Source: M-L Today
The wall is a massive land-grab which attempts to create a Palestinian reservation inside a Greater Israel. Peace can never be brought about by such actions.
According to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Hague 9th of July 2004, "the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying power, in the occupied territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and its associated regime, are contrary to international law. The construction of the wall severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination". The wall will allow for Israel the control of about one half of the West Bank. Some of the jost fertile land in Palestine as well as precious water resources will be turned into closed zones and enclaves between the wall and the Green Line. According to the UN "the damage caused by the destruction of land and property for the wall's construction is irreversible and undermines Palestinians' ability to ever recover even if the political situation allows conditions to improve".
The parties of NELF firmly distance themselves from any kind of terror. It is under the pretext of security that Israel is building the wall. We condemn the use of suicide bombers attacking Israeli citizens, but the wall is not a guarantee against this terror. On the contrary the wall is a part of a policy which includes Israeli state terror against the Palestinians as houses belonging to innocent people are shot to pieces by helicopters, tank bulldozing refugee camps, and people dying because they are unable to reach doctors and hospitals. This policy surely will lead to new suicide bombers not less. The separation wall is a part of a long-term policy of occupation, discrimination and expulsion that amount to ethnic cleansing and to the destruction of material basis for the survival and development of the Palestinian society as a whole. A viable and sovereign Palestinian state will become impossible, as is the aim of the Israeli government.
Left parties of Europe urge you to join us to exert your influence on the state of Israel and all other related parties with the following demands:
* Call For International Intervention
Volunteers from human rights organisations, NGOs as well as political parties must strengthen their efforts to monitor the situation in the occupied territories and a UN peace-keeping force is urgently needed in a steadily deteriorating situation in to pressure Israel to withdraw from all the 1967 occupied territories.
* International Support For The Non-Violent Activities Against The Wall
We urge all political parties and NGOs for full international support of the non-violent activities that are carried out by the human rights and other peace movements both in Palestine and Israel, as well as mass demonstrations and sit-ins by the citizens.
* Expose The Real Reason Behind The Wall's Construction
The policy of the Israeli government of today is to create facts on the ground, which destroy the possibilities of any kind of process towards peace. The two-states solution is becoming impossible, and the Palestinians are forced to leave under inhuman conditions. The only way of solving the issue is to insist on the implementation of the UN resolution 194, 242 and 338.
* Stop Arms Trade And Boycott Products From The Illegal Israeli Settlements
We urge citizens, volunteer organisations, labour unions, consumer co-ops, political parties and businesses to boycott goods and products from the illegal Israeli settlements. Buying and selling these products constitutes active support for the illegal occupation. It also violates international law. Imports and exports of arms to and from Israel must be stopped.
* Suspend The EU's Trade Agreement With Israel
The EU has a preferential trade agreement with Israel, the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement. As a result, Israel enjoys the right of free trade with the countries of the EU. The agreement contains provisions that demand respect for democracy and human rights. As long as Israel fails to honour life, property and freedom of movement, the trade agreement should be suspended.
Stop The Wall - Give Peace A Chance!
December 29, 2009
December 11, 2009
A Poem on Obama's Nobel Speech, by: Andy Taylor, December 11th, 2009
A Poem on Obama's Nobel Speech
then to crown his acts of shame
as if we didn't have a name
with gestures that he learned so well,
this launcher of a living Hell,
he put the nations in their place,
with a languid actor's casual grace
then to crown his acts of shame
as if we didn't have a name
with gestures that he learned so well,
this launcher of a living Hell,
he put the nations in their place,
with a languid actor's casual grace
December 10, 2009
Obama's Rejection Speech, by David Swanson, Oped News, Thurs. Dec 10, 09
That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions.
Some highlights:
"There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I."
Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize " and then making a false case for war:
"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."
This is simply not true of all tribes and civilizations, unless we include war making as a criterion for being considered civilized.
"The concept of a 'just war' emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence."
How dare someone responsible for illegal occupations and air strikes and the use of unmanned drones say these words? (Responsible, that is, given the failure of Congress and of we the people to stop him.)
"America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide and restrict the most dangerous weapons."
How dare a president refusing to support a treaty on land mines speak in these terms? Are we supposed to not see the actions and just hear the words?
"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.'"
Very wise. Very true. And completely violated by Barack Obama's actions and the better part of the words in this speech. Are we supposed to hear these words in a different part of our brains from the rest of the speech and its advocacy of war?
"A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaidas leaders to lay down their arms."
Now a group of fewer than 100 angry people in Afghanistan, and their allies elsewhere, are the rough equivalent of "Hitler's armies" and justify the brutal occupation of a nation by tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries, tanks and planes, and unmanned drones? And negotiations, with the Taliban or anyone else, are not possible because " because " well, because of that rhetoric about Hitler's armies.
"The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest."
A 1993 Congressional Research Service (CRS) study of the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center records identified "234 instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes" between 1798 and 1993. This list does not include covert actions or post-World War II occupation forces and base agreements. In a 2006 review of this study and two others, Gar Smith found that "in our country's 230 years of existence, there have been only 31 years in which U.S. troops were not actively engaged in significant armed adventures on foreign shores." In other words, fewer than 14% of America's days have been at peace. As of 2006, there were 192 member states in the United Nations. Over the past two centuries, the United State has attacked, invaded, policed, overthrown, or occupied 62 of them. Read more.
"I believe that all nations — strong and weak alike — must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."
The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is party, and which is therefore the supreme law of the United States under Article VI of the Constitution is apparently not a standard that governs the use of force, since President Obama has just thrown it away in a statement of Obama Doctrine that appears indistinguishable from the so-called Bush doctrine. Obama then doubles down with a Bush the Elder / Clintonian doctrine of humanitarian war:
"I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace."
Obama equates non-military action, non-hostile action, with inaction, pure and simple. Where is aid? Where is diplomacy? Where is cooperation? Why are all non-hostile approaches to other nations banished from the text of a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a mere 25 years after 1984?
"Peace entails sacrifice. That is why NATO continues to be indispensable."
What can be said to render that statement less persuasive than it is on its own? Maybe this:
"That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions."
Torture was illegal internationally and in the US code of law before Obama became president. He publicly instructed the Attorney General of the United States not to enforce those laws. He claimed the power to "rendition" people to other nations where they might be tortured. His CIA Director and a top presidential advisor have claimed the president has the power to torture if he chooses to. And President Obama has here claimed the power to prohibit or un-prohibit torture, spitting in the face of the very idea of the rule of law. The prison at Guantanamo is not closed, and moving those prisoners to Illinois or Bagram or any other lawless U.S. prison will not bring the United States into compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
"I have spoken to the questions that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me turn now to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace."
At last, mid-speech, we are presented with a drop of that toxic trademarked substance: hope. Only to swallow a mouthful of this:
"First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior — for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure — and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."
Set aside the hypocrisy of the globalism and rule-of-law talk from a commander in chief escalating wars and occupying 177 nations around the world. The message here is that a decent alternative to war is crippling sanctions that "exact a real price." The wisdom of a creative nonviolent outlook has not yet penetrated. And the President does not develop the idea any further, turning instead to nuclear arms:
""those with nuclear weapons will work toward disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles. But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted."
The United States is not seriously pursuing disarmament, is developing new nuclear weapons, is in clear violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And Iran is not.
"America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens."
President Obama, in his famous Middle-East speech earlier this year admirably acknowledged the U.S. overthrow of a democratically elected president in Iran, and the installation of a dictator -- who, like many dictators than and now, was one of our closest friends. The greatest success of international law in recent years has been the precedent set by prosecutors seeking to hold responsible Augusto Pinochet. Does anyone recall how he came into power?
"So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal."
Indeed.
"Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door."
And there, as this reprehensible speech is dragging to a close, are the words with which it should have begun, the words denied by the thrust of everything else here and by the actions of the man delivering the words. And then there was a bit more:
"[A] just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want."
A bitter statement for the people of Afghanistan or the United States to hear from a president who has acted to divert our resources upward to Wall Street and downwards into bombs and bases. But true and worth repeating nonetheless. Let's not imagine, however, that George W. Bush would not have said the same. He would simply have said it with a smaller military budget, a smaller war budget, fewer troops in the field, fewer mercenaries in the field, bases in fewer countries, and worse grammar.
David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.
Some highlights:
"There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I."
Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize " and then making a false case for war:
"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."
This is simply not true of all tribes and civilizations, unless we include war making as a criterion for being considered civilized.
"The concept of a 'just war' emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence."
How dare someone responsible for illegal occupations and air strikes and the use of unmanned drones say these words? (Responsible, that is, given the failure of Congress and of we the people to stop him.)
"America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide and restrict the most dangerous weapons."
How dare a president refusing to support a treaty on land mines speak in these terms? Are we supposed to not see the actions and just hear the words?
"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.'"
Very wise. Very true. And completely violated by Barack Obama's actions and the better part of the words in this speech. Are we supposed to hear these words in a different part of our brains from the rest of the speech and its advocacy of war?
"A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaidas leaders to lay down their arms."
Now a group of fewer than 100 angry people in Afghanistan, and their allies elsewhere, are the rough equivalent of "Hitler's armies" and justify the brutal occupation of a nation by tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries, tanks and planes, and unmanned drones? And negotiations, with the Taliban or anyone else, are not possible because " because " well, because of that rhetoric about Hitler's armies.
"The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest."
A 1993 Congressional Research Service (CRS) study of the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center records identified "234 instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes" between 1798 and 1993. This list does not include covert actions or post-World War II occupation forces and base agreements. In a 2006 review of this study and two others, Gar Smith found that "in our country's 230 years of existence, there have been only 31 years in which U.S. troops were not actively engaged in significant armed adventures on foreign shores." In other words, fewer than 14% of America's days have been at peace. As of 2006, there were 192 member states in the United Nations. Over the past two centuries, the United State has attacked, invaded, policed, overthrown, or occupied 62 of them. Read more.
"I believe that all nations — strong and weak alike — must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."
