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706
10,000 anti-war protesters rally outside Republican convention site
ST. PAUL, the United States, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- Anti-war protesters promise on Tuesday more demonstrations and decry police tactics, as the Republican National Convention enters day two in St. Paul, Minn.

Cheri Honkala, a spokesperson for the protesters, told reporters that police arrested more than 280 people Monday during a series of skirmishes that ranged throughout downtown St. Paul, some within blocks of the Xcel Energy Center where the Republican National Convention began its four-day run.

In speaking with reporters Tuesday morning, a dozen protest leaders blamed the confrontations on police and their "intimidating" tactics.

Some of the 4,500 delegates, too, continue to feel harassed.

At a delegate breakfast in downtown St. Paul, the tires were slashed on two buses belonging to the Minnesota delegation, said state Republican Party chair Ron Carey.

On Monday, members of the Connecticut delegation told reporters they were attacked by protesters when they got off their bus near the Xcel Energy Center.

Of those arrested, 130 were booked on felony charges, including one assault on a peace officer.

The 51 people arrested for gross misdemeanors and 103 for misdemeanors had already been released or were expected to be released soon after they were booked.

As President George W. Bush will address the delegates Tuesday night via satellite, Police say they are prepared for violent protests to continue all week, though they are hoping the worst is over.

An estimated 10,000 people of all ages walked slowly down the route from the Capitol to the convention site at the Xcel Energy Center, frequently singing, chanting, and shouting against Bush and the war in Iraq.
 
 

707
Mark `Moloch' Brown:The Empire's Coup Man in Georgia
Aug. 12, 2008 (EIRNS) http://larouchepub.com/pr/2008/080813moloch_brown.html


—There is good reason for the British Empire's silence about the attack by Mikhail Saakashvili's Georgia on South Ossetia on Aug. 7, an attack that brought the world to the brink of World War III. Saakashvili was put in power by the duo of British agents—billionaire speculator and Nazi collaborator, George Soros, and Lord Mark Malloch Brown, now the United Kingdom's Minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). And, by tracking the records of the UN Development Program (UNDP) which Malloch Brown administered, and Soros's Open Society Institute and its offshoots, the proverbial check stubs will be found.

Lord Malloch Brown has been in the business of overthrowing governments since 1986, when he left the London Economist for the international section of an agressive political consulting firm in the U.S. called Sawyer Miller, and from there advised the Presidential campaign of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines. He stuck with Aquino through the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, a role about which he boasts. In 1990, he represented the Presidential campaign of Peruvian fascist novelist Mario Varga Llosa, a drug legalization advocate, who lost the election after proposing a vicious austerity program to cut the living standards of Peru's lower classes. Sawyer Miller also helped promote the Dalai Lama against China.

From Sawyer Miller, Malloch Brown spent the next 18 years at the World Bank and the United Nations, forming a deep, but secretive relationship with Soros.

He is also secretive about his finances—he lists only his government salary of about $160,000 on financial disclosure forms. Prior to taking the Ministry job, he served as the Vice Chairman of George Soros's hedge fund, the Quantum Fund in 2007. For a bit of comparison, note that Soros earned billions of dollars heading the Quantum Fund in recent years!

Malloch Brown enhances his meager government salary, however, with a government-subsidized home in London called "The Admiralty House," which is valued at about 7.76 million pounds sterling, according to the British government. Both the Spectator and the Times of London have written exposes of Malloch Brown for this sweetheart deal, where the rent is over $300,000 per year, and for which he "leapfrogged" over 20 higher-ranking cabinet members to get the perk. The price Malloch Brown demanded, to leave Soros's Quantum Fund was a fat portfolio covering the entire world, a peerage (he is now a British Lord), the right to attend Cabinet meetings, and the luxurious home.

The subsidized home deal is identical to the arrangement which Malloch Brown had for about five years when he headed the UN Development Program, and then became Deputy Secretary General of the UN, and lived in New York. There he was a tenant at the five acre estate owned by George Soros in Katonah, New York, which the UN paid for, at $120,000 a year, to Soros. It was about 20% below the market price, but when asked about this house by a reporter, Malloch Brown stormed out of the interview, exclaiming, "I am doing God's work!"

Malloch Brown and Soros have been co-conspirators in a global plot against the nation state since at least 1993, when Malloch Brown joined a group organized by Soros that travelled to Serbia and Bosnia, to advise him on how to best spend a $50 million grant to "rebuild" Bosnia, after the British orchestrated war had destroyed it. In the 1990s, Soros had also funded the street thug apparatus OTPOR, that boasts of toppling Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Soros's network later used the experienced Serbian mob-controllers to create the "democracy shocktroops" for the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia that put Saakashvili into power.

Throughout his time at the UN, Malloch Brown and Soros were a duo. They held a joint press conference in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002, to announce plans on how use UN funds, integrated with private funding from Soros and his ilk, to control the economies and policies of Third World countries. Soros was not there as a philanthropist—he was there as President and Chairman of the Soros Management Fund, a notorious hedge fund.

