Category: US Foreign Policy

The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

nullAlexander Cockburn’s comments about the left’s inability to acknowledge US defeat in Iraq and the bogus ‘war for oil’ thesis are perceptive. But in Tariq Ali and Seumas Milne he has chosen the wrong avatars for this odd belief in the empire’s invincibility. Tariq is a good friend and I have had this conversation with him several times. I know for a fact that he rejects the reductionist ‘war for oil’ argument. (He made his position clear in the Q&A after his recent London Review of Books lecture.) Milne sometimes hews to the establishment left line, but has shown far more independence and courage than some other left luminaries. I’d rather Cockburn had directed his criticism at Noam Chomsky, whose defective and predictable analysis of the Middle East continues to mislead many.

“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all – it’s rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US , whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City , has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of The Guardian on August 4.

Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that  even though most Americans think it’s all over,  They say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there.   They gesture at  50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions.  Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq , swelling up from the present 100,000.  Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000.  Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals, typically from the developing world.  “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “ is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.

Continue reading “The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory”

Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow

A report with some of Levy’s comments can be found at Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Gideon Levy on Middle East peace

Riz Khan speaks to the great Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz about the ‘peace talks’ that are set to resume between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington.

There are no heroes in illegal and immoral wars

by Robert Jensen

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

When the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division rolled out of Iraq last week, the colonel commanding the brigade told a reporter that his soldiers were “leaving as heroes.”

While we can understand the pride of professional soldiers and the emotion behind that statement, it’s time for Americans — military and civilian — to face a difficult reality: In seven years of the deceptively named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and nine years of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, no member of the U.S. has been a hero.

This is not an attack on soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Military personnel may act heroically in specific situations, showing courage and compassion, but for them to be heroes in the truest sense they must be engaged in a legal and morally justifiable conflict. That is not the case with the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan, and the social pressure on us to use the language of heroism — or risk being labeled callous or traitors — undermines our ability to evaluate the politics and ethics of wars in a historical framework.

Continue reading “There are no heroes in illegal and immoral wars”

The Assault on Wikileaks

You’ll be seeing plenty more of this in the days and months ahead. Wikileaks has been the target of black propaganda and dirty tricks since the day it released the Baghdad massacre video. Recently even Amnesty International (which brought you the Gulf War of 1991 with false claims about Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out incubators) and Reporters without Borders (which was mighty outraged when Venezuela closes down a broadcaster invovled in an attempted coup, but seemed remarkably understanding when France shut down a Palestinian television channel) joined the Pentagon in the attempts to discredit Wikileaks, blaming it for endagering the lives of Afghan collaborators. It now emerges that the latest attempt to defame Julian Assange was another lie. The powers that be seem not to realize that as each propaganda sally misses the mark, Wikileaks’s stature grows further.

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website Wikileaks, has categorically denied Swedish sexual abuse charges launched against him.

The country’s prosecution authority has dropped an arrest warrant for a rape charge, but a separate molestation accusation is still under investigation.

WikiLeaks has been criticised for leaking Afghan war documents.And despite warnings from the Pentagon, the website is preparing to release a fresh batch of classified documents.

In an exlusive interview with Al Jazeera, Assange said that the accusations are part of a “smear campaign” against him.

John Pilger on the rebranding of the US occupation of Iraq

Legendary journalist John PIlger speaks to Riz Khan about the ostensible US withdrawal from Iraq. In his otherwise sensible commentary, Pilger claims that troops will remain to protect oil contracts, which of course doesn’t make much sense because all the major contracts are held by Russian, Norwegian, Chinese and French companies.

US combat forces have left Iraq, but who should be held accountable for the invasion and occupation that has left hundreds of thousands dead? Veteran investigative journalist John Pilger joins the show to discuss.

Also see this this important article in which Pilger defends Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is now the subject of an international smear campaign.

What Israel and the lobby really fear about Iran

by M.J. Rosenberg

The internet has been burning up with responses to Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic cover story on the likelihood that either Israel or the United States will preempt development of an Iranian nuclear bomb by attacking its atomic sites.

Goldberg does not flat-out endorse bombing Iran. Rather, after numerous conversations and briefings with US and Israeli officials, he concludes that there is at least a 50-50 chance that bombs will fly in a year or so.

Goldberg himself does not take a position on whether bombing is warranted or justified. But, given the way he frames the article and his personal closeness, to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – who speaks in apocalyptic terms of the existential danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel – it is clear that Goldberg sees no alternative to preventing an Iranian nuke, by whatever means necessary. And that includes war.

Continue reading “What Israel and the lobby really fear about Iran”

Exit Afghanistan

This excellent documentary produced by the Dutch VPROInternational is a must see. It presents a picture of the Afghan  conflict with the kind of nuance you are unlikely to find on British or American TV.

Continue reading “Exit Afghanistan”

One More War, Please

by David Bromwich

Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they were gone. The last two weeks of July saw two such stories on almost successive days.

First there was “Top Secret America,” the three-part Washington Post report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the hyperextension of private contracts, government buildings, and tax-funded expenditures in the secret surveillance economy. Since 2001, the new industries of data mining and analysis have yielded close to a million top secret clearances for Americans to spy on other Americans. Then at the end of July came the release of 90,000 documents by Wikileaks, as reported and linked by the New York Times, which revealed among other facts the futility of American “building” efforts in Afghanistan. We are making no headway there, in the face of the unending American killing of civilians; meanwhile, American taxes go to support a Pakistani intelligence service that channels the money to terrorists who kill American soldiers: a treadmill of violence. Both findings the mainstream media brought forward as legitimate stories, or advanced as raw materials of a story yet to be told more fully. This was an improvement on the practice of reporting stories spoon-fed to reporters by the government and “checked” by unnamed sources also in government. Yet, as has happened in many cases in the mass media after 2001 — one thinks of David Barstow’s story on the “war experts” coached by the Pentagon and hired by the networks — the stories on secret surveillance and the Afghanistan documents were printed and let go: no follow-up either in the media or in Congress.

We seem to have entered a moral limbo where political judgment is suspended and public opinion cannot catch its breath.

Continue reading “One More War, Please”

Obama Must Bring Back that Magic to the Middle East

Mosaic Intelligence Report: 2010 is far from over, yet the Middle East has witnessed a series of close encounters with major wars. What are Arabs afraid of? And why is Barack Obama’s popularity sinking fast?

Also see Jim Lobe’s analysis of the Brookings/Zogby ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’.