The Haitian prime minister has warned that the case of 10 US missionaries charged with child abduction is a “distraction” from earthquake recovery.
Jean-Max Bellerive said more than 200,000 people had died in the quake and one million still needed help.
The missionaries have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy.
They deny allegations they tried to smuggle 33 children across the border to the Dominican Republic.
When stopped on the border last Friday, the group said they were taking the children to an orphanage. But it has since emerged some of the youngsters’ parents were still alive.
‘In good faith’
Mr Bellerive said the case of the missionaries risked diverting international attention from the plight of Haitians who had lost their homes and livelihoods.
“I believe it’s a distraction for the Haitian people because they are talking more now about 10 people than they are about one million people suffering in the streets,” he said.
The missionaries’ lawyer, Edwin Coq, said his clients were “naive” but not malicious in their actions.
“They had no idea they were violating the law. They were acting in good faith and they just wanted to help,” he said.
But he reiterated the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, knew that documentation would be needed to remove the children from Haiti.
“I’m going to do everything I can to get the nine [other missionaries] out. They were naive.
“They had no idea what was going on, and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border. But Silsby did,” Mr Coq said, according to Associated Press.In Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the two governments were discussing the diplomatically sensitive case.
“It was unfortunate, whatever their motivation, that this group of Americans took matters into their own hands,” Mrs Clinton added.
Haitian officials have said that the cases of the 10 US citizens will now be sent to an investigating judge who will decide how to proceed.
If convicted they face lengthy jail terms, says the BBC’s Paul Adams, in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
‘Kidnappers’
After Thursday’s hearing the 10 missionaries were taken back to the jail where they have been kept since last Friday.
Amid chaotic scenes, the group was bundled into a van outside the court.“I feel good,” Ms Silsby told reporters. “I trust in God.”
The five men and five women, most of them from Idaho, were due to have a hearing earlier in the week.
The case was postponed because of a lack of interpreters.
US media reported that Ms Silsby also faces court cases in Boise, Idaho, relating to unpaid wages and legal bills.
Former employees from her shopping website business filed 14 claims for unpaid wages in the past two years.
Some have been resolved, but Ms Silsby is due on court next week for one case, and another is set to begin in March, the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported.
Mr Bellerive has labelled the Americans “kidnappers”.
Justice Minister Paul Denis has said that the missionaries should be tried in Haiti, despite the damage to the country’s judicial infrastructure and casualties among judges and court staff.
There had been suggestions that the 10 could be tried in the US.
But Mr Denis told the AFP news agency: “It is Haitian law that has been violated, it is up to the Haitian authorities to hear and judge the case.
“I don’t see any reason why they should be tried in the United States.”
The US ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, said that the US would do all it could to ensure the missionaries were treated fairly and in accordance with Haitian law.
Single village
The children, who are from aged from two to 12, are now in the care of the Austrian-run SOS Children’s Village in Port-au-Prince.
Twenty-one of the children were from a single village outside the capital and were handed over willingly by their parents, our correspondent says.
Residents in the village of Callebas told an Associated Press news agency reporter that they had handed their children over through a local orphanage worker who said he was acting on the Americans’ behalf.
The worker is said to have promised the families that the missionaries would educate their children in neighbouring Dominican Republic.
A number of parents in the badly-damaged village said they would find it difficult to provide for their children if they came back.
Ms Silsby has said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance when it arrived last week, and that he had helped them gather the children. She also admitted that the missionaries did not have the proper paperwork.
“Our intent was to help only those children that needed us most, that had lost either both their mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other had abandoned them,” she said from her jail cell on Wednesday.
Ref: BBC
Six days after the earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Southern Command finally began to drop bottled water and food (MREs) from an Air Force C-17. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had previously rejected such a method because of “security concerns.”
The Guardian reports that people are dying of thirst. And if they do not get clean water, there can be epidemics of water-borne diseases that could greatly increase the death toll.
But the United States is now sending 10,000 troops and seems to be prioritizing “security” over much more urgent, life-and-death needs. This is in addition to the increase of 3,500 UN troops scheduled to arrive.
