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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (193038)	7/25/2006 1:43:41 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago ___________________________________________________________ Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know By ALEXANDER COCKBURN As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation. The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters. Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006. Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15. Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians. Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32. That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children. Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”. Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried. Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one. None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity. You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history. This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon. In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution. Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel. Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying. With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla. The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine. When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam. Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators. The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up. Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will. So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran. Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire. I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to. Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice. counterpunch.org

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (193038)	12/29/2006 10:55:43 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's New Look on Iraq: Weary ___________________________________________________________ By David Ignatius Columnist The Washington Post Wednesday, December 27, 2006 Watching President Bush in recent weeks has become a grim kind of reality TV show. In almost every news conference, speech and photo opportunity, the topic is the same: what to do about the grinding war in Iraq. Bush has let the facade crack open -- admitting that his strategy for victory isn't working -- but then he struggles to rebuild it with new words of confidence. The stress of the job -- so well hidden for much of the past six years -- has begun to show on Bush's face. He often looks burdened, distracted, haunted by a question that has no good answer. When a photographer captures him at ease, as in a sweet Texas-romance picture of Bush and his wife, Laura, that appeared in People magazine last week, it's as if he has escaped the Iraq sweatbox. I grew up in a Washington that was struggling with the nightmare of a failing war in Vietnam. The government officials of that time were people who behaved as if they'd never known failure in their lives. They had the rosy confidence of the chosen -- "the best and the brightest," as David Halberstam put it. But then the war began to grind them down. I see that same meat grinder at work now. Bush and his officials are strong characters; they work hard not to let you see them sweat. But the anguish and exhaustion are there. Bush is not a man for introspection. That's part of his flinty personality -- the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That's why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed. Bush opened the emotional curtain at a news conference last week. A reporter noted that Lyndon Johnson hadn't been able to sleep well during the Vietnam War and asked Bush if this was a "painful time" for him. He gave an unexpectedly personal answer: "Most painful aspect of my presidency has been knowing that good men and women have died in combat. I read about it every night. And my heart breaks for a mother or father or husband or wife or son and daughter. It just does. And so when you ask about pain, that's pain." Bush's "state of denial," as Bob Woodward rightly called it, has officially ended. He actually spoke the words "We're not winning" last week in an interview with The Post, coupling it with the reverse: "We're not losing." But in truth, he cannot abide the possibility that Iraq will not end in victory. So a day after his "not winning" comment, he half took it back, saying: "I believe that we're going to win," and then adding oddly, as if to reassure himself: "I believe that -- and by the way, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't have our troops there. That's what you've got to know. We're going to succeed." Policy debates in this White House are often described as battles between competing advisers -- Dick Cheney wants this; the Joint Chiefs favor that; Condi Rice favors a third outcome. This kind of analysis implies that Bush isn't really master of his own house, but I think it's a big mistake. The truth is that with this president, the only opinion that finally matters is his own. And he's a stubborn man. Military leaders can tell him it's a mistake to surge troops into Baghdad, but that doesn't mean he will listen. Bush says he doesn't care what happens now to his poll numbers, and I believe him. He broke through the political barriers a while ago. I sense that, as he anguishes about Iraq, he has in mind the judgment of future historians. He said it plainly in an interview in October with conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly: "Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether . . . the decisions I made made sense." What makes reality TV gripping is that it's all happening live -- the contestants make their choices under pressure, win or lose. So too with Bush. He is making a vast wager -- of American lives, treasure and the nation's security -- that his judgments about Iraq were right. The Baker-Hamilton report gave him a chance to take some chips off the table, but Bush doesn't seem interested. He is still playing to win. The audience is shouting out advice, but the man under the spotlight knows he will have to make this decision alone.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (193038)	1/9/2007 2:24:49 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

