Dokumentation: Carter-administrationens støtte til Suharto.

Året er 1978. De Indonesiske styrker fortsætter, i strid med det internationale samfunds bestemmelser, militæroperationerne man i 1975 påbegyndte da Indonesien invaderede og besatte Øst-Timor. Umiddelbart sammenfaldende med at man fra indonesiske side planlægger et massivt luftbombardament af Øst-Timor mhp. at nedkæmpe den væbnede separatistbevægelse, anmoder Jimmy Carters vicepræsident Walter Mondale den 26. April i et memorandum til præsidenten, om Carters tilladelse til at sælge en eskadrille A-4 kampfly til Suharto-styret. Walter Mondale begrunder anmodningen med, at det vil gavne amerikanske interesser: "Eftersom det underliggende formål med mit besøg er at bekræfte, at vi ønsker at samarbejde med Indonesien, mener jeg en positiv respons til Suharto vil være i vores interesse." Selvom Mondale i briefingen nævner, at der under besøget vil blive talt om menneskerettigheder med Suharto, er der ingen nævnelse af situationen på det besatte Øst-Timor i memoet.

Propaganda: Kabuls børn lever i sikkerhed.

NATOs øverste civile repræsentant, britiske Mark Sedwill,udtalte for nylig, at børnene i den afghanske hovedstad Kabul nok lever i større sikkerhed end børn i London, Glasgow eller New York. Denne udtalelse står imidlertid i skarp kontrast til realiteterne.



Professor i mellemøsthistorie Juan Cole har følgende kommentar til udtalelsen på sin blog:

"Quite apart from the bombings in the Afghan capital, far beyond anything in Western capitals, some 1,795 children were killed or wounded in conflict-related violence from September 2008 to August 2010 (admittedly in the whole country and not just in Kabul). Moreover, there are powerful crime syndicates and kidnapping rings in the capital and drug addiction is spreading among even children and youth. He wasn’t speaking of infant mortality, so it isn’t fair to slam him on the grounds that a fifth of Afghan children die before reaching age five. But knowledge of the truly horrific health statistics of Afghan children might have instilled some caution about making Panglossian statements."

Dokumentation: Nixons støtte til Suharto

I et dokument klassificeret som "Top Secret/Sensitive" lærer vi om et møde den 26. Maj 1970 der finder sted i Det Hvide Hus. Mødet er mellem Richard Nixon og den indonesiske præsident Suharto som er på sit første statsbesøg til USA. Til mødet, hvor også Henry Kissinger er tilstede, byder Richard Nixon den indonesiske leder velkommen og tilføjer, at han anser Suharto for en gammel ven. Nixon spørger ind til hvordan det forholder sig med landets revolutionære bevægelser, hvortil Suharto svarer at "their strength can be said to have been nullified ... Tens of thousands of these have been interrogated and placed in detention." Studenterbevægelsen i landet er nu iflg. Suharto "active participants in the New Order" hvilket man har opnået fordi "they have received indoctrination concerning the ideas of the New Order". Nixon spørger herefter ind til Suhartos tanker angående "U.S. programs in Indonesia" hvortil Suharto svarer: "Our achievement has been based upon the hard work of our government and people but the assistance which we have received from friendly countries has been particularly helpful. We are aware that the U.S. Government faces many problems and we are thankful for the increases in aid that have been possible in the past. " Til dette svarer Nixon: "As always we are interested in supporting your economic progress and in these efforts we do so without any strings attached and without interference in your internal affairs. When you became President in Indonesia it was a difficult and dangerous time in Indonesia. We wanted to help then and we continue on the same basis." Suharto takker Nixon for hans respekt for "our non-aligned status" og forklarer herefter Nixon, at Indonesiens militær er skrøbeligt, da det militære udstyr stammer fra Rusland og Kina, hvorfor man fra russisk og kinesisk side kender til landets militære svagheder, samt, at det er vanskeligt at skaffe reservedele nu hvor Indonesien har erklæret sig neutralt. Nixon lader til at forstå problematikken idet han siger: "To maintain your non-alignment, you must be strong enough to defend such neutrality. During your visit here I would like your Chief of Staff to meet appropiate people to determine the needs of Indonesia and the appropriate role of the U.S." og Nixon tilføjer "We know your intentions are only for the purposes of defense and that you have no intention of attacking others ... We will follow through. It is our desire to help but not hurt your position. We understand that the internal political situation in Indonesia is very complex and that your country is in a critical geographical position. Please feel free to speak ... with me concerning any aspect of our economic program, private investment, Export-Import Bank or military assistance. Our primary interest is a free and independent Indonesia." Suharto slutter mødet af med disse ord: "I am very happy with our cooperation in an atmosphere of mutual respect."

USA fortsætter sin undergravende virksomhed i Latin-Amerika.

USA har en lang historie hvad undergravende virksomhed i Latin-Amerika angår.

I Guatemala væltede man i 1953 Arbenz Guzman, den første demokratisk valgte præsident i Sydamerika. Han var ikke statskommunist, men en oprigtig demokrat, men han måtte fjernes da han udgjorde en trussel mod amerikanske forretningsinteresser, idet hans økonomiske reformer gik på tværs af United Fruit Company’s profitinteresser i landet.

I 1972 skabte man, gennem en årelang indsats fra CIAs side, grobunden for Augusto Pinochets militærkup i Chile og dermed grundlaget for omstyrtningen af den demokratisk valgte regering under ledelse af Salvador Allende som døde under kuppet.

I 1980erne støttede man under Reagan-administrationen en lang række fascistoide grupperinger i Latin-Amerika. Blandt andet støttede man de nicaraguanske Contraer med penge man havde tjent på at sælge våben til Iran, selvom Iran også på daværende tidspunkt var USAs officielle fjende. Støtten til Contraerne via våbenhandlen med Iran, gik hen og blev en national skandale - Iran-Contra affæren. Nicaragua lagde efterfølgende sag an mod USA ved International Cour de Justice og vandt sagen. Domsafsigelsen ved ICJ var hård. USA havde i landets handlinger mod Nicaragua brudt gældende international lovgivning i fire henseender, nærmere bestemt ved:

1) at intervenere i en andens stats affærer.
2) at have brugt magt mod en anden stat.
3) at krænke en andens stats suverænitet
4) at spærre for fredelig maritim handel.

Desværre tyder noget på, at historien om USAs undergravende rolle i Latin-Amerika langt fra er slut. I denne måned afholdt man i Washington et møde hvor højreorienterede nøglespillere i tidligere Latin-Amerikanske statskup mødtes med flere højtplacerede medlemmer af Kongressen, hvoraf flere bestrider vigtige udenrigspolitiske stillinger. Dette indikerer at USAs aggressive politik i regionen ikke blot er historisk og afsluttet, men derimod fortsat er aktuel. Læs mere her.

Professor Stephen Zunes om Obama-administrationens støtte til repressive regimer.

Ekspert i amerikansk udenrigspolitik i Mellemøsten, Professor i international relations Stephen Zunes, har skrevet en række læseværdige kritiske artikler omhandlende Obama-administrationens udenrigspolitik i Nord-Afrika og Mellemøsten, samt om ledende Demokraters holdninger til samme.

[Foreign Policy in Focus] Zunes: "How Not to Support Democracy in the Middle East."
[stephenzunes.org] Zunes: "U.S. Lawmakers Support Illegal Annexation."
[The Huffington Post] Zunes: "Arming the Saudis."
[Foreign Policy in Focus] Zunes: "U.S. Support for Israel Mirrors 80s Support for El Salvador Junta."
[Foreign Policy in Focus] Zunes: "Democratic Party Defends Israeli Attack."
[Truthout] Zunes: "Iraq: The Democrats' War."

US Government

FOREIGN POLICY:
Obama seeks to expand arms exports by trimming approval process

MILITARY: INTELLIGENCE.
Washington Post: Top Secret America.

PRISONS: HUMAN RIGHTS.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/11/confronting-human-rights-abuses-in-us-prisons/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0712-08.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Human_Rights/Rights_Police_USA_RFA.html

Løsrivelse fra NATO-åget

En progressiv, decentralistisk, humanistisk og menneskerettighedsorienteret venstrefløjspolitik for det 21. århundrede, fordrer i praksis, at det militaristiske udenrigspolitiske paradigme, som pt. er herskende indenfor NATO regi, herunder hos vores egen regering, selvfølgelig er noget man skal få Danmark ud af hurtigst muligt. Hverken Norge eller Sverige er medlem, og der er nærmest kun gode grunde til, at melde os ud af denne klub af krigsmageriske kultur- og militærimperialistiske nationer.

Kathrin vanden Heuvel, chefredaktør ved det progressive netmagasin The Nation, kommer med nogle ret overbevisende grunde til hvorfor det er på tide at vinke NATO pænt farvel.

KLIK.

