The Rag Blog

From Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

Warfare and Healthcare
by Norman Solomon

It’s kind of logical. In a pathological way.

A country that devotes a vast array of resources to killing capabilities will steadily undermine its potential for healing. For social justice. For healthcare as a human right.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the horrific trendline four decades ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

If a society keeps approaching spiritual death, it’s apt to arrive. Here’s an indicator: Nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance, and tens of millions of others are badly under-insured. Here’s another: The United States, the world’s preeminent warfare state, now spends about $2 billion per day on military pursuits.

Gaining healthcare for all will require overcoming the priorities of the warfare state. That’s the genuine logic behind the new “Healthcare NOT Warfare” campaign.

I remember the ferocious media debate over the proper government role in healthcare — 43 years ago. As the spring of 1965 got underway, the bombast was splattering across front pages and flying through airwaves. Many commentators warned that a proposal for a vast new program would bring “socialism” and destroy the sanctity of the free-enterprise system. The new federal program was called Medicare.

These days, when speaking on campuses, I bring up current proposals for a “single payer” system — in effect, Medicare for Americans of all ages. Most students seem to think it’s a good idea. But once in a while, someone vocally objects that such an arrangement would be “socialism.” The objection takes me back to the media uproar of early 1965.

Today, we’re left with the unfulfilled potential of Medicare for all. It could make healthcare real as a human right. And it could spare our society a massive amount of money now going to administrative costs and corporate gouging. At last count, annual insurance-industry profits reached $57.5 billion in 2006.

On Capitol Hill, lobbyists for the corporate profiteers are determined to block H.R. 676, the bill to create a universal single-payer system to implement healthcare as a human right.

In the current presidential campaign, none of the major candidates can be heard raising the possibility of ejecting the gargantuan insurance industry from the nation’s healthcare system. Instead, there’s plenty of nattering about whether “mandates” are a good idea. Hillary Clinton even has the audacity (not of hope but of duplicity) to equate proposed healthcare “mandates” with the must-pay-in requirements that sustain Social Security and Medicare.

Read all of it here.

Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008

WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.

The new study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”, was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a “painful” declassification review.

It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report’s authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.

Read the rest here.

Bush in December 2002: War “Inevitable”
From Democracy Now / March 10, 2008

One of the key architects of the Iraq war has revealed new information on the run-up to the invasion. In a new book defending the war and his own role in planning it, former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith quotes President Bush as telling a National Security Council meeting in December 2002 that “war is inevitable.”

The statement came weeks before UN weapons inspectors reported their findings in Iraq and months before Bush delivered his ultimatum that Saddam Hussein leave the country or face invasion.

Feith also criticizes former Secretary of State Colin Powell for publicly cultivating an image as a war skeptic without ever expressing any private opposition. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to release a long-awaited report this week on the Bush administration’s intelligence claims in the run-up to invading Iraq.

Source.

I mean, read the first sentence of what Junior says. Read it!!!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Be Afraid, Bush. Be Very Afraid.
By Jerome Doolittle

Still mongering fear after all these years of plummeting polls, America’s protector spake thus this week to his troops at the Department of Homeland Security:

We’re in a battle with evil men — I call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you’re evil.

The events of September the 11th, 2001 demonstrated the threats of a new era. I say “new” because we found that oceans which separate us from separate — different continents no longer separate us from danger. We saw the cruelty of the terrorists and extremists, and we glimpsed the future they intend for us. In other words, there’s some serious lessons on September the 11th that it’s important for all Americans to remember.

Two years ago, Osama bin Laden warned the American people: “Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished.” All of us, particularly those charged with protecting the American people, need to take the words of this enemy very seriously. And I know you do.

At this moment, somewhere in the world, a terrorist is planning an attack on us. I know that’s an inconvenient thought for some, but it is the truth. And the people in this hall understand that truth. We have no greater responsibility, no greater charge, than to stop our enemies and to protect our fellow citizens.

The wonder of it all is that the nation doesn’t collapse in laughter or shame or both when Bush trots out this evildoer stuff. Let us start by understanding that most fights are not between a good guy and a bad guy. Most fights are between two bad guys. The good guys aren’t hanging around bars looking for trouble; they’re home playing with the kids or watching other people fight on TV.

So, in the interest of reason and common sense, let’s drop all this crap about what a rotten swine Saddam was. Of course he was. He deserved to die a thousand times over.

