Peace and Justice Post

Dave Lindorff’s blog

By Dave Lindorff | September 5, 2007

The Iraq War has been lost.

The British are acknowledging this fact by pulling out their troops from Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, handing over the city to the control of Shia militias. For all intents and purposes, the “Coalition of the Willing” is now dead. America is now going it alone.

Bush is not acknowledging defeat, but has indirectly admitted it by saying that some troops can start being brought home soon, even though clearly nothing has been accomplished with the addition of 30,000 troops for the last six months.

He acknowledged defeat too, by flying into Iraq stealthily in the dead of night this week, landing at a remote desert outpost in western Iraq, instead of going to Baghdad, and meeting with American military officials, instead of with the Iraqi government. (So much for Iraq’s being a “sovereign nation”! Can you imaging a head of state of some foreign government, together with his war secretary and his secretary of state, flying in unannounced to some remote American state, and not even meeting with American government officials?) Clearly the US military could not guarantee the president’s safety in Baghdad and the Green Zone, so he had to go to a remote outpost where he was safe behind razor wire, mines and an obscene arsenal of soldiers, tanks and gunships.

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Chicago Sun Times, September 5, 2007

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Is President Bush able to distinguish truth from falsehood? Is he too caught up in the double-talk generated by his spin masters to grasp the difference? After reading his talk to the VFW last week, I think that at this stage of his presidency he is utterly incapable of honest communication with the rest of the country. Objectively, his claim that the United States can win in Iraq, his comment that the Iraqi prime minister is a good guy and his history of the Vietnam War go far beyond the boundaries of truth. Granted, the speech was ground out by one of the spin masters (perhaps trained in dishonesty by Karl Rove), the president ultimately is responsible for it. It follows logically from all the falsehoods going back to weapons of mass destruction. It is contradicted by the intelligence estimate released the same day by the director of National Intelligence. The killing continues, the Iraq government is not improving, the war continues.

And, one would add, Americans continue to die.

Why does the president continue to deny the obvious, even when his own intelligence agency affirms it? Because some conservatives insist the United States could have won the Vietnam War if it hadn’t ”lost its nerve”? There is no serious support for this folklore. The only similarity is both wars were foolish wars for which there was no good reason, the United States was doomed to defeat from the beginning, and if someone had not pulled the plug, we’d still be fighting in Vietnam, just as we are still fighting — perhaps forever — in Iraq.

The Iraq Study Group gave the president a way out. He didn’t take it because he wanted victory. He can’t have victory. But he is not quitting during his administration, no matter how many more senseless deaths occur. His VFW speech is part of a campaign to elect a president who will continue the war. Whether Bush is deliberately deceiving his potential supporters or whether he no longer knows truth from falsehood because of his personality traits must remain a question only God can answer.

However, it is not wrong to question his credibility — and the suffering it causes to the families of those who die because of his stubborn insistence on ”staying the course” until a democratic Iraq becomes a reality. Must we not say, Mr. President, you have spoken so often against the truth, that we no longer believe anything you say.

Some writers tell me I am driven by hatred of the president, and as a priest I ought not to hate anyone. (These are people who generally did not think it was wrong to hate President Clinton or President Kennedy). I don’t hate the president, but I hate this stupid, unjust and evil war. To be a priest and not condemn evil would be sinful.

The war will end only when it ends, when someone in power says, “already, all right, enough,” and announces that the war is over. Lyndon Johnson tried to do that when he withdrew from the 1968 election. The Iraq Study Group tried to do the same thing. Johnson’s plan was frustrated when Richard M. Nixon won the election and continued the war for six more years (during which time more people died than had in the previous six years). The Iraq Study Group, basically conservative men, ran afoul of the president’s stubbornness and the reluctant loyalty of his congress- ional allies.

The long-awaited reports of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will provide another escape hatch. They will have to report in some way the Iraq government is not able to end the raging civil war. Does anyone want to bet the president will say, ”Then, let’s get out of there”?

The CounterPunch, September 4, 2007

When Wishful Thinking Replaces Resistance

By JEAN BRICMONT

Many people in the antiwar movement try to reassure themselves: Bush cannot possibly attack Iran. He does not have the means to do so, or, perhaps, even he is not foolish enough to engage in such an enterprise. Various particular reasons are put forward, such as: If he attacks, the Shiites in Iraq will cut the US supply lines. If he attacks, the Iranians will block the Straits of Ormuz or will unleash dormant terrorist networks worldwide. Russia won’t allow such an attack. China won’t allow it — they will dump the dollar. The Arab world will explode.

