Fitting a Frame for Syria Invasion

US tightens military noose around Syria

by Bill Van Auken - WSWS

Amid an escalating drumbeat about a supposed threat that Syria’s government is preparing to use chemical weapons against its own people, Washington has deployed a naval armada off the country’s coast.

The USS Eisenhower carrier strike group was sent through the Suez Canal from its deployment in the Persian Gulf earlier this week and has reportedly arrived in the Mediterranean near Syrian shores. The deployment joins that of an amphibious battle group already present in the eastern Mediterranean, consisting of the USS Iwo Jima, the USS New York and the USS Gunston Hall, which together carry a contingent of 2,500 US Marines.

Between the two naval forces, Washington now has 17 warships, 70 fighter-bombers and 10,000 military personnel within close striking distance of Syria. This is in addition to the Air Force’s 39th Air Base Wing stationed at the Incirlik base in Turkey together with tens of thousands of US ground troops deployed in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Citing US military sources, the Times of London reported Wednesday that Washington is ready to launch a military attack on Syria “within days.”

“It won’t require major movement to make action happen,” an unnamed US official told the British newspaper. “The muscle is already there to be flexed.”

Pentagon sources have suggested that an intervention carried out on the pretext of securing Syria’s chemical weapons would require some 75,000 troops.

In a further threat of direct US-NATO intervention, NATO governments are moving ahead to implement Tuesday’s decision of the NATO foreign ministers conference to deploy Patriot missile batteries on Turkey’s border with Syria. Germany’s defense and foreign ministers announced a decision to deploy some 400 German troops on the border. Similar detachments will also be sent by the US and the Netherlands.

While Turkey claimed it needed the missiles to defend itself from a supposed threat that Syria would fire missiles carrying chemical weapons towards its border, the Patriot batteries could also be used to impose a de facto “no-fly zone” over northern Syria, allowing the US-backed “rebels” to consolidate control over territory and creating the conditions for the installation of a Western-backed government on Syrian soil.

US officials have reiterated threats made by President Barack Obama and others in the administration about the government of President Bashar al-Assad crossing a “red line” and facing military action if it uses chemical weapons.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta Thursday described the US administration as “very concerned that as the opposition advances, in particular on Damascus, that the regime might very well consider the use of chemical weapons.”

Panetta referred to unspecified intelligence as the cause of these supposed concerns. Media outlets like the New York Times, CNN and NBC News have trumpeted this “intelligence,” citing unnamed US officials as the sources for vague and often contradictory accounts of developments that have allegedly pointed toward a potential use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Maqdad, charged Thursday that the allegation made by the US and other NATO countries about Syria’s chemical weapons were designed to create a “pretext for any subsequent interventions.”

“Syria stresses again, for the tenth, the hundredth time, that if we had such weapons, they would not be used against its people,” said Maqdad in an interview with Lebanon’s Al Manar television.

Speaking at the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Washington and its allies of manufacturing the alleged chemical weapons threat.

“As soon as we get these rumors [about chemical weapons] we engage in constructive demarche; when we get confirmation that nothing of that type is happening we share this information with our American colleagues,” Lavrov told the media.

There are no grounds to grant any credibility to the claims made by Washington and its media servants in presenting a supposedly imminent threat of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government as a trigger for war.

To the extent that there is any genuine content to these claims, it was expressed on Wednesday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared that Washington was concerned “that an increasingly desperate Assad regime might turn to chemical weapons, or might lose control of them to one of the many groups that are now operating within Syria.”

The statement raised for the first time the prospect that the real threat in Syria is that the so-called rebels that the US and its allies are backing could overrun Syrian military facilities and capture chemical weapons.

Citing unnamed US officials, CNN reported on Wednesday that the US State Department is preparing to add Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian Islamist militia that is playing the leading role in the military campaign against the Assad government, to its list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

According to recent reports, the Al Qaeda-connected al-Nusra militia has fielded as many as 10,000 fighters, many of them foreign Islamists who have been funneled into Syria. The group is said to be the best-armed element waging the war for regime change and is credited with recently overrunning two Syrian military bases.

Much of the weaponry going to the group has reportedly been sent in by the US-backed monarchy in Qatar. The CIA set up a command-and-control headquarters in southern Turkey earlier this year to coordinate the distribution of these arms and other aid going to the “rebels.”

The designation of the al-Nusra militia as a terrorist organization would no doubt be meant to publicly distance Washington from the Al Qaeda elements upon which it has relied to wage the sectarian civil war to oust Assad. It would amount to a damning self-indictment, however, with the US government effectively making a formal admission that it has been supporting a terrorist war in Syria, replete with suicide bombings and sectarian massacres.

One reason for the pending terrorist designation is to pave the way for the US and its allies to intervene more directly in arming the “rebels,” while claiming to distinguish between “secular-democratic” elements—found largely in luxury hotels in Doha—and Islamist militias, which are bearing the brunt of the US-backed war.

Such a move is likely in conjunction with a “Friends of Syria” meeting to be held in Marrakech, Morocco next week in which Washington may join with its NATO allies in recognizing a new “rebel” front—the National Coalition for the Opposition Forces—which was cobbled together under the direction of the US State Department.

In a related development, the New York Times published a front-page article Thursday that cited unnamed US officials explaining that in last year’s war for regime change in Libya, “the Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar” that resulted in “turning some of these weapons over to Islamic militants.” The newspaper said that evidence had yet to emerge that these weapons were used in last September’s assault on the US consulate and a secret CIA facility in Benghazi that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans.

There is little new in the article, which stresses that the Libyan experience “has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.”

No doubt underlying these reports and maneuvers are bitter divisions within the US military-intelligence apparatus over the tactics being pursued in the wars for regime change, first in Libya and now in Syria. It would be surprising if elements within the American military did not have serious reservations about a policy founded on the US arming and supporting of forces tied to Al Qaeda.

However, an examination of the trajectory of US policy in the Middle East points to a definite relationship between Washington’s attempts to assert its hegemony by military means and Al Qaeda that is sharply at odds with the official narrative of the “war on terrorism.”

Over the past decade, every regime targeted by US imperialism for military overthrow in the Middle East, from Iraq to Libya to Syria, has been hostile to Al Qaeda and the Islamist agenda. In each of these countries, Islamist and Al Qaeda-linked forces had no real power until the US intervened. The principal target for US militarism, Iran, is a nation whose population is composed predominantly of Shiite Muslims, who have been targeted for attack by Al Qaeda elements in Iraq and elsewhere.

The motivation for military action against these countries has not been to further a “war on terror,” much less to promote democracy or humanitarianism, but rather to assert US hegemony over an oil-rich and strategically vital region of the world.

To the extent that there is a genuine issue regarding chemical weapons in Syria, it is because the Obama administration has backed a “rebel” force that is dominated by Al Qaeda-linked militias into whose hands these weapons may fall, posing the threat that they may be used in terrorist attacks elsewhere.

Tsunami Warning Issued and Lifted After 7.3 Temblor Rocks Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate Japan

Quake of M7.3 jolts Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate areas; tsunami warning issued --Tsunami warning issued

by CLG

A tsunami warning has been issued after a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off Japan's eastern coast. The epicentre of the quake was about 245km (150 miles) south-east of Kamiashi at a depth of about 36km, the US Geological Survey said.

The quake was felt in the capital Tokyo and a one-metre tsunami is reported to have reached the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. Miyagi was hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Distant Wars, Distant Warriors

Cameron and Obama's Hired Thugs Now Butchering Their Way Through Syria

by Patrick Henningsen - 21st Century Wire

What a lark. Directing a war from the comfort of a golf course, or over a warm Cognac at Chequers. While they wine and dine in DC and Westminster, their hired hands work overtime to make rivers of blood in Syria.

Barak Obama and David Cameron, flanked by their ‘diplomats’ Hillary Clinton and William Hague, are all doing their bit to increase the bloodshed in Syria by backing the FSA rebel, al Qaida jihadist terrorists, who are presently working their way through the once stable country like termites eating through a once healthy home.

Blood comes cheap, and with budgets tight at home, western leaders are happy with the current arrangement. Rebel terrorist fighters are being paid between $500 and $2000 per month, and arms are free of charge through various NATO proxies and Gulf States. Their job assignment is a blunt one – to intimidate loyal pro-Syrian citizens, and to butcher thousands of innocent civilians – all in all, inflicting a reign of terror much like that one engineered by Washington in Nicaragua during the 1980′s. This is who Washington, London and Paris are backing in their quest to finally bring Syria under their globalist umbrella.

