Destroy the Holy Land - Bring Peace

Destroy The Holy Land

Is this post going to be offensive? Probably. Will I regret posting it later? Who knows. But I'll tell you one thing... on paper, sure looks like a nice solution.

Christ, Moses, Islamic Prophet Muhammad, gave a message of peace.

Now look at us. Forgot about who started it for a moment (even though we all know who started it), look at what we're doing. We're fighting, killing each other and corrupting our politics over what?

Yes, yes, some people call it The Holy Land, but what is it? I'll tell ya, land. We're fighting over, dirt, some scattered rocks and boulders... a few foothills, and some old historical sites. That's it. That's why millions of people in Gaza are dying while Israelis take trips to go sign the missiles that kill them.

It's all over fucking dirt and sand.

 That's all the Holy Land is... just a bunch of fucking dirt and sand. That's it. Oh, right, how insensitive of me; It's a bunch of fucking dirt and sand that's been there for a long time. Really, who gives a fuck?

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, do you think He intended for us to revere the spot in Jerusalem where we think He might have been born, even more than any of His Teachings?

Do you think Jesus' message was to defend the exact spots of land that he stood on, by building a giant fucking nuclear warhead to keep out all the non-Christians? Was that His message?

I'm tired of 6 BILLION dollars of our fucking tax money going to defend a bunch of wealthy sick-o's in the middle east who are one some religious ego trip and think they gotta be on the same spot of dirt they think Moses might have wondered on. Who gives a fuck where Moses lived? Or where he parted the red sea. Did he even? I don't fucking care! Because I'll tell you one thing, I don't think Moses was thinking, 'Oh, better mark this spot on a map, so that 2,500 years from now some rich Europeans can come and kill off all the Arabs that live here'. I'm sure Moses would be just as proud to find a shrine for him, protected by the KKK as he is to see his land being courageously defended by Israeli soldiers who aren't afraid to shoot at unarmed pregnant Palestinian women.

Look, what do you do when you got 2 kids, fighting over a toy, one kid says,

"I got it!"

"No, it's mine, give it back."

"I had it first!"

What do you do? Do you pick sides and say, 'Oh, I gonna side with little Billy here.' No! Kids are fucking annoying. When 2 kids fight, you don't join in, you tell to shut the fuck up!

So SHUT THE FUCK UP! I don't give a fuck, if Jesus was born there. I don't give a FUCK if you think that's where Moses lead your people. You're NOT getting my tax dollars, so you can go on some Holy endeavor.

Look, as a Christian, I believe those sites are Holy too. But I also know what Jesus taught. And the Bible doesn't say, Jesus took a stick and marked out where we should install our perimeter defenses (courtesy of US taxpayer), and here is where the holy missile base should be (again, US tax payer)...etc. Fuck it. The Holy Land is already desecrated by all the fighting that's going on there.

So back to the two fighting kids. They won't shut up, they're fucking annoying, and the toy is fucking expensive on, and you know they're going to break it. What do you do? You take it away!

If you can't stop fighting over the Holy Land, if you can't share it, then don't fucking live there!

And that's not a suggestion.

Fuck, I think we should pull our Military out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and move them straight into the Holy Land. Then evacuate it! Everybody out! Jerusalem - empty, no people, notta. Everyone, go live somewhere else, move to some other country, can't stay here.

Then, when it's totally empty, and devoid of all residents. We fire bomb it. Fucking burn that whole fucking city to the ground. I don't care about all the historical Churches or whatever. If we can't share it peacefully, then NOBODY can have it.

And you know what I think we should do then? Convert it into a wasteland. Imagine, the world's dump. We would pay all the people who lived there (used to) a $HIT load of money, to use that whole land, as the world's dump. Nuclear waste, garbage, decommissioned junk, whatever, Jerusalem is the perfect place for it.

And that's the solution folks.

FIREBOMB THE HOLY LAND!

Not, 'take back the Holy Land'. Not, kick out all the non-believers. No. Just fucking Firebomb it. Would that desecrate the place of Jesus' birth? Maybe, but only about as much as all the racism and fascism that's going on there right now. The Holy Land is already desecrated. It's a land of death, of children signing missiles, or terrorism, of racism, of prejudice.

And the sooner we wipe the Holy Land off the face of the earth, the better, and the sooner we'll have peace. You want the path to peace? That's it. We can't share it. Israel won't share with Palestine, and I'm sure the reverse would be true if Palestine had any of the Holy Land left under it's control. So fuck it. Nobody gets the Holy Land.