All this is doubtful. The Shiites in Iraq are not simply obedient to Iran. If they don’t rise against the United States when their own country is occupied (or if don’t rise very systematically), they are not likely to rise against the US if a neighboring country is attacked. As for blocking the Straits or unleashing terrorism, this will just be another justification for more bombing of Iran. After all, a main casus belli against Iran is, incredibly, that it supposedly helps the resistance against U.S. troops in Iraq, as if those troops were at home there. If that can work as an argument for bombing Iran, then any counter-measure that Iran might take will simply “justify” more bombing, possibly nuclear. Iran is strong in the sense that it cannot be invaded, but there is little it can do against long range bombing, accompanied by nuclear threats.

Continued . . .

Source: The Australian

Mark Dodd | September 05, 2007

GEORGE W. Bush should be tried as a war criminal for his role in launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Howard Government is culpable for supporting him, a US anti-war activist claims.

The US President and John Howard were committed to a failing war that was being waged for oil and economic motives, former US marine and two-time combat tour veteran Matt Howard said in Sydney yesterday.

The anti-war movement was growing in the US, and veterans had a responsibility to tell the truth about what was happening in Iraq, Mr Howard, 26, told a news conference at the Alternative APEC Centre in Sydney’s Trades Hall.

The Prime Minister’s support for the war provided “political cover” to Mr Bush’s “dangerous political agenda”, said Matt Howard.

His message on behalf of the Iraq Veterans Against the War was timed to coincide with the arrival in Sydney of Mr Bush for the APEC summit.

Tactically, Australia’s 900-strong military contribution in Iraq was so small it made no difference compared with the 160,000 US troops there, but politically it was indispensable for the Bush White House, Matt Howard said.

“We’ve destroyed Iraq and it’s been done in our name, and the Australian Government is involved,” he said.

“In 2003, I illegally invaded Iraq. We left a swath of destruction all the way from Basra to Baghdad.”

Mr Bush should be tried for crimes against humanity over the killing of the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children who were victims of the war, Mr Howard said.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the Government was “entirely comfortable” with Britain’s decision to withdraw its troops from their base in the southern city of Basra and redeploy them in the nearby airport.

Prison Planet,

By: Paul Joseph Watson on: 04.09.2007

Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University.

The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that “instructions” had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.

“It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects, writes Rubin, “It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

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Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, Sep 3, 2007

Palestinians harvest olives in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, November 2006. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Universally regarded as the symbol of peace, the olive tree has become the object of violence. For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted over one million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees in Palestine with terrible economic and ecological consequences for the Palestinian people. Their willful destruction has so threatened Palestinian culture, heritage and identity that the olive tree has now become the symbol of Palestinian steadfastness because of its own rootedness and ability to survive in a land where water is perennially scarce.

Throughout the centuries, Palestinians farmers have made their living from olive cultivation and olive oil production; 80 percent of cultivated land in the West Bank and Gaza is planted with olive trees. [1] In the West Bank alone, some 100,000 families are dependent on olive sales. [2] Today, the olive harvest provides Palestinian farmers with anywhere between 25 to 50 percent of their annual income, and as the economic crisis deepens, the harvest provides for many their basic means of survival. [3] But despite the hardships, it is the festivities and traditions that accompany the weeks of harvesting that have held Palestinian communities together and are, in fact, a demonstration of their ownership of the land that no occupation can extinguish except by the annihilation of Palestinian society itself.

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Inter Press Service, September 1, 2007

By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Aug 31 (IPS) – Poverty in the Palestinian territories has reached “unprecedented levels” because they have been held under an “economic siege” for almost seven years, a United Nations body has found.

During 2006 the number of Palestinians living in ‘deep poverty’ almost doubled to more than 1 million. Some 46 percent of public sector employees do not have enough food to meet their basic needs, with 53 percent of households in the Gaza reporting that their incomes declined in the last year by more than half.

This data is contained in a report, released Aug. 30, by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

It stated that an ostensible Israeli policy of ‘separating’ the Palestinian authorities from Arab and world markets by restricting the movement of people and goods has “squeezed the economy to a size smaller than a decade ago.”

The Palestinians’ reliance on imports as a proportion of their gross domestic product rose to 86 percent last year — up from 75 percent in 2005, equating to the loss of 500 million dollars to the economy.

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The Sunday Times

September 2, 2007

Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran

Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

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