We have never have witnessed this level of open international criminality and hypocrisy by our puppet leaders in the West.

At least with Iraq, Bush and Blair tried to be creative with their lying by making up unbelievable stories of ”mobile anthrax labs”.

Nine years on, our well-paid elite political prostitutes don’t even bother with fish stories, they just put the weapons in the hands of terrorists, and pay these professional murderers to kill indiscriminately.

All this will eventually bring shame to the citizens of western nations in the long run, much the same way that the Nazis brought shame to the German people (but no shame to the corporations, bankers and elites though – because you can only feel shame if you have a conscious to begin with).

They will keep using the same tried and tested methods, unless they can be stopped by their own electorate.

Here is a video promoting Obama and Cameron’s favoured operatives in Syria…

Falling Again for Empire in Syria

 

“I Don’t Know Whether to Kiss You…or Waterboard You…”

by Peter Lee - China Matters

A line that coulda shoulda been in Skyfall but wasn’t.

Skyfall was enjoyable, in a grim sort of way. I certainly regretted the shortage of many of the signature Bond tropes—babes, booze, quips, and gadgets-- that enlivened the earlier films, especially in the self-mocking days of Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and made the gaping plot holes more endurable.

The wheels come off Skyfall in the final act, where Bond returns to his ancestral home in Scotland with his bosslady, M, to lure the archvillain, Silva into a trap.

For some reason, although MI6 is aware of this ruse, Bond receives no official backup and has to fight off a helicopterload of henchman relying only on his wits, courage, Dame Judy Dench, and the decrepit but murderous old family retainer and caretaker, Kincade, played by Albert Finney.

In the good/bad old days, Roger Moore would have marched into the old homestead calling peremptorily for Kincade! only to be pleasantly nonplussed by the appearance of the current officeholder, Kincade’s gorgeous granddaughter, wearing nothing but a bikini under an ankle-length fur coat and wielding a shotgun. Then, after some improbable but amusing mayhem, the villain would be subjugated, Felix Leiter would appear to mop up the underlings, and M would be on the helicopter back to London harrumphing, “Where’s Bond?” Cut to Moore luxuriating with the lovely Ms. Kincade in a profusion of mink before a roaring fire, purring, “I’ve always wanted to explore the hills and valleys of my native Scotland…”

Roll credits.

In Skyfall, by contrast, much unconvincing elder-abuse derring-do ensues, culminating in a showdown in the wee kirk in the heather that holds the bones of Bond’s sainted parents. With Bond temporarily detained below the ice of the local tarn, Silva takes by surprise Dench—and Finney, who appears to have chosen this dangerous moment to take a crap in the church outhouse, only to return through a side door adjusting his suspenders just in time to stand there like a gormless idiot while Silva pulls the awkward stunt of putting his own gun to his own head, lining up Dench’s head next to his, and imploring Dench to pull the trigger, end it for them both, and take care of his mommy issues.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for M—already mortally wounded but fortuitously not exhibiting the shock, disorientation, trembling, stammering, and meaningless gibbering usually associated with severe blood loss—either to toss off a devastating quip—“No, after you, I insist!”—while twisting herself out of the way and pulling the trigger, or do the stiff upper lip thing, snuffing Silva at the cost of the remaining four minutes of her life and sacrificing her not-a-damp-eye-in-the-house death scene with JB.

Spoiler alert: Neither of these two things happens.

The key dilemma for any Bond movie is finding a plausible, crowd-pleasing mission for a heartless government assassin that doesn’t make him look like a thug or recreational terrorist or scab taking work away from the CIA and Mossad.

If you read the relentless fluffing in the Guardian (and paid attention to the whole “Queen parachutes into London Olympics with Daniel Craig” deal) you will realize that Skyfall hangs its hat on English patriotism. Early in the movie, in a psychological evaluation, Bond responds to the word “country” in a free association test with a steely “England” (instead of “club” or “Marie Osmond”, or, for that matter, “Scotland” no doubt pissing off the independence enthusiasts that hoped he might have gone all Braveheart). There is also some Churchill and British bulldog-related flagwaving intended to evoke thin red line/all for England emotions.

Mission accomplished; Skyfall, has surpassed Avatar as England’s biggest national grosser. The unintended amusement emerges when we learn exactly what Bond is protecting England from.

The set piece for this conundrum occurs during the superb second act attack on London, in the parliamentary inquiry scene where some officious young MP gets in M’s face and tells her to discontinue MI6’s black ops activities in favor of the modern point and click intel gathering that is all the rage these days.

In her reply, Dame Judy Dench deploys high dudgeon in the service of low seriousness, talking about the big, bad, dangerous world and justifying the 00s with the rhetorical question “How safe do you feel?”
Fortuitously, at this moment, Silva bursts into the hearing room on his mission of mayhem, proving that spry if wrinkly velociraptors like James Bond and even lumbering brontosaurs like M have their uses.

At least, that’s what director Sam Mendes thinks.

The catch, of course, is that Silva is an ex-MI6 agent whom M abandoned to the tender mercies of Chinese intelligence and who subsequently turned rogue.

I would have found it preferable and infinitely more entertaining if Dench had used the occasion of Silva’s irruption to acidly berate the franticly scurrying MPs, “This is exactly what I’m talking about! If we stop employing overtrained psychopaths, who is going to deal with the overtrained psychopaths who leave our employ?”

Which brings me in a roundabout way to Syria, where the anti-Assad powers (including Great Britain, of course, but also including a) the US, Turkey, and the rest of NATO and b) the GCC) will soon have the pleasure of scraping up the mess created by their material and diplomatic support of the insurrectionists.

Undoubtedly one of the options on the table is to send in some kind of armed force, not to deal with Assad (who is now having the sort of difficulties in his capital—high level defections, serial car bombs, loss of control of the airport, etc.—usually associated with regime collapse), but to restore order and support pro-Western opposition forces after Assad falls.

The general disinterest in this development astounds me.

Consider the matter of the NATO plan to position Patriot batteries in Turkey.

Is Assad going to compound his current woes by attacking Turkey? Is there any conceivable explanation for the NATO move other than to reduce the danger of Syrian regime retaliation if Turkey sends in troops?

Consider the matter of the US and UN warnings about chemical weapons. Assad has announced that the regime will not use them against domestic enemies; in any event, given the close quarters mayhem going on in Syrian cities (and the presence of civilian human shields by accident or design), it doesn’t seem a workable option. The most likely use, if any, of chemical weapons, would be against a foreign army.

Consider the matter of the hurried reorganization of SNCORF—an exercise in regime change that replaced the corrupt and conspiratorial Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SNC with a new group of stooges, equally ineffectual and isolated from the domestic opposition, but who presumably will be more responsive to foreign demands once it comes time to erect a useful pro-Western intervention-friendly proxy on the rubble of Assad’s regime and the bodies of the bloody-minded Islamist insurrectionists.

But the whole Day After contingency planning angle—including the explosive possibility that Turkish troops will be marching into an Arab country, thereby reigniting not-so-fond memories of the Ottoman Empire—gets almost no attention in the Western press.

Of course, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—and the fragmentation of the Arab Middle East into arbitrary, unstable, and largely unrulable fiefdoms—was very much the work of the British Empire during and after World War I.

In large part, the last fifty years of US foreign policy in the Middle East has been dealing with the consequences of Britain’s inability to hold on to its empire from Suez to Tehran or even manage its dissolution.

Maybe there’s a movie out there about England stepping up and shouldering the grim obligation of cleaning up the abortion the Empire midwived in the Middle East.

It certainly isn’t Skyfall.


P.S. Want the Skyfall china bulldog? It's sold out. But Royal Doulton has promised to grunt out another litter by March 2013.

Gaza City: Unspeakable Villains, Speechless Victims

Doctors and Medics Operate Under Fire and Siege in Gaza

by JOSHUA BROLLIER - Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Walid al Nassasra stands next to the former home of his brother near Rafah.

Photo: Johnny Barber.


Gaza City - Dr. Majdi Na’eim worked for eight consecutive days at Al-Shifa Hospital throughout Israel’s “Pillar of Cloud” operation in the Gaza strip. With hundreds of wounded pouring into the emergency room, there was no time for him and many of his colleagues to even leave the hospital. On the final and one of the most brutal days of the assault, Israel targeted Ni’ma tower in Gaza City. Dr. Na’eim was in the emergency room aiding physicians when he learned that one of the arriving casualties was his two year old son, Abdel Rahman Na’eim. Imagine a father’s horror and instant grief. At his son’s wake, Dr. Na’eim told friends and family who were seeking to comfort him, “I’m terribly sorry. I’m unable to talk about anything.”