When there is no more Holy Land, there will be no more Palestine and no more Israel. Instead it will be the fucking world dump. And all the people who go there can tour the world's largest assortment of junk that all the nations didn't have room to store. And we do need a place to store our nuclear waste, btw.

I'm tired of giant Pro-Israel lobbies buy up our politicians. I'm tired of angry mobs of 'christians' talking about how they're not giving a damn penny to our 'socialist' public schools, but suddenly when Israel thinks that Iran may or may not develop a nuclear mission in 60 months (5 years), the pocket books go flying open. What happened conservative America, I thought the government took all your money? Now you're telling me you got like, $100, or $400 in your pocket to give to a foreign country's military? Oh fuck that shit! Ever heard of the USS Liberty? Of course not.

If keeping the Holy Land around, means more of this,

Then leave a pacifist like me the fuck out of it.

Fight your own damn war.

Kick everyone out of the Holy Land. Leave the whole fucking dirt wad, deserted. Then, FIREBOMB IT! Or Nuke it from orbit, whichever. Just destroy it already so we can stop all the racism, the Islamophobia, and all the killing.

Zionists will stop fighting their wars and rampaging across our politics once we take away what they have to fight for. If that land is reduced to a nuclear wasteland they'll have nothing left to defend, nothing to lobby for, unless they want to start a new Israel up the Antarctic somewhere, in which case, have at it! It's a few miles of from where Moses found himself but whatever.

Now, if some religious psycho, wants to go dig through all that garbage and go live down by the nuclear waste, because he thinks that, 2,000 years ago, his uncle Larry lived there, or because his family has been there for generations; let 'em. But, document them on film when they do go, because that's the closest thing to insanity that you'll ever see.

Dr. King is Under Attack, And He Will Be To The End of Time

You see Dr. King, he was a real pro-war advocate, he really spoke out against all those radical anti-war anti-Vietnam activists.

What's the matter, don't you remember it that way?

Neither do I. 

Funny how all of a sudden Dr. King supports

whatever anyone wants him to.

Usurpers of Dr. King's message

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been 82 this month. His assassination occurred nearly 43 years ago. As we get further and further from that time, memories get fuzzy and a kind of collective amnesia sets in, some of it deliberately promoted.

In 1968 he took a brave stance against the war in Vietnam, in a speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, that cost him some of his liberal supporters.

He criticized the injustices of capitalism: persistent poverty, inadequate aid to workers and the poor, and growing wealth disparity. Let us remember he died demanding not simply integration, but labor rights for striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Remembering King’s legacy is remembering the dangers of political repression and vitriolic persecution. Recent events in Tucson come to mind.

King lived under a constant fear of assassination because his visibility and outspokenness made him a target. But something else made him a target, too.

The way in which his critics vilified him, attributed sinister motives to his actions, called him un-American and a danger to the traditional values of our nation.

Those people are called extremists now, but they weren't seen as outliers in King’s time. They were politicians and editors, civic leaders and sheriffs.

The violent rampage that left six people dead in Arizona last week and many others injured was carried out by one troubled man.

However, he chose a political event and targeted a politician. And he did so in a climate where that same politician had been a literal bulls-eye on political hit list. When violent metaphors are used to “target” opponents we should not be surprised when one disturbed person takes the bait.

But here is a sad and troubling irony: Tea party organizers can bring guns to rallies and put their political rivals under bulls-eyes on websites and have that accepted as legitimate political activity, while non-violent activists who criticize government policy are under attack by the FBI.

That refers to the Supreme Court decision in June against the Humanitarian Law Project, which essentially criminalized their efforts to offer conflict resolution training to people immersed in violent conflicts around the world.

This decision made it a crime to provide “material support” to any organization the government designates a terrorist group, but established a ridiculously broad definition of support.

The ruling has been the basis of FBI raids on the homes of activists who support Palestinian rights and oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The people the FBI is targeting do not advocate the use of guns or even own them; they advocate peace and justice.

King, too, was a peace activist who supported anti-colonial struggles and was under constant FBI surveillance. His phone was tapped, his mail was opened, he was followed and watched. People he trusted were enlisted to spy on him. Government agents plotted how to undermine his leadership, especially as he moved more toward the left.

We Are Always the Good Guys

Unlike The Other Guys

Linh Dinh

All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We’re in two now, aiming for a third.

