Peace and Justice Post

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry | Consortiumnews.com, March 19, 2008

Editor’s Note: From the start of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the toll on Iraqi civilians and on out-gunned Iraqi soldiers was staggering. Indeed, that appears to have been part of the message Bush’s neocon advisers wanted to send to other countries that might think of resisting Washington’s imperial ambitions.

Yet back home, most of the horror was kept out of view for Americans watching on TV who wanted to feel good about their brave soldiers and not think much about how their country was crossing a line into an imperial aggressor.

On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq — and in honor of all who have died — we are publishing the second part of an excerpt from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush:

Despite the stiffer-than-expected resistance, the U.S. military continued to blast its way toward its goal of toppling Saddam Hussein.

From the first days of the war, that violence took a heavy toll on Iraq’s civilians, though the bloody images were often sanitized from the American broadcasts so as not to dampen the war enthusiasm and depress the TV ratings.

The Bush administration’s lack of sensitivity about civilian casualties was reflected in the hasty decision to bomb a residential restaurant where Hussein was thought to be eating. It turned out that the intelligence was wrong, but that wasn’t discovered until after the restaurant was leveled and 14 civilians, including seven children, were killed.

One mother hysterically sought her daughter and collapsed when the headless body was pulled from the rubble.

“When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head,” The Associated Press reported, “her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed.”

The London Independent cited this restaurant attack as one that represented “a clear breach” of the Geneva Conventions ban on bombing civilian targets.

Hundreds of other civilian deaths were equally horrific. Saad Abbas, 34, was wounded in an American bombing raid, but his family sought to shield him from the greater horror. The bombing had killed his three daughters – Marwa, 11; Tabarek, 8; and Safia, 5 – who had been the center of his life.

Continued . . .

Stephen Lendman

March 20, 2008

John Dugard is The UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine and a rare public official. In January 2008, he assessed the situation in Occupied Palestine (OPT). It was detailed, inclusive and honest. This article discusses his findings in-depth. Most of them have been widely reported, but they bear repeating nonetheless. It’s because, in this instance, they’re from an agency of the 192 member states world body. It’s hoped that source highlights their importance and adds to their credibility.

From September 25 to October 1, 2007, Dugard visited Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus, Qalqiliya and the Jordan valley and held extensive meetings with: Palestinian and Israeli NGOs, UN agencies, Palestinian and Jordanian officials, academics, businessmen, and independent interlocutors. He also went to Gazan factories and West Bank checkpoints and settlements and saw firsthand the situation on the ground.

For his efforts, Dugard is both praised and criticized. Extremists even condemn him. It’s the price he and others pay for assessing conditions honestly. He addressed his critics and what they cite:

— that his reports are repetitious; he agrees because Israel repeats the same human rights and humanitarian law violations and has done it for over 40 years of occupation. They feature: “(Illegal) settlements, checkpoints, demolition of houses, torture, closure of crossings and military incursions….” More recently, add the separation wall (since 2003), “sonic booms, (stepped up) targeted killings, (using) Palestinians as human shields, and the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza since Hamas was democratically elected in January 2006.

Continued . . .

Telegraph, UK, March 21, 2008

By Tom Coghlan in Kabul

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, has triggered speculation that he has been using a tour of the Middle East to prepare Iran’s neighbours for a possible war with Tehran.

Mr Cheney, whose nine-day tour has included stops in Turkey, the Gulf and Afghanistan, insisted that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

“The important thing to keep in mind is the objective that we share with many of our friends in the region, and that is that a nuclear-armed Iran would be very destabilising for the entire area,” Mr Cheney told ABC News before arriving in Kabul, the Afghan capital, after a visit to Oman.

Challenged on the recent National Intelligence Estimate by US intelligence officials, which concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme stopped in late 2003 because of international pressure, Mr Cheney said: “What it says is that they have definitely had in the past a programme to develop a nuclear warhead – that it would appear that they stopped that weaponisation process in 2003.