Gazans in the medical field have been working in unimaginable circumstances for years. During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, “17 health personnel were killed and 26 injured. In total, 29 ambulances were damaged or destroyed by bombs or crushed by armoured vehicles, while 48 per cent of Gaza’s 122 health facilities were either directly or indirectly hit by shelling.” On November 29th, 2012, Bashar Abu Murad, head of emergency and rescue services at the Palestine Red Crescent, sat down with our delegation and gave us a first-hand account of the January 15th, 2009, attack on Al-Quds hospital. He described the panic as the hospital sustained two white phosphorus blasts from Israeli forces. A massive fire broke out after the first munitions were launched. It took six hours to squelch the fire with only water and sand bags. Workers frantically scrambled to evacuate patients and others who were taking refuge. Meanwhile, a journalist hid under the table. Bashar personally carried three people from the intensive care unit to safety. Though the first fire was eventually stopped, the hospital was rendered useless after a second shelling of white phosphorus.

Our conversation moved to the experiences of this war. Though Al-Quds hospital was not directly attacked this time and the doctors there had not seen evidence of injuries from white phosphorus, they described third degree burns and amputations caused from Israel’s “non-lethal” warning bombs and the many casualties from larger missiles fired from F16s financed by the United States. Bashar spoke of the difficulties of functioning as a medical service in a society under siege. Emergency medical technicians must improvise without basic supplies like gauze for the injured and enough body bags for the intake of casualties. Field medics and emergency medical technicians have limited contact with the hospitals because the blockade restricts them to having only insufficient analogue radios instead of modern digital communications technology. Al-Quds was running off of a gas generator due to the unstable supply of electricity. The hospital had just attained a three month buffer supply of basic medicines, all of which were depleted in the conflict. Abu Murad continued, “It is hard to even think clearly in these conditions. All 1.5 million Gazans are suffering from PTSD from this war.” The doctors were not excluded from his statement.

Later that afternoon, we interviewed two young ambulance drivers, Shadi al Tayef and Aadl el Azbot. We asked them how they summoned the courage to carry on in this work during the recent war after ambulances were targeted in Operation Cast Lead. Shadi replied, “This war was not unfamiliar from the last. In the final days, the streets were empty. Everyone was waiting in their houses. We do it only because we care about saving the people. It is all for the people.” Aadl continues to drive ambulances and is not deterred even though he was previously injured by shrapnel when the Israelis fired upon a site for the second time after the emergency vehicles arrived. According to the drivers, the Israeli military had to be aware of the emergency medics’ presence, not only from the elaborate surveillance systems comprised of drones and hot-air balloons equipped with cameras, but also because they must first coordinate every rescue mission with the Red Cross which is in direct contact with the Israeli military. Ambulance workers have often been denied access to sites until it is too late to save the wounded, only to be fired upon after receiving clearance. “We are still suffering from trauma even up to this moment,” Aadl declared anxiously. The Red Crescent society does offer psychological services to its employees, but it hard to conceive that it can keep up with the level of need. Six ambulances were destroyed and seven workers were injured during the “Pillar of Cloud” conflict. “We must cope with the situation at work, but we are given space to be human and take time at home,” Shadi asserted.

Countries and organizations sympathetic to Gazans working under fire have extended medical and financial solidarity to provide services to the population and rebuild facilities. Around the corner from Al-Quds, we toured a Moroccan military field hospital which was set up just days after the major hostilities ended. Initially, we were somewhat intimidated by the long lines, tight Moroccan security surrounding the compound and the foreboding looking communications director. Wearing opaque sun glasses, full army fatigues and towering over six feet tall, this public relations representative looked more like a commander than a humanitarian worker. We were put at ease when he welcomed us proudly, “Ahlan wa Sahlan,”and readily introduced us to the primary physician.

Dr. Hassan Ismael explained that the Moroccan King ordered the hospital to be equipped with 26 doctors and 15 specialists. As of the 4th of December, the doctors had been working for nine days, seeing over 4000 people and providing over 6000 services for no cost to the patients. Services include treatment for severe burns and broken bones, emergency surgical operations and the dispensing of medicines, many of which were not regularly available in Gaza. The doctors were also happy to provide care for illnesses not related to the war. We met with a refugee, originally from Jaffa, who received injections for severe arthritis. She stood up immediately, waving her arms emphatically. “These doctors are from God… A gift from the God!” she repeats. Nearby, a father from Khan Younis finally found appropriate treatment for his epileptic son.

It was impressive to see the quality and efficiency of what was taking place in the field hospital when the military infrastructure, which is so often used by the majority of countries for nothing more than a tool of domination and destruction, was converted to serve human needs. When much of the world stood by silently and watched, Moroccans also set up a similar medical camp and provided financial aid to rebuild Al-Quds hospital after Operation Cast Lead.

Members from the international emergency delegation to Gaza reached out to their circles to raise around 25,000 dollars for medication to give to Gazan hospitals. Though the doctors and administrators we encountered were grateful for the donations and gestures, they emphasized that the problem that Gaza is facing is primarily political. They desire an end to the siege, occupation, military incursions and the right to self- determination, among other concrete demands. They welcomed support, but they do not want to be reliant upon international aid. They have the training, knowledge and dedication to do their jobs well and to be self-sufficient. Dr. Khalil Abu-Foul, a spokesperson for the Red Crescent, gave us a reality check, “You are our eyes in your country. These rockets are from your country. Just send the facts, it’s enough.”

Sitting with families over the past week, most of whom have “facts on the ground” and stories every degree as distressing as that of Dr. Majdi Na’eim’s tragic loss of his son, I have often felt a complete lack of words. What can one say when visiting the home and farm of Walid and Tawqfiq al Nassasra, Bedouin farmers and brothers living near Rafah? On November 19th at 10 PM, an Israeli war plane targeted Tawqfiq’s tin-roof home. The house was completely destroyed leaving a massive crater in the ground. Tawqfiq’s two teenage sons, Ahmed and Mohamed, were both killed. They did not suffer any bone fractures. The pressure from the bomb caused their internal organs to explode. It is amazing there were any survivors. Tawqfiq is still hospitalized, while his wife was blinded and his young daughter was severely burned. What apologies will matter to the wife or daughter, who are now permanently disfigured and disabled, whose tearful gazes pierced our lifeless cameras and shredded our notebooks full of numbers and statistics? What prospects for recovery or receiving advanced treatment do they have while Gaza is still under siege? I grasped for some condolence. The words are insufficient. We all have a responsibility to take stronger actions so that these tragedies will never happen again.



Joshua Brollier is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. He, Kathy Kelly and Johnny Barber are reporting for CounterPunch from Gaza. He can be reached at joshua@vcnv.org.

Does a Change of Status Change Anything Else for Palestine?

Palestine’s New Status: A History Rerun or a New Palestinian Strategy

by Ramzy Baroud - PalestineChronicle.com

Palestine has become a “non-member state” at the United Nations as of Thursday November 29, 2012.The draft of the UN resolution beckoning what many perceive as a historic moment passed with an overwhelming majority of General Assembly members: 138 votes in favor, nine against and 41 abstentions.

It was accompanied by a passionate speech delivered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But decades earlier, a more impressive and animated Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat sought international solidarity as well. The occasion then was also termed ‘historic’.

Empowered by Arab support at the Rabat Arab League summit in October 1974, which bestowed on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the ever-opaque title "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", Arafat was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly. Despite the fervor that accompanied the newly found global solidarity, Arafat's language signaled a departure from what was perceived by Western powers as radical and unrealistic political and territorial ambitions.

In his speech on November 13, Arafat spoke of the growing PLO’s legitimacy that compelled his actions: 

“The PLO has earned its legitimacy because of the sacrifice inherent in its pioneering role and also because of its dedicated leadership of the struggle. It has also been granted this legitimacy by the Palestinian masses .. The PLO has also gained its legitimacy by representing every faction, union or group as well as every Palestinian talent, either in the National Council or in people’s institutions...” 

The list went on, and, despite some reservations, each had a reasonable degree of merit.

The same however can hardly be said of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA), which exists as a result of an ambiguous ‘peace process’ nearly 20-years ago. It has all but completely destroyed the PLO’s once functioning institutions, redefined the Palestinian national project of liberation around a more ‘pragmatic’ – read self-serving – discourse that is largely tailored around self-preservation, absence of financial accountability and a system of political tribalism.

