Tony Blair, Phantom of the Opera

The scum of the Earth go unpunished

By Pepe Escobar, Cross-posted from RT

The fact that the Phantom (Tony Blair) keeps getting away with his vast desert of convoluted lies — instead of languishing in some rotten, extraordinary rendition hotel — spells out all we need to know about so-called Western “elites,” of which he’s been a faithful, and handsomely rewarded, servant.

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His most recent opus speaks for itself; like a Kabuki mask high on Earl Grey tea, the Phantom is eviscerated by his own mighty pen — actually — sword.

The fact that the Phantom keeps getting away with his vast desert of convoluted lies — instead of languishing in some rotten, extraordinary rendition hotel — spells out all we need to know about so-called Western “elites,” of which he’s been a faithful, and handsomely rewarded, servant.

So Western “inaction” in Syria has led to the latest Iraq tragedy? Sorry, Tony; it was yours and “Dubya’s” 2003 Shock and Awe “action” that set the whole Shakespearean tragedy in motion.

The Phantom always wanted the Obama administration to bomb Syria, as much as he labored for “Dubya” to destroy Iraq. Phantom logic never considered that would have installed in Damascus the same Islamic State of Iraqi and the Levant (ISIL) that is now making a push towards Baghdad.

Then there’s the gift that keeps on giving — the endlessly recycled, repackaged Global War on Terror (GWOT), of which the Phantom was the prime sidekick. So Phantom had to be on board the latest US craze — which brands ISIL as the avatar of a new 9/11.

In Syria, Phantom has been one of the prime instigators of the “rebel with a cause” ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra-infested gang. If the Phantom’s bombing logic had won in Syria — he was preaching Damascus as a replay of 2003 Baghdad — Aleppo would be, for a while now, an avatar of Mosul.

The deeper we get into it, the Phantom looks and sounds like the heir of — also clueless — British commanders in 19th century Afghanistan. Look, for instance, at this unintended consequence of the 2001 American bombing of Afghanistan; now we have Hazaras — Afghan Shi’ites — fighting side by side with Iranians, alongside Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army, against the Phantom-supported Syrian “rebels.” Oh Tony; not even your old cohort Peter “Lord of Darkness” Mandelson could have explained that.

iraqUSoperationsBy the way, the Phantom has always been a firm believer in the “evil” of Iran, constantly “warning” that Tehran was on the verge of assembling a nuclear weapon (old habits — as in the Phantom’s Saddam syndrome — die hard.) So imagine his Dick Cheney-worthy stupor when Washington and Tehran are on the verge of discussing in Vienna the set up of some sort of joint action to fight ISIL in Iraq, and even “uber-hawks” such as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham utter the unimaginable words, “We are probably going to need [Iran’s] help to hold Baghdad.”

The Phantom would be incapable of connecting the geopolitical dots from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria; the bottom line he would be unable to identify is that there is absolutely no strategic, long-term Anglo-American foreign policy project in what the Pentagon still calls the “arc of instability.” If there ever was a motto, it was “Dubya’s… “you’re either with us or with the terrorists.” A motto turned on its head, because until this very moment Anglo-American power was “with the terrorists,” from Libya to Syria; a predictable perversion of time-tested Divide and Rule.

The Obama administration is going no-holds-barred to get a SOFA in Afghanistan — code for Enduring Freedom forever (with “discreet” Special Forces as the invisible stars.) Washington has already admitted it is sending lethal “assistance” to “moderate” rebels in Syria (as, in theory, the Islamic Front goons, not Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIL). As if Hollywoodish CIA assets wouldn’t know that these weapons will certainly be bought and/or stolen by hardcore jihadis.

ISIL in the borderless desert between Syria and Iraq is already a proto-Caliphate. Blowback from this weaponizing of so-called “moderates” — there are no “moderates,” as there are no Taliban “moderates” — will be no less than staggering. Victims include Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran; Turkmen in Iraq (as it’s already happening this week); and of course Christians all over (as it already happened in Syria).

