Peace and Justice Post

The drones have killed some jihadis. But the evidence suggests they create far more jihadis than they kill – and make an attack on me or you more likely with each bomb

The Independent, Oct 15, 2010

Repeated alterations in the constitution to suit different military rulers have left little opportunity for democracy to take root

Bilal Hussain, The Guardian, October 16, 2010

Recalling the last 63 years of Pakistan‘s history, democracy is found only as an interval before the arrival of the next military regime. Democracy was doomed when Liaquat Ali Khan, the first elected prime minister, was shot at a public gathering.

From there onwards, the balance of power shifted in the favour of the military. An interesting comparison reveals this shift: from 1951 to 1957 India had one prime minister and several army chiefs while during the same period Pakistan had one army chief and several prime ministers.

From Ayub Khan to Pervez Musharraf, military rule ruined the state structure of Pakistan as a whole, with only the elite benefiting from the system and no benefit being passed to the general public. Military policies have given the country cross-border and internal terrorism, millions of internally displaced people and a bankrupt national economy. Ironically we are always ready to welcome them again.

Although every person in Pakistan, whether in a position of power or not, is very vocal about the very idea of democracy, no collective effort is seen to establish it as an institution. As the political and government culture in Pakistan is a product of its links to the pre-partition British rule, Pakistan’s leaders knew best from this inheritance the vice-regal system that made little or no provision for popular awareness or involvement. Consequently, even after more than half a century of the country’s independence, we are still entangled in age-old feudal, tribal and panchayat systems.

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M&C.com, Oct 16, 2010

Amnesty International, Oct 15, 2010

Over 600 Palestinians had their homes demolished in the West Bank last year

© Amnesty International

Paul Craig Roberts, LewRockwell.com, Oct 18, 2010

Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50–60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?

Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?

Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?

Are Americans aware that the same neoconservatives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?

The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?

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By MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI, The New York Times,  October 14, 2010

Negotiations between two unequal parties cannot succeed. Success in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations requires a reasonable balance of power, clear terms of reference and abstention of both sides from imposing unilateral facts on the ground. None of that existed in the talks that were re-initiated in September.

Much like previous rounds of talks, these negotiations were dominated on one side by an Israeli government that controls the land, roads, airspace, borders, water and electricity, as well as the trade and economy of the Palestinian side, while possessing a powerful military establishment (now the third military exporter in the world) and a robust gross domestic product, which has tripled in the last decade.

This same Israeli “partner” now also boasts a general public that has shifted dramatically to the right, and to which an apartheid system for Palestinians has become an acceptable norm.

On the other side is the Palestinian Authority — one that paradoxically holds little real authority, and exists as a sort of fiefdom within the Israeli matrix of control. Further debilitating the P.A. is a protracted internal Palestinian division, total dependence on foreign aid and a decline of democracy and human rights. Finally, the Palestinian Authority is constantly pressured to provide security for its occupier while failing to provide any protection whatsoever to its own people from that same occupier.

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By Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post, Oct 15, 2010

In the publicity sheet that St. Martin’s Press has been sending out to spur interest in General Hugh Shelton’s new memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, the last highlight is a doozy: “A high-ranking cabinet member suggests intentionally flying an American airplane on a low pass over Baghdad so as to guarantee it will be shot down, thus creating a natural excuse to reltaliate and go to war.”

Turns out the incident took place during the Clinton administration, and Shelton’s response to the suggestion…well, let’s just say it more than lives up to the title of the memoir.

Over at Salon’s War Room, Justin Elliott has the specifics.

Shelton sets the scene at a “small, weekly White House breakfast” that served as regular “informal” meetings that “encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues.”

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By Rory O’Connor, Consortiumnews.com, Oct 15, 2010

Editor’s Note: From the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration refused to provide figures on the number of Iraqis killed, yet disputed estimates of war-related deaths that ranged up to one million.

Now, in a surprise development, the Pentagon has posted, without any fanfare, its totals for most of the war, numbers well below other tallies, eas Rory O’Connor notes in this guest essay:

In July, the United States military issued its largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war. The Pentagon tallied almost 77,000 Iraqis – both civilians and security forces – as having died in the carnage between January 2004 and August 2008.

As the Associated Press reported, the information went unnoticed for months after being “quietly posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command without explanation.”

It was only recently discovered by the AP “during a routine check…for civilian and military casualty numbers,” which the news agency had first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act.

As AP noted, “The military has repeatedly resisted sharing its numbers, which it uses to determine security trends.”

(One exception: U.S. military officials in Baghdad released their July 2010 Iraqi casualty tally in order to refute the Iraqi government’s much higher monthly figures, a decision made just weeks before U.S. forces withdrew all but 50,000 troops from Iraq.)

According to the AP, “a spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., could not answer basic questions about the information.”

Iraqi Health Ministry officials were equally reticent and refused to discuss the American figures, which fall thousands of deaths short of those the Iraqis have compiled using actual death certificates.

The American data claimed 76,939 Iraqi security service members and civilians killed and 121,649 wounded between January 2004 and August 2008. (The count shows that 3,952 American and other international troops were killed over the same period.)

The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry reported last October that 85,694 people were killed from the beginning of 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008, and 147,195 wounded. (Notably, these tallies do not include the period of the U.S. invasion and conquest of Iraq in March and April 2003.)

Certainly estimating casualties in Iraq has been an inexact process, and various figures have long been disputed as attempts to manipulate the political debate either by minimizing or exaggerating the numbers to sway public opinion.

The mysteriously-derived U.S. military figures rank as the lowest. One tally by a private, British-based group that has tracked civilian casualties since the war began estimates that between 98,252 and 107,235 Iraqi civilians were killed from March 2003 to Sept. 19, 2010. Other estimates of war-related deaths have been much higher, up to and even over one million.

Curious as ever about the meaning of events at the nexus of media and politics, let me ask a few questions:

1. Why was the U.S. military’s most extensive death tally ever of the Iraq war released without comment or explanation and buried on a Web site for months?

2. Why can no one in the U.S. military answer “basic questions” about the tally months after it was made, such as how it was compiled, why it was released, and whether the new numbers included suspected insurgents?

3. Why has the U.S. military repeatedly resisted requests to share its comprehensive figures on Iraqi civilian casualties?

4. Why was the U.S. death figure well below that of the Iraqi government?

5. Finally, whatever else you may think about the so-called “lamestream media,” would we ever have even known about the Pentagon’s largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war without the Associated Press requesting casualty numbers through the Freedom of Information Act – and then “routinely” checking for them?

Rory O’Connor is a journalist and filmmaker, and co-founder of the media firm Globalvision. He is author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech