Patrick’s Notebook

By Tim Franks, BBC News — 8 April 2008

– The next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories has stood by comments comparing Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis.

Speaking to the BBC, Professor Richard Falk said he believed that up to now Israel had been successful in avoiding the criticism that it was due.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

But Israel wants his mandate changed to probe Palestinian actions as well.

Professor Falk said he drew the comparison between the treatment of Palestinians with the Nazi record of collective atrocity, because of what he described as the massive Israeli punishment directed at the entire population of Gaza.

He said he understood that it was a provocative thing to say, but at the time, last summer, he had wanted to shake the American public from its torpor.

“If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison,” he said.

Continue reading ‘UN expert stands by Nazi comments’ »

By Pierre Tristam, Candide’s Notebooks — 8 April 2008

– The apologists of perpetual war in Iraq got lucky last week. The latest catastrophic fiasco over there — the Iraqi government’s face-saving surrender to a truce offered by resurgent Shiite militias — was overshadowed over here by meltdowns in the economy and sectarian battles inside the Democratic Party. From luck to spin. Today, the Bush administration gets to do what it does best: translate defeat at Arabs’ hands into victory with an American accent.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of occupation forces in Iraq and Bush’s Man Friday there, appears before two Senate committees to canonize the 2007 troop escalation no matter how much the Shiite Awakening disagrees. The administration Petraeus is shilling for, like the strategy he’s shelling out in Iraq , never was much concerned with reality, otherwise we wouldn’t still be lurching from calamity to curfew to stand-off while calling it all a success. In the administration’s version of victory, as long as Iraq isn’t in Rwandan-style genocide (and as long as American contractors continue to rake in their billions at taxpayers’ expense), it’s a success. Adding irony to insurgency, all three presidential candidates sit on the two panels Petraeus will be reading his script for — Hillary Clinton and John McCain on the Armed Services Committee, Barack Obama on the Foreign Relations Committee.

McCain has the advantage of sharing Petraeus’ script-writers, to whom facts are inferior to faith. Two weeks ago, in a Middle East trip designed to show off his knowledge of the region, McCain had to be publicly corrected about al-Qaida’s ties to Iran (it doesn’t have any) and to Shiites (it loathes them). The clanger recalled his other visit to Iraq a year ago this week, when McCain, in a bullet-proof vest, said you could “walk freely” through Baghdad . He had to be reminded by NBC News that Baghdadis generally don’t get to stroll to the market with an escort of “100 American soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Or with bullet-proof vests. Which explains the Iraqi civilian casualty rate in the hundreds of thousands and the 4 million refugees, compliments of the occupation’s dislocations.

Continue reading ‘Dog and Petraeus Show’ »

Associated Press — 8 April 2008

— Hundreds of people fled fighting in Baghdad’s Shiite militia stronghold Monday as U.S. and Iraqi forces increased pressure on anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who faces an ultimatum to either disband his Mahdi Army or give up politics.

Al-Sadr’s aides said he would only dismantle the powerful militia if ordered by top Shiite clerics — who have remained silent throughout the increasingly dangerous showdown.

Although al-Sadr holds considerable influence through the Mahdi fighters — estimated at up to 60,000 — political exile for his movement would shatter his dream of becoming the major power broker among the country’s Shiite majority.

Gunbattles raged around the sprawling Sadr City district that serves as the Baghdad nerve center of the Mahdi militia, which has been under siege since last week by about 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops.

Police said at least 14 civilians were killed in clashes Monday in the Baghdad area, nine of them in Sadr City. Frightened families poured out of Sadr City — some carrying their belongings in sacks or piled in pushcarts.

Continue reading ‘Hundreds flee as Baghdad showdown looms’ »

“It gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.”

–Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William Odom testimony in Congress

By Dave Lindorff, This Can’t Be Happening — 5 April 2008

– In a couple days, Americans will be deluged with effusive, praise-filled stories in what passes for news organizations, print and electronic, in the US, quoting Gen. David Petraeus on the glories of his and President Bush’s brilliant so-called “surge” strategy in Iraq.