The Rose Revolution
There would be no Saakashvili regime today without George Soros and Malloch Brown. Even in 2001, Saakashvili was a Soros-financed operative. In January, 2004, at the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Soros, Malloch Brown, and Mikhail Saakashvili gave a joint press conference where Saakashvili got $1.5 million—two-thirds from Soros's Open Society Institute and one-third from the UN Development Program. The funds were to be for a "Governance Reform Program" for Georgia, of which the main project was payoffs—a "Salary Supplement Fund," for which Malloch Brown arranged millions more.

Malloch Brown's UNDP bluntly describe how he and Soros would, in effect, not only give money, but would stack the Georgia government with the "skilled professionals" they would pick. The UNDP report says that,

Georgia "lacked the skilled professionals needed to design and execute sweeping reforms.... The state lacked the resources to pay salaries" that might lure the kind of globalist operatives that Soros and Malloch Brown wanted there.

So, continues the UNDP Report, "Working in close partnership with billionaire philanthropist George Soros, UNDP moved swiftly.... Speed was recognized as crucial to success. Even before Mr. Saakashvili was sworn into office, UNDP and Mr. Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI) had agreed upon the creation of a new initiative to help the new administration secure the staff and expertise it needed." The initiative—to pay a supplemental salary to Saakashvili and top government officials—went on for three years, and Saakashvili himself admitted its importance at a Washington, D.C. press conference in early 2004, when asked about his financial dependence on Soros.

Saakashvili said: "Now regarding George Soros's contribution, this is primarily UNDP Fund: United Nations Development Program Fund to fund capacity building for Georgian government, and George Soros will not be the only contributor. We said we expect, as we already have pledges from a number of other contributions. We only have at this moment, two million dollars contributed by UNDP and Soros, but we have some other pledges, we need at least eight million dollars already this year and we will need some more for the next year.... Soros played good role in bolstering democratic processes in Georgia. He was very instrumental for many NGOs in their development and I think there is nothing bad about that, wrong about that."

Malloch Brown's UNDP report even boasted that this funding had provoked "Russian President Vladimir Putin ... to chide Mr. Saakashvili that he was on Mr. Soros's payroll." By 2006, the salary supplements were over $1 million per month, says the UNDP report.

These are the funds that go to a large contingent of Soros agents who are the government of Georgia: head of the National Security Council, Alexander Lomaia; Gigi Bokeria, Deputy Foreign Minister (who had been one of the early trainees of the Serbian Otpor for street demonstrations); Chairman of Georgia Parliament's Committee for Eurointegration: David Darchiashvili, to name a few.

708
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War
August 28Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War
August 28, 2008

As we noted here yesterday, Arthur Silber has written a powerful and profound series of articles on the Joe Biden VP nomination, and its deeper implications. He has now followed these up with a piece on Biden's disturbing -- not to say blood-curdling -- acceptance speech on Wednesday night. You should read Silber's latest piece in full, but I wanted to add a few comments of my own.

Joe Biden's acceptance speech was indeed a remarkable performance -- bellicose and delusional and deceitful by turns. If you closed your eyes, there were moments when you would have thought that you were back in the Cow Palace in 1964, listening to Barry Goldwater belching fire and threatening doom for all those who challenge America's uniquely exceptional special unquestionable morally superior dominance of the world.

Arthur Silber points us to some of the money shots in Biden's speech. And the porn allusion is entirely appropriate in this case. The speech, like the whole evening -- which was given over to the glorification of war and the triumphant militarization of American society -- was a lurid example of the pornography of power.

For example, listen to Goldwat -- oops, Biden -- thundering at the evil Rooskies:



Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we've once again seen the consequences of the neglect -- of this neglect, with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild.


What will he and Barack do to hold the Russians "accountable"? And accountable for what? For acting precisely as the bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States has acted for decades: using military power to achieve political ends and "project dominance" to protect "national interests" as defined by the ruling clique? And in this case -- unlike, oh, say, the Americans in Iraq or Somalia or Panama or Lebanon or Vietnam, etc. -- the Russians were provoked into action when their soldiers (lawfully stationed in South Ossetia with UN sanction, just like the American troops at the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) were assaulted and killed, along with numerous innocent civilians, in a sneak attack by Georgian forces armed and trained by Washington.

What would an American administration have done in such a case? It would have laid waste to Tbilisi, as was done in Baghdad, Fallujah, Belgrade. It would have occupied Georgia; it would have sent soldiers barging into houses to drag out the menfolk and terrorize the women and children; it would have constructed enormous prisons to hold tens of thousands of Georgians captive, without charges, for months and years on end; it would bring in secret agents of unnameable agencies and private contractors to conduct "strenuous interrogations;" it would drop 500-pound bombs on residential areas if some guy at a computer console in a hole in Nebraska operating a drone camera spotted a Georgian man carrying a weapon or even -- heaven forbid! -- firing a weapon at the people who invaded and occupied his country, destroyed his home and killed his kinsmen.

In other words, the reaction of any American administration to such a provocation (or as in the case of Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Vietnam, etc., to no provocation whatsoever) would make Russia's action in Georgia look like a game of beach volleyball. Yet big bad Joe Biden -- and his commander-in-chief, Barry Goldwa--sorry, Barack Obama -- are going to hold Russia "accountable" (in some conveniently unspecified way) for not acting as brutally as any American administration would have done in the same situation.

