Bennis, Avnery discuss historical context, credibility, talking with perceived enemies

United States, Western countries must cease decade’s old-style relations with Middle East

Editing, brief commentary by Carolyn Bennett

U.S. journalist, activist, and political commentator Phyllis Bennis is Director of New Internationalism at the Institute for Policy Studies.  The New Internationalism project “works to challenge U.S. domination of the UN and to help democratize and empower the global organization,” according to its website. It works primarily on Middle East and United Nations issues with key areas of interest including U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Instrumentally, the NI project focuses on “education and activism to change the failed and failing U.S. policies and retool those policies to meet the goals of peace with justice” [http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/new-internationalism/]

Today in light of the U.S. Executive Government’s resumption of overt violent aggression in Iraq and again cloaking unprovoked violence in “humanitarianism” and false mandate to protect, Phyllis Bennis talked with Democracy Now.

Phyllis Bennis

Killing them as they feed them

“The notion that there is going to be the need for airstrikes to protect the few dozen U.S. diplomats and a couple of hundred military people in Erbil,” Phyllis Bennis said, “is widely understood as a legal feint (a ruse, trick, maneuver, hoax, hoodwink)  away from the reality.”

In making such a statement, the U.S. Executive undertakes a military operation without the consent of the co-equal U.S. legislative branch of government. In this amped up aggression against a sovereign nation, the U.S. president ignores the expressed view of the American people at large and the constitutional responsibility of public officials who are supposed to represent the American people at large.

The U.S. president has also in this move to return to war against the people of Iraq bypassed the 192 nations comprising the United Nations. Before this latest move by the U.S. president, Bennis said, the United Nations “had offered the Iraqi government technical help to carry out real humanitarian airlifts to the people stuck on the Sinjar Mountain.”

Echoes of sinister priors

The U.S. act of pretending to help people, dropping food packages while killing them, has a sinister history, she said.  This last time this occurred was November 2001 in Afghanistan; Afghan refugees were fleeing the U.S. bombing of the cities. And U.S. operatives, military personnel simultaneously dropped food packs (Meals Ready to Eat or MREs) “wrapped in strong, bright yellow plastic” as they were also dropping “cluster bombs that also happened to be made with bright yellow plastic of exactly the same color.” Bennis said “no one knows how many children, in particular, were killed running to what they thought were food packages that turned out to be cluster bombs.”

Whose life Humanitarian hoax exposed

Afghanistan

Common denominator massacre: As the White House reenters violent aggression against the Iraqi people, the U.S. arms Israel in massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

The U.S. president’s language, “that there are innocent people facing violations on a massive scale,” Phyllis Bennis said, “describes the situation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and yet, rather than providing humanitarian aid [to the people of Gaza] and demanding that Israel open the gates of Gaza, that it open the border crossings, the United States instead is sending more weapons and more money to buy more weapons and more ammunition for those Israeli attacks.”

Deliberate Compounding: crises created by war are worsened by more war. Crises created by U.S. violence are worsened by more U.S. violence. This is not only immoral and insensible, it is criminal, unconscionably so.   

Back in Iraq, the situation on the ground, the misery perpetrated endlessly against the people – the 2003 war never ended -- was created, manufactured, exacerbated by one after another U.S. official in high office and their partners in crime.

The Islamic State (IS) also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) the U.S. claims to be protecting whomever from, Bennis said, “is a small operation of somewhere around 10,000 fighters … well armed with U.S.-supplied equipment that they have picked up all over Iraq.” 

Part of the reason the group seems so strong, she said, “is that they are backed by military support from former generals, former strategists, former leaders of the Baathist army in Iraq who lost their jobs, lost their positions, in many cases lost their ability to protect their families at the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion; and have been sort of waiting for an opportunity to challenge the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.” What now exists in Iraq, Bennis concludes, is “an ugly kind of sectarianism that was put in place by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003” -- all of which “can be traced back to that [invasion].”

Must Talk cannot be ignored

“I was a member of a terrorist organization when I was 15 years old,” Uri Avnery explained on Democracy Now today.  “I believe,” he said that “I understand the psychology of young people who join organizations which are called terrorists by their enemies, but which themselves think of themselves as freedom fighters.