The world-renowned humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has complained that a plane carrying its portable hospital unit was re-routed by the US military through the Dominican Republic. This cost a crucial 24 hours and an unknown number of lives.
Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the UN’s World Food Program, said, “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” adding, “But most flights are for the U.S. military.”Yet Lt. General P.K. Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, reports that there is less violence in Haiti now than there was before the earthquake hit.
Doctor Evan Lyon, of Partners in Health, a medical aid group famous for its heroic efforts in Haiti, referred to “misinformation and rumours … and racism” concerning security issues.
“We’ve been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There’s no UN guards. There’s no U.S. military presence. There’s no Haitian police presence. And there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity.”
To understand the United States government’s obsession with “security concerns,” we must look at the recent history of Washington’s involvement there.Long before the earthquake, Haiti’s plight has been comparable to that of many homeless people on city streets in the US: too poor and too black to have the same effective constitutional and legal rights as other citizens. In 2002, when a US-backed military coup temporarily toppled the elected government of Venezuela, most governments in the hemisphere responded quickly and helped force the return of democratic rule. But two years later, when Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped by the US and flown to exile in South Africa, the response was muted.
Unlike the two centuries of looting and pillage of Haiti since its founding by a slave revolt in 1804, the brutal occupation by U.S. Marines from 1915-1934, the countless atrocities under dictatorships aided and abetted by Washington, the 2004 coup cannot be dismissed as “ancient history.” It was just six years ago, and it is directly relevant to what is happening there now.The United States, together with Canada and France, conspired openly for four years to topple Haiti’s elected government, cutting off almost all international aid in order to destroy the economy and make the country ungovernable. They succeeded. For those who wonder why there are no Haitian government institutions to help with the earthquake relief efforts, this is a big reason. Or why there are three million people crowded into the area where the earthquake hit. U.S. policy over the years also helped destroy Haitian agriculture, for example, by forcing the import of subsidized U.S. rice and wiping out thousands of Haitian rice farmers.
Aristide’s first democratic government was overthrown after just seven months in 1991, by military officers and death squads later discovered to be in the pay of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Now Aristide wants to return to his country, something that the majority of Haitians have demanded since his overthrow. But the United States does not want him there. And the Preval government, which is completely beholden to Washington, has decided that Aristide’s party – the largest in Haiti – will not be allowed to compete in the next elections (originally scheduled for next month).
Washington’s fear of democracy in Haiti may explain why the United States is now sending 10,000 troops and prioritizing “security” over other needs.
This military occupation by U.S. troops will raise other concerns in the hemisphere, depending on how long they stay – just as the recent expansion of the U.S. military presence in Colombia has been met with considerable discontent and distrust in the region. And non-governmental organizations have raised other issues about the proposed reconstruction: Understandably they want Haiti’s remaining debt cancelled and grants rather than loans (the IMF has proposed a $100 million dollar loan). Reconstruction needs will be in the billions of dollars: Will Washington encourage the establishment of a functioning government? Or will it prevent that, channeling aid through NGOs and taking over various functions itself, because it of its long-standing opposition to Haitian self-rule?But most urgently, there is a need for rapid delivery of water. The U.S. Air Force has the capability to deliver enough water for everyone who needs it in Haiti, until ground supply chains can be established. The more water is available, the less likely there is to be fighting or rioting over this scarce resource. Food and medical supplies could also be supplied through air drops. These operations should be ramped up, immediately.
The Wall Street Journal reported that according to Partners in Health, in the week following the quake 20,000 people a day died because of lack of access to medical treatment. The necessary supplies can be delivered if they are prioritised.
There is no time to lose.
Ref: Guaridan
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
This article originally appeared in the Guardian.
Obama, straight down the middle
Political combat sometimes stresses personal antagonisms and obsessive antipathies too much. The need for an all-out attack on an opponent makes for diverse alliances motivated solely by the desire to destroy the common enemy. But once that enemy has been brought down, the problems begin. What next? To make political decisions, the grey areas which in opposition had made an alliance possible have to be dispelled, and that brings disenchantment. Before you know it, the hated adversary is back in power, made no more appealing by his time in opposition.
