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POLITICS-US: Anti-Obama Echo Chamber in Full Swing

August 21, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz | Inter Press Service


OAKLAND, California, Aug 20 – Right-wing groups are stepping up their campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with two new books on the best-seller lists, another on the verge of publication, and a full-length documentary that will premiere during the party conventions later this month.

Jerome Corsi, a veteran of the 2004 Swiftboating campaign that helped sink the candidacy of the Democratic Party’s John Kerry, had his book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” debut at No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list on Sunday. Aug. 17 — although the list’s editors noted that some bookstores have reported receiving bulk orders.

“The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate” by David Freddoso is currently ranked at number five. And another Obama-bashing tome, expected sometime next month, is tentatively titled “Obama Unmasked,” and is written by Floyd Brown — the creator of 1988’s infamous Willie Horton television advertisement that helped put the kybosh on the presidential hopes of the Democrat’s Michael Dukakis.

Now, on Aug. 24, the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver, “Hype: The Obama Effect” — a full-length documentary that attacks everything about the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee — will be premiering at the Regal Pavilions 15 in the host city. The free showing is being sponsored by Citizens United and Chairman Dick Wadhams of the Colorado Republican Committee.

(The Regal Entertainment Group, which own Regal theaters, is the largest motion picture exhibitor in the world — it operates nearly 20 percent of all indoor screens in the U.S. The chain is owned by Philip Anschutz, an oil magnate, media mogul, and long-time contributor to conservative political causes.)

The film, through interviews with a host of Republican Party supporters, criticises Obama’s political positions, mocks the so-called cult of personality that many critics claim embodies his campaign, casts doubts about his judgment, and questions his character.

“While ‘Hype’ may not generate large box office receipts, it is sure to become another prong in the right-wing attack machine,” Mike Reynolds, a longtime investigative reporter covering politics and religion, told IPS. “[Citizens United head David] Bossie might be hopeful that as the campaign moves forward, some right-wing websites might offer the film as a premium as they have for the books.”

“In order to get regular voters to go see the movie, it will have to garner media buzz on the cable television news networks, like the anti-Obama books have,” Reynolds said. “Looking at both the television advertisement for the film and its five-minute trailer, it’s clear that neither Bossie nor Alan Peterson, the film’s director, have chops; they’re no Michael Moore.”

During the 2004 presidential campaign, one of the earliest attacks against the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Senator John Kerry — predating by several months the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mega-attack on the candidate’s military record — was spearheaded by Floyd Brown’s group, Citizens United, a long-time conservative enterprise.

The ad became one of George W. Bush’s major themes: Based on Mastercard’s famous ad campaign, the spot cataloged the cost of Kerry’s expensive taste in clothes and his ownership of properties worth millions of dollars. It ended with “Another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he’s a man of the people? Priceless.”

The goal of the Citizens United advertisement was to make Kerry look like an elitist; a premise that Bush advisor Karl Rove and the campaign of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has revived again this year. These days, in addition to the Obama-is-an-elitist message, he is also being defined by McCain as an empty suit — a “celebrity” who is out of touch with regular folks.

In June of this year, Rove — now a roving right-wing commentator with the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media platforms — pulled the snob card from the deck. Speaking at a country club, Rove likened Obama, to “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

In other words, Obama, the first African American to run for the presidency, is oddly enough being tagged as an elitist who is out of step with the U.S. public.

Bossie, who co-produced “Hype: The Obama Effect”, which was directed and written by Alan Peterson — who also directed “Fahrenhype 9/11,” a response to Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 911” — recognises that the film will likely have a very limited — if any — run in theaters and he intends to market it via mail-order sales on the Citizen United website, and through other DVD outlets.

“Bossie is a political hatchet man whose career is based on smears and attacking Democrats,” John Stauber, the executive director of the Centre for Media and Democracy, told IPS. “His Obama documentary will provide plenty of footage for use on the internet and in commercials, but I doubt that in and of itself that “Hype” will make much difference in the campaign.”