Abbas is no Yasser Arafat. But equality important, the Arafat of 1974 was a slightly different version of an earlier Arafat who was the leader of the revolutionary Fatah party. In 1974, Arafat made a statehood proposal that itself represented a departure from Fatah's own previous commitment to a ‘democratic state on all Palestine’. Arafat's revised demands contained the willingness to settle for "establishing an independent national state on all liberated Palestinian territory". While the difference between both visions may be attributed to a reinterpretation of the Palestinian liberation strategy, history showed that it was much more. 

Since that date and despite much saber-rattling by the US and Israel against Arafat’s ‘terrorism’ and such, the PLO under Arafat’s Fatah leadership underwent a decade-long scrutiny process, where the US placed austere demands in exchange for an American ‘engagement’ of the Palestinian leadership. This itself was the precondition that yielded Oslo and its abysmal consequences.

Arafat was careful to always sugarcoat any of his concessions with a parallel decision that was promoted to Palestinians as a national triumph of some sort. Back then there was no Hamas to stage a major challenge to the PLO’s policies, and Leftist groups within the PLO structure were either politically marginalized by Fatah or had no substantial presences among the Palestinian masses. The field was virtually empty of any real opposition, and Arafat’s credibility was rarely questioned. Even some of his opponents found him sincere, despite their protests against his style and distressing concessions.

The rise of the PLO’s acceptability in international arenas was demonstrated in its admission to the United Nations as a “non-state entity” with an observer status on Nov 22, 1974. The Israeli war and subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had the declared goal of destroying the PLO and was in fact aimed at stifling the growing legitimacy of the PLO regionally and internationally. Without an actual power base, in this case, Lebanon, Israeli leaders calculated that the PLO would either fully collapse or politically capitulate.

Weakened, but not obliterated, the post-Lebanon War PLO was a different entity than the one which existed prior to 1982. Armed resistance was no longer on the table, at least not in any practical terms. Such change suited some Arab countries just fine. A few years later, Arafat and Fatah were assessing the new reality from headquarters in Tunisia.

The political landscape in Palestine was vastly changing. A popular uprising (Intifada) erupted in 1987 and quite spontaneously a local leadership was being formed throughout the occupied territories. New names of Palestinian intellectuals were emerging. They were community leaders and freedom fighters that mostly organized around a new discourse that was created out of local universities, Israeli prisons and Palestinian streets. It was then that the legend of the Intifada was born with characters such as children with slingshots, mothers battling soldiers, and a massive reservoir of a new type of Palestinian fighter along with fresh language and discourse. Equally important, new movements were appearing from outside the traditional PLO confines. One such movement is Hamas, which has grown in numbers and political relevance in ways once thought impossible.

That reality proved alarming to the US, Israel and of course, the traditional PLO leadership. There were enough vested interests to reach a ‘compromise'. This naturally meant more concessions by the Palestinian leadership in exchange for some symbolic recompense by the Americans. The latter happily floated Israel’s trial balloons so that the Israeli leadership didn't appear weak or compromising. 

Two major events defined that stage of politics in 1988: On Nov 15, the PLO’s National Council (PNC) proclaimed a Palestinian state in exile from Algiers and merely two weeks later, US Ambassador to Tunisia Robert H. Pelletreau Jr., was designated as the sole American liaison whose mission was to establish contacts with the PLO. Despite the US’ declared objection of Arafat’s move, the US was in fact pleased to see that the symbolic declaration was accompanied by major political concessions. The PNC stipulated the establishment of an independent state on Palestinian 'national soil’ and called for the institution of “arrangements for security and peace of all states in the region” through a negotiated settlements at an international peace conference on the basis of UN resolution 242 and 338 and Palestinian national rights.

Although Arafat was repeatedly confronted by even more American demands – that truly never ceased until his alleged murder by poison in Ramallah in 2004 – the deceleration was the real preamble of the Oslo accords some few years later. Since, Palestinians have gained little aside from symbolic victories starting in 1988 when the UNGA “acknowledged” the Algiers proclamation. It then voted to replace the reference to the “Palestine Liberation Organization” with that of “Palestine”. And since then, it has been one symbolic victory after another, exemplified in an officially acknowledged Palestinian flag, postage stamps, a national anthem and the like. 

On the ground, the reality was starkly and disturbingly different: fledgling illegal Jewish settlements became fortified cities and a relatively small settler population now morphed to number over half a million settlers; Jerusalem is completely besieged by settlements, and cut off from the rest of the occupied territories; the Palestinian Authority established in 1994 to guide Palestinians towards independence became a permanent status of a Palestinian leadership that existed as far as Israel would permit it to exist; polarization caused by the corruption of the PA and its security coordination with Israel led to civil strife that divided the Palestinian national project between factional and self-serving agendas.

The support that ‘Palestine’ has received at the United Nations must be heartening, to say the least, for most Palestinians. The overwhelming support, especially by Palestine’s traditional supporters (most of humanity with few exceptions) indicates that the US hegemony, arm twisting and Israeli-US propaganda was of little use after all. However, that should not be misidentified as a real change of course in the behavior of the Palestinian Authority which still lacks legal, political and especially moral legitimacy among Palestinians who are seeking tangible drive towards freedom, not mere symbolic victories.

If Abbas thinks that obtaining a new wording for Palestine status at the UN would provide a needed political theater to justify another 20 years of utter failures, then time is surely to prove him wrong. If the new status, however, is used as a platform for a radically different strategy that would revitalize a haggard political discourse with the sole aim of unifying the ranks of all Palestinians around a new proud national project, then, there is something worth discussing. 

Indeed, it is not the new status that truly matters, but rather how it is interpreted and employed. While history is not exactly promising, the future will have the last word. 

– Ramzy Baroud (ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

Future Imperfect: Iran on the American Horizon

Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall: Washington’s Iranian Future

by Pepe Escobar - TomDispatch

In Election 2012’s theatre-of-the-absurd “foreign policy” debate, Iran came up no less than 47 times. Despite all the fear, loathing, threats, and lies in that billionaire’s circus of a campaign season, Americans were nonetheless offered virtually nothing substantial about Iran, although its (non-existent) WMDs were relentlessly hawked as the top U.S. national security issue. (The world was, however, astonished to learn from candidate Romney that Syria, not the Persian Gulf, was that country’s “route to the sea.”)

Now, with the campaign Sturm und Drang behind us but the threats still around, the question is: Can Obama 2.0 bridge the gap between current U.S. policy (we don't want war, but there will be war if you try to build a bomb) and Persian optics (we don't want a bomb -- the Supreme Leader said so -- and we want a deal, but only if you grant us some measure of respect)? Don’t forget that a soon-to-be-reelected President Obama signaled in October the tiniest of possible openings toward reconciliation while talking about the “pressure” he was applying to that country, when he spoke of “our policy of... potentially having bilateral discussions with the Iranians to end their nuclear program.”

Tehran won’t, of course, “end” its (legal) nuclear program. As for that “potentially,” it should be a graphic reminder of how the establishment in Washington loathes even the possibility of bilateral negotiations.

Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall

Let’s start with the obvious but important: on entering the Oval Office in January 2009, President Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable three-decade-long “Wall of Mistrust” in Iran-U.S. relations. To his credit, that March he directly addressed all Iranians in a message for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, calling for an “engagement that is honed and grounded in mutual respect.” He even quoted the thirteenth century Persian poet Sa’adi: “The children of Adam are limbs of one body, which God created from one essence.”

And yet, from the start he was crippled by a set of Washington misconceptions as old as that wall, and by a bipartisan consensus for an aggressive strategy toward Iran that emerged in the George W. Bush years when Congress ponied up $400 million for a set of “covert operations” meant to destabilize that country, including cross-border operations by special forces teams. All of this was already based on the dangers of “the Iranian bomb.”

A September 2008 report by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, was typical in assuming a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran as a fact. It was drafted by Michael Rubin from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the same AEI that had unashamedly promoted the disastrous 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Several future Obama advisers “unanimously approved” the report, including Dennis Ross, former senator Charles Robb, future Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, Anthony Lake, future U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, and Richard Clarke. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by all U.S. intelligence agencies stating that Iran had ended any nuclear weapons program in 2003 was bluntly dismissed.

Mirroring the Bush administration’s “all options are on the table” approach (including cyberwar), the report proposed -- what else? -- a military surge in the Persian Gulf, targeting “not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but also its conventional military infrastructure in order to suppress an Iranian response.” In fact, such a surge would indeed begin before George W. Bush left office and only increase in scope in the Obama years.