“Hamas thinks it’s fighting for the freedom of Palestine. They are deeply convinced of this, and therefore they are fighting. And everybody must admit that they are fighting very well, because what you have here during the last month is a guerrilla organization of [roughly] … 10,000 fighters, fighting against one of four biggest and strongest armies in the world.

“It’s not an even fight yet they are standing there—they are still standing there after more than a month.…”

Palestine

Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement Uri Avnery was born in Beckum, Germany, as Helmut Ostermann of a German Jewish family that in 1933, after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, emigrated to “Mandatory Palestine”. Thirty-two years later, he created a political party called HaOlam HaZeh – Koah Hadash, and in the 1965 Israeli election won a seat in the Knesset. In late 1975, Avnery was among the founders of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. After the 1977 election, he served in the legislature as a member of the Left Camp of Israel. He was also involved with the Progressive List for Peace, “a left-wing political party in Israel formed from an alliance of both Arab and Jewish left-wing activists.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Avnery]

On Democracy Now today, Uri Avneri reflected that the situation today between Hamas and Israel is similar to the situation with Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization

Uri Avnery

Before his death on November 11, 2004, Yasser Arafat, who had spent his lifetime fighting for Palestinian self-determination, was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and leader of the Fatah political party and former paramilitary group, which he founded in 1959.  Background reports on the decade’s long crisis in Palestine show one of the most severe PLO cross-border raids extending to March 11, 1978, when a force of nearly a dozen Fatah fighters landed their boats near a major coastal road connecting the city of Haifa with Tel Aviv-Yafo. There they hijacked a bus and sprayed gunfire inside and at passing vehicles. Thirty-seven civilians died. Israeli Defense Forces then launched Operation Litani aimed at taking control of Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. On June 6, 1982, the Lebanon war began when Israel again invaded this country for the purpose of attacking the Palestine Liberation Organization. An estimated 1,000 to 8,000 civilians died and the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. In 1985 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat narrowly survived an Israeli assassination attempt when Israeli Air Force F-15s participating in “Operation Wooden Leg” bombed his headquarters in Tunisia. Seventy-three people died. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Lebanese_conflict; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat]

“One of the basic problems at this moment,” Uri Avnery said, “is that Israelis and Hamas do not talk to each other.” Currently Egypt siding with Israel against Hamas is also “appearing as a negotiator, as a mediator, an honest broker," which is as "ridiculous [as] the American mediation was ridiculous. America is a very, very, very close ally of Israel,” Avnery noted. The U.S. president “repeats like a parrot the most basic Israeli propaganda, and so does [the U.S. Secretary of State]. So we don’t have somebody who can mediate and who’s being trusted by both sides.

Hamas went to the recent ceasefire negotiations in Cairo “full of apprehension, full of distrust towards Egypt.”

For eight years the people of Gaza have been suffering under a blockade, meaning that “all the borders are closed, including the sea border and you cannot get in anything except by the permission of Israel; and you cannot get anything out at all. There is no export from the Gaza area.… The Palestinians, Hamas cannot and will not agree to a real ceasefire, a long-lasting ceasefire, if there is a blockade on the Gaza Strip. This is a basic, local problem.”

Hamas cannot be ignored, Avnery said. People abroad and in Israel have completely distorted what Hamas is. But Hamas is neither “militia” nor “military organization.” It is “a Palestinian political party which, in the last Palestinian elections, supervised by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,” won by a majority vote: “Majority of the Palestinian people, including the Gaza Strip, voted for Hamas.”

But “when a Palestinian government was set up by Hamas, it was destroyed by Israel and the United States and Europe. It was brought down. It was then that Hamas took over power in the Gaza Strip by force, but it took power after it won a big majority in free elections in the Gaza Strip. So it’s much more complicated than just a fight between Israel and a military or terrorist or whatever-you-want-to-call-it organization.”

The simple solution Avnery sees to ending the suffering and violence is conversation. He said, “When people are firing on each other and trying to kill each other—indeed, killing each other—the best solution is that they start to talk with each other.

If the Israelis and the Palestinians would sit together opposite each other at one table and thresh out their real problems, trying to understand, be able to understand each other, the whole thing would look very differently.

Indicating that he has spoken many times with many Hamas leaders and found them to be people with whom he does not necessarily agree but with whom he can talk, he says, 

You cannot wish Hamas away. You can do to Hamas whatever you want. You can kill all the 10,000 fighters of Hamas but Hamas will remain because Hamas is an ideology and Hamas is a political party accepted by the Palestinian people. In the end, he said, “after all the killing and after all this terrible destruction…, we will have to talk with Hamas.

