April starts still at WAR

Covert, “humanitarian” — 

Righteously destroying lives

Where is anti-war movement?

Re-reporting, compiling, editing by Carolyn Bennett

“Three western governments have been undertaking, with a little help from two Arab governments, very lethal military action against Libya,” Helena Cobban writes in a late March essay “War and humanitarianism.” They have “worked to ‘justify’ those acts of war largely in the name of either ending an existing humanitarian crisis or preventing one that was about to happen. In parlance too common in western countries, this war has been described as ‘humanitarian intervention’— although war itself is anywhere and always an intrinsically anti-humanitarian undertaking. …”

Most worrying is the long term for the Mediterranean region and for the people of Libya, Cobban continues, “It is extremely unclear what the political upshot of all this will be…

“How will Libya look 12 years on? Will it be one state, or two, or three? Will its people still be locked in an unresolved, very damaging civil war or a situation of long-term political conflict? Will the Libyan people finally have the chance to have a well-run, transparent, and accountable government?

“I do not think anyone in the Obama administration has any idea what Libya will look like— or, how it might get from its present situation of war-wracked division and NATO-inflicted infrastructural breakdown to anything that might be desirable.

“How on earth do [the three Western nations] expect Libyans, or anyone else to look at what NATO (and Qatar and the UAE) are doing in Libya today and to take away a lesson that is essential to the building of any decently functioning democracy? That when you have political differences with others — even sharp differences — the only acceptable way to solve them is through a commitment to nonviolence and to the nonviolent practices of deliberation, discussion, social solidarity, and voting?”

U.S.-led

WAR DEAD

Casualty sites reporting April 2, 2011

(accurate totals unknown)

Anti-war dot com Casualties in Iraq since March 19, 2003

[U.S. war dead since the Obama inauguration January 20,

2009: 213] Information out of date

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Wounded 32,992-100,000

U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000

Suicides estimated: 18 a day

Latest update on this site: March 22, 2011

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

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Iraq Body Count

The worldwide update on civilians killed in the Iraq war and occupation

Documented civilian deaths from violence

100,287 – 109,565

MARCH TOTAL: 287 CIVILIANS KILLED.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

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ICasualties figures:

AFGHANISTAN: 1,521 U.S.; 2,388 Coalition

IRAQ: 4,441 U.S.; 4,759 Coalition

http://icasualties.org/

AFGHANISTAN

U.S. preacher burns Quran

Kandahar

Nine people died and 73 suffered wounds Saturday in Kandahar city as new protests rose against a Quran burning in the United States. These protests come a day after a mob in Afghanistan attacked and killed seven United Nations staffers. This press said this was “the worst attack on the world body in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.”

From the centre of the main southern city of Kandahar protests spread to other locations. Police clashed with crowds marching towards the U.N. offices and provincial administration headquarters. Protesters reportedly damaged government and private buildings and torched vehicles. Protests also were reported Saturday in Kabul involving “a small group of insurgents” wearing burqas who attacked a coalition base and caused “light injuries to three soldiers.” More protests were anticipated across “volatile and deeply religious Afghanistan where anti-Western sentiment has been fuelled for years by civilian casualties.”

Chants rising from demonstrators were ‘Death to America,’  ‘Death to Karzai.’ ‘They have insulted our Quran.’ ‘The foreigners brought the wrath of the Afghans on themselves by burning the Quran.’

Kabul

At UN headquarters in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday, 11 people died; among them were three foreign U.N. workers, five Nepalese UN guards and three protesters. The chief of the mission in the city was wounded, but survived; the dead included employees of Norwegian, Romanian and Swedish nationalities.

Protests were also held in Kabul, where riot police were on hand as demonstrators shouted slogans against the United States, Israel and Britain.

A deeply devout Islamic country where even rumors that the Koran has been insulted can result in deadly violence, “Afghanistan had condemned the ‘disrespectful and abhorrent’ [March 21] burning of the Quran copy by U.S. evangelical preacher Wayne Sapp in a renegade Florida church, calling it an effort to incite tension between religions.… Sapp [had] set light to a Quran copy under the supervision of Terry Jones, who last year drew condemnation over his plan to burn a pile of the holy books to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”

PAKISTAN

Peshawar

Thirteen people died and 42 suffered wounds Thursday in northwestern Pakistan when a suicide bomb struck a convoy carrying a prominent Islamist leader. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle blew himself up at a police checkpoint where supporters had assembled to greet a provincial minister, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, en route to the town of Charsadda where Thursday’s bombing occurred.

