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Iraq Collapse Shows Bankruptcy of Interventionism

Sunday June 2, 2013

May was Iraq’s deadliest month in nearly five years, with more than 1,000 dead – both civilians and security personnel -- in a rash of bombings, shootings and other violence. As we read each day of new horrors in Iraq, it becomes more obvious that the US invasion delivered none of the promised peace or stability that proponents of the attack promised.

Millions live in constant fear, refugees do not return home, and the economy is destroyed. The Christian community, some 1.2 million persons before 2003, has been nearly wiped off the Iraqi map. Other minorities have likewise disappeared. Making matters worse, US support for the Syrian rebels next door has drawn the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government into the spreading regional unrest and breathed new life into extremist elements.

read on...

Those Old Colonial Lusts

Saturday June 1, 2013

photo: Zachary Baumgartner

That old colonial impulse keeps coming back. This past week, Britain and France pushed the rest of the European Union to lift the arms embargo in Syria – which in plain English means outright military intervention in that nation’s civil war.

Let’s recall that Britain once ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface and most of its oceans. France ruled much of West Africa, the Sahara and, after Word War I, what are today Syria and Lebanon. Britain ruled much of the rest of the Mideast.

Well, they’re back! France and Britain took the lead in attacking Libya and overthrowing its long-time leader and former ally, Muammar Ghadaffi. They now dominate Libya’s oil – a major source of energy for Europe. France just sent troops to protect its mining interests in former colonies, Mali and Niger.

read on...

Turkey's Erdogan Gets Taste of His Own Medicine?

Saturday June 1, 2013

photo: OccupyGezi

After nearly a week of increasing public protests in Turkey, ostensibly over government plans to turn a last bit of green space in Istanbul into another shopping mall, matters became far more serious on Friday. Riot police descended on the protestors with various forms of tear gas (and possibly worse chemical and biological agents -- raw sewage?) and water cannon, blasting everyone and everything in sight including non-participants. When they caught protestors, they beat them violently and brutally, as can be seen in this video. Photographs show that police fired tear gas into crowded underground metro stations, leading to panic and worse. Istanbul looks like a war zone.

Today indications are that protests have only increased in number and fury in response to the violence with which they were met yesterday.

read on...

Illinois School District Forces Students to Self-Incriminate

Friday May 31, 2013

What could be less controversial than a US public high school social studies teacher informing his students that they have the right to refuse to answer whether they have done something illegal? In fact, this concept—the right against self-incrimination—is part of the typical high school curriculum. Nonetheless, in Illinois this week the Batavia Public School District 101 school board reprimanded and disciplined Mr. John Dryden, a public high school social studies teacher, for informing some of his students of just this concept.
read on...

The Self-Defeating Dynamics of American Hegemony in the Middle East

Tuesday May 28, 2013

Photo: Konabish ~ Greg Bishop

Our experience in the U.S. government — running from roughly the period of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s until March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, when we left our positions at the White House on the National Security Council staff — effectively spanned the high-water mark of American primacy in the Middle East. In an interview for the University of California’s Conversations with History series, see here, we discuss how our government service gave us “ringside seats” to watch as “the United States really misused that primacy, misused its supremacy in ways that were grossly counterproductive for its own interests, and for America’s standing in international affairs.” We also reflect on how our experience in government has both prompted and helped us to explore the ways in which succumbing to an “imperial temptation” in the Middle East distorts American perceptions of the region and warps U.S. policy outcomes.
read on...

US Makes Syria an ‘Offer it Can’t Refuse’ – again

Monday May 27, 2013

Photo: Secretary of Defense

In Mafia terms, it’s called “making an offer that can’t be refused”. The “offer” is not one of free choice between options that may benefit the object party. In reality, it is about setting up a scenario of duress, under which the object party is coerced to capitulate to detrimental terms of extreme prejudice determined cynically by the other party.

This is the scenario that Washington and its NATO allies are contriving for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad…

The so-called international peace conference that may take place in the coming weeks, at the behest of Washington and Moscow, is ostensibly aimed at finding a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria that is now in its third year and which has resulted in up to 80,000 deaths. At least half of these deaths are believed to be civilian.

read on...