The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is party, and which is therefore the supreme law of the United States under Article VI of the Constitution is apparently not a standard that governs the use of force, since President Obama has just thrown it away in a statement of Obama Doctrine that appears indistinguishable from the so-called Bush doctrine. Obama then doubles down with a Bush the Elder / Clintonian doctrine of humanitarian war:
"I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace."
Obama equates non-military action, non-hostile action, with inaction, pure and simple. Where is aid? Where is diplomacy? Where is cooperation? Why are all non-hostile approaches to other nations banished from the text of a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a mere 25 years after 1984?
"Peace entails sacrifice. That is why NATO continues to be indispensable."
What can be said to render that statement less persuasive than it is on its own? Maybe this:
"That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions."
Torture was illegal internationally and in the US code of law before Obama became president. He publicly instructed the Attorney General of the United States not to enforce those laws. He claimed the power to "rendition" people to other nations where they might be tortured. His CIA Director and a top presidential advisor have claimed the president has the power to torture if he chooses to. And President Obama has here claimed the power to prohibit or un-prohibit torture, spitting in the face of the very idea of the rule of law. The prison at Guantanamo is not closed, and moving those prisoners to Illinois or Bagram or any other lawless U.S. prison will not bring the United States into compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
"I have spoken to the questions that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me turn now to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace."
At last, mid-speech, we are presented with a drop of that toxic trademarked substance: hope. Only to swallow a mouthful of this:
"First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior — for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure — and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."
Set aside the hypocrisy of the globalism and rule-of-law talk from a commander in chief escalating wars and occupying 177 nations around the world. The message here is that a decent alternative to war is crippling sanctions that "exact a real price." The wisdom of a creative nonviolent outlook has not yet penetrated. And the President does not develop the idea any further, turning instead to nuclear arms:
""those with nuclear weapons will work toward disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles. But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted."
The United States is not seriously pursuing disarmament, is developing new nuclear weapons, is in clear violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And Iran is not.
"America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens."
President Obama, in his famous Middle-East speech earlier this year admirably acknowledged the U.S. overthrow of a democratically elected president in Iran, and the installation of a dictator -- who, like many dictators than and now, was one of our closest friends. The greatest success of international law in recent years has been the precedent set by prosecutors seeking to hold responsible Augusto Pinochet. Does anyone recall how he came into power?
"So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal."
Indeed.
"Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door."
And there, as this reprehensible speech is dragging to a close, are the words with which it should have begun, the words denied by the thrust of everything else here and by the actions of the man delivering the words. And then there was a bit more:
"[A] just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want."
A bitter statement for the people of Afghanistan or the United States to hear from a president who has acted to divert our resources upward to Wall Street and downwards into bombs and bases. But true and worth repeating nonetheless. Let's not imagine, however, that George W. Bush would not have said the same. He would simply have said it with a smaller military budget, a smaller war budget, fewer troops in the field, fewer mercenaries in the field, bases in fewer countries, and worse grammar.
David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.
United Antiwar Movement Tells Obama: No Escalation! 30.11.09 Monthly Review Press
United Antiwar Movement Tells Obama:
No Escalation!
President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, D.C.
November 30, 2009
Dear President Obama,
With millions of U.S. people feeling the fear and desperation of no longer having a home; with millions feeling the terror and loss of dignity that comes with unemployment; with millions of our children slipping further into poverty and hunger, your decision to deploy thousands more troops and throw hundreds of billions more dollars into prolonging the profoundly tragic war in Afghanistan strikes us as utter folly. We believe this decision represents a war against ordinary people, both here in the United States and in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan, if continued, will result in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of U.S. troops, and untold thousands of Afghans.
Polls indicate that a majority of those who labored with so much hope to elect you as president now fear that you will make a wrong decision -- a tragic decision that will destroy their dreams for America. More tragic is the price of your decision. It will be paid with the blood, suffering and broken hearts of our young troops, their loved ones and an even greater number of Afghan men, women and children.
The U.S. military claims that this war must be fought to protect U.S. national security, but we believe it is being waged to expand U.S. empire in the interests of oil and pipeline companies.
Your decision to escalate U.S. troops and continue the occupation will cause other people in other lands to despise the U.S. as a menacing military power that violates international law. Keep in mind that to most of the peoples of the world, widening the war in Afghanistan will look exactly like what it is: the world's richest nation making war on one of the world's very poorest.
The war must be ended now. Humanitarian aid programs should address the deep poverty that has always been a part of the life of Afghan people.
We will keep opposing this war in every nonviolent way possible. We will urge elected representatives to cut all funding for war. Some of us will be led to withhold our taxes, practice civil resistance, and promote slowdowns and strikes at schools and workplaces.
In short, President Obama, we will do everything in our power, as nonviolent peace activists, to build the kind of massive movement -- which today represents the sentiments of a majority of the American people -- that will play a key role in ending U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Such would be the folly of a decision to escalate troop deployment and such is the depth of our opposition to the death and suffering it would cause.
Sincerely, (Signers names listed in alphabetical order)
Jack Amoureux, Executive Committee
Military Families Speak Out
Michael Baxter
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Medea Benjamin, Co-founder
Global Exchange
Frida Berrigan
Witness Against Torture
Imam Mahdi Bray, Executive Director
Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
Elaine Brower
World Can't Wait
Leslie Cagan, Co-Founder
United for Peace and Justice
Tom Cornell
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Matt Daloisio
War Resisters League
Marie Dennis, Director
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Robby Diesu
Our Spring Break
Pat Elder, Co-coordinator
National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth
Mike Ferner, President
Veterans For Peace
Joy First, Convener
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Sara Flounders, Co-Director
International Action Center
Sunil Freeman
ANSWER Coalition, Washington, D.C.
Diana Gibson, Coordinator
Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice
Jerry Gordon, Co-Coordinator
National Assembly To End Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupation
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence
David Hartsough
Peaceworkers San Francisco
Mike Hearington, Steering Committee
Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, Atlanta
Larry Holmes, Coordinator
Troops Out Now Coalition
Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D., Executive Director
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Hany Khalil
War Times
Kathy Kelly, Co-Coordinator
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Leslie Kielson , Co-Chair
United for Peace and Justice
Malachy Kilbride
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Adele Kubein, Executive Committee
Military Families Speak Out
Jeff Mackler, Co-Coordinator
National Assembly to End Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
Kevin Martin, Exec. Director
Peace Action
Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, Chair-Elect
World Parliament of Religion
Michael T. McPhearson, Executive Director
Veterans For Peace
Gael Murphy, Co-founder
Code Pink
Michael Nagler, Founder
Metta Center for Nonviolence
Max Obuszewski, Director
Baltimore Nonviolence Center
Pete Perry
Peace of the Action
Dave Robinson, Executive Director
Pax Christi USA
Terry Rockefeller
September 11th Families For Peaceful Tomorrows
Samina Sundas, Founding Executive Director
American Muslim Voice
David Swanson
AfterDowningStreet.org
Carmen Trotta
Catholic Worker
Nancy Tsou, Coordinator
Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice
Jose Vasquez, Executive Director
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Kevin Zeese
Voters for Peace
No Escalation!
President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, D.C.
November 30, 2009
Dear President Obama,
With millions of U.S. people feeling the fear and desperation of no longer having a home; with millions feeling the terror and loss of dignity that comes with unemployment; with millions of our children slipping further into poverty and hunger, your decision to deploy thousands more troops and throw hundreds of billions more dollars into prolonging the profoundly tragic war in Afghanistan strikes us as utter folly. We believe this decision represents a war against ordinary people, both here in the United States and in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan, if continued, will result in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of U.S. troops, and untold thousands of Afghans.
Polls indicate that a majority of those who labored with so much hope to elect you as president now fear that you will make a wrong decision -- a tragic decision that will destroy their dreams for America. More tragic is the price of your decision. It will be paid with the blood, suffering and broken hearts of our young troops, their loved ones and an even greater number of Afghan men, women and children.
The U.S. military claims that this war must be fought to protect U.S. national security, but we believe it is being waged to expand U.S. empire in the interests of oil and pipeline companies.
Your decision to escalate U.S. troops and continue the occupation will cause other people in other lands to despise the U.S. as a menacing military power that violates international law. Keep in mind that to most of the peoples of the world, widening the war in Afghanistan will look exactly like what it is: the world's richest nation making war on one of the world's very poorest.
The war must be ended now. Humanitarian aid programs should address the deep poverty that has always been a part of the life of Afghan people.
We will keep opposing this war in every nonviolent way possible. We will urge elected representatives to cut all funding for war. Some of us will be led to withhold our taxes, practice civil resistance, and promote slowdowns and strikes at schools and workplaces.
In short, President Obama, we will do everything in our power, as nonviolent peace activists, to build the kind of massive movement -- which today represents the sentiments of a majority of the American people -- that will play a key role in ending U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Such would be the folly of a decision to escalate troop deployment and such is the depth of our opposition to the death and suffering it would cause.
Sincerely, (Signers names listed in alphabetical order)
Jack Amoureux, Executive Committee
Military Families Speak Out
Michael Baxter
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Medea Benjamin, Co-founder
Global Exchange
Frida Berrigan
Witness Against Torture
Imam Mahdi Bray, Executive Director
Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
Elaine Brower
World Can't Wait
Leslie Cagan, Co-Founder
United for Peace and Justice
Tom Cornell
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Matt Daloisio
War Resisters League
Marie Dennis, Director
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Robby Diesu
Our Spring Break
Pat Elder, Co-coordinator
National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth
Mike Ferner, President
Veterans For Peace
Joy First, Convener
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Sara Flounders, Co-Director
International Action Center
Sunil Freeman
ANSWER Coalition, Washington, D.C.