“U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year revealed that Rehman allegedly sought support from U.S. officials in Pakistan despite his fierce public criticism of Washington.… About a year ago, a suicide bomber attacked a rally being held by the Jamat-e-Islami party, another Islamist group that is sympathetic to many of the goals of the Taliban and regularly criticizes army operations against them. That attack killed more than 20 police and civilians.”

SAUDI ARABIA

"Global war on terrorism"

“Saudi Arabia has sent 2,215 people to trial on charges related to terrorism.” The Saudi authorities “freed 5,000 repenting terrorists,” according to a statement issued by a prosecutor on Saturday and obtained by Al Arabiya.

The statement noted, “A specialized criminal court had convicted 1,612 people on charges of terrorism and another 603 are still on trial.” Further, the Saudi prosecution “is preparing lists of charges against 934 people and is investigating the cases of 1,931 others.”

IRAQ

U.S.’s private Baghdad

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad Al Arabiya quotes a Washington envoy, “is expected to double its staff after American forces pull out of the country later this year.” The embassy is already the largest in the world.

The U.S. Embassy in 2012 would be protected by “a private security force estimated at 5,500; the current total of armed security contractors in Iraq is given as 2,700.  The American civilian presence in Iraq in  2012  will consist of up to 20,000 at sites that include two embassy branches, two consulates, and three police training, according to the U.S. ambassador James Jeffrey. The embassy staff would double from the present 8,000 plus personnel and “U.S. forces would make up only a very small part of that number.” Currently fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops are said to be Iraq, down from a peak of more than 170,000. 

Fifty-seven people died Saturday in Iraq during a hostage-taking incident at a government building in northern Iraq. The Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaeda front group, claimed responsibility.

The month of March in Iraq saw a rise in deaths compared with February. Fifty-five police officers and 56 soldiers died in attacks in March. The Health Ministry reported on Friday, “136 civilians died in bombings and other attacks compared with 119 in February. In March 215 civilians, 80 police officers and 75 soldiers suffered wounds.

Overall violence has fallen sharply in Iraq since the peak of sectarian warfare in 2006-2007 but bombings and other attacks occur daily. “War casualties decreased at the end of last year despite predictions that the formal end of U.S. combat operations in August would lead to an increase in attacks. American troops are scheduled to withdraw completely by the end of this year.”

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Jerusalem (Reuters)

The Israeli government on Saturday called on the United Nations to cancel the Goldstone Report that found Israel had committed war crimes during its December 2008-January 2009 Gaza offensive.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a written statement calling on the UN to cancel the Goldstone report.

The request came after the chair of the fact-finding mission that issued the report said in a newspaper essay, “‘If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.’”

South African jurist Richard Goldstone chaired the fact-finding mission that, in a 2009 report to the UN Human Rights Council, said both Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, were guilty of war crimes in the conflict. Goldstone indicated in his Friday essay that had the Jewish state cooperated with him at the time, Israel might have showed it did not deliberately target civilians ‘as a matter of policy.’

About 1,400 Palestinians including hundreds of civilians and 13 Israelis died in the devastating war that was launched with Israel’s declared aim of ending cross-border rocket fire from Palestinian militants. Israel had refused to cooperate with the Goldstone mission and later condemned the report as distorted and biased.

TURKEY (nuclear ally)

Ankara (AP)

Despite fear voiced in Greece and Cyprus that Japan’s nuclear disaster shows the new nuclear plant could threaten the Mediterranean region, Turkey plans to build a coastal nuclear power plant close to an earthquake-prone area.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said in Brussels last week, “‘Nuclear power for us is not an option because we are in a highly seismically active region.’” However, Turkey “plans to build three nuclear power plants in the years ahead — including one at Akkuyu [60 miles, 100 kilometers, north of the island of Cyprus] on the Mediterranean coast, close to the Ecemis Fault, which an expert says could possibly generate a magnitude-7 quake.”

