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Category: Iraq

  • Racist rhetoric about which refugees deserve help needs to stop now

    There are “two species” of refugee in Europe, philosopher Slavoj Žižek has warned. He was talking about a tweet – now deleted – from the government of his home country, Slovenia. The tweet attempted to draw a line between those fleeing the war in Ukraine from those who were fleeing wars in other parts of the world.

    The tweet claimed:

    The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan are coming.

    Describing this bizarre, racist position, Žižek wrote:

    After an outcry, the tweet was quickly deleted, but the obscene truth was out: Europe must defend itself from non-Europe.

    The evidence suggests this problem extends much wider, and goes much deeper, than just individual governments.

    Blatant racism

    Slovenia’s was just one – very open – example of a wider problem. Ukrainian refugees fleeing the criminal Russian invasion deserve our solidarity. So do Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians. The only fundamental difference between them is their place in a made-up racial hierarchy. And that is deplorable.

    As one Twitter user pointed out on 3 March, it’s possible to have solidarity with more than one group of people at the same time:

    Another was one of many sharing compilations of racist takes in the mainstream media:

    In most cases these involved a level of surprise that war had come to “relatively civilised” country, not a place like Iraq or North Africa. Places we can only assume are ‘uncivilised’.

    Little connection was made in these commentaries as to exactly why somewhere like Iraq, for example, has experienced years of war and violence. Did war magically appear in the Middle East? Or could it be connected to the US-led invasion in 2003? Or the centuries of colonialism beforehand?

    There seems to be no space to look at this vital context in the mainstream commentary on Ukraine.

    Shocking distinction

    Žižek wasn’t the only scholar pointing out this contradiction. Professor of Middle East Studies Ziad Majed said the “magnificent solidarity and humanism” shown toward Ukrainians was vastly different to the “dehumanization of refugees from the Middle East”.

    When you hear certain comments talking about ‘people like us’ it suggests that those who come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa are not.

    “Orientalist and racist”

    The Arab and Middle East Journalist’s Association (AMEJA) also condemned the double standard. It listed many examples, including those in the viral video above:

    AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist [racist against Asian people] and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict.

    AMEJA said these kinds of comment spoke to a deeper problem in Western media:

    This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

    “Two species”

    The outpourings of concern for refugees from Ukraine are justified and welcome. Russia’s illegal invasion, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a war crime akin to the US invasion of Iraq and Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939:

    For those of us who’ve opposed wars and supported refugees for longer than a week, our job is to point out that putting a flag in your profile picture isn’t enough. Because every refugee is worthy of our support, and all wars of aggression should be opposed.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/President of Ukraine, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Outing the Iraq War White Washers

    The guilty can be devious in concealing their crimes, and their role in them.  The greater the crime, the more devious the strategy of deception.  The breaking of international law, and the breaching of convention, is a field replete with such figures.

    Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has presented a particularly odious grouping, a good number of them neoconservatives, a chance to hand wash and dry before the idol of international law.  Law breakers become defenders of oracular force, arguing for the territorial integrity of States and the sanctity of borders, and the importance of the UN Charter.

    Reference can be made to Hitler’s invasions during the Second World War with a revoltingly casual disposition, a comparison that seeks to eclipse the role played by other gangster powers indifferent to the rule and letter of international comity.

    Speculation can be had that the man in the Kremlin has gone mad, if he was ever sane to begin with.  As Jonathan Cook writes with customary accuracy, western leaders tend to find it convenient “that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac.”

    It might well be said that the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003 was a product of its own mental disease, the product of ideological and evangelical madness, accompanied by a conviction that states could be forcibly pacified into a state of democracy.  Where there was no evidence of links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda operatives responsible for the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, it was simply made up.

    The most brazen fiction in this regard was the claim that Iraq had the means to fire weapons of mass destruction at Europe within 45 minutes.  Showing that farce sometimes precedes tragedy, that assessment was cobbled from a doctoral dissertation.

    When the invasion, and subsequent occupation of Iraq, led to sectarian murderousness and regional destabilisation, invigorating a new form of Islamicist zeal, the neocons were ready with their ragbag excuses.  In 2016, David Frum could offer the idiotic assessment that the “US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future.  Whatever [the] West’s mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Such ungrateful savages.

    On Fox News Sunday, this nonsense was far away in the mind of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  She could merely nod at the assertion by host Harris Faulkner that “when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime… I mean, I think we’re at just a real, basic, basic point there.”

    Jaw-droppingly to those familiar with Rice’s war drumming in 2003, she agreed that the attack on Ukraine was “certainly against every principle of international law and international order.”  That explained why Washington was “throwing the book at [the Russians] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also part of it.”  She also felt some comfort that Putin had “managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.”

    As Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was distinctly untroubled that her advice created a situation where international law would be grossly breached.  She was dismissive of the role played by UN weapons inspectors and their failed efforts in finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction and evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” she warned in 2002.  “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

    As the seedy conspiracy to undermine security in the Middle East and shred the UN Charter gathered place in 2002, those against any Iraq invasion were also denouncing opponents as traitors, or at the very least wobbly, on the issue of war.  Frum, writing in March 2003, was particularly bothered by conservatives against the war – the likes of Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Thomas Fleming, and Llewellyn Rockwell.  Thankfully, they were “relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large.”  They favoured “a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.”

    In the Ukraine conflict, the trend has reasserted itself.  Neoconservatives are out to find those appeasing types on the Right – and everywhere else.  “Today,” rues Rod Dreher, “they’re denouncing us on the Right who oppose war with Russia as Neville Chamberlains.”  Conservatives are mocked for daring to understand why Russia might have an issue with NATO expansion, or suggest that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not, in the end, of vital interest to Washington.  “It’s Chamberlain’s folly,” comes the improbable claim from Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast, “delivered with a confident Churchillian swagger.”

    A more revealing insight into neoconservative violence, the lust for force, and an almost admiring take on the way Putin has behaved, can be gathered in John Bolton’s recent assessment of the invasion.  Bolton, it should be remembered, detests the United Nations and was, just to show that President George W. Bush had a sense of humour, made US ambassador to it.  For him, international law is less a reality than a guide ignored when power considerations are at play – an almost Putinesque view.

    Almost approvingly, he writes in The Economist of the need to “pay attention to what adversaries say.”  He recalls Putin’s remark about the Soviet Union’s disintegration as the 20th century’s greatest catastrophe.  He notes those efforts to reverse the trend: the use of invasions, annexations and the creation of independent states, and the adoption of “less kinetic means to bring states like Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan into closer Russian orbits.”

    With a touch of delight, Bolton sees that “the aggressive use of military force is back in style.  The ‘rule-based international order’ just took a direct hit, not that it was ever as sturdy as imagined in elite salons and academic cloisters.”  And with that, the war trumpet sounds.  “World peace is not at hand.  Rhetoric and virtue-signalling are no substitute for new strategic thinking and higher defence budgets.”  In this equation, the UN Charter is truly doomed.

    The post Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Outing the Iraq War White Washers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Innate Warmongering: Seeing Conflict in Ukraine as Inevitable

    US President Theodore Roosevelt never had much time for peace, seeing its returns as distinctly less than those of war.  Despite his love of military conflict and its touted benefits, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War.  But for old Teddy peaceniks were sissies, degenerates, and probably sexually dubious.

    The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be.  On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war.  The standard reference?  The outbreak of the Second World War.  September 1939.  Poor Poland, and benighted UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

    The blind, the daft and the reality television viewer may have missed the programming point, but others could not have.  Russian forces are posed on the borders of Ukraine.  In the presses of Australasia, Europe and the United States, there is more talk of war than that of diplomacy.  There is the prospect of much death and many body bags.  Instead of running documentaries, statements or messages on how war might be averted, thereby yielding the floor to diplomacy, the message of conflict has become inexorably clear.

    This is perhaps the most visibly sickening feature of the enterprise.  It is a reminder that war has a seductiveness, acts as a paralytic agent, dulling sensibility whilst arousing other senses.  The opposite is never as inspiring because it is always constructively dull: negotiations, peace, averting death and the cracking of skulls.  Best encourage powers to shred a few people, slaughter the residents of a village or two, and crow about the evils of the enemy.  Add some political garnish: they died in the name of democracy; they were killed because they needed to be enlightened by the rules-based order.

    The message of war was promoted with unbending consistency when it came to the certifiably criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 by US-led forces.  It was very much in keeping with the rules-based order according to President George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own yappy John Howard.  War would take place, whatever the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities.

    Having decided that invading Iraq would be good copy, the Murdoch Press Empire went to work softening minds and adding Viagra to war adventurism.  Of the stable of papers run by Rupert Murdoch, only one of the 175 – the Hobart Mercury – supported the war.  The project certainly bore rewards in terms of moving opinion.  A Gallup International survey’s findings released on February 4, 2003 revealed that 68 percent of Australians backed military action against Iraq.  Of those Australians surveyed, 89 percent expected war to be imminent.  This was, pure and simple, an incitement to conflict, a hardening of the resolve.

    While it is not NATO, or the United States, that is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, a country meshed with Russian history and influence, the language of predictability, the undeviating lingo of war, has come to heavily shade the workings of diplomacy.  In London, Washington and Canberra, we are already seeing the position that war will take place.

    Speaking to CBS, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was as good as convinced that “provocations created by the Russian or separatist forces over the weekend, false flag operations” suggested a state of advanced preparedness for invasion.

    UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his address to the Munich Security Conference, conceded to not fully knowing “what President [Vladimir] Putin intends but the omens are grim and that is why we must stand strong together.”  Should Russia invade, Johnson promised, Russian individuals would be sanctioned, along with “companies of strategic importance to the Russian state”.  Raising capital on London capital markets would be made all but impossible “and we will open up the matryoshka dolls of Russian-owned companies and Russian -owned entities to find the ultimate beneficiaries within.”

    Western press outlets are also aiding in this, using, for the most part, images and material of moving tanks and personnel supplied by the Russian Ministry of Defence.  Even mocking opinions expressed by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the “invasion date” have been spun as tangible proofs of coming war.

    As New Lines Magazine points out, “the West is doing such an eloquent job of broadcasting the reality of Russian military might” for the Putin regime.  In a conversation with one of the magazine’s authors, the editor of a British “mid-market tabloid” thought that “this invasion stuff is probably all nonsense.”  But no matter.  “Boris needs this to run and run.”

    The headlines and titles of various papers are all too drearily reminiscent of 2003.  “We may be just hours away from war in Europe,” shrieked Mark Almond on February 15 in the Daily Mail.  Some hours have passed since then, but there is no sign of the journalist being held accountable for this nakedly hysterical effusion.

    The Scottish Sun was even more blood thirstily confident, with its February 13 issue trumpeting that there was “48 hours to war.”  Moscow’s “bombing blitz may be early as Tuesday after Prez talks deadlock.”  That same day, The Sunday Telegraph insisted that Russia was plotting an imminent “‘false flag attack to provoke war.”

    The script for invasion, in other words, has already been written, and not necessarily or entirely from the pen of the Russian leader.  The pieces are all in place: the assumption of invasion, the promised implementation of sanctions and limits on raising finance, and strong condemnation.  A fever has taken hold, and it promises to carry away much life and sensibility.

    The post Innate Warmongering: Seeing Conflict in Ukraine as Inevitable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Sanctions Caused Mass Civilian Deaths in Iraq. Afghan Civilians Are Up Next.

    A woman wearing a burqa carries an infant as she waits with others for free bread in front of a bakery in Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 24, 2022.

    One million Afghan children may die from starvation over the next several months, according to the United Nations. Nearly 23 million Afghans are facing “crisis levels of hunger” and 8.7 million are on the “brink of starvation.” This mass hunger has rendered millions of Afghans on the “verge of death,” according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Alongside looming mass starvation, Afghans face below-freezing temperatures, severe shortages of life-saving medical supplies, and extreme poverty, making conditions in Afghanistan among the gravest of human rights crises on Earth.

    This is not a natural disaster, nor is it the result of conflict internal to Afghanistan. This a human-made humanitarian catastrophe. United States-made, specifically.

    The U.S.-allied Afghan government, most recently under the rule of Ashraf Ghani, was heavily dependent on foreign aid. Following the Taliban takeover in mid-August 2021, the Biden administration and the UN Security Council instituted devastating sanctions, sharply reducing foreign aid. The Biden administration froze 9.5 billion dollars’ worth of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, roughly equivalent to 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

    Journalists Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota recently reported that the White House has “urged European partners and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to similarly starve the nation of capital.” This has led to the total collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, creating “an almost globally unprecedented level of economic shock.” Unemployment has skyrocketed, and the country’s health care infrastructure has been decimated.

    As experts have noted, more Afghans are poised to die from U.S. sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and U.S. military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, U.S. establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the U.S. has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports.

    These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians. The respected international diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, led the first UN delegation to Iraq shortly after the imposition of sanctions. The delegation reported that, “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country.” The sanctions had produced “near apocalyptic results.”

    Two years later, the World Food Program reported that the continuing sanctions had “virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment, [and] widespread human suffering…. A grave humanitarian tragedy is unfolding.”

    The consequences of the sanctions for Iraq’s health care system were dramatic. Journalist Jeremy Scahill extensively covered Iraq under these sanctions and reported that, “Every pediatric hospital felt like a death row for infants.” Highly trained Iraqi doctors had the knowledge to save these infants, but the sanctions blocked them from acquiring basic medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, forcing doctors to reuse syringes multiples times and ultimately watch children die of perfectly treatable ailments. Iraqi hospitals “reeked of gasoline,” Scahill recalled, since desperate doctors were forced to substitute gasoline for sterilizer, disinfectant and bleach.

    UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday resigned his post in protest of the sanctions after serving as a UN diplomat for more than 30 years. During his resignation, he told the press that, “four thousand to five thousand children are dying unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet and the bad internal health situation.” He went on to label the U.S.-imposed sanctions “genocide.” His successor, German Diplomat Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in protest after fewer than two years, calling the sanctions a “true human tragedy that needs to be ended.”

    A report by the UN Commission on Human Rights studying the impact of the sanctions on Iraq estimated the civilian death toll to be in the “range from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children.” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was confronted with this shocking statistic on “60 Minutes,” which led to this now-infamous exchange:

    Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half-a-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

    Madelaine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice. But the price — we think — the price is worth it.

    During this era of sanctions, then-Sen. Joe Biden was a member, and eventually chair, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances. The same cannot be said for Samantha Power.

    Power is the current head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who was brought into the Biden administration to be a champion of human rights, “lifting up the vulnerable” and “ushering in a new era of human progress and development,” according to Biden’s nomination statement. Power was the founding director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, served as the Obama administration’s UN ambassador, and has a long list of human rights accolades. The nomination of this “human rights crusader,” as Politico put it, was widely praised in the human rights community. Yet Power’s record on U.S. imposed sanctions — first in scholarship and then practice — is abysmal.

    In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, describes the U.S. response to genocides of the 20th century, arguing that U.S. power should have been used to prevent atrocities and protect civilians. In the chapters surveying the 1990s, Power condemns the Clinton administration’s failure to intervene in Rwanda, intervene soon enough in the Balkans, and use U.S. military force to curb atrocities elsewhere.

    Yet the U.S. sanctions regime that caused mass devastation to Iraqi civilians was conspicuously absent — it does not get a single mention in the book. For someone so dedicated to using U.S. power to protect civilians and stop atrocities, Power’s silence on the hundreds of thousands of children dead from U.S. sanctions is telling. Power is unrelenting — and rightfully so — in her condemnation of human rights abuses carried out by other countries. Yet even though the death toll of the U.S.-imposed sanctions rivaled or even exceeded the contemporaneous atrocities and genocides Power depicted in her book, when the U.S. was the perpetrator, she was silent. Unfortunately, her silence on sanctions, and their devastating human consequences, persists.

    Power, as administrator of USAID, is now an active participant in the starvation of Afghan civilians. In response to pleas from the UN and humanitarian organizations working in Afghanistan, USAID increased humanitarian aid. But as experts have noted, meagerly increasing aid while imposing devastating sanctions and freezing nearly all of Afghanistan’s foreign assets will do nearly nothing to stop the “unprecedented level of economic shock.” There is near consensus among numerous humanitarian coordinators that the only way to curb the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and prevent furthering the major humanitarian disaster already underway is to lift the sanctions. Unfortunately, Power, the celebrated defender of human rights, refuses to call for a lifting of the sanctions, and instead remains uncritical.

    The devastating human toll of sanctions on Iraqi civilians in the ‘90s is a grim warning for what lies ahead if current U.S. policy continues. The Clinton administration’s sanctions caused mass death and suffering, and the Biden administration is dangerously close to following in their footsteps. The “human rights hawks” who lamented the humanitarian consequences of the fall of Kabul are now silent in the face of U.S.-imposed mass starvation, and the “human rights crusader” within the administration is complicit.

    We must listen to the chorus of humanitarian organizations and pressure the Biden administration to immediately lift the sanctions before it is too late. Afghans have suffered at the hands of the U.S. for long enough.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Iraq: Western powers accused of complicity in Turkish airstrike on Kurdish refugee camp

    Steve Sweeney writes that Kurdish officials have accused Western powers of complicity in Turkish airstrikes that killed two people and injured many more at the United Nations-administered Makhmour Refugee Camp in northern Iraq.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • “I Remember WMDs in Iraq”: Reporter Grills US Official on Russian Intel Claims

    U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price speaks during a briefing at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on January 31, 2022.

    Veteran Associated Press reporter Matt Lee grilled a State Department spokesperson Thursday over the U.S. government’s refusal to provide direct evidence for its claim that Russia is planning to fabricate a mass casualty event as a pretext to invade Ukraine, an allegation that the Pentagon said is backed up by intelligence.

    During a press briefing, Lee asked the State Department’s Ned Price — a former CIA official — to furnish concrete proof of the government’s accusation, which suggests Russia is plotting an elaborate false flag attack involving a graphic “propaganda video… depicting corpses, crisis actors pretending to be mourners, and images of destroyed locations or military equipment.”

    Lee said he has every reason to be skeptical of U.S. government assertions, given the lies that the Bush administration used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

    “I remember WMDs in Iraq,” said Lee.

    Watch the exchange:

    After Price outlined the U.S. government’s allegations, Lee noted that the Biden administration has “shown no evidence to confirm” the alleged plot. As the New York Times reported earlier Thursday, “Officials would not release any direct evidence of the Russian plan or specify how they learned of it, saying to do so would compromise their sources and methods.”

    But Price insisted during Thursday’s briefing that the Biden administration’s decision to go public with the false flag accusation constitutes, in and of itself, evidence that Russia is planning such an operation.

    “This is derived from information known to the U.S. government, intelligence information that we have declassified,” Price said.

    “Okay, well, where is it?” Lee asked in response. “Where is this information?”

    “I just delivered it,” the State Department spokesperson said.

    When Lee continued to press the matter, noting that “a series of allegations and statements” is not evidence, Price accused the longtime journalist of wanting “to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out.”

    The exchange circulated rapidly and widely on social media, with observers applauding Lee for his persistent and straightforward questioning and arguing that Price’s responses were indicative of the U.S. government’s intolerance of skeptical inquiry.

    “This is wild,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, tweeted in response to the back-and-forth. “The State Department’s spokesman can’t comprehend why the Associated Press feels the need to distinguish between a claim and a fact, and becomes visibly offended — and then angered — by the suggestion that his claims may require evidence to be accepted as credible.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Biden Presidency and the Specter of a Third World War

    Unlike Trump who was an outsider in American politics and derisively sneered at as “toddler-in-chief” by the US national security establishment, Biden is a typical establishment Democrat unabashedly playing into the hands of the deep state throughout his maiden year as president and escalating the conflict with Russia in Ukraine and with China in the South China Sea that risks plunging the United States into a catastrophic war with either of the two global powers.

    After being elected president in a bitterly contested election alleged to be rigged by the political rival, he has given a carte blanche to his patrons in the national security establishment to substantially ramp up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe, deploy strategic armaments aimed at Russia and menacingly exercise so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and the South China Sea, veritable “territorial waters” of Russia and China, respectively.

    During his over forty-year political career, first as a longtime senator from Delaware, then as Obama’s vice president and finally as the president of the world’s most powerful nation, Joe Biden has consistently proved that he is an unapologetic stooge of the deep state and an incorrigible Russophobic hawk.

    Before being elected as Obama’s vice president in 2008, as a senator and subsequently as the member and then the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, alongside another inveterate neo-McCarthyite hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, was one of the principal architects of the Bosnia War in the Clinton administration in the nineties. Thus, he is no stranger to the Machiavellian policy of the US national security establishment to destabilize Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.

    Reflecting on first black American president Barack Obama’s memorable 2008 presidential campaign, with little-known senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his running-mate, Glenn Kessler wrote for the Washington Post in October 2008:

    The moment when Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. looked Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a ‘damned war criminal’ has become the stuff of campaign legend.

    The Democratic vice presidential nominee brings up the 1993 confrontation on the campaign trial to whoops of delight from supporters. Senator Barack Obama mentioned it when he announced he had chosen Biden as his running mate.

    During vice presidential debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting US policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he ‘was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton.’ At another point he noted: ‘My recommendations on Bosnia — I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives.’

    Instead of “saving tens of thousands of lives,” the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed countless fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of refugees for which nobody is to blame but the Clinton administration’s militarist policy of subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western capitalist bloc.

    Regarding Washington’s modus operandi of waging proxy wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich Gulf States; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms markets in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was executed to the letter.

    Raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf’s petro-monarchies allows the deep state the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists were the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

    Naively giving credit to former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden for his purported “humanitarian interventionism” and for creating a catastrophe in the Balkans in the nineties, Paul Richter and Noam N. Levey, writing for the LA Times in August 2008, observed:

    Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for the US military action in the Balkans in the 1990s.

    Biden considers his most important foreign policy accomplishment to be his leadership on the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration, first to arm Serbian Muslims and then to use US air power to suppress conflict in Serbia and Kosovo.

    In his book, ‘Promises to Keep,’ Biden calls this one of his two ‘proudest moments in public life,’ along with the Violence Against Women Act that he championed.

    In 1998, he worked with Senator John McCain on a bipartisan resolution to push the Clinton administration to use all available force to confront Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, a move designed to force the president to use ground troops if necessary against Serb forces in the former Yugoslavia, which was beset by fighting and ethnic cleansing.

    Biden’s belligerent militarism, however, didn’t stop in the Balkans, as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden said in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the US national security and there was no option but to eliminate that threat. In October 2002, he voted in favor of the “Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq,” approving the US invasion of Iraq.

    More significantly, as chair of the committee, he assembled a series of witnesses to testify in favor of the authorization. They gave testimony grossly misrepresenting the intent, history of and status of Saddam and his Baathist government, which was an openly avowed enemy of al-Qaeda, and touting Iraq’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction.

    Writing for The Guardian in February 2020, Mark Weisbrot observed that Joe Biden was at the forefront of mustering bipartisan support for the illegal Iraq War and it would come back to haunt him in the presidential elections like the criminal complicity of Hillary Clinton in lending legitimacy to the Bush administration’s unilateral invasion of Iraq thwarted her presidential ambitions, too, in the 2016 presidential elections.

    Weisbrot added:

    When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

    ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war,’ Biden said a few days before the vote. ‘I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur …’

    But he had a power much greater than his own words. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of ‘regime change as the stated US policy’ and warned of ‘a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade.’ That Iraqis would ‘welcome the United States as liberators’ and that Iraq ‘permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq’ and that ‘they are being supported.’

    When the ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t go as planned and the country slipped into myriad ethnic and sectarian conflicts, in November 2006, Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, released a “comprehensive strategy” to end sectarian violence in Iraq. Rather than continuing the previous approach or withdrawing the US forces, the plan called for “a third way”: federalizing Iraq and giving Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis “breathing room” in their own regions.

    In September 2007, a non-binding resolution endorsing such a scheme passed the Senate, but the idea was unfamiliar, had no political legitimacy, and failed to gain traction. Iraq’s political leadership denounced the resolution as a de facto “Balkanization of Iraq,” and the US Embassy in Baghdad issued a statement distancing itself from it. Foreign policy “maven” Biden laughed it off as nothing more than one of his facetious gaffes.

    Regarding the decade-long proxy war in Syria orchestrated by Washington to ensure Israel’s regional security, addressing a seminar at Harvard in 2014, “not-so-Sleepy Joe” cunningly sought refuge in plausible deniability and contended: “Saudi Arabia and the UAE had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars and large amounts of weaponry to a variety of Islamist militias inside Syria, including at least one with ties to al Qaeda.”

    “The Turks were great friends, and I’ve a great relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, … the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do?” Biden asked, according to a recording of the speech posted on the White House’s website.

    “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

    To his credit, despite being a warmonger masquerading as “a peacenik,” former President Obama was at least smart. Having graduated as one of the poorest students from law school, then-Vice President Biden didn’t realize the irony of his remarks.

    The Gulf States, Turkey and Jordan didn’t funnel money and weapons into Syria’s proxy war without a nod from Washington. The CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore to train and arm Syrian militants battling the Bashar al-Assad government from 2012 to 2017 in the border regions of Jordan and Turkey was approved and supervised by the Obama administration of which Biden was the vice president and second-in-command.

    In fact, Washington exercised such an absolute control over Syria’s theater of proxy war that although the US openly provided the American-made antitank (TOW) weapons to Syrian militant groups, it strictly forbade its clients from providing anti-aircraft weapons (MANPADS) to the militants, because Israel frequently flies surveillance aircrafts and drones and occasionally conducts airstrikes in Lebanon and Syria, and had such weapons fallen into the hands of jihadists, they could have become a long-term security threat to the Israeli air force.

    Although ostensibly fighting a “war on terror” for the last couple of decades, the US deep state has clandestinely nurtured Islamic jihadists and used them as proxies in myriad conflict zones of the Middle East, North Caucasus and the Balkans to achieve “strategic objectives” of destabilizing regional and global adversaries.

    If we take a cursory look at the history of the recent US administrations, the Carter and Reagan administrations trained and armed Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War in the eighties, those same “freedom fighters” later mutated into al-Qaeda and Taliban; the Clinton administration used Islamic jihadists to break up former Yugoslavia in the nineties; the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 that gave birth to al-Qaeda in Iraq; and the Obama-Biden administration initiated proxy wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 to topple Arab nationalist governments of Libyan leader Gaddafi and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that gave birth to extremist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Islamic State and al-Nusra Front in Syria.

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  • The Imperialists’ and Proxies’ War against Syria

    On 30 August 2021, the United States’ 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan came to an end when the removal of American forces was completed. Although the withdrawal was botched, it was the correct move. The withdrawal is ignominious because it turns out that the much ballyhooed US fighting forces were, in the end, defeated by Afghan peasants. Has the US learned anything from its debacle in Afghanistan? One might gain an insight into that question by observing the debacle still ongoing in Syria.

    Author A.B. Abrams provides an in-depth analysis on the US-led war in Syria in his excellent book World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields (Clarity Press, 2021). WW in Syria documents the lead up to war in Syria, the precursors, the ideologies, the tactics, who the combatants are and who is aligned with who at different stages of the war, the battles fought, the impact of sophisticated weaponry, adherence to international law, the media narratives, and the cost of winning and losing the war in Syria for the warring parties. Unequivocally, every side loses in war. People are killed on all sides, and each death is a loss. But a victor is usually declared, and Syria with its allies has been declared as having won this war, albeit at a great price. However, the finality and clarity of the victory is muddled because Turkey and the US are still occupying and pillaging northern areas of Syria where they provide protection for Islamist remnants (or recklessly guard Islamist prisoners; as I write, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and US are fighting to defeat an Islamic State (IS) assault on a prison in northeastern Syria). In addition, apartheid Israel continues to periodically attack war-ravaged Syria.

    Abrams asks why the West and Israel were bent on “regime change” in Syria. As Abrams explains, with several examples, nations that do not put themselves in thrall to the US will be targeted for overthrow of their governments. (chapter 1) “Syria was increasingly portrayed as being under some kind of malign communist influence — the only possible explanation in the minds of the U.S. and its allies for any party to reject what the West perceived as its own benevolence.” (p 10)

    What is happening in Syria must be understood in a historical perspective. (p 55) Abrams details how imperialist information warfare brought about violent overthrows of socialistic governments in Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. That tested template has now been applied to Syria. (chapter 2)

    Abrams identifies four casus belli for attacking Syria: (1) being outside the Western sphere of influence, (2) to isolate Syria from Hezbollah and Iran, which would appease Israel and the Gulf states, (3) to remove Iran and Russia as suppliers of natural gas to Europe, (4) to isolate Syria geo-politically from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and (5) a new base for foisting Islamist (“Islamist” is used to refer to a political ideology rather than the faith of Muslims) groups against Western-designated enemies.

    So Syria found itself beset by a multitude of aggressive foreign actors: key NATO actors Britain, France, the US, and Turkey. Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, and Israel were staging grounds for attacks. (p 99) The Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were also arrayed against Syria. At first, the mass protests — given fuel by Bashar Al Assad’s neoliberalism schemes (p 35) — served as a shield for covertly supported military operations. (p 107)

    These state actors supported several Islamist entities. Abrams, who is proficient in Arabic, adroitly elucidates the complex and realigning web of Islamist proxies. Among these groups are Al Qaeda, Fatah Al Asram, Absay Al Ansar, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and IS.

    Syria would not be completely alone as fellow Axis of Resistance members Iran and Hezbollah would come to the aid of Syria. Hezbollah directly joined in the spring of 2013 and it played an important role in the pivotal capture of Al Qusayr. (p 132) Thereafter, Iran would step up its involvement in defense of Syria. (p 134)

    What will be a surprise to most people is the solidarity shown by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) toward its longtime partner Syria. (Albeit this is no surprise to readers of another of A.B. Abram’s excellent books, Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power. Review.) Gains made by the invading forces would be substantially rolled back with the entry of Russia, an event deplored by some leftists. Among the reasons for a Russian entry was fear of Islamist terrorism approaching its frontier.

    With the advancing tide of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies, Westerners reacted by pressing for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria. However, having learned from Western manipulation of such a United Nations Security Council resolution during the war on Libya, in which Russia and China had abstained, Russia and China would veto any such attempt this time.

    The enemies of Syria would engage in manufactured gas attacks abetted by disinformation. This pretext led the US and allied attackers to grant themselves the right to bomb Syria. Abrams responds, “It is hard to find a similar sense of self-righteousness and open willingness to commit illegal acts of aggression anywhere else in the world.” Abrams connected this extremism to “the ideology of western supremacism.” (p 174) Syria would relinquish the deterrence of its chemical weapons in a futile effort to forestall any future opposition-contrived chemical attacks attributed to it.

    Although Hezbollah, Iran, the DPRK, and Russia were invited by the government of Syria, the western nations (without UN approval) were illegally attacking Syria. Among them were Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands, and Middle Eastern actors which included Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. (p 197) Israel was abetting Al Nusra. (p 199) The Syrian borders with Jordan and Turkey were supply conduits for the Islamists. (p 203)

    The US planned to create safe zones in Syria with an eye to dismemberment of Syria. (p 204-207) Russia would up the ante, killing 150 CIA-backed Islamists in airstrikes, which the US criticized. (p 221) In apparent reprisal, an IS terrorist attack would down a civilian airliner over Egypt killing 219 Russian civilians. War is a dirty endeavor. Among their other crimes, Islamists used civilians as shields, poisoned water supplies, and carried out beheadings. American war crimes included using depleted uranium and white phosphorus (p 301).

    With the US and Turkey competing to occupy land from the collapsing IS, the SAA was pressured to advance as quickly as possible in its lands.

    Aside from internecine fighting among the Islamists, there were puzzling complexities described between different combatants. Turkey and the US were sometimes aligned and sometimes at loggerheads; the same complexities existed between Russia and Turkey (“a highly peculiar situation reflecting [Turkey’s] pursuit of both war and rapprochement separately but simultaneously.” p 348), and between Russia and Israel. Of course, given past and current history, any enemy-of-my-enemy alliance between Israeli Jews and Arabs against a fellow Arab country will certainly cause much head shaking.

    Despairingly, the UN was also condemned for bias and being complicit in the western attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. (p 334)

    Abrams criticized the American arrogation of the right to attack. He warned, “This had potentially highly destabilizing consequences for the global order, and by discarding the post-Second World War legal prohibition against crimes of aggression the West was returning the world to a chaotic order that resembled that of the colonial era.” (p 383)

    In toto, Abrams finds, “Even though Syria prevailed, the West was able to achieve its destruction at very little cost to itself … meaning the final outcome of the war still represents a strengthening of the Western position at Dasmascus’ expense.” (p 384)

    Israel’s War

    A book review can only cover so much, and there is much ground covered in WW in Syria. Particularly conspicuous is the annex at the end of the book entitled “Israel’s War.” (p 389-413) This annex leads one to ask why there are no annexes on America’s War, Turkey’s War, Qatar’s War, Saudi Arabia’s War, UAE’s War, NATO’s War, or even the terrorists’ War. Why does Israel stand out? Prior to the recent invasion of Syria, it was only Israel that was occupying Syrian territory: the Golan Heights, annexed following the 1967 War, and recognized as a part of Israel by president Donald Trump in 2019 (quite hypocritical given US denunciations of Crimea’s incorporation into Russia). Syria does not recognize Israel, and it has not reached a peace agreement with Israel. Of Syria’s Middle Eastern allies, Iran does not recognize Israel; Lebanon signed a peace treaty with Israel under Israeli and American pressure, but Lebanon never ratified it. Hezbollah regards Israel as an illegitimate entity. Hezbollah is noted for the first “successful armed resistance on a significant scale to the Western-led order after the Cold War’s end” in 2006. (p 39) Thus, Israel views the arc from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon as a security threat. Since Israel is regarded by some foreign policy wonks in the US as its aircraft carrier in the region, that reason among others secures US “aid” and military support. That Syria will not bend its knees to US Empire is also a source of consternation to imperialists. After Egyptian president Anwar Sadat treacherously broke Arab solidarity, (p 21-26) Syria would find itself increasingly isolated. Given the rapacious nature of imperialism, Israel and its lobby have faced no serious opposition from within the imperialist alliance, allowing the Jewish State to pursue its plan for a greater Israel to which Syria, a country that does not threaten any western nation, is an impediment. Israel, writes Abrams, will continually seek to degrade the military capabilities of countries it designates as enemies. (p 406)

    Closing

    The situation in Syria still simmers. Those who scrupulously read the dispassionate account of WW in Syria will gain a wide-ranging insight into what underlies the simmering. It will also be clear why any attempt by western imperialists and their terrorist or Islamist proxies will not succeed in a coup against the elected Syrian government. Syrians will put up a staunch defense. Hezbollah and Iran will stand in solidarity, as will the DPRK. Having Russia, a first-rate military power, presents a powerful deterrence. In addition, China, no pushover itself, stands steadfast in support of its Russian partner. Thus the western imperialists’/proxies’ main goal has been thwarted; they have been shamelessly reduced to pillagers of oil and wheat and occupiers of small pockets of a sovereign country.

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  • Hey, Hey, USA! How Many Bombs Did You Drop Today?

    August 2020 U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 Afghan civilians. (Credit: Getty Images)

    The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.

    Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years. This endless bombardment has not only been deadly and devastating for its victims but is broadly recognized as seriously undermining international peace and security and diminishing America’s standing in the world.

    The U.S. government and political establishment have been remarkably successful at keeping the American public in the dark about the horrific consequences of these long-term campaigns of mass destruction, allowing them to maintain the illusion of U.S. militarism as a force for good in the world in their domestic political rhetoric.

    Now, even in the face of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, they are doubling down on their success at selling this counterfactual narrative to the American public to reignite their old Cold War with Russia and China, dramatically and predictably increasing the risk of nuclear war.

    The new Airpower Summary data reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178 under Biden) since February 2020.

    The good news is that U.S. bombing of those 3 countries has significantly decreased from the over 12,000 bombs and missiles it dropped on them in 2019. In fact, since the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Afghanistan in August, the U.S. military has officially conducted no air strikes there, and only dropped 13 bombs or missiles on Iraq and Syria – although this does not preclude additional unreported strikes by forces under CIA command or control.

    Presidents Trump and Biden both deserve credit for recognizing that endless bombing and occupation could not deliver victory in Afghanistan. The speed with which the U.S.-installed government fell to the Taliban once the U.S. withdrawal was under way confirmed how 20 years of hostile military occupation, aerial bombardment and support for corrupt governments ultimately served only to drive the war-weary people of Afghanistan back to Taliban rule.

    Biden’s callous decision to follow 20 years of colonial occupation and aerial bombardment in Afghanistan with the same kind of brutal economic siege warfare the United States has inflicted on Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela can only further discredit America in the eyes of the world.

    There has been no accountability for these 20 years of senseless destruction. Even with the publication of Airpower Summaries, the ugly reality of U.S. bombing wars and the mass casualties they inflict remain largely hidden from the American people.

    How many of the 3,246 attacks documented in the Airpower Summary since February 2020 were you aware of before reading this article? You probably heard about the drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians in Kabul in August 2021. But what about the other 3,245 bombs and missiles? Whom did they kill or maim, and whose homes did they destroy?

    The December 2021 New York Times exposé of the consequences of U.S. airstrikes, the result of a five-year investigation, was stunning not only for the high civilian casualties and military lies it exposed, but also because it revealed just how little investigative reporting the U.S. media have done on these two decades of war.

    In America’s industrialized, remote-control air wars, even the U.S. military personnel most directly and intimately involved are shielded from human contact with the people whose lives they are destroying, while for most of the American public, it is as if these hundreds of thousands of deadly explosions never even happened.

    The lack of public awareness of U.S. airstrikes is not the result of a lack of concern for the mass destruction our government commits in our names. In the rare cases we find out about, like the murderous drone strike in Kabul in August, the public wants to know what happened and strongly supports U.S. accountability for civilian deaths.

    So public ignorance of 99% of U.S. air strikes and their consequences is not the result of public apathy, but of deliberate decisions by the U.S. military, politicians of both parties and corporate media to keep the public in the dark. The largely unremarked 21-month-long suppression of monthly Airpower Summaries is only the latest example of this.

    Now that the new Airpower Summary has filled in the previously hidden figures for 2020-21, here is the most complete data available on 20 years of deadly and destructive U.S. and allied air strikes.

    Numbers of bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the United States and its allies since 2001:

    Iraq (& Syria*)       Afghanistan    Yemen Other Countries**
    2001             214         17,500
    2002             252           6,500            1
    2003        29,200
    2004             285                86             1 (Pk)
    2005             404              176             3 (Pk)
    2006             310           2,644      7,002 (Le,Pk)
    2007           1,708           5,198              9 (Pk,S)
    2008           1,075           5,215           40 (Pk,S)
    2009             126           4,184             3     5,554 (Pk,Pl)
    2010                  8           5,126             2         128 (Pk)
    2011                  4           5,411           13     7,763 (Li,Pk,S)
    2012           4,083           41           54 (Li, Pk,S)
    2013           2,758           22           32 (Li,Pk,S)
    2014         6,292*           2,365           20      5,058 (Li,Pl,Pk,S)
    2015       28,696*              947   14,191           28 (Li,Pk,S)
    2016       30,743*           1,337   14,549         529 (Li,Pk,S)
    2017       39,577*           4,361   15,969         301 (Li,Pk,S)
    2018         8,713*           7,362     9,746           84 (Li,Pk,S)
    2019         4,729*           7,423     3,045           65 (Li,S)
    2020         1,188*           1,631     7,622           54 (S)
    2021             554*               801     4,428      1,512 (Pl,S)
    Total     154, 078*         85,108   69,652     28,217

     Grand Total = 337,055 bombs and missiles

    **Other Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia.

    These figures are based on US. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project‘s count of bombs and missiles dropped on Yemen (only through September 2021); the New America Foundation’s database of foreign air strikes in Libya; and other sources.

    There are several categories of air strikes that are not included in this table, meaning that the true numbers of weapons unleashed are certainly higher. These include:

    Helicopter strikes: Military Times published an article in February 2017 titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly air strikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of air strikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported air strikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many missiles were fired in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.

    AC-130 gunships: The U.S. military did not destroy the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2015 with bombs or missiles, but with a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction, usually manned by U.S. Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it until it is completely destroyed. The U.S. has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria.

    Strafing runs: U.S. Airpower Summaries for 2004-2007 included a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. A-10s can fire 65 depleted uranium shells per second to blanket an area with deadly and indiscriminate fire. But that does not appear to count as a “weapons release” in U.S. Airpower Summaries.

    “Counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the world: The United States formed a military coalition with 11 West African countries in 2005, and has built a drone base in Niger, but we have not found any systematic accounting of U.S. and allied air strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or elsewhere.

    The failure of the U.S. government, politicians and corporate media to honestly inform and educate the American public about the systematic mass destruction wreaked by our country’s armed forces has allowed this carnage to continue largely unremarked and unchecked for 20 years.

    It has also left us precariously vulnerable to the revival of an anachronistic, Manichean Cold War narrative that risks even greater catastrophe. In this topsy-turvy, “through the looking glass” narrative, the country actually bombing cities to rubble and waging wars that kill millions of people, presents itself as a well-intentioned force for good in the world. Then it paints countries like China, Russia and Iran, which have understandably strengthened their defenses to deter the United States from attacking them, as threats to the American people and to world peace.

    The high-level talks beginning on January 10th in Geneva between the United States and Russia are a critical opportunity, maybe even a last chance, to rein in the escalation of the current Cold War before this breakdown in East-West relations becomes irreversible or devolves into a military conflict.

    If we are to emerge from this morass of militarism and avoid the risk of an apocalyptic war with Russia or China, the U.S. public must challenge the counterfactual Cold War narrative that U.S. military and civilian leaders are peddling to justify their ever-increasing investments in nuclear weapons and the U.S. war machine.

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  • Fighter Jets Useless against Real Security Threats

    “It’s never enough” said former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about military spending. “They always want more.” ((Jay Hill, in the House of Commons,  quoting then Prime Minister  Jean Chrétien from an article by Stephanie Rubec in the Ottawa Sun, October 20, 2003.))

    Canada shouldn’t spend huge sums on 88 new fighter jets incapable of protecting the population against pressing security threats. The warplanes will simply strengthen Canada’s powerful, offensive air force.

    Amidst a pandemic and climate crisis the security argument for spending $19 billion – $77 billion over their life cycle – on fighter jets is extremely weak. New warplanes won’t protect against climate induced disasters or new viruses. Worse still, purchasing heavy carbon emitting fighter jets diverts resources away from dealing with these genuine security threats.

    But we require these warplanes to protect Canada, say the militarists. In fact, many countries don’t have fighter jets. More than 30 nations, including Costa Rica, Iceland and Panama, don’t have an active military force at all while Ireland hasn’t had fighter jets for two decades. Nor has New Zealand, but the militarists who demand Canada follow its “Five Eyes” counterparts won’t mention that.

    Nor do they discuss how Canada’s free trade partner Mexico has no operational fighter jets. Doesn’t that country face a similar menace from the Russians or Chinese? The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is far better equipped than its counterpart in Mexico, a country with more than twice Canada’s population.

    RCAF has about 90 operational CF-18s. It is one of the better warplanes and will remain a top-tier fighter jet for many years to come. RCAF is about the 16th best equipped air force in the world. But Canada is the 39th most populous state. Should Canadians spend lavishly to maintain an air force far better equipped than this country’s relative population size?

    Considering the resources required to mitigate the climate crisis and pandemic why not simply maintain the CF-18s and when the RCAF’s standing approaches Canada’s share of the global population consider purchasing new fighter jets. If the RCAF were designed to defend Canada that would be the sensible approach. But that is not, in fact, its purpose. The RCAF is structured primarily to support the US war machine.

    Canada’s air force says CF-18s intercept 6-7 aircraft each year in Canada’s Air Defence Identification Zone, which is 100-200 nautical miles from its coastline. (Canada’s territorial airspace is 12 nautical miles from the coastline.) By comparison, notes Brent Patterson, Canada’s CF-18s have conducted 1600 offensive bombing missions over the past 30 years in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria and Libya.

    While the military tightly controls news during fighter jet missions, some information has trickled out about what happens when these planes drop bombs from the sky. Pentagon documents suggest CF-18s were responsible for a January 2015 air strike in Iraq that killed as many as 27 civilians. The RCAF claimed it had “no obligation”, reported the internal US documents, “to conduct an investigation” of the incident. In October 2015 the CBC also reported, “Canadian fighter planes have now been connected to a second airstrike in Iraq that has been reviewed by the Pentagon for possible civilian casualties.” In another incident, a CF-18 reportedly killed 10 and injured 20 Iraqi civilians on November 19, 2015.

    In 2011 seven Canadian CF-18 fighter jets dropped at least 700 bombs on Libyan targets. Two months into the bombing United Press International reported that Ottawa “ordered 1,300 replacement laser-guided bombs to use in its NATO mission in Libya” and a month later they ordered another 1,000 bomb kits. A number of coalition members placed strict restrictions on their forces’ ability to strike ground targets. These and other countries’ militaries frequently “red carded” sorties, declaring that they would not contribute. “With a Canadian general in charge” of the NATO bombing campaign, explained the Globe and Mail, “Canada couldn’t have red-carded missions even if it wanted to, which is why Canadian CF-18 pilots often found themselves in the most dangerous skies” doing the dirtiest work.

    CBC.ca reported that on March 29, 2011, two CF-18s launched strikes that directly aided the Jihadist rebels in Misrata and on May 19 Canadian jets participated in a mission that destroyed eight Libyan naval vessels. On their return to Canada, CBC.ca reported: “[pilot Maj. Yves] Leblanc’s crew carried out the final mission on the day Gaddafi was captured, and were flying 25,000 feet over when Gaddafi’s convoy was attacked.” Human Rights Watch found the remains of at least 95 people at the site where Muammar Gaddafi was captured. According to the human rights group, a sizable number “apparently died in the fighting and NATO strikes prior to Gaddafi’s capture” with multiple dozens were also executed by close range gunshot wounds. Some accused NATO forces of helping to murder Gaddafi.

    In the spring of 1999 eighteen CF-18s dropped 532 bombs in 678 sorties during NATO’s bombing of Serbia. About two thousand died during NATO’s bombing. Hundreds of thousands were internally displaced and hundreds of thousands were made refugees in a war that contravened international law.

    Two dozen CF-18s were deployed to Iraq in 1990. Among few other coalition members, Canadian fighter jets engaged in combat. They joined US and British counterparts in destroying most of Iraq’s hundred plus naval vessels in what was dubbed the “Bubiyan Turkey Shoot.” Coalition bombing destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The country’s electricity production was largely demolished as were sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, oil refineries, etc. Twenty thousand Iraqi troops and thousands of civilians were killed. The UN resolution allowed for attacks against Iraqi establishments in Kuwait while the US-led forces bombed across Iraq in what Mark Curtis described as the open “rehabilitation of colonialism and imperialism.”

    Buying 88 new fighter jets has little to do with protecting Canadians. It’s about funneling public resources to arms firms and strengthening the Royal Canadian Air Force’s capacity to fight in offensive US and NATO wars. Is this really how we should be spending public resources? If the government was truly concerned about security, it would spend the money on public/co-op housing, cleaning up ecological devastation and preparing for the next pandemic.

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  • Sir Tony Blair: Bloody Knight of the Realm

    Awards and honours bestowed by States or private committees, republican or monarchical, are bound to be corrupted by considerations of hypocrisy, racketeering and general, chummy disposition.  From the Nobel Peace Prize to the range of eccentric and esoteric orders bestowed each year in Britain by Her Majesty, diddling and manipulating is never far behind.  You are bestowed such things as a reminder of your worth to the establishment rather than your unique contribution to the good quotient of humanity.  Flip many a peace prize over and you are bound to find the smouldering remains of a war criminal’s legacy.

    The recently knighted Tony Blair is certainly not one to bother.  His name appeared in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list, having been made a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.  “It is an immense honour,” came the statement from the foundation that bears his name, “to be appointed Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, and I am deeply grateful to Her Majesty the Queen.”

    Others begged to differ.  Within hours, a petition launched by Angus Scott calling for the rescission of the award garnered thousands of signatures.  (To date, the number is 755,879.)  The award, says the petition, is “the oldest and most senior British Order of Chivalry.”  It asserts that Blair “caused irreparable damage to both the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society.  He was personally responsible for causing the death of countless innocent, civilian lives and servicemen in various conflicts.  For this alone he should be held accountable for war crimes.”

    The evangelical Blair of war adventurism will be forever associated with Iraq’s invasion in 2003, though most current commentary avoids his role in promoting humanitarian imperialism in NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.  (Never one to be too firmly attached to his ideals, Blair is currently advising the government of President Aleksandar Vučić who, as information minister of the Milošević regime, knew a thing or two in how to demonise Muslim Kosovars.)

    The Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War did not openly challenge the legality of the Iraq invasion in 2003 by Coalition forces but noted that Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to Western states.  It was also clear that peaceful options had not been exhausted.  The slippery Blair preferred another reading.  “The report should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit.”

    Sir Tony’s performance before the Chilcot inquiry should be, for students of legal history, placed alongside that of Hermann Göring at the International Military Tribunal proceedings at Nuremberg in 1946.  The latter’s sparring with the poorly briefed US Supreme Court justice turned prosecutor Robert Jackson was eminently superior, but the recently ennobled one could play the trained politician wary of being implicated in past misdeeds.

    Defenders of Sir Tony can be found in the ranks, all of whom essentially follow institutional logic.  The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey insisted that calls to rescind the knighthood showed disrespect for the Queen.  Sir Keir Starmer, his crown as Labour leader looking increasingly unsettled, defended the knighthood as rightfully earned, Blair having “made Britain a better country”.

    Others preferred to see Blair’s critics as incurably diseased.  “Blair Derangement Syndrome is a curious malady,” charges a smug Jack Kessler of The Evening Standard.  Kessler’s point is sensible enough: The entire honours system is slimed and soiled, so much so that getting upset about Blair as the “least deserving” of recipients is an act of meaningless stroppiness.

    Consider the entire awards system to begin with.  “From major donors to political parties to chief executives of soon-to-be insolvent banks, even a cursory glance at the history of our honours system would suggest this is somewhat of a reach.”

    Kessler’s parlour room logic presumes that a person party to what was described by the victors of the Second World War as a crime against peace can somehow be equated to rewarding banksters for financial misconduct or wealthy donors.  It certainly cannot be equated to King George V’s decision to make Lord Lonsdale a Knight of the Garter in 1928 in what was described at the time by a courtier as “sheer tomfoolery”.

    Others are simply indifferent to the culpability of a figure who richly deserves a grilling in the dock of the International Criminal Court.  (So much for the liberal international order of things, including the rule of law.)  The Spectator, through a piece by Stephen Daisley, shuns the issue, merely acknowledging Blair’s shabby treatment of Parliament, his “unduly presidential” manner, or a “New Labour project” spun to bankrupt politics.  These are deemed valid criticisms but hardly an impediment to receiving a knighthood.

    For Daisley, Blair Derangement Syndrome is a condition that must be rebuffed, rebuked and repudiated.  “Blair’s gravest sin, what he cannot and must not and will not be forgiven for, is that he won.”  He led his country “with moral imagination and personal fortitude and left Britain fairer, healthier, more modern and more at ease with itself.”  Pity the same cannot be said of Iraq or Afghanistan.

    It should be noted that this line of reasoning is entirely acceptable to a magazine that used to be edited by the current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and who made the Labour Prime Minister its 2002 Parliamentarian of the Year despite him showing an utter contempt for Parliament.  “It is hard to think of another party leader who, for eight years, has exercised such unchallenged dominance of the political landscape,” Johnson declared at the award ceremony.

    It was the classic affirmation that the Tories had, if only vicariously, won through the guise of one Blair.  Johnson, for his part, publicly mused that the award could aggravate the Cain-Abel relationship between Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown, “all other strategies so far having proved not wholly successful”.

    The justifications advanced by Daisley have been used for leaders past who made the trains run on time, built spiffy, smooth roads for vehicles (military and civilian) and ensured that everything operated to a neat schedule, irrespective of whether death camps or slave labour were involved.  Many made the mistake of losing the wars they began, facing noose, poison or firing squad.

    In the British context, where the benevolent, benign ruler assumes the force of majesty, the latitude for forgiveness is even greater.  Reducing colonies to penury, aiding the conditions of famine, initiating social experiments that distorted and destroyed, molested and plundered extant, thriving and sovereign cultures, has never been accounted for in a court of law, international or domestic.  In the absence of a hanging judge, it has been deemed fitting that any such figures be given knighthoods and rendered into statuary instead.

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  • Canada’s Head-of-State Honors a War Criminal

    The only place I want to hear him speak is in the dock at the Hague at the International Criminal Court facing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    — George Galloway, former British MP and the director of The Killing$ of Tony Blair

    Canada’s head of state, also the queen of Canada, has made the war criminal Tony Blair a “Sir.”

    Many will ask, “Isn’t prime minister Justin Trudeau Canada’s head-of-state?” No, he isn’t. Queen Elizabeth is Canada’s head-of-state. No, she isn’t a Canadian. So a Brit is Canada’s head-of-state. That elitist, colonial vestige remains intact in the year 2022.

    Having a foreign head-of-state has ramifications for Canada. First, under this constitutional arrangement, Canada has no say as to who its head-of-state will be. Second, the monarchy is thoroughly undemocratic. It is determined by birth order in one family. Third, atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Roman Catholics, etc need not apply. The monarch is the supreme governor of the Anglican church. That is the same church that ran so many Indian Residential Schools in Canada that sought to disappear Indigenous kids. As the Canadian civil servant in charge, Duncan Campbell Scott, stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem…. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question…”

    Elizabeth has never apologized for the monarchy’s role in the Anglican church-run residential schools in Canada.

    Usually a sovereign country would like its head-of-state to align with the foreign policy of the country. However, despite sharing a titular head with another country, it is unsurprising that those countries would occasionally differ on foreign policy objectives. Canada’s foreign policy does at times deviate from that of the United Kingdom. For instance, Elizabeth blessed the dispatch of British troops to wage war against Iraq, a war that Canada refused to send its troops to join, especially since Canadian citizens were much opposed to the war.

    UN secretary general Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal. Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali concurred on the illegality of the war. Nonetheless, Elizabeth decided to grant knighthood to the war criminal Tony Blair.

    On 1 January, Blair became a member of the Order of the Garter, England’s oldest and most senior order of chivalry. The BBC explains, “The appointments are the personal choice of the Queen, who has up to 24 ‘knight and lady companions’.”

    George Galloway was flummoxed by the queen’s decision. He pleaded with his queen: “Tonight I find myself in the unusual position of beseeching her majesty the queen to turn back from a disastrous error of judgement which she has made.”

    Canada does not even permit knighthood for Canadian citizens. Yet Canada finds itself in the position of having its head-of-state honoring a war criminal. Just how much blood is on Blair’s hands? One “catastrophic estimate” cited a figure of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths subsequent to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    Whether it is 2.4 million deaths, half of that, or a quarter of that, whatever the actual number is, the queen’s actions indicate that it is ostensibly a price worth bringing one of the war’s scoundrels into the queen’s inner circle.

    Is it not perversely ironic that the war criminal Blair who helped launch the invasion of Iraq that killed so many people is knighted while the man whose organization, WikiLeaks, that revealed the war crimes committed in Iraq and Britain’s role in the commission of those crimes, languishes as a political prisoner in a maximum security facility in England? Assange has been undergoing psychological torture, incarceration, defamation, and recently he suffered a stroke. He has had to endure all this punishment for the crime of publishing the commission of war crimes for which the kangaroo court in Britain agreed to extradite him to the United States, a country that had planned to murder him; instead he is being subjected to a a slow motion assassination in Elizabeth’s realm.

    The Canadian political establishment has been obsequious to empire when it comes to denying justice for Julian Assange, and the state/corporate media in Canada has been equally servile to empire.

    The time is long past to abolish Canada’s link to the British monarchy. More importantly, it is time for Canada to speak and act in the defense of publishers, journalists, and whistleblowers who expose the horrendous crimes of which any guilty country should forever be ashamed.

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  • After The Wars In Iraq, ‘Everything Living Is Dying’

    As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, the country remains awash in hazardous materials, such as depleted uranium and dioxin, which have polluted the soil and water. And extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau—one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

    The post After The Wars In Iraq, ‘Everything Living Is Dying’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out

    The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.

    As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.

    European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.

    Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.

    The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.

    Power projection

    In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.

    The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.

    But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.

    The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.

    That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.

    The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.

    They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.

    The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.

    Brutal policies

    After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.

    The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.

    The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.

    States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.

    Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.

    Climate crisis

    The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.

    But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.

    Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.

    In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.

    Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.

    The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.

    Impregnable borders

    Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.

    They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.

    Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.

    Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.

    Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”

    But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • I Want To Get Our Rights From The Americans Who Harmed Us

    On 12 July 2007, two US AH-64 Apache helicopters fired 30-millimetre cannon rounds at a group of Iraqi civilians in New Baghdad. These US Army gunners murdered at least a dozen people, including Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Reuters immediately asked for the US to conduct a probe into the killing. Instead, they were fed the official story by the US government that soldiers of Bravo Company, 2-16 infantry had been attacked by small arms fire as part of their Operation Ilaaj in the al-Amin al-Thaniyah neighbourhood. The soldiers called in air strikes, which came in and cleared the streets of insurgents. Reuters had information that the helicopters filmed the attack, and so the media house requested the video from the US military.