Diana Gibson, Coordinator
Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice
Jerry Gordon, Co-Coordinator
National Assembly To End Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupation
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence
David Hartsough
Peaceworkers San Francisco
Mike Hearington, Steering Committee
Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, Atlanta
Larry Holmes, Coordinator
Troops Out Now Coalition
Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D., Executive Director
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Hany Khalil
War Times
Kathy Kelly, Co-Coordinator
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Leslie Kielson , Co-Chair
United for Peace and Justice
Malachy Kilbride
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Adele Kubein, Executive Committee
Military Families Speak Out
Jeff Mackler, Co-Coordinator
National Assembly to End Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
Kevin Martin, Exec. Director
Peace Action
Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, Chair-Elect
World Parliament of Religion
Michael T. McPhearson, Executive Director
Veterans For Peace
Gael Murphy, Co-founder
Code Pink
Michael Nagler, Founder
Metta Center for Nonviolence
Max Obuszewski, Director
Baltimore Nonviolence Center
Pete Perry
Peace of the Action
Dave Robinson, Executive Director
Pax Christi USA
Terry Rockefeller
September 11th Families For Peaceful Tomorrows
Samina Sundas, Founding Executive Director
American Muslim Voice
David Swanson
AfterDowningStreet.org
Carmen Trotta
Catholic Worker
Nancy Tsou, Coordinator
Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice
Jose Vasquez, Executive Director
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Kevin Zeese
Voters for Peace
December 09, 2009
SUDBURY STRIKERS DIG IN FOR LONG WINTER, By Liz Rowley, December 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice
The word on the picket lines at Vale Inco's Sudbury mines is that it will be a long winter. But however long it takes, striking miners, mill workers and smelter workers will be there one day longer.
About 3,000 members of Local 6500 USWA, plus another 1,000 from Port Colborne, Ontario and Voisey's Bay, are entering their fifth month on strike against Vale Inco, the second largest producer of nickel in the world, with operations in Mongolia, China, India, Chile, Peru, Angola, South Africa, Indonesia, and Canada.
Vale is demanding a privatized pension scheme for new hires, and changes to seniority rights that will make it difficult if not impossible for union members to bid on jobs. It also wants a cap on the nickel bonus - a profit sharing scheme worked out by INCO and the Steelworkers years ago - that Vale says it can't afford.
But as USWA President Leo Gerard points out, Vale has made enormous profits during the worst downturn in 70 years - $4.1 billion profit in the last two years alone, more than double the profit INCO made in the last ten years when nickel prices were very high. INCO is on record stating it could still make a profit with nickel selling at $4; the price was $7.35 in late November.
"These mines don't belong to Vale. They belong to Canadians," says Gerard, a sentiment shared by many on the picket lines and in the community who call for the nationalization of Vale Inco.
The Communist Party is also calling for public ownership, under democratic controls, arguing natural resources belong to the people of Canada, and the profits generated should be used to benefit the people, to diversify Sudbury's economy with secondary industries and manufacturing, and to guarantee the wages, pensions, benefits and health and safety of mine, mill and smelter workers in Canada.
Vale, a Brazilian company that was publicly owned until it was privatized in 1997, bought out the Canadian-owned International Nickel Company in 2006 for $19 billion, after giving certain undertakings respecting Canada's national interests in the rich natural resources in the Sudbury basin. These are undertakings that the Harper government and Industry Minister "Two-Tier Tony" Clement, now refuse to enforce, or even disclose. This is why Clement's photo features prominently on the outhouses on many picket lines.
The sale is the cause of the strike, there's no doubt. Stephen Ball, Vale's Manager of Corporate Affairs in Ontario, said it all in this Sudbury media interview: "Mining is a capital intensive operation and to attract global capital, Canadian workers will have to get more competitive with workers in less developed countries."
The less developed country he has in mind is Brazil. The competition is with Brazil's 40,000 unionized miners, who made $600 a month until November when a militant strike, and support from Brazil's President Lula, won them an additional 14% over 2 years. The new wage, and the new bar for Vale is $642 a month.
"(Vale) just wants to break the union. They want to completely hit the rest button on the entire labour situation and the agreements that have been put in place in the past," a former INCO Executive told local media.
Vale is scabbing the strike with unionized office workers, members of USWA Local 2020 and 6600. These office workers don't work in the mines, mills, or smelters, but the company has ordered them to cross picket lines and get on-the-job training from managers to start up furnaces and smelters - some of the most dangerous jobs in Canada that could result in deadly explosions if a mistake is made.
Mining has also resumed with the inherent danger of rock falls and gas, and the added danger of unskilled and untrained scabs working in a dangerous environment.
Vale has built bunkhouses at the North Mine that will house 200 scabs, who will be helicoptered in and out every five days. They will work days and nights, 100 at a time, if the company has its way. On November 19, Vale invited union members to cross the lines in yet another provocation.
But scabs don't last long in the regular work force after a strike is over, said Peter Wade. "Historically these guys don't survive after they cross the picket line. Just going by the experience after the Falconbridge strike, a year after, they're not working there."
Scabs don't survive well anywhere. Not only strikers, but the whole community - families, relatives, neighbourhoods - remember who crossed and who didn't. After all, the future of the whole community is at stake today. The wages of unionized miners at Vale Inco and Xstrata (Falconbridge) keep the community, including small businesses, afloat.
As strikers hold up contractors and scabs heading in and out of worksites, members of Locals 2020 and 6600 bring coffee and donuts to the strikers, along with news of what's going on inside, and the promise that "we're working like turtles!"
Workers who refuse to cross the lines can be fired under Ontario's medieval labour laws.
The company has repeatedly taken the union to court seeking injunctions to speed up traffic in and out of the struck sites. The union has between 12 and 15 minutes to let the last truck in the line through, or face fines and restrictions on picketing.
The union has sent delegations around the world to meet with trade unions where Vale refines its products. The unions have responded with shows of solidarity including offers to shut down production to increase pressure on Vale to return to the bargaining table and bargain in good faith. A September rally in Sudbury featured union representatives from around the globe, along with USWA leaders from Canada and the US.
The pressure is on to get the company back to the bargaining table. The union is expected to announce that it's ready to restart negotiations December 1, and invite the company to join them to reach an agreement. Vale has refused to bargain since negotiations broke off and the strike began on July 13.
Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Rowswell released a letter supporting Sudbury strikers in early November. The Sault is another mining town in Northern Ontario that has also seen workers and community victimized by hard times and vicious companies, and right-wing governments. So far, Sudbury's NDP Mayor Rodriguez has said nothing about the strike, while Sudbury Liberal MPP Bartolucci told CBC Radio he can't support the strike because his constituents don't support it. But in fact the community seems quite solidly behind the strikers - no surprise given that Sudbury is all about mining. Sudbury's NDP MPs have supported the strike, and are working with the union. Sudbury Communists are also active on picket lines and in the community.
In fact, the CAW's Mine-Mill Local 598 could very well be joining strikers in February if Xstrata takes the same bargaining approach as Vale. Stay tuned.
(Rowley is the Ontario leader of the Communist Party.)
About 3,000 members of Local 6500 USWA, plus another 1,000 from Port Colborne, Ontario and Voisey's Bay, are entering their fifth month on strike against Vale Inco, the second largest producer of nickel in the world, with operations in Mongolia, China, India, Chile, Peru, Angola, South Africa, Indonesia, and Canada.
Vale is demanding a privatized pension scheme for new hires, and changes to seniority rights that will make it difficult if not impossible for union members to bid on jobs. It also wants a cap on the nickel bonus - a profit sharing scheme worked out by INCO and the Steelworkers years ago - that Vale says it can't afford.
But as USWA President Leo Gerard points out, Vale has made enormous profits during the worst downturn in 70 years - $4.1 billion profit in the last two years alone, more than double the profit INCO made in the last ten years when nickel prices were very high. INCO is on record stating it could still make a profit with nickel selling at $4; the price was $7.35 in late November.
"These mines don't belong to Vale. They belong to Canadians," says Gerard, a sentiment shared by many on the picket lines and in the community who call for the nationalization of Vale Inco.
The Communist Party is also calling for public ownership, under democratic controls, arguing natural resources belong to the people of Canada, and the profits generated should be used to benefit the people, to diversify Sudbury's economy with secondary industries and manufacturing, and to guarantee the wages, pensions, benefits and health and safety of mine, mill and smelter workers in Canada.
Vale, a Brazilian company that was publicly owned until it was privatized in 1997, bought out the Canadian-owned International Nickel Company in 2006 for $19 billion, after giving certain undertakings respecting Canada's national interests in the rich natural resources in the Sudbury basin. These are undertakings that the Harper government and Industry Minister "Two-Tier Tony" Clement, now refuse to enforce, or even disclose. This is why Clement's photo features prominently on the outhouses on many picket lines.
The sale is the cause of the strike, there's no doubt. Stephen Ball, Vale's Manager of Corporate Affairs in Ontario, said it all in this Sudbury media interview: "Mining is a capital intensive operation and to attract global capital, Canadian workers will have to get more competitive with workers in less developed countries."
The less developed country he has in mind is Brazil. The competition is with Brazil's 40,000 unionized miners, who made $600 a month until November when a militant strike, and support from Brazil's President Lula, won them an additional 14% over 2 years. The new wage, and the new bar for Vale is $642 a month.
"(Vale) just wants to break the union. They want to completely hit the rest button on the entire labour situation and the agreements that have been put in place in the past," a former INCO Executive told local media.
Vale is scabbing the strike with unionized office workers, members of USWA Local 2020 and 6600. These office workers don't work in the mines, mills, or smelters, but the company has ordered them to cross picket lines and get on-the-job training from managers to start up furnaces and smelters - some of the most dangerous jobs in Canada that could result in deadly explosions if a mistake is made.
Mining has also resumed with the inherent danger of rock falls and gas, and the added danger of unskilled and untrained scabs working in a dangerous environment.
Vale has built bunkhouses at the North Mine that will house 200 scabs, who will be helicoptered in and out every five days. They will work days and nights, 100 at a time, if the company has its way. On November 19, Vale invited union members to cross the lines in yet another provocation.
But scabs don't last long in the regular work force after a strike is over, said Peter Wade. "Historically these guys don't survive after they cross the picket line. Just going by the experience after the Falconbridge strike, a year after, they're not working there."
