Category Archives: Geopolitics/War

Geopolitics/War

Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto

Ilan Pappe
The Electronic Intifada: July 13, 2014

In a September 2006 article for The Electronic Intifada, I defined the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide.

Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy continues unabated. The term is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action — then and now — within a wider historical context.

This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.

The context

The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians.

The means for achieving this goal changed with the years, but the formula has remained the same: whatever the Zionist vision of a Jewish State might be, it can only materialize without any significant number of Palestinians in it. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

The present genocidal wave has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity government that even the United States could not object to.

The collapse of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s desperate “peace” initiative legitimized the Palestinian appeal to international organizations to stop the occupation. At the same time, Palestinians gained wide international blessing for the cautious attempt represented by the unity government to strategize once again a coordinated policy among the various Palestinian groups and agendas.

Ever since June 1967, Israel searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a “peace process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

With the decades, Israel differentiated between areas it wished to control directly and those it would manage indirectly, with the aim in the long run of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum with, among other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic strangulation.

The geopolitical location of the West Bank creates the impression in Israel, at least, that it is possible to achieve this without anticipating a third uprising or too much international condemnation.

The Gaza Strip, due to its unique geopolitical location, did not lend itself that easily to such a strategy. Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the strategy there was to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there — 1.8 million as of today — would be dropped into eternal oblivion.

But the Ghetto proved to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation and economic collapse. So resending it to oblivion necessitates the continuation of genocidal policies.

The pretext

On 15 May, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian youths in the West Bank town of Beitunia, their cold-blooded slayings by a sniper’s bullet captured on video. Their names — Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir — were added to a long list of such killings in recent months and years.

The killing of three Israeli teenagers, two of them minors, abducted in the occupied West Bank in June, was perhaps in reprisal for killings of Palestinian children. But for all the depredations of the oppressive occupation, it provided the pretext first and foremost for destroying the delicate unity in the West Bank but also for the implementation of the old dream of wiping out Hamas from Gaza so that the Ghetto could be quiet again.

Since 1994, even before the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the very particular geopolitical location of the Strip made it clear that any collective punitive action, such as the one inflicted now, could only be an operation of massive killings and destruction. In other words, of a continued genocide.

This recognition never inhibited the generals who give the orders to bomb the people from the air, the sea and the ground. Downsizing the number of Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist vision. In Gaza, its implementation takes its most inhuman form.

The particular timing of this wave is determined, as in the past, by additional considerations. The domestic social unrest of 2011 is still simmering and for a while there was a public demand to cut military expenditures and move money from the inflated “defense” budget to social services. The army branded this possibility as suicidal.

There is nothing like a military operation to stifle any voices calling on the government to cut its military expenses.

Typical hallmarks of the previous stages in this incremental genocide reappear in this wave as well. One can witness again consensual Israeli Jewish support for the massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip, without one significant voice of dissent. In Tel Aviv, the few who dared to demonstrate against it were beaten by Jewish hooligans, while the police stood by and watched.

Academia, as always, becomes part of the machinery. The prestigious private university, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya has established “a civilian headquarters” where students volunteer to serve as mouthpieces in the propaganda campaign abroad.

The media is loyally recruited, showing no pictures of the human catastrophe Israel has wreaked and informing its public that this time, “the world understands us and is behind us.”

That statement is valid to a point as the political elites in the West continue to provide the old immunity to the “Jewish state.” However, the media have not provided Israel with quite the level of legitimacy it was seeking for its criminal policies.

Obvious exceptions included French media, especially France 24 and the BBC, that continue to shamefully parrot Israeli propaganda.

This is not surprising, since pro-Israel lobby groups continue to work tirelessly to press Israel’s case in France and the rest of Europe as they do in the United States.

The way forward

Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, or the fatal shooting of two others, just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized.

I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world.

The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.

( read the full article at The Electronic Intifada)

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Drugs, Geopolitics/War

Increased children at border result of Obama-backed coup in Honduras

Those Kids Crossing the Border From Mexico Wouldn’t Be There If Obama Hadn’t Supported a Coup the Media Doesn’t Talk About

Ted Rall
Common Dreams : July 12, 2014

If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants.

Even if you’ve followed this story closely, you probably haven’t heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it’s like, check out the excellent 2004 film “Maria Full of Grace.”)

NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous “coyotes” (human smugglers) for “lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay.” True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.

The sad truth is that this “crisis at the border” is yet another example of “blowback.”

Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.’ simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region.

More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively.

