Posts Tagged ‘Bush administration’

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Calling a Time Out

January 24, 2009

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world’s greatest power — but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.

I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism. The hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East — our occupation of Iraq, our backing for repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel — that drives the terrorist impulse against us would better be resolved by ending our military presence throughout the arc of conflict. This means a prudent, carefully directed withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. We also need to close down the imposing U.S. military bases in this section of the globe, which do so little to expand our security and so much to stoke local resentment.

We cannot evade this reckoning. The British thought they could extend their control over Iraq even while pulling out their ground forces by creating a string of bases in remote parts of the country, away from the observation of most Iraqis. It didn’t work. No people that desires independence and self-determination wishes to have another nation’s military bases in its country. In 1776, remember, 13 little colonies drove the mighty British Empire from American soil.

In 2003, the Bush administration ordered an invasion of Iraq, supposedly to reduce terrorism. But six years later, there is more terrorism and civil strife in Iraq, not less. The same outcome may occur in Afghanistan if we make it the next American military conflict.

Mr. President, the bright promise of your brilliant campaign for the White House and the high hopes of the millions who thronged the Mall on Tuesday to watch you be sworn in could easily be lost in the mountains and wastelands of Afghanistan.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has estimated that the war in Iraq will have a total cost of more than $3 trillion. That war has clearly weakened our economy and our armed forces even as it has made the national debt soar. The Bush administration committed itself to Iraq before the recession. Today, with our economy teetering, does the Obama administration believe that it is time for yet another costly war in yet another Muslim country?

I’m aware that some of my fellow Americans regard me as too idealistic. But sometimes idealism is the best realism. And at a minimum, realism and idealism need not be contradictory. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has not only angered Iraqis who have lost family members, neighbors or homes; it has also increased the level of anger throughout the Muslim world and thrown up obstacles to our political leadership in that deeply important part of the planet.

Like you, Mr. President, I don’t oppose all wars. I risked my life in World War II to protect our country against genuine danger. But it is the vivid memory of my fellow airmen being shot out of the sky on all sides of me in a war that I believe we had to fight that makes me cautious about sending our youth into needless conflicts that weaken us at home and abroad, and may even weaken us in the eyes of God.

As you have noted, Mr. President, we take pride in our soldiers who conduct themselves bravely. But as you have also said, some of these soldiers have served two, three and even four tours in dangerous combat. Many of them have come home with enduring brain and nerve damage and without arms and legs. These troops need rest, rehabilitation and reunions with their families.

So let me suggest a truly audacious hope for your administration: How about a five-year time-out on war — unless, of course, there is a genuine threat to the nation?

During that interval, we could work with the U.N. World Food Program, plus the overseas arms of the churches, synagogues, mosques and other volunteer agencies to provide a nutritious lunch every day for every school-age child in Afghanistan and other poor countries. Such a program is now underway in several countries approved by Congress and the United Nations, under the auspices of the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Act. (Forgive the self-serving title.) Although the measure remains painfully underfunded, with the help of other countries, we are reaching millions of children. We could supplement these efforts with nutritional packages for low-income pregnant and nursing mothers and their infants from birth through the age of 5, as is done here at home by WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

Is this proposal pie-in-the-sky? I don’t think so. It’s food in the stomachs of hungry kids. It would draw them to school and enable them to learn and grow into better citizens. It would cost a small fraction of warfare’s cost, but it might well be a stronger antidote to terrorism. There will always be time for another war. But hunger can’t wait.

© 2009 The Washington Post

George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.

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End the occupation of Iraq

January 24, 2009

By Medea Benjamin | USA Today, Jan 23, 2009

Under the disastrous Bush years, the U.S. military invaded a country that posed no threat to the United States, destroyed its infrastructure and plunged it into chaos. This led to the death and displacement of millions of Iraqis, squandered the lives of more than 4,000 U.S. troops and robbed our Treasury of billions of much-needed dollars.

Now that President Obama inherits George W. Bush’s legacy, he must make it perfectly clear to the Iraqis, the Americans and the world that he intends to keep his campaign promise to oversee a complete, orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq no later than May 2010. Why?

The Iraqis want us out, as evidenced by poll after poll and the recent debate in the Iraqi parliament over the Status of Forces Agreement. The Iraqi people will vote on this agreement in July and will only pass it if the Iraqis are convinced that U.S. troops will soon be gone.

The American people want our troops out. The best reflection of this is that they elected Barack Obama to lead us out of Iraq. Obama needs to find solutions to the meltdown of the U.S. economy, not continue to waste billions of tax dollars occupying Iraq.

The presence of U.S. troops ensures ongoing violence by attracting armed opposition and postpones the day of reckoning among Iraqi factions. Sticking to a timeline will force the Iraqi government and the different ethnic and religious groups to negotiate power-sharing agreements.

Iraqi neighbors and the international community will feel obligated to engage in diplomatic and reconstruction efforts only if they understand the U.S. is serious about leaving. Chaos in Iraq is not in the interest of any nation, especially Iraq’s neighbors. Obama must immediately bring them into the transition process.

Obama’s administration needs to dramatically shift the image of the United States in the Muslim world. The unjustified U.S. invasion of an Arab nation has been a powerful tool in the recruitment of violent anti-American groups. This can and must be turned around, and leaving Iraq will help.