Et interessant spørgsmål til præsidenten, men intet svar.

følgende er to spørgsmål som Helen Thomas fra Huffington Post stillede Barack Obama ved hans første pressemøde. Bemærk hvordan han behændigt undgår at svare på det sidste af spørgsmålene.

Question: Mr. President, do you think that Pakistan and -- are maintaining the safe havens in Afghanistan for these so-called terrorists? And, also, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?

Obama: Well, I think that Pakistan -- there is no doubt that, in the FATA region of Pakistan, in the mountainous regions along the border of Afghanistan, that there are safe havens where terrorists are operating.

And one of the goals of Ambassador Holbrooke, as he is traveling throughout the region, is to deliver a message to Pakistan that they are endangered as much as we are by the continuation of those operations and that we've got to work in a regional fashion to root out those safe havens.

It's not acceptable for Pakistan or for us to have folks who, with impunity, will kill innocent men, women and children. And, you know, I -- I believe that the new government of Pakistan and -- and Mr. Zardari cares deeply about getting control of the situation. We want to be effective partners with them on that issue.

America's Hidden Role in Hamas's Rise to Power

By Professor Stephen Zunes
Source: AlterNet

No one in the mainstream media or government is willing to acknowledge America's sordid role interfering in Palestinian politics.

The United States bears much of the blame for the ongoing bloodshed in the Gaza Strip and nearby parts of Israel. Indeed, were it not for misguided Israeli and American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the territory in the first place.

Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities that stressed an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left- wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli soldiers -- who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations -- stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family-planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier. Israel's priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian- style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms.

American policy was not much different: Up until 1993, U.S. officials in the consular office in Jerusalem met periodically with Hamas leaders, while they were barred from meeting with anyone from the PLO, including leading moderates within the coalition. This policy continued despite the fact that the PLO had renounced terrorism and unilaterally recognized Israel as far back as 1988.

One of the early major boosts for Hamas came when the Israeli government expelled more than 400 Palestinian Muslims in late 1992. While most of the exiles were associated with Hamas-affiliated social service agencies, very few had been accused of any violent crimes. Since such expulsions are a direct contravention to international law, the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the action and called for their immediate return. The incoming Clinton administration, however, blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolution and falsely claimed that an Israeli offer to eventually allow some of exiles back constituted a fulfillment of the U.N. mandate. The result of the Israeli and American actions was that the exiles became heroes and martyrs, and the credibility of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinians grew enormously -- and so did its political strength.

Still, at the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the support of only 15 percent of the Palestinian community. Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank without apparent U.S. objections, doubling the amount of settlers over the next dozen years. The rule of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat and his cronies proved to be corrupt and inept, while Hamas leaders were seen to be more honest and in keeping with the needs of ordinary Palestinians. In early 2001, Israel cut off all substantive negotiations with the Palestinians, and a devastating U.S.-backed Israeli offensive the following year destroyed much of the Palestinian Authority's infrastructure, making prospects for peace and statehood even more remote. Israeli closures and blockades sank the Palestinian economy into a serious depression, and Hamas-run social services became all the more important for ordinary Palestinians.

Seeing how Fatah's 1993 decision to end the armed struggle and rely on a U.S.-led peace process had resulted in increased suffering, Hamas' popularity grew well beyond its hard-line fundamentalist base and its use of terrorism against Israel -- despite being immoral, illegal and counterproductive -- seemed to express the sense of anger and impotence of wide segments of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile -- in a policy defended by the Bush administration and Democratic leaders in Congress -- Israel's use of death squads resulted in the deaths of Yassin and scores of other Hamas leaders, turning them into martyrs in the eyes of many Palestinians and increasing Hamas' support still further.

Hamas Comes to Power

With the Bush administration insisting that the Palestinians stage free and fair elections after the death of Arafat in 2004, Fatah leaders hoped that coaxing Hamas into the electoral process would help weaken its more radical elements. Despite U.S. objections, the Palestinian parliamentary elections went ahead in January 2006 with Hamas' participation. They were monitored closely by international observers and were universally recognized as free and fair. With reformist and leftist parties divided into a half-dozen competing slates, Hamas was seen by many Palestinians disgusted with the status quo as the only viable alternative to the corrupt Fatah incumbents, and with Israel refusing to engage in substantive peace negotiations with Abbas' Fatah-led government, they figured there was little to lose in electing Hamas. In addition, factionalism within the ruling party led a number of districts to have competing Fatah candidates. As a result, even though Hamas only received 44 percent of the vote, it captured a majority of parliament and the right to select the prime minister and form a new government.

Ironically, the position of prime minister did not exist under the original constitution of the Palestinian Authority, but was added in March 2003 at the insistence of the United States, which desired a counterweight to President Arafat. As a result, while the elections allowed Abbas to remain as president, he was forced to share power with Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.

Despite claiming support for free elections, the United States tried from the outset to undermine the Hamas government. It was largely due to U.S. pressure that Abbas refused Hamas' initial invitation to form a national unity government that would include Fatah and from which some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders would have presumably been marginalized. The Bush administration pressured the Canadians, Europeans and others in the international community to impose stiff sanctions on the Palestine Authority, although a limited amount of aid continued to flow to government offices controlled by Abbas.

Once one of the more-prosperous regions in the Arab world, decades of Israeli occupation had resulted in the destruction of much of the indigenous Palestinian economy, making the Palestinian Authority dependent on foreign aid to provide basic functions for its people. The impact of these sanctions, therefore, was devastating. The Iranian regime rushed in to partially fulfill the void, providing millions of dollars to run basic services and giving the Islamic republic -- which until then had not been allied with Hamas and had not been a major player in Palestinian politics -- unprecedented leverage.

Meanwhile, record unemployment led angry and hungry young men to become easy recruits for Hamas militants. One leading Fatah official noted how, "For many people, this was the only way to make money." Some Palestinian police, unpaid by their bankrupt government, clandestinely joined the Hamas militia as a second job, creating a dual loyalty.

The demands imposed at the insistence of the Bush administration and Congress on the Palestinian Authority in order to lift the sanctions appeared to have been designed to be rejected and were widely interpreted as a pretext for punishing the Palestinian population for voting the wrong way. For example, the United States demanded that the Hamas-led government unilaterally recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, even though Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have a viable state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or anywhere else. Other demands included an end of attacks on civilians in Israel while not demanding that Israel likewise end its attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip. They also demanded that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority accept all previously negotiated agreements, even as Israel continued to violate key components of the Wye River Agreement and other negotiated deals with the Palestinians.

While Hamas honored a unilateral cease-fire regarding suicide bombings in Israel, border clashes and rocket attacks into Israel continued. Israel, meanwhile, with the support of the Bush administration, engaged in devastating air strikes against crowded urban neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. Congress also went on record defending the Israeli assaults -- which were widely condemned in the international community as excessive and in violation of international humanitarian law -- as legitimate acts of self-defense.

A Siege, Not a Withdrawal

The myth perpetuated by both the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties was that Israel's 2005 dismantling of its illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of military units that supported them constituted effective freedom for the Palestinians of the territory. American political leaders from President George W. Bush to House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have repeatedly praised Israel for its belated compliance with a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal of these illegal settlements (despite Israel's ongoing violations of these same resolutions by maintaining and expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights).

In reality, however, the Gaza Strip has remained effectively under siege. Even prior to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the Israeli government not only severely restricted -- as is its right -- entry from the Gaza Strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, as well. Israel also refused to allow the Palestinians to open their airport or seaport. This not only led to periodic shortages of basic necessities imported through Egypt, but resulted in the widespread wasting of perishable exports -- such as fruits, vegetables and cut flowers -- vital to the territory's economy. Furthermore, Gaza residents were cut off from family members and compatriots in the West Bank and elsewhere in what many have referred to as the world's largest open-air prison.


In retaliation, Hamas and allied militias began launching rocket attacks into civilian areas of Israel. Israel responded by bombing, shelling and periodic incursions in civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, which, by the time of the 2006 cease-fire, had killed over 200 civilians, including scores of children. Bush administration officials, echoed by congressional leaders of both parties, justifiably condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas-allied units into civilian areas of Israel (which at that time had resulted in scores of injuries but only one death), but defended Israel's far more devastating attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. This created a reaction that strengthened Hamas' support in the territory even more.

The Gaza Strip's population consists primarily of refugees from Israel's ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine almost 60 years ago and their descendents, most of whom have had no gainful employment since Israel sealed the border from most day laborers in the late 1980s. Crowded into only 140 square miles and subjected to extreme violence and poverty, it is not surprising that many would become susceptible to extremist politics, such as those of the Islamist Hamas movement. Nor is it surprising that under such conditions, people with guns would turn on each other.

Undermining the Unity Government

When factional fighting between armed Fatah and Hamas groups broke out in early 2007, Saudi officials negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the two leading Palestinian political movements. U.S. officials, however, unsuccessfully encouraged Abbas to renounce the agreement and dismiss the entire government. Indeed, ever since the election of a Hamas parliamentary majority, the Bush administration began pressuring Fatah to stage a coup and abolish parliament.