Let’s put him at ten on the evil meter, okay? And let’s assume that leaving this butcher in power over the last five years would have resulted in the murders of 100,000 innocent Iraqis.

Now let’s do the math, our unit of measurement being Iraqi corpses. According to every calculation of Iraqi casualties, even the Pentagon’s, George W. Bush outscores Saddam on the evil meter by at least five to one and probably closer to ten to one.

Set against that pile of corpses Bush’s good intentions will count for nothing when his personal End Time comes. St. Peter knows what the road to hell is paved with; if Bush actually believes in a Judgment Day, he’d better hope he’s wrong.

Source

When Will Spitzer Finally Pull Out?
by Ward Harkavy / Village Voice / March 10, 2008

Will Eliot Spitzer resign in time for this evening’s network newscasts? I wouldn’t if I were him. I’d wait until right afterwards, so that my smiling face wouldn’t appear simultaneously on every TV set in the Western world.

This is not New York provincialism. Spitzer is practically the most prominent and powerful Democrat in a huge state — Hillary Clinton’s state, Wall Street’s state, the state of millions of Democrats.

Spitzer’s boner really sticks out, even in this day and age. He didn’t just get some on the side. He violated the law, if the federal complaint and published reports are true.

Yes, it will be more important to the country when Citigroup finally collapses. That will be a real disaster.

Still, there’s some meat to this Spitzer thing. In any case, the way it went down was a case of exquisite timing, coming on the heels of last night’s final episode of HBO’s The Wire.

My buddy and former colleague Adamma Ince just texted me:

Looks like Lester got Spitzer on the wire too.

She’s referring to Lester Freamon, the ace detective on that ace investigative entertainment series about political corruption. Lester, adept at tapping and taping politicians, lawyers, and drug dealers, was the shining cop of all “murder police” on that instantly legendary series.

Judging from the complaint that apparently involves Spitzer, there was some pretty good bugging going on against him too.

Lost in the babble over the Spitzer story are the dubious prostitution laws. Why exactly is prostitution criminalized? However, it is, and Spitzer just got finished with a long stint as attorney general, where he hounded others for breaking laws. And now he’s governor.

Is he just another Democrat who can’t keep his dick in his pants? Well, this situation is a lot worse than any sexual escapade of Bill Clinton’s. Spitzer hooked up with a hooker operation, if the federal complaint against him is accurate. And so he violated the Mann Act and other laws. How stupid is that?

Clinton, on the other hand, violated little more than Monica Lewinsky — and she would have paid him to have sex with her.

At least New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey had an excuse for playing around: He was a closeted gay. Yes, he did give his boyfriend a government job, but at least he didn’t break any federal laws, at least that we know of.

McGreevey finally came out and said, “I’m a gay American.”

Spitzer can only say, “I’m a laid American.”

Big deal. But why in the world would Spitzer use an escort service? They all keep records, and there’s plenty of free stuff out there for pols. JFK didn’t write a check to Marilyn Monroe, did he?

Spitzer must have really needed a pro to get his kink on — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And if the federal complaint is true.

In the end, Spitzer appears to be — based on what we know now, which could change any second — not only stupid but also hypocritical.

All over New York, sad-sack whores and chickenheads are being busted, and he doesn’t give a damn what happens to them. Not content with our state’s offerings, the governor of New York goes to D.C. to feast on some high-priced spread. At least that’s what the federal complaint says, if Spitzer is indeed who the feds are calling “Client-9.”

Spitzer’s resignation won’t erase that blow to our tourism industry.

Let’s hope the next governor doesn’t go out of state to get his ashes hauled. If you can’t keep it in your pants, at least keep it in New York.

Spitzer Said to Leave Deposits with Hookers

New York City is ablaze right now in the wake of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s self-confessed link to prostitutes.

Details are numerous, but at the same time they’re hazy. The New York Times broke the story today, but the brothel operation Spitzer allegedly was hooked up was the Emperors’ Club, apparently in D.C., and it was the target of a federal complaint filed last week in New York’s Southern District.

Spitzer apologized mostly to himself in a hasty, brief press conference this afternoon. The 47-page criminal complaint is much juicier, if press reports are to be believed that Spitzer is who the complaint calls “Client-9.”

Hell, Spitzer even set up a tryst just before Valentine’s Day, if the complaint is to be believed.

