Posts Tagged ‘Obama’

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Bush’s Follies Will Destroy Obama If He Lets Them

November 28, 2008
Truthdig, Nov 25, 2008
USAF / Staff Sgt. Samuel Rogers

By William Pfaff

One might think that if Barack Obama believes he can make a success of his new administration by largely reconstituting the Clinton administration, Hillary Clinton included, he should know better than to take on the reckless ambitions and commitments of the George W. Bush administration as well: the government that gave America the Mideast and Asian crises, blunders and humiliations of the past 6 1/2 years.

The world has witnessed a futile, destructive and illegal American invasion of Iraq, a war conducted on false pretenses, supposedly against terrorists, accompanied by worldwide actions that have made American policy in Bush’s “global war on terror” seem to many Muslims an attack on Islamic society itself.

Obama is now taking on the quasi-impossible tasks of bringing to a successful and responsible conclusion the Bush government’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as what shows signs of becoming another military intervention of grave and unforeseeable consequences in Pakistan. He is doing so without challenging the assumptions and goals of Bush administration policy.

It has been the mindset of the Bush administration—and, unfortunately, of much of the neoconservative-influenced foreign policy establishment in Washington—that international society’s problems are reducible to wars that American armies will win. They are wrong on both counts. But some still argue that this is the way to a better and more democratic world.

Obama has no choice but to accept responsibility for these American crises. But why should he accept them on the distorted and even hysterical terms by which the Bush administration has defined world affairs since 2001?

Iraq has been a victim of the United States. Washington had no legal or moral justification for invading the country and destroying its infrastructure, killing an uncounted number of Iraqis and displacing half a million or more to ruined lives while setting off the sectarian conflicts that have wracked the country since 2003.

There is a heavy American responsibility to do no more harm, however well-intentioned. The present volatile situation in the country is for the moment a largely political shoving match between the divided and possibly ephemeral Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his rivals, who include the Shiite radicals of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Sunni, and largely ex-Baathist, Awakening Movement, sponsored by the U.S. Army to defend Sunni tribal regions against the foreigners of the fundamentalist al-Qaida. In addition, are the two Kurdish movements that together control, and plan to make independent and permanent, a Kurdistan nation incorporating—if they have their way—the oil-rich Kirkuk region.

One can make the political—and moral—argument that as the American invasion is responsible for the Iraqi upheaval, Washington should somehow settle it. The answer is that it’s impossible for Americans to do so. The U.S. cannot do it by continued military occupation and intervention in the country’s affairs.

Only the Iraqis themselves can settle this, and doing so may entail even more religious and ethnic struggle. The neighboring Shiite great power, Iran, will play its cards in the country. The Saudis will play theirs. Israel will do everything in its power to prevent an American withdrawal. All of this will probably add still more tragedies to those of the last six years, but at least the U.S. responsibility will have become only indirect, which is bad enough.

Barack Obama started off his presidential campaign by saying that he would get American troops out of Iraq by mid-2010. That was a strong, simple position that, if resolutely carried out, would make it clear to the Iraqis what they have to do to save themselves, and how long they have in which to do it.

Since the early campaign, the president-elect has been forced to qualify his position, weaken it, blur it, say that actually many U.S. troops probably will stay on, the dates may change, American involvement will continue, and so on. He has been forced back toward the Washington consensus opinion, the centrist and “responsible” position, close to the Bush opinion.

Nearly everyone is against his sticking to his original policy: The Iraq factions all plan to exploit American ambiguities to strengthen their own positions and maneuver the American command to favor them. The Kurds want time to make their proto-Kurdistan even more impregnable (while encouraging their reluctance to deal with Turkish and Iranian hostility to a sovereign Kurdistan, as well as deal realistically with their fellow Iraqis).

