Peace and Justice Post

Israel should adapt to the 21st century. Is that really a utopian idea?

As Tony Judt succinctly distilled the issue a few years ago: “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

President Obama’s “bold” departure from the position of his predecessor is that he has repeatedly asserted — as he did again on Wednesday — that “the status quo is unsustainable — for Israelis, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world.”

An occupation that has continued for 43 years has certainly proved very durable — sufficient reason for half a million Israelis to defy the claim that the status quo is unsustainable as they carry on living in the West Bank.

The focus of skepticism should in fact be focused less on the sustainability of the status quo than on the realistic prospects for a two-state solution. Such a resolution appears no more imminent now than it did when it was first proposed 73 years ago. In that period whole empires have risen and fallen and yet we’re still supposed to imagine that a Palestinian state is lurking just over the horizon?

As the Zionists have understood all along, it is the facts on the ground that shape the future and none of these facts point towards a partition of land upon which two people’s lives are now so deeply intertwined.

One state already exists. The challenge ahead is not how it can be divided, but how all those already living within its borders can enjoy the civil rights that belong to the citizens of all Western states — the part of the world to which Israel’s leaders so often profess their deepest affiliation.

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A Kashmiri leader called on India to release Kashmiri detainees who were arrested without charges ahead of Eid al-Fitr, a report said.

The Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in a statement issued in Srinagar urged India to release all the “illegally” detained Kashmiris before Eid al-Fitr.

Human rights workers have complained for years that innocent people have disappeared, been killed by government forces in staged gunbattles, and suspected fighters have been arrested and never heard from again.

Mirwaiz also appealed to the world human rights organisations to send their teams to Kashmir for cognisance of “the miserable plight” of the detainees at different jails in and outside the territory, Kashmiri Media Service said.

An other Kashmiri leader, Farooq Ahmed Dar, was quoted as saying: “India would not be able to suppress Kashmiris’ liberation struggle by resorting to brute force.”

Kashmiris see India as an “occupier” and accuse the ruling of systematic violations, killing dozens of civilians in Himalayan region.

Authorities deny any systematic violations and say all reports are investigated and the guilty punished.

By Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque, Sep 1, 2010

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama gave a speech from the Oval Office on Iraq that was almost as full of hideous, murderous lies as the speech on Iraq his predecessor gave in the same location more than seven years ago.

After mendaciously declaring an “end to the combat mission in Iraq” — where almost 50,000 regular troops and a similar number of mercenaries still remain, carrying out the same missions they have been doing for years — Obama delivered what was perhaps the most egregious, bitterly painful lie of the night:

“Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility.”

“We have met our responsibility!” No, Mister President, we have not. Not until many Americans of high degree stand in the dock for war crimes. Not until the United States pays hundreds of billions of dollars in unrestricted reparations to the people of Iraq for the rape of their country and the mass murder of their people. Not until the United States opens its borders to accept all those who have been and will be driven from Iraq by the savage ruin we have inflicted upon them, or in flight from the vicious thugs and sectarians we have loosed — and empowered — in the land. Not until you, Mister President, go down on your knees, in sackcloth and ashes, and proclaim a National of Day of Shame to be marked each year by lamentations, reparations and confessions of blood guilt for our crime against humanity in Iraq.

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A Fox News poll released last week indicates the majority of Americans feel the Iraq war was a success. It also suggests they want to get past it and focus on other things. This is good and bad. It is good that average Americans can put our invasion of Iraq in 2003 out of their minds. It is bad because it indicates they don’t know what happened, or don’t care.

According to the Fox News article, 900 people were surveyed by telephone and asked questions such as “Do you think the war was a success?” “Do you think the Iraqi people are better off now than before the war?” However, the survey didn’t ask some very important questions. For example, it didn’t ask the respondents questions such as “Have you ever been to Iraq?” “Have you ever read a book about the Iraq War?” “Do you know the number of Iraqis who died in the war?” These would be very interesting questions to ask along with the others. They would gauge the level of knowledge and awareness of the respondents to judge the veracity of the answers they gave. According to the Fox News article:

“Despite its contentious history, most American voters appear to have made a positive judgment about the country’s efforts in Iraq. Almost six in 10 (58 percent) voters think, overall, the United States ‘did the right thing’ by going to war, according to the latest Fox News poll.

“A little over one-third of voters (35 percent) take the opposite view – that the U.S. “did the wrong thing” by becoming involved militarily in Iraq. From a partisan perspective, there is still division – as 54 percent of Democrats think the U.S. did the wrong thing in Iraq, while only 14 percent of Republicans feel the same way. A slim majority of independents (52 percent) think the U.S. did the right thing in Iraq.”

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How the Obama Administration Adopted the Bush / Petraeus Story Line

By Gareth Porter, Counterpunch, Sep 6, 2010

In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had  turned Iraq into a good war after all.  That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that version of the war.

The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.

In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus story-line which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.

The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge.  The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.

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By David Sirota, trutdig,com, Sep 2, 2010

U.S. Navy / MC1 Eileen Kelly Fors

Something about 21st century warfare brings out Washington’s lust for historical comparison. The moment the combat starts, lawmakers and the national press corps inevitably portray every explosion, invasion, front-line dispatch, political machination and wartime icon as momentous replicas of the past’s big moments and Great Men.

9/11 was Pearl Harbor. Colin Powell’s Iraq presentation at the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson’s Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation. Embedded journalists in Afghanistan strutted around like the intrepid Walter Cronkite on a foreign battlefield. George Bush was a Rooseveltian “war president.” The Iraq invasion was D-Day.

A byproduct of reporters’ narcissism, politicians’ vanity and the Beltway’s lockstep devotion to militarism, this present-tense hagiography ascribes the positive attributes of sanitized history to current events. And whether or not the analogies are appropriate, they inevitably help sell contemporary actions—no matter how ill-advised. As just one example: If 9/11 was Pearl Harbor, as television so often suggested, then American couch potatoes were bound to see “shock and awe” in Baghdad as a rational reprise of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

Of course, after we were told seven years ago that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and after an historically unique conflict that has lasted longer than almost any other, you might think the press would start questioning the government’s martial stagecraft. You might also think all the comparisons to the past would stop. Instead, D.C. journalists and lawmakers are now celebrating the supposed withdrawal from Iraq, implicitly presenting the White House’s August announcement as the second coming of V-J Day.

The trouble is that the announcement is anything but, because the war isn’t even close to over. And we know that because the military is quietly acknowledging as much.

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“Non-Combat” Troops in Gun Battle as 12 Killed at Military HQ

In the most sobering reminder yet that the Iraq War quite simply is not over, the US troops that the Obama Administration carefully redefined as “non-combat” soldiers engaged in heavy combat today in the city of Baghdad.

During the attack on the Iraqi military headquarters in the city, the Iraqi miliary called in a request for ground troops as well as attack helicopters, drones and explosives experts. The attack ended with at least 12 people killed and dozens wounded.

Major attacks in Iraq are nothing new, and they have been happening with alarming frequency over the past several months. The fact that the US “non-combat” troops were called in for what was most assuredly a combat mission, less than a week after President Obama assured everyone that the combat mission was “over” must certainly raise a few eyebrows.

Roughly 50,000 US troops remain in Iraq and officials are expecting to be called on to stay past the end of 2011. In addition the US has an ever-increasing number of security contractors also engaging in combat missions, which are expected to stay for many, many years.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes,

The Washington Post, September  5, 2010

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict’s most sobering expenses: those in the category of “might have beens,” or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only “what if” worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources — including both money and attention — are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

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Protections for Domestic Workers, Systemic Reform Urgently Needed