Also from the complaint: “Client-9” left generous deposits with the hooker operation — no, not that kind, but the ones that ensure that you will leave that kind at some subsequent point.The governor is even quoted, again if you believe that he was indeed Client-9. From the complaint:
Lewis [one of the defendants, Temeka Rachelle Lewis, a k a “Rachelle] asked Client-9 what time he was expecting to have the appointment. Client-9 told Lewis maybe 10 p.m. or so, and asked who it was. Lewis said it was “Kristen,” and Client-9 said, “Great, OK, wonderful.”

It was at that point, the complaint says, that Client-9 haggled over how big a deposit to leave so that he could continue to make regular deposits.

Spitzer’s confessional confab with reporters wasn’t much. But this governor who has railed against moral turpitude will no doubt have to answer many more questions.

To which you can only say: T.S., Eliot.

— Ward Harkavy

Source.

And all the skinny on The Emperor’s Club at The Smoking Gun.

From Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan

Winter Soldier Hearings
By Aaron Glantz

10/03/08 “ICH” — – Get ready for the horrible, honest reality of the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan like you haven’t heard it before. For four days, from March 13 through March 16, hundreds of U.S. veterans of the two wars will descend on Washington and testify in the “Winter Soldier” hearings about what they really did while they were serving their country in Iraq. And their experiences aren’t pretty.

The event is inspired by the Winter Solider tribunal held in 1971 by Vietnam War vets, including John Kerry. The name comes from a quote from Thomas Paine, the revolutionary who rallied George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, saying: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Paine was trying to keep Washington’s army from deserting in the face of a bitter winter and mounting defeats at the hands of the British. Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War say the same type of courage is needed to confront the evils unleashed by the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lawless Atmosphere

“The problem that we face in Iraq is that policymakers in leadership have set a precedent of lawlessness where we don’t abide by the rule of law, we don’t respect international treaties, argued former U.S. Army Sergeant Logan Laituri, who served a tour in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before being discharged as a conscientious objector. “So when that atmosphere exists it lends itself to criminal activity.”

Laituri explained that precedent of lawlessness makes itself felt in the rules of engagement handed down by commanders to soldiers on the front lines. When he was stationed in Samarra, for example, he said one of his fellow soldiers shot an unarmed man while he walked down the street.

“The problem is that that soldier was not committing a crime as you might call it because the rules of engagement were very clear that no one was supposed to be walking down the street,” Laituri said. “But I have a problem with that. You can’t tell a family to leave everything they know so you can bomb the shit out of their house or their city. So while he definitely has protection under the law, I don’t think that legitimates that type of violence.”

Not Just Numbers

Aaron Hughes, a former member of the Illinois National Guard who spent a year running convoys in Iraq, is getting involved too. “We’re trying to create a space for veterans to speak out and change the rhetoric around the war,” he said. “There are human beings on both sides. There are not just numbers. That’s what missing in our culture.”

Hughes grew up in a basement apartment in Chicago and joined the National Guard when he saw how successfully it provided relief during heavy flooding on the Mississippi River.

But after being sent to Iraq, he came to see the military in a different way. An art student at the University of Illinois at the time he was called up, Hughes went back over the photos he took while deployed in Iraq and altered them in an “attempt to interpret the posture assumed as a soldier/tourist in the surreal space of Iraq.” Hughes’ work was been shown at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

“I think it’s wrong, looking back at it,” he said. “How can you not perceive it as a step away from your humanity? They automatically start isolating you. They tell you your girlfriend or your husband is not going to be there. They tell you not to trust anyone but the military and they really start fostering that as your sole relationship in life.”

Equally Criminal Wars

The veterans also want to stress the similarities between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The exact same units that are getting the exact same training and the exact same orders are getting sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan,” explained Perry O’Brien, a former U.S. Army Medic who became a conscientious objector after his tour in Afghanistan. “What we’re seeing is a lot of similarities between practices in both countries and both are equally criminal.”

O’Brien even witnessed the abuse of dead bodies during his tour. “When a patient would die, we would hear over the PA system an announcement through the clinic saying ‘Who wants to learn how to do a chest tube?’ or ‘Who wants to know what a human heart looks like?,’” he said. “Rather than giving the proper treatment of the dead, the body would become a cadaver for medical practice with no consent from the victim.”

Read all of it here.

Non-negotiable positions are an excuse to not negotiate at all. The Israelis are the beneficiaries of the status quo as they steadily entrench their hold on prime areas of the West Bank. And it is the Israelis and their American enablers who have been the principal obstructionists to negotiations that might lead to a fair resolution.