An Escalation of American Blood _____________________________________________________________ By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times January 9, 2007 A surge in the number of troops in Iraq might have helped in 2003 or early 2004. But in 2007, President Bush’s plan seems to represent a warmed-over variant of approaches that have already been tried and mostly failed, that are opposed by some top American military commanders and ordinary Iraqis alike, and whose most likely outcome will be many more Americans in body bags or wheelchairs. The reality is that we’ve already tried surges. There was one of 20,000 troops in early 2004, a similar one in the fall of 2005, and one a bit smaller in the summer of 2006. As recently as July, Mr. Bush cheerily described a plan “to deploy additional American troops and Iraqi security personnel in Baghdad in the coming weeks.” He explained that this would “bring greater security to the Iraqi capital ... [and] root out those who instigate violence.” By October, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, was acknowledging that the recent troop increases “had not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence.” Proponents of escalation cite the example of Tal Afar, a town in northwestern Iraq. U.S. forces there have met some genuine success since September 2005 with the “clear, build and hold” strategy that Mr. Bush apparently now favors for Baghdad. But Tal Afar is only about one-thirtieth the size of Baghdad, and it isn’t even Arab: its people are mostly members of the Turkmen minority. Trying to replicate that (limited) success in Baghdad is a fool’s errand. In Tal Afar, there was one U.S. soldier for every 40 residents. Using the same ratio in Baghdad would require 150,000 troops, sustained for more than a year. That’s impossible. Mr. Bush’s surge may be just big enough to expose more troops to danger and to let the Iraqi government off the hook, without being big enough to achieve security. Don Rumsfeld was wrong on just about everything in Iraq — except the downside of additional troops there: “More forces, U.S. and coalition forces, create the impression of an occupation,” he said. Indeed, any expansion of our military presence is likely to bolster anti-American radicals, like Moktada al-Sadr. Sure, Iraq promises to help in the crackdown. But my bet is that — once again — Iraqi leaders will make big pledges and then let us do the heavy lifting. In any case, sending in even more young Americans won’t help counterinsurgency efforts when, according to an American-sponsored poll conducted in September, 78 percent of Iraqis believe that the American troop presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.” That’s why Iraqis overwhelmingly favor a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, and it’s one reason I do as well. Mr. Bush is right about the risks of withdrawal: our pullout could be followed by a vast bloodbath and by a regional war in which Iran backs Iraqi Shiite militias and Saudi Arabia and Jordan back Iraqi Sunnis (with Turkey marching into Kurdistan). But all that may unfold anyway, and the prospect of withdrawal may be the best hope to galvanize Iraqi factions to take steps to avert such a catastrophe. If Mr. Bush succeeds in escalating our military involvement, it’s almost inevitable that many more Americans will be killed and injured. The focus has been on fatalities, but by some counts there have been 16 American service injuries for every death. That’s partly a tribute to improvements in military medicine, for in Vietnam there were 2.6 injuries per American fatality. All told, between 22,000 and 50,000 Americans have been injured so far in Iraq (depending on who does the counting); the higher number is one-third as many as in the entire Vietnam War. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard scholar who has written a new report on the war injuries, notes that the backlog for veterans’ disability claims has risen more than fivefold since 2000, and she cites horror stories like that of a staff sergeant who suffered severe brain injuries and then had his pay stopped and utilities cut because of a bureaucratic error. “If the new Congress really wants to support our troops,” Ms. Bilmes writes, “it should start by spending a few more pennies on the ones who have already fought and come home.” That’s a responsibility Mr. Bush should assume as well. And when he speaks to the nation to urge more troops in Iraq, he needs to explain why the back alleys of Baghdad are the best places to invest additional buckets of American blood.