The crucial point is this: as tens of millions of U.S. voters were choosing Barack Obama in 2008, in part because he was promising to end the war in Iraq, a powerful cross-section of Washington elites was drafting an aggressive blueprint for a future U.S. strategy in the region that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia and that the Pentagon was then still calling the “arc of instability.” And the key plank in this strategy was a program to create the conditions for a military strike against Iran.

R.e.s.p.e.c.t.?

With an Obama 2.0 administration soon to be in place, the time to solve the immensely complex Iranian nuclear drama is now. But as Columbia University’s Gary Sick, a key White House adviser on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, has suggested, nothing will be accomplished if Washington does not start thinking beyond its ever-toughening sanctions program, now practically set in stone as “politically untouchable.”

Sick has proposed a sound path, which means that it has no hope of being adopted in Washington. It would involve private bilateral discussions by credible negotiators for both sides based on a mutually agreed-upon agenda. These would be followed by full-blown negotiations under the existing P5+1 framework (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- U.S., Russia, China, France, and Britain -- plus Germany).

Considering the frantic post-2009 seesawing of sanctions, threats, cyber attacks, military surges, and colossal mutual incomprehension, no one in his right mind would expect a pattern of “mutual respect” to emerge easily out of Washington’s “dual track” approach.

It took Ambassador Hossein Mousavian, research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and spokesperson for the Iranian nuclear negotiating team from 2003 to 2005, to finally explain it all last August in a single sentence: "The history of Iran's nuclear program suggests that the West is inadvertently pushing Iran toward nuclear weapons." Chas Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, agrees, suggesting in a recent speech that Iran now “seems to be reenacting Israel’s clandestine weapons development program of five decades ago, developing capabilities to build and deliver nuclear weapons while denying that it intends actually to do any such thing.”

What makes these developments even more absurd is that a solution to all this madness exists. As I’ve written elsewhere, to satisfy the concerns of the West regarding Iran's 20% stockpile of enriched uranium,

“a mutually acceptable solution for the long term would entail a ‘zero stockpile.’ Under this approach, a joint committee of the P5+1 and Iran would quantify the domestic needs of Iran for use of 20% enriched uranium, and any quantity beyond that amount would be sold in the international market or immediately converted back to an enrichment level of 3.5%. This would ensure that Iran does not possess excess 20% enriched uranium forever, satisfying the international concerns that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. It would be a face-saving solution for all parties as it would recognize Iran's right to enrichment and would help to negate concerns that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.”

Time to Hit the New Silk Road(s)

The current U.S. strategy is not exactly a raging success. Economist Djavad Salehi-Esfahani has explained how Tehran’s theocratic rulers continue to successfully manage the worst effects of the sanctions and a national currency in free fall by using the country’s immense oil and natural gas wealth to subsidize essential imports. Which brings us to the bedrock question of this -- or possibly any other -- moment: Will Obama 2.0 finally admit that Washington doesn’t need regime change in Tehran to improve its relationship with that country?

Only with such an admission (to itself, if not the world) are real negotiations leading to a Wall of Mistrust-blasting deal possible. This would undoubtedly include a genuine détente, an acceptance of Iran’s lawful pursuit of a peaceful nuclear program, guarantees that the result would not be a covert weapons project, and a turning away from the possibility of a devastating war in the Persian Gulf and the oil heartlands of the Greater Middle East.

Theoretically, it could also include something else: an Obama “Nixon in China” moment, a dramatic journey or gesture by the U.S. president to decisively break the deadlock. Yet as long as a barrage of furiously misinformed anti-Iran hawks in Washington, in lockstep with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government, deploy a relentless PR offensive burning with incendiary rhetoric, “red lines,” deadlines, and preemptive sabotage of the P5+1 negotiations, such a moment, such a gesture, will remain the faintest of dreams.

And even such an elusive “Obama in Tehran” moment would hardly be the end of the story. It would be more like a salutary twist in the big picture. To understand why, you need to grasp just how crucial Iran’s geopolitical positioning is. After all, in energy and other terms that country is the ultimate crossroads of Eurasia, and so the pivot of the world. Strategically, it straddles the supply lines for a sizeable part of the globe’s oil and gas reserves and is a privileged hub for the distribution of energy to South Asia, Europe, and East Asia at a moment when both China and India are emerging as potential great powers of the twenty-first century.

The urge to control that reality lies at the heart of Washington’s policy in the region, not an Iranian “threat” that pales as soon as the defense spending of the two countries is compared. After all, the U.S. spends nearly a $1 trillion on “defense” annually; Iran, a maximum of $12 billion -- less, that is, than the United Arab Emirates, and only 20% of the total defense expenditures of the six Persian Gulf monarchies grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Moreover, the Iranian nuclear “threat” would disappear for good if Obama 2.0 ever decided to push for making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. Iran and the GCC have endorsed the idea in the past. Israel -- a de facto (if never officially acknowledged) nuclear power with an arsenal of up to 300 warheads -- has rejected it.

Yet the big picture goes way beyond the strategic gaming of the U.S. and Israel about Iran’s possible future arsenal. Its position at the ultimate Southwest Asian strategic crossroads will determine much about the future New Great Game in Eurasia -- especially whose version of a modern Silk Road will prevail on the great energy chessboard I call Pipelineistan.

I’ve argued for years that all these intertwined developments must be analyzed together, including Washington’s announced Asian military “pivot” (aka “rebalancing”). That strategy, unveiled in early 2012 by President Obama, was supposed to refocus Washington’s attention away from its two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region with a special focus on containing China. Once again, Iran happens to lie right at the heart of that new policy, given how much of its oil and natural gas heads east to China over waters patrolled by the U.S. Navy.

In other words, it hardly matters that Iran is a rickety regional power run by aging theocrats with an only modestly impressive military. The relationship between Obama 2.0 and Iran is guaranteed to involve the nuclear question, but also (whether acknowledged or not) the global flow of energy across Pipelineistan, and Washington’s future relations with China and the rest of Asia. It will also involve Beijing’s concerted movements to prop up the yuan in relation to the dollar and, at the same time, accelerate the death of the petrodollar. Finally, behind all of the above lies the question of who will dominate Eurasia’s twenty-first century energy version of the old Silk Road.

At the 2012 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Tehran, India, Iran, and Afghanistan pushed for the creation of what might be called a new southern Silk Road -- really a network of roads, railways, and major ports that would connect Iran and its energy wealth ever more closely to Central and South Asia. For Delhi (as for Beijing), getting closer to both Afghanistan and especially Iran is considered crucial to its Eurasian strategy, no matter how much Washington may disapprove.

India is betting on the port of Chabahar in Iran, China on the port of Gwadar in Pakistan (and of course a gas pipeline from there to Iran) as key transshipment hubs linking Central Asia and the Gulf. Both ports will be key pawns in Pipelineistan’s New Great Game, which is quickly slipping from Washington’s control. In both cases, despite its drive to isolate Iran, there is little the Obama administration can do to prevent these and other instances of closer Eurasian integration.

Washington’s grand strategy for a “Greater Central Asia” under its control once centered on Afghanistan and India. Its disastrous Afghan War has, however, blown a hole through its plans; so, too, has its obsession with creating energy routes that bypass Iran (and Russia), which looks increasingly irrational to much of the rest of Eurasia. The only version of a Silk Road that the Obama administration has been able to devise has been war-related: the Northern Distribution Network, a logistical marathon of routes crisscrossing Central Asia for bringing military supplies into Afghanistan without relying fully on an increasingly unreliable Pakistan.

Needless to say, in the long term, Moscow will do anything to prevent a U.S./NATO presence in Central Asia. As with Moscow, so with Beijing, which regards Central Asia as a strategic rearguard area when it comes to its energy supply and a place for economic expansion as well. The two will coordinate their policies aimed at leaving Washington in the lurch through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That’s also how Beijing plans to channel its solution for eternally war-torn Afghanistan and so secure its long-term investments in mineral and energy exploitation. Ultimately, both Russia and China want post-2014 Afghanistan to be stabilized by the United Nations.

The ancient Silk Road was humanity’s first globalization highway centered on trade. Now, China in particular is pushing for its own ambitious version of a new Silk Road focused on tapping into energy -- oil and natural gas -- from Myanmar to Iran and Russia. It would, in the end, link no less than 17 countries via more than 8,000 kilometers of high-speed rail (on top of the 8,000 kilometers already built inside China). For Washington, this means one thing: an evolving Tehran-Beijing axis bent on ensuring that the U.S. strategic target of isolating Iran and forcing regime change on that country will be ever just out of reach.

