Peace and Justice Post

By Kenneth Theisen | Opednews, March 11, 2008

In the recent political battle around the Marine recruiting station in Berkeley. California there has been much confusion around the concept or slogan of “supporting the troops,” but opposing the unjust wars of the Bush regime. Many who oppose the Bush Regime wars also say they “support the troops.” Let me say it straight out — I do not support the troops and neither should you. It is impossible to support the troops of the imperialist military forces of the U.S. and at the same time oppose the wars in which they fight.

“Support for the troops” has become political cover to support the wars, and undermine the widespread opposition to them. In Congress, many of those who claim they oppose the wars, use “support of the troops” to vote for hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the wars. These politicians are political opportunists, but there are also people who genuinely oppose the war, but who also say “I support the troops.”

KILLING MACHINE

The U.S. has over 700 military bases or sites located in over 130 foreign countries. The U.S. government spends more on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. The hundreds of thousands of troops stationed overseas are not there to preserve or foster freedom and democracy as the Bush regime would like to claim, but to maintain U.S. imperialist domination of the world. If you “support the troops” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other more than 100 countries in which they are located, you also support U.S. hegemony in the world. I believe that the vast majority of people who say they support the troops do not wish to support U.S. imperialism, but that is what they are really doing by putting forth the slogan of “support the troops.”

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Green Left, March 8, 2008

As the Iraq war approaches its fifth anniversary on March 20th, it is important to remember why the war was started. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 the US has looked to find new ways to justify its military interventions in order to increase economic prosperity and further expand its empire.

The “communist threat” has been replaced by a new global “threat” of terrorism. The so-called “war on terror” gave the Bush administration an opportunity to wage an illegal pre-emptive war on the sovereign nation of Iraq.

But even the idea that the US can wage a “war on terror” is ridiculous: the US has arguably been the biggest perpetrator of state terrorism since the end of World War II. It would be like Adolf Hitler declaring a war on anti-Semitism. According to John Pilger, since 1945 the US has launched 72 interventions into other countries. However, it is not called terrorism when the US attacks other countries: it is disguised as “humanitarian intervention” or “liberation”.

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Bloomberg.com, March 12, 2008

By Janine Zacharia and Ken Fireman

March 12 (Bloomberg) — Admiral William Fallon‘s resignation as U.S. commander in the Middle East provoked criticism that President George W. Bush won’t tolerate dissent and fed speculation his Iran policy could become more confrontational.

“Congress needs to determine immediately whether Admiral Fallon’s resignation is another example of truth tellers being forced to the sidelines in the Bush administration,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who lost to Bush in the 2004 election. “His departure must not clear the way for a rush to war with Iran.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that Fallon, 63, was resigning over perceived differences on Iran policy with the Bush administration as Fallon was starting an Iraq visit yesterday. Fallon will retire from the Navy at the end of March.

“Recent press reports suggesting a disconnect between my views and the president’s policy objectives have become a distraction at a critical time and hamper efforts” in his area of responsibility, known as Central Command, Fallon said in a statement.

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The Independent, March 12, 2008

Soon after the Second World War started Fullarton joined the RAF and was stationed in South Africa

Steve Fullarton was the last survivor of the 500 Scots who fought with the International Brigades against General Franco’s rebels in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Aged just 18, and halfway through his engineering apprenticeship when he crossed the Pyrenees in April 1938, he was also one of the youngest of the 2,300 men and women from the British Isles – of whom nearly one in four died – who enlisted as soldiers or medics to defend the Spanish Republic. Indeed, he had to lie about his age, since the Communist Party – the recruiting agent for the volunteers – had a policy of only accepting those aged over 21.

Fullarton was one of a family of five raised by his widowed mother in the Shettleston district of Glasgow. He made up his mind to volunteer after seeing cinema newsreel of the bombing of Spanish cities by Franco’s German and Italian allies. “There were women running around with terror in their eyes,” he recalled. “Some people could ignore it and say: ‘It’s none of my business’. I made it my business.” He watched the newsreels with mounting anger as Britain and the other democracies, by their policy of non-intervention, effectively allowed Hitler and Mussolini to topple Spain’s elected government.