In Washington, the Pentagon is against withdrawal on Obama’s terms. It still wants permanent bases in Iraq. It claims Obama’s timetable is logistically impossible. The Republicans will shout “treason” and “betrayal.” American oil companies and the corporations that are already part of the occupation, as well as those that have big ambitions for moving into an American-secured Iraq, will demand that the U.S. stay.

All this must be resisted if Obama is to be his own man. He has to rid himself of George Bush’s folly. He must make Iraq truly independent. If he doesn’t, it could destroy his administration.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services Inc.

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Quagmire, Phase 2: The Invasion of Pakistan

September 15, 2008
Truthdig.com, Posted on Sep 11, 2008

By William Pfaff

The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.

An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970, the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al-Qaida bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial “collateral damage.”

George W. Bush has now authorized independent ground assaults on Taliban and al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without consultation with Pakistan authorities. These already have begun.

This follows a period of tension, with some armed clashes, between American and Pakistani military units, the latter defending “Pakistan’s national sovereignty.” Pakistan public opinion seems largely against “America’s war” being fought inside Pakistan.

Washington’s decision was made known just in time for the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that opened the first phase of the “war on terror,” after which “nothing could ever be the same.” We no doubt have now begun phase two.

The eventual outcome of the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970 was Communist overthrow of the American-sponsored military government in that country, followed by genocide. The future consequences in (nuclear-armed) Pakistan await.

There is every reason to think they may include civil protest and disorder in the country, political crisis, a major rise in the strength of Pakistan’s own Islamic fundamentalist movement and, conceivably, a small war between the United States and the Pakistan army, which is the central institution in the country, has a mind of its own and is not a negligible military force.

In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have been complaining for many months that victory over the Taliban was impossible so long as there were secure Taliban bases in Pakistan’s largely inaccessible Tribal Territories.

Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, was told by his American allies to clean the Taliban out of the Territories or the U.S. Army and NATO would do it for him. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made the same threat. John McCain concurred. Musharraf had been looking for a negotiated arrangement with the tribesmen.

Pakistan’s military intelligence services created the Taliban while they were collaborating with the CIA to form the mujahadeen that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Many in the service still support the Taliban as a useful instrument against India, and to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of more dangerous enemies.

Musharraf was forced out of office. The U.S. brought in exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, expected to be cooperative. She was assassinated, presumably by Islamic extremists. Her widower has been elected to take her place and declares himself an enemy of terrorism. However, the United States has already taken the matter into its own hands.

In the Vietnamese case, the American military command held that it could win the war by invading Cambodia to cut the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which supplies and arms for the Viet Cong Communist insurrection were being transported. The argument made was that cutting this route would starve the Viet Cong of supplies.

Initially, the unhappy Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, desperately trying to keep his country out of the Vietnam War, was persuaded to turn a blind eye to U.S. bombing of the trail. A military coup followed in 1970, installing an American puppet general. B-52 saturation bombing ensued, without the desired military effect, but killing many Cambodians.

The joint U.S. and South Vietnamese “incursion” to cut the trail came in April 1970; it simply pushed the supply operations deeper into Cambodia. Richard Nixon said he acted to prove that the United States was not “a second-rate power.” “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

The native Cambodian Khmer Rouge subsequently defeated the American-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Genocide followed, the “killing fields,” on which the United States turned its back, condemning the triumphant Vietnamese Communist government when it later invaded Cambodia to stop the killing.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

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The Anti-Obama Hate-Fest

September 4, 2008

Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, Sept 4, 2008

Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was back at it again, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew – or George W. Bush’s last convention where GOP operatives passed out “Purple Heart Band-Aids” to mock John Kerry’s war wounds.

After a slow start because of Hurricane Gustav, the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, has turned into an anti-Obama hate-fest with a nearly all-white gathering laughing at and mocking the nation’s first African-American presidential nominee of a major party.

However, beyond the pulsating contempt visible on the faces of the GOP delegates, many of the nasty attacks on Obama – as well as the effusive praise for the Republican ticket – were blatantly false, as if testing the depths of American gullibility and bigotry.