The expansion of the Israeli settlement at this moment, regardless of its location, is a political move intended to undermine the negotiations now in progress. So was the “targeted liquidation” of five senior Hamas militants inside the Gaza Strip on March 1st that started the latest round of violence.

David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

The Five-Day War in Gaza
By Uri Avnery / CounterPunch / March 10, 2008

I was reminded this week of the old tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve in the Czar’s army against the Turks.

“Don’t exert yourself too much,” she admonishes him, “Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…”

“But mother,” he exclaims, “What if the Turk kills me?”

“Kill you?” she cries out, “Why? What have you done to him?”

This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert’s statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.

Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not “kill a Turk and rest”. That was “kill a hundred Turks and rest”. But Olmert does not understand.

The Five-Day war in Gaza (as a Hamas leader called it) was but another short chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This bloody monster is never satisfied; its appetite just grows with the eating.

This chapter started with the “targeted liquidation” of five senior militants inside the Gaza Strip. The “response” was a salvo of rockets, and this time not only on Sderot, but also on Ashkelon and Netivot. The “response” to the “response” was the army’s incursion and the wholesale killing.

The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.

As if an example for the folly of the propagators of this concept had been lacking, it was provided on TV by ex-general Matan Vilnai, when he said that the Palestinians are “bringing a Shoah on themselves”. The Hebrew word Shoah is known all over the world, where it has one clear meaning: the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Vilnai’s utterance spread like a bushfire throughout the Arab world and set off a shock wave. I, too, received dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages from all over the world. How to convince people that in day-to-day Hebrew usage, Shoah means “only” a great disaster, and that General Vilnai, a former candidate for Chief of Staff, is not the most intelligent of people?

Some years ago, President Bush called for a “Crusade” against terrorism. He had no idea that for hundreds of millions of Arabs, the word “Crusade” brings to mind one of the biggest crimes in human history, the appalling massacre committed by the original crusaders against the Muslims (and Jews) in the alleys of Jerusalem. In an intelligence contest between Bush and Vilnai, the outcome, if any, would be in doubt.

Vilnai does not understand what the word “Shoah” means to others, and Olmert does not understand why there is rejoicing in Gaza after the attack on the yeshiva in Jerusalem. Wise men like these direct the state, the government and the army. Wise men like these control public opinion through the media. What is common to all of them: blunted sensibilities to the feelings of anybody who is not Jewish/Israeli. From this springs their inability to understand the psychology of the other side, and hence the consequences of their own words and actions.

This is also expressed in the inability to understand why the Hamas people claimed victory in the Five-Day War. What victory? After all, only two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian were killed, as against 120 Palestinian dead, both fighters and civilians.

But this battle was fought between one of the strongest armies in the world, equipped with the most modern arms on earth, and a few thousand irregulars with primitive arms. If the battle ended in a draw – and such a battle always ends in a draw – this is a great victory for the weak side. In Lebanon War II and in the Gaza war.

(Binyamin Netanyahu made one of the most stupid statements this week, when he demanded that “the Israeli army must move from attrition to decision”. In a struggle like this, there never is a decision.)

The real effect of such an operation is not expressed in material and quantitative facts: so-and-so many dead, so-and-so many injured, so-and-so much destroyed. It is expressed in psychological results that cannot be measured, and therefore are inaccessible to the minds of generals: how much hatred has been added to the seething pool, how many new potential suicide bombers were produced, how many people vowed revenge and became ticking bombs – like the Jerusalem youngster, who woke up one bright morning this week, got himself a weapon, went to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the mother of all settlements, and killed as many as he could.

Now the political and military leadership of Israel sits down to discuss what to do, how to “respond”. No new idea has come up or will come up, because not one of these politicians and generals is able to bring up a new idea. They can only go back to the hundred things they have already done, and that have failed a hundred times.

The first step on the way out of this madness is the readiness to question all our concepts and methods of the last 60 years and start thinking again, right from the beginning.

That is always hard. That is even harder for us, because our leadership has no freedom of thought – its thinking is very closely tied to the thinking of the American leadership.

This week, a shocking document was published: David Rose’s article in Vanity Fair. It describes how US officials have in recent years dictated every single step of the Palestinian leadership, down to the most minute detail. Though the article does not touch the Israeli-American relationship (in itself a surprising omission) it goes without saying that the American course, including the smallest items, is coordinated with the Israeli government.