[…]

“The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world’s most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information,” reports NBC News. “El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day.”

The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That’s because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. “Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades,” The Guardian noted at the time. “During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.”

Honduras wasn’t paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.

“Zelaya’s overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions,” Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. “The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country.”

El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.

(read the full article at Common Dreams)

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Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

The United Nations is Complicit in the Massacre of Civilians in Ukraine

Michel Chossudovsky and Julie Lévesque
Global Research, July 09, 2014

In what at first appears to be a neutral statement on the violence in Ukraine, urging “all sides to put down their arms” and condemning “strong hate speech from all sides”, United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay tacitly placed the blame on the people of Donetsk and Lugansk, who are the unspoken victims of aerial bombings and mortar shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Despite numerous reports, video and photographic evidence to the effect that the Ukraine Armed Forces have been targeting civilian areas, High Commissioner Navi Pillay, basing her statements on the report of the UN Monitoring Mission to Ukraine is emphatic:

“both sides are equally to blame… and people are caught  in the crossfire between armed groups and the Ukrainian Government.”

Navi Pillay’s official statement on behalf of the United Nations is convoluted. It conveys the impression that the self-defense forces in Donesk and Lugansk rather than the Ukrainian Armed Forces including the National Guard are responsible for the abductions and killings not to mention the heavy outflow of people who are fleeing the region:

Pillay also noted that abductions by armed groups continue to be reported daily and that houses, schools and infrastructure, including water and electricity plants, have been damaged – in some cases severely enough to lead to power cuts.

The UN human rights monitoring team in Ukraine has received reports that armed groups are using the roofs of residential buildings to install anti-aircraft systems, and that they are occupying private apartments to organise sniper positions, seriously endangering residents who are not involved in the fighting. Shelling has also been reported in residential areas held by these armed groups.

The term  “armed groups” is used repeatedly by the UN Human Rights High Commissioner without revealing the identity of the “armed groups” and without clarifying who is responsible for the killings of innocent civilians.

These killings were ordered by the government of president Petro Poroshenko. The  evidence amply confirms that these killings are organized by the Armed Forces and National Guard.

Ms. Pillay is fully aware that civilian infrastructure, schools and residential areas were targeted by the Ukrainian Air Force, and that only government forces possess aircraft capable of conducting bombing raids.

According to Ms. Pillay, the Ukraine government confirmed “numerous cases of death of people in Donetsk and Luhansk who are caught in the middle of the ongoing security operations.”

This is not an “ongoing security operation”, it is an outright bombing and shelling operation directed against Ukrainian civilians led by Ukraine government forces. And Western military advisers are collaborating with government forces. 

(read the full article at Global Research)

Geopolitics/War, Privacy, Tyranny

Law-abiding public figures latest revealed victims of NSA spying

Bombshell revelations from journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain expose extensive government spying on public figures, including a political candidate, a civil rights activist, lawyers, and academics

Government spying on law-abiding public figures is tearing apart the fabric of our democracy

OpenMedia: July 8, 2014

In the wake of this evening’s bombshell revelations from journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, citizens are demanding action to rein in the power of spy agencies like the U.S. NSA and Canada’s CSEC. In an in-depth piece on their website The Intercept, Greenwald and Hussain exposed how the NSA spied extensively on the private lives of prominent public figures in the American-Muslim community. Victims include a senior political candidate for the U.S. Republican Party, high-profile academics, lawyers, and the head of a large civil rights organization.

The article revealed that:

  • The NSA targeted over 7,400 email addresses for in-depth surveillance, 202 of which were explicitly identified as belonging to U.S. citizens.
  • The Americans targeted by the NSA for surveillance came from a variety of backgrounds, and held diverse political views. Among the targets was Faisal Gill, a former Navy officer who stood as a candidate for the U.S. Republican Party in Virginia and worked in the George W. Bush White House.
  • Also targeted was Rutgers University Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi and former California State University Professor Agha Saeed.
  • Other victims include Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim-American civil rights group in the U.S.

The news comes on the heels of recent revelations from the Washington Post, which showed that NSA spying operations intercept far more data from innocent people than from targeted individuals. The daily lives of over 10,000 innocent people were tracked and catalogued extensively, including intimate details of their personal lives.

“Tonight’s revelations prove what we’ve long suspected – that our spy agencies are running hugely invasive and reckless surveillance operations against their own citizens,” says OpenMedia.ca Executive Director Steve Anderson. “This kind of spying tears at the very fabric of our democracy and we’re already seeing how it can affect law-abiding citizens in their daily lives. Clearly government spying operations are out-of-control and must be reined in.”