Obama in Tehran?

So what remains of the initial Obama drive to reach out to Iran with an “engagement that is honed and grounded in mutual respect”? Not much, it seems.

Blame it -- once again -- on the Pentagon, for which Iran will remain a number one “threat,” a necessary enemy. Blame it on a bipartisan elite in Washington, supported by ranks of pundits and think tanks, who won’t let go of enmity against Iran and fear campaigns about its bomb. And blame it on an Israel still determined to force the U.S. into an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities that it desires. In the meantime, the U.S. military build-up in the Persian Gulf, already at staggering levels, goes on.

Somebody, it seems, has yet to break the news to Washington: we are in an increasingly multipolar world in which Eurasian powers Russia and China, and regional power Iran, simply won’t subscribe to its scenarios. When it comes to the New Silk Road(s) linking South Asia, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and China, whatever Washington’s dreams may be, they will be shaped and constructed by Eurasian powers, not by the United States.

As for an Obama 2.0 “Nixon in China” moment transplanted to Tehran? Stranger things have happened on this planet. But under the present circumstances, don’t hold your breath.



Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for al-Jazeera and the Russian network RT, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2012 Pepe Escobar

Passing: Oscar Niemeyer

Passing: Dave Brubeck

Leveson's Dog and Pony Show Reveals Little

Leveson’s Punch And Judy Show Masks Hacking On A Scale You Can Barely Imagine

by John Pilger

Information Clearing House - In the week Lord Leveson published almost a million words about his inquiry into the “culture, practice and ethics” of Britain’s corporate press, two illuminating books about media and freedom were also published. Their contrast with the Punch and Judy show staged by Leveson is striking.

For 36 years, Project Censored, based in California, has documented critically important stories unreported or suppressed by the media most Americans watch or read. This year’s report is Censored 2013: Dispatches from the media revolution by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (Seven Stories Press). They describe the omissions of “mainstream” journalism as “history in the un-making”. Unlike Leveson, their investigation demonstrates the sham of a system claiming to be free. Among their top 25 censored stories are these:

The emerging police and prison state

Since 2001, the United States has erected a police state apparatus including a presidential order that allows the US military to detain anyone indefinitely without trial. FBI agents are now responsible for the majority of terrorist plots, with a network of 15,000 spies “encouraging and assisting people to commit crimes”. Informants receive cash rewards of up to $100,000.

War crimes, al-Qaida and drug money

The bombing of civilian targets in Libya in 2011 was often deliberate and included the main water supply facility that provided water to 70 per cent of the population. In Afghanistan, the murder of 16 unarmed civilians, including children, attributed to one rogue US soldier, was actually committed by “multiple” soldiers, and covered up. In Syria, the US, Britain and France are funding and arming the icon of terrorism, al-Qaida. In Latin America, one US bank has laundered $378bn. in drug money.

In Britain, this world of subjugated news and information is concealed behind a similar façade of a “free” media, which promotes the extremisms of state corruption and war, consumerism and an impoverishment known as “austerity”. Leveson devoted his “inquiry” to the preservation of this system. My favourite laugh-out-loud quote of His Lordship is: “I have seen no basis at any stage for challenging the integrity of the police.”

Those who have long tired of deconstructing the clichés and deceptions of “news” say: “At least there is the internet now.”

Yes, there is, but for how long? Alfred W. McCoy, the great American chronicler of imperialism, quotes Obama in one of the recent election debates. “We need to be thinking about cyber security,” said Obama. “We need to be thinking about space.” McCoy calls this revolutionary. 

 

“Not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words,” he wrote. “Yet, for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution … moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyber warfare, the weaponisation of space [and] a breakthrough in what’s called ‘information warfare’.”

This is about “hacking” on a vast scale by the state and its intelligence and military arms and “security” corporations. It was unmentionable at the Leveson inquiry, even though the internet was within Leveson’s remit. It is the subject of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the future of the internet by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmermann (OR Books). That the Guardian, a principal gatekeeper of liberal debate in Britain, should describe their published conversation as “dystopian musings” is unsurprising. Understanding what they have to say is to abandon the vicarious as journalism and embrace the real thing.

“The internet was supposed to be a civilian space,” Assange writes. “[It] is our space, because we all use it to communicate with each other and with members of our family … Ten years ago [mass interception] was seen to be a fantasy, something only paranoid people believed in” but now the internet is becoming “a militarized zone.” 

 

When everyone can be intercepted en masse, spying on individuals is redundant. Stasi, the East German secret police, “penetrated” 10 per cent of East Germany society. Today, the cost of intercepting and storing all telephone calls in Germany in a year is less than eight million euros. More than 175 companies now sell the surveillance of whole countries. A whistleblower at the giant US telecommunications company AT&T has disclosed that the National Security Agency (NSA) allegedly took every phone call, every internet connection. The NSA intercepts 1.6 bn. personal communications every day.

To the “national security state”, of which the US is the pioneer and model, “perpetual war” is a given; and the public are the enemy -- not terrorists. Google, Facebook and Twitter are all based in the US. In December 2010, Twitter was ordered by the Justice Department to surrender its clients’ personal information relevant to the Obama administration’s pursuit of WikiLeaks, no matter where in the world people lived. Obama has pursued twice as many whistleblowers as all US presidents combined. This is why Assange and Bradley Manning are targets – along with those rare journalists who do their job and publish in the public interest. Like Assange they, too, are liable to be prosecuted for espionage, regardless of what the US Constitution says. A whistleblower at the NSA, Bill Binney, describes this as “turnkey totalitarianism”.

The iniquity of Rupert Murdoch was not his “influence” over the Tweedledees and Tweedledums in Downing Street, nor the thuggery of his eavesdroppers, but the augmented barbarism of his media empire in promoting the killing, suffering and dispossession of countless men, women and children in America’s and Britain’s illegal wars.

Murdoch has plenty of respectable accomplices. The liberal Observer was as rabid a devotee of the Iraq invasion. When Tony Blair gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, bleating about the media’s harassment of his wife, he was interrupted by a filmmaker, David Lawley-Wakelin, who described him as a war criminal. At that, Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Such an exquisite display of irony is contemptuous of all of us.

www.johnpilger.com

 

Endgame for Syria Opening for Iran?

 

West Moves in for Syrian Endgame and War on Iran

by Finian Cunningham - RT

 

US President Barack Obama’s renewed warning against Syria this week, that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces is a red line triggering direct military assault on the country, can be seen as the Western powers moving towards their endgame of “regime change.”

 

After 21 months of international conspiracy, the American-led propaganda war on Syria seems to be moving towards the endgame of providing the political cover for direct Western military attack on that unfortunate country. This is, of course, outrageously criminal. But it is entirely predictable from the bigger picture strategic agenda of Washington and its allies: to roll over the anti-imperialist Syrian enemy, install a pliable pro-Western regime, and then pave the way for the next round of war in the region - against Iran.

Washington first raised the specter of Syrian chemical weapons several months ago and warned then that it would be forced to act militarily in order to “secure” such alleged stockpiles.

Now the American president and his officials are rekindling fears of this contingency, with the added alleged development that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad has become so desperate to survive that it is preparing to mobilize chemical warheads.

Speaking in Washington, Obama upbraided the Syria government that “the world is watching” and that there would be “consequences” for any such deployment.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton echoed the warning and described the use of these weapons as “a red line.” Tellingly, she added that if there is “any evidence” that the Syrian military had begun to use chemical warheads then “we are certainly planning to take action.”

Various Western media reported that American officials have over the past week stepped up contact with counterparts in other Western states to formulate a military response. This is said to include limited air strikes and the dispatch of thousands of ground forces.

Previously, the US and other Western governments had declined to commit military forces to Syria, as they had done in Libya last year, preferring the covert option of proxy forces, including Persian Gulf Arab weapon suppliers and mercenary fighters. That calculus seems to be now changing.

The first point to note from above is that the allegations of Syria mobilizing chemical weapons are stemming from unnamed and unverifiable American military intelligence sources, who have been busily briefing, anonymously, the major news media organizations, including CNN and the New York Times. These “reports” are then amplified by other Western media outlets, such as the Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

This is the same process of disinformation that set Iraq up for an illegal nine-year war of aggression, beginning in 2003 - with over one million people killed - over that country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It is the same scurrilous, criminal process that has set up Iran up for crippling - and illegal - economic sanctions over unfounded allegations of nuclear weapons, which are in turn fuelling tensions towards a possible all-out war on the Islamic Republic.

