Middle East

  • The real goal is empire

    Jay Bookman, one of the editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a very good column from a couple of days ago about the real goal of war on Iraq. It’s to further the goal of people like Cheney and Rumsfeld to finally assemble a global American empire.

    The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.

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    This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were.

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    Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

    Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

    Bookman refers in the column to a report issued in 2000 called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, available for download from New American Century, which is a conservative think tank. Its authors include quite a few people now in charge in the Bush administration:

    Paul Wolfowitz is now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton is undersecretary of state. Stephen Cambone is head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross are members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

    I would think Israel would be rather concerned about this if they suspect it’s what we’re planning. If Iraq becomes our “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, Israel’s strategic importance for us will drop sharply.

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  • News log on Iraq

    AlterNet has a War on Iraq newslog page.

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  • Cheney doing business with Iraq

    Here is an interesting link to a 2000 article in the Financial Times, courtesy of Mark Morford, about the fact that American companies like Halliburton and GE have continued to do business with Iraq through partners and subsidiaries.

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  • Is this what they mean by “going native”?

    A U.S. Special Forces bodyguard assigned to protect Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks with colleagues after an assasination attempt on Karzai Thursday Sept. 5, 2002 in Kandahar.

    Two more.

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  • A race to the bottom…

    Talk about defining deviancy down! Palestinian suicide bombers have nail bombs, Israel has dart bombs.

    Palestinian officials have condemned Israel’s reported use of tank shells which are said to have sprayed thousands of metal darts at a target in Gaza, killing four Palestinian civilians.

    Israeli media said the Israeli army confirmed it used flechettes in an operation near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City, on Thursday.

    Palestinian medical officials said the victims were cut to shreds after being hit by the tiny metal darts, which are dispersed by a tank shell.

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  • Blair says Iraq issue ‘must be tackled’

    Is he insane? I can’t imagine why any British PM would tie his fortunes so closely to the most ignorant man ever to be President of the USA.

    For him to argue this:

    The world cannot stand by while Iraq is in “flagrant breach” of United Nations resolutions, the UK prime minister has said.

    seems dangerous to me, given that one of the key “allies” of the US and UK in the Middle East is Israel, which is certainly in violation of a number of UN resolutions. It only makes the two countries look like hypocrites.

    I’m not arguing that Iraq is country of peace and enlightenment, but I also don’t see it as a country that threatens us enough to spend $50+ billion (more than the federal government’s annual spending on primary and secondary education plus medical research) and risk thousands of American lives, to say nothing of de-stablizing much of the Middle East.

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  • OK, I don’t even like sports…

    The Times has a front page picture and inside article about one of the doubles teams at the U.S. Open: Amir Hadad of Israel and Aisam ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan — yes, a Jewish/Muslim doubles team. There’s a video on the CNN/SI site also — they’re adorable. A photo from the U.S. Open site of them is here.

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  • This is terrorism too

    When it’s tank shells (or F-16s) rather than suicide bombs that kill civilians, Americans seem to think it’s not terrorism. Israel shelled people in a bedouin encampment last night, killing a family of four, and wounding others, claiming there was movement in an area near a settlement where Palestinians were forbidden. When I heard about it on NPR this morning, they said it was within an olive grove. I know from my friends in JAtO that now is the time for harvesting olives for oil.
    [ CNN – Photo – NY Times – Ha’aretz ]

    It’s one of the top stories on the newswires right now, but the NY Times chose to put it on page 9 with a standard-sized headline.

    The settlements are being built in areas where these families have lived for generations. To kill them for being in the olive groves that they’ve tended for hundreds of years (or more) is terrorism.

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  • Let’s Make War

    NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd announces, “I’m with Dick! Let’s Make War.” She admits she was dubious at first, but says that Cheney’s vision — as the vice-president put it, “a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized” — convinced her. “I’m on board,” she says. “Let’s declare war on Saudi Arabia!”

    My favorite part:

    The Saudis would probably use surrogates to fight anyway. They pay poor workers from other countries to do their menial labor. And they paid the Americans to fight the Iraqis in 1991. The joke among the American forces then was: “What’s the Saudi national anthem? ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ “

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  • Those wacky christians: A followup

    The Times has a followup article to the one I wrote about several weeks ago regarding monks fighting over territorial rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I can’t imagine trying to summarize this, so I’ll just excerpt a bit of it. One of the things that interested me was how all of the other sects took over the “territory” of the Ethiopians after they were wiped out by plague in 1658. The article also mentions that 11 monks were hospitalized after the previously-mentioned melee.

    At 11:40 a.m. on Saturday, a 72-year-old Egyptian priest walked out onto the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher carrying a wooden chair.

    Limping heavily, the Rev. Abdel Mallek walked to a wall in the shade of a tree mysteriously rooted in the ancient stone and sat down near a cluster of Ethiopian monks, gazing at nothing in particular. Exactly 15 minutes later, he gathered his chair and walked back into the Coptic monastery.

    It was the most prosaic of scenes, except that Father Mallek was closely guarded by an Israeli policeman, and three others stood guard. From the windows of the Egyptian monastery on one side, someone recorded the scene with a video camera, while several Ethiopian monks peered warily over the wall of their ancient compound on the other side.

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    The policemen saw nothing strange in the assignment. They are also from Jerusalem. “This is the center of the world,” one explained. “This is how the world looks.”

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