Why shocking? These things were already known, in general terms. In this respect, that article held no surprises: (a) The Americans ordered Mahmoud Abbas to hold parliamentary elections, in order to present Bush as bringing democracy to the Middle East. (b) Hamas won a surprise victory. (c) The Americans imposed a boycott on the Palestinians, in order to nullify the election results. (d) Abbas diverted for a moment from the policy dictated to him and, under Saudi auspices (and pressure), made an agreement with Hamas, (e) The Americans put an end to this and compelled Abbas to turn over all security services to Muhammad Dahlan, whom they had chosen for the role of strongman in Palestine, (f) The Americans provided plenty of money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (g) The elected Hamas government forestalled the move and itself carried out an armed counter-coup.

All this was known before. What is new is that the mixture of news, rumors and intelligent guesses has now condensed into an authoritative, well substantiated report, based on official US documents. It testifies to the abysmal American ignorance, which trumps even Israeli ignorance, of the internal Palestinian processes.

George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, the Zionist neocon Elliott Abrams and the assortment of American generals innocent of any knowledge are competing with Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and our own assorted generals, whose understanding reaches as far as the end of the gun barrels of their tanks.

The Americans have in the meantime destroyed Dahlan by exposing him publicly as their agent, on the lines of “he’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch”. This week Condoleezza dealt a mortal blow to Abbas, too. He had announced in the morning that he was suspending the (meaningless) peace negotiations with Israel, the very minimum he could do in response to the Gaza atrocities. Rice, who received the news while she was having breakfast in the exciting company of Livni, immediately called Abbas and ordered him to cancel his announcement. Abbas gave in, thus exposing himself to his people in all his nakedness.

Logic was not given to the People of Israel on Mount Sinai, but handed down from Mount Olympus to the ancient Greeks. In spite of this drawback, let us try to apply it.

What is our government trying to achieve in Gaza? It wants to topple Hamas rule (and incidentally also put an end to the launching of rockets against Israel).

It tried to achieve this by imposing a total blockade on the population, hoping that they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. This failed. The alternative course is to re-occupy the entire Strip. That would carry a high price in lives of soldiers, perhaps more than the Israeli public is ready to pay. Also, it will not help, because Hamas will return the moment the Israeli troops withdraw. (In accordance with Mao Zedong’s first rule for guerrillas: “When the enemy advances, withdraw. When the enemy withdraws, advance.”)

The only result of the Five-Day War is the strengthening of Hamas and the rallying of the Palestinian people behind it – not just in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, too. Their victory celebration was justified. The launching of rockets did not stop. The range of the rockets is increasing.

But let us assume that this policy had succeeded and that Hamas had been broken. What then? Abbas and Dahlan could return only on top of Israeli tanks, as subcontractors of the occupation. No insurance company would cover their lives. And if they did not come back, there would be chaos, out of which extreme forces would emerge the like of which we cannot even imagine.

Conclusion: Hamas is there. It cannot be ignored. We have to reach a cease-fire with it. Not a sham offer of “if they stop shooting first, then we will stop shooting”. A cease-fire, like a tango, needs two participants. It must come out of a detailed agreement that will include the cessation of all hostilities, armed and otherwise, in all the territories.

The cease-fire will not hold if it is not accompanied by speeded-up negotiations for a long-term armistice (hudna) and peace. Such negotiations cannot be held with Fatah and not Hamas, nor with Hamas and not Fatah. Therefore, what is needed is a Palestinian government that includes both movements. It must bring in personalities who enjoy the confidence of the entire Palestinian people, such as Marwan Barghouti.

That is the very opposite of the present Israeli-American policy, which forbids Abbas even to talk with Hamas. In all the Israeli leadership, as in all the American leadership, there is no one who dares to spell this out openly. Therefore, what has been is what will be.

We will kill a hundred Turks and rest. And from time to time, a Turk will come and kill some of us.

Why, for God’s sake? What have we done to them?

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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The gentleman pictured above has taken offense to characterization of Hillary as a monster.

Source.

Germany, The Re-engineered Ally: Readiness For Endless War
By Axel Brot

Part 1

08/08/07 “Asia Times” — – Not so many years ago, many hoped Europe might step up as a counterweight to US imperial policies. Such hopes were focused in particular on Germany – not only as the leading European power, but as a known moderating, non-military force in international politics.