Obama must quickly show a radical change in policy by ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq (including military contractors), resettling the enormous refugee population it helped create, committing to diplomacy and rebuilding this war-torn nation.

Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange.

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Holding Bush Accountable

January 17, 2009

by Elizabeth Holtzman | The Nation, January 15, 2009

President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and “extraordinary rendition,” and ending practices, like signing statements, that seek to undo laws.

While these steps are all crucial, however, it is not enough merely to cease the abuses of power and apparent criminality that marked the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration. We cannot simply shrug off the constitutional and criminal misbehavior of the administration, treat it as an aberration and hope it won’t happen again. The misbehavior was not an aberration–aspects of it, particularly the idea that the president is above the law, were present in Watergate and in the Iran/Contra scandal. To fully restore the rule of law and prevent any repetition of Bush’s misconduct, the abuses of his administration must be directly confronted. As Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen–recently tapped by Obama to head his Office of Legal Counsel–wrote in Slate last March, “We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals.”

What we need to do is conceptually simple. We need to launch investigations to get at the central unanswered questions of Bush’s abuse of power, commence criminal proceedings and undertake institutional, statutory and constitutional reforms. Perhaps all these things don’t need to be done at once, but over time–not too much time–they must take place. Otherwise, we establish a doctrine of presidential impunity, which has no place in a country that cherishes the rule of law or considers itself a democracy. Bush’s claim that the president enjoys virtually unlimited power as commander in chief at a time of war–which Vice President Dick Cheney defiantly reasserted just last month–brought us perilously close to military dictatorship.

As the former district attorney in Brooklyn, New York, I know the price society pays for a doctrine of impunity. Failure to prosecute trivializes and encourages the crimes. The same holds true of political abuses–failure to hold violators accountable condones the abuse and entrenches its acceptability, creating a climate in which it is likely to be repeated. The doctrine of impunity suggests, too, that there is a dual system of justice–one for the powerful and one for ordinary Americans. Because the concept of equal justice under the law is the foundation of democracy, impunity for high-level officials who abuse power and commit crimes erodes our democracy.

An impeachment proceeding against President Bush would have been the proper forum to expose the full scope of his abuses and to impose punishment. That obviously didn’t happen, but investigations and prosecutions can still provide the vast civics lesson that an impeachment process would have given our nation.

There is another important reason for not “moving on.” On January 20, Barack Obama will take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, which requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Much as President Obama might like to avoid controversy arising from investigations and prosecutions of high-level Bush administration officials, he cannot let them get away with breaking the law without violating his oath. His obligation to pursue justice in these cases is all the more serious given his acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture–which is a federal crime–and the vice president’s recent admission of his involvement in and approval of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Moreover, under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, our government is obliged to bring to justice those who  have violated the conventions. Although Bush smugly ignored his constitutional duty to enforce treaty obligations and laws that punish detainee mistreatment, Obama cannot follow the same lawless path.

Continued >>

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Israeli atrocities in Gaza: a political impasse and moral collapse

January 7, 2009

Word Socialist Web Site, January 7, 2009

The premeditated slaughter yesterday of innocent men, women and children sheltering in the UN-run al-Fakhora school in Gaza is a war crime for which the Israeli government and military general staff are directly responsible. As atrocity piles on atrocity, it is clear that the Israeli military is using Hamas’s rocket attacks as the pretext for terrorising and subjugating the entire Palestinian population.

At least 42 people were killed when Israeli shells struck just outside the school in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another 55 were injured—at least five critically. Witnesses described a scene of horror with victims cut down by shrapnel lying in pools of blood on the street. Following the attack, a hospital official, Fares Ghanem, told the Associated Press: “I saw a lot of women and children wheeled in. A lot of wounded were missing limbs and a lot of the dead were in pieces.”

The deliberate character of the attack was underscored by the fact that the school was hit not by a loose bomb dropped from 10,000 feet, but by precisely targetted shells. John Ging, operations director in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said that the Israeli army had been given the precise coordinates of the school, which was clearly marked. Noting the school was located in a built-up area, he said: “Of course it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties.” Some 350 people were taking refuge at the time inside the school.

The Israeli military issued a statement suggesting its forces had responded to mortar fire coming from the school and that Hamas had once again used civilians as “human shields”—a claim routinely made to justify Israeli Defence Force (IDF) atrocities. UNRWA official Ging denied that Hamas fighters were using its refuges. “There’s nowhere safe in Gaza. Everyone here is terrorised and traumatised,” he said. UN official Maxwell Gaylard demanded an independent investigation, saying those responsible for any breaches of international law must be held accountable.

The Israeli shelling of the al-Fakhora school is no isolated incident. Ging reported that three Palestinians were killed yesterday in a separate Israeli air strike near another school in the area where no fighting was taking place at the time. The UNRWA has 23 schools sheltering around 15,000 refugees who have been driven from their homes by the Israeli military. Yesterday morning a building next to a UN health centre was hit by Israeli fire—injuring 10 people, including seven staff and three patients. The International Red Cross reported that an ambulance post was also hit, injuring a medical worker.

