Peace and Justice Post

Chilean Envoy to U.N. Recounts Threats of Retaliation in Run-Up to Invasion

By Colum Lynch | Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, March 23, 2008

UNITED NATIONS — In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting “bitterness” and “deep mistrust” in Washington’s relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Mu¿oz, Chile‘s ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book “A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons,” set for publication next month.

“In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished” for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein‘s government, Mu¿oz writes.

But the tough talk dissipated as the war situation worsened, and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Mu¿oz’s account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration’s standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

Continued . . .

US fears as new coalition government plans to negotiate with its ‘own people’ – the extremists

• Jason Burke
• The Observer,
• Sunday March 23 2008

Paramilitary soldiers guard the streets in Quetta, Pakistan. Photograph: F Ahmed/EPA

Pakistan’s newly elected government will seek to negotiate with Islamic militants and demilitarise the campaign against them to end the violence racking the country, leaders of the major coalition parties who will take power next week have said.

The explicit declaration of a desire to talk to extremists and to reduce the role of the army marks a major change for the strategically crucial country and will confirm fears among American policymakers that the heavy defeat of President Pervez Musharraf at recent elections will lead to Pakistan scaling back its support for the US-led ‘war on terror’ in the region. Pakistan’s rugged western frontier is seen as a haven not just for Pakistani militants but also for al-Qaeda and the Taliban and has been the site of fierce combat for several years.

This week a new Prime Minister and cabinet is expected to be sworn in in Islamabad, following an accord between opposition parties. The party of assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto yesterday nominated the former National Assembly speaker Yousaf Raza Gilani as its candidate for premier. The unprecedented ‘grand coalition’ he is likely to lead is expected to seek ways to permanently remove Musharraf, a loyal US ally who was re-elected president for a five-year term last year, from power.

Continued . . .

New Statesman, March 19, 2008

Lindsey Hilsum

The last thing China wanted, in the year it is to host the Olympic Games, was the world watching its army brutally suppressing protesters

Things are not going as planned. The emblematic images of China in 2008 were supposed to be the magnificent “Bird’s Nest” sports stadium, and millions of proud Chinese applauding their country’s success in hosting the Olympic Games. Instead, the world is seeing gangs of angry Tibetan rioters attacking their Han Chinese neighbours, and Buddhist monks demonstrating against Chinese rule.

Since the 1989 unrest, which centred on Tiananmen Square but spread to Tibet, any protest has been suppressed quickly and effectively. But this time, initially, the Chinese hesitated. The government knew that nothing could be worse for China’s reputation in this Olympic year than Tiananmen-type images of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army firing on Tibetan demonstrators. So it flooded the streets with armour, in the hope that intimidation would do the trick. By Monday, Beijing had moved troops and paramilitary riot police into all sensitive areas, hoping to quash protest with a show of strength.

Continued . . .

Joseph Gerson | UK Indymedia. 22.03.2008 14:40

Victories are within sight for people in a growing number of nations where communities that host U.S. foreign military bases have long fought to get rid of them.

Ecuador’s decision not to renew the U.S. lease for the forward operating base at Manta (see Yankees Head Home) is the culmination of just one of many long-term and recently initiated community-based and national struggles to remove these military installations that are often sources of crime and demeaning human rights violations. A growing alliance among anti-bases movements in countries around the world, including the United States, is preventing the creation of new foreign military bases, restricting the expansion of others, and in some cases may win the withdrawal of the military bases, installations and troops that are essential to U.S. wars of intervention and its preparations for first-strike nuclear attacks.

The Challenge

Of course, there is still plenty of bad news. The Bush Administration is currently negotiating what is, in essence, a security treaty with the Maliki puppet government in Baghdad to secure one of the principle Bush-Cheney war aims: permanent military bases for tens of thousands of U.S. troops. The goal is to transform Iraq into an U.S. unsinkable aircraft carrier in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. Unfortunately, the plan for Iraq is only one part of the vast and expanding U.S. infrastructure of nearly 1,000 military bases and installations strategically scattered around the world.

