Peace and Justice Post

The Truth of the Iraq War is That We Destroyed Iraq

by Jodie Evans, CommonDreams.org, July 23, 2010

Almost eight years ago, I made my way to DC to meet up with Medea Benjamin and a few other friends to talk about what we could do to stop the Bush administration’s insane push toward invading an innocent country: Iraq. The next morning, eight of us were in front of the White House, on the steps of Congress and in the hearing for the resolution on Iraq; the day ended with two of us in jail. Our message was US Inspectors, Not US War. We had read articles about how the White House had been dreaming the invasion up over the summer and was waiting until September to push it because “you don’t launch a new product in August.” People’s lives were at stake, and they were treating war like the release of a new sports car.

Continues >>

By Eileen Fleming, Consortiumnews.org,  July 21, 2010

Editor’s Note: Mordechai Vanunu stands as one of the premier whistleblowers in the nuclear age, having exposed what has remained a topic never officially acknowledged by U.S. presidents and rarely discussed in the U.S. news media: Israel’s possession of a large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

In 1986, after turning over photographic evidence of Israel’s nuclear program to a London newspaper, Vanunu was lured to Rome, where he was kidnapped by Israeli agents who smuggled him back to Israel, where he was tried for treason and imprisoned for 18 years.

After his release in 2004, he was barred from speaking with foreign journalists and – when he resisted those restrictions – he was prosecuted again and returned to prison, as author Eileen Fleming describes in this guest article:

On May 23, 2010, Mordechai Vanunu began a three-month sentence in solitary confinement on charges of speaking to foreign media in 2004. On Sunday, July 11, 2010, his brother Meir was allowed to visit him for 30 minutes.

Vanunu’s friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire, reported: “There was a glass window between them and they spoke via the phone. He wore a prison uniform. He is held in the hardest prison section there is in the prison. It has the most notorious criminals in the country, well known hard murder cases. All about a dozen are in severe isolation conditions.

“He is in a cell by himself for 24 hours a day, no window but a small wire covered crack at the top part of one wall. He has about an hour’s walk a day in a very tiny yard. He was simply thrown in a cell by the security agents, the door locked, and left to suffer there all alone. He has not spoken to anyone in all the seven weeks and this visit was (apart from a short visit of his lawyer 6 weeks ago) the first conversation he had in seven weeks.

Continues >>

Morning Star Online, July 22, 2010

By Stephen Lendman, uruknet.info, July 21, 2010

The Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations is a Beirut, Lebanon-based organization engaged in “strategic and futuristic studies on the Arab and Muslim worlds, (emphasizing) the Palestinian issue.” In July 2010, it published the latest in its “Am I Not a Human?” series titled, “The Suffering of the Palestinian Child under the Israeli Occupation,” saying: Palestinian children grow up “under the Israeli occupation, surrounded by cruelty, oppression, killing, starvation and destruction.” Yet, like all children, they dream of playing and living normally and safely. Instead, their father may be dead or in prison, their brother killed, their home destroyed, and their mother forced to give birth at an Israeli checkpoint, risking her and the newborn. Continues >>

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, July 22, 2010

The international foreign ministers conference held in Kabul Tuesday formally endorsed President Hamid Karzai’s proposed 2014 target for Afghan forces to assume the lead responsibility for the country’s security, while acknowledging that the foreign occupation will continue indefinitely.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the conference, which lasted just five hours, a “turning point.” But there was little new presented at the gathering, and nothing to dispel the growing sense that after nearly nine years of occupation and war, the US-led project of installing a stable puppet regime and extending US hegemony in Central Asia is mired in crisis.

Continues >>

by Mairead Maguire, CommonDreams.org, July 21, 2010

British troops are paying the blood price in Helmand, as they did in Iraq, of a now officially subservient relationship

Seumas Milne, The Guardian/UK, July 21, 2010

The catastrophic illusions and acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being progressively exposed, one after another. In London, the former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this week that the security service had indeed warned Tony Blair’s government that aggression against Iraq, “on top of our involvement in Afghanistan”, would violently radicalise a generation of young Muslims and “substantially” increase the threat of terror attacks in Britain.

Continues >>

On the eve of the latest policy conference, top US and NATO officials have arrived in Kabul to pledge their support to the continuation of the Afghan War, with promises of an unending commitment to propping up the Karzai government going forward.

At the center of this new pledges, which look remarkably the same as the old pledges, is a new drawdown date in 2014. The date, which had actually been bandied about for over a year, was ostenisbly “leaked” in recent days to a number of key media outlets.

The date, which is “conditions-based” and “non-binding,” appears to be designed to accomplish little but replacing the July 2011 drawdown date, which has now been entirely abandoned by administration officials. The only apparent advantage to the 2014 date is that it is some four years hence and therefore far enough way as to not need to be immediately disavowed by any but the most hawkish officials.

So officials are now expressing their confidence in the 2014 victory, and the eventual security handover that will come at some point after it. In the meantime, the death toll in war continues to rise, and the promises of progress continue to seem more distant and more detached from reality.

By Michael Winship, Consortiumnews.com, July 2010

Editor’s Note: The war in Afghanistan grinds on with a political imperative now more in control of U.S. policy than any military expectation of a meaningful “victory.” Put simply: No one wants to be accused of “losing” on the original front in the “war on terror.”

For Official Washington – both the politicians and the pundits – it remains easier to throw more money and troops at the problem than acknowledge that the war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake, as Michael Winship notes in this guest essay:

A recent headline on the New York Daily News Web site was blunt: “In case you’ve forgotten,” it read, “we’re at war.”

The story was about the deaths of six Americans in Afghanistan in five separate attacks and one accidental explosion, all on the same day. The day before, coalition forces had mistakenly killed six Afghan civilians when an artillery strike missed its target; the day after, the Taliban would kill eleven Afghan policemen and a district governor.

It is the deadliest year of the war in Afghanistan, now the longest in American history.

Continues >>

The two-state solution is dead. There is no longer any hope for peace or justice in this solution, if there ever was to begin with. There was a time when Israel could have accepted a Palestinian state along the pre-June 1967 armistice line, with minor and mutually agreed upon revisions of the final border, and thereby “secure” its “gains” from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

But the “Jewish state” passed up this long-standing opportunity by rejecting the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and deliberately sabotaging all efforts by the international community to seek a final resolution by implementing the consensus on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Continues >>