Muslims are numerous but powerless. Divisions among Muslims, especially between Sunni and Shi’ites, have consigned the Muslim Middle East to almost a century of Western control. Muslims cannot even play together. The Islamic Solidarity Games, a regional version of the Olympics, which were to be held in April in Iran, have been cancelled, because the Iranians and the Arabs cannot agree on whether to call the body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.
Muslim disunity has made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the U.S. to invade Iraq, and for the U.S. to rule much of the region through puppets. For example, in exchange for faithful service, Egypt receives $1.5 billion a year from Washington, which enables President Mubarak to buy off opposition. The opposition had rather have the money than support the Palestinians. Therefore, Egypt cooperates with Israel and the U.S. in the blockade of Gaza.
Another factor is the willingness of some Muslims to betray their own kind for U.S. dollars. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman, head of the Foundation for Democracy, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”
By now we all know what that means. It means that the U.S. finances a “velvet” or some “color revolution” in order to install a U.S. puppet. Just prior to the sudden appearance of a “green revolution” in Tehran primed to protest an election, Timmerman wrote that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques. Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” So, according to the neocon Timmerman, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, it was U.S. money that funded Mousavi’s claims that Armadinejad stole the last Iranian election.
During President George W. Bush’s regime it became public knowledge that American money is used to purchase Iranians to work against their own country. The Washington Post, a newspaper sympathetic to the neocon’s goal of American hegemony and war with Iran, reported in 2007 that Bush authorized spending more than $400 million for activities that included “supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics.”
This makes the U.S. government a “state sponsor of terrorism.” For confirmation, one of the U.S. paid operatives, who conducted terror operations in Iran, has ratted on his terrorist supporters in Washington. Abdulmalek Rigi, leader of the Baloch separatist group responsible for several attacks, was recently arrested by the Iranians. Rigi admitted that the Americans in Washington assured him of unlimited military aid and funding for waging an insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Possibly he was tortured into confession. It is the American way. If the “light of the world,” the “indispensable people,” and the “shining city on the hill” tortures people, perhaps the Iranians do as well. Rigi’s younger brother, himself on death row in Iran, has said that the U.S. provided direct funding to the separatist group and even ordered specific terrorist attacks inside Iran.
The U.S. and its NATO puppets have been killing Afghan women, children, and village elders since October 7, 2001, when the U.S. military invasion “Operation Enduring Freedom,” a proper Orwellian title for a self-serving war of aggression, was launched. The U.S. installed puppet president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is bought and paid for with U.S. dollars.
The money that Washington gives Karzai finances the corruption that supports him. Karzai’s corruption and his treason against the Afghan people encourage the Taliban to keep fighting in order to achieve a government that serves Afghans instead of Washington, D.C.
Without the puppet Karzai selling out Afghans to Washington, the U.S. would have already been driven out of the country. With Karzai paying Afghans with American money to fight Afghans for the Americans, the war drones on into its ninth year.
Feminists, liberals, and naive American flag-wavers will say that what is written here is utter rot, that Americans are in Afghanistan to bring women’s rights and birth control to Afghan women and to bring freedom, democracy and progress to Afghanistan, even if it means leveling every village, town, and house in the country. We, “the indispensable people,” are only there to do good, because we care so much for the Afghan people who live in a country that most Americans can’t find on a map.
While this collection of naifs rants on about America “saving” Afghans from whatever, the White House and the Congress are conspiring against the American people to cut $500 billion dollars out of Medicare in order to give the money to private insurance companies. Jobless benefits are about to run out for millions of Americans, whose jobs have been moved offshore in order to make the rich richer. The U.S. Senate failed on Friday, Feb. 26, to extend jobless benefits. A single Republican Senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, was able to block the bill because it would cost a measly $10 billion and “would add to the budget deficit.”
The “fiscally responsible” Bunning supports blank checks for wars of aggression (war crimes under the Nuremberg standard) and payoffs to investment banks for wrecking the retirement plans of most Americans. Bunning sends the bills to the unorganized and unrepresented Americans, whose jobs have been stolen by corporate offshoring of jobs and whose retirements have been stolen by the endless greed of the Wall Street investment banks.
What fool believes that the U.S. government, which is totally indifferent to the fate of its own citizens, cares so much about Afghanistan that it will spend blood and treasure to bring “progress” and “women’s rights” to a country half a world away, while it drives its own citizens into the ground?
At Washington’s behest, the government of Pakistan is conducting war against its own people, killing many and forcing others to flee their homes and lands. The Pakistani government’s war against its own citizens has caused military expenses to soar, putting Pakistan’s budget deep in the red. Deputy US Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin ordered the Pakistani government to raise taxes to pay for the war against its own people. The puppet ruler, Asif Ali Zardari, complied with his American master’s orders. Zardari declared a broad-based value added tax on virtually all goods and most services in Pakistan. Thus, Pakistanis are forced to finance a war against themselves.