Nuclear protests have come from activists inside Turkey and from Cyprus. “Hundreds of protesters have marched in Istanbul, holding banners that read: ‘Don't let Akkuyu become Fukushima.’” The nuclear standoff comes against a background of territorial disputes between Greece and Turkey, including in Cyprus.

The EU is reassessing the 27-nation bloc’s energy policy and questioning the role of nuclear power on a continent where no one can forget that the 1986 Chernobyl disaster spewed radiation for thousands of miles (kilometers).

LIBYA

U.S. on the ground
Covert operations, friendly fire, civilian deaths

The chief spokesman for the Libyan ‘rebels’ said Saturday at least 13 people died and seven suffered wounds after coalition air strikes on Friday hit a convoy by mistake as fighters claimed victory in the battle for Brega.

NATO authorities called the “friendly fire” incident a “regrettable occurrence” of “unintentional deaths.”

The Libyan government has produced a video said to show civilians, including women and children, in a Brega hospital. They are believed to have been wounded as they tried to escape the air strikes.

Doctors say more than 240 people have been killed and over 1,000 wounded in Misurata in the last month alone, as a counter-offensive by Gaddafi's troops raised the number of casualties.

Covert operations

U.S. and Egyptian special forces, Al Jazeera is reporting an unnamed ‘rebel’ source, have reportedly been offering covert armed training to ‘rebel’ (anti-government) fighters in the battle for Libya. The unnamed source revealed that he had undergone training in military techniques at a ‘secret facility’ in eastern Libya.

“[A] new shipment of Katyusha rockets had been sent into eastern Libya from Egypt, the source said Thursday night. ‘These were state-of-the-art, heat-seeking rockets and they [rebels] needed to be trained on how to use them, which was one of the things the American and Egyptian special forces were there to do.’”

Al Jazeera reported, “Our correspondent said the intriguing development has raised several uncomfortable questions, about Egypt’s private involvement and what the arms embargo exactly means.

“There is also the question of whether or not the outside world should arm the rebels, when in fact they [rebels] are already being armed covertly.”

“If the rationale sounds high-minded and noble, “the vast majority of our citizens [left and right] see nothing wrong with their government killing masses of people.” 


Peace lovers among us are rare, Margaret Kimberley writes in her March 31 essay “Obama, Libya, and our challenge: the true anti-war movement must reawaken.”

U.S. foreign interventions “should be taboo,” she says, because “our system is in no way designed to be humanitarian.” No matter how evil enemies are made out to be, evidence of history should make us wary of arguments pushing war.… 

“True anti-war activists, not just anti-Republican activists, must raise their voices. A true anti-war movement must reawaken; hundreds of thousands take to the streets as they did before the invasion of Iraq.”

Sources and notes

“War and humanitarianism: From Kosovo to Libya? (Posted by Helena Cobban), March 27, 2011, filed in Libya http://justworldnews.org/archives/004184.html

“Taliban deny role in attack on UN staff Nine dead in 2nd day of Afghan Quran burning demos,” April  2, 2011,  http://www.alarabiya.net/index/searchengine/search?cnt_search=afghanistan&lang=en

“Three protesters killed in the attack Afghan Quran protest attack kills 8 UN workers,” April 1, 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/01/143828.html

“Leader of Pakistan Islamic party survives murder attack13 dead in attack on Pakistan Islamic party leader,” March 31 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/03/31/143677.html

“Saudi frees 5,000 repenting convicted terrorists, Saudi sends 2,215 to trial on terrorism charges” (Written by Mustapha Ajbaili), April 2, 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/02/143964.html

“U.S. embassy in Iraq already the largest in the world US Baghdad embassy will double in size: envoy,” April 2, 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/index/searchengine/search?cnt_search=IRAQ&lang=en

“Number of violent deaths rises in Iraq in March” (Writing by Khalid al-Ansary; Editing by Caroline Drees and Elizabeth Fullerton), April 1, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110401/wl_nm/us_iraq_violence_toll_1

“Request comes after jurist says may have been wrong Israel urges UN,” http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/02/143975.html

“Turkey plans to build three nuclear power plants Turkish nuclear plans on Mediterranean raise fears Saturday,” April 2, 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/02/143981.html

“Libyan rebels ‘receiving covert training’ — Rebel source tells Al Jazeera about training offered by U.S. and Egyptian special forces in eastern Libya,” April 2, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net//news/africa/2011/04/201142172443133798.html