According to Reuters, at least 75 Palestinian civilians were killed yesterday—indicating a sharp jump in casualties since the Israeli army launched ground operations four days ago. Eric Fosse, a Norwegian doctor working at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, told CNN that he had seen more women and children among the casualties on Monday than on any other day since the Israeli offensive began. Most of the wounded men were also civilians. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the death toll in Gaza reached 660 yesterday.

Today’s Financial Times reported that at least 115 of the casualties have been children. Thousands more have been deeply traumatised by the terrifying experience of constant bombing as well as the lack of electricity, running water, food and sanitation. “Even before the Israeli attacks began,” the article explained, “some 50,000 children were suffering from malnutrition in Gaza, amid the crippling blockade of the territory. This number ‘could be increased by thousands,’ warned Isama Damo, who works in Gaza with the human rights group, Save the Children. Many grocery stores have shut and fresh food such as milk, cheese and fruit is scarce.”

The targetting of the al-Fakhora school exposes the lie used by Israel and its apologists to justify its war against the Palestinian people as an act of “self defence”. The Israeli army is engaged in a desperate attempt to destroy the capacity of Palestinians to resist in any way their decades-long oppression. When Israeli officials denounce Hamas as “terrorists”, their vitriol is in reality directed at the million and a half impoverished people crushed into the narrow strip of land known as Gaza.

In a comment in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky denounced the UN for failing to eliminate what he termed the “heart of the problem”—Gaza’s refugee camps of dispossessed Palestinians. Describing the camps as “the terrorists’ unique system of control” and their schools as “indoctrination centres for martyrdom”, he accused the UNRWA of being “facilitators for the terrorists’ goal of grinding an entire civilian population under their thumb”. Sharansky’s ravings served to lay bare the fascistic rationale behind Israel’s deliberate targetting of the camps, the UNRWA and the al-Fakhora school.

Yesterday’s attack conformed to a definite modus operandi on the part of the IDF. In 2006, the army waged a similar military offensive in southern Lebanon aimed at destroying the Shiite Hezbollah militia and its base of support within the population. Repeated missile strikes on the town of Qana killed at least 57 residents, including 37 children. The Israeli military also destroyed a UN monitoring post, forcing the pullout of UN observers who were witnesses to its crimes.

The use of such terrorist measures goes back to the very origins of the Zionist state, when Israeli forces and armed gangs perpetrated atrocities against Palestinian towns and villages as the means of expelling millions of Arabs from Israeli territory. The long history of terrorist acts directed against Palestinians, including the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, flows inescapably from the reactionary logic of Zionism: the attempt to carve out a Jewish state inevitably involved trampling on the rights of the Palestinian people.

The perspective at the heart of the assault on Gaza’s population was spelled out in a letter written in 2007 by former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, calling for the carpet bombing of the entire area. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, Eliyahu wrote that the population as a whole was morally responsible for failing to halt the rocket attacks on Israeli territory. His son, also a prominent rabbi, told the newspaper that the Israeli air force had to kill “whatever it takes to make them stop”—a 100, a 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, even a million.

These comments recall nothing so much as the methods of collective punishment employed by the Nazis during World War II in an effort to end resistance to their rule throughout Europe. They reflect the complete perplexity in Israeli ruling circles and the political dead-end that has been reached in the Zionist project as a whole. Israel’s desperate attempt to use overwhelming military force to suppress Palestinian opposition in Gaza can only lead further into the morass. One can only ask what comes next: the forcible expulsion of all Arabs from Israeli territory?

The US government’s blocking of a ceasefire has given the green light for the Israeli military to escalate its attacks. The reaction of the Bush administration to the killing of civilians at the al-Fakhora school was virtually identical to that of Israel. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told the media “not [to] jump to conclusions… What we know is that Hamas often hides amongst innocents and uses innocents, including children, as human shields.” The US military has used identical pretexts to justify its own war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the other imperialist powers, including Britain, France and Germany, have been more discrete about their support for the Israeli war, they too place the onus on Hamas for the conflict, demanding an end to all resistance to the Israeli onslaught as the price of any ceasefire. The Israelis have also received encouragement from the various bourgeois regimes in the Middle East. All of them, whether openly backing Israel—in the case of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordon—or feigning support for the Palestinians—Iran and Syria—are seeking to exploit the crisis to pursue their own economic and geo-political aims at the direct expense of the Palestinian masses and the working class of the entire region.

Notwithstanding the universal support by the major powers and in the international media for Israel, world opinion is rapidly turning against the slaughter being carried out in Gaza. The one-sided war is provoking a wave of revulsion, including among intellectuals and class conscious workers in Israel appalled by the crimes being carried out in their name. The real ally of the Palestinian people is the international working class—including Arab and Jewish workers—which must be united against the Israeli ruling elite, the bourgeois regimes in the Middle East, and US and world imperialism on the basis of the struggle for a socialist federation of the Middle East.

Peter Symonds

The author also recommends:

Hands off Gaza!
5 January 2009

The Gaza crisis and the perspective of permanent revolution
30 December 2008

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Israel’s war of terror against Gaza

January 3, 2009

Socialist Worker, January 2, 2009

ISRAEL’S ONSLAUGHT against the Palestinian population of Gaza continues to take a terrible toll.

