Peace and Justice Post

By Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com,  Nov 22, 2010

AP / Jeff Widener

By Chris Hedges

There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.

The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.

Obama knows where power lies and serves these centers of power. The tragedy—if tragedy is the right word—is that Obama, after selling his soul to corporations, has been discarded. Corporate power doesn’t need brand Obama anymore. They have found new brands in the tea party, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Obama has been abandoned by those who once bundled contributions for him by the millions of dollars. Obama and the Democratic Party will, I expect, spend the next two years being even more obsequious to corporate power. Obama clearly loves the pomp and privilege of statecraft that much. But I am not sure it will work.

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With one word, “blowback,” Chalmers Johnson explained the folly of empire in the modern age.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September11, 2001, true American patriots—as opposed to the jingoists and profiteers whose madness and greed would steer a republic to ruin—needed a new language for a new age.

They got it from Johnson. His 2000 book, Blowback,: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Macmillan), he took an old espionage term—which referred to the violent, unintended consequences of covert (and sometimes not so covert) operations that are suffered even by superpowers such as the United States—became an essential text for those who sought to explain the attacks and to forge sounder and more responsible foreign policies for the furture.

Johnson, who has died at age 79, was no liberal idealist. He was the an old Asian hand who had chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and then served as president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute. In other words, he was a man of the world who knew how the world worked. And what he tried to explain, to political leaders and citizens, was that the old ways of empire building (and maintaining) no longer worked in an age of instant communications, jet travel and doomsday weaponry.

“In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world,” Johnson explained in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, another of his series of three books on imperialism and empire, which became best sellers in the period after the 9-11 attacks. “The concept ‘blowback’ does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes—as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001—the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia—the area of my academic training—than on the Middle East.”

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Pakistan’s government may have rejected US calls to expand the CIA drone strike program into the western province of Balochistan, but that does not mean that they are going to keep the US spy agency out of the region.

Rather Pakistan officials are now confirming that the government agreed to a “compromise” that would allow a significant increase in the number of CIA ground teams operating in the Balochistan capital city of Quetta, one of Pakistan’s largest cities and also where the US believes Afghan Taliban leadership are located.

So far US officials have only confirmed the demand for more drone strikes, which have already dramatically increased in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The attacks have sparked growing anti-US sentiment across Pakistan, and expanding the attacks outside of the tribal areas would likely do much more to harm the credibility of the Zardari government.

This is doubly so if US missiles started falling on Quetta, a city of nearly a million people. Pakistani officials have also expressed concern about the US eagerness to start attacking this city, particularly after strikes in the more sparsely populated tribal areas have proven so unreliable.

The Independent, Nov 20, 2010

Getty Images: Hillary Clinton meets the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah last year

Eric Margolis, ericmargolis.com, November 19, 2010

Amazing as it sounds, NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, may be losing the only war the 61-year old pact every fought. All its soldiers, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and electronic gear are being beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

This weekend in Lisbon, NATO’s 28 members face deepening differences over the Afghanistan War as public opinion in the United States, Canada and Europe continue to turn against the conflict.

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 brazenly – even scornfully –  contradicted by US generals and strongly opposed by resurgent Congressional Republicans.  Hardly anyone believes the president’s withdrawal  date.

Obama is fresh from groveling before Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.  He pleaded with Israel’s leader to impose a short, token freeze on settlement building in exchange for a multi-billion dollar bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising the value of US arms stockpiled for Israel’s use to $1 billion. Rarely has a US president crawled so low.

Israel will likely take Obama’s bribe, with more sweeteners,  but not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really runs US Mideast policy and as a warning not to mess with Israel. The last US president to challenge Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, George H. W. Bush, was ousted in 1992 after one term.

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The Nowhere to Turn report, by 29 international and national aid agencies including Oxfam, the Afghan Women’s Network and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, was released to coincide with the Nato summit in Lisbon.

The groups say that US forces used 2,100 bombs or missiles from June through September – an almost 50 per cent increase on the same period last year – in a bid to “show fast results at home.”

Hundreds of civilians are believed to have died in the air raids.

The report shows that 2010 has been the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since 2001.

According to the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan there were 1,271 civilian deaths in the first six months of 2010 – an increase of 21 per cent on the same time last year.

The agencies say that armed opposition groups have responded to the influx of Western military forces – whose presence increased from 90,000 to 140,000 over the past year – by expanding their presence into the north, centre and west and “now have control of or significant influence in over half of the country.”

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By Don North, Consortium News, November 18, 2010

At this complex and dangerous moment in history, we must recognize that journalists around the world are failing in their duty as watchdogs of the people and that – combined with economic stresses – the traditional role of journalism is diminishing.

As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life disappear from public view and go dark. Much of local and state governments, whole federal departments, and the world itself are neglected.

Politicians are working increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability. Perhaps most alarmingly, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism abroad go underreported despite the billions of dollars spent and the tens of thousands of lives lost.

And it often isn’t much better when the major U.S. news media does provide saturation coverage. During President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, American journalists – with only a few exceptions – failed to respond, first, to the challenge of scrutinizing the case for war and, then, to the political and military failures during the war.

At times the U.S. media’s coverage made one think that the Pentagon could have skipped the middlemen and simply supplied the news feeds itself.

‘Embedded’ Journalists

In those first heady days of the conflict, “embedded” journalists excitedly broadcast green-tinted, night-vision action footage as they traveled on U.S. Army personnel carriers racing through the Iraqi desert.

Meanwhile, cable networks MSNBC and Fox News superimposed waving American flags on news scenes from Iraq and ran special packages of patriotic war images with stirring music and heroic titles.

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Encircling Russia, Targeting China

By Diana Johnstone, Counterpunch,  Nov  18, 2010

On November 19 and 20, NATO leaders meet in Lisbon for what is billed as a summit on “NATO’s Strategic Concept”.  Among topics of discussion will be an array of scary “threats”, from cyberwar to climate change, as well as nice protective things like nuclear weapons and a high tech Maginot Line boondoggle supposed to stop enemy missiles in mid-air. The NATO leaders will be unable to avoid talking about the war in Afghanistan, that endless crusade that unites the civilized world against the elusive Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabah, eleventh century chief of the Assassins in his latest reincarnation as Osama bin Laden.  There will no doubt be much talk of “our shared values”.

Most of what they will discuss is fiction with a price tag.

The one thing missing from the Strategic Concept summit agenda is a serious discussion of strategy.

This is partly because NATO as such has no strategy, and cannot have its own strategy.  NATO is in reality an instrument of United States strategy.  Its only operative Strategic Concept is the one put into practice by the United States. But even that is an elusive phantom.  American leaders seem to prefer striking postures, “showing resolve”, to defining strategies.

One who does presume to define strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of the Afghan Mujahidin back when they could be used to destroy the Soviet Union.  Brzezinski was not shy about bluntly stating the strategic objective of U.S. policy in his 1993 book The Grand Chessboard: “American primacy”.  As for NATO, he described it as one of the institutions serving to perpetuate American hegemony, “making the United States a key participant even in intra-European affairs.” In its “global web of specialized institutions”, which of course includes NATO, the United States exercises power through “continuous bargaining, dialogue, diffusion, and quest for formal consensus, even though that power originates ultimately from a single source, namely, Washington, D.C.”

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