In speech after speech, Republicans didn’t so much as tell the Big Lie as they deployed Wholesale Lies.

The Associated Press, which mostly had been recycling the Republican spin about the supposedly “maverick” ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, was so struck by the litany of distortions that the AP produced a special fact-checking article describing how Republicans had “stretched the truth.”

For instance, Palin said about Obama, “it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.”

However, as the AP noted, Obama “worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year.”

Plus, the AP reported, “In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.”

The AP’s fact-checking article noted, too, that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s slap at Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden – that Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States” – was a “whopper.”

The AP wrote that “Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.”

Parallel Reality

The Republican National Convention also acted as if the Republicans had not controlled the White House for the past eight years and the Congress for most of that time.

“We need change, all right,” declared former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, “change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington – throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.”

Beyond this parallel universe of who runs Washington, there was fanciful puffery about the GOP “reformer” ticket – dubbed “maverick squared” – that doesn’t square with reality at all.

For instance, the AP cited Palin’s claim that “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”

The reality, of course, was much different.

As the AP noted. Palin, as  mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, hired a lobbyist and made annual treks to Washington seeking earmarked spending that totaled $27 million, and then as Alaska’s governor for less than two years, she sought nearly $750 million in special federal spending, “by far the largest per-capita request in the nation.”

And as for that $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents, the truth is that Palin enthusiastically supported the project before she reluctantly opposed it, rejecting the “Bridge to Nowhere” only after it had become politically indefensible.

The Los Angeles Times discovered that Sen. McCain had specifically cited several of Palin’s earmarks on his annual list of wasteful pork-barrel spending.

In 2001, for instance, McCain’s list included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla, and in 2002, he criticized $1 million targeted for an emergency communications center that Palin sought but local law enforcement said was redundant and a source of confusion.

Remaking Palin

Now, however, Palin has been transformed into a maverick reformer. McCain’s campaign even cites her experience as an abuser of the earmark process as part of the reason she supposedly understands why it must be scrapped.

McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin said Palin’s successes in getting earmarked funds “was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed.”

Nevertheless, Palin wrote in a newspaper column just this year that “the federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship.” [For more details, see Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2008]

Beyond the GOP’s reality-challenged speeches, there was the startling image of a nearly all-white convention – where only 36 of the 2,380 delegates were black, the smallest number in at least 40 years – rollicking in ridicule and bristling with animosity toward Obama, an African-American.

With their loud chants of “drill, baby, drill” regarding energy policy and boisterous shouts of “USA, USA” about “victory” in Iraq, there was a sense that St. Paul was hosting a convention of American Falangists, rather than that of a modern national party.

The whiff of authoritarianism extended to outside where demonstrators and journalists were swept off the streets in indiscriminate arrests.

What’s less clear about the GOP convention is whether the Republicans are on to something, that perhaps the United States has crossed over into a post-rational society that cares little about facts and reality or serious policy ideas and respectful debate, but rather is a nation moved by anger and ridicule, fear and nationalism.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

August 31, 2008

By MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE | Counterpunch, August 30 / 31, 2008

The Pentagon says “only” five civilians were killed Friday, a week ago, by US aerial bombardment. According to Afghan officials and a United Nations report, 90 Afghan civilians died, 60 of whom were children.

Just days after this carnage, the Democrats, so many dressed in red, white, and blue, opened their convention in Denver. In the wake of the barbarity in Afghanistan and the continued suicide bombings in Iraq, the revelry and flag waving in Colorado seemed inappropriate. Sure, I understand that hope was and is in the air, but I reached for the remote and powered off.

Thursday night, I tuned in to hear a sweet, young voice, pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of American. “With freedom and justice for all.”

Freedom and justice are concepts we can no longer take for granted. They aren’t guaranteed by stars, stripes, and platitudes. The truth is that George and Dick have sucked the life out of our Constitution, aided by Congressional Republicans and Democrats as well as too many among the electorate who are guilty by reason of fear or complacency.