The national unity government put key ministries in the hands of Fatah members and independent technocrats and removed some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders and, while falling well short of Western demands, Hamas did indicate an unprecedented willingness to engage with Israel, accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and negotiate a long-term cease-fire with Israel. For the first time, this could have allowed Israel and the United States the opportunity to bring into peace talks a national unity government representing virtually all the factions and parties active in Palestinian politics on the basis of the Arab League peace initiative for a two-state solution and U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. However, both the Israeli and American governments refused.

Instead, the Bush administration decided to escalate the conflict by ordering Israel to ship large quantities or weapons to armed Fatah groups to enable them to fight Hamas and stage a coup. Israeli military leaders initially resisted the idea, fearing that much of these arms would end up in the hands of Hamas, but -- as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put it -- "our government obeyed American orders, as usual.' That Fatah was being supplied with weapons from Israel while Hamas was fighting the Israelis led many Palestinians -- even those who don't share Hamas' extremist ideology -- to see Fatah as collaborators and Hamas as liberation fighters. This was a major factor leading Hamas to launch what it saw as a preventive war or a countercoup by overrunning the offices of the Fatah militias in June 2007 and, just as the Israelis feared, many of these newly supplied weapons have indeed ended up in the hands of Hamas militants. Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip ever since.

The United States also threw its support to Mohammed Dahlan, the notorious Fatah security chief in Gaza, who -- despite being labeled by American officials as "moderate" and "pragmatic" -- oversaw the detention, torture and execution of Hamas activists and others, leading to widespread popular outrage against Fatah and its supporters.

Alvaro de Soto, former U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, stated in his confidential final report leaked to the press a few weeks before the Hamas takeover that "the Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas" and "worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry." De Soto also recalled how in the midst of Egyptian efforts to arrange a cease-fire following a flare-up in factional fighting earlier this year, a U.S. official told him that "I like this violence . it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas."

Weakening Palestinian Moderates

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the moderates must be able to provide their population with what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories. However, Israeli policies -- backed by the Bush administration and Congress -- seem calculated to make this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas' electoral victory, how "Israel 's unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority, which was already severely crippled by . Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions."

Bush and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress have also thrown their support to the Israeli government's unilateral disengagement policy that, while withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, has expanded them in the occupied West Bank as part of an effort to illegally annex large swaths of Palestinian territory. In addition, neither Congress nor the Bush administration has pushed the Israelis to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which have been suspended for over six years, despite calls by Abbas and the international community that they resume. Given that Fatah's emphasis on negotiations has failed to stop Israel's occupation and colonization of large parts of the West Bank, it's not surprising that Hamas' claim that the U.S.-managed peace process is working against Palestinian interests has resonance, even among Palestinians who recognize that terrorism by Hamas' armed wing is both morally reprehensible and has hurt the nationalist cause.

Following Hamas' armed takeover of Gaza, the highly respected Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, writing in the June 15 issue of Yediot Ahronoth, noted that "The U.S. and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure." Despite claims by Israel and the United States that they wanted to strengthen Abbas, "in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street."

De Soto's report to the U.N. Secretary-General, in which he referred to Hamas' stance toward Israel as "abominable," also noted that "Israeli policies seemed perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants." Regarding the U.S.- instigated international sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, the former Peruvian diplomat also observed that "the steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect."

Some Israeli commentators saw this strategy as deliberate. Avnery noted, "Our government has worked for year to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal form the occupied territories and the settlements there." Similarly, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Center observed, "the fact is that Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for the Palestinian extremists" since "supplanting ... Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.' The problem, Avnery wrote at that time, is that "now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory."



Since then, the Israeli strategy has been to increase the blockade on the Gaza Strip, regardless of the disastrous humanitarian consequences, and more recently to launch devastating attacks that have killed hundreds of people, as many as one-quarter of whom have been civilians. The Bush administration and leaders of both parties in Congress have defended Israeli policies on the grounds that the extremist Hamas governs the territory.

Yet no one seems willing to acknowledge the role the United States had in making it possible for Hamas to come to power in Gaza in the first place.


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


Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

Colombia: Secret Documents Show US Aware of Army Killings in 1990s

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jan 12 (IPS) - Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA and former U.S. ambassadors were fully aware, as far back as 1990, that the military in Colombia -- the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt -- were committing extrajudicial killings as part of "death squad tactics."

They also knew that senior Colombian officers encouraged a "body count" mentality to demonstrate progress in the fight against left-wing guerrillas. In an undetermined number of cases, the bodies presented as casualties in the counterinsurgency war were actually civilians who had nothing to do with the country’s decades-old armed conflict.

Since at least 1990, U.S. diplomats were reporting a connection between the Colombian security forces and far-right drug-running paramilitary groups, according to the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).

In the meantime, the U.S. State Department continued to regularly certify Colombia’s human rights record and to heavily finance its "war on drugs."

The declassified documents were published Jan. 7 by the NSA, a non-governmental research and archival institution located at the George Washington University that collects, archives and publishes declassified U.S. government documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

NSA’s Colombia Project identifies and secures the release of documents from secret government archives on U.S. policy in Colombia regarding issues like security assistance, human rights, impunity and counternarcotics programmes.

"These records shed light on a policy -- recently examined in a still-undisclosed Colombian Army report -- that influenced the behaviour of Colombian military officers for years, leading to extrajudicial executions and collaboration with paramilitary drug traffickers," says the NSA report released last week.

The secret army report mentioned by the NSA led in late 2008 to the dismissal of 30 army officers and the resignation of Gen. Mario Montoya, the Colombian army chief who long "promoted the idea of using body counts to measure progress against the guerrillas," writes the author of the NSA report, Michael Evans.

In one of the declassified documents obtained by the NSA, then U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette complained in 1994 about the "body count mentalities" among Colombian army officers seeking to climb through the ranks.

"Field officers who cannot show track records of aggressive anti-guerrilla activity (wherein the majority of the military’s human rights abuses occur) disadvantage themselves at promotion time," said Frechette.

Evans, director of the NSA Colombia Project, states in his report that "the documents raise important questions about the historical and legal responsibilities the Army has to come clean about what appears to be a longstanding, institutional incentive to commit murder."

"But the manner in which the investigation was conducted -- in absolute secrecy and with little or no legal consequences for those implicated -- raises a number of important questions," says Evans, who asks "when, if ever, will the Colombian Army divulge the contents of its internal report?"

The question of extrajudicial killings by the army made the international headlines and drew the attention of the United Nations after a scandal broke out in the Colombian media in September 2008 over the bodies of young men reported by the armed forces as dead guerrillas or paramilitaries.

It turned out that the men had gone missing from their homes in slum neighbourhoods on the southside of Bogotá and that their corpses had turned up two or three days later in morgues hundreds of kilometres away.

Since then, scores of cases of "body count" killings by the army, also known as "false positives," have emerged.

Although the government expressed shock and indignation, evidence soon began to emerge of a pattern that dated back years.

As defence minister under current President Álvaro Uribe, Camilo Ospina, who is now Colombia’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), signed a 15-page secret ministerial directive in 2005 that provided for rewards for the capture or killing of leaders of illegal armed groups, for military information and war materiel, and for successful counterdrug actions.

According to the W Radio station, which reported on the secret directive in late October, it could have encouraged extrajudicial killings under a new system, which may include "a mafia of bounty-hunters allied with members of the military."

But in the view of Iván Cepeda, spokesman for the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), "this is not about an infiltration of organised crime in the armed forces, nor about people who have broken the law. As the NSA report shows, this is an institutional practice that has been followed for decades."

The Defence Ministry directive encouraged the phenomenon by creating a system of incentives that rewards "results" in the form of battlefield casualties, "discounting accepted methods and controls and the observance of human rights and international humanitarian law," he said.

Cepeda also maintained that the activities of far-right death squads and the army’s "body count" killings were connected, and that the military used the paramilitaries to show results.

"The paramilitaries delivered to the army the bodies of people who were supposed members of the guerrillas but who were actually people selectively killed by those (paramilitary) groups," he told IPS.

When the killings became more and more widespread, the armed forces themselves asked the paramilitaries to hide the remains, to keep the country’s homicide rate from soaring any further, paramilitaries who took part in a demobilisation process negotiated with the right-wing Uribe administration have confessed.

The declassified documents demonstrate "that the U.S. military as well as U.S. diplomats and governments have taken a complacent stance towards this kind of practice," said Cepeda.

The declassified records are in line with the results of "Colombia nunca más" (Colombia never again), a monumental effort to document human rights abuses carried out by 17 organisations since 1995.

"’Colombia nunca más’ has created a databank on 45,000 (human rights) violations, including around 25,000 extrajudicial executions and 10,000 forced disappearances, committed between 1966 and 1998," said Cepeda. Colombia’s two insurgent groups emerged in 1964 and the paramilitaries in 1982, although the latter launched a lethal offensive beginning in 1997.

