The Quest to Dominate the Arab World
March 21st, 2011 § 2 Comments
by Brenda Heard
Sample leaflet dropped by US forces. See http://www.iwar.org.uk/psyops/resources/iraq/index.htm
‘Shock and Awe’—the phrase is back in the headlines. As we have watched the bombs bursting onto Libya over the past two days, we cannot help but recall the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Iraq eight years ago this week. The phrase that defined that assault was launched into popular usage in January 2003 with the pre-invasion tremors from America. Now, eight years later, the media is divided over whether we are witnessing another blast of ‘shock and awe’. Having lost much of its original meaning, the phrase has taken on two identities. When used by political-military pundits, it euphemistically suggests a quick and clean campaign to eliminate evil forces. When used by the general public, it has settled into a synonym for ‘wow’.
In their prologue to the 1996 report Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance [1], Harlan Ullman and James Wade spoke of ‘a time when uncertainty about the future is perhaps one of the few givens’. Their solution? Control that future. America’s world supremacy in military power, coupled with its expanding technology industry, presented ‘an unusual opportunity’ to seize the power that had ‘tantalized and confounded’ war strategists throughout history: ‘destroying the adversary’s will to resist before, during, and after battle’.
As we now watch the global contest of wills playing out in the Middle East, it becomes painfully obvious that dominance, the end goal of ‘shock and awe’, will never be quick and clean. While the American stated objective of displacing Saddam Hussein was indeed met, eight years of angry and bloody chaos have darkened Iraq to an extent unforeseen in the sterile analyses of Ullman and Wade. And while the Americans cling to the strategic position they captured in Baghdad, the entire region has grown impassioned with resistance.
Breaking Australia’s silence: WikiLeaks and freedom
March 20th, 2011 § 2 Comments
‘Breaking Australia’s silence: WikiLeaks and freedom’ was a public forum held on 16 March 2011 at the Sydney Town Hall. The event was staged by the Sydney Peace Foundation, Amnesty, Stop the War Coalition, and supported by the City of Sydney.
Chaired by Mary Kostakidis, it featured speeches by John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie MP (the only serving Western intelligence officer to expose the truth about the Iraq invasion) and Julian Burnside QC, defender of universal human rights under the law.
Introducing Nafissa Assed
March 20th, 2011 § 6 Comments
Our correspondent in Tripoli, who’s been sending us such stirring and terriying reports, is now safe in Morocco. She is finally able to renounce her anonymity. She wants me to tell you her name in capital letters, NAFISSA ASSED, daughter of a martyr, proud Libyan citizen. Read her self-description after the break.
Infantile Leftism
March 20th, 2011 § 38 Comments
picture by Ali Farzat
It certainly feels uncomfortable to watch American, British and French planes enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, bombing Libya’s anti-aircraft defences and destroying Libyan tanks. Certainly the hypocrisy of the West and the Arab dictators is as galling as ever. There’s no chance of a no-fly zone over Palestine and Lebanon, nor over Saudi-occupied Bahrain. I can understand very well the fears of some that the West will overstay its welcome – although I think this is very unlikely indeed.
I am pleased, however, that the joint British-French-Lebanese (with Hizbullah in government in Lebanon) resolution for the no-fly zone has been adopted by the United Nations, that the massacres of the Libyan people may be minimised or stopped, that liberated Benghazi will probably not now fall to the tyrant.
If Britain, France and others are seeking influence in post-Qaddafi Libya by pleasing the Libyan people, that’s fine by me. Perhaps they fear their companies being banned from Libya as a punishment for supporting the dictator, and they are taking this opportunity to make amends. Again, fine. This is how things are done between strong, free countries which respect each other. It’s not the same as, for instance, Western powers arming and politically supporting the Saud family in return for military bases which are hated by the Saudi Arabian population.
A Tribe Called Libya
March 20th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Our Tripolitanian witness is alive and well in an Arab country beyond Libya’s borders. Free to use the internet again, she has sent some old reports. This one is from March 7th.
Today is the 7th March 2011, one of the most horrible days that Libya has witnessed since the ‘Greatest Libyan Revolution’ began. Zawiya has seen the nastiest massacres. The city was attacked from 8 am until 9pm; in the morning there were over 1500 protestors in the city streets, and by the end of the day there was no one. Hundreds were brutally murdered by heavy machine guns, missiles, and tanks, others were seriously injured, and some were lucky enough to stay alive.
Tripolitanian Abnormality
March 20th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Steve Bell's Qaddafi
Our Tripolitanian witness is alive and well in an Arab country beyond Libya’s borders. Free to use the internet again, she has sent some old reports. The first is from early March.