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (193038)	1/27/2007 5:22:50 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Larry Johnson, ex-CIA agent, argues, on Josh Marshall's blog that the recent kidnapping and killing of four US soldiers in Karbala suggests just how dangerous Bush's escalation is... tpmcafe.com A Growing Military Credibility Gap? By Larry Johnson Today brought sad news that someone with the U.S. military Multi National Force--Iraq (MNF-I) lied about an attack on U.S. soldiers in the Shia-controlled city of Karabala on Saturday, 20 January 2007. The initial story released to the press stated: KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Attackers who killed five U.S. troops at a government building in Karbala posed as U.S. military officials to get past Iraqi guards, a Karbala police spokesman said. The attack happened Saturday as the U.S. military convened a meeting to discuss security for Ashura, the upcoming Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala. section break According to police spokesman Abdul Rahman al-Mishawi, about 30 gunmen traveling in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows -- similar to the vehicles used by top U.S. military officials -- drove up to the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military. About a dozen U.S. troops were inside the compound at the time, al-Mishawi said. Today, we got Rosanne Rosanna Danna (I am now informed I should have referenced Emily Litella. Never Mind). As far as the first version is concerned, NEVER MIND. Instead of 30 attackers there were only 12. But it is the other details that makes the story truly alarming. Here's what happened according to the Associated Press: BAGHDAD, Iraq - In perhaps the boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers last week at the provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and then shot them to death. The U.S. military confirmed a report earlier Friday by The Associated Press that three of the soldiers were dead and one was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province, about 25 miles from the compound where they were captured. A fifth soldier was killed in the initial attack on the compound. The new account contradicted a U.S. military statement on Jan. 20, the day of the raid on an Iraqi governor's office, that five soldiers were killed "repelling" the attack. . . . The brazen assault, 50 miles south of Baghdad, was conducted by nine to 12 gunmen posing as an American security team, the military confirmed. The attackers traveled in black GMC Suburban vehicles (the type used by U.S. government convoys), had American weapons, wore new U.S. military combat fatigues, and spoke English, according to two senior U.S. military officials as well as Iraqi officials. The confirmation came after nearly a week of inquiries. The U.S. military in Baghdad initially did not respond to repeated requests for comment on reports that began emerging from Iraqi government and military officials on the abduction and a major breakdown in security at the Karbala site. Within hours of the AP report that four of the five dead soldiers had been abducted and found dead or dying about 25 miles east of Karbala, the military issued a long account of what took place. "The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division-Baghdad. "The attackers went straight to where Americans were located in the provincial government facility, bypassing the Iraqi police in the compound," he said. "We are looking at all the evidence to determine who or what was responsible for the breakdown in security at the compound and the perpetration of the assault." At the very moment we are surging troops into Baghdad, who will be scattered in small outposts throughout the city and will have to rely on Iraqi soldiers to protect them, we learn belatedly that someone in Iraq is dressing up in US military uniforms, carrying US weapons, and speaking English like a gringo. You know what this means? U.S. soldiers who were already skeptical about the trustworthiness of their Iraqi counterparts will now also have to question whether the U.S. soldier coming towards them is really a U.S. soldier. The planning evident in this operation is sophisticated and points clearly to the uncomfortable fact that someone within the Iraqi military, who was knowledgeable about the meeting, tipped off the bad guys. It could have been Iranians retaliating for the earlier U.S. attacks on Iranian diplomats inside Iraq or maybe it was someone with a militia group with a grudge to settle. Regardless, it is bad news all around. Equally disturbing is the fact that someone in the U.S. military chain of command lied about what happened and put out false information to the press and the American people. It is one thing to lie in order to preserve operational security. It is another thing to lie simply to cover your ass so you do not look like a complete fool. Unfortunately, when the lie is uncovered the charge of being a "fool" is the least of the blowback. An incident like this also raises an important question, "Can the military be trusted to tell the truth?" If the American people begin to doubt they are getting the straight information about the situation on the ground in Iraq, the ebbing public support could turn into a complete rout. Maybe the soldiers who put out the lie about what happened in Karbala took their clue from Dick Cheney, who triumphantly announced to Wolf Blitzer earlier this week that things in Iraq are going swimmingly and we are enjoying enormous success. I guess the U.S. military decided that this attack was just another benchmark of our glorious Iraqi success. Break out the champagne and wave the victory flag. Mission Accomplished!!!! Meanwhile, the families of five U.S. soldiers are weeping for their loved ones and preparing to bury them. And they died for what?