Continued . . .

Jesse Rosenfeld, The Electronic Intifada, 21 March 2008

“The Israelis tied my hands, blindfolded and then beat me all the way to the interrogation center. I was then cuffed to a chair for four days where interrogators prevented me from sleeping. I was tied in painful stress positions, and on one occasion the agents grabbed me while I was cuffed to the chair and shook me severely, I passed out when they started shaking me by the head,” says “Samer” a former student activist at Birzeit University who was arrested in 2006.

Nonetheless, this isn’t torture according to Canadian foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier and the Harper government. After it was exposed that Canada had Israel and the United States listed as offenders in a training manual for diplomats about torture, the two countries were promptly dropped on 19 January with Bernier’s expression of regret and embarrassment.

Continued . . .

New York Times, March 22, 2008

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – About one thousand people protested in central Amsterdam on Saturday against right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders and the imminent release of his film expected to be critical of the Koran.

Anti-racism protesters clad in winter clothing against the freezing cold and drizzling rain held placards that said “Enough is enough” and “Stop the witch-hunt against Muslims.”

Pop and hip-hop groups entertained the crowd in between speeches by social groups.

“We can no longer remain silent. There is a climate of hate and fear in the Netherlands,” said spokesman Rene Danen from anti-racism organization Nederland Bekent Kleur (the Netherlands recognizes color differences), which had organized the protest.

There should be restrictions on what Wilders can say, said Rieke, a 61-year-old Amsterdam arts teacher who declined to give her last name.

“I think it is embarrassing what Wilders says, for example about tearing up the Koran. It is a very bad example to people to let him say whatever he wants,” she said.

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Online Journal, March 19, 2008

My contributory remembrance to this fifth anniversary of Bush’s infamous invasion of Iraq is neither a journalistic peace memorial to that holocaustic, still ongoing conflict; nor is it a disguised book review of Bilmes’ and Stiglitz’s “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” It has little to do with the infamy of a man presiding over the annihilative power of the United States, and his incompetent, amoral administration; or, for that matter, with the cold economic tabulation of war costs made in unsustainable, borrowed greenbacks.

Instead, it has to do with a cost that Americans — an overwhelming majority of the adult population of this nation — are unwilling to acknowledge, much less face: that the Iraq adventurous fiasco may have started as a criminal act of a few, but it’s continuing as a criminal replication of the many . . . ultimately resulting in total hardening of the nation’s compassionate arteries, and a complete loss of conscience and national shame.

Why, why have Americans hardened their hearts, encrusted and cauterized them with an impenetrable wall to feelings, emotions and morality? Have Americans in their self-indulgence for material things become so callous to the needs of others? Or even to the pain and suffering of their fellow men, particularly those beyond America’s borders? Have our people reached the culmination of insensitivity by permitting death when life is always an option at hand?

Sixty-two years ago, with Adolph Hitler dead, the Allies tried to find justice in Nuremberg by putting on trial 24 key individuals from the Third Reich. These “dirty two-dozen” were indicted for crimes of conspiracy against peace; and/or, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; and/or war crimes; and/or crimes against humanity. And at the end of the trial, half of them were condemned to hang.

Continued . . .

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry | Consortiumnews.com, March 19, 2008

Editor’s Note: From the start of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the toll on Iraqi civilians and on out-gunned Iraqi soldiers was staggering. Indeed, that appears to have been part of the message Bush’s neocon advisers wanted to send to other countries that might think of resisting Washington’s imperial ambitions.

Yet back home, most of the horror was kept out of view for Americans watching on TV who wanted to feel good about their brave soldiers and not think much about how their country was crossing a line into an imperial aggressor.

On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq — and in honor of all who have died — we are publishing the second part of an excerpt from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush:

Despite the stiffer-than-expected resistance, the U.S. military continued to blast its way toward its goal of toppling Saddam Hussein.

From the first days of the war, that violence took a heavy toll on Iraq’s civilians, though the bloody images were often sanitized from the American broadcasts so as not to dampen the war enthusiasm and depress the TV ratings.

