Peace and Justice Post

Thursday 19 June 2008

by: James Risen, The Washington Independent

(Illustration: Paul Giambarba)

Bush hawks aggressively working to rewrite accepted Iraq war history.

Ever since the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon ended abruptly in the aftermath of the Democratic victory in the 2006 mid-term elections, the civilian hawks who ruled the Defense Dept. during the early years of the Iraq war have remained largely silent. They have not engaged publicly even as their culpability for the Iraq war’s myriad failures has congealed into accepted wisdom.

But for the Pentagon troika most identified with Iraq – former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith – silence has not equaled happiness. It certainly has not meant acceptance of their fate at the hands of the many journalists, former generals and assorted ex-members of the Bush administration who have taken to the cable talk fests and the nation’s media outlets to reject and denounce them. Nor does it mean they walk the aisles at Barnes & Noble with equanimity while scanning shelves filled with books that lay the fault for George W. Bush’s failed presidency at their doorstep.

This anti-Pentagon historical narrative is straightforward and seems well established: Wolfowitz and Feith ran a neoconservative frat house while an arrogant, fiddling Rumsfeld roared against anyone who dared try to bring him the truth.

Neoconservatives – a loose association of pundits, politicians and analysts who put a right-wing spin on American exceptionalism and coupled that with an embrace of the doctrine of pre-emptive war – began pushing for regime change in Iraq in the 1990s. Wolfowitz and Feith brought this desire to oust Saddam Hussein with them when they joined the Bush administration.

After 9/11, neoconservatives inside and outside the administration argued for war; Washington must act because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and might share them with terrorists. Inside the government, Rumsfeld, not a neoconservative himself, embraced and advanced these arguments, following the lead of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Perhaps Rumsfeld also sensed that the war in Afghanistan had been too quick and remote to serve as a true demonstration of U.S. power in the Middle East.

Continued . . .

By Khody Akhavi | IPS News, June 20, 2008

WASHINGTON, – An informal truce between Israel and Hamas went into effect early Thursday morning, temporarily suspending a year of fighting that has left more than 600 Palestinians — many of them civilians — and 18 Israelis dead.

The guns fell silent at 6 a.m. amid scepticism that the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire will actually hold. The next 48 hours will determine whether both sides halt their cross-border fighting in exchange for a partial and gradual easing of Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza.

While welcomed by Washington, the fragile truce marks yet another failure for the George W. Bush administration’s “transformative diplomacy” policy in the Middle East. In the current climate, the Bush administration’s tacit support for the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire underscores its need to salvage the withering Annapolis process.

“Anything that helps maintain security for Israeli citizens, that helps end the kind of violence that has been fairly constant along the border with Gaza is something that’s positive,” State Department spokesperson Tom Casey told reporters Thursday.

“I think the one caveat we have always said is that we don’t think that any other track or any other negotiating path ought to be a substitute or a distraction from the primary set of discussions and negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said, referring to U.S.-led peace talks that have yet to result in substantive progress.

The White House has publicly ruled out direct negotiations with Hamas until it renounces violence and accepts Israel’s right to exist, but the group’s ability to exploit the consequences of its isolation over the last year forced Washington to soften its stance. As in Lebanon, the move appears to have strengthened the political standing of a group that Washington still considers a terrorist organisation.

Beyond easing the immediate hardship to Gazans and stopping rocket fire into Israel, analysts here say the ceasefire will not lead to a substantive shift in peace talks.

“The ceasefire in Gaza will be a welcome respite, but a fundamental road to nowhere,” said Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six U.S. secretaries of state, during a panel on Capitol Hill last Wednesday.

Continued . . .

The British expedition to Afghanistan is on the brink of something worse than defeat: a long, low-intensity war from which no government will dare to extricate itself. With the death toll mounting, battle is reportedly joined with the Taliban at the very gates of the second city, Kandahar. There is no justification for ministerial bombast that “we are winning the war, really”.

What is to be done? In 2001 the West waged a punitive retaliatory strike against the hosts of the perpetrators of 9/11. The strike has since followed every law of mission creep, now reduced in London to a great war of despair, in which the cabinet can do nothing but send even more men to their deaths.

In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies have made every mistake in the intervention book. They sent too few troops to assert an emphatic presence. They failed to “hit hard and get out”, as advocated by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary. They tried to destroy the staple crop, poppies, and then let it go to warlords who now use it to finance suicide bombers, among others.

They allowed a corrupt regime to establish itself in the capital, Kabul, while failing to promote honest administration in the provinces.

They pretended that an international coalition (Nato) would be better than a unitary command (America), which it is not. They killed civilians and alienated tribes with crude air power. Finally, they disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: don’t stay too long. The British ambassador threatens “to stay for 30 years”, rallying every nationalist to the insurgents’ cause.