The events of 9/11 sent masses rushing to either purchase or dust off their Bibles and reference scripture for guidance and to to justify “an eye for an eye.” Never mind that we leveled a country with no link to those who used our commercial airplanes as weapons. The attack on our soil provided the neocons the excuse they needed to implement their plan for domination of Earth’s bounties. Add to this the groupies convinced that George Bush was chosen by God to be president at this particular time of crisis. That Bush himself believed this should have been a red-flag warming that the path he demanded we follow would lead us, not to an Eden of security and prosperity but, to a miasma of endless conflict and contempt from most of the world.

The warmongers forgot the song learned in childhood:

“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

The lyrics crawl through my consciousness as war rages on and candidates for the highest office in our land spar in their own war of words for the power prize, which is the authority to declare war. To John Bomb Bomb McCain, war is something about which to joke, promote, and accelerate. He reminds us repeatedly of his years as a tortured prisoner of war. Yet he never mentions the targets whose eyes he didn’t see–all those Vietnamese peasants, men, women, and children, whose bodies he melted. For Barack Obama who opposed the invasion of Iraq but, without fail, has voted to fund it, the prudent foreign policy strategy is to send more troops to the “right” hotspot, Afghanistan. Russia must love this.

Monday is the beginning of the Republican version of Denver. When McCain, who seems to have a “thing” for beauty queens, speaks, we’ll probably hear about that trip he’s going to take to the “gates of hell.” Also, he’ll offer the usual “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” and “if we leave too soon, they’ll follow us home,” and that we “must achieve victory.”

But no one is defining victory, so allow me: Victory is pledging allegiance to peace.

Imagine if we had a candidate who said:

So much of the history of our country has been sanitized. The truth is that we have battled unnecessarily, illegally, immorally. We have sent our sons and daughters to die, to return maimed, to sustain traumatic brain injuries and post traumatic stress disorder while destroying the lives of those we call the enemy, the other. We have invaded for resources that we call our “interests” and for superior positioning. Just to show we can. Just to show our might. Not to defend ourselves. I say no more. Not on my watch. As your president, I pledge allegiance to the people. I pledge allegiance to peace.

Actually, we do have aspirants who have said as much. Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney certainly are transformational choices. Bob Barr, the Libertarian, gets it, too, when he says that war “should be the last rather than the first resort.” But our corporate media give them little credibility and even less airtime.

So, we wait. Some wave their flags and hope while others feel despair and shame at what continues to be done in our names.

Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She’s written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she’s a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,’05, she has been writing political articles. She can be reached at: Missybeat@aol.com

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President Obama Up Against the Middle East “Berlin Wall”

August 7, 2008

Robert Weitzel, August 6, 2008

“People of the world — look at Berlin, where a wall came down . . . and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one” -Barak Obama–

On July 24, Barak Obama stood where a 96-mile-long wall of barbed wire and concrete once separated the ideologies and lives of East and West Berlin. He told a crowd of 200,000 that “history reminds us that walls can be torn down” and that the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us one from another.”

He reminded the crowd that sixty years ago this summer, the Soviet Union “cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin. That [was] when . . . the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.”

American pilots nicknamed the rescue “Operation Vittles.” History knows it as the Berlin Airlift.

For the fifteen months of Operation Vittles, American C-47 and British Avro York cargo planes flew over the wall separating East and West Berlin 278,228 times, flying 92 million miles and delivering over 2,325,000 tons of food and vital supplies.

The Allies literally “flew to the sun” to save two million people.

The day before his Berlin speech, Obama stood at the 187-foot-long Western Wall that flanks the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. This wall is the closest anyone can get to the “Even ha-shetiya” (Foundation Stone), the holiest spot in Judaism and the biblical justification for the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

His presence at the wall so soon after his genuflection at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington D.C. in June assured the Israelis that their “security” would remain the number one priority of U.S. Middle East Policy.

