Peace and Justice Post

by Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation,  November 26, 2010

President Obama once said withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in July 2011 — maybe, conditions permitting. But then he backed off that date. Now NATO, echoing American officials, says security won’t be fully turned over to the Afghan government any earlier than the end of 2014 — again, maybe; the alliance has signed a long-term security agreement with the Afghan president. Allied troops thus will remain in Afghanistan — as occupiers always say — in a supporting role beyond 2014 and even 2015. Calling the December 31, 2014, an “aspirational goal,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said, “It does not mean that all U.S. or coalition forces would necessarily be gone by that date.”

Even before Obama backed off the 2011 timetable and before the NATO summit, Gen. David Petraeus had told Bob Woodward, “You have to recognize that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” And Defense Secretary Robert Gates went even further, telling Woodward: “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely. In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.”

Thus no one seems to take target dates or even aspirational goals very seriously. The U.S. national-security apparatus is planted in Afghanistan and appears in no hurry to leave.

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The Raw Story, Nov 25, 2010

JERUSALEM — Israeli police were accused of “flagrant violations” of the law Thursday over their harsh and at times violent treatment of Palestinian children suspected of stone-throwing in east Jerusalem.

The allegations were detailed in a letter sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a group of 60 Israeli professionals, among them experts in medicine, psychology, education, social work and law — all of whom work with children.

But Israel police flatly denied the allegations, with a spokesman telling AFP they “operate within the bounds of the law.”

The letter expresses concern about the growing number of testimonies submitted by Palestinian minors who have been arrested by police in occupied and annexed east Jerusalem, notably in the flashpoint neighborhood of Silwan.

“We are writing … to express our deep concerns about the physical and emotional welfare and proper development of children and young people in east Jerusalem in the light of police behavior during the investigation and arrest of minors in this area,” it said.

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Going, going, gone!  You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of never.  If you take the word of our Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we’re not leaving any time soon. As with any clever time traveler, every date that’s set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.

In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him.  Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster.  Finally, he disappeared entirely leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear “over the horizon” (a place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have finally handed their duties over to the Afghan forces they are training).

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Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, AHRC, Nov 25, 2010

Today, in recognition of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, it is incumbent upon the international community and the government of Pakistan to examine with greater concern the status and future of Pakistani women. This day may in some nations commemorate significant accomplishments for women’s rights and gender parity, but, in Pakistan, today must serve primarily as a reminder of how much Pakistan has yet to do to protect its women from gender-based violence and to ensure their safety.

In particular, this day should inspire consideration of the circumstances faced by women in Pakistan with regard to overwhelming barriers to legal access and assaults perpetrated by representatives of the state. For example, in a recent case a woman who received a stay order from court over a dispute on ownership of her house was picked up by policemen and their informers and taken to a private detention centre where she was gang raped for more than 50 days. The rape victim’s cases against the accused policemen and their henchmen were withdrawn due to the controversy of the geographical jurisdiction of the police. The medical report of the rape was not issued even after one month following the medical examination. The victim and her family are in hiding because of continuous police threats to withdraw the case. The deputy inspector generals of the two districts of Karachi metropolitan city refused to entertain the complaints of the victim on the grounds of jurisdiction.

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The Givati soldiers’ conviction essentially handed the post of chief of staff to Yoav Galant and bestowed legal immunity on political figures, in particular Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak.

By Amira Hass, Haaretz, Nov 24, 2010

The Givati Brigade soldiers who were tried and convicted of risking the life of a non-combatant Palestinian child are entitled to feel like victims. But why shouldn’t they feel patriotic pride? Their conviction essentially handed the post of chief of staff to Yoav Galant and bestowed legal immunity on political figures, in particular Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak.

They were just small cogs who were brainwashed about the might of the enemy. Look at the statements other soldiers made to the organization Breaking the Silence; some of them quickly realized their commanders had filled them with lies before the ground offensive on the Gaza Strip on January 3, 2009. But even if the two convicted Givati soldiers had the maturity and judgment to realize this wasn’t the heroic struggle for which they had been prepared, it’s clear they acted out of fear when they ordered a 9-year-old boy to open bags. They grew up in an atmosphere that one could do anything to the Palestinians in Gaza. They didn’t come up with that approach – they’re the lower rank soldiers that the system put under the spotlight.