Then came an encounter in a dance-hall one Saturday night with the local Communist Party organiser. Fullarton was already involved in the regular street collections of tins of food and condensed milk to send to Spain. Soon he was travelling through France with five other volunteers. With the border sealed, the group entered Spain by night along smugglers’ paths, wearing rope-soled sandals to silence their footsteps.

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Margaret Kimberley | Smirking Chimp | March 10, 2008

This is all too sick and disgusting for words. Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair will teach religion at Yale University. That’s right. The man responsible for giving Bush cover in occupying Iraq and killing one million people will be affiliated with the Yale University Divinity School. I hope someone at Yale has guts enough to denounce this travesty.

It isn’t surprising that Blair can only get a job like this in America, or that the Bush family alma mater is the place where he landed. Will he ever stop sucking up to Bush? I guess not. When he tried to establish a similar arrangement at the London School of Economics faculty and students said no thank you. The British have sense enough to be embarassed by his presence. Only the Bushies would make the case for this awful man to have a decent job. If there were any justice in this world Blair would be permanently unemployed and friendless.

Blair, like Bush, is a war criminal. He shouldn’t be allowed anywhere in polite society, certainly not in a classroom with impressionable young minds. But we all know what will happen. The ambitious student will clamor to be in his presence because his courses will look good on an American resume. A letter of reference from a former British Prime Minister will look even better.

So the worst criminals in this world, government leaders, once again get a pass. Blair thinks that killing thousands is fine as long as a government run by white people does the killing. If you think I’m being harsh look at his own words.

“British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing?”

Gee Tony, maybe people are mad because Britain is doing some of the killing. There is more death in Iraq post occupation than there was under Saddam Hussein, and that is no mean feat.

Like his pal George Bush, Tony Blair is a terrorist. Warfare is the ultimate act of terror with the biggest body count. There is no terror group with the killing capacity of a government. Just ask Rev. Blair. He can explain it all to you.

AFP, March 10, 2008

Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer Monday accused China of fabricating alleged plots against the Olympics, and even of scheming to carry out its own terror attacks, to blacken her community’s name.

“It’s completely untrue. All these allegations are falsified,” the separatist figurehead, who joined her US-based husband in 2005 after six years in a Chinese jail, told AFP through an interpreter.

“The real goal of the Chinese government is to organize a terrorist attack so that it can increase its crackdown on the Uighur people,” the 61-year-old head of the Uyghur American Association said.

Wang Lequan, Communist Party chief in the northwestern Xinjiang region, said Sunday that a January raid on “terrorists,” which resulted in the deaths of two militants and 15 arrests, had foiled a planned attack directed at the Games.

It was the second foiled attack linked to Muslim separatists in Xinjiang, home of the Uighur community, to be announced over the weekend.

Passengers attempted to crash a Chinese airliner on Friday that was flying to Beijing from Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, a regional official said on Sunday.

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By Hannah Allam and Yasseen Taha | McClatchy Newspapers, March 10, 2008

BAGHDAD — Bombers unleashed a wave of explosions in Baghdad and north of the capital Monday, including two attacks that killed eight U.S. service members in the deadliest day for the military this year, American and Iraqi authorities said.

The other blasts targeted Iraqi security forces, militias and civilians, hitting a police station, a hotel, a busy traffic intersection and near a mosque and a hospital.

The combined death toll of at least 22 included 14 Iraqi casualties, on the heels of twin bombings that killed nearly 70 people last Thursday in a Baghdad shopping district, indicated that Sunni Muslim insurgents are reasserting their presence at a time when large-scale attacks had dipped to record lows, Iraqi officials said.

Authorities couldn’t say for certain whether any of Monday’s bombings were coordinated.

Two of the explosions occurred in militia-controlled Shiite Muslim districts, signaling that bombers still can strike in the heart of Mahdi Army territory. Another blast ripped through the front gate of a hotel in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah in the autonomous Kurdish region, which had been among the safest places in Iraq.

“The terrorists want to send a message to the Kurdistan region and to all those concerned that they can make big security breaches at any time, in any place they want,” said Suzan Shihab, a Kurdish member of parliament who represents Sulaimaniyah.

In the worst attack on U.S. forces in Baghdad in nearly a year, five American service members died after a suicide bomber approached their foot patrol and detonated an explosives vest in the once-upscale central Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, according to the U.S. command in Baghdad.

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By Cynthia Tucker

09/03/08 “Yahoo” — – Once upon a time, the United States was the world’s most powerful economic engine, a job-producing machine that propelled a broad swath of its citizens into a comfortable middle class. They bought tidy little houses they could afford. They bought big, shiny Chevrolets and Fords with bench seats.

They used their health insurance to pay for the occasional tonsillectomy or appendectomy. They retired with pensions generous enough to purchase nice gifts for the grandkids.

That period of broad prosperity was relatively short, no more than 50 years after the end of World War II, but it looms large in the national psyche, supplying the cultural icons and touchstones that furnish the “American dream.” And that era depended as much on the weakness of other nations — the backwardness of China and India as well as the postwar devastation of Europe — as it did on American enterprise.

But it’s a tricky business to announce to voters that the golden age is over. Just ask any of the current crop of presidential candidates.

As the era of widely shared prosperity staggers to its end, globalization — “NAFTA” is the shorthand — looks like the enemy, a con job foisted on ordinary Americans by greedy corporations and pointy-headed intellectuals. There may be a bit of truth to that.

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Counterpunch, March 11, 2008

By ED O’LOUGHLIN

Gaza

SAFA ABU SEIF, 12, was fatally wounded as she stood in an upstairs room of her home in the Gaza City district of Jabaliya 10 days ago.

She was one of 27 children identified by United Nations staff among the 107 Palestinians who were killed in five days last week. Another 25 dead, including five women, were identified as unarmed non-combatants. The status of 13 more dead victims could not be determined. At least three of the children were reportedly shot in their homes by Israeli small arms or sniper fire.

A Palestinian gunman killed eight Israeli students on Thursday before he was killed himself. An Israeli soldier was also killed that day. Two Israeli soldiers died in action in the early stages of a three-day incursion into Jabaliya, and an Israeli civilian was killed by Palestinian rocket fire on the first day of the surge in violence.

Asked by the Herald to comment on allegations that its troops had killed children in the area, the Israeli Defence Force blamed the violence on terrorist groups who exploited Palestinian civilians as human shields while firing rockets intended to harm Israeli civilians.

“IDF operations in the Gaza Strip are aimed solely at the Hamas terror infrastructure, armed terrorists and rocket launchers,” its statement said.

A security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Civil Administration – Israel’s military government for the occupied territories – had received no complaints about shootings of civilians, and no investigation was underway.

Yet the family of the Palestinian television journalist Mahmoud Al Adjrami said that when Safa was struck Israeli troops were occupying their house, 90 metres across a stretch of open space from the window she was struck through.

They say the invading soldiers smashed up their tile floor to get sand to fill sand-bags for firing positions in first-floor windows facing the Abu Seif house. The discarded sand, together with the smashed door and tiles, spent bullet cases and heaps of Israeli ration boxes and discarded snack wrappers, were still in the house a day after the troops withdrew.

It is standard Israeli military procedure during tank raids to take over civilian homes as snipers’ nests and hideouts, holding the occupants at gunpoint. According to the testimonies of victims and from Israeli soldiers themselves, this process can frequently involve theft, vandalism and violence against unarmed civilians.

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Foreign Policy In Focus, March 7, 2008

by John Lindsay-Poland

Absent in the discussion of the conflict brewing in the Andes over a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to kill a guerrilla leader is the role of U.S. military in the conflict. It goes well beyond providing satellite intelligence on the location of guerrilla camps: the two countries have opposing responses to Washington’s attempt to militarize the hemisphere. Ecuador’s constituent assembly proposes prohibiting all foreign military presence, while Colombia seeks ever greater U.S. military hardware, intelligence and troops. The U.S. response has been quite undiplomatic.

While visiting Italy last October, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa made a modest proposal: if the United States allows his country to set up a military base in Miami, his government would renew the lease for a U.S. base in the coast city of Manta. Otherwise, U.S. troops and operations will have to leave the when the base lease ends next year.

Less than a month later, Correa passed through Miami on his way to China, and U.S. Customs police treated the president as an ordinary foreigner. It wasn’t the first time Correa and his vice-president had been denied diplomatic treatment. Ecuador’s foreign minister called the incident a “humiliation of a head of state, from arrogance by a country that believes itself above all others.”

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