Bomb them into democracy, againThe Phantom now is preaching for American “intervention” in Iraq; first you starve them; then you bomb them into a wasteland and call it “democracy”; then you occupy them; then you infest them with jihadis; then they kick you out; then the jihadis raise hell (now flush with $425 million stolen from a government vault in Mosul, apart from loads of cash from Wahhabis in the Gulf to buy all those white Toyotas and RPGs); then you re-occupy them softly. It IS the gift that keeps on giving.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces run for cover after an Iraqi army helicopter mistook them for militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Jalawla in the Diyala province, on June 14, 2014. (AFP Photo / Rick Findler) As for the notion — equally peddled by the Phantom and US neo-cons — that ISIL is a threat to Western security (“trying to do harm to Europe, to America and other people,” in Kerry’s words). That’s nonsense; a joke as monumental as that maze of American satellites incapable of tracking a long line of white Toyotas advancing in the Western Iraqi desert — leading to the swift disintegration of four Iraqi army divisions.

They saw it, they tracked it, and they kept mum. That’s straight from the Empire of Chaos’s playbook. Why not advance murderous “Divide and Rule” between Sunnis and Shiites? Let them eat corpses — and kill each other to kingdom come, as in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

ISIL’s push is a remix of the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war of 2006-2007, whose effects, pre-American surge, I documented in my reportage book Red Zone Blues. At the time, it was all centered in Baghdad; when al-Qaeda in Iraq took over the Dora neighborhood in Baghdad, that lasted only a short while. Sunnis themselves rebelled against the medieval jihadi “worldview.”

The Phantom, anyway, got his wish; Iraq is for all practical purposes broken, irretrievably fragmented, and cannot be “fixed” (Colin Powell’s terminology). The Kurds have already solved one of the most intractable problems of post-Shock and Awe; they’ve already rearranged Sykes-Picot by taking over oil-rich Kirkuk (not to mention the Nineveh plateau).

And as further proof ISIL has nothing to do with a threat to Western security, the tanks and heavy artillery they captured in Iraq were redirected to Syria, in their push to fight Damascus.

This is all too much for the Phantom to digest. Perhaps he should start by reading this — as in Iraqi works rejecting everything that happened even before 2003, and even before the Phantom’s limelight moment.

As for the Phantom’s key argument that what’s happening now in Iraq is the result of less — and not more — Western warmongering, call it phantom hubris. The “Middle East” — in fact Southwest Asia — is a Western fiction imposed by colonial powers on the local populations. What the Pentagon described since the early 2000s as the “arc of instability” is a self-fulfilling projection of anarchy, with some patches of “peace” represented by those repellent GCC petro-monarchies (after we need “our” oil).

And then there’s the slowly but surely inevitable process of progressive integration of Eurasia — along the myriad, Chinese-driven new silk roads. That’s anathema for the empire of chaos and its “special relationship” minion. So Southwest Asia in perpetual chaos is more than welcomed. Expect the hubristic Phantom to call for increased fuel to be added to this Western-concocted opera already on fire.


Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His regular column, “The Roving Eye,” is widely read. He is an analyst for the online news channel Real News, the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.  He argues that the world has become fragmented into “stans” — we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. He has published three books on geopolitics, including the spectacularly-titled “Globalistan: How the Globalised World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War”.  His latest book is “Obama Does Globalistan.”



Freedom Rider: America’s War Crime in Iraq

ObamaMaskOnBush

By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Iran is now more of a “frenemy” because it supports Iraqi president Maliki against the ISIS threat.”

Beginning in 1991 the United States government brought what has become a never ending hell to Iraq. President George H.W. Bush’s war that year was followed by devastating sanctions which were continued by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It was bad enough that 500,000 children died because of shortages of food and medicine but in 2003 Bush the younger and his henchmen and women rolled the dice on invasion and an occupation that lasted for more than ten years. The Project for a New American Century, the 21st century version of Manifest Destiny, demanded a Pax Americana which set out to make the United States the master of the world.