That scenario has already been played out in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. Berlusconi was defeated in 1995 by an insipid ragtag left that lacked a plan, only to be returned to power six years later. In Sarkozy’s France, marriages of convenience have been made between parties (ecologists, centrists and socialists) and also between individuals (Dominique de Villepin, prime minister under Jacques Chirac, has made common cause with the revolutionary socialist Olivier Besancenot, with whom he has almost nothing in common, long enough to attack the government). Their common target is Sarkozy; but what comes next?
The combination of casual coalitions, uncertain policies and then disappointment also describes the current US political landscape. A year ago the rout of the Republicans and the end of George W Bush’s presidency brought a moment of jubilation.
Even if some of the electorate whose lot has not improved continue to put their faith in Obama (see report on Detroit), their jubilation seems to have evaporated. Pacifists despair over the intensification of the war in Afghanistan, health reform has fallen short of reasonable expectations, as has environmental policy. The general verdict is less than great, but better than nothing. That contributes to a mood of despondency. Political passion is once again changing sides.
Such a stalemate strengthens the power of the lobbies and raises questions about the real power of the US president. Obama isn’t Bush; Romano Prodi wasn’t Silvio Berlusconi either. But not being Bush isn’t enough to tell you where Obama is heading, or to make you want to follow him. The US is suffering: the unemployment rate has risen sharply, there are whole neighbourhoods of repossessions. The president is not short on talk and explanations, and the desire to convince. But what does it add up to? In Cairo he condemned Israeli settlements then resigned himself to the fact that they continue to expand. He backed an ambitious health care reform, but when Congress watered it down, he put up with it.
One day he tells West Point cadets he is sending reinforcements to Afghanistan, the next he accepts the Nobel peace prize. But there is a remedy for this dissonance: a stream of words to balance each pronouncement with its opposite. The refrain almost always turns out to be “my progressive friends say this; my Republican friends reply that. The first are demanding too much and the second aren’t conceding enough. Therefore, I’m opting for the middle course.”
Obama encouraged the West Point cadets to “show restraint in the use of force”. And he told the Oslo jury that the fact that “force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism: it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. The jury members were also invited to ponder the example of President Nixon who, despite the “Cultural Revolution’s horrors”, agreed to meet Mao in Beijing in 1972. Being so very particular on the question of human rights, Nixon had to get over the experience by ordering the bombing of Vietnamese cities shortly after, and backing General Pinochet’s putsch in Chile… Obama made no mention of this in his speech. Ever the impeccable centrist, he preferred to pay tribute to Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan.
Yet it all began so well. In November 2008 nearly two-thirds of the US voting age population (and 89.7% of registered voters) took part in the election. The man they voted into the White House was a candidate whose trajectory suggested the scale of the change to come: “I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.” For precisely that reason he was able to mobilise young and black and Hispanic voters as well as an unprecedented proportion of the white vote (43%). Achieving a higher share of the vote than Reagan in his 1980 victory (52.9% compared with 50.7%), Obama could rightly pride himself on having a genuine mandate. There was no one to challenge it. The Republicans had been utterly routed. Their neoliberal philosophy, which was concisely summed up by the new president (“we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else”), was in tatters. And the Democrats had a large majority in both houses of Congress.
History lessonsThree months before his election, Obama had warned: “The greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You [grassroots supporters] have shown what history teaches us – that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it – because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.”
Grassroots activism would, one might assume, make it possible to shake the conservative inertia of the capital, where all the lobbyists are based. One year on, while there’s no trace of a popular movement, there are innumerable examples of planned legislation that has been blocked, diluted or neutered by the “same old politics with the same old players”.