That’s why Obama and Clinton’s latest warning words to Syria are ominous. “The world is watching… for any evidence of chemical weapons.” In other words, the world is being prepared for a “shocking revelation” by American and Western spy agencies and ventriloquist media, who are about as trustworthy as a nest of scorpions and rattlesnakes.

The second point to note is that the Syrian government has repeatedly denied possession of chemical weapons and that if it had such munitions it would not deploy them against its own citizens.

Apart from the CIA and other anonymous secret service agents doing their best through trusty media outlets to whip up hysteria about sarin, VX, mustard gas and other horrors, the other tactic by Western forces is to portray the Damascus government as increasingly panicky and therefore sufficiently under duress that it would resort to such weapons.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told media, “We believe that with the regime’s grip on power loosening, with its failure to put down the opposition through conventional means, we have an increased concern about the possibility of the regime taking the desperate act of using its [alleged] chemical weapons.”

Well, a big part of the reason unmentioned by the White House for why the Syrian military is failing to put down the opposition is because of the criminal, massive flow of weapons, funds, logistics, mercenaries and covert personnel that the American government and its Western allies and regional proxies have been funneling into Syria.

There is no doubting that after 21 months of unrelenting violence, the Western-backed insurgents and foreign mercenaries are taking a heavy toll on Syrian society and the Damascus government’s control.

Reports of recent significant military gains by the foreign-backed militants have indeed intensified efforts by the government to maintain its authority over the ravaged country.

In particular, American-made surface-to-air missiles, reportedly supplied by Qatar and also possibly Saudi Arabia, appear to have lately given the anti-government militants crucial extra firepower and important tactical and territorial advantages.

Western military sources are reportedly of the view that the Syrian national army and air force retain the upper-hand and are too strong to be seriously threatened with defeat.

Nevertheless, with the Western-fomented havoc wreaking Syria - up to 700,000 refugees, five million displaced, 30-50,000 dead out of a population of 20 million - it is all too easy to portray and perceive an atmosphere of doom and desperation, which is then cited by the White House and its anonymous media agents as a “tipping point” for the imminent deployment of alleged chemical weapons of mass destruction.

To this end, there seems to be a concerted effort in the past few days to convey the image of a country falling apart.

Turkish officials have disclosed that it was fears that Syria may use chemical weapons against opposition militants on its border areas that prompted Ankara to request the supply of Patriot anti-missile systems in the coming weeks.

Both the UN and the European Union are reported as closing down activities in Syria on grounds of “security concerns” and both organizations are said to be preparing for the imminent evacuation of all staff from the country.

Regional airlines, including Egypt Air and Dubai’s Emirates Airline, have this week cancelled regular services to Syria on the basis of “safety concerns”. Both countries, it should be noted, are firmly in the Western geopolitical camp of demanding Assad’s overthrow.

Last weekend, the Syrian population was cut off from telecommunications in a three-day blackout that was blamed on sabotage. That too is serving to heighten an atmosphere of duress that the Western powers can cite as “evidence” that the Syrian authorities are “preparing to use chemical weapons”.

Originally from Belfast, Ireland, Finian Cunningham (born 1963) is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio. More Press TV articles by Finian Cunningham

 

Peace and Justice as Defined by Their Trespassers

 

Justice and Peace as Defined by the Jewish State

by William A. Cook

“As for the rights of Jewish people in this land, I have a simple message for those people gathered in the General Assembly today, no decision by the U.N. can break the 4,000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel." (Ron Prosor, United Nations Ambassador from Israel, November 29, 2012)

In today’s world a tragic hero is a representative figure who stands before us as one speaking for his people, an Ambassador if you will, addressing the citizens of the world at the United Nations, enunciating the beliefs and demands of his nation as they must confront an event of great magnitude that appears to represent a reversal of their fortunes.

Such a figure is Ronald Prosor, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations on November 29th, 2012, as he addresses the assembled delegates before their vote on the recognition of the state of Palestine: “No decision by the UN can break the 4,000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel,” he arrogantly proclaimed, thereby determining that no decision by the UN can alter the absolute dictates of the state of Israel as they have impacted the desires and hopes and dreams of the citizens of the world regarding peace and justice in the land of Palestine.

That statement must stand as an articulated hamartia, a mistake of moral blindness, capturing in its hubris the downfall of a noble nation. Before the citizens of the world, Prosor demanded that Israel alone must determine what peace and justice will be, knowing beforehand that the UN, in General Assembly, would momentarily act to question the legitimacy of Israel’s unilateral defiance of its decrees. The vote to recognize the rights of the people of Palestine, by electing it to the forum of nation states, proclaims to all that they are equal to all assembled and can use the powers vested in the UN to bring their oppressors and occupiers before the International Courts of Justice and to seek redress for the rights denied them under its charters. No longer can they be shackled to the demands of either the United States or Israel. Now they can address the UN as victims of an aggressive nation that has defied more than 160 of its Resolutions since 1948 by imposing with force conditions inimical to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which it is a signatory.

Prosor unveiled the true nature of the state of Israel, revealing at its core a total repugnance for the world organization of which it is a member, albeit a fraudulent one, that openly defies its international laws and the rights it proclaims for the people of the world. Thus does Israel stand naked before the world as a nation that threatens its sister nations with actions that it will determine regardless of the will of the UN. Such threats, made in advance of the vote, ennobles the UN since it proclaims that the moral responsibility it addressed with its vote must now be the basis for future responses to the aggrieved people of Palestine. The arrogance of Prosor’s declaration was made with the intention of changing the votes of the sister nations or in full knowledge that Israel would defy their action.

Acceptance of the consequences sets the destiny of the state of Israel as it moves through the halls of the United Nations aware that it has openly defied the vast majority of its neighbors throughout the world. This action could result in a change of fortune if the Israeli state recognizes that it must conform to the will of its sister nations and accept their determination of rights and justice, not theirs, “a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate” (Aristotle).

On November 29th, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly proposed the division of Mandate Palestine into two states for two peoples. Between that date and May 15, 1948, the date assigned to the British Mandate government to leave Palestine, the Jewish armies began a systematic destruction of Palestinian Arab towns and villages (see All That Remains). A total of 418 such areas were destroyed, bulldozed and eradicated, including a calculated expulsion of the inhabitants (an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 people) and the massacring of their people, approximately 23 such massacres as listed by the Israeli historian Dr. Benny Morris in his recent text, Righteous Victims, the deplorable extent of which can be witnessed through the eyes of the Jewish Agency and its military forces as described by Dr. Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On November 29th, 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognize the existence of a Palestinian State, 64 years after the Jewish armies attempted to eliminate the Arabs from Mandate Palestine.

This historic vote, including the 41 abstentions, is concrete recognition that the people of Palestine should have their own state, acceptance, one might observe, that 188 nations of the 193 member states of the UN realize the injustice that the Palestinian people have suffered under the occupation by the self-proclaimed Jewish State. Arguably those abstaining reacted to the coercion leveled at them by the United States and Israel. Indeed, given the United Kingdom’s attempt to force the Palestinian delegation to abjure any avenue to legal recourse against the occupying state through the International Court of Justice or the UNHRC reflects the amoral behavior of the nation that caused the debacle in the first place through its unjustified Balfour Declaration.

Hence the importance that must be directed to the speech given by the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Ron Prosor, as he commands the member states of the United Nations to reject the application submitted by Mr. Abbas or face the consequences of not abiding by the dictates of Israel and its puppet the United States. Prosor applies three areas of fundamental and irrefutable Israeli logic to his argument: one historical, the second religious, and the third arrogance, as he threatens the representatives of 193 Nations with potentially catastrophic consequences if Israeli definitions and logic do not determine the outcome.

Let us entertain each in sequence. Historical: these are Prosor’s words;

“President Abbas described today’s proceedings as “historic”. But the only thing historic about his speech is how that 65 years ago today, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate into two states: a Jewish state, and an Arab state. Two states for two peoples.” 

Mark that he fails to mention this inconvenient truth that the minute the UN recommended its Partition Plan in November of 1947, Israeli forces not only ignored the proposal, they defied it. Ironically that defiance followed six years of terrorism against the British Mandate government, whose authority was granted by both the League of Nations and the new United Nations , the international body responsible for proposing the existence of an Israeli state. Nor does Prosor mention yet another inconvenient truth, the deception showered on President Truman as the deadline for the Mandate authorities termination neared, details of which can be found in my article “A Nation Born in Deception,” April 27, 2010. That omission avoided mentioning that the clandestine government fighting against Britain had no intentions of partitioning the land of Palestine. Indeed, in documents now available in The Plight of the Palestinians, documents seized by the Mandate authorities from the Jewish Agency and classified as Top Secret, it is clear that the Jews intended to eradicate every Arab living in Palestine.