Scabs don't survive well anywhere. Not only strikers, but the whole community - families, relatives, neighbourhoods - remember who crossed and who didn't. After all, the future of the whole community is at stake today. The wages of unionized miners at Vale Inco and Xstrata (Falconbridge) keep the community, including small businesses, afloat.
As strikers hold up contractors and scabs heading in and out of worksites, members of Locals 2020 and 6600 bring coffee and donuts to the strikers, along with news of what's going on inside, and the promise that "we're working like turtles!"
Workers who refuse to cross the lines can be fired under Ontario's medieval labour laws.
The company has repeatedly taken the union to court seeking injunctions to speed up traffic in and out of the struck sites. The union has between 12 and 15 minutes to let the last truck in the line through, or face fines and restrictions on picketing.
The union has sent delegations around the world to meet with trade unions where Vale refines its products. The unions have responded with shows of solidarity including offers to shut down production to increase pressure on Vale to return to the bargaining table and bargain in good faith. A September rally in Sudbury featured union representatives from around the globe, along with USWA leaders from Canada and the US.
The pressure is on to get the company back to the bargaining table. The union is expected to announce that it's ready to restart negotiations December 1, and invite the company to join them to reach an agreement. Vale has refused to bargain since negotiations broke off and the strike began on July 13.
Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Rowswell released a letter supporting Sudbury strikers in early November. The Sault is another mining town in Northern Ontario that has also seen workers and community victimized by hard times and vicious companies, and right-wing governments. So far, Sudbury's NDP Mayor Rodriguez has said nothing about the strike, while Sudbury Liberal MPP Bartolucci told CBC Radio he can't support the strike because his constituents don't support it. But in fact the community seems quite solidly behind the strikers - no surprise given that Sudbury is all about mining. Sudbury's NDP MPs have supported the strike, and are working with the union. Sudbury Communists are also active on picket lines and in the community.
In fact, the CAW's Mine-Mill Local 598 could very well be joining strikers in February if Xstrata takes the same bargaining approach as Vale. Stay tuned.
(Rowley is the Ontario leader of the Communist Party.)
December 04, 2009
Afghans unimpressed by Obama's troops surge, By Sayed Salahuddin, Kabil, Wed Dec 2, 2009
KABUL, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Thirty thousand more U.S. troops for Afghanistan? Esmatullah only shrugged.
"Even if they bring the whole of America, they won't be able to stabilise Afghanistan," said the young construction worker out on a Kabul street corner on Wednesday morning. "Only Afghans understand our traditions, geography and way of life."
U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement of a massive new escalation of the eight-year-old war seemed to have impressed nobody in the Afghan capital, where few watched the speech on TV before dawn and fewer seemed to think new troops would help.
Obama said his goal was to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al Qaeda in Afghanistan and "reverse the Taliban's momentum". [ID:nN02527192]
The extra U.S. forces, and at least 5,000 expected from other NATO allies, would join 110,000 Western troops already in the country in an effort to reverse gains made by the Islamist militants, at their strongest since being ousted in 2001.
Shopkeeper Ahmad Fawad, 25, said it would not help.
"The troops will be stationed in populated areas where the Taliban will somehow infiltrate and then may attack the troops," he said. "Instead of pouring in more soldiers, they need to focus on equipping and raising Afghan forces, which is cheap and easy."
For many, the prospect of more troops meant one thing: more civilian deaths.
"More troops will mean more targets for the Taliban and the troops are bound to fight, and fighting certainly will cause civilian casualties," Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, a former Afghan prime minister, told Reuters.
"The civilian casualties will be further a blow to the U.S. image and cause more indignation among Afghans."
"NOTHING REALLY NEW"
By late morning, the Afghan government had yet to issue an official response to Obama's statement. President Hamid Karzai has in the past said he favours additional Western troops, although he wants Afghan forces to take over security for the country within five years.
Although Obama pointedly addressed Afghans, telling them the United States was not interested in occupying their country, parliamentarian Shukriya Barakzai said she was disappointed because the speech contained little talk of civilian aid.
"It was a very wonderful speech for America ... but when it comes to strategy in Afghanistan there was nothing really new which was disappointing," she told Reuters from her home.
"It seems to me that President Obama is very far away from the reality and truth in Afghanistan. His strategy was to pay lip-service, and did not focus on civilians, nation-building, democracy and human rights."
Other Afghans, hardened by decades of war and wary of foreign forces whom have for years fought proxy battles in Afghanistan, were sceptical of the United States' intentions.
Kabul money changer Ehsanullah wondered why U.S. forces had managed to find former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but had yet to locate Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden or Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who both fled U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001.
"This is part of America's further occupation of Afghanistan," he said. "America is using the issue of insecurity here in order to send more troops." (Additional reporting by Abdul Saboor and Yara Bayoumy; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Peter Graff and Alex Richardson) ((yara.bayoumy@reuters.com; Kabul newsroom; Reuters Messaging: yara.bayoumy.reuters.com@reuters.net))
"Even if they bring the whole of America, they won't be able to stabilise Afghanistan," said the young construction worker out on a Kabul street corner on Wednesday morning. "Only Afghans understand our traditions, geography and way of life."
U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement of a massive new escalation of the eight-year-old war seemed to have impressed nobody in the Afghan capital, where few watched the speech on TV before dawn and fewer seemed to think new troops would help.
Obama said his goal was to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al Qaeda in Afghanistan and "reverse the Taliban's momentum". [ID:nN02527192]
The extra U.S. forces, and at least 5,000 expected from other NATO allies, would join 110,000 Western troops already in the country in an effort to reverse gains made by the Islamist militants, at their strongest since being ousted in 2001.
Shopkeeper Ahmad Fawad, 25, said it would not help.
"The troops will be stationed in populated areas where the Taliban will somehow infiltrate and then may attack the troops," he said. "Instead of pouring in more soldiers, they need to focus on equipping and raising Afghan forces, which is cheap and easy."
For many, the prospect of more troops meant one thing: more civilian deaths.
"More troops will mean more targets for the Taliban and the troops are bound to fight, and fighting certainly will cause civilian casualties," Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, a former Afghan prime minister, told Reuters.
"The civilian casualties will be further a blow to the U.S. image and cause more indignation among Afghans."
"NOTHING REALLY NEW"
By late morning, the Afghan government had yet to issue an official response to Obama's statement. President Hamid Karzai has in the past said he favours additional Western troops, although he wants Afghan forces to take over security for the country within five years.
Although Obama pointedly addressed Afghans, telling them the United States was not interested in occupying their country, parliamentarian Shukriya Barakzai said she was disappointed because the speech contained little talk of civilian aid.
"It was a very wonderful speech for America ... but when it comes to strategy in Afghanistan there was nothing really new which was disappointing," she told Reuters from her home.
"It seems to me that President Obama is very far away from the reality and truth in Afghanistan. His strategy was to pay lip-service, and did not focus on civilians, nation-building, democracy and human rights."
Other Afghans, hardened by decades of war and wary of foreign forces whom have for years fought proxy battles in Afghanistan, were sceptical of the United States' intentions.
Kabul money changer Ehsanullah wondered why U.S. forces had managed to find former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but had yet to locate Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden or Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who both fled U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001.
"This is part of America's further occupation of Afghanistan," he said. "America is using the issue of insecurity here in order to send more troops." (Additional reporting by Abdul Saboor and Yara Bayoumy; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Peter Graff and Alex Richardson) ((yara.bayoumy@reuters.com; Kabul newsroom; Reuters Messaging: yara.bayoumy.reuters.com@reuters.net))
The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give (But Won't) By Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, 04 Dec, 2009
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
A New Way Forward:
The President's Address to the American People on Afghan Strategy
Oval Office
For Immediate Release
December 2nd
My fellow Americans,
On March 28th, I outlined what I called a "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." It was ambitious. It was also an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I believed -- and still believe -- that, in invading Iraq, a war this administration is now ending, we took our eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.
I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan was already "perilous." I announced that we would be sending 17,000 more American soldiers into that war zone, as well as 4,000 trainers and advisors whose job would be to increase the size of the Afghan security forces so that they could someday take the lead in securing their own country. There could be no more serious decision for an American president.
Eight months have passed since that day. This evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our options in that region that has involved commanders in the field, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State Department officials and key ambassadors, special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and outside this administration, I have a very different kind of announcement to make.
I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness Americans deserve from their president. I've recently noted a number of pundits who suggest that my task here should be to reassure you about Afghanistan. I don't agree. What you need is the unvarnished truth just as it's been given to me. We all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide open. It doesn't pay for a president or a people to fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a difficult decision down the road, especially when the lives of American troops are at stake.
During the presidential campaign I called Afghanistan "the right war." Let me say this: with the full information resources of the American presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to change his mind. In fact, more than most people, it's important that he do so based on the best information available. No false pride or political calculation should keep him from that.
And the best information available to me on the situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn't matter whether you are listening to our war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press reports have indicated, believes that with approximately 80,000 more troops -- which we essentially don't have available -- there would be a reasonable chance of conducting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general with significant experience there, who believes we shouldn't send another soldier at present. All agree on the following seven points:
1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.
2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai's administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.
3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.
4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circumstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.
5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates -- and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisors agree on this -- that there may be perhaps 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another 300 in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.
6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisors estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra dollars; eighty thousand troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisors in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war -- $65 billion -- and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.
7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.
These seven points have been weighing on my mind over the last weeks as we've deliberated on the right course to take. Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I've just described them to you, I've put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That's for the American people, and them alone, to decide.
Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.
This will, of course, take time. But I have already instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Special Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions, however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for a truce in place. Before year's end, I plan to call an international conference of interested countries, including key regional partners, to help work out a way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first American troops from Afghanistan.
For the counterinsurgency war that we now will not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked down that well-mined path once in recent American memory and we know where it leads. For ending the war in another way, there is no precedent in our recent history and so no path -- only the unknown. But there is hope. Let me try to explain.
Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their advisors had little to rely on in the American record. They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown as they made their choices. The same is not true of us.