It’s true that Obama’s pedigree is different from those of his predecessors, not just for the obvious visible reason, but also because it’s unusual for a White House incumbent to have decided as a young man to pass up the chance to get rich practising law in New York, and instead help the people of Chicago’s poor neighbourhoods. But when one looks at Obama’s choices for his cabinet, the novelty is less striking. For every minister such as Hilda Solis (Obama’s labour secretary, who has close links with the unions and promises a break with old policies), there is a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose diplomatic position is little different from the past. Then there’s the defence secretary, Robert Gates, a direct holdover from the Bush administration. Or the finance minister, Timothy Geithner, who’s too close to Wall Street to want or be able to reform it, or economic adviser Lawrence Summers, architect of the financial deregulation that brought his country close to meltdown. And the diversity of his team turns out to be not so diverse after all: 22 of Obama’s 35 top nominations hold a degree from an elite American or British university.
Since the early 20th century, the Democrats have been particularly susceptible to the technocratic illusion of competence, pragmatism, government by “the best and the brightest”, excellence, and expertise which seeks to impose its will on a political world they suspect of permanent demagogy. This philosophy views mass mobilisation and populism with distrust. It’s one Obama subscribes to, which is paradoxical given his trajectory (perhaps it’s to avoid any confusion with Afro-American activism).
At the outset Obama hoped that the most reasonable part of the Republican Party would go along with him to get the country out of its present predicament. But he reached out to them in vain. He recently commented on this rebuff: “We were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve” (1). This is an odd, but revealing, way of putting it. It overlooks the fact that after the 2008 presidential election, the Republicans didn’t decide to hand over the reins of power to the Democrats: the people voted them out of office.
Media frenzyRepublicans find this intolerable, hence their strength of feeling. Already back in June 1951, there had been a Democrat in the White House, Harry Truman. As president, he had devoted himself to the fight against communism and the Soviet Union, the defence of the empire and the profits of General Electric. But in the eyes of a significant part of the Republican electorate, he was a traitor no matter what he did. Senator Joseph McCarthy asked: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principal shall be forever deserving of the malediction of all honest men.” For four years, McCarthy terrorised US progressives, artists and trade unionists, and also high officials, including the military.
We haven’t reached that point yet. But the atmosphere is again being poisoned by the paranoia of rightwing activists whipped into a frenzy by the radio talk shows, the rolling “news” from Fox News, the editorials of the Wall Street Journal, the fundamentalist churches and the crazy rumours spread by the internet. These invade the mind and block out thought about other things. Millions of Americans who are passionate about politics are convinced that their president lied about his birth and is ineligible to occupy the White House because he was born abroad. They are adamant that his victory, won by 8,500,000 votes, was the result of fraud, a “conspiracy on a scale so immense”…
They loathe the idea of having a leader who spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia, a former leftwing activist and cosmopolitan intellectual (2). They have an unshakeable belief that health reform is just the precursor to the creation of death panels, tribunals that will decide which patients will receive treatment. These cohorts form the hard core of the Republican Party. They rule with a rod of iron over the representatives with whom the good centrist Obama reckoned on negotiating his stimulus package, his health insurance reforms and financial regulation.
The vanity of such a hope quickly became apparent. Less than a month after Obama arrived in the White House, his plan to increase public expenditure failed to receive the support of any of the 177 Republicans in the House of Representatives. In November came health reform; just one opposition member voted with the Democrat majority. In December legislation designed to protect consumers from abusive practices by credit companies was also passed by the House of Representatives without a single Republican supporter. On every occasion, however, the bills put to the vote were amended in the hope that the president could present them as bipartisan.
High price to payIn finance reform, no one can tell what the law he will eventually sign will be like. If less than 60 of the 100 senators demand a vote, the discussions could go on indefinitely. As there are 40 Republican senators, each of them – and any refractory Democrats – can exact a high price for their support. One such Democrat, Joseph Lieberman (who endorsed John McCain, the Republican candidate in the 2008 election), has already obstructed the creation of a public option for Americans without medical cover. Private medical insurance companies are among Senator Lieberman’s main funders.
On 28 September 2008, when a $700bn rescue package for the banks approved by candidate Obama was being discussed, a representative on the left, Dennis Kucinich, asked: “Is this the US Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?” The question is still pertinent, as Obama recently found it necessary to point out that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street”. Nonetheless, in 2008 Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS and Morgan Stanley were among his top 20 campaign funders (3). Journalist William Greider summed the situation up: “The Democrats face a dilemma: can they serve the public interest without discomforting the bankers who help fund their campaigns?” (4).