Anderson continued: “Sadly, here in Canada the government is actually in the midst of ramming through Bill C-13, legislation that would increase warrantless surveillance of innocent Canadians and which the Supreme Court has just said is likely unconstitutional. There are reports of sensitive private information being collected on law-abiding Canadians without their knowledge and then distributed to employers without their consent. This is a daily concern for many people now. Thanks to this government we have a growing privacy deficit despite the fact that Canadians are increasingly concerned about their data security. The Conservatives are quickly turning into the anti-privacy party, and it’s time for them to change course”

Canadians are asking questions about the extent of CSEC’s involvement with NSA spying operations, given the long history of close cooperation between CSEC and the NSA, and recently revealed proof that CSEC spied on thousands of innocent Canadian air travellers. OpenMedia.ca, which is leading a huge non-partisan coalition calling for greater privacy protections, says the government needs to come clean about how many Canadians have been swept up in CSEC databases.

OpenMedia.ca has been working with over 50 major organizations in the Protect our Privacy Coalition to demand effective legal measures to safeguard Canadians’ privacy from government spies. The BC Civil Liberties Association, a coalition member, has also launched a constitutional challenge that aims to put a stop to all illegal government spying on Canadians.

CSEC has over 2000 employees and an annual budget of over $420 million. Taxpayers are spending over $4 billion to build and operate a lavish new CSEC headquarters, which the CBC has described as a “spy palace” and as “the most expensive government building ever built”.

Over 40,000 people have pledged their support to Privacy Coalition calls for new legislation to protect citizens’ privacy from government spying, with more signing on every day at http://OurPrivacy.ca

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Source: OpenMedia

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Alternative Free Press

Banksters, Geopolitics/War, Health/Environment, Privacy, Tyranny

Newly released FBI files on 9/11 CONFIRM GOVERNMENT COVER UP

Newly released FBI files on 9/11 Florida investigation reveal an “antagonist” from Jerusalem – Who is the government trying to protect?

Joshua Cook
Ben Swann : July 3, 2014

Thanks to the tireless effort of watchdog organization the Broward Bulldog and its Freedom of Information Act suit against the government, more information is being released about the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars, about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Benswann.com has followed this story for months now and on Monday, the FBI released 11 heavily censored pages, which also include information on an “antagonist” to the United States.

From an FBI report dated April 2002:

It says the Tampa FBI office “has determined that (blank) is an antagonist of the United States of America. (Blank) resides in Jerusalem. (Blank) allegedly has held regular and recurring meetings at his residence to denounce and criticize the United States of America and its policies. (Blank) is allegedly an international businessman with great wealth.”

In November 2001, (blank) visited the United States for the first time. He traveled to Sarasota, Florida, opened a bank account and made initial queries into the purchase of property in south central Florida. (Blank) intends to establish a Muslim compound in Central Florida. (Blank) revealed that (blank) is fearful of (blank) and fears that (blank) intends to begin offensive operations against the United States if he is able to purchase property and establish a Muslim compound in Central Florida.”

Unfortunately, those blanks won’t be uncensored until 2039, which makes you wonder who the government is trying to protect?

The Broward Bulldog sued in 2012 after being denied access to the FBI’s file on a once-secret investigation focusing on the Sarasota Saudis — Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father  Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.

The pages reveal  that the al-Hijjis had departed the U.S. in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.” Even though, publicly the FBI has denied any connection.

Another interesting part of the documents include this story, which took place around Halloween, 2001:

Deputies were called after a man with a Tunisian passport was observed disposing of items in a dumpster behind a storage facility he had rented in Bradenton.

The man’s name is blanked out, but the report says authorities who searched the dumpster found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight to fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa, took flying lessons.

Read the documents here. The documents were located via court-ordered text searches using the names of the al-Hijjis and Ghazzawi. U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch is currently reviewing more than 80,000 pages of 9/11 records.

Miami First Amendment attorney Thomas Julin represents BrowardBulldog.org and said:

“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety. It’s startling that after initially denying they had any documents they continue to find new documents as the weeks and months roll by. Each new batch suggests there are many, many more documents.”

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War

Blackwater Rep Reportedly Issued Death Threat to US Investigator

According to newly disclosed documents, a Blackwater official issued an implied death threat to a US State Department investigator assigned to monitor the firm.