As a C-47 flies, Obama was standing less than two miles from the 400-mile-long wall of concrete and fear and hate that divides a land and imprisons hope and makes a mockery of the democratic pretensions of Israel. On the Israeli side it is a landscaped separation barrier. On the Palestinian side it is a bleak apartheid wall. Neither barrier nor wall was mentioned by Obama . . .either day.

The walls surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have turned these areas into open-air prisons. At the whim of the Israeli government or commanding officer or private soldier, entry/exit points are closed for hours, days, weeks or months.

Palestinians seeking life-saving medical attention are denied passage to hospitals on the landscaped side. Children are born just to die in the scorched dust while their mothers wait for permission to pass—mothers die as well. Workers are denied access to jobs, farmers to fields and students to school. A season’s worth of harvest rots in trucks broiling in the hot sun. Food, medical supplies, replacement parts for a deteriorating infrastructure and the stuff of daily commerce are permitted through in a trickle much too small to sustain the nearly four million people held beyond the reach of humanity’s conscience.

Fully eighty percent of people in Gaza live on less than two dollars a day and depend on food aid for their day-to-day survival. Many parents can provide only one meal a day for themselves and their children.

Dov Weisglas, a senior Israeli government advisor, was candid, if not boastful, regarding Israel’s unconscionable policy of cutting off food and supplies to the walled areas, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Anyone with an unblinkered view of the Zionist vision will understand Weisglas to mean, “The idea is to make their lives so intolerable that they lose hope and “choose” to go somewhere . . . anywhere . . . else.”

If ever there was a need for an airlift to breech a wall and succor a desperate people it is now. It is Palestine. Should Barak Obama become the next president of the world’s only superpower he will have an opportunity and the wherewithal to put his well-articulated Berlin vision into action. He will have an opportunity to walk his talk.

Forming a humanitarian “coalition of the willing,” President Obama can order American C-130 Hercules cargo planes, with a payload of 18 tons, to transport supplies the 360 miles from Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey to Israel. Sustaining the West Bank and Gaza Strip for fifteen months will require ferrying five million tons of food and supplies 93 million miles in 258,333 flights.

‘Amaliet Ta’am (Operation Vittles), like the Berlin Airlift, will required a “trip to the sun.” But the “trip” will send a message to Israel that the world is standing as one to demand that they tear down the walls and create a legitimate secular democracy that guarantees the civil and human rights of all its inhabitants regardless of religion or ideology.

Barak Obama is not a disinterested or ill informed or uncaring man. He knows the reality of the Palestinians’ brutally suffocating existence. But he, like all national politicians in America, has had his knees weakened by the realpolitik of Israel’s shadow government on K Street.

Hopefully, if Obama is the man he claims to be, he will change the realpolitik in America and will one day walk with strengthened knees across the sands of a true democracy in Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine . . . or whatever they elect to call it.

_______

Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com

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“Afghanistan: Shoals Ahead for President Obama”

August 4, 2008

I. Wallerstein, Commentary No. 238, August 1, 2008

Obama has founded his campaign and become attractive to the American voters in large part on the basis of his position on the Iraq war. He opposed it publicly since 2002. He has called it a “dumb” war. He voted against the “surge.” He has called for a withdrawal over 16 months of all combat troops. He has refused to agree that it was wrong to oppose the surge.

While doing all that, he has always argued that the United States should do more in Afghanistan. This explicitly includes sending 10,000 more troops as soon as possible. He does not seem to think that the war there is somehow dumb. He does seem to think that the United States can “win” that war – with more troops and with more assistance from NATO. Once president, he may be in for a rude surprise.

Obama would do well to reflect upon the recent interview in Le Monde given by Gérard Chaliand. Chaliand is a leading geostrategist, specializing in so-called irregular wars. He knows Afghanistan exceedingly well, having been in and out of there over the last thirty years. He spent much time with the mujahidin during their struggle against Soviet troops in the 1980s. He currently spends several months a year in Kabul at the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, of which he was one of the founders.