Japan, whose land we’re still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit.

It’s surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran!

A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren’t our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade.

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged.

This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side.

We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy.

We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country.

It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a fuck about.

How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute — hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer — is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water.

They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die.

Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May, 2009.

The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government.

Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be a genocidal power abroad and complicit in the slaughter of its own citizens.

Lebanon, in Israel's Sights?

Spy Trade: How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy


Analyst says Israel, more likely to initiate hostilities

By Jim Lobe

While speculation over a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities intensifies, at least one influential analyst is calling on Washington to focus more on the likelihood of a new war breaking out between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and how to prevent or contain it.

In his eight-page “Contingency Planning Memorandum” released last week by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), retired U.S. ambassador Daniel Kurtzer argued that Israel was more likely than Hezbollah to initiative hostilities and that it could “also use a conflict with Hezbollah as the catalyst and cover for an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

He also warned that, as in the 2006 war that was touched off by Hezbollah’s attack on an Israeli border patrol, “even small-scale military engagements with limited objectives can escalate into a major conflict” involving outside powers – notably Syria – with “significant implications for U.S. policy and interests in the region.”


“If the next Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation were to result in a sharp decline in Hezbollah’s military capabilities and was not accompanied by substantial civilian casualties or destruction of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, the result would be beneficial for U.S. interests,” he wrote. “However, such an outcome is slim.”


“The more likely unfolding of an Israeli-Hezbollah war would hold almost no positive consequences for the United States, which is focused on three Middle East priorities: trying to slow or stop Iran’s nuclear program, withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, and helping Middle East peace talks succeed,” according to his report, titled “A Third Lebanon War.”


In an e-mail exchange with IPS, the author, Kurtzer, who served as ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and specialized in the Middle East during a distinguished foreign-service career spanning three decades, stressed that he did not believe war was imminent, despite an escalation of rhetoric in recent months on both sides of the border.


“My time frame for the crisis to erupt was 12-18 months,” he wrote. “I don’t think the immediate term poses risks, but the situation could change or deteriorate rapidly and without much advance warning.”


Speculation about an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program has grown in recent weeks, as both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his neoconservative allies have argued that recently adopted U.S. and international economic sanctions are unlikely to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear program before it accumulates enough highly enriched uranium to manufacture a bomb.


In just the past week, since Netanyahu returned home from a summit with President Barack Obama, neoconservatives, who have been close to Netanyahu’s Likud Party since the early 1980s, have stepped up calls for Washington to provide support for Israel should it decide to carry out an eventual attack, or, better yet, for Washington to carry out its own.


Indeed, the cover story of this week’s Weekly Standard, a hard-line neoconservative publication headed by William Kristol, is titled “Should Israel Bomb Iran?” The story, by Reuel Marc Gerecht, who worked previously at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is currently employed by another Likudist group, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is subtitled “Better Safe Than Sorry.”


While Kurtzer’s study does not address the likelihood of such an attack, it argues that Hezbollah’s increasingly potent missile arsenal – much of it believed to be supplied by Iran, as well as Syria – and the security threat it poses to Israel may move policymakers in the Jewish state to “take preemptive military action.”


While it does not exclude the possibility that Hezbollah could launch an attack, possibly to unify its supporters, particularly after the passing of Shia cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah or at the urging of an Iranian leadership eager to deflect international pressure on its nuclear program, the more likely scenario is for Israel to either initiate hostilities or “lure [Hezbollah] into a war to destroy capabilities that threaten Israel’s security,” according to Kurtzer, who also served as a key Middle East adviser to the Obama during his presidential campaign.


“The combination of … the size and quality of Hezbollah’s missile inventory; the possible acquisition of long-range, accurate missiles; and the possible upgrading of Hezbollah’s surface-to-air missile capability changes the equilibrium on the ground to an extent that Israel views as threatening,” according to the report. The report argues that Israel would likely exploit an “operational opportunity,” such as an attack against a convoy carrying long-range weapons or a storage facility in Lebanon or even in Syria that it claims Hezbollah is using.


The study noted that indicators and other warning signs of war are “already evident” and include an increase in anti-Israeli rhetoric on Hezbollah’s part and in official statements on Hezbollah from Israel – specifically, recent allegations that the group had acquired Scud missiles from Syria and that its fighters are being trained there in their use. It also pointed to heightened levels of Israeli military and civil-defense preparedness on the northern front.