(Of course, when the same Russian leaders did conduct a brutal, savage war of destruction -- in Chechnya -- there was no talk whatsoever about "holding them accountable," or kicking Russia out of the G-8, or imposing sanctions. But the Kremlin, being weaker then -- before Bush's wars and rumors of war enriched Russia with oil price spikes -- was thought to be more obedient. Now Moscow is more recalcitrant. And it is the recalcitrance -- not the "military aggression" or the "Putin tyranny" -- that sticks in the Anglo-American craw. For more on the implications of the "new Cold War-ism" breaking out among the Anglo-American elite, see these excellent analyses in the Guardian, here and here, and these letters to the paper's editor here.)

Biden declares that Georgia has been "destroyed." This is not true. There has been damage and there have been deaths, and none of them are justified (on either side). But Georgia is not in ruins, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the three main targets (so far) of the American "War on Terror" that Biden so ardently embraced in his speech.

Biden called for a billion dollars in aid to "rebuild" Georgia. All well and good -- if this aid is really to be used to help innocent people in Georgia who got caught in the crossfire between the idiotic and violent Mikhail Saakashvili and the calculating and violent Vladimir Putin. Of course, it would be a first if such a thing happened -- if most of the "aid" didn't turn out to be weapons for the local warlord and pork for various cronies back home -- but these are days of hope and change, so who knows?

But here's a curious thing. Later on in his speech Biden says that, in Iraq, he and Obama will "shift the responsibility to the Iraqis." The Georgians, who instigated a war they could not possibly win, must be given all assistance to "rebuild" their undestroyed country; but the Iraqis, whose country was invaded and destroyed in a flagrantly criminal action by a vastly superior power, have to "take responsibility" for the damned mess that got made over there in Mesopotamia.

A mess that Biden himself was instrumental in creating, as Stephen Zunes points out in great and damning detail. Here are some excerpts of his article, via Arthur Silber again:


[Biden] has been one [of] the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.

Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country...

It is difficult to overestimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on Aug. 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.


And, as Zunes and Silber note, Biden was calling for an invasion of Iraq years before "9/11 changed everything" -- just like the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Project for the New American Century" group, which openly yearned for a "new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" its agenda for the expansion of empire and further militarization of American society:


Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration's lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. ...

Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran [and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter] "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."

When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.


Zunes and Silber also bring out one other point that bears repeating, over and over: Biden has been a champion of dismembering Iraq, chopping the country up in a forced partition that even the Bush Administration found too extreme. Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote here about one of the "partition" plans that so-called "liberals" like Biden have been bandying about:


While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq -- or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn't call it ethnic cleansing -- the Democrats and their outriders, the "liberal hawks" (or "humanitarian interventionists" or "Wilsonian idealists" or whatever tag they're wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters -- Joe Biden and "liberal" intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts -- and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy "clerisy"... Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, "an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history," who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant "partition" proposals of Galbraith and others.

Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: "The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by respected "scholars" Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph:



...using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: "we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries" (p. 16); "on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks" (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, "this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct."



"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."

I have a suggestion for Mr. O'Hanlon [and Joe Biden]. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how "bearable" it is. He doesn't even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of "soft partition." Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months -- not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an "EZ Pass" to expedite any "important business" he needs to do.

This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them.


All of this is OK with Joe Biden. As noted, he was one of the earliest advocates of partition. But in the end, it doesn't matter: partition the Iraqis, abandon them, occupy them openly -- or covertly occupy them with "non-permanent" permanent bases for "residual forces" and "training brigades" and "counterrorism response" and "force protection," which is the current Obama plan -- who the hell cares? We've killed a million of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, but now it's time to go strut around in Georgia, it's time to bring more heat to Afghanistan and nuclear-armed, politically unstable Pakistan, "the real central front in the war on terror," as Biden proclaimed on Wednesday. The Iraqis are trash, pure trash; let them "take responsibility" -- while we do whatever the hell we want to do, or don't want to do, with their country.

As we said here yesterday: listen to what Biden and Obama are actually saying. I consider myself a fairly skeptical person, especially about politicians and their promises of "change" and "hope," but even I have been taken aback by how openly brutal and bloodthirsty the Obama campaign has become. I thought they would make much more hay of the "anti-war" stance, but they threw that aside long ago, and have now put one of the chief enablers of the war on the national ticket. It turns out that Obama is not "anti-war" (even as a cynical, vote-getting posture); he and Biden and the Democratic establishment -- and vast tracts of the "liberal" blogosphere as well -- are simply "other-war."

Iraq was the wrong war, you see, the wrong application of deadly, murderous force for dubious ends that have nothing to do with the well-being and security and pressing concerns of ordinary American citizens. But they heartily approve such applications elsewhere, and hope to see more of them.

***

I must admit that these days I'm feeling much as I did in the weeks and months after 9/11, when it seemed the whole nation had gone mad -- and deaf as well, simply not hearing the crimes and atrocities and immoral, dishonorable actions that were being planned and promised in their names. For example, what in God's name did people think Dick Cheney was talking about when he announced on national television -- on Sept. 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks -- that "we will also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will"? Or when George W. Bush declared on Aug. 7, 2002: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." Or in the long, slow build-up to the act of aggression against Iraq, when the most transparent lies were told -- easily debunkable by the most ordinary person with an internet connection or the slightest acquaintance with recent history, as I used to demonstrate week after week in the Moscow Times -- much less by savvy "foreign policy experts" like Joe Biden?