He is very clear on the military situation. “Victory is impossible in Afghanistan….Today, one must try to negotiate. There is no other solution.” Why? Because the Taliban control the local powers throughout the east and south of the country, where Pashtun populations prevail. Doubling the number of Western troops, doubling the projected size of the government’s army, and spending far more than the present 10% of outside aid for economic development might change the situation. But Chaliand doubts, and so do I, that this is politically likely for the United States and the NATO countries. The German Foreign Minister has already warned Obama not to press Germany for more troops to fight the Taliban. It is not that the Taliban can win either, says Chaliand. Rather there is a “military impasse.” The Taliban, who are geopolitically astute, are patiently waiting until the West “gets tired of a war that drags on.”

To see how the United States has got itself into this cul-de-sac, we have to go back a little bit into history. Since the nineteenth century, Afghanistan has been the focal point of the “great game” between Russia and Great Britain (now succeeded by the United States). No one has ever gained long-term control over this crucial zone of transit.

Today, Afghanistan has on its border a state called Pakistan, which has a large Pashtun population precisely on the border. Pakistan’s prime geopolitical interest is to have a friendly Afghanistan, lest India – but also Russia, the United States, and/or Iran – come to dominate it. Pakistan has been supporting in one way or another the Pashtun majority, which today means the Taliban. Pakistan is not about to stop doing this.

Under President Carter, the United States decided to try to oust a so-called Communist government deemed too close to Russia. We know now, via the release of archives from the Carter administration as well as via a famous interview given ten years ago by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then Carter’s National Security Advisor, that U.S. support of the mujahidin predated by at least six months the intrusion of Soviet troops. Indeed, one of the objectives was precisely to lure the Soviet Union into intervening militarily on the correct assumption that this would ultimately badly misfire and weaken the Soviet regime at home. Bravo! It did that. But the U.S. policy also at the same time spawned both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban – a classic case of blowback for the United States. In any case, none other than Brzezinski is warning Obama against repeating the Soviet error.

So, Obama is promising something today he is in no position to deliver. It is all very well for him to receive the implicit endorsement of the Iraqi government for his Iraq proposals. He is riding high on that, and will reap credit from the U.S. and world public for his stance. But he can undo that credit by failing to deliver on an impossible promise concerning Afghanistan. His gang of 300 advisors is not serving him very well on this issue. Obama knows how to be prudent when necessary. He is not being very prudent at all on Afghanistan.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

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MIDEAST: Arabs Despair of U.S. Even More

August 1, 2008

Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jul 31 (IPS) – For decades, the U.S. has jealously guarded its role of sole arbiter of the Arab-Israeli dispute. In light of recent shows of support for Israel by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, however, many Arabs fear that Zionist influence on the U.S. body politic — across the political spectrum — has made the notion of ‘U.S. even-handedness’ a contradiction in terms.

“When it comes to the Middle East conflict, the Arabs no longer see any difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Ahmed Thabet, political science professor at Cairo University told IPS. “Both parties vie with one another in expressing total support for Israel.”

In a speech before Israeli parliament in May, U.S. President George W. Bush went further than any of his predecessors in voicing praise for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Referring to Israelis as a “chosen people”, Bush pledged Washington’s unwavering support against Israel’s traditional nemeses, including Iran and resistance parties Hamas and Hezbollah.

In statements heavy on “Judeo-Christian” religious references, Bush went on to describe Washington’s alliance with Israel as “unbreakable”.

Similar sentiments have been echoed by Bush’s would be Republican successor, Senator John McCain, who has also pledged “eternal” U.S. support for Israel.

“Israel and the U.S. must always stand together,” McCain declared before the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in early June. “We are the most natural of allies. And, like Israel itself, that alliance is for ever.”