If war breaks out, according to Kurtzer, Washington could suffer serious setbacks to its regional priorities, including a resumption of Syrian support for Iraqi insurgents in Iraq and the likelihood that U.S.-encouraged Arab-Israeli peace efforts would “enter another deep freeze.”


Washington’s capacity to prevent a war, according to the study, is “limited” given both Israel’s perception of the threat and the fact that Washington has no relations with Hezbollah or Iran and that Obama’s initial efforts to upgrade ties with Syria have largely stalled as a result of opposition by Republicans and the right-wing leadership of the so-called Israel Lobby.


Nonetheless, Kurtzer calls for Washington to upgrade U.S.-Israeli intelligence exchanges; reiterate U.S. support for Israel’s right of self-defense and concerns about Hezbollah’s rearmament; increase pressure on Syria to halt arms shipments to Hezbollah; support international monitoring efforts; and prepare both for the likelihood of war and its aftermath, including the possibility of launching a post-conflict diplomatic initiative to promote a broader Arab-Israeli peace process.

Analyzing The Situation With Iran

 Iran, a threat?

By Noam Chomsky

 

The Iranian threat is not military aggression but that doesn't mean it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with U.S. global designs. Specifically, it threatens U.S. control of Middle East energy resources.

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration.

General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that "the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability" in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of U.S. global concerns.

The term "stability" here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under U.S. control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies.

The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding U.S. offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the U.S. could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area.

The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group.

According to a U.S. Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 "bunker busters" used for blasting hardened underground structures.

Planning for these "massive ordnance penetrators," the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished.

On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

"They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran," according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London.

"US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours," he said. "The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003," accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is "to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran."

British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia).

On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the U.S. will stay the course Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior military staff.

He also had meetings with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S.

The meetings focused "on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran," according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that, "I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective." Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.

The increasing threats of military action against Iran are, of course, in violation of the UN Charter and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.

Some analysts, who seem to be taken seriously, describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that, "The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East," no less.

If Iran's nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will "move toward" the new Iranian "superpower."

To rephrase in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the U.S. In the U.S. army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a U.S. attack that targets not only Iran's nuclear facilities, but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure—meaning, the civilian society.

This kind of military action is akin to sanctions—causing 'pain' in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means."

What is the Threat, Exactly?


Such inflammatory pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? The military and intelligence assessments are concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.

The reports make it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran's military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the region," and minuscule as compared to the U.S. Iranian military doctrine is strictly "defensive - designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities."

Iran has only "a limited capability to project force beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."

Though the Iranian threat is not military aggression, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with U.S. global designs.

Specifically, it threatens U.S. control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II. As one influential figure advised, expressing a common understanding, control of these resources yields "substantial control of the world".

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence.

Iran's "current five-year plan seeks to expand bilateral, regional, and international relations, strengthen Iran's ties with friendly states, and enhance its defense and deterrent capabilities.

Commensurate with that plan, Iran is seeking to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity."

In short, Iran is seeking to "destabilize" the region, in the technical sense of the term used by General Petraeus. U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iran's neighbors is "stabilization."

Iran's efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is "destabilization," hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine.

Thus, the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor of the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term "stability" in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was necessary to "destabilize" the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also carrying out and supporting terrorism, the reports continue.

Its Revolutionary Guards "are behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the past three decades,"including attacks on U.S. military facilities in the region and "many of the insurgent attacks on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq since 2003."

Furthermore, Iran backs Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine—if elections matter.

The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon's latest (2009) election.

Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the U.S. and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election.

These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case.

Particularly, alongside of strong U.S. support for the regional dictatorships, emphasized by Obama with his strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

War With Iran, Imminent?

"...the two party system agrees to the necessity of more war."

 By Shamus Cooke

When the UN refused to agree to the severe sanctions the US wanted, Obama responded with typical Bush flair and went solo. The new U.S. sanctions against Iran are an unmistakable act of war. If enforced, Iran’s economy will be potentially destroyed.

The New York Times outlines the central parts of the sanctions:

“The law signed by Obama imposes penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. It also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the United States government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran.”

Iran must import a large part of its refined oil from foreign corporations and nations, since it does not have the technology needed to refine all the fuel that it pumps from its soil. By cutting this refined oil off, the U.S. will be causing massive, irreparable damage to the Iranian economy — equaling an act of war.