So can the US be reformed? Its system is supposed to be characterised by checks and balances. But really it consists of different centres of powers all governed by the dollar. In 2008 millions of young people threw themselves into the political struggle, reckoning that with Obama as president, nothing would be as it was before. But now he too is engaged in horse-trading, buying a vote that he needs, courting a figure he despises.
Could he do otherwise? The personality of a single individual doesn’t count for all that much weighed against the tyranny of the whole system, especially when the opposition has turned hysterical and the grassroots movement boils down to some crumbling unions, black activists co-opted by the executive and bloggers who think that activism can be spread from their keyboards. For things to take a progressive turn in the US would require an almost perfect alignment of the planets. In contrast, in order massively to reduce the tax burden on the rich, Ronald Reagan didn’t even need a majority in Congress.
Some of the misunderstanding may stem from Obama’s biography. First, because it has concentrated all the fire and all the expectations on him as an individual. And second, because it’s been a long time since the president resembled the radical adolescent described in his memoirs – the Obama who attended socialist lectures; who was shocked by the anti-communist coup in Indonesia in 1965; and who worked in Harlem for an association with links to Ralph Nader. Nor does there remain a trace of the Afro-American activist who, “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, chose [his] friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” (5).
For Republicans, this journey is all the proof they need that the man is dangerous – alien to the individualist culture of the US, indulgent towards the enemies of liberty and disposed “to socialise the US health system”. Democratic activists are hoping their president, who has disappointed them thus far, will put into action more progressive policies as soon as he can, and that such is his intention. The fears of one group stir up the hopes of the other. To paraphrase the journalist Alexander Cockburn, the left that pokes among the entrails of bills presented to Congress to divine the smallest evidence of mini-victories knows that its days are numbered: next November’s legislative elections, likely to take place in a gloomy economic climate, will thin the Democratic ranks.
Paranoid styleThere is too much talk about Obama. The man has taken on the aspect of a demi-god believed to be capable of taming a range of social forces, institutions and interests. This immature personalisation of power is also characteristic of France and Italy, but there the devil is on the other side (if only Berlusconi and Sarkozy were to fall, the thinking goes, then the left would be saved). Half a century ago, the US historian Richard Hofstadter popularised the expression “paranoid style” to capture this political mood. What he had in mind was the McCarthyite right and its immediate successors, but he claimed that his ideal type would find other applications in the course of time.
So it has proved. Today the rise of individualism, intellectual laziness, the hysterical direction of debate, the harmful role of the media and the decline of Marxism have made widespread the illusion according to which, as Hofstadter explained in 1963, “unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself the victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depression, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced” (6). Rush Limbaugh, the neocon radio host, accuses some of Obama’s supporters of taking him for the Messiah. Maybe so, but then why does he persist in denouncing Obama as the Antichrist?
Ultimately, the miracle of the election in November 2008 could be to remind us that there’s no such thing as a miracle. And that the destiny of the US, like that of other countries, mustn’t be confused with the personality of one man or the will of a president.Ref: le Monde
Translated by George Miller
More by Serge Halimi(1) Address to the Brookings Institution, 8 December 2009.
(2) See “US: phoney culture wars”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, June 2006.
(3) According to the list produced by the Center for Responsible Politics. See also “Top contributors to Barack Obama”.
(4) William Greider, “The money man’s best friend”, The Nation, New York, 11 November 2009.
(5) Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father, Crown Books, New York, 2004.
(6) Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1966.
My Lai massacre- 40 years later
The My Lai Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Mỹ Lai [mǐˀ lɐːj]; English pronunciation: /ˌmaɪˈleɪ, ˌmaɪˈlaɪ/ ( listen),[1] Vietnamese: [mǐˀlaːj]) was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people.
Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.[2] The massacre took place in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and My Khe of Sơn Mỹ village during the Vietnam War.[3][4] While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest.