The relentless pounding from the skies is drastically worsening already dire conditions caused by Israel’s suffocating siege of the last 18 months. Yet as the new year began, Israel dismissed proposals for even a 48-hour cease-fire–and instead broadened its offensive.

Israel’s attack has stirred outrage around the world. But among U.S. political leaders–from the Republican Bush administration to the Democratic leaders in Congress–there is unanimous support for Israel’s war, and universal acceptance of the claim that Hamas, the Islamist party that won elections to the Palestinian National Assembly nearly three years ago, is “to blame for the violence.”

Haidar Eid is a professor, an activist for Palestinian national rights and a resident of Gaza City. He spoke with Eric Ruder on December 31 about the appalling conditions facing the people of Gaza–as well as the larger political context in which Israel’s onslaught is taking place.

Palestinians in Gaza City carry a victim of the Israeli assault to Al Shifa hospital (Thair al-Hassany | propaimages)Palestinians in Gaza City carry a victim of the Israeli assault to Al Shifa hospital (Thair al-Hassany | propaimages)

OUR LAST interview the day after Israel’s attack began was interrupted by bombing very nearby. Are you and your relatives safe?

YES. I’M sorry I had to cut the interview short. They started bombarding the ministerial compound behind the building where I live. I’ve lost all the windows in my flat.

It was horrible. Unbelievable. I can’t begin to describe the situation. I haven’t been able to sleep for five nights straight–tonight will be the sixth–because every single night, they have aerial strikes.

The Israelis are furious, because they don’t know what to do. They have no more targets to attack, and yet they haven’t been able to find a single leader of the resistance [the first reports of a senior Hamas leader killed by the bombings came the day after this interview took place]. But it’s easy to attack mosques and schools and hospitals and universities, and so this is what they’ve been doing.

The last bomb I heard was 15 minutes ago, about two kilometers from where I live. They attacked a currency exchange, which the Israelis accuse of money laundering and working for Hamas. It’s ridiculous.

The number of people who have died in the last five days is now more than 400, including 70 children and 18 women. They have also attacked 18 mosques. The number of injured is about 2,500. It’s crazy, it’s genocidal. They want to send us back to the dark ages, as they say.

What you can do

Protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza have already taken place in cities around the country, with more planned for the coming days. Contact local organizers for details where you live.

For updates on the current situation, plus commentary and analysis on the background to the war, read the Electronic Intifada Web site. Electronic Intifada Executive Director Ali Abunimah’s “Gaza massacres must spur us to action” is a good starting point for further reading.

You can also find updated coverage on conditions in Gaza and the efforts of activists to stand up to the Israeli war at the Free Gaza Web site.

Between the Lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. “War on Terror,” by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad, documents the apartheid-like conditions that Palestinians live under today.

For background on Israel’s war and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, read The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays edited by Lance Selfa on the history of the occupation and Palestinian resistance.

SO FAR, they still haven’t started ground operations, right?

NO INCURSIONS so far. Television news reports are now talking about Israel starting a land attack on Friday, January 2, but that’s also part of the psychological warfare–because they don’t generally announce their attack plans to maintain their strategic advantage.

They’ve carried out more than 700 air strikes so far. Crazy. As I am speaking to you right now, I can clearly hear the Apache helicopters. But because it’s too dark, I can’t see them. We have no electricity for the sixth day in my building.

WHAT DO the Israelis want at this point? You’ve said that they’re running out of targets. Do they want to kill or force the Hamas leadership into exile? Do they expect some other kind of surrender?

THE OBVIOUS objective that they’ve been talking about is “destroying the infrastructure of the terrorist organizations.” But they aren’t just referring to destroying Hamas, although that is their main goal. And in any case, they know that they can’t do that, because Hamas is not only the freedom fighters. It’s a very big organization, with social welfare aspects to it, as well as other elements.

They claim that Hamas has about 15,000 fighters. And then there are about 10,000 fighters belonging to the other resistance organizations–including, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a Marxist organization.

The Israelis want to create a new reality on the ground–to weaken Hamas as a political organization and weaken other resistance movements opposed to the Oslo Accords in order to pave the way for the return of the pro-Oslo organizations and the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah.

I think this is their ultimate goal, and they know very well that they can’t achieve it. The fact that they haven’t been able to destroy the resistance movement for the fifth consecutive day actually means a victory for the resistance movement. I don’t think they’ll be able to succeed, even after 15 days.

This is a repeat of what happened to the Israeli military operation in Lebanon two years ago. Remember that the Israelis started with “shock-and-awe” bombing, like the U.S. did in Iraq, with aerial strikes against the Lebanese resistance movement, and Hezbollah in particular.

They weren’t able to accomplish anything. They weren’t able to destroy the infrastructure of Hezbollah. And when they started their ground attack, it was obvious that Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance movement, including the Communist Party of Lebanon, were actually victorious. This is what the Winograd report [from an Israeli commission charged with investigating the Lebanon war] concluded.

What we’re witnessing right now in Gaza is similar because the people of Gaza are supporting the resistance movement. The Israelis want to punish the people for voting for an anti-Oslo organization three years ago when they voted for Hamas.