It is unfortunate that Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and company became the only faces of American aggression. They are indeed responsible for the 2003 invasion but imperialism is still on the move and now has a more shrewd personification in the person of Barack Obama.

The corporate media have quite a lot to answer for in their reporting of the Iraqi and American relationship. They take their cue from whoever is in the White House and repeat what countless spokespeople tell them to write and to broadcast. After having accepted the Bush administration policy of embedding journalists with American troops, Iraq was then ignored and disappeared from the consciousness of this country. Recent events have made Iraq a focus of attention once again and the news is still terrible for the people of that country.

“The history of American and Saudi collusion to destabilize that region is a long and sad tale.”

ISIS, translated into English as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is the latest head of the fundamentalist Jihadi hydra created by the United States and gulf monarchies. ISIS is making huge territorial gains as the Iraqi army collapses in its wake. The history of American and Saudi collusion to destabilize that region is a long and sad tale. For many years these partners in crime have left a trail of death and devastation in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria as well as in Iraq.

Now the propaganda that Americans have been fed by two presidents and their helpers in the press is falling apart. They have to explain why Iran, a country depicted as our mortal enemy, may end up saving the Iraqi government. Iran has also been devastated by United States sanctions and its very destruction has been openly advocated by Israel and numerous administrations and members of Congress. Iran is now more of a “frenemy” because it supports Iraqi president Maliki against the ISIS threat.

After the deaths of one million people, after the hellish destruction of Fallujah, after the babies deformed by depleted uranium, Iraqis are again fleeing from the disaster of American intervention. As politicians are trotted out to defend their lies and the likes of Tony Blair attempt to deflect responsibility for their evil acts, it is important to remember the extent of the decades long crime.

The press [15] and politicians may speak in terms of the 5,000 American lives lost or the astronomical sums spent, but it is the ongoing war of American terror that must be remembered.

The depiction of George W. Bush as the villain of bad judgment and lies is certainly true, but America’s violence and commission of war crimes should be the central issue when Iraq is discussed so that Democratic Party imperialists aren’t permitted to do likewise.

“They have to explain why Iran, a country depicted as our mortal enemy, may end up saving the Iraqi government.”

Very few Americans remember that millions of people around the world foresaw the calamity and acted to try and prevent it. Not only were there huge protests in many nations but there was serious discussion of the extent of American criminality. The World Tribunal on Iraq [16] held a series of meetings from November 2003 through June 2005 in New York, London, Rome, Lisbon, Stockholm, Mumbai, Tunis, Hiroshima, Beirut and other cities. The culminating session in Istanbul produced a Declaration of the Jury of Conscience [17] which spelled out in stark detail the violations of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremburg Principles. The tribunal spared no one, condemning the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom for acts of aggression and the United Nations Security Council for its inaction. One of the tribunal’s charges is particularly prescient:

“Engaging in policies to wage permanent war on sovereign nations. Syria and Iran have already been declared as potential targets. In declaring a ‘global war on terror,’ the US government has given itself the exclusive right to use aggressive military force against any target of its choosing. Ethnic and religious hostilities are being fueled in different parts of the world.”

As the politicians and pundits scramble for cover remember the words of the tribunal. Barack Obama knows that Bush was condemned more for sending American troops to fight overseas than for the substance of what he did. Obama can’t be allowed to use ISIS and similar groups to attack Syria without also paying a price. Democrats can’t defend Obama’s destruction of Libya or carrying out “kill list” assassinations without being called out as complicit as the neo-cons of the Bush era. Ultimately they are all neo-cons and the so-called “mistake” of the Iraq war will be revisited again unless American imperialism is called just that.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as athttp://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [18] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-america%E2%80%99s-war-crime-iraq

 

 



Top 10 Reasons Why Corporate Social Media is Not Your Friend, and Dark Social Media Is

BARmorpheus-on-social-media

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

For a long time now, we’ve all been told, and have told each other, that corporate social media is the way to build businesses, audiences and brands. What if this is about as true as the old saw about real estate prices only going up? What is “dark social media” and how is it different from Twitter, Facebook and the rest.