Calling Israel “an inspiration to free nations everywhere,” McCain barely addressed longstanding Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Like Bush, he denounced regional actors opposed to Israel’s occupation of Arab land, referring to Hamas as “the terrorist-led group in charge of Gaza.”

Neither Bush nor McCain so much as mention — let alone criticise — Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinian populations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This treatment includes frequent military assaults often targeting civilians, the use of ‘targeted assassinations’, the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip (which has brought that territory to the brink of starvation), continued construction of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and the forced removal of non-Jewish, Arab inhabitants from the city of Jerusalem.

Arab analysts, meanwhile, express little surprise at such blatant pro-Israel bias, coming as it does from a political party thoroughly influenced by the so-called “neo-conservative” movement, of which Israeli ascendancy is a central tenet.

More disturbing to Arab critics of U.S. policy is the fact that Democratic presidential contenders have shown just as much zeal for Israeli supremacy as their Republican rivals.

In his own speech to AIPAC in early June, Obama stressed the need for a “more nuanced” approach to U.S. Middle East peacemaking. He stunned many, however, when he went on to state that Jerusalem would “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Although Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, its claim to the city has never been recognised by the international community. Officially, the status of Jerusalem — which Palestinians also want as capital of their future state — is supposed to be determined in long-awaited “final status” negotiations.

Continued . . .

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Let’s Speak the Truth About Afghanistan

July 31, 2008

The Huffington Post, Posted July 30, 2008 | 12:55 PM (EST)

By Eric Margolis

NEW YORK — During his triumphant European tour, Senator Barack Obama again urged NATO’s members to send more troops to Afghanistan and called the conflict there, “the central front in the war on terror.” Europe’s response ranged from polite evasion to downright frosty.

It is unfortunate that Obama has adopted President George Bush’s misleading terminology, “war on terror,” to describe the conflict between the United States and anti-American groups in the Muslim world. Like many Americans, he and his foreign policy advisors are sorely misinformed about the reality of Afghanistan.

One understands Obama’s need to respond with martial élan to rival John McCain’s chest-thumping about “I know how to win wars.” Polls put McCain far ahead of Obama when it comes to being a war leader. But Obama’s recent proposal to send at least 7,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and his threats to attack Pakistan’s territory, and warnings about Islamabad’s nuclear forces, show poor judgment and lack of knowledge.

The United States is no longer “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, as Bush, Obama and McCain insist. The 2001 U.S. invasion was a legitimate operation against al-Qaeda, a group that properly fit the role of a “terrorist organization.” But, contrary to the White House’s wildly inflated claims that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was a worldwide conspiracy, it never numbered more than 300 hard core members. Bin Laden and his jihadis long ago scattered into all corners of Pakistan and elsewhere. Only a handful remain in Afghanistan.

Continued . . .

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Bush’s Legacy of Torture

July 31, 2008

Truthdig, posted July 28, 2008

By Eugene Robinson

I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation’s great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the United States government. But that’s precisely what he did.

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of this disgraceful episode. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable—the use of brutal interrogation methods that international agreements define as torture—and keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed.

The memos don’t call it torture, of course. Heavily redacted before being surrendered to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the documents refer euphemistically to “enhanced techniques” of interrogation. Changing the name doesn’t change the act, however. One memo, written in 2004, specifically makes clear the administration’s view that “the waterboard” is an acceptable way to extract information.

Waterboarding, a technique of simulated drowning, is considered torture virtually everywhere on earth except in the Bush administration’s archive of self-exculpatory memos, directives and opinions.

The most stunning of the memos—written in August 2002 by Jay Bybee, who was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—makes the incredible claim that unless a torturer has the “specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” no violation of U.S. laws against torture has occurred. Bybee, since appointed to the federal bench, wrote that the torturer needed only the “honest belief” that he was not actually committing torture in order to avoid legal jeopardy. Oh, and Bybee added that it wasn’t even necessary for that belief to be “reasonable.”