In fact, war against Japan in WWII was sparked by very similar circumstances. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spearheaded a series of sanctions against Japan, which included the Export Control Act, giving the President the power to prohibit the export of a variety of materials to Japan, including oil.

This gave Roosevelt the legal stance he needed to implement an oil embargo, an obvious act of war. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor simply brought the war out of the economic realm into the military sphere.

Iran is facing the exact same situation. Whereas the Obama Administration calmly portrays economic sanctions as “peaceful” solutions to political problems, they are anything but. The strategy here is to economically attack Iran until it responds militarily, giving the U.S. a fake moral high ground to “defend” itself, since the other side supposedly attacked first.

But the U.S. is provoking militarily too. According to the New York Times: “The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships [war ships] off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four [surrounding] Arab countries, according to administration and military officials.”

The same article mentions that U.S. General Petraeus admitted that, “… the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf [Iran’s border] at all times.

Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles.” Iran, as well as the whole world, knows full well that “antimissile systems” are perfectly capable of going on the offensive — their real purpose.

Iran is completely surrounded by countries occupied by the U.S. military, whether it be the mass occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. puppet states that house U.S. military bases in Arab nations (not to mention Zionist Israel, a U.S. cohort in its war aims against Iran).

Contrary to the statements of President Obama, Iran is already well contained militarily.

It remains to be seen how closely U.S. allies will follow the new oil sanctions; they will be under tremendous pressure to do so. The European Union has already signaled that it will follow Obama’s lead.

Ultimately, the march to war begun by Bush is picking up momentum under Obama. Congressional Democrats and Republicans gave the President their overwhelming support in passing these sanctions, proving that the two party system agrees to the necessity of more war.

Uniting the U.S. anti-war movement is crucial if current and future wars are to be stopped. A step in this direction will take place at the National Peace Conference, in Albany, New York, July 23-25.

National Peace Conference

Citizens of Oceanea, A Message For You

The Ministry of Obama

By John Pilger

In 1984, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace.

Rather, a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude.

To the people of Afghanistan, which the U.S. has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition.

He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a U.S. military assault would take place by mid-October.

The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure U.S. control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

According to U.S. intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the U.S. because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BENEATH THE surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach.

This is known as Coin (counter-insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country.

Embedded media reported this as "peace"; American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in 1984, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant.

"We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable," Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Favored western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam.

The CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong--the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures.

Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance--these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people.

And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself.

The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials.

People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in 1984, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world...

"People ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who...were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

Obama Further Expands The War on Terror

I wonder how many of the people in this picture voted for Obama...

By Bill Van Auken

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.The Obama regime is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism. This only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against Americans and the world.
Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

 These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.

Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation Monday to deliver his bellicose remarks in the face of a crescendo of Republican criticism. The Republican right has tried to exploit the abortive attack in order to indict the Democratic administration as “soft” on terrorism.

This campaign has been fueled in part by the claim initially made by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked” in the incident, which easily could have claimed the lives of 300 passengers and crew members.

In fact, there are serious questions about how the student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was able to board the plane.

He reportedly bought a one-way ticket, paid for in cash, and checked no luggage. Moreover, according to an account given by fellow passengers, he and an accomplice had tried to get him on the flight without showing a passport.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press cited unnamed intelligence officials as stating that they had recordings of conversations between Abdulmutallab and at least one member of al Qaeda.

His father had informed the US Embassy in Lagos more than a month earlier that his son had fallen in with Islamist extremists in Yemen, which resulted in his name being placed on a terror watch list.

Any one of these things should have triggered intense scrutiny. That they did not suggests the possibility that Abdulmutallab’s boarding the flight was facilitated from within the national security apparatus.

This allowed him to carry out an action that is now being used to justify yet another US military intervention abroad.

Clearly, the Republicans in Congress have no interest in probing any of these issues. Rather, they are trying to turn the failed bombing into an argument in defense of torture, for keeping open the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to vindicate all of the criminal policies of the Bush administration.

Obama’s response has been an attempt to outflank his Republican critics from the right by threatening another expansion of US militarist aggression.

There can be little doubt that this will be supplemented with intensified attacks on democratic rights and the continuation of the policies of torture and preventive detention.

In his remarks Monday, Obama vowed “to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us—whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland.”

The US administration is already in the midst of an escalation that is sending another 30,000 US troops into Afghanistan.