I also think the Israelis are choosing the timing very carefully. One, they’re taking advantage of the grey area between George Bush leaving the White House and Barack Obama coming in. Also, it’s between Christmas and New Year’s, when most of the West is on holiday and celebrating, and not paying as much attention to international developments.

But notice that they’ve been postponing the ground invasion because the Israelis also have elections coming up in February. So Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are very reluctant to start the land invasion until the most damage possible is done from the air–in the hope that this will make victory on the ground more likely.

We were expecting the ground assault as early as the first or second day, but–oh gosh, another strike, so close. Maybe 500 meters to one kilometer away. Now another one. We rely on local radio stations to tell us exactly where the strikes are. I think these strikes are from Navy vessels, because I live near the beach. I’m sorry. I’ve lost my concentration.

The conclusion I wanted to end with is that Israeli leaders don’t want a second Winograd report. The first report concluded that the initial aerial strikes against Lebanon actually failed. This is what is happening right now. That’s why we’ve started hearing criticisms in the mainstream Israeli press, such as Ha’aretz and Yediot Aharonot newspapers, including from pilots saying that we’re killing so many civilians.

And remember, the last time I talked to you, I explained that the timing of the first strikes was at 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, when schoolchildren are returning home. So 80 children have been killed, and by the way, today, two sisters–seven and eight years old–died in the morning, and an hour ago, I heard their brother died from his injuries.

So Israel’s “strategy” is to kill as many civilians as possible to create a situation where civilians would rebel against Hamas and resistance movements. But like in Lebanon, this has had the opposite effect. The population supports the resistance–and not only the resistance of Hamas by the way.

Just like in Lebanon, it wasn’t only the resistance of Hezbollah, but also the Lebanese Communist Party that had support. And here, we have Hamas as one organization among 12 to 14 organizations, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

EARLIER, YOU mentioned that we’re in the grey area between the Bush and Obama administrations. What makes this so favorable for military action by Israel?

IDEOLOGICALLY, THE Bush administration sees the crushing of Palestinian resistance as part of the so-called war on terror. Notice that I say Palestinian resistance, and not the Islamic resistance of Hamas, because all resistance to imperial oppression is defined as “terrorism” by the Bush administration. The U.S. enables Israeli crimes in Palestine and Lebanon with its financial, military and moral support.

These are the same kinds of atrocities that the neocons in the U.S. have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan, with their fighter planes and tanks firing all kinds of ordnance–both conventional and illegal, such as white phosphorous and cluster bombs–against civilians.

The Bush administration even blames Hamas. It has adopted the policy of “blaming the victim,” and this has been the ideological orientation of the Zionist state since its inception.

The Bush administration also has a close ideological partner in the right-wing government of Israel, so it’s easier for them to find that support from the Bush administration. Bush allowed Olmert and Livni to undermine the Annapolis meeting [in 2007 between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, hosted by U.S. officials in Maryland].

The Annapolis meeting itself was a fiasco, but Bush also allowed them to undermine it by focusing on Israeli “security” and marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine and Palestinian rights.

In fact, I read yesterday in Ha’aretz that Israeli officials began talking about this assault on Gaza as a plan six months ago. Ehud Barak asked his officers and generals to start planning for this attack. This is at the same time that they agreed to the truce with the resistance movement in Gaza.

After the Annapolis meeting, Olmert immediately authorized a massive building program of new Jewish-only housing units in East Jerusalem, which was a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the two-state solution [that was nominally under discussion at Annapolis].

The two-state solution has been the essence of the Bush doctrine in the Middle East, but I don’t think there is any possibility of the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, because Israel has taken irreversible steps in the West Bank to make such a state an impossibility.

The same complicit silence that we see right now from the Bush White House has also accompanied the drive to starve Gaza for the last two years–the shortages of food, fuel, medicine, electricity. Patients in need of dialysis and other kinds of medicine have been dying daily for the last two years.

Even a person as ignorant of Middle Eastern issues as George W. Bush must realize how cynical it is to talk about a two-state solution that has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the looting and pillaging of Gaza, the construction of the apartheid wall, the annexation of more than 25 percent of West Bank land to the expanding Jewish settlements.

The Bush administration has been silent or has supported all of these measures. So the Israeli government wants to take advantage of Bush’s support.

It is also hesitant to embarrass Barack Obama at the beginning of his term, although I don’t believe Obama will be that different when it comes to Middle Eastern issues. Obama has already shown his complicity. When he visited Palestine during the presidential campaign, he spent only 45 minutes in Ramallah with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after which he refused to give a press conference.

Then Obama visited Sderot, the Israeli town that neighbors Gaza, and sympathized with the Sderot people, but uttered not a word of sympathy for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. And the first thing he did after being elected president was appoint Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who is known for his strong pro-Israel views, as his chief of staff.

So the signals from Obama are clear. But the Israelis don’t want to force his hand from the moment he takes office on January 20. That’s why the gray area is important to them.

The difference between what happened in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza today is that the people living in the south of Lebanon fled to Beirut–about half a million people, I think. The people of Gaza, however, cannot do that. The only exit here is the Rafah crossing, which is completely closed off by Egyptian authorities.

So the population of 1.5 million in Gaza are left in Gaza, supporting the resistance. And when I say resistance, I’m not only talking about military resistance. I’m talking about initiating a global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure on Israel. We, as civil society organizations, have called for his. I’m on the steering committee of the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. I am also on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Central Committee.