    The post I Want To Get Our Rights From The Americans Who Harmed Us appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge

    It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.

    His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    These two western countries killed non-combatants and carried out torture not, as they claimed, in the pursuit of self-defence or in the promotion of democracy, but to impose control over a strategic, resource-rich region.

    It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want to keep concealed. By redefining his journalism as “espionage” – the basis for the US extradition claim – they are determined to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle.

    Eyes off the ball

    Last week, in overturning a lower court decision that should have allowed Assange to walk free, the English High Court consented to effectively keep Assange locked up indefinitely.  He is a remand prisoner – found guilty of no crime – and yet he will continue rotting in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future, barely seeing daylight or other human beings, in Belmarsh high-security prison alongside Britain’s most dangerous criminals.

    The High Court decision forces our eyes off the ball once again. Assange and his supposed “crime” of seeking transparency and accountability has become the story rather than the crimes he exposed that were carried out by the US to lay waste to whole regions and devastate the lives of millions.

    The goal is to stop the public conducting the debate Assange wanted to initiate through his journalism: about western state crimes. Instead the public is being deflected into a debate his persecutors want: whether Assange can ever safely be allowed out of his cell.

    Assange’s lawyers are being diverted from the real issues too. They will now be tied up for years fighting endless rearguard actions, caught up in the search for legal technicalities, battling to win a hearing in any court they can, to prevent his extradition to the United States to stand trial.

    The process itself has taken over. And while the legal minutiae are endlessly raked over, the substance of the case – that it is US and British officials who ought to be held responsible for committing war crimes – will be glossed over.

    Permanently silenced

    But it is worse than the legal injustice of Assange’s case. There may be no hack-saws needed this time, but this is as visceral a crime against journalism as the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials back in 2018.

    And the outcome for Assange is only slightly less preordained than it was for Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The goal for US officials has always been about permanently disappearing Assange. They are indifferent about how that is achieved.

    If the legal avenue is a success, he will eventually head to the US where he can be locked away for up to 175 years in severe solitary confinement in a super-max jail – that is, till long past his death from natural causes. But there is every chance he will not survive that long. Last January, a British judge rejected extraditing Julian Assange to the US over his “suicide risk“, and medical experts have warned that it will be only a matter of time before he succeeds.

    That was why the district court blocked extradition – on humanitarian grounds. Those grounds were overturned by the High Court last week only because the US offered “assurances” that measures would be in place to ensure Assange did not commit suicide. But Assange’s lawyers pointed out: those assurances “were not enough to address concerns about his fragile mental health and high risk of suicide”. These concerns should have been apparent to the High Court justices.

    Further, dozens of former officials in the Central Intelligence Agency and the previous US administration have confirmed that the agency planned to execute Assange in an extrajudicial operation in 2017. That was shortly before the US was forced by circumstance to switch to the current, formal extradition route. The arguments now made for his welfare by the same officials and institutions that came close to killing him should never have been accepted as made in good faith.

    In fact, there is no need to speculate about the Americans’ bad faith. It is only too apparent in the myriad get-out clauses in the “assurances” they provided. Those assurances can be dropped, for example, if US officials decide Assange is not being cooperative. The promises can and will be disregarded the moment they become an encumbrance on Washington’s ability to keep Assange permanently silenced.

    ‘Trapped in a cage’

    But if losing the extradition battle is high stakes, so is the legal process itself. That could finish Assange off long before a decision is reached, as his fiancee Stella Moris indicated at the weekend. She confirmed that Assange suffered a small stroke during a hearing in October in the endless extradition proceedings. There are indications he suffered neurological damage, and is now on anti-stroke medication to try to stop a recurrence.

    Assange and his friends believe the stroke was brought on by the constant double strain of his solitary confinement in Belmarsh and a legal process being conducted over his head, in which he is barely allowed to participate.

    Nils Melzer, the United Nations expert on torture, has repeatedly warned that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture in the nine years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking asylum from US efforts to persecute him.

    That form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be far more effective at breaking people than physical torture. Moris told the Daily Mail: “[The stroke] compounds our fears about [Assange’s] ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. … Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”

    And that indeed looks to be the prize for US officials that wanted him assassinated anyway. Whatever happens to Assange, the lawless US security state wins: it either gets him behind bars forever, or it kills him quietly and quite lawfully, while everyone is distracted, arguing about who Assange is rather what he exposed.

    Political prisoner

    In fact, with each twist and turn of the proceedings against Assange we move further from the realities at the heart of the case towards narrative distractions.

    Who remembers now the first extradition hearings, nearly two years ago, at which the court was reminded that the very treaty signed by Britain and the US that is the basis for Assange’s extradition explicitly excludes political cases of the kind being pursued by the US against Assange?

    It is a victory for state criminality that the discussion has devolved to Assange’s mental health rather than a substantive discussion of the treaty’s misapplication to serve political ends.

    And similarly the focus on US assurances regarding Assange’s wellbeing is intended to obscure the fact that a journalist’s work is being criminalised as “espionage” for the first time under a hurriedly drafted, draconian and discredited piece of First World War legislation, the 1917 Espionage Act. Because Assange is a political prisoner suffering political persecution, legal arguments are apparently powerless to save him. It is only a political campaign that can keep underscoring the sham nature of the charges he faces.

    The lies of power

    What Assange bequeathed us through Wikileaks was a harsh light capable of cutting through the lies of power and power of lies. He showed that western governments claiming the moral high ground were actually committing crimes in our name out of sight in far-off lands. He tore the mask off their hypocrisy.

    He showed that the many millions who took to the streets in cities around the world in 2003 because they knew the US and UK would commit war crimes in Iraq were right to march. But he also confirmed something worse: that their opposition to the war was treated with utter contempt.

    The US and UK did not operate more carefully, they were not more respectful of human rights, they did not tread more lightly in Iraq because of those marches, because of the criticism beforehand. The western war machine carried on regardless, crushing the lives of anyone who got caught up in its maw.

    Now with Assange locked up and silenced, western foreign policy can return comfortably to the era of zero accountability that existed before Assange shook up the whole system with his revelations. No journalist will dare to repeat what Assange did – not unless they are ready to spend the rest of their days behind bars.

    The message his abuse sends to others could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.

    The truth is journalism is already reeling from the combined assaults against Khashoggi and Assange. But the hounding of Assange strikes the bigger blow. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge, no sanctuary anywhere in the world.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • Iraq Announces End Of US Combat Mission

    Iraqi groups expressed dissatisfaction and opposition to the official announcement of the end of the US combat mission in the country on Thursday, December 9, weeks before the deadline of December 31. The groups pointed to the official declaration by the US that no troops will be withdrawn from Iraq immediately but that the remaining troops will shift their mission to assisting and training the Iraqi forces. The groups have reiterated their demand for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops.

    Qasim al-Araji, Iraq’s national security advisor, tweeted, “today we finished the last round of dialogue with the international coalition..to officially announce the end of the combat mission of the coalition forces and their withdrawal from Iraq.”

    The post Iraq Announces End Of US Combat Mission appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • High Court hands Priti Patel final decision on US extradition of Julian Assange

    Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to the US. Judge Holdroyde ruled that the US appeal was allowed. Assange has been detained in Belmarsh prison since 2019. Prior to that, he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The speed of any extradition now appears to depend on home secretary Priti Patel.

    Assange is wanted by the US in connection with the publication of thousands of documents about the Iraq War. Previously a judge ruled against Assange being extradited due to his mental health. The US appealed this decision.

    US journalist Kevin Gosztola was in the courtroom:

    The extradition case will now be handed over to the US Secretary of State:

    It appears that Assange still has options for appeal. Though this is being described as a very serious loss:

    Barrister Adam Wagner tweeted some of the specifics of the decision. The courts claim that the US has provided a satisfactory “package of assurances”.

    Assange’s treatment at the hands of the authorities has been a topic of controversy. In 2020, the Lancet medical journal argued that his treatment amounted to torture and medical neglect.

    Some have argued that due to alleged CIA plans to assassinate Assange, he should not be handed over to the US.

    As Wikileaks pointed out yesterday, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) share this view:

    For now, Assange’s fate lays with home secretary Priti Patel.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

    Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.

    The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

    Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.

    Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’s choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it, or “defense” as the dictionary defines it.

    U.S. society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.

    Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world—even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place.

    While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.

    This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

    The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.

    But no such cut happened. U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.

    The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.”

    Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

    Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the U.S. decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project U.S. power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions.

    Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt U.S. politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War, and reducing congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for.

    It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” (President Eisenhower’s original wording) is reaping the benefits.

    Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

    Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.

    According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his Farewell Address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to “insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.”

    As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Austin and Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt MIC conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.

    So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.

    Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.

    The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.

    There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.

    If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s U.S. military.

    Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.

    Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

     

     

    The post How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

    The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come in an end.

    For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and – “there is no alternative.”

    But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new era.

    The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.

    Why?

    The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.

    That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”

    However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamize had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”

    And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.

    In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.

    The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.

    Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.

    With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.

    That is why, like a crazed wounded animal during the decline of the white West, all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.

    But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition. And that opposition is clear. In order for the world to live, the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy must die.

    The post The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Migrant caravan and Qatar’s tarnished World Cup: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians

    An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.

    And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.

    At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.

    A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.

    In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.

    Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.

    Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?

    Colonial narrative

    The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.

    The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.

    This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.

    It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.

    Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?

    The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.

    The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”

    The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.

    That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.

    Pattern of behaviour

    But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.

    And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.

    But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.

    Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.

    It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.

    When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.

    As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”

    Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.

    The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.

    Killing innocents

    The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.

    Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.

    Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.

    Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.

    In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.

    That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.

    The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.

    No scrutiny

    Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.

    US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce.  But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.

    The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.

    The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.

    But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.

    That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.

    In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.

    Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Terrorism 101: The Bert Sacks Story

    Since the annual U.S. Veterans Day holiday honoring military veterans was just observed on November 11, it seems more than appropriate to suggest the creation of a U.S. Victims Day, just as in a similar effort at truth in labeling, the Defense Department should be renamed the Offensive War Department.

    For the victims of American terrorism far outnumber the American soldiers who have died in its wars, although I consider most U.S. veterans to be victims also, having been propagandized from birth to buy the glory of war, not the truth that it’s a racket that serves the interests of the ruling class.

    Such wars, carried out with bombs, drones, mercenaries, and troops, or by economic embargoes and sanctions, are by their nature, acts of terrorism.  This is so whether we are talking about the mass fire bombings of Japanese and German cities during WW II, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombings and the agent orange dropped on Vietnam, the depleted uranium on Iraq, the use of terrorist surrogates everywhere, the economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Syria, etc.  The list is endless and ongoing.  All actions aimed at causing massive death and damage to civilians.

    According to U.S. law (6 USCS § 101), terrorism is defined as an act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

    By any reasonable interpretation of the law, the United Sates is a terrorist state.

    Let me tell you about Bert Sacks.  Perhaps you’ve heard of him.  His experiences with the U.S. government regarding terrorism tell an illuminating story of conscience and hope.  It is a story of how one person can awaken others to recognize and admit the truth that the U.S. is guilty of crimes against humanity, even when one is unable to stop the carnage.  It is a tale of witness, and how such witness is contagious.

    In November 1997 Sacks led a delegation to Iraq to deliver desperately needed medicines ($40,000 worth, all donated) that were denied into the country because of US/UN economic sanctions.  For such an act of human solidarity, he was later fined $10,000 by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Sacks had refused to ask for a license to travel to Iraq or to subsequently pay the fine for compelling reasons connected to his non-violent Gandhian philosophy, which teaches that non-cooperation with evil is as much an obligation as cooperation with good.

    For years previously, Sacks had been learning, as would have anyone who was following the news, that the American sanctions under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton following the illegal and unjust Gulf War, had been aimed at crippling the Iraqi infrastructure upon which all civilian life depended.  Iraq had been devastated by the U.S. war of aggression, and a great deal of its infrastructure, especially electricity and therefore water purification systems, had already been destroyed. Clinton kept up the sanctions and the bombing in support of Bush’s war intentions. So much for differences between Republicans and Democrats!  Regular Iraqis were suffering terribly.  All this was being done in the name of punishing Saddam Hussein in order to oust him from power, the same Hussein whom the U. S. had supported in Iraq’s war with Iran by assisting him with chemical and biological weapons.

    As Sacks later (2011) wrote in his declaration to the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington when he sued OFAC:

    Weeks after the end of the Gulf War, on March 22, 1991, I read a New York Times front- page story covering the UN report by Martti Ahtisaari on the devastating, ‘near- apocalyptic conditions’ in Iraq after the Gulf War. The report said, ‘famine and epidemic [were imminent] if massive life-     supporting needs are not rapidly met. The long summer… is weeks away. Time is short.’ The same article explained U.S. policy this way: ‘[By] making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people, [sanctions] will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.’ This sentence has stayed with me for twenty years. It says to me that my government – by inflicting suffering and death on Iraqi civilians – hoped to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, and that we would simply call  it “making life uncomfortable.” [my emphasis]

    The years to follow the first war against Iraq revealed what that Orwellian phrase really meant.

    In 1994 Sacks read a survey on health conditions of Iraqi children in The New England Journal of Medicine that said:

    These results provide strong evidence that the Gulf War and trade sanctions caused a threefold increase in mortality among Iraqi children under five years of age. We estimate that an excess of more than 46,900 children died between January and August 1991.

    And that was just the beginning.  For the number of dead Iraqi children [and adults] kept piling up as a result of “making life uncomfortable.”

    Anton Chekov’s story “Gooseberries” pops into my mind:

    Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism.  There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him —  disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears  others.

    Sacks has long been that man with a gentle hammer, far from happy, comfortable, or contented in what he was learning.  In 1996 he watched the infamous CBS 60 Minutes interview of Madeleine Albright by Leslie Stahl who had recently returned from Iraq. Albright was then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be the Secretary of State.  Stahl, in reference to how the sanctions had already killed 500,000 Iraqi children, asked her, “Is the price worth it?” – Albright blithely answered, “The price is worth it.”

    In April 1997, a New England Journal of Medicine editorial said that:

    Iraq is an even more disastrous example of war against the public health . … The destruction  of the country’s power plants had brought its entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children. Mortality rates doubled or tripled among children admitted to hospitals in Baghdad and Basra… [my emphasis]

    The evidence had accumulated since 1991 that the U.S. had purposely targeted Iraqi civilians and especially very young children and had therefore killed them as an act or war.  This was clearly genocide.  In its 1999 news release, UNICEF announced: “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.”