By Barry Donegan
Ben Swann: June 30, 2014

As Iraq descends into civil war and as four former Blackwater employees stand trial in New York for alleged crimes related to a September 2007 civilian massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, the State Department has released documents from a 2007 report by Deputy Division Chief Jean Richter containing explosive allegations against the private defense firm. According to The New York Times, Jean Richter was sent to Iraq in August of that year to investigate reports that the contracting firm Blackwater had failed in its duties to provide quality food and sanitation systems for US soldiers serving at a base in the war-torn nation.

Upon arrival, Richter asked Blackwater official Daniel Carroll, the project manager in charge of the camp suffering from inadequate facilities, why the firm had failed to respond to complaints regarding dining conditions that were affecting troop morale. Said Richter in his statement about the meeting, “In his response to my inquiries, Mr. Carroll claimed that the WPPS II Camp Baghdad was not technically Department of State property and therefore not under Chief of Mission (COM) Authority. Mr. Carroll accentuated this point by stating that he could ‘kill me’ at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq. A second individual present, Mr. Donald Thomas, then made a remark that compared the lawless working environment in Iraq to the ‘OK corral.’”

American embassy officials then took to Blackwater’s defense and ordered the State Department investigators to leave Iraq, complaining that the investigation had hampered the embassy’s relationship with the private contracting firm. Upon returning to the US, Jean Richter penned the highly-critical report which has just recently surfaced, noting the fact that the US government was losing control over Blackwater’s activities. Richter said in his statement, “The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves.” Going further, Richter said, “To me, it was immediately apparent that the Blackwater contractors believed that they were the de facto authority and acted accordingly, in an alarming manner.”

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Health/Environment, Privacy, Tyranny

Canada to host TPP negotiations in July: Treason behind closed doors

The TPP is coming to Canada (not that it’s easy to tell)

Scott Harris
The Council of Canadians: June 25, 2014

Canada is about to play host to the latest round of high-level talks aimed at concluding the sweeping 12-nation trade and corporate rights pact known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but the Harper government seems to be doing as much as it can to ensure nobody even knows it’s happening.

Not that secrecy is something new when it comes to TPP negotiations which started back in 2008, and which Canada joined in October of 2012.

It’s one of the largest and most dangerous agreements ever negotiated, with 12 countries (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam) involved, representing almost 800 million people and almost 40 percent of the world economy. While it’s presented as another “free trade” agreement, only a handful of the TPP’s expected 29 Chapters have anything to do with traditional trade issues like market access for goods. The rest deal with dictating how governments can regulate corporations, the length of pharmaceutical and copyright terms, rules on the Internet and the sharing of data across borders, and rules for the financial sector.

Worse yet, all of this will be backed up by a NAFTA Chapter 11-like process of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which will allow corporations to sue governments for compensation when environmental, health or other regulatory policies interfere with profits.

But despite the far-reaching impacts TPP will have if concluded, the talks have been largely shrouded in secrecy. Negotiating texts are secret, so everything the public knows about TPP has come from leaked documents. Background materials won’t be made public until four years after the TPP negotiations end. Even elected members of national parliaments apparently can’t be trusted with knowing what’s in the TPP and they’ve had to push to see the agreement before it’s signed.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Canada’s first (and likely last) turn as host of a high-level TPP negotiating round is also shrouded in secrecy.

Negotiations are supposed to start in Ottawa on July 3 and run until July 12, with the lead negotiators joining smaller, issue-specific negotiating teams starting on July 5. Even though the talks are slated to begin next week, the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD) only made it official on their website yesterday afternoon (June 24) with a brief note saying, “Negotiators, subject matter experts and other officials will meet in Ottawa, Canada, from July 3-12. No ministerial meeting is being scheduled on the margin of the officials meeting in Ottawa.”

Even more curiously, the talks had been initially booked in Vancouver (not that the hosts made an official announcement about the meetings), but on June 18 Canada suddenly notified the other negotiating parties that it was switching the venue to Ottawa.

And while negotiators and interested civil society groups now know (unless it changes again) that the talks will be indeed be held in Ottawa, no other details have been revealed. Nobody — not even negotiators coming to Canada next week for the talks — have been told the location. Specific information about when negotiations on specific chapters will take place are being kept similarly under wraps.

There has been no response from requests from interested civil society groups for information about opportunities for engagement with negotiators. In previous rounds of the TPP negotiations some efforts were made to facilitate discussions with negotiators, albeit with the challenge of not being able to know the specifics of what was being negotiated. As the negotiations have moved forward, however, public interest groups have been increasingly sidelined from the process and shut out of negotiations.