It’s new, it’s now, it’s cool, learn how… everybody’s on it, everybody’s doing it. For some time now, we’ve been told you cannot build a business, find old friends or organize much of anything without the indispensable aid of corporate social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. But what if this is about as true as other stuff the supposedly wise and informed told us in recent years, like that real estate prices could be counted on to always go up?

Human societies are based on lots of horizontal communication. What if corporate social media is little more than a gigantic scam to extract revenue from the otherwise ordinary communication the internet permits between groups and individuals, between people and businesses, and among communities of interest. What if corporate social media ultimately aims not to open up but to throttle and restrict those conversations to make them artificially scarce and valuable commodities. What if corporate social media’s business model is to thrive on content its proprietors don’t create, and to place itself between that content and prospective audiences, even to substitute itself for the web sites, email lists and media offerings of content creators?

With a billion users, Facebook is far and away the largest player in the world of corporate social media, so all these criticisms apply to Facebook. But many also apply to Twitter, Pinterest and their little brothers as well.

Here are the top ten reasons why corporate social media is NOT your friend, and dark social media is.

  1. Facebook currently limits the number of your “friends” who can see your posts to about 7 or 8%. What? You thought that “friends” list was yours? It’s not. It’s theirs. And think about it, if you had a thousand friends, and 25 of them, that’s 2.5% posted 3 or 4 times a day, another 25 posted once a day, and a hundred posted once a week, that would be at least 150 daily posts for you to comb through, leaving little room for Facebook to insert ads and promoted content which customers have paid for into your news feed.
  2. Facebook will let you talk to the other 92 or 93% of your friends, but you have to pay for that privilege. You buy an ad, or you “promote” the post by paying Facebook. Essentially Facebook is “broken on purpose” so it can extract payment from you to do what you imagined it would do anyway, keep you in touch with your friends. You can get around this to a very limited extent by “tagging” each post with the names of individuals, or joining dozens of Facebook groups and individually sharing posts in the groups. But this is a time consuming process which has to be repeated with each post. If Black Agenda Report, with only a dozen or so new articles each week, we’d be on Facebook three or four hours each publication day.
  3. Facebook, along with Twitter and other corporate social media platforms provide you no way whatsoever to contact or individually identify your Facebook “friends” outside its own walled garden. Again, those lists of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends aren’t really yours at all.
  4. Facebook limits the “organic reach” of your business or nonprofit organization page to about 3% of those who say they “like” you.Presumably those people “liking” your page imagined this would keep them up to date with what you’re doing. Not so. Neither Facebook nor Twitter provides you any way to identify those “likes”, and Facebook won’t allow you even to send a message to them. Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose you’ve got a business or a worthy cause, and a list of thousands of customers, prospects, clients, or past and potential volunteers and like minded donors. If I offer to take care of deliveries to that list, but won’t let you see their names, their email addresses, or how many and which of them I actually deliver to, would that be OK with you? No? Now please tell me again why corporate social media which pretty much does that is essential to building your business, your brand, your cause.
  5. Facebook will gladly sell you advertising directed at the 97% of your “likes” who otherwise might never see your stuff. Actually, these people WILL see what you offer if they go out of their way to your Facebook page. But with the same amount of effort, they could have visited your web site independently of Facebook, couldn’t they?
  6. Third party vendors are eager to sell you all the “Facebook likes,” “Facebook friends” and Twitter “followers” you’re willing to pay for.They might be located in Egypt, Sri Lanka or Croatia, and never interact with your product or page again, but you can count them as “likes.” Twitter and Facebook do not endorse these parasitic vendors, but the mythology around corporate social media being so important to your business or organizational “presence” on the web keeps them in business as well.
  7. If someone hostile to your politics, your business or your person lodges a spurious complaint to Facebook, or Yahoo, Google or YouTube, say, that you’re an anti-Semetic copyright-violating whistle blowing vegan child molester, what these providers generally do is simply cut your account off without notice. Their terms of service often relieve them of the bother of even sharing the exact nature of the complaint against you let alone investigating it, and explicitly state that “your” lists are really theirs. I know people who’ve lost thousands of business contacts and years of content in Yahoo and Google email accounts, lists and YouTube contents this way.
  8. Facebook, Twitter and other corporate social media platforms don’t just track your every move while you’re on Twitter or Pinterest or Facebook. If you close the browser tab without logging off or purging cookies, they usually continue to record and transmit all your internet activity home for data miners to crunch. Such data, both raw and refined are major revenue sources.
  9. While Facebook, Twitter and all the social media platforms rely on YOU and people like you for their compelling content, they deliberately aim to place themselves between you and your readers, customers, and clients, to substitute your Facebook presence for your own offerings elsewhere on the internet. Do you actually visit all the articles you pause over in your Twitter feed? Nobody else does either. We habitually comb through 140 character snippets and hundred word Facebook brain farts while seldom leaving the corporate social media plantation, and imagine we’ve actually visited those web sites, those sources. There are already folks whose ONLY daily internet experience is Facebook, and books like “The Shallows” explain how our internet reading makes us practically unable to read book length arguments, reluctant to follow any single line of inquiry for more than a minute or three.
  10. Dark social media is “dark” because it’s social media untraceable by Big Data and corporate marketers. It’s direct email sent from your own lists and your own listserves. Dark social media was around before Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and remains the proven way for individuals, causes and businesses to reach, retain and maintain contact with friends, customers, clients, and like minded souls. Using dark social media to expand the reach of your business or project, to engage audiences directly and without an intermediary is often a more fruitful way to spend scarce resources. Corporate media won’t tell you this and neither will the “social media consultants,” sometimes because they don’t believe fat meat is greasy, and other times because disinformed customers are more profitable.