Cepeda told IPS that in the next few months, MOVICE would begin to organise the families of victims of extrajudicial killings, which would culminate in a national meeting to discuss "what routes of documenting the truth and obtaining justice can be followed in an organised manner by the families of the victims of this practice."

The earliest of the declassified documents obtained by the NSA is a 1990 cable signed by then U.S. Ambassador Thomas McNamara, addressed to the State Department and copied to the Defence Department, the U.S. army Southern Command, and the U.S. embassies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

The cable, whose subject line reads "human rights in Colombia -- widespread allegations of abuses by the army," cites reports that an army major "personally directed the torture of 11 detainees and their subsequent execution…carried out by cutting of the limbs and heads of the still living victims with a chain saw."

Referring to the connection between army officers and the paramilitaries, the ambassador stated that many "officers continue to discount virtually all allegations of military abuses as part of a leftist inspired plot to discredit the military as an institution."

In addition, the cable mentions "strong evidence linking members of the army and police to a number of disappearances and murders which took place earlier this year in Trujillo, Valle de Cauca department."

McNamara also mentioned "an apparent June 7 incident of extra-judicial executions."

"The military reported to the press that, on that date, it killed 9 guerrillas in combat in El Ramal, Santander department. The investigation by Instruccion Criminal and the Procuraduria (legal authorities) strongly suggests, however, that the nine were executed by the army and then dressed in military fatigues. A military judge who arrived on the scene apparently realised that there were no bullet holes in the military uniforms to match the wounds in the victims’ bodies, and ordered the uniforms burned," said the ambassador.

As sources told the ambassador, "all of the victims were part of the same family, and one of them, said by the army to have been a guerrilla, was 87 years old." (END/2009)

In Washington, All Roads Lead to Tehran

By Daniel Luban

Januaru 10, 2009 -- WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (IPS) - As the war in Gaza approaches its third week, a chorus of influential voices in the U.S. media has cast the conflict as a proxy war in which the real enemy is not Hamas but Iran.

The result has been a growing tendency in the U.S. to view Gaza as simply one battleground in a larger war between Iran and the West, and to dismiss the stated concerns of the Palestinians as a mere smokescreen for Iranian influence.

But critics charge that this way of framing the conflict is both overly simplistic and agenda-driven. By overstating the importance of Iran's operational aid to Hamas, they claim, these opinion-makers aim to increase hostilities with Iran, to bolster an increasingly shaky Israeli rationale for war, and to curtail any inclination to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

For years, it has been a commonplace among neoconservatives that Iran is the real source of opposition to the U.S. and Israel throughout the Middle East, from Palestine to Lebanon to Iraq. During Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, prominent neoconservatives urged the West to focus "less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders in Syria and Iran", as William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard.

Similarly, neoconservatives have taken the current war with Hamas as a sign that the West needs to take a harder line with Iran. "It's all about Iran," Michael Ledeen, a prominent Iran hawk based at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, wrote in National Review Online on Dec. 30. "[The Israelis] are left to contend with the tentacles of the terrorist hydra, while the main body remains untouched. They may chop off a piece of Hamas or Hezbollah, but it will regenerate and grab them again."

However, the belief that Hamas is merely an Iranian proxy has spread beyond neoconservative circles to be voiced by opinion-makers closer to the political centre. Self-described realist Robert Kaplan wrote in the Atlantic on Monday that "Israel's attack on Gaza is, in effect, an attack on Iran's empire...Our own diplomacy with Iran now rests on whether or not Israel succeeds."

In the New York Times, influential neoliberal Thomas Friedman implied that Iran was to blame for the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, writing that Tehran can "stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will". In the Los Angeles Times, Israeli commentators Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren wrote an op-ed titled "In Gaza, the real enemy is Iran", which warned that if Hamas "manipulat[es] world opinion into the imposition of a premature ceasefire...[it] would mean another triumph for Iran".

And in the literature released by hawkish advocacy groups such as the Israel Project, Hamas is rarely mentioned without the adjective "Iran-backed".

It is widely accepted that Iran has in fact provided weaponry and other operational assistance to Hamas in recent years. However, there are few reliable estimates of the scope of this aid.

"I'm very sceptical whenever I see figures in the media," former State Department intelligence official Wayne White, now of the Middle East Institute, told IPS. "Even when I was in the intelligence community, exact details were often elusive."

Many feel that those blaming Iran for the Gaza crisis attach too much importance to Iran's operational aid to Hamas when they suggest that Hamas is nothing more than an Iranian "proxy".

White suggested that Iran's relationship with Hamas is "more symbiotic than dictatorial", and that its influence with Hamas is more limited than is portrayed in the media. "Iranian inspiration is being given far too much weight in the overall Israeli-Hamas equation. Hamas has every reason to make its own decisions, most of which are sufficiently militant to please the Iranians," he said.

Critics charge that framing the Gaza conflict as an U.S.-Iran proxy war is a tendentious move that is meant to advance several covert political goals.

The most obvious of these goals is to increase hostilities with Iran. Unsurprisingly, many of those espousing the "proxy war" argument, such as Ledeen, are advocates of regime change in Tehran, backed if necessary by military force.

But the proxy war argument has also been deployed to bolster the Israeli case for war in Gaza, as Israel's war aims have become increasingly slippery and elusive over the past two weeks.

Israeli officials have at times suggested that the war is intended to halt all rocket fire from Gaza, or to overthrow Hamas rule in Gaza, but both of these goals are viewed by many as unrealistic and the Israeli government has subsequently backed off of them.

Casting the military campaign as a struggle against Iranian power provides a broader rationale for war, and has been used as a way to rally support from U.S. policymakers who are sceptical of the campaign's wisdom. On this analysis, Israel is doing the U.S.'s dirty work by confronting Iranian power.

In this vein, the Wall Street Journal editorialised on Monday that the war would help President-elect Barack Obama's diplomatic efforts with Iran, since "the mullahs are going to be more interested in diplomacy if their military proxies have been defeated".

And hawkish liberal Jim Hoagland suggested in the Washington Post that Israel's attack was helping to hold off the possibility of a nuclear Iran, writing that "only Israel poses any threat of military action to halt Iran's drive to enrich enough uranium to build a nuclear bomb".

But one important consequence of the proxy war argument, critics say, has more to do with Palestine than with Iran. By portraying Hamas as nothing more than a projection of Iranian power, commentators implicitly reject any notion that the group may derive its influence from specifically Palestinian concerns.

By doing so, the critics argue, these commentators seek to assuage Israeli consciences by portraying Hamas as the product of a nebulous Islamist menace rather than of local grievances about occupation, refugees, or settlements.

But more than that, they seek to remove any impetus to compromise on such issues. If Iranian power is the real cause of Israel's Palestinian problem, then a local settlement with the Palestinians would do little to alleviate Israel's insecurity.

In response, a growing number of analysts have spoken out against this line of thinking.

"Yes, the conflict has been exploited on many sides and certainly by Iran and other hardliners in the region," wrote former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation on Monday. "[B]ut if the unaddressed Palestinian grievance did not exist then it would not be there to exploit."

White concurred in his assessment of the situation.

"The [proxy war] view is a very unsophisticated one," he told IPS. "This is at bottom a struggle between Hamas, along with many other Palestinians, and the Israelis."

The Cost Of War: $136 Billion In 2009

[AP) Defense Secretary Robert Gates says military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost almost $136 billion for the 2009 budget year that began Oct. 1 if they continue at their current pace.

Speaking for neither his current boss, President George W. Bush - nor his future one, President-elect Barack Obama - Gates told top lawmakers in a New Year's Eve letter that the Pentagon would need nearly $70 billion more to supplement the $66 billion approved last year.

"This estimate is my personal assessment and does not reflect the position of the Bush administration or the incoming Obama administration," Gates said.

The estimate would cover Pentagon operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other elements of the global war on terror. An official request for war funding is coming after a review by the Obama administration, Gates said.

In the letter, sent to the chairmen of the House and Senate panels overseeing the war, Gates said that Congress should expect that the Obama administration "will conduct a fresh review of these matters and provide an updated and more authoritative proposal early next year."

Gates also said the estimate doesn't account for a proposed increase in the tempo of operations in Afghanistan.

This estimate is my personal assessment and does not reflect the position of the Bush administration or the incoming Obama administration.

Defense Secretary Robert GatesCongress provided about $188 billion for the global war on terror in the 2008, according to the Congressional Research Service, as a surge in Iraq operations helped bring greater stability to the troubled nation. Obama has promised to bring down war costs as he works to remove most U.S. combat troops.

All told, CRS says, Congress has approved $864 billion for the overseas wars and other programs related to the battle against terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. Such funding includes military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veterans' health care.


© MMIX The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Neoconservatism dies in Gaza

The recent Israeli offensive has put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's Middle East fantasy.

By Juan Cole - Professor of Middle East studies.