“I assume that the overall theme of Obama as ‘socialist agent disguised as cult hero’ must be resonating in the political marketing surveys of the Bossie-types and the McCain operatives, or they would switch to something more effective,” Stauber added.

“Going back to the days when he was unremitting in his attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bossie’s forte has never been accuracy,” Reynolds said. “It has been bloodletting. And in that regard, if ‘Hype’ gets any traction at all, it is likely to be viewed as the political counterpart of [the horror movie franchise] Saw V, due to be released just before the election.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

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In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe

August 20, 2008
This outdated military alliance is playing with fire in Russia. In Pakistan and Afghanistan it is playing with dynamite

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west’s postwar resistance to the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats’ Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday’s Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia’s frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia’s defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato’s intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that “the age of spheres of influence is over”. In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush’s neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?

The US’s two greatest bugbears at present, Russia and Iran, both have grounds for feeling encircled by hostile forces. However badly they behave, they too are vulnerable to the politics of irrational fear. Both countries display the rudiments of democratic activity, with paranoia playing on pluralism.

The glib response of Nato’s leaders has been hawkish, that the only thing “these people” understand is tough talk and big sticks. But that just apes Russia’s attitude towards Georgia and Ukraine, which at least Russia has the power to enforce.

The west is not threatened by Russia. Turning its border into a zone of bluff and counter-bluff, so Nato can boast 10 extra flags outside its headquarters, has proved destabilising and provocative. Intelligence, like morality, is supposedly the tribute power should pay to reason. Russia is boorish and belligerent enough already. Why encourage it?

With Russia, Nato is playing with fire. In Afghanistan/Pakistan – which should always be yoked together – it is playing with dynamite. Here Osama bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld must be laughing in unison: the former because Nato’s conduct of the war against the Taliban has been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida in Pakistan; the latter because everything he said about nation-building has proved true. “Get in fast and get out fast” was his strategy, and he was right.

The fall of Pervez Musharraf might be good news for Pakistan’s democrats. It is dreadful news for Nato’s proconsuls in their fortified enclaves in Kabul. The likelihood of political turbulence in Pakistan can only increase the hold that pro-Taliban tribes have over the long frontier with Afghanistan and, with it, the certainty of an escalating war.

Nato’s performance here has been dreadful. A half-hearted peacekeeper, it had displayed divided counsels, divided leadership and divided rules of engagement. It has reflected the view of the US general in Kosovo, Wesley Clark, that US units should never again be placed under international command. International command means no command at all.

A Pentagon report by General Barry McCaffrey, revealed last week, criticises the lack of command unity in Kabul. “Afghanistan is in misery,” it says. “A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the Afghan theatre of operation does not exist.”

There is said to be a plan for a 12,000-strong reinforcement of US troops to stage a Baghdad-style “surge”, outside the remit of Nato. The idea that the rural Taliban might be susceptible to the same handling as Iraq’s urban militias may be senseless, but is on the cards. Such a surge would mean three rival armies – Afghan, Nato and American – roaming this troubled land, a gift to any enemy.

The newly triumphant coalition in Islamabad must long for the days when its Afghan backyard was quiet. The Taliban regime was funded by opium and the Saudis, and of no strategic (as opposed to terrorist) concern to the west. There were no US Predators bombing villages, no CIA phone-tapping, no suborned Pakistan intelligence officers, no outside interference. Pakistan’s sphere of influence might not be to every taste, but it was roughly stable.

We shall now have the world’s sixth largest country, and with an active nuclear arsenal, in internal turmoil because of a doomed Nato adventure on its border. Taliban units are operating freely throughout the south and east of Afghanistan and within miles of the capital, Kabul, flatly contradicting the mendacious spin of Nato spokesmen over the past two years.