To speak out against all this -- to simply point to plain facts and the obvious implications of what national leaders were actually saying, to take the very traditional and indeed conservative position that America should not wage aggressive war and should obey its own laws -- was in those days like shouting into a hurricane. Nobody listened, nobody cared, and any nay-sayer was denounced as a crank or a fool or a traitor, whose dangerous carping would give aid and comfort to the enemy, and help the bad guys win. Strange days indeed.

And here we are again. Joe Biden stood on a stage before the world Wednesday night and, echoing Barack Obama's own positions, clearly promised more hell on earth for us all. Yet his speech was greeted rapturously across almost all of the liberal commentariat, and treated respectfully, as a serious and completely legitimate policy statement, even by those politically opposed to Biden and his boss.

But if you point to the plain facts and obvious implications of what the leaders of the Democratic ticket are saying -- i.e., "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland" -- you will be accused of "helping John McCain into the White House." You will be denounced for trying to derail "our last hope for change, however imperfect it may be."

But it is not the critics of the openly stated positions taken by Obama and Biden who are "derailing our last hope for change." It is these powerful men in the pursuit of more power who are betraying those hopes by embracing the corruption and violence of domination, belligerence, greed, militarism, and imperial expansion. I'm not forcing them to do it. I don't want them to do it. But should we not tell the truth as we see it? 
 
, 2008

As we noted here yesterday, Arthur Silber has written a powerful and profound series of articles on the Joe Biden VP nomination, and its deeper implications. He has now followed these up with a piece on Biden's disturbing -- not to say blood-curdling -- acceptance speech on Wednesday night. You should read Silber's latest piece in full, but I wanted to add a few comments of my own.

Joe Biden's acceptance speech was indeed a remarkable performance -- bellicose and delusional and deceitful by turns. If you closed your eyes, there were moments when you would have thought that you were back in the Cow Palace in 1964, listening to Barry Goldwater belching fire and threatening doom for all those who challenge America's uniquely exceptional special unquestionable morally superior dominance of the world.

Arthur Silber points us to some of the money shots in Biden's speech. And the porn allusion is entirely appropriate in this case. The speech, like the whole evening -- which was given over to the glorification of war and the triumphant militarization of American society -- was a lurid example of the pornography of power.

For example, listen to Goldwat -- oops, Biden -- thundering at the evil Rooskies:



Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we've once again seen the consequences of the neglect -- of this neglect, with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild.


What will he and Barack do to hold the Russians "accountable"? And accountable for what? For acting precisely as the bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States has acted for decades: using military power to achieve political ends and "project dominance" to protect "national interests" as defined by the ruling clique? And in this case -- unlike, oh, say, the Americans in Iraq or Somalia or Panama or Lebanon or Vietnam, etc. -- the Russians were provoked into action when their soldiers (lawfully stationed in South Ossetia with UN sanction, just like the American troops at the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) were assaulted and killed, along with numerous innocent civilians, in a sneak attack by Georgian forces armed and trained by Washington.

What would an American administration have done in such a case? It would have laid waste to Tbilisi, as was done in Baghdad, Fallujah, Belgrade. It would have occupied Georgia; it would have sent soldiers barging into houses to drag out the menfolk and terrorize the women and children; it would have constructed enormous prisons to hold tens of thousands of Georgians captive, without charges, for months and years on end; it would bring in secret agents of unnameable agencies and private contractors to conduct "strenuous interrogations;" it would drop 500-pound bombs on residential areas if some guy at a computer console in a hole in Nebraska operating a drone camera spotted a Georgian man carrying a weapon or even -- heaven forbid! -- firing a weapon at the people who invaded and occupied his country, destroyed his home and killed his kinsmen.

In other words, the reaction of any American administration to such a provocation (or as in the case of Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Vietnam, etc., to no provocation whatsoever) would make Russia's action in Georgia look like a game of beach volleyball. Yet big bad Joe Biden -- and his commander-in-chief, Barry Goldwa--sorry, Barack Obama -- are going to hold Russia "accountable" (in some conveniently unspecified way) for not acting as brutally as any American administration would have done in the same situation.

(Of course, when the same Russian leaders did conduct a brutal, savage war of destruction -- in Chechnya -- there was no talk whatsoever about "holding them accountable," or kicking Russia out of the G-8, or imposing sanctions. But the Kremlin, being weaker then -- before Bush's wars and rumors of war enriched Russia with oil price spikes -- was thought to be more obedient. Now Moscow is more recalcitrant. And it is the recalcitrance -- not the "military aggression" or the "Putin tyranny" -- that sticks in the Anglo-American craw. For more on the implications of the "new Cold War-ism" breaking out among the Anglo-American elite, see these excellent analyses in the Guardian, here and here, and these letters to the paper's editor here.)

Biden declares that Georgia has been "destroyed." This is not true. There has been damage and there have been deaths, and none of them are justified (on either side). But Georgia is not in ruins, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the three main targets (so far) of the American "War on Terror" that Biden so ardently embraced in his speech.

