Peace and Justice Post

Barbara Koeppel, Consortiumnews.com, Sept 8, 2010

A few weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus pulled off a flawless remake of Gen. William Westmoreland’s 1967 performance in which the Vietnam War commander detected “light at the end of the tunnel” – just months before the Viet Cong launched its Tet offensive, proving the resistance was very much alive and well. This time, the geography is Afghanistan. But Gen. Petraeus’s upbeat claims on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and elsewhere — that U.S. and NATO troops have ousted some Taliban from conflicted areas, helped reform the corrupt Afghan government, and trained Afghan security forces to fight on their own — are equally phony, according to a former senior U.S. government official.

In an interview, Matthew Hoh, an ex-Marine commander in Iraq who took a high-ranking State Department job in Afghanistan before resigning a year ago because he “couldn’t stand the BS of it anymore,” disputed each Petraeus claim.

First, rather than the U.S. having ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan’s south and east, quite the opposite is true, Hoh said.

“Villagers still turn to their Afghan brothers to rid their towns of carpetbaggers,” Hoh said. “These include not only U.S. or NATO forces, but also the Afghan government that … is staggeringly corrupt and its troops are mainly from different ethnic groups or regions.”

These areas of Afghanistan are so anti-outsider that U.S. congressional and other delegations can’t venture there.

According to Hoh, nothing has improved, even though “the number of NATO troops soared from under 30,000 in 2005 to the current 150,000, and we’ve spent about $350 billion for the military and $50 billion for reconstruction programs, which include training and equipping Afghan forces.”

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by John Chuckman, Dissident Voice, September 8th, 2010

I don’t know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.

It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.

As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.

Israel has the peace that comes of infinitely greater power, systematic and ruthless use of that power, the reduction of the people it regards as opponents to squatters on their own land, and a world too intimidated to take any effective action for justice or fairness.

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Middle East Online, First Published 2010-09-07


‘The next few months will be decisive for reform’

Ex IAEA chief will press on with campaign to gather signatures ‘for change’ before organising ‘peaceful protests’ for reform.

CAIRO – Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief turned Egyptian reformer, has called for a boycott of a general election due later this year, an independent daily reported on Tuesday.

“We will boycott the upcoming election because anyone taking part will be acting against the will of the people,” ElBaradei said, according to the Shorouk newspaper.

Egypt is due to go to the polls for a parliamentary election in November ahead of a presidential election due next year.

ElBaradei, 68, has ruled out standing in next year’s vote unless the constitution, which places restrictions on independent candidates, is reformed.

Veteran President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has not yet said whether he will stand again, but is widely believed to be grooming his son Gamal for the succession.

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By David Cronin , ZNet,  Sep 7, 2010

Change Text Size a- | A+ David Cronin’s ZSpace Page

Nine years after it was delivered, Tony Blair’s speech to the 2001 Labour Party conference remains a chilling piece of hubris and hypocrisy. Britain’s government, he claimed, was not only concerned with the well-being of its own people but with the entire planet. “The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountains of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.”

Blair’s protégé Catherine Ashton has evidently learned a few tricks from the war criminal who masquerades as a peace envoy. As the EU’s foreign policy chief (“high representative” in Brussels parlance), Ashton has been diligently spreading the myth that she and other senior European politicians are even-handed in dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict.

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uruknet.info, Sept 6, 2010

Noam Sheizaf, Promised Land,

An IDF Powerpoint slideshow, presented before the Turkel committee for the investigation of the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, reveals the official goals of the Israeli policy regarding the Gaza strip.

The slideshow, prepared by The Administration for the Coordination of Government Policy in the Territories – the IDF body in charge of carrying out Israeli government policies regarding the civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza – deals with the humanitarian conditions in the strip; with food, water, fuel and electricity supply and with the condition of medical facilities in Gaza.

download the IDF slideshow [Hebrew] here

The first set of slides details the background for the current activities of The Administration for the Coordination of Government Policy in the Territories. Slide number 15 details the principles of Israeli policy:

–    Responding to the humanitarian needs of the population.
–    Upholding civilian and economic limitations on the [Gaza] strip.
–    Separating [or differentiating, בידול] Judea and Samaria [i.e. West Bank] from Gaza – a security and diplomatic objective.
–    Preserving the Quartet’s conditions on Hamas (Hamas as a terrorist entity).

Slide 20 deals with freedom of movement from and to the Gaza strip. Policy objectives are:

–    Limiting people from entering or exiting the strip, in accordance with the government’s decision.
–    Separating [differentiating] Judea and Samaria from Gaza.
–    Dealing with humanitarian needs.
–    Preserving the activity of humanitarian organizations in the strip.
–    Keeping a coordinating mechanism with the Palestinian Authority.

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For more than 50 years, Washington has subscribed to the absurd notion that America can police the world with military action. All we’ve managed to do is bankrupt our country.

AlterNet, Sep 6, 2010

Andrew Bacevich speaks with a fairly unique mix of experience, authority, passion and wisdom in questioning our nation’s priorities: specifically our willingness to place so much of our national identity, wealth, attention, moral practice, and finally the life and blood of many thousands of our citizens and millions of those of other countries in the hands of our military. A professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich served twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He lost his son in Iraq. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including The New American Militarism; The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism; and his newest, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

McNally: Your book, Washington Rules, opens with a moment that you offer as a turning point: could you share that experience?

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