Western governments seem never to learn. Counter-insurgency wars of this sort never work if they become drawn out. At best they leave broken, corrupted, failed states such as Lebanon and Kosovo – and, soon, Iraq. At worst they mean defeat. If ever America were walking into another Vietnam, it is now in Afghanistan, fast replacing Iraq as the mecca for every anti-western fanatic on earth.

Peace in Afghanistan might not matter over much. But its absence will grossly destabilise Pakistan, and that matters greatly. Is this to be another feather in Nato’s cap?

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

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Geopolitical Chess: Background to a Mini-war in the Caucasus

August 16, 2008

Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 239, Aug. 15, 2009

The world has been witness this month to a mini-war in the Caucasus, and the rhetoric has been passionate, if largely irrelevant. Geopolitics is a gigantic series of two-player chess games, in which the players seek positional advantage. In these games, it is crucial to know the current rules that govern the moves. Knights are not allowed to move diagonally.

From 1945 to 1989, the principal chess game was that between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was called the Cold War, and the basic rules were called metaphorically “Yalta.” The most important rule concerned a line that divided Europe into two zones of influence. It was called by Winston Churchill the “Iron Curtain” and ran from Stettin to Trieste. The rule was that, no matter how much turmoil was instigated in Europe by the pawns, there was to be no actual warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. And at the end of each instance of turmoil, the pieces were to be returned to where they were at the outset. This rule was observed meticulously right up to the collapse of the Communisms in 1989, which was most notably marked by the destruction of the Berlin wall.

It is perfectly true, as everyone observed at the time, that the Yalta rules were abrogated in 1989 and that the game between the United States and (as of 1991) Russia had changed radically. The major problem since then is that the United States misunderstood the new rules of the game. It proclaimed itself, and was proclaimed by many others, the lone superpower. In terms of chess rules, this was interpreted to mean that the United States was free to move about the chessboard as it saw fit, and in particular to transfer former Soviet pawns to its sphere of influence. Under Clinton, and even more spectacularly under George W. Bush, the United States proceeded to play the game this way.

There was only one problem with this: The United States was not the lone superpower; it was no longer even a superpower at all. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States had been demoted from being one of two superpowers to being one strong state in a truly multilateral distribution of real power in the interstate system. Many large countries were now able to play their own chess games without clearing their moves with one of the two erstwhile superpowers. And they began to do so.

Two major geopolitical decisions were made in the Clinton years. First, the United States pushed hard, and more or less successfully, for the incorporation of erstwhile Soviet satellites into NATO membership. These countries were themselves anxious to join, even though the key western European countries – Germany and France – were somewhat reluctant to go down this path. They saw the U.S. maneuver as one aimed in part at them, seeking to limit their newly-acquired freedom of geopolitical action.

The second key U.S. decision was to become an active player in the boundary realignments within the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This culminated in a decision to sanction, and enforce with their troops, the de facto secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

Russia, even under Yeltsin, was quite unhappy about both these U.S. actions. However, the political and economic disarray of Russia during the Yeltsin years was such that the most it could do was complain, somewhat feebly it should be added.

The coming to power of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin was more or less simultaneous. Bush decided to push the lone superpower tactics (the United States can move its pieces as it alone decides) much further than had Clinton. First, Bush in 2001 withdrew from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Then he announced that the United States would not move to ratify two new treaties signed in the Clinton years: the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the agreed changes in the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty. Then Bush announced that the United States would move forward with its National Missile Defense system.

And of course, Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. As part of this engagement, the United States sought and obtained rights to military bases and overflight rights in the Central Asian republics that formerly were part of the Soviet Union. In addition, the United States promoted the construction of pipelines for Central Asian and Caucasian oil and natural gas that would bypass Russia. And finally, the United States entered into an agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to establish missile defense sites, ostensibly to guard against Iranian missiles. Russia, however, regarded them as aimed at her.