We call on all civil society organizations around the world–in the United States, in the Arab and Islamic world and so on–to initiate a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign against South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s.

After the Sharpeville Massacre committed by the racists of South Africa against Black people, the divestment movement got momentum, and that was the beginning of the end of apartheid.

I look at what is happening in Gaza today from a historical perspective, and I think this should be the beginning of the end of the apartheid state of Israel.

This is not an anti-Semitic argument, as critics often assert. I am calling for the establishment of a secular democratic state in the historic land of Palestine–a state for all of its citizens, regardless of religion, race or sect.

Also, I must say that I really appreciate all of your great work there in the U.S. To be working as dissidents and critical voices against the power of the mainstream media in the U.S. has really been impressive, and gives us support here.

Honestly, I talk about you all the time. Because what people know about America here are the Apache gunships and the F-16s, and what the American government does. I always tell people that there is another America that you represent, and that is the America we bank on.

THAT’S VERY kind of you to say, but it’s us who are humbled by your courage and conviction as the Israeli attack continues. Here, the media reports on the situation as if the fighting in Gaza is a battle between two equally matched contenders–instead of massive firepower against a population that has very little to defend itself with.

TO TALK about “two sides” is truly absurd. What you have is one side that is considered under international law as an occupying and colonizing power; one side that has F-16s and Apache helicopters; one side that has the third or fourth strongest army in the world, and of course, the strongest army in the Middle East; and one side that has more than 250 nuclear warheads.

On the other side, you have an occupied people–people fighting with stones, people fighting with crude, homemade rockets like firecrackers. It’s unfair to talk about two evenly matched sides because it absolves Israel of its war crimes that have been committed in Gaza.

It would seem mandatory for the International Court of Justice to investigate the crimes committed by Israeli generals and officers, and indict them for crimes against humanity.

How is it possible to talk about “two sides?” You don’t have two sides. Were there two equal sides when discussing we were apartheid and the African National Congress? Were there two sides when Hitler and the Nazis were committing horrendous crimes and killing more than 6 million innocent Jews?

The world said we would never allow that to happen again. The uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto–the Intifada of the Jewish prisoners in Poland in 1943–actually inspires us here in Gaza.

Gaza has been transformed into the largest concentration camp on the face of the earth. And you cannot equate the prisoner and the warden. I think in America people need to wake up to this reality.

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President Bush Winks at Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza, While Obama and Clinton Are Silent

December 28, 2008

By Matthew Rothschild, The progressive,  December 27, 2008

Israel recklessly bombed Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 205 Palestinians and wounding at least 350 more, according to Palestinian health officials.

This wholly disproportionate response to Hamas’s immoral but largely ineffective rocket attacks on Israel is guaranteed to further enflame the Middle East.

Not lost on anyone there will be the Bush Administration’s winking at Israel’s attacks.

White Houses spokesman Gordon Johndroe laid all the blame on Hamas.

“Hamas’s continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop,” Johndroe said.

Then even as he gave a perfunctory nod toward safeguarding civilians, he showed no displeasure with Israel going after Hamas: “The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza,” Johndroe said.

Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama and Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton were shamefully silent in the first hours after the attack.

Bush’s reaction, and the non-reaction by Obama and Clinton, underscores the point that Hanan Ashrawi made on Saturday. “Israel has gotten used to not being held accountable and to being a country that is above the law,” said the Palestinian legislator and human rights activist. She called the bombings a “massacre.”

With Washington condoning Israel’s assault, the violence may only get worse.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, “The operation will be deeper and expanded as much as necessary. . . . It won’t be short, and it won’t be easy.”

A Hamas spokesperson vowed revenge and said Hamas “will continue the resistance until the last drop of blood.”

This cycle of violence will get bloodier and bloodier unless and until Washington finally prevails on Israel to make a just settlement with the Palestinians.

Bush did not have the inclination to do so. Neither, it appears, does Obama.

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Will Bush Officials Face War Crimes Trials? Few Expect It

December 21, 2008

by Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers, Dec 19, 2008

WASHINGTON – Emboldened by a Democratic win of the White House, civil libertarians and human rights groups want the incoming Obama administration to investigate whether the Bush administration committed war crimes. They don’t just want low-level CIA interrogators, either. They want President George W. Bush on down.

[CONFESSED WAR CRIMINAL DICK CHENEY "It is mind boggling to say eight years later that there is not going to be some sort of criminal accountability for what happened," said David Glazier, a law of war expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a retired naval officer. "It certainly undermines our moral authority and our ability to criticize other countries for doing exactly the same thing. But given the legal issues and the political reality, I am hard pressed to see any other outcome."]CONFESSED WAR CRIMINAL DICK CHENEY “It is mind boggling to say eight years later that there is not going to be some sort of criminal accountability for what happened,” said David Glazier, a law of war expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a retired naval officer. “It certainly undermines our moral authority and our ability to criticize other countries for doing exactly the same thing. But given the legal issues and the political reality, I am hard pressed to see any other outcome.”