The memo notes that U.S. torture statutes outlaw the infliction of severe mental pain, as well as physical pain. It acknowledges that “the threat of imminent death” is one of the specific acts that can constitute torture. Somehow, though, the administration pretends not to understand that strapping a prisoner down and pouring water into his nose until he can’t breathe constitutes a death threat—regardless of whether the interrogator intended to stop before the prisoner actually drowned.

Perhaps that question was dealt with in the nine-tenths of the memo that was redacted before the administration handed it over to the ACLU. The memo never would have been released at all if the government hadn’t been ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The whole thing would be laughable if it were not such a rank abomination. No government obeying the law needs a paper trail to absolve its interrogators of committing torture. Conversely, a government that produces such a paper trail has something monstrous to hide.

It is not difficult to avoid violating federal laws and international agreements that prohibit torture. Just don’t torture people, period. The idea that there exists some acceptable middle ground—a kind of “torture lite”—is a hideous affront to this nation’s honor and values. This, perhaps above all, is how George Bush should be remembered: as the president who embraced torture.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as he left office, Bush issued some sort of pardon clearing those who authorized or carried out “enhanced techniques” of interrogations from any jeopardy under U.S. law. International law is something else entirely, however, and I imagine that some of those involved in this sordid interlude might want to be careful in choosing their vacation spots. I’d avoid The Hague, for example.

Barack Obama has stood consistently against torture. John McCain, who was tortured himself as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has denounced torture as well—and, although he voted against restraining the CIA with the same no-exceptions policy that now applies to military interrogators, he has been forthright in saying that waterboarding is torture, and thus illegal. On Inauguration Day, whoever wins, this awful interlude will end.

The clear and urgent duty of the next president will be to investigate the Bush administration’s torture policy and give Americans a full accounting of what was done in our name. It’s astounding that we need some kind of truth commission in the United States of America, but we do. Only when we learn the full story of what happened will we be able to confidently promise, to ourselves and to a world that looks to this country for moral leadership: Never again.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

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A new consensus on Iraq

July 29, 2008

Eric Ruder looks at the factors driving the seeming convergence of Barack Obama, the Bush administration and other players when it comes to Iraq–and what policy they are actually converging around.

Socialist Worker, July 25, 2008

IS THE end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq within sight?

In late July, newspaper headlines announced that the Bush administration and Iraqi officials had agreed on a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals” for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The fuzzy phraseology allows the Bush administration to deny that it had agreed to a “timetable” for withdrawal–something it has repeatedly denounced as “irresponsible” when advocated by Democrats.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who has promised to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by late 2010 if he becomes president, captured the world’s attention with a whirlwind tour that took him to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi politicians and U.S. military leaders.

Shortly before he arrived, an interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Germany’s Der Spiegel made headlines because Maliki basically endorsed Obama’s 2010 timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops–and made the pointed remark that “he who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

The sudden convergence of Obama, Maliki and the Bush administration on Iraq left Republican presidential candidate John McCain out in the cold. For months, he has attacked Obama for failing to understand what’s at stake in Iraq with his 16-month withdrawal proposal. But suddenly, McCain looks like the one who’s out of step–with the heads of state in both the U.S. and Iraq.

As news of Maliki’s praise of Obama sunk in, McCain stuck to his script. “The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do, we would have lost,” McCain said. “And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region. And Iran would have increased their influence.”

That perfectly describes the situation that already exists–as a direct product of the U.S. war on Iraq.

At the same time, McCain might be trying to change direction. “If there is any fixed position in John McCain’s policy agenda, it’s that we must never, ever, set a timetable for leaving Iraq,” observed the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman. “So it was a surprise to hear him say Monday [July 21], when asked if our troops might depart in the next two years, ‘Oh, I think they could be largely withdrawn, as I’ve said.'”

Continued . . .

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