Sources and notes

“As U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq Begin, Will Military Intervention Escalate Growing Crisis? August 8, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/8/as_us_air_strikes_in_iraq

“Uri Avnery on Gaza Crisis, His Time in a Zionist "Terrorist" Group & Becoming a Peace Activist,” August 8, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/8/uri_avnery_on_gaza_crisis_his

Sinjar Mountain also Shengar/Shengal Mountains: a single ridge of mountains inhabited by Yazidis located in Nineveh Governorate in northwestern Iraq. It is situated near a city of the same name (Sinjar). Reportedly in August 2014, “an estimated 40,000 Yazidis fled to the mountains” after attacks on the city of Sinjar “by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinjar_Mountains]

Yazidi is a religious sect found primarily in the districts of Mosul, Iraq; Diyarbakır, Tur.; Aleppo, Syria; Armenia and the Caucasus region; and in parts of Iran; the religion is reportedly a fusion or combination “of Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian, and Islāmic elements.” [Britannica]

Also Wikipedia and Institute for Policy Studies   

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Washington's WARS far from over

Brits Sunday Dec 18
Protest
West's attack on Iran

Continuing carnage in Middle East
This week's protests, commentary on lies

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

U.S. in Iraq

 “Fifty-seven (57) percent of all Iraqis lived in slums,” Van Buren cites a 2009 UN report. “In the worst areas, such as Maysan and Diyala, more than 80 percent lived in slums.” 

IRAQ

Before the 2003 U.S. invasion, “the average number of slum dwellers in Iraq was 20 percent.”

The foreign service officer wrote, “After years of seeking a military solution, followed by years of building ineffective privies through our embedded (with military) Provisional Reconstruction Teams (abbreviated ePRTs), we [the U.S.] simply declared victory and started to pack up.

Van Buren said one of the sheiks commented that the U.S. “‘dug a deep hole in 2003 and now are walking away leaving it empty.’ America sneezed and Iraq caught the cold.”

Van Buren seems to excuse the inexcusable not only with his book title “We meant well”; but he concludes, “Hubris stalked us; we suffered from arrogance and we embraced ignorance.… [W]e lacked the courage to be responsible. It was almost as if a new word were needed, disresponsible, a step beyond irresponsible, meaning you should have been the one to take responsibility but shucked it off.”

This week as the Nobel laureate president claimed, “mission accomplished,” many reports and commentators assessed the continuing carnage.

Iraqis protest U.S. wall

IRAQ

Women suffer most

The President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, said Friday on the Democracy Now program, “Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were” before the U.S. invasion and years of foreign occupation. “All the major buildings are still destroyed. If you drive in the streets of the capital, your car cannot survive more than one month, because all the streets are still broken. There was no reconstruction for the buildings, for the cities.”

Because of the policies that were imposed in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed said, “we have turned into a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich.… Destruction is everywhere. Poverty is for all the people except the 1 percent who live inside the Green Zone.”

More than one million women have been widowed, some reports give higher figures. “These widows try to survive on a salary of $150” but, because of internal displacement, most widows “cannot get this salary.” Yet the 1 percent of Iraqis living in the Green Zone — where there was a loss $40 billion from the annual budget — “drowns in a sea of money.” After nine years, she said, “we have the most corrupt government in the world and nobody is accountable for it.

“We are divided into a society of Shias, who are ruling, and Sunnis, who want to get divided from the country of Iraq. We are now on the verge of the division of country according to religions and ethnicities; it has already happened.

The biggest losers are the women. “Poverty and discrimination against women has become the norm.” Under the new constitution “are articles referring to the Islamic Sharīah according to which “women are worth half a man legally and one-quarter of a man socially in a marriage.”

Her organization, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, she says, meets women daily “who are vulnerable to being bought and sold in the flesh market.”

Iraqis, she said, “are living in a huge military camp in which a million Iraqi men are recruited into the army.” In addition, there are “almost 50,000 militia members.”

Irrevocable Malevolence

Refugees
UNHCR image

In an article republished at Press TV, Chris Floyd (author of Empire Burlesque) observes much more forcefully that the U.S. president, in claiming an end to the war on Iraq, uttered not a single word “about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this ‘fulfilled mission,’ this ‘extraordinary achievement,’ this ‘success.’