There will be little critical comment on his report, which will claim that the surge is working but that Iraqi’s “need to do more” to take advantage of the surge in stability to create a stable government in Baghdad.

He will claim, and the media will help him here, that the collapse of President Nouri al-Maliki’s “defining moment” attack on the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, with 1000 of his crack troops and two leading officers defecting to the other side, and Maliki himself having to be rescued by American troops, was a minor event. He will claim that the rise in violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq back to pre-surge levels is of no significance—a statistical aberration.

And President Bush will ask for another $102 billion from Congress to continue funding his catastrophic war in Iraq.

Just to keep our sanity and clarity, it would be good to listen to another general, Lt. General (ret.) William E. Odom, who on April 2 testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Continue reading ‘Listen to the General on Iraq (No, not Petraeus!)’ »

U.S. military expert Chalmers Johnson argues the catastrophe in Iraq and the staggering cost of running a military that stretches across 130 countries on 737 bases may finally cost America its empire.

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash — 24 March 2007 (original post date)

– I believe that we’re close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. … The world’s balance of power didn’t change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that’s what we did.

– Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Has our “leadership” traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world’s newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: “… my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences.”

Johnson’s well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what’s needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.

* * *

Continue reading ‘Is the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?’ »

The Associated Press

– Officials in Iran confirmed for the first time Saturday that the country played an important role in brokering a recent truce between the Iraqi government and anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Shiite Iran helped end the clashes between Iraqi government troops and al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia for the sake of Shiite unity, said a senior Iranian official who deals with Iraq.

“It is in Iran’s best interests to see unity among Shiite factions,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki heads a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, but has clashed with other Shiite factions in the country, including the one led by al-Sadr.

The Iraqi prime minister sparked clashes with al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army over a week ago when he sent government troops to Basra to crack down on Shiite militias. The fighting eased last Sunday after al-Sadr ordered his men off the streets and called on the Iraqi government to end its attacks.

The Iranian government helped broker the truce during high-level talks in Iran’s holy city of Qom with Shiite Iraqi officials and senior supporters of al-Sadr, said a prominent Iraqi party official based in Tehran.

“Iran played a mediating role and helped ease things a lot,” said the Iraqi official, also speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“Given its influence over al-Sadr, Iran convinced the Sadrists to stop fighting,” he said.

Continue reading ‘Officials confirm Iran’s role in brokering truce between Iraqi government and Shiite cleric’ »

Residents of Sadr City, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Baghdad stronghold, said they felt ‘caught in the middle’ of the battle between Sadr’s Mahdi Army and US and Iraqi forces.

By Sam Dagher, The Christian Science Monitor — 1 April 2008 edition

– “The Charge of the Sadrs” is spray painted in black all over the numerous Iraqi Army and police checkpoints now abandoned in eastern Baghdad’s Shiite neighborhoods.

The graffiti mocks Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security operation – “The Charge of the Knights” – launched in Basra, the southern Iraqi oil city, last week that put Iraqi and US forces in direct confrontation with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in the capital and across the south.

On Monday, one day after the Shiite cleric’s call for a truce following the battle that killed hundreds of people and wounded scores of others, several conclusions are clear.

Mr. Sadr has demonstrated his power, despite the blows dealt to his movement over the past few years. The government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, thanked him profusely on Monday for his decision, but vowed that the fight would continue in Basra, where militiamen have now largely melted away from the streets, but remain very much in control of their strongholds.

“It’s the same old ending,” says Juliana Dawood, a Basra resident, referring to previous battles with Sadr’s Mahdi Army in 2004 that have finished with similar truces.

Continue reading ‘Anger follows the fight with Sadr’s militia’ »

Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com — 3 April 2008

– Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq. Their troops are training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan army, while their Special Operations forces are planning to train Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country’s wild, mountainous borderlands.

Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city of Basra. To “discuss” their needs in their President’s eternal War on Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived in Pakistan — to the helpless outrage of the local press — on the very day newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of office. (”I don’t think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day… right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms…” was the way Zaffar Abbas, editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)

At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates in which they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults against Pakistan’s tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani government but based on “actionable intelligence” on terrorists. Their drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to — in the phrase of the hour — “take out.” Agents from their intelligence services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist suspects directly off the streets of major cities and transporting them to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the whole planet into “commands,” the last of which, Africom, was just formed.

Continue reading ‘American Grand Delusions’ »

“What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”

–The Riddle of the Sphinx

By Col. Dan Smith, CounterPunch.org — 2 April 2008

– A necessary aspect of armies–or even of a military style police force–is that they carry weapons. Even in Great Britain, except for the local “Bobbie” on the beat, it seems as if more and more special police armed units are being created to fight criminal enterprises. Meeting the need for compact, powerful pistols and other small arms is a vast industry, one that, in the United States, started in the three decades prior to the U.S. Civil War.

So it was no great surprise, seven years after the U.S. defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan and five years after Saddam Hussein’s army dissolved in Iraq, to find in the Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 110-181) some congressional action to procure small arms to help rebuild the armies of these countries. The relevant Section is 892 of P.L. 110-181 titled “Competition for Procurement of Small Arms Supplied to Iraq and Afghanistan.” This section specifies that the procurement of small arms of less than .50 caliber cannot be sole source. Specifically, it enjoins the Secretary of Defense to ensure that the competition is “full and open,” that no U.S. manufacturer is excluded, and that no “product” manufactured in the United States is excluded even if the parent company is incorporated or has its base of operations in another country.

What was surprising was Section 882 of the same public law. This section is titled “Authority to License Certain Military Designations and Likenesses of Weapons Systems to Toy and Hobby Manufacturers.”

That’s right: the Secretary of the Army, Navy, or Air Force, under a new subsection, is empowered to “license trademarks, service marks, certification marks, and collective marks owned or controlled by the Secretary relating to military designations and likenesses of military weapons systems to any qualifying company upon receipt of a request from the company.”

Continue reading ‘The Toys of War: The Militarization of America’ »

By Isaiah J. Poole, OurFuture.org — 2 April 2008

“You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. … And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to hell, if we don’t use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.”

You might think those words were recently uttered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor, hurled in the latest guilt-by-association attack against the presidential candidate. In fact, that was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing sanitation workers in Memphis just a little more than two weeks before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

This is the Dr. King that the nation tends not to commemorate when we honor his birthday in January, the man who 40 years ago this week was at the side of workers fighting for fair wages and preparing to take his case for economic justice to Washington. Since that battle, his message has too often been scrubbed clean of anything that would hold the nation accountable for making racial equality an economic fact of life.

A report released today by the Service Employees International Union seeks to undo that travesty.The economic implications of King’s movement and message are explored in “Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty [1],” prepared by the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center and the Howard University Department of Economics.

That report concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralyzed outside the gates of the city.” It is true that African Americans “have made amazing progress to get where we are. Black educational attainment is three times higher than in 1968, for example. Our out-of-wedlock birthrate has fallen in half. And countless positions of authority—from school boards to political offices to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 corporations—are now filled with black women and men.”

And yet, today African Americans still face what the report calls “a two-dimensional job crisis: high unemployment and low wages.” Four out of 10 black people over the age of 16 were jobless in 2006, the report notes, and 31 percent of black full-time workers earned less than $25,000. Thus, even as the education gap between black people and white people has narrowed dramatically in the past 40 years, the racial economic disparities have not.

Continue reading ‘Forty Years Later, Still Far From the Mountaintop’ »

By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, IPS — 2 April 2008

– A recent article in Vanity Fair magazine “exposing” a U.S.-planned coup attempt against Palestinian resistance movement Hamas last year has ignited a storm of debate about Washington’s Middle East policies. Yet for more than nine months, details of the plot were reported in the independent Arabic press — and elsewhere — leading some observers to ask: where was the mainstream media?

