Peace and Justice Post

How the Obama Administration Adopted the Bush / Petraeus Story Line

By Gareth Porter, Counterpunch, Sep 6, 2010

In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had  turned Iraq into a good war after all.  That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that version of the war.

The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.

In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus story-line which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.

The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge.  The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.

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By David Sirota, trutdig,com, Sep 2, 2010

U.S. Navy / MC1 Eileen Kelly Fors

Something about 21st century warfare brings out Washington’s lust for historical comparison. The moment the combat starts, lawmakers and the national press corps inevitably portray every explosion, invasion, front-line dispatch, political machination and wartime icon as momentous replicas of the past’s big moments and Great Men.

9/11 was Pearl Harbor. Colin Powell’s Iraq presentation at the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson’s Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation. Embedded journalists in Afghanistan strutted around like the intrepid Walter Cronkite on a foreign battlefield. George Bush was a Rooseveltian “war president.” The Iraq invasion was D-Day.

A byproduct of reporters’ narcissism, politicians’ vanity and the Beltway’s lockstep devotion to militarism, this present-tense hagiography ascribes the positive attributes of sanitized history to current events. And whether or not the analogies are appropriate, they inevitably help sell contemporary actions—no matter how ill-advised. As just one example: If 9/11 was Pearl Harbor, as television so often suggested, then American couch potatoes were bound to see “shock and awe” in Baghdad as a rational reprise of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

Of course, after we were told seven years ago that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and after an historically unique conflict that has lasted longer than almost any other, you might think the press would start questioning the government’s martial stagecraft. You might also think all the comparisons to the past would stop. Instead, D.C. journalists and lawmakers are now celebrating the supposed withdrawal from Iraq, implicitly presenting the White House’s August announcement as the second coming of V-J Day.

The trouble is that the announcement is anything but, because the war isn’t even close to over. And we know that because the military is quietly acknowledging as much.

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“Non-Combat” Troops in Gun Battle as 12 Killed at Military HQ

In the most sobering reminder yet that the Iraq War quite simply is not over, the US troops that the Obama Administration carefully redefined as “non-combat” soldiers engaged in heavy combat today in the city of Baghdad.

During the attack on the Iraqi military headquarters in the city, the Iraqi miliary called in a request for ground troops as well as attack helicopters, drones and explosives experts. The attack ended with at least 12 people killed and dozens wounded.

Major attacks in Iraq are nothing new, and they have been happening with alarming frequency over the past several months. The fact that the US “non-combat” troops were called in for what was most assuredly a combat mission, less than a week after President Obama assured everyone that the combat mission was “over” must certainly raise a few eyebrows.

Roughly 50,000 US troops remain in Iraq and officials are expecting to be called on to stay past the end of 2011. In addition the US has an ever-increasing number of security contractors also engaging in combat missions, which are expected to stay for many, many years.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes,

The Washington Post, September  5, 2010

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict’s most sobering expenses: those in the category of “might have beens,” or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only “what if” worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources — including both money and attention — are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

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Protections for Domestic Workers, Systemic Reform Urgently Needed

Combat Communalism, July-August 2010, No. 157

As unrest continues to brew in the Kashmir valley, and more and more innocent people lose their lives at the hands of the police or security forces, it is increasingly apparent that the Indian state urgently needs to re-examine its position and dramatically alter its tactics in Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian polity must insist on this. The strategy employed by the Indian government over the years has denied a sizeable section of the people basic human rights and estranged them from the mainstream. The wrongs that are still being inflicted on them by state forces and militant groups, the Kashmiri people’s burgeoning anger and continuing alienation feeds a conflagration that will not be extinguished unless corrective action is taken, and taken without delay. This is not a grave matter for Kashmir alone; it is a perilous situation for India as a whole. It is a blot on India’s conscience as a nation, a distressing account of systemic cruelty and studied indifference to the sorry plight of an ever-growing multitude of its citizens. And even as we urge for fundamental changes in the status quo, we must do all we can towards reparation and to ensure that the average Kashmiri’s valiant and ceaseless quest for justice yields positive results.

A report of the Independent People’s Tribunal on Human Rights Violations in Kashmir reveals the extent of deprivation of basic human rights and the depth of alienation felt by the Kashmiri people. Excerpts from the report:

Aims

There is a general perception that the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir is bad and largely unaddressed. The various official human rights mechanisms, including the judiciary and the State Human Rights Commission, are unable to act proactively and rein in human rights violators, including the army, paramilitary forces, police and surrendered militants. In this context, it was felt that a civil society initiative, including retired members of the judiciary, was imperative to clarify the situation and the reasons for the continued deaths and suffering.

The practice of human rights abuse is protected, if not encouraged, by legislation like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act and the Disturbed Areas Act – where security forces are given sweeping powers to shoot, kill, arrest and detain along with blanket immunity from prosecution for such heinous acts. These powers are in complete disregard of the most fundamental postulates of international law enshrined in the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948), the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), the ICESCR (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), the UNCAT (UN Convention Against Torture) and the UN Convention on the Elimination of Enforced Disappearances, among others. The latter two have been signed but not ratified by India.

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Speigel Online International, Sep 3, 2010

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Jerusalem

Photo Gallery: 9 Photos

AP

Part 2: ‘Building Freeze Is More Harmful than Useful’

Construction work is also going on in Kfar Adumim. The settlement is significantly larger than the norm — 2,700 people live here in the hills between Jerusalem and Jericho. Among them are two members of the Knesset, the two hardliners Aryeh Eldad and Uri Ariel. 30 houses are to be built here and 50 Palestinian workers are employed on the site. One man, who is busy laying bathroom tiles, says they started work a month before the building freeze came into force. In the beginning, they had 300 men working at full speed to lay as many foundations as possible in the short time.

Etkes sees the circumventing of the building freeze here as a “classic example of the cooperation between the settlers and the government”: Some of the foundations were hastily laid before the building freeze came into force, some afterwards — but nobody bothers to police it. “The building freeze was discussed for half a year, that was enough time for all parties to prepare.”

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Morning Star Online, September 3, 2010

Former prime minister attacked by anti-war protesters in Dublin as he promotes memoirs