“We don’t know whether or not they’ve restarted. What we do know is that they had then, and have now, a process by which they’re trying to enrich uranium, which is the key obstacle they’ve got to overcome in order to have a nuclear weapon. They’ve been working at it for years.”

A senior aide to Mr Cheney was forced to deny that the nine-day trip to Turkey and the Middle East was part of a strategy by the vice-president to build support for military action against Iran.

Asked by journalists travelling on Mr Cheney’s plane about the vice-president’s repeated comments about Iran during his tour, the aide said: “That’s not what these discussions are about.”

The official acknowledged that Mr Cheney’s talks with the Oman government focused on “the concerns we have about the full range of their [Iran’s] activities”.

These included the country’s links to the radical Hamas authorities in Gaza and Washington’s belief that Iran has become the dominant power in Lebanon through its sponsorship of Hizbollah.

General Dan McNeill, the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, told The Daily Telegraph in September that advanced weapons smuggled across the Iran border to the Taliban could only have come with the complicity of the Iranian government or elements within its security services.

By Zuheir Kseibat | Information Clearing House

20/03/08 “Al-Hayat” — – Five years ago to the day, it was the dawn of the American invasion that carried Iraq to the endless darkness of the occupation. The fall of Baghdad, the Arab capital which they almost dubbed Saddam Hussein’s capital, was nothing but the onset of a massive volcanic eruption in the region; its fires still consume the Arabs’ stability and security and rewrite maps from the Ocean to the Gulf.

The captain of the invasion, George Bush, celebrates the “first large-scale Arab uprising against Usama bin Laden.” He reassures Americans that the costs of the invasion and war against and in Iraq, now touching $500 billion, are petty when bearing the “gains” in mind…notably ending “Saddam’s tyranny” and lighting the candles of hope towards “democracy.”

As he celebrates the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Bush forgets the big misleading lie about the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The battle has turned into a front against al-Qaeda and terrorism, and its strategic goal is to prevent shifting the battlefield to the US. Let it then be the 100-year war fought with Iraqi blood!

Continued . . .

Victories are within sight for people in a growing number of nations where communities that host U.S. foreign military bases have long fought to get rid of them.

Ecuador’s decision not to renew the U.S. lease for the forward operating base at Manta (see Yankees Head Home) is the culmination of just one of many long-term and recently initiated community-based and national struggles to remove these military installations that are often sources of crime and demeaning human rights violations. A growing alliance among anti-bases movements in countries around the world, including the United States, is preventing the creation of new foreign military bases, restricting the expansion of others, and in some cases may win the withdrawal of the military bases, installations and troops that are essential to U.S. wars of intervention and its preparations for first-strike nuclear attacks.

The Challenge

Of course, there is still plenty of bad news. The Bush Administration is currently negotiating what is, in essence, a security treaty with the Maliki puppet government in Baghdad to secure one of the principle Bush-Cheney war aims: permanent military bases for tens of thousands of U.S. troops. The goal is to transform Iraq into an U.S. unsinkable aircraft carrier in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. Unfortunately, the plan for Iraq is only one part of the vast and expanding U.S. infrastructure of nearly 1,000 military bases and installations strategically scattered around the world.

Continued . . .

Paying the Piper

By DAVE LINDORFF | CounterPunch, March 20, 2008

It’s appropriate that on this week of the fifth anniversary of the criminal US invasion of Iraq, we are also seeing several other things: the death toll of American troops in that doomed adventure is rising past 4000, the economy is sliding into a recession which could be deep and long, and the financial markets are teetering on the edge of a possibly historic collapse.

The conjunction of all of these dire things is no coincidence.

The war on Iraq was a predictable disaster from day one, when the administration tried to do it on the cheap, using less than half the manpower that Bush’s own generals said would be needed to control the country after the inevitable collapse of its government and military. But of course the US had to conduct this war on the cheap because the country was never really behind the war in the first place. It was a war that was “marketed” to us like a risky financial investment or a badly designed new car. The idea was to close the sale and get away from the deal as quickly as possible, leaving no office forwarding address.