Biden called for a billion dollars in aid to "rebuild" Georgia. All well and good -- if this aid is really to be used to help innocent people in Georgia who got caught in the crossfire between the idiotic and violent Mikhail Saakashvili and the calculating and violent Vladimir Putin. Of course, it would be a first if such a thing happened -- if most of the "aid" didn't turn out to be weapons for the local warlord and pork for various cronies back home -- but these are days of hope and change, so who knows?

But here's a curious thing. Later on in his speech Biden says that, in Iraq, he and Obama will "shift the responsibility to the Iraqis." The Georgians, who instigated a war they could not possibly win, must be given all assistance to "rebuild" their undestroyed country; but the Iraqis, whose country was invaded and destroyed in a flagrantly criminal action by a vastly superior power, have to "take responsibility" for the damned mess that got made over there in Mesopotamia.

A mess that Biden himself was instrumental in creating, as Stephen Zunes points out in great and damning detail. Here are some excerpts of his article, via Arthur Silber again:


[Biden] has been one [of] the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.

Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country...

It is difficult to overestimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on Aug. 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.


And, as Zunes and Silber note, Biden was calling for an invasion of Iraq years before "9/11 changed everything" -- just like the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Project for the New American Century" group, which openly yearned for a "new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" its agenda for the expansion of empire and further militarization of American society:


Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration's lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. ...

Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran [and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter] "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."

When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.


Zunes and Silber also bring out one other point that bears repeating, over and over: Biden has been a champion of dismembering Iraq, chopping the country up in a forced partition that even the Bush Administration found too extreme. Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote here about one of the "partition" plans that so-called "liberals" like Biden have been bandying about:


While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq -- or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn't call it ethnic cleansing -- the Democrats and their outriders, the "liberal hawks" (or "humanitarian interventionists" or "Wilsonian idealists" or whatever tag they're wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters -- Joe Biden and "liberal" intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts -- and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy "clerisy"... Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, "an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history," who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant "partition" proposals of Galbraith and others.

Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: "The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by respected "scholars" Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph:



...using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: "we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries" (p. 16); "on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks" (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, "this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct."



"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."

I have a suggestion for Mr. O'Hanlon [and Joe Biden]. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how "bearable" it is. He doesn't even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of "soft partition." Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months -- not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an "EZ Pass" to expedite any "important business" he needs to do.

This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them.


All of this is OK with Joe Biden. As noted, he was one of the earliest advocates of partition. But in the end, it doesn't matter: partition the Iraqis, abandon them, occupy them openly -- or covertly occupy them with "non-permanent" permanent bases for "residual forces" and "training brigades" and "counterrorism response" and "force protection," which is the current Obama plan -- who the hell cares? We've killed a million of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, but now it's time to go strut around in Georgia, it's time to bring more heat to Afghanistan and nuclear-armed, politically unstable Pakistan, "the real central front in the war on terror," as Biden proclaimed on Wednesday. The Iraqis are trash, pure trash; let them "take responsibility" -- while we do whatever the hell we want to do, or don't want to do, with their country.

As we said here yesterday: listen to what Biden and Obama are actually saying. I consider myself a fairly skeptical person, especially about politicians and their promises of "change" and "hope," but even I have been taken aback by how openly brutal and bloodthirsty the Obama campaign has become. I thought they would make much more hay of the "anti-war" stance, but they threw that aside long ago, and have now put one of the chief enablers of the war on the national ticket. It turns out that Obama is not "anti-war" (even as a cynical, vote-getting posture); he and Biden and the Democratic establishment -- and vast tracts of the "liberal" blogosphere as well -- are simply "other-war."

Iraq was the wrong war, you see, the wrong application of deadly, murderous force for dubious ends that have nothing to do with the well-being and security and pressing concerns of ordinary American citizens. But they heartily approve such applications elsewhere, and hope to see more of them.

***

I must admit that these days I'm feeling much as I did in the weeks and months after 9/11, when it seemed the whole nation had gone mad -- and deaf as well, simply not hearing the crimes and atrocities and immoral, dishonorable actions that were being planned and promised in their names. For example, what in God's name did people think Dick Cheney was talking about when he announced on national television -- on Sept. 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks -- that "we will also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will"? Or when George W. Bush declared on Aug. 7, 2002: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." Or in the long, slow build-up to the act of aggression against Iraq, when the most transparent lies were told -- easily debunkable by the most ordinary person with an internet connection or the slightest acquaintance with recent history, as I used to demonstrate week after week in the Moscow Times -- much less by savvy "foreign policy experts" like Joe Biden?

To speak out against all this -- to simply point to plain facts and the obvious implications of what national leaders were actually saying, to take the very traditional and indeed conservative position that America should not wage aggressive war and should obey its own laws -- was in those days like shouting into a hurricane. Nobody listened, nobody cared, and any nay-sayer was denounced as a crank or a fool or a traitor, whose dangerous carping would give aid and comfort to the enemy, and help the bad guys win. Strange days indeed.

And here we are again. Joe Biden stood on a stage before the world Wednesday night and, echoing Barack Obama's own positions, clearly promised more hell on earth for us all. Yet his speech was greeted rapturously across almost all of the liberal commentariat, and treated respectfully, as a serious and completely legitimate policy statement, even by those politically opposed to Biden and his boss.