Jan. 08, 2009 |

The Gaza War of 2009 is a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy. For over a decade, the leading figures in this school of thought saw the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a parliamentary regime in Iraq as the magic solution to all the problems in the Middle East. They envisioned, in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, the moderation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the overthrow of the Baath Party in Syria and the Khomeinist regime in Iran, the deepening of the alliance with Turkey, the marginalization of Saudi Arabia, a new era of cheap petroleum, and a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms favorable to Israel. After eight years in which they strode the globe like colossi, they have left behind a devastated moonscape reminiscent of some post-apocalyptic B movie. As their chief enabler prepares to exit the White House, the only nation they have strengthened is Iran; the only alliance they have deepened is that between Iran and two militant Islamist entities to Israel's north and south, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The neoconservatives first laid out their manifesto in a 1996 paper, "A Clean Break," written for an obscure think tank in Jerusalem and intended for the eyes of far right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, who had just been elected prime minister. They advised Israel to renounce the Oslo peace process and reject the principle of trading land for peace, instead dealing with the Palestinians with an iron fist. They urged Israel to uphold the right of hot pursuit of Palestinian guerrillas and to find alternatives to Yasser Arafat's Fatah for the Palestinian leadership. They called forth Israeli airstrikes on targets in Syria and rejection of negotiations with Damascus. They foresaw strengthened ties between Israel and its two regional friends, Turkey and Jordan.

They advocated "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," in part as a way of "rolling back" Syria. In place of the secular, republican tyrant, they fantasized about the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, and thought that a Sunni king might help moderate the Shiite Hezbollah in south Lebanon. (Yes.) They barely mentioned Iran, though it appears that their program of expelling Syria from Lebanon and weakening its regime was in part aimed at depriving Iran of its main Arab ally. In a 1999 book called "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein," David Wurmser argued that it was false to fear that installing the Iraqi Shiites in power in Baghdad would strengthen Iran regionally.

The signatories to this fantasy of using brute military power to reshape all of West Asia included some figures who would go on to fill key positions in the Bush administration. Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, became chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a civilian oversight body for the Pentagon. Douglas J. Feith became the undersecretary of defense for planning. David Wurmser first served in Feith's propaganda shop, the Office of Special Plans, which manufactured the case for an American war on Iraq, and then went on to serve with "Scooter" Libby in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The neoconservatives used their well-funded think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP, an organ of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Hudson Institute, among others, to promote this agenda of the conquest of Iraq as a solution of all ills.

They had cheerleaders and allies in major newspapers and political journals. Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, took up the neoconservative mantra on Sept. 5, 2002, writing that "The road to Jerusalem more likely leads through Baghdad than the reverse. Once the Palestinians see that the United States will no longer tolerate their hero Saddam Hussein, depressed though they may be, they may also come finally to grasp that Israel is here to stay and that accommodating to this reality is the one thing that can bring them the generous peace they require." (Peretz is a perennial embarrassment to his stable of often excellent journalists in that he occasionally hijacks the magazine for such pronouncements.)

Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post on Feb. 1, 2002, that "Iran is a deadly threat," insofar as it was trying "to establish a terrorist client state by arming and infiltrating Yasser Arafat's Palestine." How would he have us roll it back? "Overthrowing neighboring radical regimes shows the fragility of dictatorship, challenges the mullahs' mandate from heaven and thus encourages disaffected Iranians to rise." What did he mean by neighboring regimes? "First, Afghanistan to the east. Next, Iraq to the west." Leading neoconservative columnist William Kristol delivered himself of a daisy chain of false predictions, inaccurate pronouncements, and political wet dreams about Iraq and the Middle East, as David Corn of the Nation itemizes here. "Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world," Kristol said in 2002.

The brutal Israeli war on the population of Gaza is the nail in the coffin of the neoconservative doctrine. Their policies have hardly strengthened ties between Turkey, Israel and the United States, as they had argued. Turkey had a special place in the thinking of figures such as Perle, who lauded it as a secular example for the Muslim world and a close ally of Israel. But in 2002 the Islamically tinged conservative Justice and Development Party (Turkish acronym AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept to power and has ruled Turkey ever since. In 2003, the AKP dealt a cruel blow to the hopes of Perle and his colleague Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz when its members of parliament voted against allowing the U.S. military to invade Iraq through Turkish territory. Erdogan more recently has been a profound disappointment to the Israeli right because of his willingness to talk with Hamas leaders. Hundreds of thousands of Turks, many of them AKP supporters, have demonstrated in Istanbul against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.



Erdogan drew anguished Israeli protests when he told an election rally in Ankara that Israel was "perpetrating inhuman actions which would bring it to self-destruction. Allah will sooner or later punish those who transgress the rights of innocents." Turkey has received Hamas leader Khalid Mashal and has worked for an early cease-fire in the current conflict, putting the blame for it on Israel. The right-wing Jerusalem Post observed ominously, "Turkey has just taken its seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council and Ankara pledges to be Hamas's conduit to the United Nations," and urged Israel to recall its ambassador from Ankara.

Massive demonstrations and protests in Jordan calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador over the Israeli military's disregard for civilian life have caused Prime Minister Nader Dahabi to tell the parliament, "Jordan will look into all options, including reconsidering relations with Israel." So much for Feith, Perle and Wurmser's plan to solidify ties between Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

But at least the new Iraqi government will support Israel rather than Hamas now that Saddam Hussein is gone, right? Think again. The Islamic Da'wa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called last week for all Muslim countries to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and to cease all public and behind-the scenes contacts with it. Large demonstrations have been staged against Israel in Mosul, Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala. The spiritual leader of many of the world's Shiites condemned Israeli aggression in Gaza and said that "mere verbal expressions of condemnation and disapproval" were not enough, calling instead for "practical steps" to break the Israeli blockade and stop the attack. For a fatwa of the chief Shiite authority in Iraq to demand practical steps against Israel is a little noticed but ominous development for the Israelis that could help politicize Shiites even further on this issue.

Wurmser's conviction that Iranian Shiite influence would not spread if the Sunni bulwark were demolished in Mesopotamia has proved as wrongheaded as all the other neoconservative predictions. The 2005 parliamentary elections were won by the most hard-line, pro-Tehran Shiite fundamentalist parties, who have ruled Iraq ever since. Iran has warm relations with the ruling Islamic Da'wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose party was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982.

Iran's influence with Hezbollah in south Lebanon has grown from strength to strength, and was enhanced after Israel's disastrous 2006 war on that country when it sent extensive reconstruction aid. Hezbollah has been able to rearm, and has joined a national unity government that recognizes its militia as a sort of national guard for the south of Lebanon. It gained new allies in Iraq. It had been formed in part by the Islamic Da'wa Party of Iraq, which naturally supports it, as does the large and influential Sadr Movement in Iraqi Shiism. Hezbollah, more popular than ever, was able to get out massive crowds in Beirut to protest Israel's assault on Gaza. And Gaza itself is now viewed by the Israeli establishment as an Iranian beachhead on the Mediterranean, the sort of development that the neoconservatives confidently predicted their policies would forestall.

Krauthammer's conviction that the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq would weaken the Iranian regime was wrong because it exalted ideology over power politics. Baathist Iraq and Sunni fundamentalist Afghanistan had walled Iran in. Destroying them no more weakened Iran than blowing up the Hoover Dam would tame the Colorado River. From an Iranian point of view, an elected Shiite parliament in Iraq morally guided by Ayatollah Sistani does not represent a significant departure from their own form of government, except that Iran is blessed with much greater stability, security and prosperity than its Mesopotamian sibling. Likewise, Syria's regime has been undisturbed by the changes in Iraq, and, recognizing at last that it would have to deal with Bashar al-Asad, the government of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had initiated indirect negotiations with Damascus rather than, as the neoconservatives had insisted, bombarding it.

The neoconservatives made almost as big an error in working to destroy the peace process of the 1990s as they did in fostering a war on Iraq. A two-state solution was not far from being concluded in 2000, but negotiations were abruptly discontinued by the government of Ariel Sharon in spring of 2001 with the encouragement of the Bush administration. (It is not true that the Palestinian side had ceased negotiating, or "walked away," from the Clinton plan, nor is it true that the Israelis had as yet formalized a specific offer in writing.) In the past eight years, Israel has greatly expanded its settlements in the West Bank and around Jerusalem, fencing the Palestinians in with checkpoints, superhighways that cut villages off from one another, and a wall that has stolen from them key agricultural land. Ariel Sharon's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza made no provisions for what would happen next, and in any case Israel continued to control Gaza's borders and denied it a harbor, an airport and, more recently, enough food to eat.

As a result of the deliberate destruction of the peace process by the Israeli right and by Hamas, a two-state solution seems increasingly unlikely. This tragic impasse, one phase of which is now playing out with sanguinary relentlessness, was avoidable but for the baneful influence of the neoconservatives and their right-wing allies in the U.S. and Israel.