In the White House, for instance, a number of us have been reading a book on how the U.S. got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vietnam War. We have history to guide us here. We know what happens in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren't enough, of course, we have the path to defeat already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen to send those extra 40,000 Americans. That is the known.
On the other hand, peering down the path of de-escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like this has been tried before in Washington. But I firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the American grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves, traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the unknown. Americans have long braved the unknown in all sorts of ways.
To present this more formulaically, if we sent the troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army, we basically know how things are likely to work out: not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents, despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength. Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan is likely to become more destabilized.
If, however, we don't take such steps and proceed down that other path, we do not know how things will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.
We do not know how things will work out in Pakistan, or how well.
That is hardly surprising, since we do not know what it means to end such a war now.
But we must not be scared. America will not -- of this, as your president, I am convinced -- be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury -- and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.
Let me say again that the unknown path, the path into the wilderness, couldn't be more American. We have always been willing to strike out for ourselves where others would not go. That, too, is in the best American tradition.
It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the future, but in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, war has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a negotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect, but in the opposite direction. It may actually take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually encourage forces in both countries with which we might be more comfortable to step to the fore.
Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with any aid or advice we can offer toward a future peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to take some of the savings from our two wars winding down and put them into a genuine jobs program for the American people.
The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to secure our borders against those who would harm us, and to put Americans back to work. With this in mind, next month I've called for a White House Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs that were not only popular across the political spectrum in the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were remembered fondly long after by those who took part in them -- the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. These basic programs put millions of Americans back to work on public projects that mattered to this nation and saved families, lives, and souls.
We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and a 10.2% official unemployment rate at home. We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path to American safety.
As president, I retain the right to strike at al-Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no matter where they may be, including Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.
It's time for change. I know that not all Americans will agree with me and that some will be upset by the approach I am now determined to follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility for whatever may result from this policy departure. Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced that this is the way forward for our country in war and peace, at home and abroad.
I thank you for your time and attention. Goodnight and God bless America.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Communists want post-1989 politicians to account to people ČTK, 16 November 2009
Prague, Nov 13 (CTK) - The Czech Communists (KSCM) called on post-November 1989 politicians to present to people accounts for the 20 years since the Velvet Revolution during which, they say, the property created in the 40 years of Communist rule has been misappropriated.
The KSCM leadership issued Friday a statement on the 20th anniversary of November 17, 1989, when the events that brought about the fall of Communist rule in then Czechoslovakia started.
The statement says the 20 years of "promises and lying" by the post-November governments and ruling political parties have resulted in the current economic and financial crisis.
A mere cliche has remained from the post-November 1989 ideas of democratisation of society, the statement says.
It claims that a majority of society wished that the socialist social system, work and social certainties be preserved 20 years ago.
The November 1989 leaders, "particularly Vaclav Havel and a part of so called 'dissidents' concentrated around him knowingly lied to people in the Czech Republic from the very beginning," the statement says.
Not the truth and love prevailed and determined the fundamental values of society, but those who were purposefully building neo-liberal capitalist society in which one sole measure - private profit - exists under the veil of moral values, the Communists say.
They refer to Havel's motto that the truth and love will prevail over lie and hatred.
The new political elites broke up the joint state of Czechs and Slovaks (as from January 1993) and the coupon privatisation became the fraud of the century, the statement claims.
It says unemployment has appeared in society and half a million people in the ten million country are without work now.
More than 800,000 people live on the brink of poverty, human health and the right to education have become commodities, society is threatened with mounting crime and corruption, including political corruption, the Communists say.
They accuse the post-November 1989 government of having brought the country to NATO, of sending soldiers to foreign missions and of being servile to the United States and other allies.
The Communists accuse the rightist parties of being ready "to sell the Czech Republic to the foreign military-economic interests of the United States" and to allow building a military base on Czech oil.
They refer to the U.S. plans to build a radar base on Czech soil within the U.S. missile defence shield that Barack Obama's government has scrapped, however.
The two strongest Czech parties, the Civic Democrats (ODS) and the Social Democrats (CSSD), together with their "political satellites" are unable to cope with the current social and economic problems of society, the statement says.
The Czech Republic has lost a substantial part of its state sovereignty when it entered NATO and ratified the Lisbon treaty.
"Vaclav Havel who bears personal responsibility for the developments in the Czech Republic over the past 20 years even publicly and systematically challenges the arrangement of Europe after World War Two," the Communists claim in the statement without elaborating.
Copyright 2009 by the Czech News Agency (ČTK)
December 03, 2009
Fidel Castro Ruz November 29, 2009, IS THERE ANY MARGIN FOR HYPOCRISY AND DECEIT?
Reflections by comrade Fidel
from: cuba.cu
IS THERE ANY MARGIN FOR HYPOCRISY AND DECEIT?
The United States, in its struggle against the Revolution, had in the Venezuelan government its best ally: the eximious Mr. Rómulo Betancourt Bello. We did not know it then. He had been elected President on December 7, 1958; he had not taken office yet when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1st, 1959. Weeks later I had the privilege of being invited by the provisional government of Wolfgang Larrazábal to visit Bolivar’s homeland, which had been so supportive of Cuba.
Very seldom in my life had I seen a warmer people. The film images are still preserved. We drove down the broad highway that replaced the paved road I was taken through the first time I traveled to Venezuela in 1948 -from Maiquetía to Caracas- by the most reckless drivers I had ever seen.
That time I heard the noisiest, longest and most embarrassing booing of my life when I dared to mention the name of the recently elected President-to-be. The more radical masses of the heroic and combative Caracas had overwhelmingly voted against him.
The “illustrious” Rómulo Betancourt was referred to with interest by Latin America and Caribbean political circles.
What was the explanation for that? He had been so radical when he was young that at the age of 23 he became a full member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Costa Rica and remained there from 1931 to 1935. Those were the hard times of the Third International. From Marxism-Leninism he learned about the class structure in a society, the exploitation of men by men throughout history and the development of colonization, capitalism and imperialism in recent centuries.
In 1941, together other leftist leaders, he founded the Partido Acción Democrática (Democratic Action Party) in Venezuela.
He acted as provisional president of Venezuela from October 1945 to February 1948 by virtue of a civic and military coup d’état. He went again into exile when the eminent Venezuelan writer and intellectual, Rómulo Gallegos, was elected Constitutional President and almost immediately after was ousted.
The well-lubricated machinery of his party elects him President during the elections held on December 7, 1958, after the Venezuelan revolutionary forces, led by Junta Patriótica (Patriotic Junta) that was headed by Fabricio Ojeda, overthrew the dictatorship of General Pérez Jiménez.
By the end of 1959, when I spoke at Plaza del Silencio, where hundreds of thousands of people had gathered, and I mentioned, out of sheer courtesy, the name of Betancourt, there was this colossal booing that I mentioned earlier against the President-elect. To me that was a true lesson of political realism. Later I had to pay a visit to him, since he was the President-elect of a friendly nation. I found him to be an embittered and resentful man. He was already the model of “democratic and representative” government the empire needed. He collaborated as much as he could with the Yankees previous to the mercenary invasion through Girón.
Fabricio Ojeda, a sincere and unforgettable friend of the Cuban Revolution, whom I had the privilege to meet and with whom I talked extensively, told me later much about the political process in his homeland and the Venezuela he dreamed of. He was one of the many persons assassinated by that regime, which was totally to the service of the imperialism.
Almost half a century has gone by ever since. I can attest to the exceptional cynicism of the empire that we, the Revolutionary Cubans, the proud heirs of Bolivar and Marti, have indefatigably confronted.
During all these years, ever since the days of Fabricio Ojeda, the world has changed significantly. The military and technological power of that empire has grown bigger, and so have its experience and total absence of ethics. Its media is ever more costly and less committed to moral standards.
To accuse Hugo Chávez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, of inciting a war against the people of Colombia and unleash an arms race, to portray him as the mastermind and promoter of drug trafficking, and accuse him of repressing the freedom of expression, violating human rights and other similar misdeeds is a repugnant and cynical action, as everything else that the empire has done, still does and promotes. We can neither ever forget nor stop reiterating realities. Objective and well-reasoned truth is the most important weapon with which we should ceaselessly hammer into the conscience of peoples.
The US government –it is necessary to remind us of that- promoted and supported the fascist coup d’état in Venezuela on April 11, 2002, and after it failed, it pinned all its hopes in an oil coup, supported with technical programs and resources capable of destroying any government, thus underestimating the people and the revolutionary leadership of that country.
Ever since then, the US government has ceaselessly plotted against the Venezuelan revolutionary process, just as it did and has continued to do against the Revolution in our Homeland for fifty years now. The United States is far more interested in controlling Venezuela –given its huge energy resources and the other raw materials it has, which are obtained at negligible prices, as well as the huge facilities and services owned by transnationals – than Cuba.
After violently crushing the Revolution in Central America and thwarting, by bloody and repressive coups, the democratic and progressive advances in South America, the empire could not resign itself to the construction of socialism in Venezuela. This is a real fact that could not be denied by or hidden from those with a minimum political education in Latin America or elsewhere in the world.
It is worthwhile remembering that not even after the coup promoted by the United States on April 2002 the Venezuelan government armed itself. One oil barrel was hardly 20 dollars worth, a currency that was already devalued since 1971, when Nixon suspended the gold standard mechanism, almost thirty years before Chávez became President. When he took office, the Venezuelan oil was hardly 10 dollars worth. Afterwards, when prices went up, he invested the country’s resources in social programs, development and investment projects and cooperation with several Caribbean and Central American nations and other poorer economies in South America. No other country had offered such a generous cooperation.
He did not buy a single rifle during the first years of his government. He even did something that no other country would have done at a time when his integrity was at stake: he legally suspended the obligation of every honest and revolutionary citizen to defend their country with the arms in their hands.
I would rather say that the Bolivarian Republic waited for too long to acquire new weapons. The infantry rifles they had were the same that existed more than 50 years ago, when the head of the Provisional Government, Admiral Larrazábal, presented me with an automatic FAL rifle on November 1958, the penultimate month of the war. Venezuela continued to use that kind of infantry weaponry for several years after Chávez took office.
