Peace and Justice Post

By Zuheir Kseibat | Information Clearing House

20/03/08 “Al-Hayat” — – Five years ago to the day, it was the dawn of the American invasion that carried Iraq to the endless darkness of the occupation. The fall of Baghdad, the Arab capital which they almost dubbed Saddam Hussein’s capital, was nothing but the onset of a massive volcanic eruption in the region; its fires still consume the Arabs’ stability and security and rewrite maps from the Ocean to the Gulf.

The captain of the invasion, George Bush, celebrates the “first large-scale Arab uprising against Usama bin Laden.” He reassures Americans that the costs of the invasion and war against and in Iraq, now touching $500 billion, are petty when bearing the “gains” in mind…notably ending “Saddam’s tyranny” and lighting the candles of hope towards “democracy.”

As he celebrates the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Bush forgets the big misleading lie about the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The battle has turned into a front against al-Qaeda and terrorism, and its strategic goal is to prevent shifting the battlefield to the US. Let it then be the 100-year war fought with Iraqi blood!

Continued . . .

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 . . .

Paying the Piper

By DAVE LINDORFF | CounterPunch, March 20, 2008

It’s appropriate that on this week of the fifth anniversary of the criminal US invasion of Iraq, we are also seeing several other things: the death toll of American troops in that doomed adventure is rising past 4000, the economy is sliding into a recession which could be deep and long, and the financial markets are teetering on the edge of a possibly historic collapse.

The conjunction of all of these dire things is no coincidence.

The war on Iraq was a predictable disaster from day one, when the administration tried to do it on the cheap, using less than half the manpower that Bush’s own generals said would be needed to control the country after the inevitable collapse of its government and military. But of course the US had to conduct this war on the cheap because the country was never really behind the war in the first place. It was a war that was “marketed” to us like a risky financial investment or a badly designed new car. The idea was to close the sale and get away from the deal as quickly as possible, leaving no office forwarding address.

The problem was that Iraqis, the victims of our attack, didn’t cooperate. They didn’t lie down and play dead. They decided to resist our effort to take over their country and run it like a retail gas station. So now the US has wasted over $500 billion in a country trying–and failing–to gain control over a country no bigger than a mid-sized state, battling against resistance forces armed with homemade bombs, obsolete grenade launchers and Vietnam-era AK-47 rifles.

But because the Bush/Cheney administration could never admit to Americans what this war would be costing, and has cost, all that money has been borrowed. As for the deaths and the tens of thousands of injuries, the government has hidden these, flying in the casualties in the dead of night and burying them quickly and as quietly as possible, while sticking the wounded in closed off VA hospitals and rehab centers, from which the press, for the most part, are barred (if they even bother to try and do a story).

Continued . . .

The Sharpening of Ideological Contention

By Badri Raina | ZNet, March 18, 2008

I

Ever since the Hindutva right-wing, led by the top leadership of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), demolished the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on Dec.,6,1992 in brazen defiance of the Constitution and the rule of Law, the question has been asked whether, after all, the BJP can be regarded a legitimate participant in India’s parliamentary democracy.

A litany of subsequent pogroms since then have, if anything, lent force and urgency to that poser.

These have included violent vigilante attacks on artists, art products, films, text books, institutions, minority religious establishments, and the unforgettable carnage of muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

That this party has no more than a scant and expedient relationship with parliament is borne out again by the fact that eversince the defeat of the BJP-led NDA coalition in 2004, the BJP has done one of two things as the leading opposition in the house of the people—either disrupt or boycott its proceedings.

And if it has raised its voice there, nothing has been farther from its intentions than to underscore issues that touch the vast pauperized mass of Indians.

These circumstances have yielded a rather unique consequence—that of obliging the Left parties which support the UPA government from the outside to function in crucial ways as the most credible opposition within the House.

The overarching fact that it is within the Left that the chief antagonist of the BJP resides has thus tended to be sharply emphasized.