The neoconservatives had prided themselves on their macho swagger, their rejection of namby-pamby Clintonian multilateralism, and on their bold vision for reshaping the Middle East so that the Israeli and American right would not have to deal with existing reality. In the cold light of day, they look merely petulant and arrogant. The ancient Greek poet Bion said that boys cast stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest. The neoconservatives were the boys, and the people of Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon have been their frogs. The biggest danger facing the United States is that there will be no true "Clean Break" -- that the neoconservatives will somehow find a way to survive the Bush administration, and continue to influence American foreign policy.

Obama’s Bay of Pigs

By Michael Carmichael

January 05, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- The volcano is erupting, and the lava pouring forth is a bold and deliberate challenge metaphorically slapping the face of President-Elect Barack Obama. The architect of Obama’s challenge is, of course, Lame Duck President George W. Bush.

During the US presidential campaign, Vice-President-Elect Joseph Biden predicted that Obama would be tested. “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama . . . Gird your loins,” Biden said while addressing a fundraiser in Seattle. Today, Biden seems like the proverbial prophets of the Old Testament uttering their dire predictions of imminent catastrophe for the people of Israel precipitated by the troubling policies of their monarchs. Even Biden did not conceive that Obama’s challenge would be the Parthian shot of a disgraced lame duck that could be morphing into Obama’s Bay of Pigs.

History appears to be repeating itself. In 1960 during the presidential campaign, JFK received top secret briefings from the CIA and Secret Service that informed him about US plans to back a counter-attack against Fidel Castro’s forces in Cuba manned by anti-Castro Cuban exiles marshaled into guerilla forces based in Florida and Guatemala. The plan for the attack was the product of the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, and Eisenhower’s designated White House liaison for the CIA, then Vice-President Richard Nixon. The Top Secret briefings presented the anti-Castro invasion to JFK as a fait accompli, and as a candidate for the presidency, he had no power to veto it.

After his inauguration, JFK scaled back US military involvement and the operation floundered on the Cuban beach engraved into the collective consciousness of that era as a massive military debacle known as The Bay of Pigs. JFK accepted the blame for the fiasco, and he ordered the retirement of Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell who bore responsibility for the failure. In the aftermath, JFK ordered the reorientation of the CIA that shifted from covert operations that produced searing blowback under Dulles to policing the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons under John McCone, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

While it might seem uncanny, a similar scenario is now unfolding in Gaza. A counter-terrorist operation involving US military materiel and foreign troops is taking place before the inauguration of the next president, and there are some striking similarities between the Bay of Pigs and the Gaza War for the origins of both stem from the secret chambers of the previous administration.

Last Saturday, the Israeli Air Force launched its attack on Hamas via its aptly named Operation Cast Lead, a phrase from a popular children’s song during Chanukah to, “cast lead dreidels.” The dreidel is a four-sided spinning top, the favorite child’s toy during Chanukah. Sixty Israeli military aircraft including both F-16s and Apache helicopters are not dropping lead dreidels on the inhabitants of Gaza -- they are dropping high-tech 250-pound bombs provided by the “foreign aid” program of the Bush government courtesy of the United States of America.

The giant US arms manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin, produces the F-16 “Fighting Falcon” at costs of $70 million per fighter, while McDonnell-Douglas produces the Apache helicopters at an average unit cost of a paltry $14 million per unit. Boeing produces the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) at a cost of $70-90,000 each. In the first phase of Operation Cast Lead, fifty Israeli Air Force (IAF) F-16s dropped one hundred US-built bombs on 50 targets in Gaza. It should be noted that Hamas does not have an air force, nor supersonic bombers, nor attack helicopters, nor high-tech bombs so the current conflict has no pretensions of being a just war. It is naked aggression – nothing more, nothing less.

In contrast to the high-tech US-manufactured arsenal generously provided to Israel courtesy of American taxpayers, Hamas uses outdated and ineffective Katyusha and Qassam missiles. The Russians developed the Katyusha in 1941 as an un-guided artillery shell sometimes described as a multiple rocket launcher. The Qassam is a crude and inexpensive, home-made unguided rocket or ‘missile’ from 3-7 feet in length bearing a small explosive charge that works like a fourth of July rocket from a Chinese fireworks factory.

The official rationale for the 2008 Gaza War suggests that the massive military operation is a response to the end of the agreement for a six-month truce between Israel and Hamas that officially concluded on December 19th. Both sides claim violations of the truce. The government of Israel argues that a palpable escalation of rocket fire from Gaza killed one Israeli civilian and triggered the current crisis.

In contrast to the official Israeli rationale, Palestinians, Israeli journalists, Israeli writers and Israeli peace activists trace the breakdown of the truce to an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) military operation that raided a tunnel between Gaza and Egypt and led to the deaths of six Palestinians as the tipping point that precipitated the subsequent escalation of rocket fire from Gaza. On the fifth of November the morning news reported that Barack Obama had been elected to replace George Bush, and on that very day the IDF raided the tunnel killing six Palestinians in the process. In the aftermath of the tunnel raid, Hamas escalated rocket fire ultimately resulting in the death of one Israeli prior to the launch of Operation Cast Lead.

Last June, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt brokered the six-month truce agreement that began on June 18th and expired on the 19th of December. Last week, Prime Minister Tzipi Livni informed Hosni Mubarak that Israel would strike Hamas in retaliation to the rocket fire. Reports in Israel confirm that military planning for the current operation began six months ago, at the beginning of the truce. Less than two months into the truce, the New York Times reported the US would speed up delivery of high-tech bombs to Israel. On the first day of the Israeli assault more than 200 Palestinians died making it the bloodiest day of the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six Day War of 1967.

In televised statements from Bush’s official spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, it is clear that the US is supporting the Israeli attack on Gaza. In a tremulous voice, Mr. Johndroe addressed a hastily assembled press conference in Crawford, Texas. In brief comments punctuated by “Ummms” and “Ahhhs,” Johndroe justified the conflict by the refusal of Hamas to accept the right of Israel to exist.

From his podium in Crawford, Johndroe intoned, “Hamas has a choice to make. Right now they are choosing to be a terrorist organization that fires rockets into Israel. That is not going to lead to a ceasefire.”

From Johndroe’s statements, the position of the US is sharp and clear. The people of Gaza must not defend themselves against the IAF bombardment or any future IDF ground assault. Through Johndroe’s statements, Bush has issued an ultimatum to the Palestinian people to restrain them from their natural compulsion to defend themselves against armed aggression. Bush’s policy is now perfectly clear, Palestinians will suffer even more severe punishment than Operation Cast Lead via the IDF – the forceful re-occupation of Gaza as a last gasp of Bush’s neoconservative hubris.

Johndroe revealed that President Bush was constantly monitoring the situation while conferring with Vice-President Cheney. During the Lebanon War of 2006, Vice President Cheney maintained close communications with the IDF in their assault that resulted in an embarrassing outcome for Israel for they did not achieve their principal objective of destroying Hizbullah, the armed Pro-Palestinian political faction in Lebanon. In the government of Lebanon, Hizbullah’s political strength is growing in both the parliament and the cabinet.

It now seems likely that the Gaza War will be counterproductive. Hamas will emerge more popular than before the US-backed Israeli attack. Five months after the failure of The Bay of Pigs, Che Guevara wrote a letter to JFK thanking him for the attack and stating that it strengthened the popularity of the revolution in Cuba.

Demonstrating the decline of US influence that has fallen off a cliff during the Bush presidency, the rest of the world is condemning the US-backed Israeli operation. Public protests against the Israeli attack began on Saturday morning when 1,000 Israeli protesters challenged the bombing of Gaza in a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. Today, a wave of public protest is sweeping across the globe from Turkey to Pakistan in the Middle East to leading cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas – people are convulsed in a cascade of criticism aimed at the disproportionate attack. In several major cities, hundreds of angry protestors are surrounding Israeli embassies to demand an immediate cessation of hostilities. This Saturday, there will be a major demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square.

However, statements from Israeli officials have made it clear that the confrontation will not end soon. Speculation is mounting about an Israeli ground assault to re-occupy Gaza and reverse the bold policy of Ariel Sharon who ordered the IDF withdrawal in 2005. This tactic is shaped by anticipation of a new foreign policy that will be unveiled by President-Elect Obama after he takes the oath of office in January.

In February, Israel will hold its elections. The ranking contenders are: Tzipi Livni, the current Foreign Minister; Ehud Barak, the current Minister of Defense, and Binyamin Netanyahu, the head of the right-wing party, Likud. All three support Operation Cast Lead. The outcome of the conflict may prefigure the outcome of the election.

During this phase of the conflict, President-Elect Obama, Vice-President-Elect Biden and Secretary of State Designate Hillary Clinton are maintaining a policy of non-intervention stating through spokespersons that there can be only one president at a time and that Obama will assume the presidency on the 20th of January. At the same time, Obama is receiving a stream of intelligence briefings on the crisis that has transformed his sojourn in Hawaii into a working holiday if ever there were one. During this period, Obama will be in routine contact with Jim Jones, his National Security Advisor.

