Category: News

Today the NYT runs a front page article headlined “(Susan) Rice Offers A More Modest Strategy for the Middle East.” It should be headlined “Battle of the Titans: Israel Firsters versus China Haters.”

It tells of a policy review of the U.S. Empire’s bloody strategy in the Middle East. But it goes well beyond that. As Noam Chomsky tells us, the real story is usually buried away deep in a “news” article. Sure enough here the key paragraph is the penultimate, which goes thus:
“More than anything, the policy review was driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to turn his gaze elsewhere, notably Asia. Already, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.” For “notably Asia” in the first sentence substitute “notably China.”

The new policy is driven by a desire to confront and “contain” China. Right now the key to this U.S. strategy is to get Japan rearmed and poised to challenge China, as outlined here. and here This is very dangerous since it threatens us with World War III. And it is unlikely to succeed. Since Mao’s revolution in 1949, the U.S. and the Western neocolonial powers have tried to bring China back under Western domination. They failed when China was far weaker and there is no reason to believe that they can succeed now.

The second key paragraph also lies on the second web page of the article and quotes a “critic” of the new policy: ““You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,” saidTamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The argument that we can’t make a decisive difference, so we’re not going to try, is wrongheaded.”” The Saban Center is a hotbed of pro-Israel sentiment, a key part of the Israeli Lobby.

The struggle shaping up is between those who want to continue the depredations of the US in the Middle East, among them the Israel firsters, and those who want to turn toward smashing China. Unwittingly perhaps, Israel and its Lobby may now be China’s best allies.

Hundreds of folks turned out today in DC to protest NSA surveillance.   The sign makers outdid themselves for this worthy cause —
[[ on Twitter – @jimbovard ]]

Marching from Union Station to the base of Capitol Hill…

 

 

Plenty of “Thank You Snowden” signs in today’s crowd…

Kelley Vlahos, the only journalist adept enough to write for both Fox News & Antiwar.com –

K

Let’s face it, with rising public criticism of the Obama administration’s drone war, embarrassing political posturing and shutdown politics on the domestic side, and unprecedented worldwide outrage over NSA spying, the U.S. government has seen better days (something worthy of celebration, in my opinion).

Jon Stewart sums it up well:

In a commentary that appeared in USA Today, RAND Corporation senior adviser Brian Michael Jenkins praises President Obama’s increased reliance on Joint Special Operations Command raids in place of drone strikes.

“The two U.S. commando raids in Libya and Somalia this month,” Jenkins argues, represent “a significant shift” that “has the potential to both reduce public hostility to the drones…and to improve intelligence by capturing rather than killing terrorist leaders.”

Mind you, Jenkins doesn’t express concern over the unlawfulness of the U.S. drone war or that it consistently kills civilians, as the two recent reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch document. Rather, raids are better because they reduce public anger and provide the opportunity to obtain intelligence by putting detainees in a legal limbo on a ship somewhere in the ocean.

There is a lot of “psychological utility” in the use of raids over drones, Jenkins explains. “Now, America can turn things around,” he writes. “Terrorists want us to live in fear. We will make them live in fear.”

I know what you’re thinking: with a comment like that, this Jenkins guy belongs in a Hollywood movie!

Interesting you should say that, because Jenkins cites another advantage to special operations raids over drone strikes: it feeds Americans’ appetite for warrior praise. If Americans can glorify and exalt the bravery and sacrifice of U.S. Marines, it will go a long way towards regaining the public support for U.S. militarism that drone warfare has diminished.

War is not to be celebrated or romanticized, but movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Captain Phillips provide images and narratives that sustain morale in a protracted conflict. These special operations raids contrast the courage and prowess of American warriors with the calculated savagery displayed by murderers of unarmed civilians, so dramatically demonstrated in the terrorist attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi.

Among the many honors these two Hollywood jingo flicks have received, I’m sure it warms the hearts of the actors, producers, and directors that there is profound propaganda value in their work.

See here for some history on how Hollywood served a similar role for war propaganda back in WWII.

This well-reported article by Will Crisp at the Christian Science Monitor has two important findings. First, disparate armed militias are really who rules Libya, not the government. Second, these militias are motivated to wrest even more control over the government by a fear of Western interference.

Abdelmonem al-Said is the head of the militia that kidnapped Libya’s prime minister last month. He proudly stands by his role in the abduction and defiantly announces in press conferences how not scared he is of retribution or punishment, because the government is too weak, Crisp reports.

Here’s a key section of Crisp’s report, sub-titled “Suspicion of intervention.”

In the weeks ahead of Zeidan’s abduction, the Justice and Construction party, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, repeatedly called for the prime minister’s removal, but couldn’t drum up the 120 votes in parliament needed for a no-confidence vote. The new lawmakers behind the push for a no-confidence vote insist they were not behind the kidnapping, and only seek to bring down the government by legitimate means.

“This could well have been an attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve something illegally that they failed to achieve through the legitimate means of a no-confidence vote,” says Jason Pack, a research at Cambridge University and president of Libya-Analysis.com.

“The Brotherhood doesn’t necessarily want to replace him with one of their own ranks, but it does want to block his plans to build a strong army. It’s seen what happened in Egypt and sees plans to cooperate with the US and Europe over training troops as a threat.”

Continue reading “Armed Militias Rule Libya, Primed For ‘Backlash’ At Sign of Western Meddling”

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The incursion into Lebanon was one of the biggest debacles of the Reagan administration.  Unfortunately, though Reagan eventually recognized his folly and pulled troops out, other presidents did not recognize the tragic lessons of the pointless loss of American troops.

Here’s a piece I wrote ten years ago on the Lebanon debacle for Counterpunch  (excerpted from my 2003 book, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (St. Martin’s/Palgrave).

Counterpunch, October 8, 2003
The Reagan Roadmap for an Antiterrorism Disaster
by James Bovard

In his televised speech to the nation on September 7 [2003], President Bush declared, “In the past, the terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge. In this, they are mistaken.” There are many parallels between the 1982-84 U.S. deployment and decimation of U.S. troops in Beirut and the current Iraqi situation. None of them bode well for the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom or the life expectancy of American troops.

Few Americans remember the bitter details of one of Reagan’s biggest foreign debacles. Lebanon had been wracked by a brutal civil war for seven years when, in June 1982, Israel invaded in order to crush the Palestinian Liberation Organization. U.S. troops were briefly deployed in August in Beirut to help secure a ceasefire to facilitate the withdrawal of the PLO forces to Tunisia.

Continue reading “30th Anniverary of Beirut Marine Corps Bombing Debacle”