Phi Beta Iota: This is a good initiative, something we should have been doing for decades. However, it does not go far enough. No such study can be credible without the participation of Brazil, China, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan, as well as major “interested parties” such as South Africa and Turkey. In short, we are long over-due for a Multinational Decision-Support Centre that does M4IS2 on all topics.
But as US action around the world aimed at eliminating the recently won right to self-determination for the peoples of Asia and Africa under the guise of “Western democracy” fighting “totalitarian communism”, which left a trail of millions murdered by the US and its allies (starting with Korea and moving to the Congo, to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and from Guatemala to Brazil to Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Chile, to Southern Africa and the Middle East), the cruel US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade have hardly changed this anti-democratic trend. Yet two important victories are always touted by supporters of US foreign policy on the democratic front: namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “democratisation” of Eastern Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The US hopes that its policies in both places will guide it to achieve similar ends for those uprisings of the Arab world that it cannot crush.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.
Revelations of secret bombing in Yemen bring President Obama closer to Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon and their secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War than is appropriate for any Nobel Peace Laureate. How many wars is this President going to start? As many as the American people will allow.
Der Spiegel reports that the Pentagon released the remaining papers of the Pentagon Papers while admitting that lies were told about the war. We know that. But here it is from them. The four volumes of the Gravel Papers can be accessed through Der Spiegel by clicking on the link below. How many more lies will the U.S. government tell the American people and the international community? As many as the American people will allow.
Are NATO's allies child soldiers? Isn't that against the law? So what else is new with this war? How long will war crimes and crimes against humanity be committed by NATO? As long as the American people allow these crimes to be committed.
This blaster is intended to bring two very important reports and a short third report to your attention. The three should be thought about together.
1 is an essay by Robert ParryConsortium News. It is an excellent summary of the last 10 years of perpetual war and the debacle wrought by the Neoconmen. It also explains why these wars are now un-winnable and how President Obama has walked merrily into the Aftrap and is being set up as the fall guy to the Neconmen's debacle. (My essay, which appeared in the Jan-Feb issue of Challenge, explaining the domestic politics underpinning the Pentagon's need for perpetual war can be found here.)
2 is a more narrowly focused but deeply disturbing essay in Counterpunch by Gareth Porter, who reports on a recent book by Saleem Shahzad, the distinguished Pakistani journalist whose body was found outside Islamabad last week. As Porter explains, Shahzad has laid out how Al Qaeda, especially Dr. Ayman Zawahiri (the brains of the outfit), laid out a strategy that played President Bush (and his fellow travellers) like like a violin. Porter describes how the name of the game has been to dupe the cowboys in America to overreact to generate blowback in the Muslim word. He explains why Zawahiri wants the US mucking around in Afghanistan. But Belogolova's report does raise a valid concern. If Shahzad is right in his assessment of Zawahiri, the good Dr must be laughing his rocks off … because from his perspective, Afghanistan may turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving.
3 is Olga Belogolova's report on a new Senate study in the 8 June issue of National Journal …. She tells the reader that the Senate report suggests we can not even leave Afghanistan without collapsing the economy. This is kind of thinking can be used as yet another pretext for signing up to Zawahiri's script of the U.S. staying in Afghanistan forever, enraging the Muslim world — and in the near term for scaring Obama into not withdrawing significant forces in July as he has promised to do. I am not so sure this concern over the economic effects of reducing aid is that important. If so much of the aid money goes into the swamp of corruption, a large part of the collapse may be related to corruption. Is eliminating the honey pot stoking corruption that bad for the Afghan people (or the Americans for that matter)? Will Afghanistan really collapse? Who knows? But I doubt it.
The real subject of these essays, however is the sorry state of the United States and its political elites who are either working for the benefit of other countries (i.e., see Parry's discussion of the Neoconmen and Israel) or are brain dead strategists in Versailles on the Potomac, who, as we used to say in the Pentagon, “went for the cape — right off the cliff.” An now the numbskulls who got the United States into these messes are suggesting we must stay the course. Which brings us back to the Colonel's lament in my last blaster.
Chuck Spinney
La Ciotat, France
Phi Beta Iota: Integrity might be lost at the top, but it is the failure of integrity among all ranks that enables the corruption at the top to persist. We swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the chain of command, but all of our officers, with few exceptions, appear at this time to be in violation of their oath to the Constitution.
When the Obama administration sent 24 Navy SEALs into Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, “Geronimo” was the code name for the mission. It was also the code the SEALs used to alert their commanders that they identified their target; and finally “Geronimo-E KIA” was the coded message to confirm that they had killed Bin Laden.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Professor Jim Craven / Omahkohkiaaiipooyii (Big Bear Speaks), a life-long Native American activist, a Professor of Economics at Clark College, Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences about the Obama Administration’s use of “Geronimo” as a code word for Osama Bin Laden, and its’ historical significance.
Speaking at the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum, Doc talks about how power relationships work in markets vs how they should and could work. Markets are conversations, and they should be symmetrical conversations. Note his bit about how the language of marketing parallels the language of slavery….and the part where all their cookies end up giving them 50% completely wrong information.
About the Author: Robert Taber traveled to Cuba in the late 1950s as a CBS investigative journalist to cover the country’s burgeoning revolutionary movement. He became an eyewitness to history as he marched from the Sierra Maestra to Havana with the ragtag revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who forced Batista to flee the country.
The author lists six conditions for a successful revolution:
1. Valid popular grievances
2. Sharp social divisions (or ethnic)
3. Unsound or stagnant economy
4. Oppressive or illegitimate government
5. Moral leadership within the guerilla movement
6. A foundation on the truth rather than lies