When the incident became public knowledge in 1969, it prompted widespread outrage around the world. The massacre also reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War. Three U.S. servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were denounced by U.S. Congressmen, received hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on their doorsteps.[5] Only 30 years after the event were their efforts honored.[6]
The massacre is also known as the Sơn Mỹ Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Sơn Mỹ) or sometimes as the Song My Massacre.[7] The U.S. military codeword for the hamlet was Pinkville.[8]
Ref: Wikipedia
On Christmas eve, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin,” but his Christmas eve call to war relies on disinformation and contradiction, not on objective scholarly analysis.
For example, Kuperman contradicts the unanimous report of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Russian intelligence with his claim that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. Astonishingly, it does not occur to Kuperman that readers might wonder how an academic bureaucrat in Austin, Texas, has better information than these authorities.
Kuperman is so determined to damn President Obama’s plan to have other countries enrich Iran’s uranium for Iran’s nuclear energy program and medical isotopes that he commits astounding blunders. After claiming that Iran has a “bomb program,” Kuperman claims that “Iran’s uranium contains impurities” and that Ahmadinejad’s threat “to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 per cent level . . . is a bluff, because even if Iran could further enrich its impure uranium, it lacks the capacity to fabricate the uranium into fuel elements.”
What was the New York Times op ed editor thinking when he approved Kuperman’s article? Iran, Kuperman writes, needs “90 per cent enriched uranium” to have weapons-grade material, but cannot reach 20 per cent or even make fuel elements for its nuclear energy. So, how is Iran going to produce a bomb? Yet, Kuperman writes that “we have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.”
It could not be made any clearer that, as with the US invasion of Iraq, a military attack on Iran has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. An “Iranian nuke” is just another canard behind which hides an undeclared agenda.
One wonders about Kuperman’s non-proliferation credentials. How does a wanton military attack on a country encourage non-proliferation? Aren’t America’s bullying, threats and acts of war more likely to encourage countries to seek nuclear weapons?
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States has wars ongoing in Iraq where the ancient Chaldean Christian community was destroyed–not by Saddam Hussein but by the neoconservatives’ illegal invasion of Iraq–in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan. The US initiated a war, which it lost, between its puppet ruler in the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia.
The US, the world’s greatest supporter of terrorism, is the main financier of terrorist groups that stage attacks within Iran. It was American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover that enabled the Israeli war crimes against the Lebanese people during 2006 and against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during 2008-2009, crimes documented in the Goldstone Report.
Iran has never interfered in US internal affairs, but the US has a long record of interfering in Iranian affairs. In 1953 the US overthrew Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq and installed a puppet who tortured Iranians who desired political independence.
Despite this and other American offenses against Iran, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed Iran’s interest to be on friendly terms with the United States, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. The US wants war with Iran in order to expand US world hegemony.
One might expect a non-proliferation expert to take history into account, but Kuperman fails to do so. Kuperman also has nothing to say about Israel’s, India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Unlike Iran, none of these countries are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, India, and Pakistan all developed their nuclear weapons in secret, and many experts believe Israel had American help, an act of treason. All three countries have been rewarded by Washington despite their perfidy. Why is Kuperman concerned about Iran, which submits to the IAEA inspections, but is unconcerned with Israel, a country that has never permitted a single inspection?
The answer is that the Israel Lobby, the US military-security complex, and the “Christian” Zionists have succeeded in demonizing Iran. Every real expert knows that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have no function other than deterring an attack on Iran. Ever since the US lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons, after using them offensively and pointlessly against a defeated Japan, nuclear weapons have served no purpose other than deterrence.
The US has no conflicting economic interests with Iran. Iran is simply a supplier of oil, an important one. A US attack on Iran, such as the one advocated by Kuperman, would most likely shut down oil flows to the West through the Strait of Hormuz. This might benefit refiners, who sell gasoline to the West and could charge enormous prices, but no one else would benefit.Adding to the war cry are congregations of fake Christians. A great number of them, organized by someone’s money under the banner, “Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran,” has written to Congress demanding sanctions against Iran that amount to an act of war. The roll call includes the “Christian” Zionist John Hagee, who, according to reports, denigrates Jesus Christ and preaches to his congregation that it is God’s will for Americans to fight and die for Israel, the oppressor of the Palestinian people.