“Opposition forces retake oil town of Brega, NATO air strikes kill 13 Libyan opposition fighters” (Ajdabiyah, LIBYA, Agencies), “A Western coalition air strike hit a group of Libya’s opposition fighters on the eastern outskirts of Brega late on Friday, killing at least 13 of them,” April 2, 2011, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/02/143883.html

“Rebels ‘killed by coalition plane’” (James Tapsfield, PA), April 2, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/rebels-killed-by-coalition-plane-2260427.html

“Obama, Libya, and Our Challenge: the True Anti-War Movement Must Reawaken,” March 31, 2011 (Margaret Kimberley’s article appears at World Can’t Wait), http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php/home-mainmenu-289/7067-obama-libya-and-our-challenge-the-true-anti-war-movement-must-reawaken; her Freedom Rider column appears weekly in Black Agenda Report, Margaret Kimberley is Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist

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“Just war,” Sanctions, Punishment masked as “Peace”

In siege warfare, armies surround cities. With sanctions, international powers prohibit migration and sale or purchase of goods. Both are types of war that destabilize and fail states, inflict and exacerbate injustice: human rights abuse, hunger and homelessness, sickness, disease and perpetual poverty. Warfare and sanctions do what they purport to undo. The current administration in Washington carries on its predecessors’ legacy of punishment and hegemony.
Re-reporting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett

Describing sanctions as a means of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘enforcing human rights’ is counterfactual
Sanctions are bureaucratized, internationally organized siege warfare. 
Gordon

Punishment for its own sake

 Punishment is the deliberate infliction of harm to the punished party (and thus stands in clear contravention of anything like a Hippocratic Oath, writes journalist Helena Cobban in “Economic sanctions, just war doctrine, and the ‘fearful spectacle of the civilian dead.’” She was writing during the previous regime in Washington. Two central problems with the punishment constituted by the present bombing campaign are the dimension of the harm being caused,” she writes, “and to whom this harm is happening. The infliction of harm ─ or at the very least, a severe curtailment of rights ─ is not a by-product of punishment. It is intrinsic to it.

“Many theorists of punishment have tried to predicate the right to punish on a claimed right to undertake actions of self-defense but the right to self-defense is not a license to inflict any amount of harm on another person or persons. If it were, then the effect of repeated iterations of people acting in self-defense would be to fuel a rapidly escalating cycle of violence such as we have seen over the past year in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.… Bombings of Afghanistan… and the massive military preparations that preceded bombings are seriously problematic at a number of levels.

“They have not abided by the jus in bello [“just war”] constraints of proportionality and discrimination. In particular, they have resulted in the infliction of widespread harm on Afghan civilians who bore no relationship to the Bin Laden networks ─ harm, even if it was not directly intended, was still fairly easily foreseeable and was indeed foreseen by many international aid agencies.”

Sanctions: punishment, acts of war
Fairfield University Professor Joy Gordon also takes punishment in warfare to punishment in economic sanctions. “Economic sanctions violate ‘just war’ principles of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello,” she says. “Jus ad bellum requires that a belligerent party have valid grounds for engaging in warfare, whereas jus in bello requires that the war be fought in accordance with certain standards of conduct. To engage in warfare at all, the belligerent party must have a just cause.

“‘Just cause’ requires ‘a real and certain danger’ such as protecting innocent life, preserving conditions necessary for decent human existence, and securing basic human rights. Under the requirement of proportionality, the damage inflicted ‘must not be greater than the damage prevented or the offense being avenged.’ There must also be a probability of success. The ‘probability of success’ criterion prohibits resort to force when the outcome will be futile.”

Sanctions serve hegemony and serve the punisher. They are raw acts of aggression cloaked in a “peace” mask, but aggression nevertheless ─ aggression for its own sake (U.S. v. Iran or Iraq or Haiti or Somalia; Israel v. Palestinians or Gazans); acts of war crafted by entrenched power perpetuating itself.

Sanctions of the kind imposed by the United States and Israel, Cobban writes, “have usually had the effect [a seeming irrational or unintentional opposite effect] of … strengthening regimes these states do not favor.” [The] primal urge to punish, punish, punish is so strong in these countries [the United States and Israel],” Cobban says, that simple rationality is set aside. The main aim is the sanctions themselves ─ often seen, “over the past 17 years [in the character of] Martin Indyk [the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State], as an important way of weakening the regime prior to overthrowing it ─ rather than resolving the questions and uncertainties around Iran’s avowedly civilian nuclear program.”