The problem was that Iraqis, the victims of our attack, didn’t cooperate. They didn’t lie down and play dead. They decided to resist our effort to take over their country and run it like a retail gas station. So now the US has wasted over $500 billion in a country trying–and failing–to gain control over a country no bigger than a mid-sized state, battling against resistance forces armed with homemade bombs, obsolete grenade launchers and Vietnam-era AK-47 rifles.

But because the Bush/Cheney administration could never admit to Americans what this war would be costing, and has cost, all that money has been borrowed. As for the deaths and the tens of thousands of injuries, the government has hidden these, flying in the casualties in the dead of night and burying them quickly and as quietly as possible, while sticking the wounded in closed off VA hospitals and rehab centers, from which the press, for the most part, are barred (if they even bother to try and do a story).

Continued . . .

The Sharpening of Ideological Contention

By Badri Raina | ZNet, March 18, 2008

I

Ever since the Hindutva right-wing, led by the top leadership of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), demolished the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on Dec.,6,1992 in brazen defiance of the Constitution and the rule of Law, the question has been asked whether, after all, the BJP can be regarded a legitimate participant in India’s parliamentary democracy.

A litany of subsequent pogroms since then have, if anything, lent force and urgency to that poser.

These have included violent vigilante attacks on artists, art products, films, text books, institutions, minority religious establishments, and the unforgettable carnage of muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

That this party has no more than a scant and expedient relationship with parliament is borne out again by the fact that eversince the defeat of the BJP-led NDA coalition in 2004, the BJP has done one of two things as the leading opposition in the house of the people—either disrupt or boycott its proceedings.

And if it has raised its voice there, nothing has been farther from its intentions than to underscore issues that touch the vast pauperized mass of Indians.

These circumstances have yielded a rather unique consequence—that of obliging the Left parties which support the UPA government from the outside to function in crucial ways as the most credible opposition within the House.

The overarching fact that it is within the Left that the chief antagonist of the BJP resides has thus tended to be sharply emphasized.

The axes of that antagonism become apparent if one were to encapsulate the major planks of the right-wing BJP agenda for the nation:

–Majoritarian hegemony;

–Hinduisation of culture in toto;

–Minority bashing;

–Privatisation of national wealth;

–Militarisation of the state;

–“strategic partnership” with neo-imperialism of which Zionism is seen as crucial part;

to name just the principle coordinates.

Continued . . .

The Iraq catastrophe isn’t down to mistakes or lack of planning, but a refusal to accept that people will resist foreign occupation

Seumas Milne

• The Guardian, Thursday March 20 2008

The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out.Meanwhile, we’re being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country round, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future. In an echo of his notorious “mission accomplished” speech of May 2003, George Bush yesterday proclaimed the Iraq war a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror”.

All this is self-delusion on a heroic scale. The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, “a day which will live in infamy”. Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead, as Jon Snow’s compelling TV documentary Hidden Iraq underlined this week, they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.

Continued . . .

Andy Sullivan

Reuters North American News Service, Mar 19, 2008 19:22 EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 160 people were arrested across the United States Wednesday as protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq obstructed downtown traffic and tried to block access to government offices.document.write(“”+”“); There were 32 arrests in Washington after demonstrators attempted to block entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, while 30 others were arrested outside a congressional office building, police said.

Protesters had hoped to shut down the IRS, the U.S. tax collection agency, to highlight the cost of the war. Police cleared the building’s entrances within an hour.

In San Francisco, long a center of anti-Iraq war sentiment, police arrested more than 100 people who protested through the day along Market Street in the central business district, a spokesman said.

Sgt. Steve Maninna said officers had arrested 101 people on charges including trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing traffic.

Four women were also detained for hanging a large banner off the city’s famous Golden Gate Bridge and then released, said bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie.

On Washington’s National Mall, about 100 protesters carried signs that read: “The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness” and waved upside-down U.S. flags, a traditional sign of distress.

“Bush and Cheney, leaders failed, Bush and Cheney belong in jail,” they chanted, referring to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Continued . . .