Putin decided to push back much more effectually than Yeltsin. As a prudent player, however, he moved first to strengthen his home base – restoring effective central authority and reinvigorating the Russian military. At this point, the tides in the world-economy changed, and Russia suddenly became a wealthy and powerful controller not only of oil production but of the natural gas so needed by western European countries.

Putin thereupon began to act. He entered into treaty relationships with China. He maintained close relations with Iran. He began to push the United States out of its Central Asian bases. And he took a very firm stand on the further extension of NATO to two key zones – Ukraine and Georgia.

The breakup of the Soviet Union had led to ethnic secessionist movements in many former republics, including Georgia. When Georgia in 1990 sought to end the autonomous status of its non-Georgian ethnic zones, they promptly proclaimed themselves independent states. They were recognized by no one but Russia guaranteed their de facto autonomy.

The immediate spurs to the current mini-war were twofold. In February, Kosovo formally transformed its de facto autonomy to de jure independence. Its move was supported by and recognized by the United States and many western European countries. Russia warned at the time that the logic of this move applied equally to the de facto secessions in the former Soviet republics. In Georgia, Russia moved immediately, for the first time, to recognize South Ossetian de jure independence in direct response to that of Kosovo.

And in April this year, the United States proposed at the NATO meeting that Georgia and Ukraine be welcomed into a so-called Membership Action Plan. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all opposed this action, saying it would provoke Russia.

Georgia’s neoliberal and strongly pro-American president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was now desperate. He saw the reassertion of Georgian authority in South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) receding forever. So, he chose a moment of Russian inattention (Putin at the Olympics, Medvedev on vacation) to invade South Ossetia. Of course, the puny South Ossetian military collapsed completely. Saakashvili expected that he would be forcing the hand of the United States (and indeed of Germany and France as well).

Instead, he got an immediate Russian military response, overwhelming the small Georgian army. What he got from George W. Bush was rhetoric. What, after all, could Bush do? The United States was not a superpower. Its armed forces were tied down in two losing wars in the Middle East. And, most important of all, the United States needed Russia far more than Russia needed the United States. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, pointedly noted in an op-ed in the Financial Times that Russia was a “partner with the west on…the Middle East, Iran and North Korea.”

As for western Europe, Russia essentially controls its gas supplies. It is no accident that it was President Sarkozy of France, not Condoleezza Rice, who negotiated the truce between Georgia and Russia. The truce contained two essential concessions by Georgia. Georgia committed itself to no further use of force in South Ossetia, and the agreement contained no reference to Georgian territorial integrity.

So, Russia emerged far stronger than before. Saakashvili had bet everything he has and was now geopolitically bankrupt. And, as an ironic footnote, Georgia, one of the last U.S. allies in the coalition in Iraq, withdrew all its 2000 troops from Iraq. These troops had been playing a crucial role in Shi’a areas, and would now have to be replaced by U.S. troops, which will have to be withdrawn from other areas.

If one plays geopolitical chess, it is best to know the rules, or one gets out-maneuvered.

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Putin’s war enablers: Bush and Cheney

August 15, 2008

Russia’s escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration’s long assault on the international rule of law.

By Juan Cole | Salon.com, August 14, 2008

Pages 1 2

George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Vladimir Putin (right) of Russia and George W. Bush arrive at a summit on the Black Sea, April 5, 2008.

The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, “It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose [Georgia’s] duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.” By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

While U.S. leaders have tended to back Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, there are two sides to every dispute, and in the ethnically diverse Caucasus it may be more like a hundred sides. Abkhazia and Ossetia are claimed by Georgia, but they have their own distinctive languages, cultures and national aspirations. Both fought for independence in the early 1990s, without success, though neither was Georgia able to assert its full sovereignty over them, accepting Russian mediation and peacekeeping troops.

The separatist leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia now speak of Saakashvili in terms reminiscent of the way separatists in Darfur speak of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Sergei Bagapsh of Abkhazia and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia have come out against conducting any further talks with Georgia, calling instead for Saakashvili to be tried for war crimes. Kokoity told Interfax, “There can be no talks with the organizers of genocide.” The Russian press is full of talk of putting Saakashvili on trial for ordering attacks on Ossetian civilians.