    The British journalist Robert Fisk called this intentional destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure “biological warfare”: “The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear. Bomb now: die later.”  In his declaration to the court, Sacks wrote that the Centers for Disease Control, in warning about potential terrorist biological attacks on the U.S., clearly lists attacks on water supplies as terrorism and biological warfare:

    Water safety threats (such as Vibrio cholerae and Cryptosporidium parvum): Cholera is an acute bacterial disease characterized in its severe form by sudden onset, profuse painless watery stools, nausea and vomiting early in the course of illness, and, in untreated cases, rapid dehydration, acidosis, circulatory collapse, hypoglycemia in children, and renal failure. Transmission occurs through ingestion of food or water contaminated directly or indirectly with feces or vomitus of infected persons.

    By January 1997, as a result of such statements and those of U.S. military and government officials and reports in medical journals and media, Sacks concluded that the United States government was guilty of the crime of international terrorism against the civilian population of Iraq.  And being a man of conscience, he therefore proceeded to lead a delegation to Iraq to alleviate suffering, even while knowing it was a drop in the bucket.

    It is important to emphasize that the U.S. government knew full well that its intentional destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure would result in massive death and suffering of civilians.  Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said of such destruction that “If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing.”  All the deaths that followed were done as part of an effort at regime change – to force Hussein out of office, something finally accomplished by the George W. Bush administration with their lies about weapons of mass destruction and their 2003 war against Iraq that killed between 1-2 million more Iraqis.  The recent accolades heaped on Colin Powell, who as Secretary of State consciously lied at the UN and who led the first war against Iraq – two major war crimes – should be a reminder of how unapologetic U.S. leaders are for their atrocities.  I would go so far as to say they revel in their ability to commit them.  Because he called them out on this by doing what all journalists and writers should do, they have pursued and caged Julian Assange as if he were a wild dog who walked into their celebratory dinner party.

    In this 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” you can read how these people think.  And read Thomas Merton’s poem “Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site With Furnaces,” and don’t skip its last three lines and you can grasp the bureaucratic mind at its finest. Euphemisms like “uncomfortable” and “collateral damage” are their specialties.  Killing the innocent are always on their menu.

    Bert Sacks and his delegation got some brief media publicity for their voyage of mercy.  He believed that if the American people really knew what was happening to Iraqi children, they would demand that it be stopped.  This did not happen.  His tap with the hammer of conscience failed to awaken the hypnotized public who overwhelmingly had elected Clinton to a second term in 1996 six months after the 60 Minutes interview.  Yes, “Everything is [was] quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics.”

    Although the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi children in the 1990s were dying at the rate of at least 5,000 per month as a direct result of the sanctions, very few major media publicized this.  The 60 Minutes show, with its shocking statement by Albright, was an exception and was seen by millions of Americans.  After that show aired, to claim you didn’t know was no longer believable.  And although most mainstream media buried the truth, it was still available to those who cared.  There were some conscience-stricken officials, however.  In his declaration to the court, Sacks wrote:

    The first two heads of the “Oil-for-Food” program – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck – each resigned a position as UN Assistant Secretary General to protest the consequences of the U.S. imposed sanctions policy on Iraq. Mr. Halliday said, ‘We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.’ He called it genocide.

    There were also doctors, politicians, independent writers, and Nobel Peace Laureates who called the policy genocide and said, “Sanctions are the economic nuclear bomb.”  Sacks told the court that “Finally, this list includes a 32-year career, retired U.S. diplomat – Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism – who says: ‘you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in [terrorist] activities. Ours is one of them.’”

    Military planners, moreover, wrote in military publications that it was desirable to kill Iraqi civilians; that it was an essential part – if not the major part – of war strategy.  They called it “dual-use targeting” and called themselves “operational artists.”

    Sacks was able to reach a few officials and journalists who realized this was not art but massive war crimes.  This showed that it is not impossible to change people, hard as it is.  The judge in his court case, James L. Robart, while agreeing that OFAC had not exceeded its authority in fining him, acknowledged that the court had to accept as true that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children as reported by UNICEF had come to constitute genocide, but [my emphasis] U.S. law prohibited the bringing of any consideration of genocide into a legal proceeding, which allows the U.S. government to commit this crime while barring any other party from raising the issue legally.

    In other words, the U.S. government can accuse others of committing genocide, but no one can legally accuse it.  It is above all laws.

    Ten months before his 1997 trip to Iraq, Sacks met with Kate Pflaumer, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington.  He says:

    We met in her office and I asked her for the legal definition of terrorism pursuant to the laws of the United States. She asked what could she do for me.  I said “Prosecute me for violating U.S. Iraq sanctions by bringing medicine there.”  She said, “I won’t do that for you!  Can I help in any other way?” I asked for the U.S. legal definition of terrorism.  She pulled out a law book, had her secretary copy the page for me, and didn’t forget my request.  When she left office, she wrote the op-ed on June 21, 2001 …calling U.S. Iraq policy terrorism! The two main elements relevant to the issue here are: (1) it is an act dangerous to human life; and (2) done apparently to coerce or intimidate a civilian population or a government  (see 18 U.S.C. § 2331).

    On June 21, 2001, Ms. Pflaumer, then the former U.S. Attorney, wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following:

    The reality on the ground in Iraq is not contested. Thousands of innocent children and adult civilians die every month as a direct result of the 1991 bombing of civilian infrastructure: sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, water purification facilities. Allied bombing targets included eight multipurpose dams, repeatedly hit, which simultaneously  wrecked flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. [Four of seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage facilities. Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq. We did this for “long term leverage.” These military decisions were sanctioned by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.]

    In May 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reaffirmed that the “price” of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was “worth it. ”

    Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states:

    It is prohibited to attack, destroy or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” and includes foodstuffs, livestock and “drinking water supplies and irrigation works.

    Title 18 U.S. Code Section 2331 defines international terrorism as acts dangerous to human life that would violate our criminal laws if done in the United States when those acts are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.

    Thus did Kate Pflaumer, in an act of conscience and upholding her legal obligation as an attorney, call the U.S a terrorist state.  This probably never would have happened without the non-violent hammer of Bert Sacks, who over the years has made nine trips to Iraq with other brave and determined souls who are a credit to humanity.  Messengers of love, truth, and compassion.

    Despite their witness, such U.S. terrorism continues as usual.

    We cannot let “nothing protest but mute statistics.”  The first lesson in U.S. Terrorism 101 is to become people with hammers, and hammer out truth and justice for the world to hear.  Bert Sacks has done this.  We must follow suit.

    Therein lies our only hope.

    For by any reasonable interpretation of the law, the United Sates is a terrorist state – beyond the law.

    The post U.S. Terrorism 101: The Bert Sacks Story first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Turkey is using chemical weapons in its attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan

    The Kurdistan Freedom Movement – together with solidarity groups and human rights organisations – are calling for an end to Turkey’s use chemical weapons.

    Turkey – which is denying it has used chemical weapons – has been a signatory to the chemical weapons convention since 1997.

    According to the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its supporters, however, the use of such weapons has increased since Turkey invaded guerrilla held areas in South Kurdistan – the area of Kurdistan that lies within Iraq’s borders (also known as Iraqi Kurdistan).

    According to campaign group Peace in Kurdistan:

    Since Turkey’s armed forces invaded northern Iraq/South Kurdistan on 23 April 2021 there have been reports that it has been using chemical weapons against Kurdish guerrillas in the regions of Zap, Metina and Avasia.

    These areas are held by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and associated guerrilla forces. The PKK is demanding an end to the repression and authoritarianism of the Turkish state, and is part of the movement for a radical democratisation of the region through a bottom up system called democratic confederalism.

    The group’s statement continues:

    The frequency of the use of these weapons and their lethality has increased in the past two months – there are now reports of over 300 separate uses. The evidence of this international crime and the casualties resulting from chemical weapons use are mounting up.

    “All living beings and nature are completely destroyed”

    The Kurdistan Communities Union – or KCK – described the effects of the use of these weapons:

    The chemical weapons used by the Turkish state are lethal weapons that cause suffocation, burns, impairment of the nervous system, and cauterization and destruction of tissue. In the areas where these weapons are used, all living beings and nature are completely destroyed. In addition, the remnants of these weapons settle in soil, water and plants, massively endangering the health and survival of the local population for years to come.

    Dr Rûken Samsun, who’s a guerrilla fighting as part of the YJA Star Free Women’s Troops, told reporters from Firat News Agency:

    These chemical weapons affect human reflexes and nerves. There are also chemical gases that burn and suffocate the human body. Suffocation occurs when living things are deprived of oxygen. Chemical weapons are banned worldwide. The use of chemical weapons against the guerrillas is immoral.

    The interview with Samsun can be viewed here:

    Effects are being felt by the civilian population

    The 5 November KCK statement highlights that Turkey’s chemical weapon attacks affect Kurdish civilians, as well as the guerrillas:

    It is well known that chemical weapons are being used not only against the guerrillas, but also against the local civilian population. As a result of the use of these weapons, the civilian population is already suffering from severe health problems that have now reached extremely worrying levels. Many people in the region have been directly affected by the use of chemical weapons and have therefore tried to visit civilian hospitals in the region. However, they are being prevented from doing so by the KDP [authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan] and the Turkish state and are instead being treated in secretly established military hospitals. Although all these facts are known, the crimes against humanity committed by the Turkish occupation forces through the use of chemical weapons are still not recognized. This denial and the accompanying silence or open support provide legitimacy to these crimes.

    Why are you silent?

    The KCK concludes its statement with a call on people worldwide to speak out:

    As the KCK Health Committee, we are reaching out directly to all institutions, organizations, human rights defenders, and environmental and animal rights activists who are committed to securing the future of humanity: Why are you silent?

    It also makes a specific call for several international organisations – the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the United Nations (UN), the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), and Doctors Without Borders – to condemn Turkey’s use of chemical weapons:

    We would like to take this opportunity to directly address the OPCW, UN, CPT and especially Doctors Without Borders: Why are you silent regarding the genocidal crimes of the Turkish state in Kurdistan and the Middle East? To remain silent on the use of chemical weapons means to become accomplices and supporters of this crime. In particular, we would like to make the following appeal to the OPCW and Doctors Without Borders: We call on you to live up to your tasks, investigate the use of chemical weapons by the Turkish occupation forces in the guerrilla areas of South Kurdistan as soon as possible and without further passing of valuable time and to thus stop this crime. We would like to emphasize here that we are ready to provide all necessary support and assistance for these efforts.

    Calls for an arms embargo and sanctions against Turkey

    The Kurdistan National Congress, meanwhile, is calling for support from people worldwide:

    [we] call on all international institutions, governments and the international public

    ……to condemn Turkey for its crimes and use of chemical weapons

    ….to put Turkish government and state officials on trial for their crimes against humanity and war crimes

    ….to impose sanctions on Turkey for using chemical weapons

    ….to impose an arms embargo on Turkey.

    We call on the international press to break their silence and start reporting on Turkey’s use of chemical weapons.

    We call on the international public and all democratic forces to show solidarity with the Kurdish resistance and support the Kurds’ demand for an immediate stop of Turkey’s attacks and use of chemical weapons.

    Featured Image via Firat News Agency

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Media’s Lies About Colin Powell’s Lies

     

    USA Today: A Warrior, Diplomat and 'Great American'

    USA Today‘s front-page obituary for Colin Powell (10/19/21) called him “a Warrior, Diplomat and ‘Great American.” Accompanying stories called him “A Man Trusted by Presidents and the Public Alike,” and “Always Willing to Stand Against Racism.” The only hint of criticism was a story that said that “Iraq Tarnished [His] Storied Career.”

    Former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell received virtually wall-to-wall adulation in corporate media coverage of his death last week.

    In the New York Times (10/19/21), Bret Stephens called Powell “an exemplary military leader and presidential adviser.” Stephens’ Times colleague Maureen Dowd (10/23/21) said Powell was “the best America had to offer” and a “great man.” Theodore R. Johnson wrote in the same paper (10/21/21) that “we should take inspiration from Mr. Powell’s accomplishments.”

    Powell led, as David Ignatius tells it in the Washington Post (10/18/21), an “extraordinary life of service,” characterized by “a sterling career of public service.” Like Ignatius, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal (10/21/21) lacked a thesaurus, describing Powell as “a great man” and one of “the great ones.” In another Journal piece, Paula Dobriansky (10/20/21) called him “a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans,” a “hero of our time.”

    This gratuitous fawning deflects readers from reckoning with Powell’s record. Consider the heinous acts the “great man” admitted to carrying out in Vietnam.  (See Consortium News, 7/8/96.) In his memoir, My American Journey, Powell said of his unit in Vietnam: “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.” The “hero of our time” wrote:

    Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?  Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam…. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?

    Similarly, Powell’s “sterling career of public service” involved obstructing the truth of US war crimes in Vietnam. After the My Lai Massacre, when Powell was an Army major posted in Saigon, he was tasked with investigating a soldier’s letter describing US barbarism against the Vietnamese (Columbia Journalism Review, 4/3/09). Powell denied the charges, writing, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

    Selling the Iraq invasion

    AP: Colin Powell Dies, Trailblazing General Stained by Iraq

    AP‘s obituary (10/18/21) described Powell as a “trailblazing soldier and diplomat whose sterling reputation of service to Republican and Democratic presidents was stained by his faulty claims to justify the 2003 US war in Iraq.”

    The only aspect of Powell’s life that corporate media coverage of his death identified as a flaw with some consistency was the infamous 2003 speech to the United Nations, in which he helped sell the invasion of Iraq by falsely claiming the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction. Even on this issue, corporate media were soft on Powell.

    Ignatius said that the case Powell laid out “turned out later to have [been] based on flawed intelligence.” Stephens claimed that the so-called evidence Powell put forth “had the full confidence of the intelligence community.” Dowd wrote that “Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.”

    These are lies about Powell’s lies, as a Jon Schwarz article for the Intercept (2/6/18) demonstrated three years back. The “flawed intelligence” behind what Powell told the UN wasn’t, as Ignatius wrote, something that “turned out later” to be wrong: Powell claimed that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes supposedly for their covert nuclear weapons program but, prior to the speech, his own intelligence staff prepared a memo that pointed out that this assertion was untrue. Powell said that the tubes were built “to a tolerance that far exceeds US requirements” for comparable conventional weapons, but the memo noted that this was false.

    Nor did what Powell alleged at the UN have, as Stephens wrote, “the full confidence of the intelligence community”: Powell told the UN that “weapons experts at one [Iraqi] facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents” so as to “deceive [weapons] inspectors,” but another memo from his intelligence staff pointed out that this statement was “not credible.”