Remember all those real estate professionals and “wealth building experts” who told us home values would never go down? Some of them actually believed it that swill. Some others knew better, but were watching their own bottom line, not those of their customers or the public. This is not so different.

Facebook does some really nice things, and many of us have and interacted (online at least) with a ton of interesting people. But it may be time for your business, your social movement or project or you as an individual to reconsider the effort and resources devoted to maintaining a presence on Facebook, Twitter and corporate social media platforms. If you’ve already got two or three thousand Facebook friends or tens of thousands of “likes” that aren’t fakes a bit of continued effort on Facebook and Twitter is probably required.

contact page or emailed at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

 



As US prepares to bomb, what we’re not being told about ISIS and the Iraq crisis

Former US marine Ross Caputi says ISIS is not a lone actor in Iraq, capturing territory for a future Islamic state: it is just one faction in a larger popular rebellion against the Maliki government.

Iraq ISIS rebels.

Iraq ISIS rebels.

ROSS CAPUTI

This week Iraq emerged from the recesses of American memory and became a hot topic of conversation. Alarming headlines about ISIS’s “takeover” of Mosul and their march towards Baghdad have elicited a number of reactions: The most conservative call for direct US military action against ISIS to ensure that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki remains stable in Baghdad. The most liberal lament the ongoing violence and divisions in Iraqi society caused by the US occupation; though they make no attempt distinguish between the violence of ISIS and the violence of the Maliki government.

This range of ideas and perspectives is fascinating, and it says much about American war culture, but mostly for the ideas and perspectives that are omitted from this debate. Entirely absent is the perspective of Iraqis and the issues that are important to them: accountability, independence, and resistance. Moreover, the real complexities of this issue have been lost in a number of the Western media’s favorite binaries: terrorism vs. counterterrorism, good vs. evil, and insurgency vs. stability.