And for its first crack at hosting a chief negotiators-level TPP meeting, it would seem, Canada has taken it to the extreme by attempting to eliminate any possibility of engagement by civil society at all, and is not even letting negotiators from other countries know the location out of concern that word will get out.

With some speculation that the TPP could be finished late this year, it’s more important than ever that Canadians — and the citizens of the other 11 TPP countries — know what’s being negotiated in their name and have a chance to see the deal before it’s signed. Unfortunately, the Harper government is instead doing everything it can to make sure nobody can even find the meetings.

Source:
http://canadians.org/blog/tpp-coming-canada-not-its-easy-tell
cc

Geopolitics/War

Maybe listening to Dick Cheney on Iraq isn’t a good idea

Paul Waldman
Washington Post : June 18, 2014

Today, on the Senate floor, Harry Reid said: “Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history.”

Reid was responding to Cheney’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz attacking the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, a piece that has already generated much discussion. The Cheneys have also formed an organization, the Alliance for a Strong America, to advocate Cheneyite policies (you can tell it’ll be strong and resolute, because in the announcement video, Dick is wearing a cowboy hat).

[…]

The Cheneys offer no discussion of the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in the first place (though they still surely believe the war was a great idea, they apparently realize most Americans don’t agree). But anything that happened afterward can only be Obama’s fault. They write, “Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

Yes, he “had only” to do that, and everything would have turned out fine. But who was it who signed the agreement mandating the removal of all American forces from Iraq by the end of 2011? It was George W. Bush. When the time arrived, the Maliki government was determined to get all American troops out, and refused to negotiate a new agreement without putting American troops at the mercy of the Iraqi justice system — something no American president would ever have accepted.

[…]

Maybe that’s why the Cheneys’ op ed is silent on what they would do differently in Iraq today. The op-ed contains nothing even approaching a specific suggestion for what , other than to say that defeating terrorists “will require a strategy — not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America’s military capacity — reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.”

So to recap: we need a strategy, and though they won’t tell us what that strategy might be, it should involve military, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts, and rebuilding the military. Apart from the absurd claim that the armed forces have been “weakened” (we’re still spending over $600 billion a year on the military even with the war in Iraq behind us and Afghanistan winding down), the Cheneys are about as clear on what we should do now as they were on how invading Iraq was supposed to spread peace and democracy across the Middle East.

Watch closely as Republicans troop to the TV studios in the coming days, because they’ll be saying much the same thing. They won’t bring up what a disaster the war was; they’ll hope you forget that they supported it, and they won’t mention that it was Bush who signed the agreement to remove all the troops from Iraq. They will say almost nothing about what they would do differently now, other than to say we have to be “strong” and “send the right message” to the terrorists.

When it comes to being wrong about Iraq, Dick Cheney has been in a class by himself. It was Cheney who said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

It was Cheney who said: “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta “did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”

It was Cheney who said: “we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon”

It was Cheney who said in 2005: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

All those things, and many more, were false. There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.

And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?

(read the full article at Washington Post)

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Geopolitics/War

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning

Ezra Klein
Vox : June 17, 2014

The news that the US and Iran might cooperate to save Iraq’s government is a measure of just how badly the Iraq war failed to achieve its aims.

“Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty,” President George W. Bush said on March 17th, 2003. “And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.”

After 9/11, there was a struggle to define what the attacks actually were. There were some who saw them as a crime: a mass homicide, carried out in spectacular fashion. But there were others who saw them an inevitable collision between the values and the armies of the liberal, democratic west, and the autocratic, theocratic Islamic world. “A clash of civilizations.” They actually used that term.

This is crucial context for the Iraq War. The Bush administration didn’t just want to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) stockpile of illegal weapons. They wanted to invade Iraq to create a liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam. They wanted to create a country that would, through its glittering example, erode the foundations of Iran’s theocratic regime and al Qaeda’s deadly ideology.

It was called the Democratic Domino Theory. First Iraq would become a beacon of political freedom and economic success. Then, one by one, the populations across the rest of the Middle East would rise up and force their countries to follow. The war on terror wouldn’t end with a fight. It would end with a vote.

A decade later Iraq is becoming the things it was meant to destroy. It could become a Shiite dominated state dependent on Iran for its security. It could become a weak or broken state that serves partly as a haven for the Sunni terror organization ISIS. It could end up as both.

The one thing it will not be is the liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam that the Bush administration sought. There is no one in the Middle East who looks to the Iraqi state and sees a better life for them and their children.

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

(read the full article at Vox)

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Alternative Free Press -fair use