Continued . . .

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This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression

August 14, 2008

War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It’s likely to be a taste of things to come

Seumas Milne

The Guardian, Thursday August 14 2008

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”. George Bush denounced Russia for having “invaded a sovereign neighbouring state” and threatening “a democratic government”. Such an action, he insisted, “is unacceptable in the 21st century”.

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied – along with Georgia, as luck would have it – the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?

You’d be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to “restore constitutional order” – in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: “I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children,” one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain’s minister for Europe, called a “small beautiful democracy”. Well it’s certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a “Rose revolution”. Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an “increasingly authoritarian” government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. “Democratic” simply seems to mean “pro-western” in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia – as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia – is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia’s control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo – whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia’s forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq – hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili’s links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration’s wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush’s father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

Over the past decade, Nato’s relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia’s borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why Saakashvili launched last week’s attack and whether he was given any encouragement by his friends in Washington.

If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And despite Bush’s attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper’s independence is respected – best protected by opting for neutrality – that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, this week’s conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. That would be even more obvious in the case of Ukraine – which yesterday gave a warning of the potential for future confrontation when its pro-western president threatened to restrict the movement of Russian ships in and out of their Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great power conflict returns, South Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of things to come.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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Why McCain May Well Win

August 9, 2008

By Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, August 6, 2008

It might seem unlikely that the United States would elect John McCain to succeed George W. Bush when that would ensure continuation of many unpopular Bush policies: an ill-defined war with the Muslim world, right-wing consolidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, a drill-oriented energy strategy, tax cuts creating massive federal deficits, etc., etc.

But there are reasons – beyond understandable concerns about Barack Obama’s limited experience – that make a McCain victory possible, indeed maybe probable.

Here is one of the big ones: The U.S. news media is as bad as ever, arguably worse.

On Monday, Obama gave a detail-rich speech on how he would address the energy crisis, which is a major point of concern among Americans. From ideas for energy innovation to retrofitting the U.S. auto industry to conservation steps to limited new offshore drilling, Obama did what he is often accused of not doing, fleshing out his soaring rhetoric.

McCain responded with a harsh critique of Obama’s calls for more conservation, claiming that Obama wants to solve the energy crisis by having people inflate their tires. McCain’s campaign even passed out a tire gauge marked as Obama’s energy plan.

For his part, McCain made clear he wanted to drill for more oil wherever it could be found and to build many more nuclear power plants.

These competing plans offered a chance for the evening news to address an issue of substance that is high on the voters’ agenda. Instead, NBC News anchor Brian Williams devoted 30 seconds to the dueling energy speeches, without any details and with the witty opening line that Obama was “refining” his energy plan.

So, instead of dealing with a serious issue in a serious way, NBC News ignored the substance and went for a clever slight against Obama, hitting his political maneuvering in his softened opposition to more offshore drilling.

Williams’s quip fit with one of the press corps’ favorite campaign narratives, Obama’s flip-flopping. But the coverage ignored far more important elements of the story, such as the feasibility of Obama’s vow that “we must end the age of oil in our time” or the wisdom of McCain’s emphasis on drilling – and nuking – the nation out of its energy mess.

And, as for flip-flops, McCain’s dramatic repositioning of himself as an anti-environmentalist – after years of being one of the green movement’s favorite Republicans – represents a far more significant change than Obama’s modest waffling on offshore oil.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation’s premier environmental organizations, has repudiated McCain and now is running ads attacking his energy plan. But McCain’s flip-flops – even complete reversals – remain an underplayed part of the campaign story. They just don’t fit the narrative of maverick John McCain on the “Straight Talk Express.”

