prisons,
With no form for legal appeal,
Freeze them and harm them
Hunger and starve them
`Till despair is all that they feel.

Destroy their homes and their culture,
Every dream, every seed that they sow,
Beat them and bruise them and if you can, use them,
They are DIS-POSE-ABLE don’t you know.

Show no mercy for the sick or the hungry,
The dying, the dead or the lame,
No worries about world opinion,
Since no one gives much of a damn.

They’ve been demonised by world leaders,
The press and the “anti-Islam,”
No worries about retribution,
The “Bushies” will keep us from harm.
They lie for us, they die for us,
They will for us, they kill for us
The US, our giant pet lamb.

Make certain they constantly suffer,
That their days are a living hell,
That they’re battered and torn, wish they’d never been born,
With a neighbour like Israel.

By Paul Richter and Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers | Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2008

Two victorious opposition parties may not embrace U.S. anti-militant aims. Some critics fear Washington will interfere on Musharraf’s behalf.

WASHINGTON — The legislative elections that radically reshuffled political power in Pakistan this week also have thrown the Bush administration’s efforts in the country into even deeper disarray.

The election handed new power to two opposition parties that are at best ambivalent about Washington’s chief interest in the South Asian country: the military pursuit of Islamic militants.

And it gave rise to widespread suspicions that U.S. officials are maneuvering to preserve the dwindling power of their chief ally, President Pervez Musharraf. The administration has invested $10 billion in foreign and military aid to Musharraf’s government since 2001, much of it to encourage Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts.

The elections concentrated the country’s parliamentary seats among members of the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated late last year, and the party led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The outcome greatly reduced the influence of Musharraf’s party.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration would continue to deal with Musharraf as president but that it was up to Pakistanis to organize their government.

The White House is viewed in Pakistan as the former general’s chief protector, and Washington’s staunch support for him during six weeks of emergency rule last year, a period widely seen as martial law, is recalled with resentment.

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