Of all the problems facing President-Elect Obama, the Arab-Israeli conflict is the proverbial Gordion Knot. In order to move beyond the neoconservative era of Bush and Cheney, the first task facing the Obama administration is not merely the US withdrawal from Iraq, but the pacification of the Middle East. Unless there is a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama will face the untenable prospect of continuing the failed foreign policy of Bush.

After Obama announced the appointments of his national security team, a seismic surge of diplomacy has been the source of tremors presaging an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the announcement of her appointment, Hillary Clinton held a lengthy telephone conversation with outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Shortly after their teleconference Olmert called for stronger US leadership from the next president in guiding Israel and the Palestinians toward peace. In a second interview Olmert criticized the systematic aggression of Israeli settlers on the West Bank that he characterized as a “pogrom” where Palestinian lands have been seized and occupied over the past forty years.

Obama’s key advisors have designed a diplomatic course that will relegate the neoconservatives to the dustbin of history. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft believe that Obama must resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict promptly in order to project a viable foreign policy. Obama’s designated National Security Advisor, Jim Jones proposed a NATO peacekeeping force to occupy the West Bank – a policy that would preclude any further assaults like Operation Cast Lead. Current UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown criticized the Israeli settlements on the West Bank as a blockade to peace. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair who is now the Middle Eastern Envoy for the European Union told a reporter that a secret deal has been struck between the Arabs and Israelis. The new American pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby, J Street criticized the growing violence of the Israeli settlers. Now, J Street is now calling for the immediate cessation of Operation Cast Lead and the launch of peace negotiations.

Against the backdrop of a new American administration preparing to assume power and make changes, Lame Duck President George W. Bush authorized the Israeli assault on Gaza by pledging US support for the attack. It should never be forgotten that Bush is a dedicated Christian Zionist who broke into tears when he was fawningly eulogized in the Knesset during his last visit to Israel in May.

Like the portrait of Dorian Gray that morphed into increasingly hideous configurations while its subject descended into deeper levels of vice, immorality and personal corruption, Bush’s broken presidency is morphing into a crescendo of violence and pathos in a childish fit of pique designed to destroy Obama’s presidency before it begins – in effect foisting a catastrophe upon the incoming president before he has a chance to take the oath of office.

This macabre scenario vividly recalls the Bay of Pigs, the ill-conceived assault on Castro’s Cuba planned in secret by Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, and then-Vice President Richard Nixon in the summer of 1960. JFK permitted the tragedy to unfold, and he took the blame for the fiasco that was the most searing foreign policy scandal of his short term in office.

Today, Obama is facing the same gambit on the chessboard as JFK – a disastrous last gasp of neoconservatism threatens to scuttle his presidency before it begins. This is the first major test of Obama predicted by Biden. Failure to respond appropriately to this challenge will plunge the Middle East into a maelstrom that could very well consume Obama’s presidency in a Cold War over energy with American prestige on the decline.

In ancient Persia, the Parthians produced one of the most devastating cavalry techniques in ancient warfare. While retreating from the battlefield, Parthian archers would turn in their saddles to fire a volley of arrows at their pursuers. While Bush is being democratically forced from power, he is firing a volley of military crises at Obama, and his fingerprints are all over the current crop of corpses in Gaza.

Obama is not JFK, and Gaza is not Cuba. With American prestige on the decline and the global economic meltdown, Obama is facing a distinctly different but equally challenging nightmare as JFK did in 1961 in the midst of recession and the macabre machinations of the Cold War.

Biden was right. Obama is facing a brazen challenge that will test his mettle for the office he will soon hold. Let us hope that history will not repeat itself marring a presidency long-anticipated as the vanguard of a new era of global progress.

SOURCES

Biden to Supporters: "Gird Your Loins", For the Next President "It's Like Cleaning Augean Stables"
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/10/biden-to-suppor.html

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?hp


IDF Uncovers Tunnel Intended for Terror Attack in the Gaza Strip
http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/News/the_Front/08/11/0501.htm

The 2008 Gaza War Update
http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/

Gaza humanitarian plight 'disastrous,' U.N. official says
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/28/gaza.humanitarian/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

US veto blocks UN anti-Israel resolution
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=79727§ionid=351020202

Israel strike may shift Obama plan
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16889.html

What's Next on Gaza/Israel and Why Americans Should Care
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-levy/what-next-on-gazaisrael-a_b_153743.html

Analysis: Israel trying to ensure that Hamas can't become another Hizbullah
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1230456504736

Air strikes on Gaza continue as death toll rises
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/28/gaza.israel.strikes/index.html

US Blames Hamas for Israel's Gaza Bloodbath
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/news.php?id=a4563212a6545b73ce00e91977138426&mode=details#a4563212a6545b73ce00e91977138426

Robert Fisk’s World: How can anyone believe there is 'progress' in the Middle East?
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-how-can-anyone-believe-there-is-progress-in-the-middle-east-1212434.html

Israeli far right gains ground as Gaza rockets fuel tension
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/27/israel-nationalism-beiteinu-likud-gaza

Scores dead in Israeli raid on Gaza
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2008/12/200812279451509662.html

Column One: Netanyahu's grand coalition
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728164511&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Catastrophe for Gaza
An Israeli blockade curtails food, fuel, medicine and travel.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-sarraj14-2008dec14,0,2658218.story

All conflicts can be resolved, says Nobel Peace laureate Ahtisaari
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i9mCfugpuu5q5mMbaBAVVGzBhmpg

Gazans Resort To Eating Grass And Taking Painkillers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/14/gazans-turn-to-painkiller_n_150862.html

Blair says that Palestinians and Israelis Reached a Secret Agreement
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daoud-kuttab/blair-says-that-palestini_b_148639.html

Israel deports American academic
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/15/middleeast-israelandthepalestinians

Palestinian PM Fayyad says West Bank settlement must end for peace
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/15/fayyad-west-bank-israel

Israeli settlements are blockage to Middle East peace, says Gordon Brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/15/gordonbrown-middleeast

J Street / Tell Hoenlein to condemn violent Jewish settler extremism
http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/2747/t/3251/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=505&hebron-email

Ed Asner, The Shminitsim
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-asner/shminisitim_b_150043.html

UN adopts Middle East resolution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7786602.stm

Palestinian President: Will Call General Elections 'Very Soon'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/16/palestinian-president-wil_n_151475.html

UN out of touch with reality
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/08/12/18/10268055.html

Poll: Most Israelis oppose Arab peace plan
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728221188&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Livni and Netanyahu vow to oust Hamas after Gaza rocket strikes
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/livni-and-netanyahu-vow-to-oust-hamas-after-gaza-rocket-strikes-1207398.html

Hamas agrees 24-hour Gaza truce, threatens suicide attack
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jhAET7wvkXGSTXy4YW--3Z3MzVVA

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Michael Carmichael is a senior political consultant, historian, author and broadcaster. Carmichael worked professionally in several US presidential campaigns: RFK; Gene McCarthy; Hubert Humphrey; George McGovern; Lloyd Bentsen; Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich. In 2008, he supported Barack Obama. From 1985, Carmichael was based in Oxford, England where he conducted academic research, held seminars and was invited to address international conferences in Modena, Malta, Lugano, Lucerne, Milan, Sardinia, London, Istanbul, Palermo and Kuala Lumpur. In 2003, Carmichael founded Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom and the USA. In 1998, Carmichael appeared as an academic expert on the British documentary series, Sacred Weeds. Carmichael has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC's Today, Hardtalk, PM, as well as numerous appearances on ITN, NPR and many other European broadcasts examining politics and culture. Carmichael’s political commentary has appeared on many websites including: The Huffington Post, Global Research; International Clearing House; Counterpunch and the Baltimore Chronicle. Carmichael can be reached through his website: www.planetarymovement.org - mc@planetarymovement.org

Gaza Obama is losing a battle he doesn't know he's in

The president-elect's silence on the Gaza crisis is undermining his reputation in the Middle East

Barack Obama's chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don't wait for Washington inaugurations.

Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.

But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama's detachment - and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush's strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush's bias or simply does not care.

The Al-Jazeera satellite television station recently broadcast footage of Obama on holiday in Hawaii, wearing shorts and playing golf, juxtaposed with scenes of bloodshed and mayhem in Gaza. Its report criticising "the deafening silence from the Obama team" suggested Obama is losing a battle of perceptions among Muslims that he may not realise has even begun.

"People recall his campaign slogan of change and hoped that it would apply to the Palestinian situation," Jordanian analyst Labib Kamhawi told Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune. "So they look at his silence as a negative sign. They think he is condoning what happened in Gaza because he's not expressing any opinion."

Regional critics claim Obama is happy to break his pre-inauguration "no comment" rule on international issues when it suits him. They note his swift condemnation of November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Obama has also made frequent policy statements on mitigating the impact of the global credit crunch.