“These human beings — these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends — cannot be acknowledged; they cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

U.S. in Iraq

“This divorce from reality is beyond description. It is the all-pervasiveness of the disassociation that obscures its utter, its obvious insanity. There is something intensely primitive and infantile in the reductive, navel-gazing, self-blinding monomania of the U.S. psyche today.…

“The Iraq War has not ended. Not for the dead, not for their survivors, not for the displaced, the maimed, the lost, the suffering, not for all of us who live in the degraded, destabilized, impoverished world it has spawned, and not for the future generations who will live with the ever-widening, ever-deepening consequences of this irrevocable malevolence.”

Carnage over there, simultaneously over here

USA

USA

Local U.S. municipalities bankrupt

Federal shutdown 3

School closings

Institute for Policy Studies vice chair Saul Landau spoke in interview this week about U.S. breakdown and Americans’ denial.

“There is a level of denial in the ruling group of Americans, the political class and Congress and in the administration,” Landau said. “They are denying climate change. They are denying the extent to which the economy has tanked and really is close to going under in certain places, or indeed, has gone under; and they continue to equate the Republic, which is in terrible shape. We see empire: look at the defense budget that passed, $700 billion not counting the money that goes for various wars, for nuclear weapons, for the CIA, all of that adds up to almost a trillion dollars.”

 Military tactics
USA

Money goes for a new fighter plane nobody wants and absolutely nobody thinks is necessary — all the while U.S. schools are closing, people have no access to health care,  the cushion people used to be able to fall back on has diminished, for the really poor it no longer exists and they are falling onto hard concrete.

“The system is collapsing,” he said, “and government officials and those running for office are not facing it. … They want to cut, but not the military — a military power greater than any in the world — because the military stands for the empire.”

Landau says, “There is a disconnect, [and] we have now found a new enemy, Iran. All of a sudden Iran is going to be the bane of the new cold war, which is totally ridiculous.”

 IRAN

British activists call for end to hostility, provocation against Iran

Today protesters dressed in white gather at the Bank of Ideas next to Finsbury Square, make banners, share ideas in preparation for tomorrow’s protests.

On Sunday, Britain’s peace activists will hold a peace march in protest of ‘the British Government’s aggressive, illegal, and dangerous policy toward Iran.’ The anti-war protesters will also protest against ‘the unjust war in Afghanistan, which is at its bloodiest after ten years.’

“The protesters declared that the British government’s involvement in wars around the world is ‘only in the interest of the 1 percent — a government cabinet of millionaires and their friends in the oil and arms companies.’”

Announcing protest plans was Britain’s most prominent campaigner against unjust wars, the Stop the War Coalition.

Oil Rig - Iran

From Tehran, the Director of the Iranian Armed Forces Center for Strategic Studies, Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, has restated Tehran’s view of a dangerous Western hypocrisy: that “the West and the U.S. are the founders and sponsors of terrorism in the world and use terror tactics against their opponents.”

The U.S. is using the imposition of sanctions on Iranian military commanders as a means of exerting “psychological pressure and for propaganda purposes.”

Iran, Iraq
Afghanistan, Pakistan
Saudi Arabia

The officer was referring to recent sanctions imposed on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Major General Hassan Firouzabadi and Deputy Commander of the Ground Forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Abdullah Araqi.

Press TV today is reporting Shamkhani saying, “‘Given that both commander Firouzabadi and Araqi on the list of [individuals targeted by] U.S. sanctions, such a measure (imposing a ban) is questionable.’” Criticizing Western double standards regarding terrorism, he said, “‘Some Western countries, which promote terrorism and sponsor assassination, accuse other countries and their officials of terrorism.’

“As signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the IAEA,” the news article reports, “Tehran has stood by its right to develop and acquire nuclear technology meant for peaceful purposes.”

Continuing to terrorize Afghanistan and Pakistan

Afghan woman's body

AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

A pregnant Afghan woman died and four other women suffered wounds today when U.S. forces raided a house in Afghanistan’s southeastern Paktia Province.

Two sons of the director of the counter-narcotics department of Paktia Province, Hasibullah Ahmadzai, were reportedly detained during the raid.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of eradicating Taliban militants. Since the invasion countless civilians have died or been injured. The security situation remains fragile in Afghanistan despite (or because of) the presence of nearly 150,000 U.S.-led foreign forces.

bombed minibus Afghanistan

The slaughter of civilians has caused deep anger among Afghans and prompted violent demonstrations throughout the country.