US vituperation of the reputed European preference for diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution as well as official Britain, in the person of Richard Cooper, former prime minister Tony Blair’s international-relations guru, deemed it necessary to lecture “post-industrial Europe” about the need for “double standards” and colonial ruthlessness to beat down benighted non-Westerners, seemed to give substance to these hopes.

Well, Germany and the European Union did step up – but rather differently than expected. And it was no electoral twitch that set the stage for “better be wrong with the United States than being right against it”. Since Angela Merkel’s visit to Washington (as the conservative opposition leader) on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to oppose the war, the return to US good graces was not only the main conservative foreign-policy project; it turned rapidly into the supreme project of the German political class – including the Social Democrats.

Merkel became the chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European interlocutor for the US political class to work jointly and determinedly to harden US global hegemony against the consequences of America’s Iraq-inflicted weakness – this not only in the wider Middle East but also, and especially, with regard to Russia and China, the Bush administration’s original enemy of choice before the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” consumed so much of its political capital.

Overcoming the domestic constraints on its ability to use the German army more extensively for “humanitarian interventions”, for the defense of “Western civilization” against Islamist terrorism, is an important, though not the most important, part of the Merkel government’s “the West united behind the US” policy. Notwithstanding the absence of public debate on its strategic implications – eg, of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s geographical restrictions, the mission of “securing access to raw materials” – the rejection on general principles of a more activist military role by a majority of Germans has not (yet) been overcome.

This has far-reaching consequences: it has, in a significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes and expectations toward the EU, and toward Germany’s relationship with France. The public discourse about foreign policy as well as the underlying elite mindset is changing – from “responsibly conservative” to the channeling of the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search for the origins of 20th-century disorder: (British) imperialism, Western militarism and racism. And since the majority of Germans is (again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the efforts of “re-educating” them (as Der Spiegel recently demanded again) are as consistently strident as they are mythologizing.

But there are also quite a number of senior officials and politicians, still serving or retired, who are looking with dismay or worry at the evolution of German policies in response to the crisis of US-German relations. Their publicly voiced concerns are focused on the expansion of German military commitments – of the easy to get into, but next to impossible to get out of sort – and the rapid deterioration of relations with Russia.

In addition, among the small number of senior experts on international economics, a majority are looking with deep foreboding at the mounting instabilities of the international financial system. They see them driven by the huge trade imbalances of the US and the growing threat to leverage them against the creditor nations – in particular against China, Russia, and the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that are running large surpluses.

The US congressionally mandated financial sanctions against such countries as Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea are taken, moreover, as indicators that the United States is about to destroy the trust the international financial system is based upon. The consequences of its eventual – sooner rather than later – meltdown will be dramatic and uncontrollable.

These warning voices are, though, in the wings of the German debate. The stage is held by the narrative of the terrorist menace. But there are very few serious experts who sincerely believe that Islamist terrorism is motivated by their hate for “Western freedoms and values”. Hate and the desire for revenge are certainly crucial elements; but this has not much to do with Western culture or with the alleged humiliating realization of Muslim inferiority.

If one should be looking for causes, the decades of violence the West visited upon these countries, either directly or through its dependent regimes, is a necessary part of the explanation. The other part, of course, would have to face the fact that it was the West that transformed weak and isolated fundamentalist cells into its terrorist Golem. It nurtured, trained, financed, organized and used it for decades in terror campaigns against secular nationalist and socialist regimes and movements until those were defeated or isolated, leaving their compromised remnants to do the Western bidding.

Though Germany was not in the forefront of Middle East meddling, it was fully engaged in creating and empowering a Wahhabi-Salafist coalition to fight the Soviets and the communist regime in Afghanistan – the central front in the global anti-communist offensive that appeared to have turned terrorism on three continents into the Western weapon of choice.

And for the Middle East this still seems to be the case. It is seen in the Western use of Sunni terror groups (and the anti-Iranian-government Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, as well as the Iranian sister organization of the Kurdistan Workers Party) against Iran, and against the ascendent Shi’ites in Lebanon.

But the mythologization of al-Qaeda and the “clash (in German, war) of civilizations” serves to legitimize the readiness for endless war. In the words of a retired German official: “We have been walking the world over the cliff, and are falling into a sea of blood.”

All of this does not only involve ideological re-rigging. In the US wake, Germany is running up the pennant of permanent war. The following should serve to provide a view into some of its particulars.

Read all of it, with a link to Part 2, here.