Gordon reinforces the thought that “in certain respects, sanctions are obviously the modern version of siege warfare. Each [war and sanctions] involves the systematic deprivation of a whole city or nation of economic resources. Although in siege warfare this is accomplished by surrounding the city with an army, the same effect can be achieved by using international institutions and international pressure to prevent the sale or purchase of goods, and to prevent migration.

“To the extent that we see sanctions as a means of peacekeeping and international governance, sanctions effectively escape ethical analysis ─ we do not judge them by the same standards we judge other kinds of harm done to innocents. Yet, concretely, the hunger, sickness, and poverty, which are ostensibly inflicted for benign purposes, affect individuals no differently than hunger, sickness, and poverty inflicted out of malevolence. [Therefore] to describe sanctions as a means of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘enforcing human rights’ is an ideological move, which, from the perspective of concrete personal experiences, is simply counterfactual.

“Sanctions are, at bottom, a bureaucratized, internationally organized form of siege warfare.

They should be seen and judged as such.”

Sources and notes
“Economic sanctions, just war doctrine, and the ‘fearful spectacle of the civilian dead’ (Joy Gordon): “Sanctions like siege intend harm to civilians and therefore cannot be justified as a tool of warfare,” (Cross Currents), http://www.crosscurrents.org/gordon.htm

Dr. Joy Gordon is Professor in Philosophy, Director of Legal Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, http://www.fairfield.edu/about/about_contact.html

“Having an effect on vulnerable others: Two aspects of the present U.S. actions toward Afghanistan” Digest of remarks by Helena Cobban, columnist, The Christian Science Monitor [from Teach-in panel discussion on ethical dimensions of crisis held at the University of Virginia, October 9, 2001], http://helenacobban.org/

Helena Cobban is a veteran writer, researcher, and program organizer on global affairs. She is author of Re-engage! America and the World after Bush (2008); and publishes the blog “Just World News” centered on international issues.

Martin Sean Indyk
Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Martin Sean Indyk (b. 1951 - ) was the Clinton administration’s U.S. ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. Indyk was a lead U.S. negotiator at the Camp David talks and framer of the U.S. policy of dual containment [U.S. policy of ‘dual containment’ (isolating both Iran and Iraq) sought to depict Iran as a ‘rogue’ state that supported terrorism.]. Iraq and Iran were viewed as Israel’s two most important strategic adversaries [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Indyk] and Britannica

Camp David [Maryland] Accord
Agreements between Israel and Egypt signed on September 17, 1978, which led in the following year to a peace treaty between those two countries, the first such treaty between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. The accord was brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt. The accord was officially titled ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’ and the agreements became known as the Camp David Accords because the negotiations took place at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. Britannica

Britannica:
Concept from the Middle Ages
Just war (jus ad bellum) is a notion, rising from Classical Roman and biblical Hebraic culture containing religious and secular elements, which first coalesced as a coherent body of thought and practice during the Middle Ages.

The idea is that the resort to armed force (jus ad bellum) is justified under certain conditions; and the notion that the use of such force (jus in bello) should be limited in certain ways.

In the Western context, “just war” is a by-product of canon law and theology: the ideas of jus naturale (Latin: ‘natural law’) and jus gentium (Latin: ‘law of nations’) from Roman law that established practices of statecraft, and the chivalric code.

A “just war” most scholars agree must meet several jus ad bellum requirements. Four most important ones are:

• The war must be openly declared by a proper sovereign authority ─ the governing authority of the political community in question
• The war must have a just cause ─ e.g., defense of the common good or a response to grave injustice
• The warring state must have just intentions ─ i.e., it must wage the war for justice rather than for self-interest
• The aim of the war must be the establishment of a just peace

“Just war” conditions added at the end of World War II:

• There must be a reasonable chance of success
• Force must be used as a last resort
• The expected benefits of war must outweigh its anticipated costs

Western thought distinguishes the “just war” concept from the Islamic concept “jihad” (Arabic: ‘striving’ or holy war) which is, in Muslim legal theory, the only type of “just war.”