If we dare to take Iraqi voices seriously and think outside of the dominant framework presented to us by the mainstream media, a very different picture of the violence in Iraq emerges and a whole new range of options open up for achieving peace and justice.

The Rise of ISIS

One year ago ISIS was concentrated in Syria, with almost no presence in Iraq. During this time, a nonviolent protest movement, which called itself the Iraqi Spring, was in full swing with widespread support in the Sunni provinces and significant support from the Shia provinces as well. This movement set up nonviolent protest camps in many cities throughout Iraq for nearly the entire year of 2013. They articulated a set of demands calling for an end to the marginalization of Sunnis within the new Iraqi democracy, reform of an anti-terrorism law that was being used to label political dissent as terrorism, abolition of the death penalty, an end to corruption, and they positioned themselves against federalism and sectarianism too.

Instead of making concessions to the protestors and defusing their rage, Prime Minister Maliki mocked their demands chose to use military force to attack them on numerous occasions. Over the course of a year, the protestors were assaulted, murdered, and their leaders were assassinated, but they remained true to their adopted tactic of nonviolence. That is, until Prime Minister Maliki sent security forces to clear the protest camps in Fallujah and Ramadi in December of 2013. At that point the protestors lost hope in the tactic of nonviolence and turned to armed resistance instead.

It is important to note that from the beginning it was the tribal militias who took the lead in the fight against the Iraqi government. ISIS arrived a day later to aid Fallujans in their fight, but also to piggy-back on the success of the tribal fighters in order to promote their own political goals.

A command structure was set up in Fallujah within the first weeks of fighting. It consisted primarily of tribal leaders and former army officials and went by the name of the General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries. This council was led by Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, who also led the the Shura Council of Mujihadeen in Fallujah in 2004. After the 2nd US-led assault on Fallujah, Janabi fled to Syria, but returned to Iraq in 2011. His calls for cooperation between the various militant factions in Fallujah was a significant unifying factor.

Yet despite the glaring differences between the various militant groups in Fallujah, the Iraqi government insists on treating all fighters as terrorists. A government official said it clearly to Reuters, “if anyone insists on fighting our forces, he will be considered an [ISIS] militant whether he is or not.” The Iraqi government launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign that to date haskilled 443 civilians and has wounded 1657 in Fallujah, and has displaced over 50,922 families from Anbar Province as a whole. The Fallujah hospital has been targeted numerous times, and residential neighborhoods have been bombed and shelled daily for six months. Struan Stevenson, President of European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq, wrote an open letter calling the Iraqi government’s operation “genocidal”.

Over the course of the months of fighting with the government, ISIS has grown in strength. Their access to funds and weapons has made them an attractive group to young Sunnis who see no future for themselves in Iraq as long as Maliki remains in power. Many of the recruits who have joined ISIS are the same men who were nonviolent protestors one year earlier. Many of them remain opposed to the ideas of federalism and sectarians—ideas which are central to ISIS’s political platform. What unites them and the hardcore ideologues within ISIS is their desperation to be rid of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who has left them with no choice but to operate outside of the political system in order to better their lives in Iraq.

Insurgency or Revolution? 

This week the media buzzed with the news that ISIS had captured Mosul, the 2nd largest city in Iraq, and was prepared to march towards Baghdad. Two assumptions in these reports went unexamined: that ISIS had been a lone actor and that Mosul had been “captured” rather than liberated.

While the first assumption is a matter of fact, the latter is a matter of perspective. It was noted in the New York Times that ISIS had collaborated with several local militias in Mosul, including Baathist and Islamist groups; although the significance of such a fact went understated. If one further acknowledges that ISIS has cooperated and continues to cooperate with several militias in several Iraqi cities, it begins to appear that ISIS is not a lone actor in Iraq, attempting to capture territory for a future Islamic state. Rather, it appears that ISIS is just one faction in a larger popular rebellion against the government of Nouri al Maliki.