The Bush administration’s lack of sensitivity about civilian casualties was reflected in the hasty decision to bomb a residential restaurant where Hussein was thought to be eating. It turned out that the intelligence was wrong, but that wasn’t discovered until after the restaurant was leveled and 14 civilians, including seven children, were killed.

One mother hysterically sought her daughter and collapsed when the headless body was pulled from the rubble.

“When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head,” The Associated Press reported, “her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed.”

The London Independent cited this restaurant attack as one that represented “a clear breach” of the Geneva Conventions ban on bombing civilian targets.

Hundreds of other civilian deaths were equally horrific. Saad Abbas, 34, was wounded in an American bombing raid, but his family sought to shield him from the greater horror. The bombing had killed his three daughters – Marwa, 11; Tabarek, 8; and Safia, 5 – who had been the center of his life.

Continued . . .

Stephen Lendman

March 20, 2008

John Dugard is The UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine and a rare public official. In January 2008, he assessed the situation in Occupied Palestine (OPT). It was detailed, inclusive and honest. This article discusses his findings in-depth. Most of them have been widely reported, but they bear repeating nonetheless. It’s because, in this instance, they’re from an agency of the 192 member states world body. It’s hoped that source highlights their importance and adds to their credibility.

From September 25 to October 1, 2007, Dugard visited Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus, Qalqiliya and the Jordan valley and held extensive meetings with: Palestinian and Israeli NGOs, UN agencies, Palestinian and Jordanian officials, academics, businessmen, and independent interlocutors. He also went to Gazan factories and West Bank checkpoints and settlements and saw firsthand the situation on the ground.

For his efforts, Dugard is both praised and criticized. Extremists even condemn him. It’s the price he and others pay for assessing conditions honestly. He addressed his critics and what they cite:

— that his reports are repetitious; he agrees because Israel repeats the same human rights and humanitarian law violations and has done it for over 40 years of occupation. They feature: “(Illegal) settlements, checkpoints, demolition of houses, torture, closure of crossings and military incursions….” More recently, add the separation wall (since 2003), “sonic booms, (stepped up) targeted killings, (using) Palestinians as human shields, and the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza since Hamas was democratically elected in January 2006.

Continued . . .

Telegraph, UK, March 21, 2008

By Tom Coghlan in Kabul

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, has triggered speculation that he has been using a tour of the Middle East to prepare Iran’s neighbours for a possible war with Tehran.

Mr Cheney, whose nine-day tour has included stops in Turkey, the Gulf and Afghanistan, insisted that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

“The important thing to keep in mind is the objective that we share with many of our friends in the region, and that is that a nuclear-armed Iran would be very destabilising for the entire area,” Mr Cheney told ABC News before arriving in Kabul, the Afghan capital, after a visit to Oman.

Challenged on the recent National Intelligence Estimate by US intelligence officials, which concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme stopped in late 2003 because of international pressure, Mr Cheney said: “What it says is that they have definitely had in the past a programme to develop a nuclear warhead – that it would appear that they stopped that weaponisation process in 2003.

“We don’t know whether or not they’ve restarted. What we do know is that they had then, and have now, a process by which they’re trying to enrich uranium, which is the key obstacle they’ve got to overcome in order to have a nuclear weapon. They’ve been working at it for years.”

A senior aide to Mr Cheney was forced to deny that the nine-day trip to Turkey and the Middle East was part of a strategy by the vice-president to build support for military action against Iran.

Asked by journalists travelling on Mr Cheney’s plane about the vice-president’s repeated comments about Iran during his tour, the aide said: “That’s not what these discussions are about.”

The official acknowledged that Mr Cheney’s talks with the Oman government focused on “the concerns we have about the full range of their [Iran’s] activities”.

These included the country’s links to the radical Hamas authorities in Gaza and Washington’s belief that Iran has become the dominant power in Lebanon through its sponsorship of Hizbollah.

General Dan McNeill, the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, told The Daily Telegraph in September that advanced weapons smuggled across the Iran border to the Taliban could only have come with the complicity of the Iranian government or elements within its security services.