The “cakewalk war” in Iraq has lasted 7 years instead of the promised 6 weeks, and the violence is still ongoing with Iraqis killed and maimed nearly every day. The reason Americans are still in Iraq is because the Iraqis hate each other more than they hate the American invader. The vast majority of the violence in “the Iraq war” was committed between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shi’ites as they cleansed one another from neighborhoods.
The majority Shi’ites regarded the American invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to gain power over the minority Sunnis, who ruled under Saddam Hussein. Therefore, the Shi’ites never engaged the American invading forces. The minority Sunnis (20 percent of the population) gave most of their effort to fighting the Shi’ite majority, but in their spare time a few thousand Sunnis were able to inflict serious losses on the American superpower.
Finally realizing the power of lucre in the Arab world, the Americans put 80,000 Sunnis on the U.S. military payroll and paid them to stop killing Americans.
This is how the U.S. won the war in Iraq. Iraqis sold out their independence for American dollars.
Considering that a few thousand Sunnis were able to prevent superpower America from successfully occupying Baghdad or much of Iraq, had the Shi’ites joined with the Sunnis against the invaders, the U.S. would have been defeated and driven out. This outcome was not possible, because the Shi’ites wanted to settle the score with the Sunnis, who had ruled them under Saddam Hussein.
This is the reason that Iraq today is in ruins, with one million dead, four million displaced or homeless, and the professional class having fled the country. Iraq, under the American puppet Maliki, is an American protectorate.
As long as Muslims hate and fear one another more than they hate their conquerers, they will remain a vanquished people.
The Obama Killing Machine in Afghanistan
March 8, 2010by Prof. Marc W. Herold
In a cemetery marked by green and white flags in Helmand’s provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, 20 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Marjah, men buried one Marjah resident who died of his injuries suffered in what his brother said was coalition bombing three days ago. “I buried him here, because I couldn’t take him back to my village,” the brother, Sayed Wali, a thin man in a faded blue tunic (from http://www1.cw56.com/news/articles/world/BO136048/ ).
Veteran reporter, Kathy Gannon, with a record of independent reporting on Afghanistan going back to October 2001, noted that the Taliban fighting foreign forces in Marja are villagers.[2] She also provided rare details on victims of foreign forces there: Musa Jan’s home was hit by an aircraft around February 16th killing five occupants inside including children; Sayed Lal was outside in a field with a friend when he was shot by foreign soldiers. Assadullah, 22, was riding his motorcycle when the Americans fired at him shattering his arm; Abdul Hamid, 12, was in front of his home when raiding foreign forces arrived,
On 27 February, foreign soldiers killed three people, including two children, in Alasai district of Kapisa province. Mohammad Ashraf, a tribal elder of Kotki area of Alasai district, giving details of the incident, told AIP that last night at around 2200 local time, French soldiers descended from their helicopter in an area far from Waldikhel village of Kotki area.and and laid an ambush. When people of the area learned about the arrival of these forces, they started fleeing from their village when the French forces opened fire at them.” The tribal elder added: “As a result of the firing, three people have been martyred, one of whom was nine-year-old Joma Gul, son of Gholam Rasul, another was 10-year-old Aghar Khan, son of Morad Mohammad, and the third one was Faqir Mohammad, a young man.”
A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as “U.S. Special Forces” surrounded the compound. Saying he witnessed one man’s death, Hamidullah said, “Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him.” Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details. A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that blames Americans. “Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry,” he said.