When 500,000 residents of Mosul fled their city earlier this week, they did not do so out of fear that ISIS would subject them to sharia courts. They did so out of fear of their government’s reprisal. Many have even expressed gratitude towards the fighters who kicked Maliki’s security forces out of their city.

This loose coalition of militias—from the tribal militias in Fallujah, to Baathist militias like Naqshabandi, and Islamist groups like ISIS—have come to embody the hopes and aspirations of Sunnis in Iraq to one day be free of Maliki’s oppression. For them there is no other option, no other future is imaginable, and there is no turning back.

A Path Forward

President Obama has announced that the US would not intervene in Iraq until the Iraqi government made concessions to the disenfranchised Sunni community within Iraq. However, the US has already increased its “intelligence and surveillance assistance” and has shown no sign of decreasing its supply of arms to the Iraqi government. While publicly criticizing the Maliki government’s sectarian policies, the US has been aiding and facilitating this “genocide” against the Sunni population for months.

The impunity of the Maliki government is never questioned in the debate raging within the US. It is simply unimaginable within the limits of this debate that Maliki might be held accountable for the war crimes his regime has committed against his own people. Equally unimaginable is the notion that his regime should fall and that Iraqis should be able to dismantle the constitution and the institutions that the US-led occupation imposed on them.

We must take seriously the legitimacy of Sunni resistance, while at the same time taking seriously the fear that a group like ISIS elicits in Shia Iraqis. These fractured communities within Iraq must decide their own future, without the interference of Washington or Tehran. Most importantly for us, as Americans, we must make an effort to analyze this issue outside of the paradigm of US political thought and try to see this issue through the eyes of those most affected by it. We must respect their ideas and values, their politics and culture, and their right to determine their own future, unimpeded by foreign interference.

Source: Common Dreams

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ross Caputi, 29, is a US veteran of the occupation of Iraq. He took part in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. That experience led him to become an anti-war activist.

 



Washington’s Iraq “Victory”

Paul Craig Roberts

Iraq-War-640x350

The citizens of the United States still do not know why their government destroyed Iraq. “National Security” will prevent them from ever knowing. “National Security” is the cloak behind which hides the crimes of the US government.

George Herbert Walker Bush, a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who became President courtesy of being picked as Ronald Reagan’s Vice President, was the last restrained US President. When Bush the First attacked Iraq it was a limited operation, the goal of which was to evict Saddam Hussein from his annexation of Kuwait.

Kuwait was once a part of Iraq, but a Western colonial power created new political boundaries, as the Soviet Communist Party did in Ukraine. Kuwait emerged from Iraq as a small, independent oil kingdom. http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html

According to reports, Kuwait was drilling at an angle across the Iraq/Kuwait border into Iraqi oil fields. On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein, with Iraqi troops massed on the border with Kuwait, asked President George H. W. Bush’s ambassador, April Glaspie, if the Bush administration had an opinion on the situation. Here is Ambassador Glaspie’s reply:

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960’s that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

According to this transcript, Saddam Hussein is further assured by high US government officials that Washington does not stand in his way in reunifying Iraq and putting a halt to a gangster family’s theft of Iraqi oil:

“At a Washington press conference called the next day, State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutweiler was asked by journalists:

‘Has the United States sent any type of diplomatic message to the Iraqis about putting 30,000 troops on the border with Kuwait? Has there been any type of protest communicated from the United States government?’

“to which she responded: ‘I’m entirely unaware of any such protest.’

“On July 31st, two days before the Iraqi invasion [of Kuwait], John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, testified to Congress that the ‘United States has no commitment to defend Kuwait and the U.S. has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq’.”

(See here among other sources: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1102395/posts )

Was this an intentional set-up of Saddam Hussein, or did the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait produce frantic calls from the Bush family’s Middle Eastern business associates?