The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.

Britain went into Helmand two years ago on the basis of gung-ho, and gung-ho still censors public debate. Yet behind the scenes all is despair. A meeting of Afghan observers in London last week, at the launch of James Fergusson’s book on the errors of Helmand, A Million Bullets, was an echo chamber of gloom.

All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at hand “if only” the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians dare not admit it.

Continued . . .

By Robert Weitzel | CommonDreams. org, June 20, 2008

“My number one priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.”
-Former House Speaker Richard Armey

Rocky was a boyhood friend. He was as big and as strong as his name. In his wild days, Rocky hung out with a runt whose obnoxious mouth regularly got my friend into serious bar fights. One night Rocky was beaten senseless when he stepped between the runt and someone with dangerous friends. I never understood his irrational defense of a guy with obvious “needs.”

But then — K Street realpolitik notwithstanding — I have difficulty understanding America’s irrational defense of Israel, a country whose “needs” are as much at odds with the security of my country as were the runt’s “needs” at odds with the health of my friend.

Earlier this month 7,000 activists and politicians attended the America Israel Public Forum Committee’s 2008 Policy Conference in Washington D.C. This was AIPAC’s premier pro-Israel event, which attracted a bipartisan who’s who of Congressional sycophants. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s keynote address drew nearly half the members of Congress.

Along with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, both presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential candidates bent a knee and lowered their head in supplication, pledging an unwavering fealty along with an additional 30 billion taxpayer dollars in military aid to Israel.

John McCain told attendees, “The threats to Israel’s security are large and growing and America’s commitment must grow as well. I strongly support the increase in military aid to Israel . . . our shared interests and values are too great for us to follow any other policy.”

Barak Obama dittoed, “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable . . . Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us . . . as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.”

As an American citizen, I’d like to think the number one “non-negotiable” of anyone who would be president is the security and the interests of the American people. Instead of reading from the same AIPAC-vetted script, McCain and Obama would better serve their country by reading from the same Constitution — the version enshrined in Washington D.C. not in Jerusalem.

AIPAC is the most powerful of the dozen or so major organizations and think-tanks that comprise the “Israel lobby” in the United States. This influential lobby dictates U.S. Middle East foreign policy: “You can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here,” admitted Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) upon leaving office in 2004.

Recently, former President Jimmy Carter pointed out that the Israel lobby makes or breaks American politicians depending on their willingness to promote Israel’s “security” as their number one foreign policy priority: “It’s almost political suicide . . . for a member of Congress who wants to seek reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti-policy of the conservative Israeli government.”

Predictably, politicians wanting to keep their government and K Street paychecks merrily dance the mizinka, the Jewish traditional marriage (of convenience) polka.

Most detrimental to the democratic process, however, is the way the lobby manages the political and social discourse by tarring critics of Israel’s policies and actions regarding the Palestinians, Gaza and the West Bank with the brush of anti-Semitism, a black epithet that once applied is difficult, if not impossible, to scrub off.

Continued . . .

Reflections by comrade Fidel

The discredited way in which the European Union suspended its sanctions on Cuba on June 19 has been reported in 16 international press dispatches. It has absolutely no economic effect on our country. On the contrary, the United States’ extraterritorial laws and, thus, its economic and financial blockade are still fully in effect.

At my age and with my state of health, one cannot be sure of the time one has left to live. Nevertheless, I want to express my contempt towards the immense hypocrisy of that decision. Such hypocrisy is made all the more evident by the brutal European measure to expel illegal immigrants from Latin American countries, some of which have populations which, in their majority, are of European origin. Immigrants are also the fruit of colonial, semi-colonial and capitalist exploitation.

In the name of human rights, Cuba is asked to grant impunity to those who would bind the feet and hands of the homeland and its people and hand them over to imperialism.

Even Mexican authorities have to admit that the Miami-based mob, at the service of the U.S. government, used force to snatch from the hands of an important contingent of migratory agents, or bought, dozens of illegal immigrants who had been arrested in Quintana Roo, including innocent children transported by force across risk-laden seas and mothers obliged to emigrate. Traffickers of human beings, like drug traffickers, who take advantage of the largest and most coveted of the world’s markets, have undermined the authority and moral statute needed by any government to lead the State, spilling Latin American blood everywhere, to say nothing of those who die trying to emigrate by climbing over the humiliating border wall erected over what was once Mexican territory.

The food and energy crises, climate change and inflation are scourging the world’s nations. As political helplessness prevails, ignorance and illusions tend to flourish. Not one of these governments, let alone those of the Czech Republic and Sweden, which were firmly opposed to the European Union’s decision, was able to give coherent answers to the questions that have been put on the table.