It was the US government the one that decreed the disarmament of Venezuela, when it banned the supplies of spare parts for all the Yankee military equipment which it had traditionally sold to that country, including fighting planes, military transport aircraft and even communication equipment and radars. Accusing Venezuela of engaging in an arms build-up is an extremely hypocritical attitude.
Quite on the contrary, the United States has supplied billions of dollars worth in arms, means of combat, aircraft and training to the Armed Forces of the neighboring Colombia. The pretext was the struggle against the guerrillas. I can bear witness to the efforts made by President Hugo Chávez in his quest for the internal peace in that sister nation. The Yankees not only supplied weapons; they also instilled feelings of hatred against Venezuela among the troops they trained, as they did in Honduras, through the Task Force based in Palmerola.
Wherever the US has military bases, it supplies the combat units with the same type of uniform and equipment used by the interventionist troops of that country anywhere else in the world. The United States does not need soldiers of its own, as in Iraq, Afghanistan or the northern region of Pakistan, to plot acts of genocide against our peoples.
The imperialist extreme right, which holds the reins of power, resorts to brazen lies to mask its plans.
The Venezuelan-American lawyer and analyst, Eva Golinger has shown how the strategic arguments used in the message sent on May, 2009, to the United States Congress to justify an investment in the military base of Palanquero were absolutely altered in the agreement whereby the United States received that same base together with several other civil and military facilities. The document sent to the Congress on November 16 entitled “Addendum to reflect terms of the US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement” that signed on October 30, 2009, has been completely altered, as was explained by the analyst. The document is no longer about “the mobility mission providing access to the entire South American continent with the exception of Cape Horn”. All references to global reach operations, security theaters and increased capability of the US Armed Forces to launch an expeditious warfare in the region have also been modified, according to the sharp and well informed analyst.
Furthermore, it is obvious that the President of the Bolivarian Republic is striving very hard to overcome the obstacles put by the United States against Latin American countries, among them, social violence and drug trafficking. The American society was not able to prevent drug trafficking and consumption, the consequences of which are affecting many countries of the region.
Violence has been of the most exported products by the United States capitalist society during the last half a century, through the increasing use of the media and the so called entertainment industry. Those are new phenomena that the human society did not know about before. Such means could be used to create new values in a more humane and just society.
Developed capitalism created the so called consumption societies and with that it also created problems that it is not able to solve today.
Venezuela is the country that has more rapidly been implementing the social programs that can counteract those extremely negative trends.The colossal successes achieved in the last Bolivarian Sport Games is a proof of that.
At the UNASUR meeting, the Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic made a crystal-clear explanation about the problem of peace in the region. What is the position adopted by each country regarding the installation of Yankee bases in South America? This is an obligation not only of each and every State, but also a moral obligation of each and every conscious and honest man and woman of our hemisphere and the world. The empire should know that whatever the circumstances, Latin Americans will fight tirelessly for their most sacred rights.
There are far more serious and pressing problems affecting all peoples in the world: climate change is perhaps the worst and most urgent at this moment.
Before December 18, each State should adopt a decision. Once again the illustrious Peace Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama, should define his position regarding this thorny issue.
Since he accepted the responsibility of receiving the Prize, he will have to respond to the ethical request launched by Michael Moore when he heard the news: “now you should earn it!” I wonder if he could. At a time when there is a unanimous demand on the part of scientific circles to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by no less than 30 per cent of the levels attained in 1990, the United States is only offering to reduce 17 per cent of what it emitted in 2005, which hardly accounts for 5 per cent of the minimum that Science demands from all the inhabitants of this planet by the year 2020. The United States consumes twice as much per inhabitant than Europe, and its emissions exceed those of China, despite its 1.338 billion inhabitants. An inhabitant of the society that consumes the most, emits tens of times more CO2 per capita that a citizen from a poor country of the Third World.
In only thirty more years, the no less than 9 billion human beings that will inhabit the planet will require that the carbon dioxide volumes emitted into the atmosphere be reduced to no less than 80 per cent of the 1990 levels. Such figures are being bitterly understood by an increasing number of leaders of rich countries. But the hierarchy that leads the most powerful and rich country in the planet, the United States, comforts itself by asserting that such predictions are scientific inventions.
Everybody knows that in Copenhagen, countries will, at best, agree on continuing discussions so that an agreement could be reached among the more than 200 States and institutions that should discuss about the commitments, among them, a very important one: which will be the rich countries that will contribute to the development and energy saving of the poorest countries and how much resources will they give?
Is there any margin for hypocrisy and deceit?
Fidel Castro Ruz
November 29, 2009
7:15 p.m.
from: cuba.cu
IS THERE ANY MARGIN FOR HYPOCRISY AND DECEIT?
The United States, in its struggle against the Revolution, had in the Venezuelan government its best ally: the eximious Mr. Rómulo Betancourt Bello. We did not know it then. He had been elected President on December 7, 1958; he had not taken office yet when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1st, 1959. Weeks later I had the privilege of being invited by the provisional government of Wolfgang Larrazábal to visit Bolivar’s homeland, which had been so supportive of Cuba.
Very seldom in my life had I seen a warmer people. The film images are still preserved. We drove down the broad highway that replaced the paved road I was taken through the first time I traveled to Venezuela in 1948 -from Maiquetía to Caracas- by the most reckless drivers I had ever seen.
That time I heard the noisiest, longest and most embarrassing booing of my life when I dared to mention the name of the recently elected President-to-be. The more radical masses of the heroic and combative Caracas had overwhelmingly voted against him.
The “illustrious” Rómulo Betancourt was referred to with interest by Latin America and Caribbean political circles.
What was the explanation for that? He had been so radical when he was young that at the age of 23 he became a full member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Costa Rica and remained there from 1931 to 1935. Those were the hard times of the Third International. From Marxism-Leninism he learned about the class structure in a society, the exploitation of men by men throughout history and the development of colonization, capitalism and imperialism in recent centuries.
In 1941, together other leftist leaders, he founded the Partido Acción Democrática (Democratic Action Party) in Venezuela.
He acted as provisional president of Venezuela from October 1945 to February 1948 by virtue of a civic and military coup d’état. He went again into exile when the eminent Venezuelan writer and intellectual, Rómulo Gallegos, was elected Constitutional President and almost immediately after was ousted.
The well-lubricated machinery of his party elects him President during the elections held on December 7, 1958, after the Venezuelan revolutionary forces, led by Junta Patriótica (Patriotic Junta) that was headed by Fabricio Ojeda, overthrew the dictatorship of General Pérez Jiménez.
By the end of 1959, when I spoke at Plaza del Silencio, where hundreds of thousands of people had gathered, and I mentioned, out of sheer courtesy, the name of Betancourt, there was this colossal booing that I mentioned earlier against the President-elect. To me that was a true lesson of political realism. Later I had to pay a visit to him, since he was the President-elect of a friendly nation. I found him to be an embittered and resentful man. He was already the model of “democratic and representative” government the empire needed. He collaborated as much as he could with the Yankees previous to the mercenary invasion through Girón.
Fabricio Ojeda, a sincere and unforgettable friend of the Cuban Revolution, whom I had the privilege to meet and with whom I talked extensively, told me later much about the political process in his homeland and the Venezuela he dreamed of. He was one of the many persons assassinated by that regime, which was totally to the service of the imperialism.
Almost half a century has gone by ever since. I can attest to the exceptional cynicism of the empire that we, the Revolutionary Cubans, the proud heirs of Bolivar and Marti, have indefatigably confronted.
During all these years, ever since the days of Fabricio Ojeda, the world has changed significantly. The military and technological power of that empire has grown bigger, and so have its experience and total absence of ethics. Its media is ever more costly and less committed to moral standards.
To accuse Hugo Chávez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, of inciting a war against the people of Colombia and unleash an arms race, to portray him as the mastermind and promoter of drug trafficking, and accuse him of repressing the freedom of expression, violating human rights and other similar misdeeds is a repugnant and cynical action, as everything else that the empire has done, still does and promotes. We can neither ever forget nor stop reiterating realities. Objective and well-reasoned truth is the most important weapon with which we should ceaselessly hammer into the conscience of peoples.
The US government –it is necessary to remind us of that- promoted and supported the fascist coup d’état in Venezuela on April 11, 2002, and after it failed, it pinned all its hopes in an oil coup, supported with technical programs and resources capable of destroying any government, thus underestimating the people and the revolutionary leadership of that country.
Ever since then, the US government has ceaselessly plotted against the Venezuelan revolutionary process, just as it did and has continued to do against the Revolution in our Homeland for fifty years now. The United States is far more interested in controlling Venezuela –given its huge energy resources and the other raw materials it has, which are obtained at negligible prices, as well as the huge facilities and services owned by transnationals – than Cuba.
After violently crushing the Revolution in Central America and thwarting, by bloody and repressive coups, the democratic and progressive advances in South America, the empire could not resign itself to the construction of socialism in Venezuela. This is a real fact that could not be denied by or hidden from those with a minimum political education in Latin America or elsewhere in the world.
It is worthwhile remembering that not even after the coup promoted by the United States on April 2002 the Venezuelan government armed itself. One oil barrel was hardly 20 dollars worth, a currency that was already devalued since 1971, when Nixon suspended the gold standard mechanism, almost thirty years before Chávez became President. When he took office, the Venezuelan oil was hardly 10 dollars worth. Afterwards, when prices went up, he invested the country’s resources in social programs, development and investment projects and cooperation with several Caribbean and Central American nations and other poorer economies in South America. No other country had offered such a generous cooperation.
He did not buy a single rifle during the first years of his government. He even did something that no other country would have done at a time when his integrity was at stake: he legally suspended the obligation of every honest and revolutionary citizen to defend their country with the arms in their hands.
I would rather say that the Bolivarian Republic waited for too long to acquire new weapons. The infantry rifles they had were the same that existed more than 50 years ago, when the head of the Provisional Government, Admiral Larrazábal, presented me with an automatic FAL rifle on November 1958, the penultimate month of the war. Venezuela continued to use that kind of infantry weaponry for several years after Chávez took office.