Among the signatories of the “Christians” demanding an act of war against Iran, are Dr. Pat Robertson, president of Christian Broadcasting Network, Nixon-era criminal Chuck Colson, and Richard Land, president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention. Obviously, for southern baptists ethics means murdering Islamists, and religious liberty excludes everyone but “Christian” Zionists.
It is a simple matter for an educated person to make fools of these morons who profess to be Christians. However, these morons have vast constituencies numbering in the tens of millions of Americans. There are, in fact, more of them than there are intelligent, informed, moral, and real Christian Americans.
The votes of the morons will prevail.
In the second decade of the 21st century, America’s Zionist wars against Islam will expand. America’s wars in behalf of Israel’s territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America. The Treasury’s bonds to finance the US government’s enormous deficits will lack for buyers. Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. The result will be rising rates of inflation. The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports. Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and “Superpower America” will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts.
America has been brought low, both morally and economically, by its obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Even Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States and Governor of Georgia recently had to apologize to the Israel Lobby for his honest criticisms of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the occupied Palestinians in order for his grandson to be able to run for a seat in the Georgia state senate.
This should tell the macho super-power American tough guys who really runs “their” country.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published next month by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
The call for over 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan is a travesty for the people of that country who have already suffered eight brutal years of occupation.
It is also a harsh blow to the US soldiers facing imminent deployment.
As Barack Obama, the US president, gears up for a further escalation that will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to over 100,000, he faces a military force that has been exhausted and overextended by fighting two wars.
Many from within the ranks are openly declaring that they have had enough, allying with anti-war veterans and activists in calling for an end to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with some active duty soldiers publicly refusing to deploy.
This growing movement of military refusers is a voice of sanity in a country slipping deeper into unending war.
The architects of this war would be well-advised to listen to the concerns of the soldiers and veterans tasked with carrying out their war policies on the ground.
Many of those being deployed have already faced multiple deployments to combat zones: the 101st Airborne Division, which will be deployed to Afghanistan in early 2010, faces its fifth combat tour since 2002.
“They are just going to start moving the soldiers who already served in Iraq to Afghanistan, just like they shifted me from one war to the next,” said Eddie Falcon, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Soldiers are going to start coming back with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), missing limbs, problems with alcohol, and depression.”
Many of these troops are still suffering the mental and physical fallout from previous deployments.
Rates of PTSD and traumatic brain injury among troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been disproportionately high, with a third of returning troops reporting mental problems and 18.5 per cent of all returning service members battling either PTSD or depression, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.
Marine suicides doubled between 2006 and 2007, and army suicides are at the highest rate since records were kept in 1980.
Resistance in the ranks
US army soldiers are refusing to serve at the highest rate since 1980, with an 80 per cent increase in desertions since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the Associated Press.
These troops refuse deployment for a variety of reasons: some because they ethically oppose the wars, some because they have had a negative experience with the military, and some because they cannot psychologically survive another deployment, having fallen victim to what has been termed “Broken Joe” syndrome.
Over 150 GIs have publicly refused service and spoken out against the wars, all risking prison and some serving long sentences, and an estimated 250 US war resisters are currently taking refuge in Canada.
This resistance includes two Fort Hood, Texas, soldiers, Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop, who publicly resisted deployment to Afghanistan this year, facing prison sentences as a result, with Bishop still currently detained.
The war in Afghanistan is losing support
in the US [AFP]“There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan,” wrote Agosto, upon refusing his service last May. “The occupation is immoral and unjust.”
Within the US military, GI resisters and anti-war veterans have organised through broad networks of veteran and civilian alliances, as well as through IVAW, comprised of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
This organisation, which is over 1,700 strong, with members across the world, including active-duty members on military bases, is opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and openly supports GI resistance.
“Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on Obama to end the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) by withdrawing troops immediately and unconditionally,” wrote Jose Vasquez, the executive director of IVAW, in a December 2 open letter.