Loving the ‘Surge’

The major U.S. news media has been equally superficial in dealing with the Iraq War and the “war on terror.” It is now a fully enshrined conventional wisdom that George W. Bush’s troop “surge” was a huge success and vindicates McCain’s early support for it.

On Obama’s overseas trip, it became de rigueur for each interviewer to pound him for the first 10 or 15 minutes with demands that he accept the accepted wisdom about the “surge” and admit that he was wrong and McCain was right.

Continued . . .

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White House ‘buried British intelligence on Iraq WMDs’

August 6, 2008

The Times, August 6, 2008

George W Bush and Tony Blair

(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Tony Blair and George Bush both saw intelligence contradicting the rationale for invading Iraq, a new book claims

Tim Reid in Washington and Sam Coates in London

MI6 told Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq that a high-placed Iraqi source said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was passed to the US but was buried by the White House, according to a new book.

The book claimed that the former Prime Minister sent a top British spy to the Middle East in 2003 — three months before the invasion — to dig up enough intelligence to avoid war but that President Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, dismissed any claims or possible evidence that would stop military action.

In The Way of the World, the Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind also claimed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated, handwritten letter purportedly from the head of Iraqi Intelligence to Saddam. The letter, which came to light nine months after the invasion, was meant to demonstrate a link between the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda.

The forgery, adamantly denied by the White House, was passed to a British journalist in Baghdad and written about as if genuine by The Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003. The article received significant attention in the US and provided the White House with a new rationale for the invasion, Suskind claimed. The White House called the allegation absurd.

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Suskind said that at the beginning of 2003 MI6 sent one of its top agents, Michael Shipster, to the region. Mr Shipster held secret meetings in Jordan with Tahir Jalil Habbush, the head of Iraqi Intelligence. The meetings were confirmed by Nigel Inkster, former assistant director of MI6.

Mr Inkster also confirmed that Mr Shipster was told by Mr Habbush that there were no illicit weapons in Iraq. Mr Inkster refused to comment last night.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British Intelligence, was also interviewed by Suskind. The author said that Sir Richard confirmed the Shipster meetings and report. He added that he asked why Mr Blair had not acted on the intelligence.

Sir Richard was quoted as saying that the mission was an eleventh-hour “attempt to try, as it were, I’d say, to diffuse \ the whole situation”. He added: “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”

Suskind wrote that Sir Richard flew to Washington in February 2003 to present the Habbush report to George Tenet, then the Director of the CIA. The report stated that according to Mr Habbush, Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in 1991 — the same year that he destroyed his chemical weapons programme — and ended his biological weapons programme in 1996. These assertions turned out to be true.

Mr Tenet briefed Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice, at the time his National Security Adviser.

Suskind wrote: “The White House then buried the Habbush report. They instructed the British that they were no longer interested in keeping the channel open.”

Rob Richer, a former CIA officer in the Near East division, told Suskind: “The Brits wanted to avoid war — which was what was driving them. Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office.”

Mr Habbush was put on the White House’s list of most-wanted Iraqis but according to Suskind he was paid by the CIA in October 2003 to write the forged letter to Saddam, dated July 1, 2001, saying that the putative September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq. This was the letter publicised in The Sunday Telegraph.

Of the forgery allegation, Mr Tenet said: “There was no such order from the White House to me or, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from the CIA ever involved in any such effort.” Of Mr Habbush, Mr Tenet said that the claims in the book were a complete fabrication. He said that Mr Habbush had “failed to persuade” the British that he had “anything new to offer by way of intelligence”.

Delving deep

— Ron Suskind was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000

— His serialised stories, following a religious student from a blighted inner-city school to the Ivy League Brown University, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995

— His 2004 book The Price of Loyalty penetrated the inner sanctum of the Bush Administration

— Excepts of his last book, The One Percent Doctrine, were published last month in Time magazine

Source: www.ronsuskind.com

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Correspondence exchanged with the International Criminal Court in The Hague

August 1, 2008
By Robert Thompson | Axis of Logic, July 31, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page

To Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court

Dear Mr Moreno-Ocampo,

For over fifty years I have been a lawyer (now in retirement), and during that time I have had practical hands-on experience of international law at the highest level and criminal law (among other disciplines) at all levels. My experience has also caused me in many fields to work under two very different judicial systems, namely that in operation in England and Wales and that applied in France.