Occupied Afghanistan, March 5, 2010. An Afghan horse cart approaches a U.S. occupation force Stryker armored personnel carrier near Shah-Wali-Kot, Kandahar (photo by John Moore, Getty Images at http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/97456605/Getty-Images-News )
Rare photo of an injured victim of U.S/NATO forces., shot during U.S. offensive near Marjah, February 14, 2010
(photo by AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito at http://topics.philly.com/photo/09Opdbv6joaZZ )
LASHKARGAH, Feb 17, 2010: An eight-year-old girl weeps while laying head on her knees as foreign soldiers handed over the bodies of her family members killed during the ongoing operation Moshtarak in southern Helmand province. The girl, resident of Marja district, lost her 10 family members in a NATO missile strike (Source: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/02/17/bodies-of-12-civilians-killed-by-nato-handed-over-to-families.html )
The following Table details the 80-86 Afghan civilians killed by direct U.S/NATO actions along several dimensions. The numbers represent a low-count insofar as they do not include many Pashtun civilians killed in the Pakistani border regions by U.S drone strikes. The Table demonstrates that close to three-quarters of all civilian deaths resulted from air strikes (including the rocket strike in Marja on February 14th). U.S/NATO occupation forces killed civilians in the provinces of Uruzgan, Helmand, Kunduz, Kandahar, Paktia, Kapisa, Farah and in Miranshah (drone strike in Pakistan). The average number of civilians killed in an air strike was ten, whereas in a ground attack it was 2.4. But ground attacks are more deadly for foreign occupation forces. Some 46% of civilian casualties were accounted for by two deadly air strikes – the HiMars rocket strike upon a home in Marjah on February 14th and that by U.S. Special Forces in Dai Kundi, Uruzgan on February 22nd. A Marjah resident noted,
Always when they storm a village the foreign troops never care about civilian casualties at all. And at the end of the day they report the deaths of women and children as the deaths of Taliban.[4]
Table Afghan and Pashtun Civilians killed by U.S/NATO Occupation Forces during February 2010
Female male children undet
Air strike ground combined undet
And what is reported in the mainstream western press? For the first two months of 2010, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission’s Fareed Hamidi trumpeted a dip in civilian deaths, announcing for all those willing to listen that 71 civilians had died at the hand of Afghan and foreign forces.[5] The UN naturally parroted this gross under-count. In fact, as I reported, foreign forces alone killed 150-156 Afghan civilians during the first two months of 2010.[6] In other words, the AIHRC only counts one in two Afghan civilians killed by foreign forces. Another font of propaganda, the Soros-bankrolled Open Society Institute, reassured its readers that protecting civilians and protecting troops in Afghanistan was part of the “new” counterinsurgency-style offensive.[7]
In 2008, the UNAMA captured about 70% of Afghans killed by foreign forces, but in 2009 the figure was under 40%, justifiably earning UNAMA’s performance as being faith-based (or ideologically-inspired) counting. Sadly, ‘groupies’ like the western media, peace groups and even the World Socialist Web Site (wsws) uncritically go about citing spurious UNAMA figures, for example endlessly mentioning that Afghan civilian deaths caused by “coalition forces” have declined: naturally they have since the UNAMA missed only 30% of such deaths in 2008, but 60% in 2009.
As I have argued and documented, in fact a trade-off exists between protecting foreign occupation forces and Afghan civilians.[8] Such trade-off is best captured by the ratio of Afghan civilians killed per dead foreign occupation soldier. This ratio was 4.97 in 2007, 3.19 for 2008, 1.94 for 2009, and for Jan-Feb 2010 it was 1.48.[9] In effect, the Obama regimen involved trading off US/NATO soldier deaths for fewer Afghan civilian ones in order to placate critical NATO members.[10]
Conclusion
Air strikes still kill the majority of Afghan civilians. The absolute number of Afghan civilians killed by foreign occupation forces is not declining.[11] The mainstream western media with few exceptions and organizations like UNAMA and the AIHRC de facto serve the Obama news management effort by severely under-reporting Afghan civilians killed by foreign forces.
Notes
1. Most recently in my “Technology Spectacles: the Country that Produced MRE’s now gives Afghans Drones and GRR (Government-Ready-to-Rule) Kits,” RAWA News (March 3, 2010) at http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/03/03/technology-spectacles-the-country-that-produced-mres-now-gives-afghans-drones-and-grr-government-ready-to-rule-kits.html
2. Kathy Gannon, “Afghan Wounded Tell of More Left Behind in Marjah,” Associated press (February 24, 2010) at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEB2VT9-Ux1pdXs8XuxMSo6zcajgD9E2N4Q00
3. Ibid
4. Jay Boone, “Thousands of Civilians flee Afghan Region as NATO Plans Onslaught,” The Guardian (February 5, 2010)
5. “Afghanistan: Dip in Civilian Deaths in First Two Months of 2010,” IRIN News (March 1, 2010) at http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/SHIG-835JLW?OpenDocument
6. Herold (2010) in Table 1.
7. Erica Gaston, “Protecting Civilians and Protecting Troops in Afghanistan,” The AFPAK Channel (February 19, 2010) at http://blog.soros.org/2010/02/protecting-civilians-and-protecting-troops-in-afghanistan/
8. In my “Killing the Innocents to Save ‘Our Troops’,” RAWA News (October 15, 2009) at http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/10/15/killing-the-innocents-to-save-our-troops.html
9. Herold (2010), op. cit
10. See my “Obama’s Unspoken Trade-Off,” Frontline. India’s National Magazine 26, 18 (August 29 – September 11, 2009) at http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2618/stories/20090911261813000.htm
11. See Table 1 in Herold (2010), op. cit.
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