Obama's absence from the fray is also allowing hostile voices to exploit the vacuum. "It would appear that the president-elect has no intention of getting involved in the Gaza crisis," Iran's Resalat newspaper commented sourly. "His stances and viewpoints suggest he will follow the path taken by previous American presidents... Obama, too, will pursue policies that support the Zionist aggressions."

Whether Obama, when he does eventually engage, can successfully elucidate an Israel-Palestine policy that is substantively different from that of Bush-Cheney is wholly uncertain at present.

To maintain the hardline US posture of placing the blame for all current troubles squarely on Hamas, to the extent of repeatedly blocking limited UN security council ceasefire moves, would be to end all realistic hopes of winning back Arab opinion - and could have negative, knock-on consequences for US interests in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf.

Yet if Obama were to take a tougher (some would say more balanced) line with Israel, for example by demanding a permanent end to its blockade of Gaza, or by opening a path to talks with Hamas, he risks provoking a rightwing backlash in Israel, giving encouragement to Israel's enemies, and losing support at home for little political advantage.

A recent Pew Research Centre survey, for example, showed how different are US perspectives to those of Europe and the Middle East. Americans placed "finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict" at the bottom of a 12-issue list of foreign policy concerns, the poll found. And foreign policy is in any case of scant consequence to a large majority of US voters primarily worried about the economy, jobs and savings.

On the campaign trail, Obama (like Clinton) was broadly supportive of Israel and specifically condemnatory of Hamas. But at the same time, he held out the prospect of radical change in western relations with Muslims everywhere, promising to make a definitive policy speech in a "major Islamic forum" within 100 days of taking office.

"I will make clear that we are not at war with Islam, that we will stand with those who are willing to stand up for their future, and that we need their effort to defeat the prophets of hate and violence," he said.

As the Gaza casualty headcount goes up and Obama keeps his head down, those sentiments are beginning to sound a little hollow. The danger is that when he finally peers over the parapet on January 21, the battle of perceptions may already be half-lost.

The American Puppet State

By Paul Craig Roberts

January 05, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- - President George W. Bush was in his stand-up comedian role when he declared that he wanted to be remembered as a fighter for human rights.

Seldom has a fighter for human rights amassed Bush’s death toll. According to Information Clearing House, Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,297,997 dead Iraqis. Millions more have been wounded, and millions are displaced. Bush’s legions have taken out weddings, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, and mosques.

And that’s before we come to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan “we don’t do body counts” declared a commander of Bush’s imperial legions. But the thousands of dead civilians and school children have rallied Afghans to the Taliban, whose lightly armed fighters have retaken most of the country from the Unipower.

The Taliban doesn’t have an air force, or cluster bombs, or drones, or “smart missiles,” or tanks, or satellite capability. The Taliban has Afghan resistance to occupation.

Bush was fighting for human rights in 2006 when he prevented for one month the civilized world from stopping Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and civilian neighborhoods. Israel had intended to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon in order to steal that part of the country for its water resources. When the vaunted Israeli Army was defeated and put to rout by a few lightly armed Hezbollah guerrillas, Israeli rage took the Israeli defeat out on Lebanon’s civilian population--from the air, of course. The murder of Lebanon’s civilian population was enabled by the American weapons with which Israel is flooded.

Now Israel is bombing civilians in Israel’s Gaza Ghetto. Nothing has been spared. Not the hospitals, the university, or the children. Again, President Bush, to America’s everlasting shame, is blocking the civilized world’s attempt to force a halt to the Israeli aggression against the civilian population in Gaza.

If only Bush were merely a stand-up comedian. In truth, he is a puppet. A puppet of Zionist Israel.

No one any longer listens to Bush’s radio addresses. Three-fourths of the American people cannot wait until the moron’s last Oval Office days are over. But his January 2 speech proves, yet again, that the president of the United States is Israel’s puppet. Listen to the “leader of the free world”:

Bush: “This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas--a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel’s destruction. Eighteen months ago Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a coup, and since then has imported thousands of guns and rockets and mortars.”

Fact: Neither Iran nor Syria calls for Israel’s destruction. Reporting from Jerusalem three years ago, Chris McGreal (The Guardian, 1-12-06) noted that “Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto.” On June 22, 2006, McGreal reported from Jerusalem that “Hamas has made a major political climbdown by agreeing to sections of a document that recognize Israel’s right to exist.” Hamas won the Palestinian election that Bush and the Israeli government demanded be held. The democratic result was unacceptable to Bush’s Israeli masters. Hamas was turned out of the West Bank Ghetto and a puppet government installed. However, Israel had withdrawn from Gaza in September 2005 in order to keep the occupied territories in the West Bank, and was unable to dispose of Hamas in Gaza. Israel has decided to dispose of Hamas by violence against the Palestinians in Gaza. George Bush supports this assault on democratic elections, as does the US Congress (except Dennis Kucinich), and the US print and TV media].

Bush’s January 2, 2009, radio address is one grand lie that would win the World’s Biggest Liar contest in Cumbria. Israel is turning Gaza into Auschwitz, and the idiot puppet in the White House is blaming the Gazans.

Listen to the blatant lies of the puppet president who wants to be remembered for his defense of human rights:

“Since Hamas's violent takeover in the summer of 2007, living conditions have worsened for Palestinians in Gaza. By spending its resources on rocket launchers instead of roads and schools, Hamas has demonstrated that it has no intention of serving the Palestinian people [Hamas is the only organization that hasn’t sold out ]. America has helped by providing tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, and this week we contributed an additional $85 million through the United Nations. We have consistently called on all in the region to ensure that assistance reaches those in need [the last humanitarian ship was rammed by Israeli gunboats and turned away]. And as I told President Mubarak, America appreciates the role Egypt has played in facilitating the delivery of relief supplies in recent days In addition to reducing humanitarian suffering, all nations must work toward a lasting end to the violence in the Holy Land, and a return to the path of peace. The United States is leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful ceasefire that is fully respected [the US is blocking a cease fire, as it did in Lebanon in 2006, so that Israel can continue killing]. Another one-way ceasefire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable [Israel engineered the breaking of the ceasefire that was in place]. And promises from Hamas will not suffice -- there must be monitoring mechanisms in place to help ensure that smuggling of weapons to terrorist groups in Gaza comes to an end. I urge all parties to pressure Hamas to turn away from terror, and to support legitimate Palestinian leaders working for peace” [here the White House Puppet is saying that the elected government of the Palestinians is not legitimate. Unlike Bush’s own elections, Hamas’ election was not stolen].”

The president of the United States is a sick joke. He has falsified history.

Hamas was elected in free elections in 2006. The US and Israel responded by organizing sanctions against the Hamas government, including the suspension of all foreign aid. According to news reports, the US supplied arms to Fatah to take on Hamas in the streets of Gaza. As for Hamas’ resources, Israel has given part of the Palestinian tax resources to its puppet Abbas and kept the rest. The role of the Israeli/American puppet Mubarak is to keep Palestinians pinned in Gaza where they can be bombed by Israel. Mubarak” refuses to open the frontier so that Palestinians can escape their slaughter by Israel.

Americans should be ashamed that their president is a puppet of a small, but ruthless, state in the Middle East that lives off American largess.

Nothing has changed with the election of Obama, whose first act was to put Israel in charge of the White House. For the first time in its history the Americans have a duel citizen, an Israeli who served in the Israeli military, as chief of staff of the White House.

My friends in the Israeli peace movement are despondent that America, “the light of the world,” is overcome by evil and serves wickedness.

Compared to Russia with its energy and leadership and to China with its modern industry, the United States is a second rate power. The US has nukes but can continue its wars of aggression only as long as the dollar can survive as reserve currency. American power has been exhausted by mismanagement. The United States is a discredited country, a bane on the world, its nuclear arsenal a threat to life on earth.

Political scientist Michael Haas has just published a book, George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes. Haas writes that Bush’s violations of law and the Constitution “transform the United States into a rogue nation feared by the rest of the world and loved by almost none.” http://www.uswarcrimes.com/

America has entered its decline. America has exported its manufacturing so that CEOs and Wall Street crooks could claim large bonuses while the working class declined. The American financial industry is discredited and in chaos, having resorted to stealing one trillion dollars from American taxpayers, while putting the rest of the world into financial crisis, including the destruction of Iceland’s currency.

Most of the world now has reasons to hate and to distrust the United States.

American unemployment is high and rising despite the massive printing of money and budget deficits that are too large to be financed, except by the printing of more money.

The damage done to the American people in the first decade of the 21st century by their own government is comparable in some ways to the damage American hubris and self-righteousness have inflicted on the civilian populations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza, and South Ossetia. Instead of losing their homes to bombs, more than one million Americans have lost their homes to the subprime mortgage fraud. We are spied upon without warrants or cause. Our civil liberties are endangered.

Does anyone believe that George Bush, who assaulted his own country’s civil liberty, will be remembered as a “fighter for human rights”?