New actor on the same old stage
August 2, 2008
‘If Obama is elected he will be enmeshed in the Middle East tragedy and forced to take sides,’ writes Robert Fisk.
I was in the studios of al-Jazeera – the Qatar satellite channel so democratic in the eyes of Colin Powell that Bush later wanted to bomb it – while Barack Obama was performing his theatricals in the Middle East. “Theatre” is what I called it on air while the anchor desperately tried to suck some Arab hope out of the whole ridiculous fandango. No such luck, I told him. It isn’t going to make the slightest difference to the Arabs whether Obama or McCain wins.
Westerners believe that Obama appeals to the Arabs because of his middle name or because he’s black. Untrue. They like him – or liked him – because he grew up poor. Like them, he understood – or rather, they thought he understood – what oppression was about. But they quickly found out where they stood in the food chain. Forty-five minutes in Ramallah vs 24 hours in Israel was the Obama equation. Yes, I know the old saw. Every US presidential candidate has to make the pilgrimage to the Wailing Wall, to Yad Vashem, to some Israeli town or village that has taken casualties (albeit minuscule in comparison to those visited upon the Palestinians), to talk about Israel’s security, etc. That doesn’t mean, we are always told, that Israel is going to have it easy once the US president is elected. Wrong. Israel is going to have it easy. Because no sooner is he elected than he will be enmeshed in the Middle East tragedy and be forced to take sides – Israel’s, of course – and then it will be time for the next election, so the president’s hands will be tied again and he’ll be talking about Israel’s security (rather than Palestinian security) and we’ll be back on the same old itinerary.
Careful What You Wish For
July 27, 2008
Graham Usher on Obama’s visit to Afghanistan. Obama’s recent speeches have been full of ill-informed silly comments about Pakistan. As Juan Cole points out, ‘Hundreds of Pakistani troops have died fighting the tribes and al-Qaeda in recent years. In his Berlin speech Obama also talked about terror training camps “in Karachi.” None existed to my knowledge. Karachi is a stronghold of the secular MQM. There is lots to criticize about the Pakistani government, but this level of animus and misinformation is odd and you have to wonder where it is coming from.’
Barack Obama’s Middle East tour got off to a bloody start. No sooner had the Democratic presidential hopeful landed in Afghanistan than news came that thirteen Afghan police and civilians had been killed in the country.
Their killers were not the Taliban or al Qaeda but NATO international forces. Four police and five civilians were killed in a “mistaken” NATO airstrike in Farah province. And four civilians died when misplaced NATO mortar fire hit a house in Paktika province.
The International Red Cross says more than 100 civilians have been killed this month by NATO or US Special Forces fire, including fifty at a wedding on July 6. It’s not clear whether this is more or fewer than the civilians slain by the Taliban. But the count would surely bring home to Obama the fact that Afghanistan is a black-and-white conflict only from a distance.
Hope, Change, and the US Foreign Policy
July 20, 2008
Ali Abunimah, Ivan Eland on Riz Khan.
Riz Khan looks at what a change in the White House will do to America’s foreign policy with voices from different sides of the American political spectrum.
How Britain Wages War
July 17, 2008
John Pilger describes the insidious militarisng of Britain as the effects of two colonial wars and the cover-up of atrocities come home.
The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny.
Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won serving in the British army.
He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Downing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him.
The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, NATO planes struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described as “militants” or “suspected Taliban”. The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghanistan is “the noble cause of the 21st century”.
Western Bloc Barbarism
July 17, 2008
Today’s guest editorial is the latest in toni solo’s Globalization and terror series.
It has not always been so hard to map the frontiers of North Atlantic Treaty Organization country foreign policy beyond which US imperialism goes it alone. Nor, until now, have NATO countries’ relations with Israel encroached so blatantly on the enduring symbiosis between Israel’s militarist aggression and the US government’s militarist imperialism. If it is clear by now that US power and influence is less than it was even ten years ago, what might be the implications for how NATO is used and abused in terms of shifting international economic relations and, in particular, the diverse processes of corporate globalization?