But if you point to the plain facts and obvious implications of what the leaders of the Democratic ticket are saying -- i.e., "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland" -- you will be accused of "helping John McCain into the White House." You will be denounced for trying to derail "our last hope for change, however imperfect it may be."

But it is not the critics of the openly stated positions taken by Obama and Biden who are "derailing our last hope for change." It is these powerful men in the pursuit of more power who are betraying those hopes by embracing the corruption and violence of domination, belligerence, greed, militarism, and imperial expansion. I'm not forcing them to do it. I don't want them to do it. But should we not tell the truth as we see it? 
 

709
The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power

http://www.stratfor.com/

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion
In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

The Western Encirclement of Russia
To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere
Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

 
 

710
News Items / Interior Ministry: US Airstrikes Kill 76 Afghan Civilians
« on: August 24, 2008, 04:18:01 PM »
http://news.antiwar.com/2008/08/interior-ministry-us-airstrikes-kill-76-afghan-civilians/
 
Interior Ministry: US Airstrikes Kill 76 Afghan Civilians
Written on August 22, 2008

Last Updated 8/22 11:00 PM EST
Just one day after US airstrikes in Laghman province were reported to have killed at least 20 civilians, a much larger incident has occurred on the opposite side of the country in Herat Province.
As with yesterday’s story, the initial US report claimed that 30 militants were killed, including an al-Qaeda commander. Though the Afghan Defense Ministry reported several homes were destroyed and that civilians were among the dead, US officials denied that there were any civilians killed.
Shortly later, Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry released a statement regarding the incident. In it they announced that 76 people, all civilians, had actually been killed in the strike. Among those killed were seven men, 19 women, and 50 children under the age of 15. The Independent quotes council member Saeed Sharif as saying the victims “were attending a holy Koran recitation” when the bombing began. The Ministry expressed “profound regret” for the killings, which they described as accidental, and promised to dispatch a delegation to conduct a full investigation.
In May of last year, US airstrikes in the same region killed over 50 civilians. After the incident, NATO promised to review its military tactics to ensure that similar incidents didn’t happen in the future. An American commander said he was “ashamed” of the incident, and announced that compensation of approximately $2,000 would be paid to each victim’s family.
compiled by Jason Ditz
 

711
Growing threat - Join us in mobilizing to Stop War on Iran!

US Stop War on Iran

August 12, 2008

As we write, the arrival of new U.S. warships will mark the largest build-up of Naval forces in the Gulf since the 1991 Gulf War.

The aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Ronald Reagan, along with the USS Iwo Jima, an Amphibious Assault Ship are sailing toward the Persian Gulf to reinforce the US strike forces in the region, along with a British Royal Navy carrier battle group and a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine.

This move follows the ominous Operation Brimstone, a massive military exercise involving more than a dozen warships from the US, England, and France in the Atlantic Ocean in preparation for a possible confrontation with Iran.

The USS Roosevelt, which participated in the just-concluded exercise, and the USS Ronald Reagan will join two US naval battle groups in the area: the USS Abraham Lincoln with its Carrier Strike Group Nine ; and the USS Peleliu, and Amphibious Assault Ship with its expeditionary strike group.

Naval forces now heading towards the Gulf include:

Carrier Strike Group Nine: USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN72) nuclear powered carrier with its Carrier Air Wing Two Destroyer Squadron Nine: USS Mobile Bay (CG53) guided missile cruiser USS Russell (DDG59) guided missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG92) guided missile destroyer USS Shoup (DDG86) guided missile destroyer USS Ford (FFG54) guided missile frigate USS Ingraham (FFG61) guided missile frigate USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG60) guided missile frigate USS Curts (FFG38) guided missile frigate Plus one or more nuclear hunter-killer submarines Peleliu Expeditionary Strike Group: USS Peleliu (LHA-5) a Tarawa-class amphibious assault carrier USS Pearl Harbor (LSD52) assult ship USS Dubuque (LPD8) assult ship/landing dock USS Cape St. George (CG71) guided missile cruiser USS Halsey (DDG97) guided missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG65) guided missile destroyer

Carrier Strike Group Two: USS Theodore Roosevelt (DVN71) nuclear powered carrier with its Carrier Air Wing Eight Destroyer Squadron 22: USS Monterey (CG61) guided missile cruiser USS Mason (DDG87) guided missile destroyer USS Nitze (DDG94) guided missile destroyer USS Sullivans (DDG68) guided missile destroyer USS Springfield (SSN761) nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine IWO ESG ~ Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group USS Iwo Jima (LHD7) amphibious assault carrier with its Amphibious Squadron Four and with its 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit USS San Antonio (LPD17) assault ship USS Velia Gulf (CG72) guided missile cruiser USS Ramage (DDG61) guided missile destroyer USS Carter Hall (LSD50) assault ship USS Roosevelt (DDG80) guided missile destroyer USS Hartfore (SSN768) nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine

Carrier Strike Group Seven: USS Ronald Reagan (CVN76) nuclear powered carrier with its Carrier Air Wing 14 Destroyer Squadron 7: USS Chancellorsville (CG62) guided missile cruiser USS Howard (DDG83) guided missile destroyer USS Gridley (DDG101) guided missile destroyer USS Decatur (DDG73) guided missile destroyer USS Thach (FFG43) guided missile frigate USNS Rainier (T-AOE-7) fast combat support ship

This massive deployment means that hundreds of nuclear-armed warplanes, thousands of troops, and destroyers capable of launching cruise missiles carrying nuclear weapons, bunker busters, or fragmentation bombs will be available for a strike on Iran. While Russia is bogged down with the crisis in Georgia, and China is occupied with the Olympics, the Bush Administration may believe that this is an opportune time to strike. This massive deployment is occurring as both Houses of Congress are set to approve resolutions that would mandate a U.S. blockade (which is an act of war under international law).

