Antiwar.com Blog

Amy Goodman interviews the great journalist and author of Pity the Nation Robert Fisk, who lives in Lebanon, about the gruesome assassination of Rafik Hariri, in which 18 people were dashed to pieces;

… at one point, I saw a woman’s hand …

Fisk has many interesting observations about the region, and while he believes that Syria knew about the assassination, he doesn’t think Syria ‘ordered’ it, which he characterizes as a ‘Hollywood’ view of world events. Hariri simply had a lot of enemies. Mp3 link Note: for best results, copy the link and paste it into Windows Media Player’s “open URL” function. WMP will download the entire file into a temp directory, so there won’t be any streaming screw-ups.

Last night, Brian Williams released a breaking story on NBC: that the presiding judge on the Saddam tribunal had been assassinated.

It turned out it was an error: one of the lower judges and a lawyer were killed. Not a major error in the news report, except….

NBC ran a photo of the actual presiding judge in the case, whose identity is supposed to be secret. They had previously run the photo in an earlier report, but had blurred out his face. This time, however, thinking he was dead, they unblurred his face and showed a nice clear shot of him (they might as well have drawn a target on it).

Thanks to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

Columns, that is. Tomorrow’s edition will be the 200th appearance of my exclusive column for Antiwar.com. It began in the fall of 2000, in the aftermath of Serbia’s “October revolution,” and has chronicled events in the former Yugoslavia ever since: the Presevo insurgency, the Djindjic assassination, the uncivil war in Macedonia, the pogrom in Kosovo, the Hague show trials, many elections, anniversaries and transitions. On several occasions it revisited history, both recent and distant, and even addressed language issues.
This isn’t the end – far from it! I intend to keep writing for as long as the situation in Yugoslavia’s successor states merits attention. Unfortunately for the people living there, that looks to be a long-term prospect.
It turned out – not surprisingly – that Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t the sole source of trouble in the region (well, there goes that conspiracy theory!), and his fall from power in 2000 didn’t do a damn thing to resolve the ongoing conflicts. Ultimately, the present crisis has roots in the demise of Yugoslavia, and until the circumstances of that murder – for that’s what it was – are addressed, the various parties involved will continue fighting over what they believe is rightfully theirs. So it looks like there will be a job chronicling that conflict for a good long time. Continue reading “Balkan Express turns 200”

The China Post perceives a new cold war with the United States:

“A new Cold War is taking shape after last week’s U.S.-Japan joint statement that China is their biggest security threat and that Taiwan is key to keep Beijing’s growing military might in check… It was the first time that the U.S. and Japan openly placed Taiwan under their defense umbrella. The joint statement represented the most significant change since 1996 to the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Alliance. Just two days before that, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, told the Council on Foreign Relations that China was one of the ‘four key concerns’ of the U.S., the others being weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and failing states. While the U.S. would respect China’s aspiration to achieve national greatness, Feith said, this in turn would require Beijing to ‘forgo the threat or use of force to pursue unification.’
In other words, China’s rise has to be in line with America’s ‘rules of the road.’ If not, he warned, ‘respect for sovereignty’ does not require the U.S. ‘to ignore the depredations of tyrannical regimes.'”

We (especially Feith) are in a position to say so because our government has respect for the rule of law.

What a shock. I honestly didn’t see this coming. What happens when you design a “missile defense”, which might, someday, be able to stop all missile attacks, and thus nullify the ability of any nation in the world to respond to a US attack? This is what happens;

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Tuesday that Moscow was creating a nuclear weapon capable of thwarting any defense system in the world, Interfax news agency reported.
“There is not now and will not be any defense from such missiles,” the news agency quoted Ivanov as saying.

Noam Chomsky has been pointing out that opponents of the missile defense were arguing incorrectly that the missile defense doesn’t work, when it’s far more dangerous if it appears that it might work. If that’s the case, then the US can attack any nation in the world with total impunity. And certainly the US has not given the rest of the world any reason to fear attack, has it? …

From Democracy Now:

The resolutions, every single one, and it got up to 56, more than 52, every single resolution begins with a plea to support and respect the troops. We need these people here. They’re first responders, they’re family, they’re friends, they’re workers down the street. They make up the fabric of society in Vermont. They’re an important part of that fabric. So, we began with that, and Amy, it wasn’t just lip service, as some have suggested. The rest of the resolution also supports members of the Guard. Let me just give you the high points of what we asked for. We asked for our legislature to assess the impact of the deployment, not just on readiness, but on our communities, on our families. We’re asking the delegation, Senator Leahy, Senator Jeffords, Congressman Sanders, to help restore a reasonable balance between states and the federal government, not in the case of every war, only in what we call “wars of choice.” We know that if this country is attacked, if there’s an emergency, if there’s an insurrection under the Constitution, there is no question that Guard members have signed up to serve, and that they would serve, and they would serve with enthusiasm and a sense of duty. Wars of choice are a whole different phenomenon. They’re relatively new. We have no national policy governing the use of these wars. It’s a big omission.

Vermont has lost more soldiers per capita than any state, and has the second highest mobilization rate for its National Guard and reservists.