Yesterday in Kabul, a police station came under attack. A bomber blew himself up at a police station in Kotai Sangi area. In a second incident, a group of armed militants broke into police headquarters and detonated an explosive.

On Thursday, at least two Afghan soldiers died and two others were wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’s northwestern province of Badghis.

Also on Thursday at least four civilians died and eight others were injured when a roadside bomb exploded in Afghanistan’s western province of Farah. A minibus came upon the explosive device on a road in the Malai area of Pur Chaman district in the province.

On Wednesday a roadside bomb had killed an anti-Taliban district governor and two of his bodyguards in the southern Helmand Province.

Roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices are reportedly the most lethal weapons Taliban militants have used against foreign troops, Afghan forces, and civilians.

PAKISTAN

Demanding end to assassination drones, breach of sovereignty

On Thursday at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, Pakistani officials reportedly made a presentation about the November 26 NATO cross border attacks that left Pakistani officers dead. 

Senior Pakistani officials showed relevant material that they said could prove what happened in NATO’s deadly assault on a pair of Pakistan’s army border outposts at the Afghan border was no mistake.

“The evidence presented to international journalists also showed that the shooting by helicopter gunships continued for an hour after NATO forces told Pakistani officials at the posts that it would stop.”

Acting Pakistani envoy Iffat Imran Gardezi said, “‘We want to offer our view of the incident as we see it.’”

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Islamabad will continue blocking of NATO convoys.

Meeting on Friday with the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said that the United States had to guarantee that it would commit no more breaches of the country’s borders in the future.

The United States, Gilani said, “must respect Pakistan’s red lines as well as the Central Asian nation’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Pakistan has closed the border crossings the Western military alliance uses to send fuel and other supplies to the U.S.-led forces in landlocked Afghanistan. Around 40 percent of the non-lethal supplies travel across the Pakistani soil.

On Thursday in the eastern city of Lahore, hundreds of Pakistanis took to the streets to voice their anger over the NATO cross-border airstrikes that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in that late November attack. NATO helicopters and fighter jets on November 26 attacked two military border posts in northwest Pakistan and killed 24 Pakistani troops.

Protesters continued their chants of anti-U.S. slogans. They burned NATO in effigy and lit candles to mourn for Pakistani soldiers who died in the attack.

DRONES

Britain interrogated on collusion

In the face of many reports indicating that UK intelligence has assisted U.S. CIA with providing  locations of alleged militants later targeted by U.S. drones, law firm Leigh Day and Co, acting on behalf of Noor Khan, have called on British Foreign Secretary William Hague “to clarify the role of the British intelligence in CIA drone attacks.… Reveal how British intelligence has assisted America’s ‘targeted killing’ campaign in Pakistan.”

Together with the killing of hundreds of Pakistani civilians, among the dead was Noor Kahn’s father. He was a victim of U.S. drone strikes in northwest Pakistan.

 “‘Unless it is categorically denied that the UK continues to pass such information to the U.S. government forces,’” said the  head of the law firm’s human rights department, “‘we require a clear policy statement of the arrangements which are in place and circumstances in which the UK considers it to be lawful to do so.’”

                                                                                                      

AFRICA

Libya- War crime?

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, says there are serious suspicions that the death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi may be a war crime.

On October 20, eight months into the revolution that put an end to his 42-year-long rule, “Revolutionary fighters found Muammar Qaddafi hiding inside a concrete sewage pipe in his hometown of Sirte.” Videos taken at the time show the Libyan leader injured but alive and surrounded by a frenzied crowd. “He is hustled through revolutionaries and beaten to the ground on several occasions.” Qaddafi “then disappears in the crush and the crackle of gunfire.”

On October 25, Qaddafi and his slain son, Mu’tassim, are buried in a secret location in the North African country.

Somalia hospital
Displaced people

SOMALIA

Hardest hit in worst drought in the Horn of Africa in six decades.

This week in a 12-hour period, 50 children died in refugee camps between Mogadishu and Afgoye. Cholera and malaria had broken out in the camps of this famine-stricken country where there are insufficient medicines to help those stricken with diseases. Close to 580 children went to hospitals.