The time to act is now:

Please sign the petition online at http://stopwaroniran.org/petition.shtml

And please help us get the word out - use the Tell a Friend Link at http://stopwaroniran.org/friend.shtml

Also, in the next few days and weeks, we will (US Stop War) be mobilizing in the streets against an attack on Iran. As we write, we are preparing placards, banners, and printed material to take to the Republican and Democratic national conventions. We know that the only force that will stop the warmongers in Washington is a grassroots peoples movement. We need your help to take the message to the conventions and to mobilize for other emergency actions. Please consider making a donation to help with expenses at http://stopwaroniran.org/donate.shtml

712
News Items / Stop War Coalition Statement on Georgia Crisis
« on: August 22, 2008, 10:29:59 AM »
Stop War Coalition Statement on Georgia Crisis
Statement on Georgia Crisis
Written by Stop the War Coalition
Sunday, 17 August 2008

The outbreak of war in Georgia is a disaster for the people of the Caucasus, creating thousands of casualties and refugees and further destabilising a region already beset with tensions.

Georgia marks a new stage in the growth of instability around the world, threatening confrontation between the United States and the Russian Federation.

The immediate issue behind the conflict was that of national independence. The government of Georgia claims that the military attack it launched on South Ossetia was to ‘restore constitutional order’ and assert its independence from Russia, while the people of the two disputed regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, do not wish to be ruled from Tbilisi.

Ultimately, the cause of this war – like the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and the threat of military action against Iran – lies in the ambition of the USA to exercise global hegemony.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president is an important ally of the US in the region. The US seeks to integrate Georgia into its sphere of influence through membership of NATO. Saakashvili took US support for Georgia’s membership of NATO as direct encouragement of its conflict with Russia. NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s borders, together with the siting of US Missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and the new US bases established IN Central Asia, is seen by Russia as a direct threat to its interests.

Disregarding the implications of NATO expansion, the western media attributes the conflict in Georgia to ‘ethnic hatreds’ and ‘historical grudges’. In doing so, it forgets the long experience of great power rivalry in the locality where Europe and Asia meet, which is now the hub of an important energy transit route.

Georgia is a key participant in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline developed by a British Petroleum-led consortium, which bypasses Russia AND IRAN to take oil westward from the Caspian basin.

These are all the circumstances in which the outbreak of war has taken place.

Few people can have failed to register the breath-taking hypocrisy of George Bush’s denunciation of Russia for ‘invading a sovereign neighbouring state’ The originator of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq already bears responsibility for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the daily misery and suffering of the peoples of those countries.

As in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British government is following in US footsteps over Georgia, with Gordon Brown and David Miliband repeating US assertions that ‘Russian aggression must not go unanswered’.

The anti-war movement must once again make its presence felt by bringing to bear every possible pressure on the British government to break with US foreign policy.

Add your voice to the call for No More Wars. Join the demonstration at Labour Party conference in Manchester on 20th September.
 

713
EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.

“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”

Transcript:

HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.

But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.

…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.

Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.

UpdateKevin Drum adds:

If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

In the end, of course, we didn't do this. We just didn't bother with any pretext at all.
 

714
Newcastle Stop the War / TSWC September Meeting
« on: August 04, 2008, 10:25:30 PM »
Next meeting: September 1st at 6.30 in the Muslim Welfare House, 12, North Terrace, Claremont Road.

Items on the agenda will include the National Demonstration at the Labour Party Conference on Saturday September 20th on the Costs of War.  coach going.

Student Meeting in October

Campaign Against the Arms Trade Activities

Website and Discussion Forum

715
Demonstrate the cost of war at Labour Conference in Manchester - 20 September 2008     
Written by Stewart office     
Monday, 30 June 2008 
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the lives of more than 200 British soldiers and countless thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. They have also cost billions of pounds - money which could have been spent on houses, healthcare and education in this country. The war has seen the price of oil escalate, with a knock on effect on the price of food and other essentials.

It has been estimated that this war has cost Ł10 billion so far, without counting the cost of looking after injured soldiers for the rest of their lives. It is time we demanded that Labour spend the money on better services for all, not wars in the Middle East.

 

716
News Items / Iraq: Alarm at forced transfer of Basra union activists
« on: July 29, 2008, 12:36:09 AM »
Iraq: Alarm at forced transfer of Basra union activists
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Friday July 25 2008

Eight Iraqi trade union leaders have been forcibly transferred from Basra to
Baghdad, where their lives are said to be at risk for opposing a planned law
in which control over oil exploration and production would be placed in
foreign hands.

The men, members of the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions, IFOU, have been
moved to the capital apparently on the personal orders of Hussain al-
Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, under anti-union legislation left over from
Saddam Hussein's rule. Greg Muttitt, co-director of Platform, the human
rights, environment and oil industry watchdog, described the men's transfer
as "extremely disturbing". He met Shahristani a month ago to protest
against the move.