All the while, in Cuba, the mercenaries and traitors at the empire’s service are at their wit’s end and throw up their hands in horror in defense of the rights to treachery and impunity.

I have many more things to say, but let this suffice for today. It is not my intention to trouble others with these words, but, as I am alive, I continue to think about these things.

I shall publish this reflection on the Internet only, today, June 20, 2008.

Fidel Castro

1:55 p.m.

Jason Leopold | Consortiumnews. com,  June 21st, 2008

A Democratic engineered emergency supplemental bill to continue funding the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan to the tune of $162 billion is expected to win bipartisan support, aides to leaders in the House said late Wednesday.

The bill, as currently drafted, does not contain any conditions for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq nor does it restrict how President Bush can conduct military operations. The legislation ensures both wars are funded well into 2009 and comes nearly two years after Democrats won majorities in Congress and the Senate largely on promises to resist handing the Bush administration “blank-checks” for Iraq and a pledge to immediately bring U.S. troops home.

A spokesperson for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was unavailable for comment.

In a column published on The Huffington Post in November 2006, just a couple of weeks after Democrats took back control of Congress, Pelosi wrote “that the biggest ethical issue facing our country for the past three and a half years is the war in Iraq.”

“This unnecessary pre-emptive war has come at great cost. Nearly 2,900 of our brave troops have lost their lives and more than 21,000 more have suffered lasting wounds,” Pelosi wrote.” Since the war began, Congress has appropriated more than $350 billion, and the United States has suffered devastating damage to our reputation in the eyes of the world.”

Since she published that column, an additional 1,200 U.S. troops died in Iraq and nearly 10,000 more were wounded, according to statistics released by the Defense Department. Additionally, tens of thousands of Iraqis civilians have been killed since the March 2003 invasion. Moreover, if the new supplemental passes it will bring the total costs of the war to more than $600 billion.

Continued . . .

Guantánamo has proved a useful distraction from the secret detention camps run by the US around the world

George Monbiot

The Guardian, Tuesday June 17, 2008
We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had.

Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from poor to rich, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable.

Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US supreme court ruled that the inmates at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in the civilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against the prison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court has ruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional.

Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it could scarcely be less. The department of defence can transfer its prisoners to an oubliette in another country, where the constitution’s writ does not run. The public atrocity of Guantánamo Bay has provided a useful distraction from something even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runs around the world.

We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledged it in September 2006. “Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantánamo.” Other suspects, he said, were being “held secretly” by the CIA. “Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged.” He went on to claim that all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantánamo Bay.

Continued . . .

Bexhill Observer, June 21, 2008

Anti-war protest leaders have accused the police of unprovoked brutality during protests in London to mark a visit by US President George Bush.

Prominent campaigners said scenes of violence in Westminster reflected a growing authoritarian clampdown on the right to peaceful protest.

Members of the Stop the War Coalition criticised the Government for apparently allowing the president’s security detail to enforce a protest-free “green zone” around his Downing Street visit.

They said protesters suffered injuries including head wounds, cuts and heavy bruising as they were beaten by police with batons at barricades between Whitehall and Parliament Square.

Veteran peace campaigner Walter Wolfgang, 84, said he was shocked by the unexpected violence.

He said: “Not only did some of the police behave brutally – they looked as if they enjoyed it. They used the batons without reason.”

Human rights activist Bianca Jagger said protesters were attacked for attempting to exercise their rights.

Ms Jagger said she narrowly escaped becoming caught up in the violence as she walked through the demonstration on Sunday.

Police arrested 25 people after 10 officers suffered minor injuries during the demonstration in Parliament Square.

Up to 2,500 people gathered to mark President Bush’s farewell tour of London, which was surrounded by a massive security operation.

Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2008, All Rights Reserved.

By Ramzy Baroud | The Palestine Chronicle, June 20, 2008

Senator John McCain is greeted by an Ultr-Orthodox Jewish man as he arrives at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, March 19, 2008. (Photo: AP)

Abstract: A study of the political, religious and cultural factors underlying the pro-Israeli bias apparent in the Western media today, as depicted in the mainstream news and television programmes.

As Palestinians hurriedly buried their loved ones in the Gaza Strip following a deadly Israeli onslaught, which further contributed to Gaza’s worst humanitarian crisis since 1967 [1], US and Israeli celebrities rallied at a Los Angeles benefit concert for the Israeli town of Sderot, located near the border of Gaza. [2] Hollywood movie stars Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, Valerie Harper and comedian Larry Miller mingled with Israeli celebrities such as singer Ninet Tayeb and others. Children from the Israeli town of Sderot, which received the lion’s share of homemade Palestinian rockets, were cheerful nonetheless. Song and dance, interrupted occasionally by solemn messages of support delivered via satellite by both Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates, replaced the cries of sirens the images of huddling families in the town’s shelters. It was a bittersweet moment, that of solidarity, a renewal of the vow made too often, that Israel’s plight is that of America, and Israel’s security is an American priority, and, indeed, ‘God loves those who love Israel’.