It has mounted an intensified campaign of Predator drone missile attacks against Pakistan, while, according to recent press reports, also sending Special Operations units and CIA operatives into the country to conduct covert assassination and “snatch and grab” missions.

It has justified these acts of military aggression as a necessary defense of the “homeland” against terrorist attacks, the same rationale given by the Bush administration for launching the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan as well as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, now in its seventh year.

Now, the Obama White House is preparing to unleash “every element of our national power” against Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps other nations yet unnamed.

The Pentagon and the CIA are already involved in semi-covert operations in both of these countries.

In Somalia, having organized a proxy invasion by US-assisted Ethiopian troops in 2006, Washington is now channeling arms and other military aid to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), while carrying out clandestine assassination raids by American commandos operating from US warships.

In Yemen, US warplanes have carried out repeated strikes against purported Al Qaeda targets as well as against Shia rebels known as the Huthis in the country’s northwest.

Washington has cemented increasingly close relations with the repressive dictatorship of Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh, dispatching top officials, including Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The December 25 bombing attempt on the Northwest flight may now be used to make the US military interventions in both countries more direct, overt and deadly.

In his remarks Monday, Obama justified these actions as a means of keeping the American public “safe and secure” in the face of what he termed “a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”

The reality is that the military actions being prepared by Washington will have just the opposite effect.

If the statement attributed to the group Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula claiming responsibility is to be believed, the attempted airline bombing was undertaken in retaliation for the December 17 US bombing of Yemen that claimed the lives of more than 60 civilians, nearly half of them women and children.

What does the December 25 incident reveal about “the nature of those who threaten our homeland”?

Abdulmutallab, the son of one of Nigeria’s wealthiest bankers, was apparently radicalized while attending the prestigious University College London.

Like millions of young Muslims, most from far less privileged backgrounds, he undoubtedly was outraged by the images of dead and wounded men, women and children produced by the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Washington’s closest ally and client state, Israel.

That this anger is channeled into the retrograde Islamist politics and reactionary terrorist methods of groups like Al Qaeda is no accident.

These organizations represent in a real sense Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster.

For decades, the CIA promoted Islamist movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the precursor of Hamas as a means of undermining socialist and left-nationalist movements in the Middle East.

This policy found its most lethal expression in Afghanistan, where Washington spent billions of dollars in financing and arming an Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

This triggered a war that devastated the country and killed more than 1 million Afghans. It was in this war, initiated in 1978, that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda got their start.

Similarly, in Yemen, as part of its Cold War crusade, Washington backed the Islamist regime in the North against secular nationalists in the South who called themselves socialists and forged ties with Moscow.

In the country’s 1994 civil war, Yemenis returning from fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan played a prominent role in helping to secure the rule of Saleh.

That the Obama administration is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism, only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against the people of the United States and the world.

Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.

American "Holy" War

 

Obama keeps the war machine humming

By Rodrigue Tremblay

Since September 11, 2001, a new type of “holy war” may have begun. This time, the new crusade with strong religious overtones pits fundamentalist Christian America and its allies, against political Islam and the radical Islamist al Qaeda network.

On September 16, 2001, then President George W. Bush set the tone when he said: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take awhile.”

On December 1, 2009 Nobel “Peace” laureate Barack Obama, president of the United States since January 20, 2009, decided to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

He announced a policy of stepping up the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan-Pashtunistan. He announced an escalation in the military occupation of Afghanistan by sending extra American troops in that Muslim country, putting the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan at more than 100,000.

Not satisfied in using the same vocabulary as George W. Bush, Barack Obama pushed the symbolism by adopting Bush’s practice of announcing policies surrounded by more than 4,000 students dressed as soldiers at the West Point Academy.

This was all too reminiscent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fatal decision in 1965 to acquiesce to the request from U.S. commanders to enlarge the Vietnam war by sending scores of additional U.S. soldiers to that Asiatic country.

America seems to be in a constant need of a foreign enemy. First, it was the British. Then it was the Indigenous peoples. Then it was the Mexicans. Then it was the Spanish. Then it was the Filipinos.

Then it was the Japanese. Then it was the Germans. Then it was the Italians. Then it was the Koreans. Then it was the Cubans. Then it was the Vietnamese. Then it was the Soviets. Then it was the Iraqis.

Then it was the Islamists. Then it was the Taliban. And, once the current conflict in Pashtunistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan is over, it will possibly be the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians…etc.!