“From the very beginning, Hamas has publicly insisted that what happened in Gaza last year came in reaction to plans being hatched against it,” Tarek Abd al-Gaber, former news correspondent for Egyptian state television covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, told IPS.

Hamas has been widely blamed in much of the mainstream media for carrying out a “violent coup” against the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip last summer. After six days of heavy fighting, Hamas wrested control of the territory from the government of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the U.S.-backed Fatah movement, in mid-June.

Hamas fighters quickly seized all official institutions and symbols of governance in the Gaza Strip, including the presidential residence in Gaza city.

Declaring a state of emergency from the Fatah-ruled West Bank, Abbas announced the dissolution of the previous national unity government, led by Hamas-affiliated Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh. Hamas leaders in Gaza, however, refused to recognise the declaration, and have remained in control of the territory.

Continue reading ‘This ‘Bombshell’ Took a Year Falling’ »

What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

By Howard Zinn, Tomdispatch.com – 1 April 2008

– With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period of “imperialism.”

I recall the classroom map (labeled “Western Expansion”) which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called “The Louisiana Purchase” hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call “ethnic cleansing” — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging “civilization” and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of “Jacksonian democracy” in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the “Trail of Tears,” the deadly forced march of “the five civilized tribes” westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as “emancipation” was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln’s administration.

Continue reading ‘Empire or Humanity’ »

The Untold Story of How the GOP Rigged Florida and Michigan

By Wayne Barrett, The Huffington Post — 31 March 2008

– Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean came out of hiding last week to announce that there is no reason to rush to resolve the fate of Florida and Michigan. He said he was confident that these delegations, disqualified in 2007 by Dean’s own Rules Committee, would be seated at the August convention — but, apparently, only after a nominee is chosen, which he predicted would occur by July 1. This modern-day Metternich, whose two-fisted handling of this two-state controversy has already had more impact on the 2008 race than his candidacy did on the race in 2004, is promising to mediate the dispute once it’s already settled.

The Dean plan is that these two swing states — big enough to decide the nomination or general election — will eventually be granted “virtual” seats at the convention because, as Dean imaginatively put it in an AP interview, “the campaigns believe that kind of deal is premature right now.” Since one campaign (Hillary Clinton’s) was amenable to redoes, even financing Michigan’s, and the other campaign (Barack Obama’s) opposed every feasible proposition, it is, in a strange way, true that the two sides weren’t collectively ready for a deal.

In all the buzz about the media’s pro-Obama tilt, its indifference to his resistance to including these states in the “actual” nominating process is its most disturbing favor, especially since this brand of “conventional politics,” as Obama would put it, flies in the face of his contention that “the people” should pick the nominee. Obama’s only proposal so far has been to split the delegates evenly, just like he and Michelle parcel out Christmas presents to their two daughters.

Of course, the column inches and moments of air time spent on how and why these two states and their 366 delegates have been banished adds up to less than the attention devoted to, say, the Wyoming caucus, where a 2,066-vote Obama margin gave him a big enough delegate boost to virtually cancel out Hillary Clinton’s 329,000-vote margin in the five March races.

The body count that the mainstream media has regurgitated out of Florida and Michigan is that 2.3 million Democrats voted in primaries that broke the rules, leaving the DNC with no choice but to level both villages, even if the collateral damage might include the party’s prospects of carrying those disenfranchised states in November. The DNC and the MSM appear to have simultaneously concluded that even Clinton’s 300,000-vote win in Florida, where both candidates competed on a level playing field, shouldn’t be counted in the popular vote tally, a calculation that appears nowhere in DNC rules and turns 1.7 million Democratic voters into ghosts.

Continue reading ‘Could the Republicans Pick the Democratic Nominee?’ »