Welcome to America’s parallel reality on Israel and Palestine, barefaced in its defying of the notions of commonsense, equality and justice, ever-insistent on peeking at the Arab-Israeli conflict from a looking glass manufactured jointly in the church, in the Congress and in the news room, where the world is reduced to characters interacting in a Hollywood-like movie set: good guys, well groomed and often white-skinned vs. bad guys bearing opposite qualities.

One may become accustomed to watching, reading and listening to the chorus of support that America – its politicians, most of its mainstream media and a large conglomerate of its churches and clergies – tirelessly offer Israel. But one must never dismiss such support, as typical, expected or, as some of Israel’s supporters would put it, ‘special’ and ‘historic’. As simplistic and naïve in its articulation as the so-called pro-Israeli sentiment in the United States may be, in actuality, its intricate manifestation of political, religious, and cultural factors are as old, in some way, as the United States itself. To understand these factors, some deconstruction is in order. This article merely aims at shedding light at some of these factors and the history behind them.

Continued . . .

By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jun 20 (IPS) – Cuba reacted cautiously to the announcement that the European Union would lift the diplomatic sanctions adopted after 75 dissidents received lengthy jail terms on charges of conspiring with Washington to destabilise the Cuban state, and three men convicted of hijacking a passenger ferry were executed, in 2003.

The governing Communist Party daily newspaper Granma published the news Friday under the headline: EU Foreign Ministers Revoke Unjust Sanctions against Cuba. The brief article also says “the EU plans to reactivate political dialogue with Havana.”

But European diplomatic sources consulted by IPS clarified that the article cannot be considered an official response by the government.

“There will surely be a response when the authorities see the document on the question,” which could be approved next Monday in Brussels, according to one of the sources.

“If that has occurred, I believe it is a step in the right direction,” Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said Thursday night when approached by a Reuters journalist at a reception held in honour of Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez.

EU ambassadors in Havana held their monthly meeting Friday, in which the decision to lift sanctions, which was already expected, was “just one more point” on the agenda, said a diplomat who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity.

Some dissident groups responded to the announcement with disappointment or outright rejection, while more moderate groups said the EU decision was “the right thing to do.”

“We support dialogue as a route towards democratisation,” dissident leader Manuel Cuesta told IPS. “Now we have to say that the ball is in the Cuban government’s court.”

The EU temporarily suspended the sanctions in 2005. But in March, the Cuban government insisted that dialogue would only be possible if the measures were officially eliminated.

The sanctions included a limit on high-level government visits, a reduction in EU participation in Cuban cultural events, and invitations to dissidents to the receptions held in European embassies in Havana on the countries’ national days.

The participation of dissidents in embassy receptions particularly irritated the Cuban government, which considers them “mercenaries” at the service of a hostile U.S. policy towards Cuba.

According to the news from Brussels, the foreign ministers of the 27 EU countries reached an agreement that proposes, besides the removal of the measures, the start of a political dialogue with the Cuban government, now headed by Raúl Castro.

But at the behest of several countries opposed to the decision, the EU will reassess the results of the dialogue on political and human rights questions a year from now.

Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos clarified, however, that the reassessment will not consider a renewal of the measures, which have been definitively struck down.

Granma said that condition was “a renewed commitment to the so-called Common Position” on Cuba sponsored in 1996 by the Spanish rightwing government of Prime Minister José María Aznar (1996-2004), which in Havana’s view is “an instrument that meddles in Cuba’s internal affairs.”

The Common Position was approved by the European Council with the stated aim of encouraging a gradual, peaceful transition towards a pluralist democracy and respect for human rights and basic freedoms in Cuba, and towards improved living standards.

That stance, which has complicated relations and has stood in the way of a framework cooperation accord between the EU and Cuba for years, was not mentioned as a hurdle to the normalisation of ties during European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Louis Michel’s visit to Havana in March.

On that occasion, Michel and his host, Foreign Minister Pérez Roque, agreed that to engage in broad political dialogue encompassing all issues, including human rights, it was essential to lift the 2003 sanctions.

Michel said he was in favour of such a move, but clarified that it was up to the European Council to decide, and that the decision had to be unanimous.

In a press conference in Brussels, Foreign Minister Moratinos said the aim in removing the diplomatic measures was to initiate a stage of dialogue that is neither conditioned nor limited by measures that, in the view of Spain’s socialist government, have never been especially useful and were even counterproductive.

Madrid heads the group of countries in favour of dialogue with the Cuban government, which has repeatedly stated that it will not accept pressure or impositions of any kind. (END/2008)