It was the US government the one that decreed the disarmament of Venezuela, when it banned the supplies of spare parts for all the Yankee military equipment which it had traditionally sold to that country, including fighting planes, military transport aircraft and even communication equipment and radars. Accusing Venezuela of engaging in an arms build-up is an extremely hypocritical attitude.
Quite on the contrary, the United States has supplied billions of dollars worth in arms, means of combat, aircraft and training to the Armed Forces of the neighboring Colombia. The pretext was the struggle against the guerrillas. I can bear witness to the efforts made by President Hugo Chávez in his quest for the internal peace in that sister nation. The Yankees not only supplied weapons; they also instilled feelings of hatred against Venezuela among the troops they trained, as they did in Honduras, through the Task Force based in Palmerola.
Wherever the US has military bases, it supplies the combat units with the same type of uniform and equipment used by the interventionist troops of that country anywhere else in the world. The United States does not need soldiers of its own, as in Iraq, Afghanistan or the northern region of Pakistan, to plot acts of genocide against our peoples.
The imperialist extreme right, which holds the reins of power, resorts to brazen lies to mask its plans.
The Venezuelan-American lawyer and analyst, Eva Golinger has shown how the strategic arguments used in the message sent on May, 2009, to the United States Congress to justify an investment in the military base of Palanquero were absolutely altered in the agreement whereby the United States received that same base together with several other civil and military facilities. The document sent to the Congress on November 16 entitled “Addendum to reflect terms of the US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement” that signed on October 30, 2009, has been completely altered, as was explained by the analyst. The document is no longer about “the mobility mission providing access to the entire South American continent with the exception of Cape Horn”. All references to global reach operations, security theaters and increased capability of the US Armed Forces to launch an expeditious warfare in the region have also been modified, according to the sharp and well informed analyst.
Furthermore, it is obvious that the President of the Bolivarian Republic is striving very hard to overcome the obstacles put by the United States against Latin American countries, among them, social violence and drug trafficking. The American society was not able to prevent drug trafficking and consumption, the consequences of which are affecting many countries of the region.
Violence has been of the most exported products by the United States capitalist society during the last half a century, through the increasing use of the media and the so called entertainment industry. Those are new phenomena that the human society did not know about before. Such means could be used to create new values in a more humane and just society.
Developed capitalism created the so called consumption societies and with that it also created problems that it is not able to solve today.
Venezuela is the country that has more rapidly been implementing the social programs that can counteract those extremely negative trends.The colossal successes achieved in the last Bolivarian Sport Games is a proof of that.
At the UNASUR meeting, the Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic made a crystal-clear explanation about the problem of peace in the region. What is the position adopted by each country regarding the installation of Yankee bases in South America? This is an obligation not only of each and every State, but also a moral obligation of each and every conscious and honest man and woman of our hemisphere and the world. The empire should know that whatever the circumstances, Latin Americans will fight tirelessly for their most sacred rights.
There are far more serious and pressing problems affecting all peoples in the world: climate change is perhaps the worst and most urgent at this moment.
Before December 18, each State should adopt a decision. Once again the illustrious Peace Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama, should define his position regarding this thorny issue.
Since he accepted the responsibility of receiving the Prize, he will have to respond to the ethical request launched by Michael Moore when he heard the news: “now you should earn it!” I wonder if he could. At a time when there is a unanimous demand on the part of scientific circles to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by no less than 30 per cent of the levels attained in 1990, the United States is only offering to reduce 17 per cent of what it emitted in 2005, which hardly accounts for 5 per cent of the minimum that Science demands from all the inhabitants of this planet by the year 2020. The United States consumes twice as much per inhabitant than Europe, and its emissions exceed those of China, despite its 1.338 billion inhabitants. An inhabitant of the society that consumes the most, emits tens of times more CO2 per capita that a citizen from a poor country of the Third World.
In only thirty more years, the no less than 9 billion human beings that will inhabit the planet will require that the carbon dioxide volumes emitted into the atmosphere be reduced to no less than 80 per cent of the 1990 levels. Such figures are being bitterly understood by an increasing number of leaders of rich countries. But the hierarchy that leads the most powerful and rich country in the planet, the United States, comforts itself by asserting that such predictions are scientific inventions.
Everybody knows that in Copenhagen, countries will, at best, agree on continuing discussions so that an agreement could be reached among the more than 200 States and institutions that should discuss about the commitments, among them, a very important one: which will be the rich countries that will contribute to the development and energy saving of the poorest countries and how much resources will they give?
Is there any margin for hypocrisy and deceit?
Fidel Castro Ruz
November 29, 2009
7:15 p.m.
Cebrapaz repudiates the US military presence in Latin America, São Paulo, August 3rd 2009
Cebrapaz repudiates the US military presence in Latin America
Cebrapaz repudiates the US military presence in Latin America
The Brazilian Centre of Solidarity to the Peoples and Struggle for Peace (Cebrapaz), a Brazilian social movement that is in charge of the WPC – World Peace Council Presidency, makes public its repudiation to the newest military wage in South America – through the military agreement between USA and Colombia.
The US’s utilization of the military bases of Palanquero, Apiay, Malambo, Cartagena and Malaga located in Colombian territory constitutes a serious menace to security and peace in our region. These new bases aim transform Colombia in a US tactical operational center in Latin America.
The agreement signed for ten years long will allow US to have 1.400 men in Colombia, among civil and military ones and will have an investment about US$ 5 billion. Today, Colombia is the fifth country in the score of the biggest countries with those the USA has military cooperation, behind only Israel, Iraq, Egypt and Afghanistan.
We emphasize that as the influence US policy in the region decreases, the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) of that country, directed to Latin America and the Caribbean, increasingly expands its presence on the continent, either through the installation of military bases and radar or initiatives to scale even greater, as the recent reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the US navy.
These new bases complete the formation of a real military belt around the border with Brazil. Among their real goals are to intimidate the political processes of change that are underway, and gain strategic position in a region with vast natural wealth.
Cebrapaz welcomes the initiative of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachellet to call for the next day on August 10 the Council of South American Defense to address the issue.
We calls on all progressive and national forces and social movements to be alert to this new military escalation of US imperialism in our region
According to the resolution of the 2nd National Assembly of Cebrapaz held in last July, we reinforce our struggle for the dismantling of all foreign military bases around the world, especially those that are in our continent.
We repudiate the intent of making Colombia a center of operations and tactics against the peoples and countries of the region and democratic and anti-imperialist governments. To reject the US military escalation in Colombia means defending Latin America as a region of peace.
São Paulo, August 3rd 2009, Socorro Gomes, President of CEBRAPAZ
CEBRAPAZ
Centro Brasileiro de Solidariedade aos Povos e Luta pela Paz
Sede Nacional: Rua Rego Freitas, 148, conjunto 24 - República -
CEP 01220-010 - São Paulo - Brasil
TEL. (11)3223-3469
www.cebrapaz.org.br
Cebrapaz repudiates the US military presence in Latin America
The Brazilian Centre of Solidarity to the Peoples and Struggle for Peace (Cebrapaz), a Brazilian social movement that is in charge of the WPC – World Peace Council Presidency, makes public its repudiation to the newest military wage in South America – through the military agreement between USA and Colombia.
The US’s utilization of the military bases of Palanquero, Apiay, Malambo, Cartagena and Malaga located in Colombian territory constitutes a serious menace to security and peace in our region. These new bases aim transform Colombia in a US tactical operational center in Latin America.
The agreement signed for ten years long will allow US to have 1.400 men in Colombia, among civil and military ones and will have an investment about US$ 5 billion. Today, Colombia is the fifth country in the score of the biggest countries with those the USA has military cooperation, behind only Israel, Iraq, Egypt and Afghanistan.
We emphasize that as the influence US policy in the region decreases, the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) of that country, directed to Latin America and the Caribbean, increasingly expands its presence on the continent, either through the installation of military bases and radar or initiatives to scale even greater, as the recent reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the US navy.
These new bases complete the formation of a real military belt around the border with Brazil. Among their real goals are to intimidate the political processes of change that are underway, and gain strategic position in a region with vast natural wealth.
Cebrapaz welcomes the initiative of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachellet to call for the next day on August 10 the Council of South American Defense to address the issue.
We calls on all progressive and national forces and social movements to be alert to this new military escalation of US imperialism in our region
According to the resolution of the 2nd National Assembly of Cebrapaz held in last July, we reinforce our struggle for the dismantling of all foreign military bases around the world, especially those that are in our continent.
We repudiate the intent of making Colombia a center of operations and tactics against the peoples and countries of the region and democratic and anti-imperialist governments. To reject the US military escalation in Colombia means defending Latin America as a region of peace.
São Paulo, August 3rd 2009, Socorro Gomes, President of CEBRAPAZ
CEBRAPAZ
Centro Brasileiro de Solidariedade aos Povos e Luta pela Paz
Sede Nacional: Rua Rego Freitas, 148, conjunto 24 - República -
CEP 01220-010 - São Paulo - Brasil
TEL. (11)3223-3469
www.cebrapaz.org.br
December 02, 2009
The Most Urgent Threat to World Peace Is … Canada By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com, AlterNet, December 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144290/
When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbor, decent, civilized, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.
Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.
It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.
After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations from striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.
In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.
In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the well-being of the world.
Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.
To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.
Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for exploiting the tar sands.
The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.
I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?
George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.
© 2009 Monbiot.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144290/
When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbor, decent, civilized, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.
Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.
It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.
After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations from striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.
In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.
In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the well-being of the world.
Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.
To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.
Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for exploiting the tar sands.
The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.
I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?
George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.