I was greatly upset to hear on the radio that you had decided to seek an arrest warrant against Mr Omar el-Basheer, the current President of Sudan, for his alleged personal responsibility for crimes committed in Darfour, but that you had no desire to initiate proceedings against either Mr George Walker Bush, the current President of the United States of America, or Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for their admitted personal responsibility for crimes affecting Iraq.

To an experienced lawyer such as I am this seems an extraordinary attitude on your part, since it would seem normal to act first in cases where the accused person admits (and even boasts of) extremely serious breaches of the Nuremberg Principles, as well as provisions of certain Geneva Conventions.

It also seems to me that there is a difference of scale in the offences which either apply or could apply to the facts. The thousands of victims of repression in Darfour are much fewer in number than the victims of the actions of Mr Bush and Mr Blair (and many of those to whom they gave orders) when they decided to wage war against the people of Iraq and subsequently to occupy that country.

It seems to me that you, as Chief Prosecutor at the I.C.C., have an absolute duty to pursue those who admit that they have acted in ways which are so seriously in breach of international criminal law.

If you take the trouble to re-read the Nuremberg Principles, you will find in Principle VI extremely clear definitions of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, and Principle VII adds that complicity in any one or more of these crimes set out in Principle VI is also a crime under international law.

If you consider these simply definitions, it seems impossible for you not to draw the conclusion that these two men (and many of their advisers and servants) are clearly guilty of Crimes against Peace and also appear to have been complicit in both War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.

A summary of these three forms of criminality under Principle VI can be made as follows:

a) Crimes against Peace, in that they planned, prepared, initiated and waged a war of aggression against Iraq in direct violation of the international agreement set out in clearly worded United Nations Security Council Resolutions;

b) War Crimes, in that they were party to the ill-treatment and deportation of civilians, and prisoners of war, such as those who were sent to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and also in the destruction of cities, towns and villages in Iraq (there have also been the use of torture on prisoners);

c) Crimes against Humanity, in that they were involved in the murder and extermination of civilians (as in Fallujah) and the deportation of civilians to Guantanamo Bay.

Under Principle VII things look even worse for both men, since they have been complicit in many crimes committed in many countries including those already mentioned.

I have limited myself in this letter to specific crimes committed in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, but similar points can be made concerning both men (and their advisers and servants) regarding other lands, particularly the Lebanon and Palestine, under Principle VII, for having provided the aggressors with vast quantities of arms knowing full well that they would be used for unjustified aggression.

The obvious question is therefore why you do not immediately seek arrest warrants against Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (and some of the others suggested above). The fact that the United States of America refuses to recognise the I.C.C. should not prevent your so doing, since these people could be arrested if and when they might dare to enter any country which does recognise the Court.

I would be very happy to hear from you, but I do not intend holding my breath while waiting, since your decision to act against Mr Omar el-Basheer seems to be a sign both of shocking partiality against such a man while failing to act against much worse offenders and of an unwillingness to act against persons for the sole reason that they are powerful.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Thompson

Avocat Honoraire au Barreau de Boulogne-sur-Mer

22 rue de l’Eglise

62990 RIMBOVAL

FRANCE

-o-o-o-

Reply received:

Our reference: OTP-CR-302/08

The Hague, 28 July 2008

Dear Sir, Madam,

The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court acknowledges receipt of your documents/letter.

This communication has been duly entered in the Correspondence Register of the Office. We will give consideration to this communication, as appropriate, in accordance with the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

As soon as a decision is reached, we will inform you, in writing, and provide you with reasons for this decision.