But Prosor continues his tirade against the Palestinians, “Israel accepted this plan. The Palestinians and Arab nations around us rejected it and launched a war of annihilation to throw the "Jews into the sea".” How can he assert that Israel accepted this plan when they were, in November, planning and executing the eradication of hundreds of Palestinian towns and the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands, not to mention the expropriation of land they did not own? Tragic deception before an international audience!

Prosor continues his harangue:

“They have never been willing to accept what this very body recognized 65 years ago. Israel is the Jewish state. . . Not only do you not recognize the Jewish state, you are also trying to erase Jewish history. This year, you even tried to erase the connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. You said that Jews were trying to alter the historic character of Jerusalem. You said that we are trying to "Judaize Jerusalem".”

There is an inconvenient truth avoided here: Prosor fails to mention that the very Balfour Declaration he relies on as granting the existence of a homeland for Jews does not establish a Jewish State. Witness this statement by the British authorities as noted in the Command Paper 1922 from the Avalon Project at Yale University:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is no part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”

This statement was later confirmed by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947:
"Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English. His Majesty's Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab delegation, the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.”

One final historical reference should be part of this discussion. “65 years ago the Palestinians could have chosen to live side-by-side with the Jewish State of Israel. 65 years ago they could have chosen to accept the solution of two states for two peoples. They rejected it then, and they are rejecting it again today.” Prosor, as he does consistently throughout this talk, omits the truth. Consider the reality of the conditions in 1947 as the UN committee met to address the issue of the two peoples living in peace side by side. Witness these observations:

“75. Few phrases in history have provoked such lasting contention as "Jewish National Home." Twenty years after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the Royal Commission devoted a chapter63/ of its report to a careful appraisal of the relevant texts and historical antecedents in order to clarify the meaning of the phrase.

“76. Regarding the political implications of the term "National Home," the finding of the Commission is unequivocal:

"We have been permitted to examine the records which bear upon the question and it is clear to us that the words "the establishment in Palestine of the National Home' were the outcome of a compromise between those Ministers who contemplated the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State and those who did not. It is obvious in any case that His Majesty's Government could not commit itself to the establishment of the Jewish State. It could only undertake to facilitate the growth of a Home.”

Prosor provides but one perspective about the recognition of Palestine by the UN, don’t, it is contrary to the Israeli State’s best interests, after all they have had 64 years to arrive at a settlement and they have succeeded in preventing a resolution to peace (see Dr. Jeff Halper’s, “Israel is the Problem,” in The Plight of the Palestinians, for a discussion of 19 failed attempts).

Consider Prosor’s second attempt to justify the existence of the state of Israel couched in biblical terms: “Peace is a central value of Israeli society. The bible calls on us: “seek peace and pursue it.” He continues to give substance to his point by noting, “Peace fills our art and poetry. It is taught in our schools. It has been the goal of the Israeli people and every Israeli leader since Israel was re-established 64 years ago.” How unfortunate then that the instruction in the schools and the efforts of Israeli leaders have failed year after year. Perhaps it’s the responsibility of the Palestinians to usher in peace that the admonition of the Israeli G-d might be fulfilled. Certainly it is understandable that a quid pro quo should exist as negotiations for a lasting peace, based on the biblical directive, could be achieved.

Today the populations of Israel and that of the Palestinians is relatively comparable hovering in the vicinity of 7 million each. The Jewish state controls over 93 % of the land for Jews only constituting about 84% of Mandate Palestine. That leaves about 14% for the Palestinians. Would an objective observer see the enormity of this discrimination and find it Israel’s responsibility to give something for peace? What in the way of land does the new state of Palestine have to offer in exchange? Water? Ocean frontage? Gas reserves possible now off the Gazan coast since they are now recognized as a state? Internal highways to facilitate transportation? None of the above? Israel controls all water in the West Bank and controls all egress and ingress to Gaza, including access from the Mediterranean. Israel has highways for Jews only throughout Palestine and what Israel considers Israel; Palestinians can only drive on unimproved roads checked often at military checkpoints.

Let’s face it, there is nothing the Palestinians can barter with except these three items: a. Palestine must recognize the right of the Jewish state to exist and to accept it as a Jewish State; b. it must stop violence against Israel; and c. it must be a demilitarized state accepting Israeli security needs. Realistically, recognition of the State of Israel as a Jewish State denies the rights of 20% of its Arab Israeli population; it also assumes that by implication that Israel is an apartheid state, something no western democracy should support much less a mid-eastern state. The second demand makes no mention of a reciprocal action by Israel to cease and desist from all violence against Palestine. Why can Israel argue that every incursion into Gaza, every new settlement with government approval of settler violence is labeled self-defense or required for security purposes while Palestinians, who have no military, has no means of securing their people from the ravages of the IDF. Why should Palestine be “demilitarized” while the state with the fourth largest military in the world rides rough shod over their borders, confiscates their land, bulldozes down homes, businesses, and schools? Saying the words mean truth does not make it so.

Prosor continues by reference to Israel’s Declaration of Independence which states, “We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help...” What he does not say is that Israel does not have a Constitution that commands its government to be such a neighbor. The Declaration has no power over the government of Israel. But consider the truth of Prosor’s statement. Israel has invaded all of its neighbors over the years and occupies some of their lands to this day: Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. It has invaded in recent years Lebanon in 2006, Gaza in 2008-9, Syria by bombing its purported nuclear plant, and before that Iraq’s , it sinks or takes control of international shipping including the illegal attack on the Turkish ship the Mavi Mamara with the resulting assassination of nine innocent people. Saying the words mean truth does not make it so.

Finally, it is important that we not lose sight of the root cause of the Israeli state’s claim that it has an “Historical Right” to the land of Palestine. This thought is imbedded in Prosor’s statement, “the 4,000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel.” Consider the reality of this claim in light of 4000 years of millions of diverse peoples living in this geographic area. The God of ancient Judaism existed in the minds and hearts of a few thousands of people, estimated at 20,000-40,000 at the time of the Exodus. New research notes: “Instead of the Exodus happening in the 13th century, when the estimated population of the Israelites numbered somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000, it never happened as told about the Israelites. It was recorded in the 7th century using ancient stories gathered together into a “history” of the Israelites to aid Josiah in creating his dream kingdom.” The god of Israel, like the gods throughout ancient cultures, was a creation to address conditions of the times, a means of understanding self in a world beyond comprehension, a world that could give meaning to the citizens of a place. For contemporary society to direct their future through the eyes of ancient peoples, a pitifully small percentage of the population in the seventh century BCE, when the populations of the planet exceeds seven billion is to exercise a futile gesture not only in logic but in fairness to all peoples.

Consider that Prosor’s observation, “the 4000 year-old-bond…” implies a continuity of Jewish domination in the land. It is not so. If “King David” conquered the tribes and city states of Canaan in 1000 BCE (a date still in dispute), a kingdom of small numbers, approximately 300,000 that lasted until 722, that’s about 278 years. Following that date Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Seleucian’s controlled much of Palestine. In 586 Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. In 331 Alexander the Great conquered the Persians. In 61 BC the Romans invaded Judea and sacked Jerusalem. The Romans maintained control through 400AD. In 600 Arab armies conquered the mid-east and kept control until the end of the first World War. At the beginning of the 20th century there were approximately 85,000 Jews resident in Palestine. Add to this diverse population and control history the work of Dr. Schlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, and it becomes markedly absurd for the nations of the world to be controlled by a mythological god of a small tribe that existed in the Canaan area 3000 years ago.

International Law and the creation of a world body to aid in the direction of nation states to live in peace and justice under defined conditions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charters of the UN suggests that Israel must change, it must recognize that it is not the sole determiner of world events, that it has lifted its beliefs beyond those that exist elsewhere in the world and it must, therefore, reverse its direction to become one with its neighbors and all the nations of the UN. No longer can it use ruthless force to attain its ends, no longer can it run to the US veto to maintain impunity in crime, no longer must the people of Palestine be ignored, no longer can this world body live with the lies, the distortions, the deceit used by the Jewish nation to control all the peoples of the earth.



William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He has written numerous books on the mid-east including Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Plight of the Palestinians, and his most recent work Decade of Deceit, 2002-2012: Reflections on Palestine. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or through his web site at www.drwilliamacook.com.