    That Powell kept these claims in his speech gives lie to Dowd’s attempt to portray Powell as doing his best to “scrub his speech of . . . the deceptions,” as does Powell’s active fabrication of evidence: Powell played an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers talking about searching ammunition dumps to make sure they weren’t accidentally holding onto banned chemical weapons, but he doctored  what they were saying in a way that made it sound like they were discussing the hiding of proscribed weapons (Intercept, 2/6/18).

    Powell’s deliberate lies shatter the myth that he was a “reluctant warrior,” as the Times’ Eric Schmitt (10/18/21) put it, a talking point that Ignatius (Washington Post, 10/18/21) repeated. Powell described a satellite picture as showing “a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong,” one of the “sure signs” that Iraqi “bunkers are storing chemical munitions.” Yet, Schwarz showed, another memo from Powell’s intelligence staffed flagged this claim as “WEAK,” and noted that “decontamination vehicles—cited several times in the text—are water trucks that can have legitimate uses.” Powell may have had misgivings about the assault on Iraq at various points in the lead up to it, but a person who knowingly distorts the truth so as to help bring about an invasion cannot reasonably be described as a “reluctant warrior.”

    Enthusiastic warrior

    WaPo: Colin Powell, the Reluctant Warrior

    One of David Ignatius’ main examples (Washington Post, 10/18/21) of how Powell was a “reluctant warrior” was the 2003 invasion of Iraq that he played a pivotal role in selling—which Ignatius called “a painful ending to a sterling career of public service.”

    The coverage of Powell’s death was silent on the consequences of other instances where Powell was quite the enthusiastic warrior. A Washington Post editorial (10/18/21) claimed that

    successful military operations…—the Gulf War, the 1989 invasion of Panama—benefited from Mr. Powell’s insistence that their costs and benefits be thoroughly weighed and that, when used, force should be deployed swiftly and overwhelmingly.

    Schmitt too mentioned both of these US aggressions—launched when Powell headed the Joint Chiefs of staff—and declined to say anything about their costs for Panamanians or Iraqis.

    A proper count of the civilians Washington killed in its attack on Panama—which a UN General Assembly resolution called a “flagrant violation” of international law (AP, 12/29/89)—has never been tabulated, but estimates believe it to be in the thousands, with the Panamanian poor subjected to the bulk of the violence (Al Jazeera, 1/31/16). Shortly after the war, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) found that the attack had displaced 15,000 people, and that at least 3,000 civilians were injured to the extent that they needed emergency treatment.

    In the invasion’s aftermath, Human Rights Watch concluded that

    American forces inflicted a toll in civilian lives that was at least four-and-a-half times higher than military casualties in the enemy, and 12 or 13 times higher than the casualties suffered by US troops. By themselves these ratios suggest that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians, where doing so would not compromise a legitimate military objective, were not faithfully observed by the invading US forces.

    Thus, there are thousands of Panamanians who might demur from the Post characterizing the war as having “benefited” from Powell’s “insistence” on using US military might “swiftly and overwhelmingly.”

    Somewhere in the range of 142,500 and 206,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War, between 20,000 and 35,000 of them civilians. In one hideous incident, US forces bombed an Iraqi infant formula factory. At the time, Powell claimed that “it is not an infant formula factory…. It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure.” A UN investigation found that what he said wasn’t true.

    Helping to keep people dying

    The coverage was also quiet about other important aspects of Powell’s legacy, including his role in Iran/Contra, a policy under which the US armed Iran in its war against Iraq—which was the US’s principal ally in that war—helping to keep people dying in both countries. The US would use that money to arm the Contras, a mercilessly violent band of counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua, to circumvent congressional legislation against supporting them.

    The Contras were, as Human Rights Watch reported at the time,

    major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.

    The report went on to say that US support for the Contras was

    sustain[ing] a force that has shown itself incapable of operating without consistently committing gross abuses in violation of the laws of war. The policy also has placed in jeopardy the holding of elections by encouraging Contra attacks on the electoral process.

    Powell, by his own admission, “had a role in this [Iran/Contra] business.” As Robert Parry and Norman Solomon (Consortium News, 9/16/96), “It was Powell who short-circuited the Pentagon covert procurement system that otherwise would have alerted the military brass that thousands of missiles were headed to Iran,” which the US said it regarded as a terrorist state. Even after the fallout from the affair, Powell would continue fighting on behalf of the Contras, traveling to Central America with Contragate kingpin Elliott Abrams to deliver a message that US aid would be in jeopardy unless the guerrilla war against Nicaragua continued (New York Times, 1/14/88).

    Earlier, in 1983, Powell was part of a supposed fact-finding mission to El Salvador that concluded that the US should keep training and lavishly funding the Salvadoran military, even though it had—with US assistance—massacred 600 people at El Sumpul and 1,000 at El Mozote, where half of the victims were under 12 years old (Democracy Now!, 10/19/21). A year after Powell’s visit, the Salvadoran military massacred 80 non-combatants in Cabanas province and at least 50 displaced persons in Chalatenango, in both cases “raping and murdering peasant women and systematically executing unarmed civilians” (AP, 3/28/85).

    Not ignorance but indifference

    WaPo: Colin Powell’s greatest legacy is in the people he inspired

    Condoleezza Rice (Washington Post, 10/18/21): The best thing Colin Powell did was inspire people like me.

    Taken together, the obituaries suggest that it’s not that corporate media journalists don’t know about the blood Powell helped shed; it’s that they think it’s all well and good that he did. Thus, the Post’s editorial board can assert that his “mistakes” were “outweighed by his accomplishments,” without fretting over some torched Vietnamese homes and efforts to starve Vietnamese people to death. He can be called “a great man” and a “hero” because the people who write such things are indifferent to piles of corpses in Latin America, or think  that their murders were justified.

    If these outlets found the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis objectionable, they wouldn’t fill their pages with praise for one of the people most responsible for the deaths, nor would they have had him eulogized by co-conspirators like Condoleezza Rice (Washington Post, 10/18/21) and Karl Rove (Wall Street Journal, 10/20/21). Lionizing someone who, like Powell, should have stood trial for war crimes, will—if left unchecked—prime the public to admire the next batch of would-be war criminals…rather than stopping them.

    Featured image: Main photo from the New York Times‘ obituary for Colin Powell (10/18/21).

    The post The Media’s Lies About Colin Powell’s Lies appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Racist Western Monopoly Media Ignore Colin Powell’s Horrendous War Crimes

    File photo taken on 5 February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the UN Security Council in New York. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary / AFP)

    The pro-Apartheid Israel former African-American military commander, mass murderer and genocidal liar, Colin Powell, has just died. Mendacious, racist and pro-war Western Monopoly media and politicians have been fulsome in their praise for the first Black US Secretary of State, white-washing his deadly lies over non-existent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and ignoring the millions dying in the Powell-complicit Vietnamese, Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian Genocides.

    By way of a posthumous International Criminal Court (ICC) war crimes prosecution brief, summarized below are the horrendous human consequences of Colin Powell’s evil role over 40 years in deadly US state terrorism atrocities from the Vietnam War to the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel (dates and Indigenous deaths from violence and war-imposed deprivation are given in brackets):

    (1). Powell lying and white-washing of the Vietnamese Genocide (1955-1975; 11.9 million deaths).

    (2). Powell lying and the illegal invasion of Panama (1989; 3,000 deaths).

    (3). Powell lying, the Gulf War and mass murder of Iraqi children by Sanctions (1990-2003; 1.9 million deaths).

    (4). Powell lying, America’s 9/11 false flag atrocity and the War on Terror (2001 onwards; 34 million deaths).

    (5). Powell lying and the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (2001-2021; 6.7 million deaths).

    (6). Powell lying and the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003-2011; 2.7 million deaths).

    (7). Powell lying, the Apartheid Israel-linked Iran-Contra scandal, Opiate Holocaust and the ongoing deadly Sanctions against Iran (post-1979, 4 million Iranian deaths; post-2001, 5.8 million global opiate deaths).

    (8). Powell lying and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by Apartheid Israel (1914 onwards; 2.2 million deaths).

    (9). Powell lying, General Smedley Butler’s truths, and the Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust (post-1950; 1,500 million avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation).

    (10). Critics of mendacious mass murderer Powell (post-1950 US Asian wars; 40 million deaths).

    (11). Egregiously dishonest Mainstream praise for serial war criminal, mass murderer, liar and child-killer Powell that soils and endangers America and the World (lying, inaction and Climate Genocide may cause 10 billion deaths this century).

    (12). Powell, post-WW2 German CAAAA (C4A; Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends, and Assertion of “never again”), and the need for de-Nazification of America and its Western allies.

    For details see Gideon Polya, “Vietnamese, Afghan & Iraqi Genocides: Mainstream media ignore war crimes of Colin Powell,” Countercurrents.

    The post Racist Western Monopoly Media Ignore Colin Powell’s Horrendous War Crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Our Future vs. Neoliberalism

    (Photo:  Tom Pennington)

    In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results.

    Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, education and clean energy, and repair a shredded social safety net. After decades of tax cuts for the rich, they are also committed to raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to pay for this popular agenda.

    Germany has elected a ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats that excludes the conservative Christian Democrats for the first time since 2000. The new government promises a $14 minimum wage, solar panels on all suitable roof space, 2% of land for wind farms and the closure of Germany’s last coal-fired power plants by 2030.

    Iraqis voted in an election that was called in response to a popular protest movement launched in October 2019 to challenge the endemic corruption of the post-2003 political class and its subservience to U.S. and Iranian interests. The protest movement was split between taking part in the election and boycotting it, but its candidates still won about 35 seats and will have a voice in parliament. The party of long-time Iraqi nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr won 73 seats, the largest of any single party, while Iranian-backed parties whose armed militias killed hundreds of protesters in 2019 lost popular support and many of their seats.

    Chile’s billionaire president, Sebastian Piñera, is being impeached after the Pandora Papers revealed details of bribery and tax evasion in his sale of a mining company, and he could face up to 5 years in prison. Mass street protests in 2019 forced Piñera to agree to a new constitution to replace the one written under the Pinochet military dictatorship, and a convention that includes representatives of indigenous and other marginalized communities has been elected to draft the constitution. Progressive parties and candidates are expected to do well in the general election in November.

    Maybe the greatest success of people power has come in Bolivia. In 2020, only a year after a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup, a mass mobilization of mostly indigenous working people forced a new election, and the socialist MAS Party of Evo Morales was returned to power. Since then it has already introduced a new wealth tax and welfare payments to four million people to help eliminate hunger in Bolivia.

    The Ideological Context

    Since the 1970s, Western political and corporate leaders have peddled a quasi-religious belief in the power of “free” markets and unbridled capitalism to solve all the world’s problems. This new “neoliberal” orthodoxy is a thinly disguised reversion to the systematic injustice of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism, which led to gross inequality and poverty even in wealthy countries, famines that killed tens of millions of people in India and China, and horrific exploitation of the poor and vulnerable worldwide.

    For most of the 20th century, Western countries gradually responded to the excesses and injustices of capitalism by using the power of government to redistribute wealth through progressive taxation and a growing public sector, and ensure broad access to public goods like education and healthcare. This led to a gradual expansion of broadly shared prosperity in the United States and Western Europe through a strong public sector that balanced the power of private corporations and their owners.

    The steadily growing shared prosperity of the post-WWII years in the West was derailed by a  combination of factors, including the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, Nixon’s freeze on prices and wages, runaway inflation caused by dropping the gold standard, and then a second oil crisis after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

    Right-wing politicians led by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. blamed the power of organized labor and the public sector for the economic crisis. They launched a “neoliberal” counter-revolution to bust unions, shrink and privatize the public sector, cut taxes, deregulate industries and supposedly unleash “the magic of the market.” Then they took credit for a return to economic growth that really owed more to the end of the oil crises.

    The United States and United Kingdom used their economic, military and media power to spread their neoliberal gospel across the world. Chile’s experiment in neoliberalism under Pinochet’s military dictatorship became a model for U.S. efforts to roll back the “pink tide” in Latin America. When the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe opened to the West at the end of the Cold War, it was the extreme, neoliberal brand of capitalism that Western economists imposed as “shock therapy” to privatize state-owned enterprises and open countries to Western corporations.

    In the United States, the mass media shy away from the word “neoliberalism” to describe the changes in society since the 1980s. They describe its effects in less systemic terms, as globalization, privatization, deregulation, consumerism and so on, without calling attention to their common ideological roots. This allows them to treat its impacts as separate, unconnected problems: poverty and inequality, mass incarceration, environmental degradation, ballooning debt, money in politics, disinvestment in public services, declines in public health, permanent war, and record military spending.

    After a generation of systematic neoliberal control, it is now obvious to people all over the world that neoliberalism has utterly failed to solve the world’s problems. As many predicted all along, it has just enabled the rich to get much, much richer, while structural and even existential problems remain unsolved.

    Even once people have grasped the self-serving, predatory nature of this system that has overtaken their political and economic life, many still fall victim to the demoralization and powerlessness that are among its most insidious products, as they are brainwashed to see themselves only as individuals and consumers, instead of as active and collectively powerful citizens.

    In effect, confronting neoliberalism—whether as individuals, groups, communities or countries—requires a two-step process. First, we must understand the nature of the beast that has us and the world in its grip, whatever we choose to call it. Second, we must overcome our own demoralization and powerlessness, and rekindle our collective power as political and economic actors to build the better world we know is possible.

    We will see that collective power in the streets and the suites at COP26 in Glasgow, when the world’s leaders will gather to confront the reality that neoliberalism has allowed corporate profits to trump a rational response to the devastating impact of fossil fuels on the Earth’s climate. Extinction Rebellion and other groups will be in the streets in Glasgow, demanding the long-delayed action that is required to solve the problem, including an end to net carbon emissions by 2025.

    While scientists warned us for decades what the result would be, political and business leaders have peddled their neoliberal snake oil to keep filling their coffers at the expense of the future of life on Earth. If we fail to stop them now, living conditions will keep deteriorating for people everywhere, as the natural world our lives depend on is washed out from under our feet, goes up in smoke and, species by species, dies and disappears forever.

    The Covid pandemic is another real world case study on the impact of neoliberalism. As the official death toll reaches 5 million and many more deaths go unreported, rich countries are still hoarding vaccines, drug companies are reaping a bonanza of profits from vaccines and new drugs, and the lethal, devastating injustice of the entire neoliberal “market” system is laid bare for the whole world to see. Calls for a “people’s vaccine” and “vaccine justice” have been challenging what has now been termed “vaccine apartheid.”