Yours sincerely,

Head of Information & Evidence Unit

Office of the Prosecutor

-o-o-o-

Further letter from Robert Thompson:

Rimboval, 31st July 2008

Your reference : OTP-CR-302/08

Dear Sirs,

I thank you for your letter of 28th July 2008, and note the situation, and I await with interest receiving the decision which will be taken on the subject of the crimes committed by the person whom I named – i.e. Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair – under the terms of Principles VI and VII of the Nuremberg Principles.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Thompson

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U.S. mercenaries in Iraq

July 9, 2008

Jeremy Scahill | Socialist Worker, July 9, 2008

Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist and author of the award-winning book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, spoke at Socialism 2008 on the spread of privatized war corporations and the struggle against them.

Blackwater's heavily armed security forces

I GAVE a talk the other day in San Francisco in front of an audience primarily of military people. I was invited by the Marines’ Memorial Association of San Francisco, and I was actually introduced by Major Gen. Mike Myatt, who was one of the commanders of the 1991 Gulf War.

This was hardly an antiwar crowd, but as an indication of how serious the problem of mercenaries and private forces in Iraq has become, many from within the established military are now starting to speak out about it.

So I was honored to be in a room full of people, regardless of their perspective on the war, who take this issue seriously enough to do something about it–who realize that this is an incredible problem. We didn’t share the same global outlook and certainly not the same opinion about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but on this issue, we’re hearing more and more voices coming from the established military.

Series: From Socialism 2008

Some 1,000 people from across the U.S. gathered for a weekend of left politics and discussion at the Socialism 2008 conference on June 19-22 in Chicago. SocialistWorker.org will be publishing some of the presentations from the weekend, so stay tuned for more.

I’m going to spend time talking about what’s at stake not just with mercenaries in Iraq, but also with the election. But I want to begin by telling a story that makes up part of a substantial investigation I did for the update of my book Blackwater. I have over 110 new pages of material in this book, and I also went through and substantially updated it based on some of the important investigations that have been conducted and are ongoing into Blackwater’s activity.

I open the book with a new investigation of an incident that I know everyone in this room remembers well–the Nisour Squre shootings last September. What I want to do right now is begin by giving you a narrative overview of what exactly happened there–what we understand from eyewitness testimony and from investigations that have been done. Because it really is a horrifying story. I think it’s important not just that we know that Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians, but the nature of that crime, and what the response of the Bush administration was after it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

ON THAT morning of September 16, 2007, a young 20-year-old Iraqi medical student, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed, was with his mother and father. Ahmed was driving; his mother Mohassin was in the passenger seat. They dropped off his father at the local hospital where he worked, and then they went to go run some errands.

What else to read

Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army climbed into the New York Times best-seller list on its release. Now the book has been republished in paperback, with indispensable additional materials.

Scahill documents Blackwater’s latest venture, a private spy company run by the shadowy J. Cofer Black, in “Blackwater’s Private Spies” in the Nation. Scahill’s “Blackwater: From the Nisour Square Massacre to the Future of the Mercenary Industry” is an extended interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

For more on the rise of the mercenaries, see “Blackwater’s Heart of Darkness” in the International Socialist Review, an article based on an earlier speech by Scahill.

Among the errands that they were running was dropping off college applications for Ahmed’s younger sister. This was an extraordinary family. They very much had medicine in their DNA; they were a family of doctors. They had an opportunity to leave Iraq when the U.S. invasion was imminent, but they ultimately decided as a family that they were going to stay in their country, because they felt that more than ever in the history of their nation, the country was going to need doctors because of the incredible violence and bloodshed that was going to be unleashed. So they stayed in Iraq.

Ahmed and his mother were driving, and they pulled into an area of Baghdad known as the Monsour district. I had been there many times in my travels to Iraq. It used to be an upscale section of the city, where there were markets and cafes and restaurants. Now it’s a hollow shell of its former self.

Continued . . .

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