In the past eight years,  administration critics have demanded that top officials be held accountable for a host of expansive assertions of executive powers from eavesdropping without warrants to detaining suspected enemy combatants indefinitely at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. A recent bipartisan Senate report on how Bush policies led to the abuse of detainees has fueled calls for a criminal investigation.

But even some who believe top officials broke the law don’t favor criminal prosecutions. The charges would be too difficult legally and politically to succeed.

Without wider support, the campaign to haul top administration officials before an American court is likely to stall.

In the end, Bush administration critics might have more success by digging out the truth about what happened and who was responsible, rather than assigning criminal liability, and letting the court of public opinion issue the verdicts, many say.

“It is mind boggling to say eight years later that there is not going to be some sort of criminal accountability for what happened,” said David Glazier, a law of war expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a retired naval officer. “It certainly undermines our moral authority and our ability to criticize other countries for doing exactly the same thing. But given the legal issues and the political reality, I am hard pressed to see any other outcome.”

Robert Turner, a former Reagan White House lawyer who supported several of the Bush administration’s assertions of executive powers, but not the use of harsh interrogation techniques, said that war crimes “may well have been committed,” given reports by human-rights organizations that some prisoners may have been beaten to death.

Turner was outraged when Bush signed an executive order in 2007 that he believes permitted highly abusive treatment, so long as the “purpose” was to acquire intelligence to stop future terrorist attacks, rather than just to humiliate or degrade the detainee.

He recalls telling senior Justice Department officials during a conference call prior to the public release of the order: “Do you people understand that you are setting up the president of the United States to be tried as a war criminal?” The conference call, he said, quickly came to an end.

Turner, who co-founded the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law in 1981, rebuts the administration’s defense that waterboarding, which simulates the sensation of drowning, isn’t torture and therefore is legal.

He also challenges the administration’s argument that Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, prohibiting inhumane treatment of detainees, isn’t binding. “The standard is not torture. It’s humane treatment. That’s a much higher standard,” he said, noting that after World War II, the U.S. prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using waterboarding on American troops.

Continued >>

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All roads lead out of Afghanistan

December 20, 2008

By M K Bhadrakumar | Asia Times, Dec 20, 2008

The measure of success of president-elect Barack Obama’s new “Afghan strategy” will be directly proportional to his ability to delink the war from its geopolitical agenda inherited from the George W Bush administration.

It is obvious that Russia and Iran’s cooperation is no less critical for the success of the war than what the US is painstakingly extracting from the Pakistani generals. Arguably, Obama will even be in a stronger negotiating position vis-a-vis the tough generals in Rawalpindi if only he has Moscow and Tehran on board his Afghan strategy.

But then, Moscow and Iran will expect that Obama reciprocates with a willingness to jettison the US’s containment strategy towards them. The signs do not look good. This is not only from the look of Obama’s national security team and the continuance of Robert Gates as defense secretary.

On the contrary, in the dying weeks of the Bush administration, the US is robustly pushing for an increased military presence in the Russian (and Chinese) backyard in Central Asia on the ground that the exigencies of a stepped-up war effort in Afghanistan necessitate precisely such an expanded US military presence.

Again, the Bush administration’s insistence on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Afghan problem on the specious plea that a Wahhabi partner will be useful for taming the Taliban doesn’t carry conviction with Iran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Wednesday pointedly stressed the need to be vigilant about “plots by the world’s arrogance to create disunity” between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

Russian-Iranian proximity
It seems almost inevitable that Moscow and Tehran will join hands. In all likelihood, they may have already begun doing so. The Central Asian countries and China and India will also be closely watching the dynamics of this grim power struggle. They are interested parties insofar as they may have to suffer the collateral damage of the great game in Afghanistan. The US’s “war on terror” in Afghanistan has already destabilized Pakistan. The debris threatens to fall on India, too.

Most certainly, the terrorist attack on Mumbai last month cannot be seen in isolation from the militancy radiating from the Afghan war. Even as the high-level Russian-Indian Working Group on terrorism met in Delhi on Tuesday and Wednesday, another top diplomat dealing with the Afghan problem arrived in the Indian capital for consultations – Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mahdi Akhounjadeh.

Speaking in Moscow on Tuesday, chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Nikolai Makarov, just about lifted the veil on the geopolitics of the Afghan war to let the world know that the Bush administration was having one last fling at the great game in Central Asia. Makarov couldn’t have spoken without Kremlin clearance. Moscow seems to be flagging its frustration to Obama’s camp. Makarov revealed Moscow had information to the effect that the US was pushing for new military bases in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Continued >>

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The Torture Presidency

December 15, 2008

By Scott Horton | Harper’s Magazine, Dec 13, 2008

President George W. Bush has launched “Operation Legacy,” which he placed in the hands of his ultimate advisor, indeed his “brain,” Karl Rove. Remember Rove? He’s the man who refused to testify under oath when summoned by Congress to do so and was recently identified in a Congressional report as the plotter behind the U.S. Attorneys scandal, among other trainwrecks. The Rove effort features a 2-page set of talking points which have been circulated to members of the administration’s team highlighting the supposedly major Bush accomplishments which have begun to fill the American media. They start with the contention that “Bush kept us safe” by preventing any further attack on American soil after 9/11. Really?