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Speech by Chris Hedges

Mass Arrests, Intimidation, Campaign Restrictions Make Fair Outcome Questionable

(Cairo) – Egypt has carried out mass arbitrary arrests, wholesale restrictions on public campaigning, and widespread intimidation of opposition candidates and activists in the weeks leading up to parliamentary elections on November 28, 2010, Human Rights Watch said today. In a report released today, Human Rights Watch argues that the repression makes free and fair elections unlikely.

The 24-page report, “Elections in Egypt, State of Permanent Emergency Incompatible with Free and Fair Vote,” documents the vague and subjective criteria in Egypt’s Political Parties Law that allow the government and ruling party to impede formation of new political parties. Egypt remains under an Emergency Law that since 1981 has given security officials free rein to prohibit or disperse election-related rallies, demonstrations, and public meetings, and to detain people indefinitely without charge. …

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By G.M. TAMÁS, gerlo.hu

One of the central questions of social theory has been the relationship between class and knowledge, and this has also been a crucial question in the history of socialism. Differences between people – acting and knowing subjects – may influence our view of the possibility of valid cognition. If there are irreconcilable discrepancies between people’s positions, going perhaps as far as incommensurability, then unified and rational knowledge resulting from a reasoned dialogue among persons is patently impossible. The Humean notion of ‘passions’, the Nietzschean notions of ‘resentment’ and ‘genealogy’, allude to the possible influence of such an incommensurability upon our ability to discover truth.

Class may be regarded as a problem either in epistemology or in the philosophy of history, but I think that this separation is unwarranted, since if we separate epistemology and philosophy of history (which is parallel to other such separations characteristic of bourgeois society itself) we cannot possibly avoid the rigidly-posed conundrum known as relativism. In speaking about class (and truth, and class and truth) we are the heirs of two socialist intellectual traditions, profoundly at variance with one another, although often intertwined politically and emotionally. I hope to show that, up to a point, such fusion and confusion is inevitable.

All versions of socialist endeavour can and should be classified into two principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two have opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these visions have determined everything from rarefied epistemological positions concerning language and consciousness to social and political attitudes concerning wealth, culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be said at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.

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Bolivian President Evo Morales on Monday urged Latin America to reject U.S. policies in region, calling them “pretexts for interventionism.”

Morales told a defense conference attended by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Washington remained a threat to regional peace and stability.

“Democracy, peace and security can only be guaranteed without interventionism, without hegemony,” Morales said, listing a series of charges against Washington ranging from coup-plotting to interference in the country.

All of them, Morales said, are or have been engaged in secret plans to overthrow the government in Bolivia or its Latin American neighbors.

“There have always been coups, but there are never any coups in the United States because there is no embassy of the United States in the United States,” Morales said.

Morales took particular aim at U.S. military operations in the region.

“Countries have a right to decide for themselves about their own democracy, for themselves about their own security,” Morales said, adding that “while we have interventionist attitudes for whatever pretext surely it is going to slow the liberation of the people.”

“How can there be peace if there are U.S. military bases?” he asked, referring to a U.S. deal with Colombia that would give American forces greater access to Colombian military bases as part of its anti-drug effort. The agreement has been in limbo since a Colombian court suspended it in August.

Morales accused the United States of being behind efforts to undermine the socialist governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras, where a coup unseated the president and democracy was not restored until the end of his term.

“With the United States we are 3-1,” Morales joked.

Eric Margolis, LewRockwell.com, Nov 23, 2010

According to the US government, 41.8 million Americans now receive food stamps. Meanwhile, Washington is spending $7 billion monthly on its nine-year old occupation of Afghanistan, not to mention billions more on trying to build an obedient Afghan army and to pay of Pakistani politicians and general.

Last weekend, the US and its NATO allies met in Lisbon to try to hammer out a contradictory strategy that will keep western troops in Afghanistan indefinitely while assuaging public opinion in North America and Europe that wants the war to end. Most observers failed to note the historical irony that in the 1960’s and 70’s, Portugal had waged a long, debilitating colonial war to preserve its crumbling African empire that ended up nearly bankrupting the mother nation and ending for good its imperial pretensions.

All the platitudes, doubletalk, synthetic optimism and fudging at the NATO summit could not conceal the fact that for all their soldiers, fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and wizardly electronic gear, the western powers are being slowly beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of US foreign policy. His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from Afghanistan next July has been scornfully contradicted by US generals and resurgent Congressional Republicans.

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