The reason for such a permanent-war mentality is most likely related to the U.S. military-industrial complex, an enormous beast that must be fed regularly hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, to sustain itself.

In the months following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the high echelons at the Pentagon were busy designing a new post-cold-war strategy designed to keep the U.S. war machine humming.

Paul Wolfowitz, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the George H. Bush administration, wrote a memorandum titled “The Defense Policy Guidance 1992-1994”, which was dated February 18, 1992.

The new so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine was a blueprint to “set the nation’s [military] direction for the next century.” This new neocon military doctrine called for the replacement of the policy of “containment” with one of military “preemption” and international “unilateralism”, in effect, discarding the United Nations Charter that forbids such international behavior.

The Pentagon’s overall goal was to establish, through military force, a “one-Superpower World”. The more immediate objectives of the new U.S. neocon doctrine was to “…preserve U.S. and Western access to the [Middle East and Southwest Asia] region’s oil.”

And, as stated in an April 16, 1992 addendum, to contribute “to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel’s security”.

Because of some opposition within the U.S. Government, the new policy did not become immediately effective. But the objective remained.

For instance, in September 2000, under the auspices of “The Project for the New American Century”, a new strategic document was issued and was entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Strategy: Forces and Resources For a New Century”. The same goals expressed in the 1992 document were reiterated.

The belief was expressed that the kind of military transformation the (neocon) planners were considering required “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”, to make it possible to sell the plan to the American public.

They were either very prescient or very lucky, because exactly one year later, they were served with the “New Pearl Harbor” they had been openly hoping for. Indeed, the Islamist terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, turned out to have been a bonanza for the American military-industrial complex.

The military planners’ wish for a “New Pearl Harbor”, was fulfilled at the right time. It is important to remember that from 2001 to 2005, Paul Wolfowitz served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, reporting to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In this capacity, he was well positioned to implement his own Wolfowitz doctrine that later morphed into the George W. Bush Doctrine.

For the time being, this is the “doctrine” that newly-elected President Barack Obama continues to implement in the Pashtunistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan corridor. As a politician, Barack Obama may be new at the job, but the policy he is being asked to implement was crafted long before he even set foot in Washington D.C.

Another possible reason why the United States is so often involved in foreign wars, besides its obvious aim of imposing a New American Empire on the world, may be due to the strong influence of religion in the United States.

Just as for some aggressive Islamic countries, the U.S. is also the most religious of all first world countries.

Researchers have found strong positive correlations between a nation’s religious belief and high levels of domestic stress and anxiety, and other indicators of social dysfunction.

These include homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births and abortions, corruption, large income inequalities, economic and social insecurity, etc.

It is possible that wars serve as an emotional outlet that allows some Americans to forget about their nation’s domestic problems. I suppose more research would be necessary on this issue.

Indeed, is it possible that foreign wars, including wars of aggression, are a way for the American elites to deflect attention from domestic social problems and, as such, are a convenient pretext to direct tax money to defense expenditures rather than to social programs?

The issue deserves at least to be raised. This could explain why U.S. foreign policy is so devoid of fundamental morality.

U.S. politicians who become president understand this American proclivity for war. They know that the best way to popularity is to be seen as a “war president”.

A president who does not start a war abroad or who does not enlarge one already in progress is open to criticism and is likely to suffer politically.

He must be seen less as a president than as “commander-in-chief”, in effect, as an emperor. How could this be, when the framers of the U.S. Constitution attempted precisely to avoid that?

Indeed, Article One (the War Powers Clause) of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, and not the President, the authority to declare war.

Since World War II, however, this central article of the U.S. Constitution has been circumvented by having Congress give the President a blanket authorization to deploy troops abroad.

This sleight of hand is euphemistically called “police actions“, which means it doesn't need an explicit or formal congressional declaration of war. The term was first used by President Harry S. Truman to describe the Korean War.

This artifice has done a lot to trivialize the act of war. It also contributed much in the transfer of the powers of war and peace from the legislative branch to the executive branch.

In doing so, it has reinforced the role of the U.S. president as a commander-in-chief or as a de facto emperor. Only a formal constitutional amendment could restore, in practice, the framers’ initial intent.

All said, it is easy to understand why when political faces change in Washington D.C., policies do not necessarily change. This push toward empire on the part of the United States can also explain why there is resentment and an anti-Americanism movement abroad.