The Iraqi oil minister said the eight men were involved with the militias and
in criminal activities, such as smuggling. But Muttitt said: "There is
absolutely no substance in these extremely serious allegations and he
offered no evidence."

Even if there was such evidence, it should be a matter for the Iraqi judicial
authorities and the courts, he added.

British officials in Baghdad and Basra have investigated the affair, said Kim
Howells, the foreign minister. In a letter, he said Britain wanted to repeal
Saddam's "restrictive" union laws and said Anne Clywd, the prime minister's
special envoy on human rights, had recently "emphasised the fundamental
need for free and fair trade unions in Iraq".

However, he added: "It appears that the government of Iraq is tackling
illegal trade union activities with the South Oil Company."

John Hilary, executive director of War on Want, said: "The Iraqi Federation
of Oil Unions has been leading the opposition to the sell-off of Iraq's oil and
these members are clearly being targeted for their political actions. We
believe the British government should work for the safety of Iraqi trade
unionists, not be complicit in their persecution."

In a letter to Howells, he said: "We would also like you to state whether the
British government in any way condones the transfer of trade unionists into
dangerous areas as a method of "tackling their activities, whether legal or
illegal".

Hassan Juma'a Awad, an IFOU spokesman, claimed the transfer was
ordered by Shahristani himself. "Those activists, through their hard work,
are well known for fighting corruption and corrupt-ministry gangs in the oil
sector," he insisted, adding that the transfer amounted to a "human rights
crime".

717
News Items / UK troops kill Afghan civilians
« on: July 26, 2008, 03:01:15 PM »
UK troops kill Afghan civilians

The incident took place in the Sangin district of Helmand

British troops in southern Afghanistan have killed four civilians and injured three others after a vehicle failed to stop at a checkpoint.

Soldiers opened fire on the vehicle in the Sangin district of Helmand, suspecting that those inside were insurgents, Nato said.

The wounded Afghans were taken to a field hospital at the UK's Camp Bastion for treatment.

The International Security Assistance Force expressed regret at the incident.

However, it said the situation had been "caused by the reckless actions of the vehicle driver''.

The BBC's Alistair Leithead said it had been a "bad week" for troops at the nearby Inkerman base, where the Afghans were initially taken for treatment.

A dog handler was killed after a patrol came under attack from the Taleban and a soldier was injured when a British mortar bomb fell short.

718
Newcastle Stop the War / TSWC August Meeting
« on: July 24, 2008, 11:36:24 PM »
Next meeting: August 4th at 6.30 in the Muslim Welfare House, 12, North Terrace, Claremont Road.

719
News Items / Does Gordon Brown want a war with Iran?
« on: July 24, 2008, 11:28:41 PM »
Does Gordon Brown want a war with Iran?     
Written by Lindsey German     
Monday, 21 July 2008 
Gordon Brown is the first British prime minister to address the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

He used the occasion to launch an extraordinary attack on Iran, saying that Britain would stand beside Israel in its fight for liberty.

The fear of Brown and the Israelis is that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon.

Unmentioned in the Knesset speech was the fact that Israel, alone in the Middle East, has nuclear weapons already.

At a time when the hawks in the US have apparently drawn back, at least temporarily, from military attack on Iran in favour of increased diplomacy, Brown’s statement can only ratchet up the calls for war again and give comfort to those in Israel who want aggression against Iran.

Brown is calling for stiffer sanctions initially but implicitly signalled today that he would back unilateral action by Israel. This would plunge the region into much greater war, exacerbate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and worsen the oil crisis internationally.

The Stop the War Coalition opposes all intervention in Iran. Our prime minister could help peace in the region by pulling all British troops out and by demanding justice for the Palestinians.
 

720
For Your Information / U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq
« on: July 24, 2008, 11:03:49 PM »
U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq

By Prof. Peter Phillips

Global Research, July 22, 2008

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003 . We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000”.

The ORB report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18 2003 put the civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. The now estimated 1.2 million dead, as of July 2008, includes children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cab drivers, clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers, policemen, poets, healthcare workers, day care providers, construction workers, babysitters, musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many more. All manner of ordinary people in Iraq have died because the United States decided to invade their country. These are deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government. The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of US forces– a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history. This act has not gone unnoticed. Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single impeachment article against George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq. On July 15 The House forwarded the resolution to the Judiciary Committee with a 238 to 180 vote. That Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s threat to the US is now beyond doubt. Former US federal prosecutor Elizabeth De La Vega documents the lies most thoroughly in her book U.S. Vs Bush, and numerous other researchers have verified Bush’s untrue statements. The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in our name. We have allowed the war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered ourselves little choice within the top two presidential candidates for immediate cessation of the mass killings. McCain would undoubtedly accept the deaths of another million Iraqi civilians in order to save face for America, and Obama’s 18-month timetable for withdrawal would likely result in another 250,000 civilian deaths or more. We owe our children and ourselves a future without the shame of mass murder on our collective conscience. The only resolution of this dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq and the prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible. Anything less creates a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation for that we will forever suffer.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research group. He is the co-editor with Dennnis Loo of the book Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney.

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