    Conclusion

    In the 1980s, U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often told the world, “There is no alternative” to the neoliberal order she and President Reagan were unleashing. After only one or two generations, the self-serving insanity they prescribed and the crises it has caused have made it a question of survival for humanity to find alternatives.

    Around the world, ordinary people are rising up to demand real change. The people of Iraq, Chile and Bolivia have overcome the incredible traumas inflicted on them to take to the streets in the thousands and demand better government. Americans should likewise demand that our government stop wasting trillions of dollars to militarize the world and destroy countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and start solving our real problems, here and abroad.

    People around the world understand the nature of the problems we face better than we did a generation or even a decade ago. Now we must overcome demoralization and powerlessness in order to act. It helps to understand that the demoralization and powerlessness we may feel are themselves products of this neoliberal system, and that simply overcoming them is a victory in itself.

    As we reject the inevitability of neoliberalism and Thatcher’s lie that there is no alternative, we must also reject the lie that we are just passive, powerless consumers. As human beings, we have the same collective power that human beings have always had to build a better world for ourselves and our children – and now is the time to harness that power.

    The post Our Future vs. Neoliberalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Colin Powell: Establishment Warrior

    History is strewn with the broken branches of twisted irony.  An individual who found himself entangled in it was the late Colin Powell, who, as a military man, gave a doctrine his name only to forgo it as a diplomat.

    The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could bring overwhelming and decisive force to bear.  Political goals had to be clear; hostilities would be brief.  There would be no more quagmires, no more Vietnam Wars for the US imperium.  The model for this was his first engagement with Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991.  The other manifestation of this approach was opposing military intervention in Bosnia.

    Such ruminations were reached after service in Vietnam, where he made his mark as a major who questioned the account of the My Lai massacre.  Tasked with providing the first response to the Pentagon’s queries spurred on by Ron Ridenhour, he showed an all-establishment view to the butchering of over four hundred villagers, questioning the complaint against Charlie Company as vicious rumour mongering.

    This approach served him well, enabling him to get a White House Fellowship, receive patronage from Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assume the role of President Ronald Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor, then National Security Advisor.  The Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs was only logical in the scheme of this alignment, granting him an almost panoptical view of military-intelligence operations.  He directly supervised the teachers of torture from the School of the Americas and learned the importance of keeping the death-squads in the service of US power at arm’s length.  Ridenhour conveys this point with gruesome precision.  “Just keep those big, burly, white American advisers far enough away from the actual mayhem so that they will never be seen splattered with blood on the evening news.”

    His briefings during the 1991 Gulf War were famed for being direct and free of jargon.  It stood to reason.  The Vietnam War, for the likes of Powell, had been lost not only because of unclear goals but because of a failure to control army-media relations.

    Through the 1990s, he had a certain pop allure that drew him towards a possible tilt at the White House.  He had mastered military greatness and could now be readied as an Ike-redux.  Under heavy spousal pressure, he gave up his bid for office.  Alma Powell had threatened to leave him in the event of him running, fearing potential assassination from a racist’s bullet.  At the time, Christopher Hitchens recalled those “dinner-parties that turned into unspeakable cafard; the TV and radio chat-shows that went null at the mention of his name.”

    Slotting into the role of US Secretary of State in the first administration of George W. Bush, he was billed the voice of sane moderation in a cabinet of hawks, the wounds of September 11, 2001 still bleeding.  The military man could still make his mark, despite pretending to prefer ploughshare to sword.

    Prior to him taking the reins at the State Department, he had been mocked by his predecessor, Madeline Albright, who always had a touch of the war monger about her.  “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” she chided him with a bloody craving, “if we can’t use it?”  Albright had been a critic of the qualifications suggested by the Powell doctrine, calling it archaic before it even came into practice.  “You know, Gen. Powell wrote a book and one of the problems with writing a book is that it takes a while to get it published.”  She found it “probably ironic that just at the time that this [book] came out, in fact, the limited application of limited force in Bosnia was working.”

    Powell would have done his critics proud in abandoning his own doctrine, demonstrating that ideas are there to be vanquished and burned, even by their own creators.  The moment he did so remains dark folklore, a poison of statecraft.  With the Bush administration enthralled by the prospect of war in the Middle East, having marshalled themselves against evidence more counterfeit and conspiratorial than Donald Trump ever could be, Powell played along with gusto. This heralded a conversion from remarks made in February 2001 that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of destruction.  He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.”

    His infamous February 2003 address to the UN Security Council accusing Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction was another effort at public relations but of a very different quality.  It proved to be free of accuracy and unburdened by reality, despite Powell’s own vetting efforts of the evidence.  This was a man fully enrolled in the service of regime change and making the case for it.

    Every statement, claimed Powell, was “backed up by sources, solid sources”.  They were “not assertions.  What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  The theatrics were ample.  “Let me remind you how ricin works.  Less than a pinch – imagine a pinch of salt – less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, could cause shock followed by respiratory failure.  Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote.  There is no cure.  It is fatal.”  To the US Senate, he could say that these were “real weapons.  We’re talking about anthrax.  We’re talking about botulinum toxin.  We’re talking about nuclear weapons programmes.”

    This was heavy going, given that such solid intelligence had been gathered from the quicksand sources of the Iraqi National Congress, a notorious outfit of exile led by the oleaginous Ahmed Chalabi.  Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, noted how many “of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the INC.”

    The Secretary of State also ran with the al-Qaida-Iraqi connection, another spurious link manufactured in the aftermath of 9/11 linking the terrorist attacks to Baghdad.  “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaida.  These denials are simply not credible.”  His UN speech makes special reference to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggesting that al-Qaida “affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies throughout Iraq for his network”.

    Powell spent subsequent years calling his presentation “painful”, a “blot” that would “always be part of my record.”  But ever mindful of public relations, he could find other more worthy alibis for his conduct.  Blame could be saddled and pinned down elsewhere – for instance, upon the more nefarious Donald Rumsfeld.  Or the devious Vice President Dick Cheney, whose office authored the speech.

    For those keen to confine the scope of Powell’s errors and assessments, it is also worth remembering that the taste for regime change did not stop with the placing of boots in Mesopotamia.  As chair for the Bush’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, Powell oversaw the production of a 2004 report advocating various ways the Cuban government might be overthrown.  These were familiar: insinuating market capitalism into the state; introducing multi-party elections; giving Cuban Americans living in the US restitution for losses suffered under the Castro regime.  Accordingly, Washington should “support the Cuban people as they … work to transform themselves” and enable them “to develop a democratic and civic culture … and the values and habits essential to both.”  Such mindful benevolence.

    With the imperium in respectful lockstep and sighing deferentially to a departed soldier, Powell’s blemishes can be overlooked by glowing reference to his “service” and patriotism.  But in performing that service, Powell’s legacy will be associated with the murderous, not infrequently incompetent adventurism of US foreign policy and its messianic bent.

    The post Colin Powell: Establishment Warrior first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Creator Of World’s Most Effective Anti-War Meme Dead At 84

    Colin Powell, creator of the viral anti-war meme featuring himself holding a stage prop while lying to the United Nations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, has died at the age of 84.

    Over the years Powell’s meme has been an invaluable asset for opponents of western military interventionism and critics of US propaganda narratives about empire-targeted nations, serving as a single-image debunk of any assertion that it is sensible to trust the claims US officials make about any government that Washington doesn’t like.

    In online discourse the Powell meme makes the perfect response to anyone regurgitating an unsubstantiated claim about a government that has been targeted for disobeying the dictates of the US empire.

    “We must remove Assad by any means necessary because he’s killing Syrians with poison gas!”

    Oh yeah? Boom. Powell meme.

    “Russian hackers are attacking our democracy!”

    Boom. Powell meme.

    “Iranian nuclear weapons program!”

    Boom.

    “Uyghur genocide!”

    Boom.

    “Maduro narco terrorism!”

    Boom.

    It stops the conversation in its tracks, using a single image that doesn’t even contain any words. Now the conversation is about what it should be about: the indisputable fact that US officials lie. They lie brazenly. They lie even if it can lead to the deaths of millions of people. Any narrative about any empire-targeted government that is backed by US officials must be presumed false unless and until it has been backed by mountains of independently verifiable evidence.

    Other memes have emerged in recent years to criticize the absurdity of western war propaganda which are not without their own charm, like the “Really makes you feel like you’re part of history” one and all its variants:

    Or the one about Republican bombs vs Democrat bombs:

    Secular Talk🎙 on Twitter: "Can somebody please tweet me that meme where one fighter jet says republican and the other says democrat and they're both bombing but the democrat one has a

    But nothing has ever emerged that rises to the level of efficacy and utility as the simple image showing Colin Powell lying to the entire world about a government the Bush administration wanted to destroy.

    Powell’s deceitful performance was after all picked up and parroted as “irrefutable” proof about Saddam Hussein’s WMD operations by the very same mass media institutions which tell us we must ramp up aggressions against other foreign governments on equally insubstantial claims today. It was a pivotal moment in the propaganda war the US-centralized empire was waging upon our minds to convince us that it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid.

    Image

    Powell’s other contributions to the world include covering up and participating in war crimes in Vietnam, facilitating atrocities in Central America, and destroying Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War. But it’s hard to dispute that his greatest lasting legacy will be his immortal reminder to future generations that there is never, ever a valid reason to trust anything US officials tell us about a government they wish to bring down.

    Powell’s contribution to the war effort has been considerable. But as time grinds down the tall spires of artificial insanity that the powerful are continually imposing upon our species, when all is said and done his contribution to the anti-war effort will have been greater.

    Be sure to remind everyone of Powell’s sociopathic facilitation of human slaughter often and loudly in the coming hours. Public opinion is the only thing keeping western war criminals from The Hague, after all, and those war criminals are keenly aware of this fact. At times like these, they suddenly become highly invested in making sure that regular people “respect the dead,” not because they respect any human alive or dead, but because they cannot allow the death to become an opportunity to amplify and change public opinion about their egregious murderous crimes.

    There is a giant narrative management exercise that will be playing out over the next few days. Be sure to enthusiastically disrupt it with the truth.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Tribunal to combat disinformation on the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing another extradition hearing on 27-28 October. The US authorities are appealing an earlier ruling that Assange should not be extradited to the US on health and safety grounds.

    Now the US and its allies are to be put on ‘trial’ by a tribunal. They are accused of committing atrocities, for example in Iraq, and of torture at Guantánamo Bay. While the tribunal possesses no legal powers, it’s intention is to set the record straight and demonstrate that Assange is not the criminal here.

    The tribunal – referred to as the Belmarsh Tribunal, after the prison where Assange continues to be held – will commence proceedings on 22 October.  There are 20 members of the tribunal, including:

    • Historian Tariq Ali
    • Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
    • Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa
    • Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
    • Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon
    • Award-winning film maker Ken Loach
    • Hellenic parliament member Yanis Varoufakis.
    What it’s all about

    Via a press release, Tariq Ali explains the tribunal’s origins:

    The Tribunal takes inspiration from the Sartre-Russell Tribunal, of which I was also a member. In 1966, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre issued a call for a War Crimes Tribunal to try the United States for crimes against humanity in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. A number of us were sent to North Vietnam to observe and record the attacks on civilians. I spent six weeks under the bombs, an experience that shaped the rest of my life.

    “The tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1967. The jury members included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Dedijer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, and David Dellinger, among others. The aim was not legal but moral: to bring the crimes to the notice of the public.

    “In London on 22 October 2021, we will do the same. Assange must be freed and the many crimes of the War on Terror placed centre stage.”

    Jeremy Corbyn says it’s all about accountability:

    Wikileaks exposed crimes of US empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. At the Belmarsh Tribunal, we will turn the world the right way up, placing crimes of war, torture, kidnapping and a litany of other gross human rights abuses on trial.

    The perpetrators of these crimes walk free, often still prominent public figures in the US, U.K. and elsewhere. They should be held accountable for the lives they destroyed and the futures they stole.

    To understand why the imprisonment of Assange is a travesty of justice, it’s important to appreciate some of the many crimes, including war crimes, exposed by WikiLeaks.

    War crimes

    As reported on by The Canary, during one of Assange’s extradition hearings Reprieve human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith provided details of some of the war crimes committed by the US.

    In a March 2019 article, the Canary’s John McEvoy reported that “according to a highly sensitive 2006 UK military report into Iraq, UK and US war planning “ran counter to potential Geneva Convention obligations””. He added how a “US cable from April 2009 [published by WikiLeaks] shows UK business secretary Peter Mandelson “pushing British oil and other corporate interests in Iraq””. A “2009 cable also reveals that the government of former PM Gordon Brown “put measures in place to protect [US] interests” during the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq”. Another “US cable also shows how the US and UK governments “rigged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to stop it being able to hold [Tony] Blair and [George W.] Bush accountable for the crime of aggression over Iraq””.

    In 2018, journalist Mark Curtis reported that a WikiLeaks published cable revealed that former foreign secretary David Miliband helped “the US to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at US bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year”.

    More allegations

    In 2016, The Canary reported on several allegations of US war crimes based on testimony given by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

    Another article in The Canary referred to a cable published by WikiLeaks that “suggested that the US had intended to convince Spanish officials to interfere with the National Court’s judicial independence”. This was in connection with an allegation “that the [six US officials] accused conspired with criminal intent to construct a legal framework to permit interrogation techniques and detentions in violation of international law”. The cable shows that the US secretly pressurised the Spanish government to ensure no prosecutions took place.

    The Canary also reported on allegations of a cover-up relating to hundreds of UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. These included UK involvement in the use of torture centres in both countries. One such centre was Camp Nama where it’s alleged:

    British soldiers and airmen helped operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion. Many of the detainees were brought there by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.

    Britain was also implicated in the extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and imprisonment) of detainees.

    Underestimating deaths

    As for the number of Iraqis killed during the war, The Canary reported on figures far higher than the official estimates.

    According to journalist Nafeez Ahmed:

    the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.

    Ahmed added that the overall figures of fatalities from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s – from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation – constituted:

    around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the ‘war on terror’), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.

    Back to front

    The prosecution of Assange is arguably political. Indeed, journalist John McEvoy points out how mass media has responded to recent news of a plot to kill Assange with “ghoulish indifference”.

    UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has commented how Assange has been “systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed”. In other words, the Belmarsh Tribunal will at the very least help remind us that it’s the perpetrators of war crimes who should be prosecuted – not the person who helped reveal those crimes.

    As such, Assange should be released forthwith.

    Featured image via Veterans for Peace / Wikimedia Commons

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.