A banal anecdote may help set those questions in some kind of manageable framework. Back in 1993, the Irish government, like many other Western European governments got on the transparency and participation bandwagon prior to that year’s UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna. So a bunch of NGOs working on a broad range of human rights matters were invited to a preparatory meeting in Iveagh House, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ building on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. We all sat about a large conference table along with various DFA staff and an avuncular guy informally dressed who turned out to be an important member of the Irish government delegation to the United Nations.
After Benazir
July 15, 2008
Next Door to War. Tariq Ali has an excellent article on Pakistan in the new issue of the London Review of Books (the best publication out there). For anyone with interest in the region’s politics this article should be a must-read. In it he also reviews the book by war-pimp Ahmed Rashid, and Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars within by Shuja Nawaz.
To recapitulate. After Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, her will was read out to the family’s assembled political retainers. Her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, inherited the Pakistan People’s Party, but until he came of age her husband, Asif Zardari, would act as regent. The general election, postponed following her death, took place in February. The immediate impact of the stunning electoral defeat suffered by General Musharraf’s political party and his factotums was to dispel the disillusionment of the citizenry. Not for long. Musharraf is still clinging on to the presidency; Zardari is running the government with the help of his old cronies; the judges dismissed by Musharraf have still not been reinstated; the economy is a mess; and the US Air Force has started dropping bombs on the North-West Frontier Province again. Poor Pakistan.
I urge you to pick a copy to read the rest.
US Wiped Out Afghan Wedding Party
July 15, 2008
Originally denied, now proven true. US occupiers massacre a wedding party in Afghanistan. Imagine the outrage if Afghanis committed a similar crime here. Of course this terror passes with little comment – cause brown people died and we weren’t aiming for them anyway, it was an accident. Shit happens. The hypocricy is deafening.
A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.
Another nine people were wounded in Sunday’s attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.
Fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province, but one missile went off course and hit the wedding party, said the provincial police chief spokesman, Ghafor Khan.
The US military initially denied any civilians had been killed.
Instrumentalizing Press Freedom
July 5, 2008
Todays guest feature is an important article on ‘Independent’ Journalism Organizations and the National Endowment for Democracy from Michael Barker.
Most people agree that a democratic public sphere is an essential part of any nominally democratic society, however, what many disagree over are the exact ingredients of such a democratic public sphere. In large part these disagreements are caused by different conceptions of what democracy actually means. So while optimistic scholars believe that democracy is thriving globally, researchers, of a more critical bent – like this author – are more inclined to believe, that while global democratic governance is on the rise, these gains are being overshadowed by the increasing dominance of corporate and political elites over all aspects of life. This gloomy diagnosis does not mean to belittle the significance of progressive victories in minority countries and majority ones, but collectively considered these hard won concessions have been unable to repeal the coordinated neoliberal onslaught waged upon the global citizenry over the last few decades. Subsequently, the political, economic and cultural ascendency of corporate-backed elites has severely limited discussions of what should constitute a democratic public sphere. Thus not surprisingly the corporate voices driving such media discourses provide ‘democratic’ options far removed from radical proposals for a New World Information and Communication Order.
Despite the democratic rhetoric flowing from the world’s most powerful political leaders – which is duly amplified by their corporate media mouthpieces – their actual actions tell an alternative, antidemocratic story, a story that is defined by its dedication to oppression and destruction, and opposition to all but the most minimal interpretations of democracy. That many of our planets ruling politicians are also world misleaders is well documented, yet even these so-called politicians still acknowledge that their voters (that is their secondary constituents after corporate ‘persons’) hold great power to effect dramatic social change. Consequently in a perverse tribute to progressive activism, politicians cloak their antidemocratic actions (particularly their military ventures) under the veil of democracy – stretching their cooptive vocal repertoire almost beyond belief to encompass terms like empowerment and participatory democracy – to describe work which undermines commonly understood conceptions of democracy by promoting polyarchy in its place.
The Pak-Afghan Front
June 19, 2008
Will Pakistan fight a US war?
Aijaz Ahmad: US bombing has disrupted negotiations between Pakistan gov and tribal leaders. More here
Does the Afghan war matter to the US?
Ahmad: Permanent bases and strategy towards China long term US objectives in Afghanistan. More here.
Obama and Afghanistan
What should Obama’s policy be for Afghanistan?
Aijaz Ahmad: There is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan
Kandahar braces for Taliban offensive
Taliban and NATO forces both assert that they are in control. More here.