Drought and famine have affected millions of people across Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. United Nations reports say a quarter of Somalia’s 9.9 million people are either internally displaced or living outside the country as refugees.

Reports have shown that the Somali people have also come under attack by U. S. drones.

Cairo October 

EGYPT

Protests against army persist

Yesterday in Cairo two people died in Egyptian army rulers’ crack down on protesters who are demanding an end to military rule in the country. Close to a hundred people were injured.

Los Angeles immigrants

Activists told reporters that the clashes originally erupted on Thursday evening after the police beat up a young man participating in a sit-in protest outside the cabinet building.

YEMEN

Egyptian protesters accuse the military junta of carrying on with practices used by the former ruler, Hosni Mubarak. They are calling for his successor, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, to hand over power to a civilian government.

BAHRAIN

Protests and military-style crackdowns also continued this week in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and in the United States. 

Persistent casualties of persistent war

“Despite the conventions of modern warfare that forbid armies to target civilians,” Ann Jones writes of the unhealthiness of war, it is civilians who die in far greater numbers than soldiers.

“The more high-tech the army, the more sophisticated its weaponry, the safer the soldiers; but that shield does not extend to civilians.

“In fact, in many conflicts today, ruthless leaders use an effective strategy to destroy the civil society and culture of the enemy: a deliberate but unacknowledged war against women.”

Sources and notes

IRAQ

We meant well: How I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people

Peter Van Buren. New York: Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, 2011, pp. 253-254

“Iraqi Women’s Activist Rebuffs U.S. Claims of a Freer Iraq: ‘This is not a Democratic Country,’” December 16, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/16/iraqi_womens_activist_rebuffs_us_claims

Sharīah (also spelled sharia): the fundamental religious concept of Islam, namely its law, systematized during the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Muslim era (8th–9th centuries AD).

“The Costs of War: Tens of Thousands Dead, Billions Spent, and a Country Torn Apart,” December 16, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/16/iraqi_womens_activist_rebuffs_us_claims

“War without end, amen: the reality of America’s aggression against Iraq” (Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque, December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/216254.html

Further excerpt from Chris Floyd’s article

“In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation that had not attacked it and posed no threat to it.

“This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

“This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. Moreover, it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly.

“Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

 “Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children — the infants, the toddlers, the school kids — whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

“This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality. …You cannot make it otherwise. It has already happened. It always will have happened. You can of course ignore it. This is the path chosen by the overwhelming majority of Americans, and by the entirety of the bipartisan elite. This involves a pathological degree of disassociation from reality.”

CHRIS FLOYD

Chris Floyd is an U.S. journalist whose work has appeared in print and online in sources including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium; and co-founder and editor of the ‘Empire Burlesque’ political blog.

“War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America’s Aggression Against Iraq” (Chris Floyd), Friday, December 16, 2011, http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/frontpage

“Divide widening between US rich, poor — The ‘incredibly unequal top-down distribution of wealth’ in the U.S. has formed an elite group who controls most aspects of the country’s affluence, according to analysts,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216090.html

Saul Landau is an internationally known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. In 2008, the Chilean government presented him with the Bernardo O’Higgins Award for his human rights work. Landau has written fourteen books. He is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Pomona and a senior Fellow at and Vice Chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, http://saullandau.com/

IRAN

“UK protesters urge policy shift on Iran,” December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216215.html

“‘U.S. uses sanctions as psywar tactic,’” December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216244.html

AFGHANISTAN

“U.S. forces kill pregnant Afghan woman, December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216210.html

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216170.html

“Police station bombed in Afghan capital,” December 16, 2011,  http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216066.html

“Bomb blast kills 2 Afghan soldiers,” December 15, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215858.html

“Roadside bomb kills 4 Afghan civilians,” December 15, 2011,  http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215850.html

PAKISTAN

“Pakistan: NATO raids were deliberate” (citing Christian Science Monitor reporting), December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215958.html

“Pakistan: U.S. must heed our red lines,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216099.html

“Pakistanis protest deadly NATO attacks,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215973.html

http://www.presstv.ir/section/351020401.html

DRONES

“Britain questioned over CIA drone strike” [“‘CIA drone strikes are killing hundreds - if not thousands - of civilians and destabilizing Pakistan’”], December 17, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216274.html

AFRICA

LIBYA

“Qaddafi killing could be war crime: ICC,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215990.html