© 2009 Monbiot.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144290/
December 01, 2009
Andrew Taylor: My Obama Foreign Policy Interim Report Card . Grade: F
Dec 1, 09: an Obama Foreign Policy Report Card : (1) No prosecution of Bush-Cheney war-crimes or CIA torturers;(2)dictated Pakistan wage war in the NW of their country causing 3,000,000 displaced ; (3) endorsed phoney coup 'election' in Honduras; (4) withdrew demand for Israeli Settler building Freeze as a pre-condition to Peace with Palestine; (5) Massive troop SURGE to fight in the Afghanistan civil war. CHANGE?
HE CANNOT BELIEVE WHAT HE IS GOING TO SAY ABOUT AFGHANISTAN Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland Radical, Tuesday, December 1, 2009
After a 1966 presentation by Dean Rusk before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey commented about the Secretary of State that he could not have believed what he had just said about Vietnam. I thought of Case’s comments the other day after hearing that President Obama was going to announce the sending of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan with a cost of $40 billion.
The President is a smart man. He knows that the demonic image of Al Qaeda as a world wide threat to the United States is about as accurate as the old story about the threat of international communism during the Cold War. He has to know that the Taliban and Al Qaeda have their own separate agendas. He has to understand that the Taliban have been motivated by two concerns: corrupt local government and foreign occupation of their country. Further, he has got to know that these foreign forces cannot subdue or defeat the Taliban in their own country because the population prefers them to the foreigners who are killing civilians and destroying what survives of their desperately poor country.
The President knows that his predecessor gained world wide condemnation for ignoring the traditional international relations tool of diplomacy. He has to see that countries in the region and those that share common cultures, languages, and religions are more likely to be able to defuse conflicts than the Christian superpower from North America.
Yes indeed, the President is a smart man. He knows that military spokespersons have always proposed exaggerated battle plans guaranteeing such favorable results as defeating indigenous enemies and strengthening friendly governments while enhancing the security of the United States. And most of all, Obama has to know what the Vietnam War did to the United States.
The Permanent War Economy
If he knows all these things why is the president going to expand U.S. military operations in Afghanistan? The answer to the question has its roots in the formation of the permanent war economy. The PWE was constructed during World War II as government, the corporate sector, and the military mobilized to defeat fascist armies in Europe and Asia. While others demobilized after the war (or were forced to do so), the United States launched a several trillion dollar program to build the largest war machine in world history.
As economist Ismael Hossein-zadeh reported, military spending has been the second largest item in the federal budget behind social security, which is really a self-financed fund. Quoting from William Hartung, U.S. military spending in 2008 was greater than the entire world combined and thirty times greater than all State Department operations. Military programs constituted over fifty percent of all discretionary spending.
Pollin and Garret-Peltier added that military spending rose from 3 percent to 4.3 percent of the GDP during the Bush years. In 2008, military spending in excess of $600 billion created approximately five million jobs, both military and defense industry related. As Seymour Melman documented years ago, military spending meant funding a huge bureaucracy, contracts for the defense industry, and sub-contracts for manufacturers that produce goods that find their way into weapons systems. Nowadays spending includes private armies, security forces, civilian contracted services for the military, homeland security programs, large grants to major research universities, and many more activities funded and related to military missions.
Of course, military spending is never justified in narrow institutional terms but rather in terms of grand projects and campaigns; fighting communism, combating terrorism, or checking drug smuggling. These campaigns are presented as almost timeless. For example, Tom Hayden has alerted us to the doctrine of the “long war” quoting a counter-insurgency strategist who in 2004 wrote that “there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an ‘Arc of Instability’ that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia.”
These campaigns are reinforced by the general proposition embedded in our political culture that there always has been war and there will always be war. Generals and media pundits from time to time comment on the need for this or that weapon system “for the next war.” The scourge of war will always be with us.
Threats to the Primacy of the Permanent War Economy
Debate about military missions today comes in the context of deep economic crisis and growing demands for scarce societal resources. Banks had to be bailed out. One in eight Americans are on food stamps. Health care needs to be reformed. Millions of people need jobs. Logic would suggest cutting back on military spending particularly since Pollin and Garrett-Peltier have shown once again that each billion in government expenditures in education would create almost three times more jobs than military spending. In fact, government investment in every civilian activity generates more jobs than investment in the military.
The newly released Economic Policy Institute “American Jobs Plan” includes a proposal for a $40 billion per year allocation of government funds to create one million public service jobs. The cost of this aspect of the EPI jobs program could be paid for with funds that will be going to expanding the war in Afghanistan instead.
So when we ask ourselves why military operations in Afghanistan will be expanded the answer seems clear. First, the military constitutes the largest organized, armed, and funded institution in American society. In today’s political economy it stands shoulder to shoulder with Wall Street as a source of almost unstoppable resistance to change. Second, military largesse trickles down throughout the society affecting manufacturing, scientific research, education, private armies, spy operations, and myriad other activities. Third, pentagon elites see the danger of this new administration reallocating spending to meet the needs of a crisis-ridden economy: health care, jobs, education, and transportation (it is interesting to note that Senators Lugar and Graham already have called for shelving health care reform until the battle in Afghanistan has been won). Finally, military institutional interests demanding increasing shares of government money use in their advocacy expanding wars playing upon the deeply embedded war-proneness of American culture.
What are the consequences of this analysis for peace? One conclusion is that grassroots activists must take on the permanent war economy. It has been an enduring feature of American foreign and domestic policy since the end of World War II. The wastefulness of military spending, the folly of claims made justifying each and every war, and the war culture must be challenged. In addition, peace and justice movements must show clearly that every dollar that is allocated for the military is a dollar that is not used to sustain life, create jobs, promote education, and provide for health care.
The President is a smart man. He knows that the demonic image of Al Qaeda as a world wide threat to the United States is about as accurate as the old story about the threat of international communism during the Cold War. He has to know that the Taliban and Al Qaeda have their own separate agendas. He has to understand that the Taliban have been motivated by two concerns: corrupt local government and foreign occupation of their country. Further, he has got to know that these foreign forces cannot subdue or defeat the Taliban in their own country because the population prefers them to the foreigners who are killing civilians and destroying what survives of their desperately poor country.
The President knows that his predecessor gained world wide condemnation for ignoring the traditional international relations tool of diplomacy. He has to see that countries in the region and those that share common cultures, languages, and religions are more likely to be able to defuse conflicts than the Christian superpower from North America.
Yes indeed, the President is a smart man. He knows that military spokespersons have always proposed exaggerated battle plans guaranteeing such favorable results as defeating indigenous enemies and strengthening friendly governments while enhancing the security of the United States. And most of all, Obama has to know what the Vietnam War did to the United States.
The Permanent War Economy
If he knows all these things why is the president going to expand U.S. military operations in Afghanistan? The answer to the question has its roots in the formation of the permanent war economy. The PWE was constructed during World War II as government, the corporate sector, and the military mobilized to defeat fascist armies in Europe and Asia. While others demobilized after the war (or were forced to do so), the United States launched a several trillion dollar program to build the largest war machine in world history.
As economist Ismael Hossein-zadeh reported, military spending has been the second largest item in the federal budget behind social security, which is really a self-financed fund. Quoting from William Hartung, U.S. military spending in 2008 was greater than the entire world combined and thirty times greater than all State Department operations. Military programs constituted over fifty percent of all discretionary spending.
Pollin and Garret-Peltier added that military spending rose from 3 percent to 4.3 percent of the GDP during the Bush years. In 2008, military spending in excess of $600 billion created approximately five million jobs, both military and defense industry related. As Seymour Melman documented years ago, military spending meant funding a huge bureaucracy, contracts for the defense industry, and sub-contracts for manufacturers that produce goods that find their way into weapons systems. Nowadays spending includes private armies, security forces, civilian contracted services for the military, homeland security programs, large grants to major research universities, and many more activities funded and related to military missions.
Of course, military spending is never justified in narrow institutional terms but rather in terms of grand projects and campaigns; fighting communism, combating terrorism, or checking drug smuggling. These campaigns are presented as almost timeless. For example, Tom Hayden has alerted us to the doctrine of the “long war” quoting a counter-insurgency strategist who in 2004 wrote that “there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an ‘Arc of Instability’ that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia.”
These campaigns are reinforced by the general proposition embedded in our political culture that there always has been war and there will always be war. Generals and media pundits from time to time comment on the need for this or that weapon system “for the next war.” The scourge of war will always be with us.
Threats to the Primacy of the Permanent War Economy
Debate about military missions today comes in the context of deep economic crisis and growing demands for scarce societal resources. Banks had to be bailed out. One in eight Americans are on food stamps. Health care needs to be reformed. Millions of people need jobs. Logic would suggest cutting back on military spending particularly since Pollin and Garrett-Peltier have shown once again that each billion in government expenditures in education would create almost three times more jobs than military spending. In fact, government investment in every civilian activity generates more jobs than investment in the military.
The newly released Economic Policy Institute “American Jobs Plan” includes a proposal for a $40 billion per year allocation of government funds to create one million public service jobs. The cost of this aspect of the EPI jobs program could be paid for with funds that will be going to expanding the war in Afghanistan instead.
So when we ask ourselves why military operations in Afghanistan will be expanded the answer seems clear. First, the military constitutes the largest organized, armed, and funded institution in American society. In today’s political economy it stands shoulder to shoulder with Wall Street as a source of almost unstoppable resistance to change. Second, military largesse trickles down throughout the society affecting manufacturing, scientific research, education, private armies, spy operations, and myriad other activities. Third, pentagon elites see the danger of this new administration reallocating spending to meet the needs of a crisis-ridden economy: health care, jobs, education, and transportation (it is interesting to note that Senators Lugar and Graham already have called for shelving health care reform until the battle in Afghanistan has been won). Finally, military institutional interests demanding increasing shares of government money use in their advocacy expanding wars playing upon the deeply embedded war-proneness of American culture.
What are the consequences of this analysis for peace? One conclusion is that grassroots activists must take on the permanent war economy. It has been an enduring feature of American foreign and domestic policy since the end of World War II. The wastefulness of military spending, the folly of claims made justifying each and every war, and the war culture must be challenged. In addition, peace and justice movements must show clearly that every dollar that is allocated for the military is a dollar that is not used to sustain life, create jobs, promote education, and provide for health care.
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