The Real Meaning of President Obama’s National Security Speeches

Saturday May 25, 2013

This past Thursday and Friday, President Obama delivered two speeches designed to outline his new thinking on national security and counter-terrorism. While much was made in the media of the president’s statements at the National Defense University and the US Naval Academy suggesting that the most active phase of US military action overseas was coming to an end, this “new” approach is but the same old policy wrapped in new packaging. In these addresses, the president panders to the progressives, while continually expanding and solidifying the "enabling act” principle.

The president will continue and even expand drone attacks overseas because they are “less deadly” than ground invasions. He promises to be more careful in the future.

He is entertaining the introduction of “kill courts” which will meet in secret to decide who is to be executed without trial or charge. He promises these will have sufficient oversight.
read on...

When Terrorism Comes Home

Thursday May 23, 2013

photo: mattlemmon
Several observers have pointed out the similarities between today's savage attack in London, where a British soldier was reportedly beheaded by two men shouting "Allahu Akbar," and the gruesome recent attack by US/UK-supported Free Syrian Army Commander Abu Sakkar, who cut out and devoured his Syrian Army soldier victim's heart.

Indeed one of the eyewitnesses of today's London attack could well have been describing Syrian rebel Commander Sakkar's butchery a few weeks ago in Syria:

"We thought the two guys were helping him. We then saw two kitchen knives like you would find in a butchers shop, they were hacking at this poor guy literally. We thought they were trying to remove organs or something."

Nearly identical behavior.

It is important to point out that while the US and UK increasingly condemn (and exaggerate) the role of Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian fighters on the side of the government in next-door Syria, the truth is thousands of foreign fighters, including at least hundreds from Europe and handfuls from the US, have signed up to fight with the radical Islamic insurgents in Syria.

read on...

Tony Does Tirana

Tuesday May 21, 2013

photo: Lafayette College
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair willfully and gleefully disseminated and embellished the lies of President Bush to propagandize the public and pave way for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of its secular dictator, Saddam Hussein. In the process Blair invented plenty of lies of his own. The ongoing UK Chilcot Inquiry investigation of the dodgy events leading up to the attack on Iraq continues to produce damning information about Blair, including that he most surely knew at the time that he was spreading lies about Iraq's WMD.

Because of Bush and Blair's lies, hundreds of thousands have died.

But feeding the war machine is always profitable for those who deal in death, and Blair is no exception. In fact, not only is Blair not ashamed of the carnage that his lies produced, he has actually directly personally profited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from his miserable deeds. According to the above link:

"The former Prime Minister of the UK is earning an estimated 5 million (British Pounds) per year from private business ventures connected to his role in the illegal wars in the Middle East -- particularly the invasion and conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan."

Now we hear that in the poorest country in Europe, Albania, the successor party to that of communist dictator Enver Hoxha, the Socialist Party of Albania, has hired Tony Blair to tell some more lies to Europe about how suited it is to govern Albania and bring it into the European Union. The Albanian Socialists are expected to pay Blair several million British pounds as a "consultant."
read on...

As Scandals Deepen, Obama, His Party, and Republicans Will Militarily Intervene in Syria

Tuesday May 21, 2013

As three administration-wrecking scandals – Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP phone records – continue to unfold, it will become increasingly clear that President Obama is: (a) stupid; (b) unable to control his felonious subordinates; or (c) a liar and a trimmer. And as this clarity evolves, Obama will engineer a U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria. This week Obama told the press his administration has fairly solid evidence that chemical weapons were used by Damascus against al-Qaeda and its allies. Obama also said he still wants more and better evidence that Asaad used the weapons. This long has been his standard line.

But then, before closing his remarks, Obama lapsed into his patented weeping-for-humanity mode, saying in an almost off-hand manner enough thousands of Syrians had been killed in the civil war to justify intervention by that American-killing and nation-bankrupting fiction of our bipartisan governing elite’s imagination, the “U.S.-led International Community.” In other words, our beleaguered president already is looking to distract Americans from his administration’s rampant felonies, and what better way to quiet the hounds of just retribution than by consigning U.S. soldiers and Marines to death in a useless intervention in Syria, a place where no genuine U.S. national interest is at stake. One straw in the wind: Friday’s news brought word of Obama’s talking-points-changing, intelligence-leaking lickspittle of a CIA Director, John Brennan, sneaking into Israel to “discuss Syria.”

read on...