Let’s just take a look at some of that “deranged” criticism. Indeed, let’s start with the criticism from the man tapped by Bush’s fellow Republicans to succeed him, John McCain. This week the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a powerful report, released jointly by chair Carl Levin and ranking member John McCain, that received the unanimous support of its Democratic and Republican members. The report concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials of the administration consciously adopted a policy for the torture and abuse of prisoners held in the war on terror. It also found that they attempted to cover up their conduct by waging a P.R. campaign to put the blame on a group of young soldiers they called “rotten apples.” Lawyers figure prominently among the miscreants identified. Evidently the torture policy’s authors then enlisted ethics-challenged lawyers to craft memoranda designed to give torture “the appearance of legality” as part of a scheme to create the torture program despite internal opposition. A declassified summary of the report can be read here; the full report is filled with classified information and therefore has been submitted to the Department of Defense with a request that the materials be declassified for release. (Don’t expect that to happen before January 20, however).

This report sums up all you need to know about George W. Bush’s eight years of leadership. Karl Rove stresses that Bush has been a perfect moral example for young people in the country. The report tells us that when photos and other evidence of abuse first surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their policies and the abuse, then attempted to scapegoat a group of more than a dozen young recruits (but not, of course, any of their supervising officers, who knew the details of the administration’s involvement and would have made things messy if disciplined). The report puts these actions in an unforgiving light:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

But of course, Bush only turned to torture to keep America safe, right? Wrong. With the unanimous support of its 12 Republican members, the Committee concludes:

The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

The report has some more bombshells in it waiting to emerge on declassification. It studies with some care the introduction of specific torture techniques, showing how they were reverse engineered from the SERE program—used to prepare American pilots to resist interrogation techniques used by the Soviets, North Koreans, Chinese and North Vietnamese. By “reverse engineering,” we mean it was adopting the techniques used by the nation’s Communist adversaries in prior generations. We have met the enemy, and he looks remarkably like George W. Bush.

And deep in its classified hold, the report looks into the use of psychotropic drugs which were, with Donald Rumsfeld’s approval, routinely administered to prisoners in order to facilitate their interrogation—in violation of international agreements and American criminal law.

The report, even in its still-classified form, does not tell the whole story of what happened. It does not address the program administered by the CIA. And even with respect to the Department of Defense, the Committee and its investigators were effectively stonewalled by the United States Special Operations Command and its overlords in the Pentagon who failed to provide information about special rules of engagement introduced with the authority of Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone that authorized the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held for intelligence interrogation in operations dating back to the earliest weeks of the “war on terror.”

The Levin-McCain Report, when fully declassified and circulated, will tell Americans a good deal about our history. It will help define what will become known as the “torture presidency” of George W. Bush. But it is also a remarkably incomplete document, testimony to the Bush Administration’s conscious policy of obfuscation, misdirection and deceit—its mockery of Congressional oversight, and its corruption of our Constitution and system of government. It gives us a clear lesson. As John McCain stated: “This must never be repeated. Never.”

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Iraq reconstruction ‘has failed’

December 14, 2008
Al Jazeera, Dec 14, 2008

The report quotes Powell as alleging that Iraqi troop numbers were inflated by defence officials [AFP]

The US-led force’s $100bn effort to rebuild Iraq has failed amid bureaucratic quarrels, ignorance of Iraqi society and violence in the country, the New York Times says, quoting a US federal report.

The newspaper said on its website on Saturday that it had obtained a draft copy of Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, which is circulating among senior officials.

The report was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is led by Stuart Bowen Jr, a Republican lawyer.

In the report, Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, alleges that after the 2003 invasion the US defence department kept inflating figures on the number of Iraqi security forces on the ground.

The defence department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces – the number would jump 20,000 a week! We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000”, he is quoted as saying in the draft report.

The report says that Powell’s view was supported by Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the most senior ground troops officer in Iraq, and Paul Bremer, who was the civilian administrator before the Iraqi government takeover in June 2004.

It concludes that the US government does not have the policies or the organisational structure required to put the largest reconstruction programme since the Marshall Plan into place, the newspaper reported.

Cronyism alleged

The rebuilding effort did not go beyond restoring what was destroyed during the invasion and its immediate aftermath, the newspaper cited the draft report as saying.

By mid-2008, the report says, $117bn had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including about $50bn in US taxpayer money.

In one example, an official at the US Agency for International Development (USAID)was given four hours to work out how many miles of Iraqi roads needed to be repaired, the Times said.

The official’s estimate came from documents in USAID’s library and was then submitted into a master plan.

Furthermore, funding for a large amount of Iraqi reconstruction projects was divided up among local politicians and tribal leaders, according to the New York Times.

“Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources,” it quotes one US embassy official in Baghdad as saying.

“You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'”

Political lobbying

The report also pointed to political manoeuvring in the US, highlighting an example where a Republican lobbyist working for the US occupation authority called on the Office of Management and Budget to fund $20bn in new reconstruction money in August 2003.

“To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the president [George Bush],” Tom Korologos, the lobbyist, said, according the report.

“[Bush’s] election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt,” the draft quoted Korologos as saying.

The Bush administration supported Korologos’ request and the US congress allocated the money later that year.

The draft report is based on about 500 interviews and more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations undertaken in Iraq over several years.

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