“It’s not time for our brothers and sisters in arms to go to Afghanistan. It’s time for them to come home.”No clear progress
GI coffee houses have sprung up at several military bases around the country. In the tradition of the GI coffee houses of the Vietnam war era, these cafes provide a space where active duty troops can speak freely and access resources about military refusal, PTSD, and veteran and GI movements against the war.
“Here at Fort Lewis, we’ve lost 20 soldiers from the most recent round of deployments,” said Seth Menzel, an Iraq combat veteran and founding organiser of Coffee Strong, a GI coffee house at the sprawling Washington army base.
“We’ve seen resistance to deployment, mainly based on the fact that soldiers have been deployed so many times they don’t have the patience to do it again.”
As the occupation of Afghanistan passes its eighth year, with no clear progress, goals that remain elusive, and a high civilian death count, this war is coming to resemble the Iraq war that has been roundly condemned by world and US public opinion.
The never-ending nature of this conflict belies the real project of establishing US dominance in the Middle East and control of the region’s resources, at the expense of the Afghan civilians and US soldiers being placed in harm’s way.
The voices of refusal coming from within the US military send a powerful message that soldiers will not be fodder for an unjust and unnecessary war. By withdrawing their labour from a war that depends on their consent, these soldiers have the power to help bring this war to an end, as did their predecessors in the GI resistance movement against the Vietnam war.
And the longer the war in Afghanistan drags on – the more lives that are lost and destroyed – the more resistance we will see coming from within the ranks.
Ref: Al jazeera
Sarah Lazare is an anti-militarist and GI resistance organiser with Dialogues Against Militarism and Courage to Resist. She is interested in connecting struggles for justice at home with global movements against war and empire.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators have gathered in New York to mark the one-year anniversary of Israel’s devastating attack on the Gaza Strip.
The protestors, which included Muslim, Christian and Jewish human rights activists, marched against the Tel Aviv regime’s three-week war on Gaza and urged world countries to stand up to Israeli crimes against Palestinians, IRNA reported on Sunday.
“Now is the time to stand with Palestinians. Now is the time to speak out against the Israeli genocide,” New York Rabbi Joseph Cohen told IRNA. “The regime of Israel is not only the enemy of Palestinians, but also an enemy of the Jewish people.”
Tel Aviv attacked Gaza on December 27 with the declared goal of “self-defense” and toppling the Hamas government. More than 1,400 Palestinians, including a large number of women and children, were killed in the conflagration.The attack, which lasted three weeks, also wounded thousands of others, displaced 60,800 civilians and seriously damaged 17,000 homes at a time when Gazans were already subjected to a months-long blockade which had in turn triggered a humanitarian crisis in the tiny Palestinian territory.
More than two months after Tel Aviv declared an alleged ceasefire, disturbing revelations of the Israeli army’s massive violations of human rights set the wheels turning on an international war crime case.
During the offensive, Israel reportedly shelled three clearly GPS-designated UN schools and opened fire on hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel and civilian homes.
After categorical denials that it used white phosphorus on the densely-populated Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers finally admitted that they had pounded the Palestinian coast with at least twenty white phosphorus bombs.
The most shocking revelation, however, came on January 4 when Israeli troops evacuated some 110 Gazans — half of whom were children — into a single-residence house in the Zeitoun neighborhood and warned them to stay indoors.
Twenty-four hours later, the soldiers shelled the home incessantly, killing more than 30 of the people inside the house.
A 575-page report headed by Jewish South African judge Richard Goldstone has substantiated claims of Israeli war crimes and human rights violations during the Gaza war.
In the year that has passed since Israel’s offensive, the Tel Aviv government has blocked the reconstruction of thousands of damaged buildings in Gaza.
Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian politician and former minister of information, condemned Israel’s refusal to allow in supplies to rebuild Gaza’s shattered infrastructure.
“Today 25,000 houses in Gaza remain unrepaired because Israel is not allowing a single sack of cement or a piece of glass into Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera on Monday.
In the year that has passed since Israel’s offensive, Tel Aviv has blocked the reconstruction of thousands of damaged buildings in Gaza.
Ref: Press Tv
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Occupied lands of Palestine
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