The axes of that antagonism become apparent if one were to encapsulate the major planks of the right-wing BJP agenda for the nation:

–Majoritarian hegemony;

–Hinduisation of culture in toto;

–Minority bashing;

–Privatisation of national wealth;

–Militarisation of the state;

–“strategic partnership” with neo-imperialism of which Zionism is seen as crucial part;

to name just the principle coordinates.

Continued . . .

The Iraq catastrophe isn’t down to mistakes or lack of planning, but a refusal to accept that people will resist foreign occupation

Seumas Milne

• The Guardian, Thursday March 20 2008

The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out.Meanwhile, we’re being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country round, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future. In an echo of his notorious “mission accomplished” speech of May 2003, George Bush yesterday proclaimed the Iraq war a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror”.

All this is self-delusion on a heroic scale. The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, “a day which will live in infamy”. Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead, as Jon Snow’s compelling TV documentary Hidden Iraq underlined this week, they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.

Continued . . .

Andy Sullivan

Reuters North American News Service, Mar 19, 2008 19:22 EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 160 people were arrested across the United States Wednesday as protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq obstructed downtown traffic and tried to block access to government offices.document.write(“”+”“); There were 32 arrests in Washington after demonstrators attempted to block entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, while 30 others were arrested outside a congressional office building, police said.

Protesters had hoped to shut down the IRS, the U.S. tax collection agency, to highlight the cost of the war. Police cleared the building’s entrances within an hour.

In San Francisco, long a center of anti-Iraq war sentiment, police arrested more than 100 people who protested through the day along Market Street in the central business district, a spokesman said.

Sgt. Steve Maninna said officers had arrested 101 people on charges including trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing traffic.

Four women were also detained for hanging a large banner off the city’s famous Golden Gate Bridge and then released, said bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie.

On Washington’s National Mall, about 100 protesters carried signs that read: “The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness” and waved upside-down U.S. flags, a traditional sign of distress.

“Bush and Cheney, leaders failed, Bush and Cheney belong in jail,” they chanted, referring to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Continued . . .

By Dahr Jamail
Inter Press Service News Agency Wednesday 19 March 2008

Washington – Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a “successful endeavour”.

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled ‘The Three Trillion Dollar War’, a figure it considers a “conservative estimate” of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly “low-balled” the cost of the war, and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The number of British casualties is 175.

“The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain,” journalist Patrick Cockburn of London’s Independent Newspaper wrote Mar. 17. “It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than four million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside of the country.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report Mar. 17 that millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care.

Iraq’s infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.

The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July that found that four million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition, and that 70 percent of Iraqis lacked access to safe drinking water.

The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq that has been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average less than five hours of electricity a day.

Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels.

Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid – or dead.

All this Cheney calls a “successful endeavour”.

Continued . . .

Antiwar protesters said yesterday that they plan a series of demonstrations starting this evening and lasting through tomorrow that could disrupt traffic, hamper commuters and block access to some buildings in downtown Washington.

The actions, aimed to draw attention to the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, are directed at business, government, political and media centers that demonstrators blame for the continuation of the war, according to members of the United For Peace and Justice coalition, which is heading the protest.

Activists plan tomorrow morning to target the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, at 12th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, which they said they hope to shut down. They said they will also protest at various corporations in the vicinity of K Street between 13th and 18th streets NW.

Antiwar military veterans plan a 9 a.m. march tomorrow on the Mall from the National Museum of the American Indian to the Capitol.

Other events — including a die-in, a knit-in and a torture simulation — are planned at the Department of Veterans Affairs, McPherson Square, Lafayette Square, the American Petroleum Institute and the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on Capitol Hill.

Some activists plan a 9:30 a.m. “March of the Dead” from Arlington National Cemetery into the District, with stops at war memorials and the Department of State. Others plan to demonstrate at The Washington Post, local offices of ABC, CNN, Fox and United Press International and the National Press Building.

Continued . . .

Responsibility for this spectacular tragedy must lie with those who ignored the facts five years ago