Whatever explains the dramatic, sudden, total change of position of the US government, the result produced military action that fell short of war on Iraq itself.

From 1990 until 2003 Iraq was acceptable to the US government.

Suddenly, in 2003 Iraq was no longer acceptable. We don’t know why. We were told a passel of lies: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to America. The spectre of a “mushroom cloud over an American city” was raised by the National Security Advisor. The Secretary of State was sent to the UN with a collection of lies with which to build acceptance of US naked aggression against Iraq. The icing on the cake was the claim that Saddam Hussein’s secular government “had al Qaeda connections,” al Qaeda bearing the blame for 9/11.

As neither Congress nor the US media have any interest to know the reason for Washington’s about face on Iraq, the “Iraq Threat” will remain a mystery for Americans.

But the consequences of Washington’s destruction of the secular government of Saddam Hussein, a government that managed to hold Iraq together without the American-induced violence that has made the country a permanent war zone, has been ongoing years of violence on a level equal to, or in excess of, the violence associated with the US occupation of Iraq.

Washington is devoid of humanitarian concerns. Hegemony is Washington’s only concern. As in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, Washington brings only death, and death is ongoing in Iraq.

On June 12, 500,000 residents of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, benefactors of Washington’s “freedom and democracy” liberation, fled the city as the American trained army collapsed and fled under al Qaeda attack. The Washington-installed government, fearing Baghdad is next, has asked Washington for air strikes against the al Qaeda troops. Tikrit and Kirkuk have also fallen. Iran has sent two battalions of Revolutionary Guards to protect the Washington-installed government in Baghdad.

(After this article was published, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani dismissed the widespread news reports–Wall Street Journal, World Tribune, The Guardian, Telegraph, CNBC, Daily Mail, Times of Israel, etc.–that Iran has sent troops to help the Iraqi government. Once again the Western media has created a false reality with false reports.)

Does anyone remember the propaganda that Washington had to overthrow Saddam Hussein in order to bring “freedom and democracy and women’s rights to Iraqis”? We had to defeat al Qaeda, which at the time was not present in Iraq, “over there before they came over here.”

Do you remember the neoconservative promises of a “cakewalk war” lasting only a few weeks, of the war only costing $70 billion to be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues, of George W. Bush’s economic advisor being fired for saying that the war would cost $200 billion? The true cost of the war was calculated by economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes who showed that the Iraqi war cost US taxpayers $3 trillion dollars, an expenditure that threatens the US social safety net.

Do you remember Washington’s promises that Iraq would be put on its feet by America as a democracy in which everyone would be safe and women would have rights?

What is the situation today?

Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, has just been overrun by al Qaeda forces. These are the forces that Washington has claimed a number of times to have completely defeated.

These “defeated” forces now control Iraq’s second largest city and a number of provinces. The person Washington left in charge of Iraq is on his knees begging Washington for military help and air support against the Jihadist forces that the incompetent Bush regime unleashed in the Muslim world.

What Washington has done in Iraq and Libya, and is trying to do in Syria, is to destroy governments that kept Jihadists under control. Washington faces the prospect of a Jihadist government encompassing Iraq and Syria. The Neoconservative conquest of the Middle East is becoming an al Qaeda conquest.

Washington has opened Pandora’s Box. This is Washington’s accomplishment in the Middle East.

Even as Iraq falls to al Qaeda , Washington is supplying the al Qaeda forces attacking Syria with heavy weapons. It is demonized Iran that has sent troops to defend the Washington-installed regime in Baghdad! Is it possible for a country to look more foolish than Washington looks?

One conclusion that we can reach is that the arrogance and hubris that defines the US government has rendered Washington incapable of making a rational, logical decision. Megalomania rules in Washington.

This article is published jointly with the Strategic Culture Foundation http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/06/14/washington-iraq-victory.html