Today I went out in my area, Ben Ashour, and all the shops were still closed in the main street. I stopped by the bakery for bread and I found a long line of people waiting; the bakery of my area gives each person a rationed number of loaves so each can have at least some bread by the end of the day. I also went to Fashloom, near my neighborhood, and I noticed a weird silence and only a few people walking in that area, the walls all clean of the anti-Qaddafi graffiti that had covered them earlier. I also noticed two cars belonging to Qaddafi’s thugs parked (and undoubtedly armed) in the corners of the tiny streets of Fashloom. Some thugs were dressed like civilians and yet I could tell who they were by their car. Others were wearing military outfits and standing alertly in front of their cars. A member of my family sadly confirmed to me that some families they know in Fashloom (and other areas) had buried their epic martyrs in the gardens of their houses, for they were scared the bodies would be taken away from them by Qaddafi’s thugs.
Gaddafi is the regime
March 20th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Charles Glass has an excellent post on the London Review Blog, worth reproducing in full:
The Libyan dictator is resisting the popular forces ranged against him in ways that his counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt did not. In Tunis and Cairo, Zine Abedine Ben-Ali and Hosni Mubarak were the faces of military regimes. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is not the face: he is the regime. The Egyptian and Tunisian army chiefs calculated that sacrificing their nominal commanders-in-chief would preserve their own positions without jeopardising the interests of their American benefactors. Playing the role of saviours of the nation, after years in which the officer class enriched itself and ordinary soldiers were made to repress dissent, the armies in Tunisia and Egypt emerged as arbiters of whatever order will follow the post-dictator era.
Since Gaddafi seized power in Libya with his co-conspirator Major Abdul Salam Jalloud in 1969, he has remade the military in his own image to enforce his rule. In this, he enjoyed the successive support of the CIA, the Soviet Union and the East German security services. In Egypt, the army had some legitimacy from the Nasser era, when a whole generation of junior officers (all of whom entered the army after its officer class was expanded beyond the pashas in the 1930s) supported the revolution of 1952. When Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat was assassinated in 1981, the army set ground rules for transition that preserved its position. Libya, since Gaddafi overthrew King Idris, has never faced a transition. Gaddafi is not contemplating one, which leaves his army no option but to retain him. If he goes, they are finished.
Srebrenica on the Mediterranean
March 19th, 2011 § 13 Comments
Two days after Gaddafi promised that he’ll show ‘no mercy’, his troops are bombarding, some entering, Benghazi. The UN Security Council had passed a resolution declaring a no-fly zone over Libya. Thus far, the sky belongs to Gaddafi. There was a point where Gaddafi could have been thwarted, had his armoured columns been checked by the presence of hostile air power. No need to bomb them, just bomb the road ahead. Check their advance, send a message. Instead, the troops have been allowed to enter Benghazi. Now they cannot be attacked without inflicting high casualties on civilians. The UN forces will likely excuse themselves by claiming that tanks can’t be attacked because now they are in the city. Western forces are also reluctant because since 2003, Gaddafi has been a reliable economic parter and Libya has been a favoured destination for rendition flights. (Remember where Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi died?)
The UN could still salvage the situation by threatening Gaddafi’s supply lines. But I fear we are about to see another Srebrenica. In that instance, the UN forces delayed intervention till the Serbs had encircled the enclave and then declined to intervene because they said it would put their own peacekeepers lives at risk. Meanwhile the slaughter continues.
World fears shortage of kosher hotdogs in event of nuclear strike on Israel
March 18th, 2011 § 6 Comments
Israel meanwhile suffers fallout of Japanese disaster
Making rounds over the past few days is an item from the Business section of Israel’s Ynet news site, entitled “Israel fears sushi shortage after quake”. The article begins by noting that, while Japan “has yet to recover from one of the greatest disasters in its history, Israelis fear a shortage in the ingredients of one of their favorite dishes: Sushi”.
In case readers are still unclear as to the identity of the real victims of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation crisis, the second paragraph of the article underscores the frightening dilemma presently facing humanity:
Many of sushi’s basic components come from Japan or are imported through the battered countries. Will Israelis soon suffer from a shortage of the beloved rolls’ necessary ingredients?”
That all is not lost is confirmed by the article’s subheading, however: “Rice shortage not expected”.
Sane observers appear to be confused as to whether the piece was intended for publication in The Onion, where it would certainly thrive thanks in large part to the article’s protagonist Dudi Afriat, sales manager of the Rakuto Kasei company that imports Kikkoman soy sauce and other sushi paraphernalia to Israel.
Now Syria?
March 21st, 2011 § 2 Comments
Syriacomment‘s Joshua Landis on dramatic events in Syria:
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