SOMALIA

“Diseases kill 50 more Somali children,” December 15, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215815.html

EGYPT

“Two protesters killed in Cairo violence,” December 16, 2011, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/216089.html

Jones, Ann

War is not over when it’s over: women speak out from the ruins of war, Ann Jones, New York: Metropolitan books, 2010, p. 7

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

War multiplied in 40s, veteran costs, debt, trillions rise

Re-reporting, excerpting, compiling, editing by Carolyn Bennett From “How Iraq and Afghanistan wars are crippling the U.S. economy” by Professor Linda J. Bilmes, co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

Costs and consequences of wars last centuries

Between 2003 and 2008—before the financial crisis unfolded—the debt rose from $6.4 trillion to $10 trillion, and, at least one-quarter of this increase was directly attributable to the wars, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

Spending has risen to more than $1 trillion in Iraq, not counting the $700 billion consumed each year by the Pentagon budget. Spending in Iraq and Afghanistan comes to more than $3 billion weekly, making the wars a major reason for record-level budget deficits.

Considering the new numbers, we now believe our initial estimate [that the budgetary and economic costs of the war would reach $3 trillion] was far too conservative. The cost of the wars will reach between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.

The legacy of wars spans decades.

History shows that the cost of caring for war veterans typically peaks 40 years after conflict ends. Paying out disability claims to World War I veterans peaked in 1969. Paying out disability claims to World War II veterans peaked in the 1980s. Vietnam War veterans’ benefits have not yet peaked. The six-week Gulf War now costs more than $4 billion a year in veterans’ disability compensation.

The long-term costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will be higher than previous wars because of higher survival rates, greater incidence of PTSD and other mental-health disorders.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans have received treatment in VA medical facilities. Many will require care for the rest of their lives. More than half-a-million people have filed for disability compensation.

The total lifetime cost of providing for veterans [not including materiel replacement] is likely to tally between $600 billion and $900 billion.… These huge numbers do not include the economic costs borne by veterans and their families: diminished quality of life, lost employment, and long-term suffering.

This spending (and the accompanying debt) will one day need to be paid [but] we do not care to connect the dots. Iraq and Afghanistan cast a long shadow — a legacy we will live with for decades.

Source and notes


Writer Linda J. Bilmes is a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor and co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Major newspapers, magazines and academic journals have published her articles on financial and budgetary issues.

“How Iraq and Afghanistan wars are crippling the U.S. economy (Linda J. Bilmes, Daily Beast) October 30, 2010, http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2129/27/

How many (est.) in two-theater

U.S.-led

WAR DEAD?

Casualty sites reporting November 5, 2010

(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: 199]

Wounded 32,900-100,000

U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000

Suicides estimated: 18 a day

Latest update on this site: October 24, 2010

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

• Iraq Body Count (civilian deaths from violence) figures:

98,691 – 107,707

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

• ICasualties figures:

IRAQ: 4,427 U.S., 4,745 Coalition

AFGHANISTAN: 1,378 U.S., 2,203 Coalition

http://icasualties.org/oif/

FOR THIS AND MORE

"Remembrance"

World War II veteran Richard Charlifue, 85, of Aurora, Colorado, remembers “hell on Earth.”

The dead were everywhere their skin rotting, bodies infested with maggots and mosquitoes — I could not believe the stench of human dead.


One day he is standing guard with a fellow soldier. A Japanese soldier appears from the foliage his hands raised in surrender. We had orders to take no prisoners and “My buddy kept saying, ‘shoot him.’ I could not do it.… ‘Discretion is the better part of valor’ — one human being refusing to kill a helpless human being.”


Saipan was such a “beautiful tropical island” but the experience there was “hell on Earth.”

Sources and notes
“Aurora WWII veteran reflects on war, his life after service” (David Pollan), November 8, 2010,
http://www.aurorasentinel.com/living/features/visual_features/article_d106b3f8-eb59-11df-af95-001cc4c002e0.html

Saipan was under Spanish sovereignty from 1565 to 1899. It then came under German rule (1899–1914) and was a Japanese mandate from 1920 until captured (1944) by U.S. forces during World War II. It became an important U.S. military air base during the latter part of the war. Between 1953 and 1962, it was under U.S. naval jurisdiction and from 1962 to 1986 Saipan served as headquarters of the U.S.-administered United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The island is part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean [Britannica notes].

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