OBL Dead

Osama Bin Laden is dead killed by a special unit of US forces in Pakistan. He was killed in his compound located in an urban area 30 miles from Islamabad.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan must have known about his whereabouts during all these years. Saudi Arabia is in a difficult position now in the ME, with all those revolutions at its door, and badly needs US protection for the survival of its backward monarchy. Bin Laden is the price for this unconditional protection.

Bin Laden leaves behind him a trail of murders, wars, violence and multiple religious sectarianisms: Muslims versus Christians, Sunnis versus Shias. He discredited Muslims and Arabs all over the world and served well the US and Israel's imperial interests in the 'greater middle east area'.

UPDATE
US special forces told to kill, not capture, Bin Laden.

Reactions: 'Sunni Hamas condemns killing of Arab holy warrior'. Palestinian resistance movements are all corrupted by Saudi Arabia's money. Deprived of support and having to sustain a harsh occupation, Palestinian leaders turn to the wrong country, wrong ideology and wrong man...Ismail Hanyia's statement on Bin Laden is confirming what zionists say about Hamas. How dumb of him to call Bin Laden 'Arab holy warrior'. We need an Arab spring in Palestine now!
Sunni Lebanese Muslim preachers, Saudi kooks and Hariri tools, hail Bin Laden for attacking at the heart of the US. These people feel no shame. Bin Laden was fabricated by Saudi Arabia and the US, then served to us, and we should feel relieved at his death, not mournful and not a bit proud about his criminal enterprises.

Some perspective:

Angry Arab on the celebrations.

Angry Arab on OBL and his sponsors.

More from Angry Arab (this is an extract and I took the liberty to put it in paragraphs, it is known that Angry Arab doesn't like paragraphs):

Now, turning to the US, I also believe that in the wake of any US military operation, we are fed a large amount of lies, fabrication, sc fi scenarios, and exaggerations.  

I mean, other than Bin Laden has been killed by US troops, I am skeptical of the rest.  

Let us begin with the one about that Bin Laden received a "Muslim burial at sea."  I mean, do they think that Arabs/Muslims are idiots?  Burial at sea? Is that a new military term for tossing his body from the air?  Burial at sea? Who are you kidding? Just say what happened: most likely, soldiers scrawled slogans on his body, and then yelled: Allahu Akbar, you motherfucker, and then tossed his body in the water.  

Then the story that I instantly wrote about yesterday: the notion that the find was the product of painstaking hard work and research by US intelligence agents. I remember that we were told how US intelligence agents in Iraq did a family tree and complicated charts of the relatives and bodyguards of Saddam to locate him.  Later we learned that: a bodyguard of Saddam turned himself in to US troops and asked for the bounty.  There is now a beginning of insinuations US troops found him due to a tip.  Here is the beginning of the story in the US press.  First we were told that a courier was spotted by US agents.  Now we are told that Pakistani agents were the first to spot him.  

We were first told that a man in the compound took a woman as a human shield and that she was killed.  When I now hear a "human shield" story, I know that I am about to be lied to by Israeli or US military to justify yet another killing of civilians.  Later we were told that Bin Laden was the one who took a woman as a human shield.  I am sure that the human shield story will disappear later. Just remember the original early story of Pat Tillman: I mean some in the US military are experienced in movie scripts.  

To their credit, Politico has noticed the various inconsistencies and lies and the changes in the early accounts.   And `Abdul-Bari `Atwan of Al-Quds Al-`Arabi, who knew Bin Laden and liked him says in his editorial today that an aide to Bin Laden said that he requested that his bodyguards shoot him if he ever faced killing by enemies.  `Atwan leans to that theory for his killing: that his own bodyguard shot him.  I think this is very likely and may emerge later.  Is that why the body was thrown in the sea? Because Americans want to believe that an American bullet killed him?  Does this matter? Well, yes.  

The US has lied so much that it is understandable that it is not believed by Muslims especially that Arabs/Muslims can't celebrate the American celebrations of their killings, even if the person killed is Bin Laden: who may not be loved by Arabs and Muslims (and who clearly failed to win support among the masses) but any US president is hated more than Bin Laden. That is the key element to help you understand the complicated Arab/Muslim attitudes to Bin Laden and his death.  This explains the stupid foolish statement by Isma`il Haniyyah who called Bin Laden "mujahid" (holy struggler).  

Oh, and now Fox News is giving credit where it is due: it crediting torture for locating Bin Laden.  

And the stupidity can be seen in Arab media too: New TV who I generally like, yesterday aired a report on the possible successors to Bin Laden.  It said that Abu Zubayda is the most likely to emerge as the key commander of Al-Qa`idah. Can some one tell New TV that Abu Zubyayda won't be able to assume his duties because he is sitting in Guantanamo? 

Why Bin Laden might have been dead for years and why the US chose to announce his death now.

Wikileaks and the Afghan war

There are many lessons to be learned from the recent leak of secret reports on the Afghan war. One of them should be that nobody will be out of reach of Wikileaks now. The very idea is somehow liberating...Big brother has been defeated by a smart little brother operating in a different direction to spread information, embarrass those who lie to us by hiding and customizing information to rule the masses ...
I hope Julian Assange will deliver one day some truth on that paradigm of misinformation that is the HIT...

Obama's foreign policy: reality bites

For those of you who might have hoped that Obama would be a departure from Bush it is time to look at reality:

The middle east process is dead. It needs more than hope and speeches...

The US is engaged in a civil war in Yemen,

Afghanistan, not only the Taliban, is chanting 'death to Obama'...

America has lost its leadership in the world while its presidents apply a dumb foreign policy whose only understandable aim is to spread instability in the world while failing on security...

The Obama Afghan surge: a decision more political than strategic

An article worth reading. And now Obama is trying to save his presidency while putting more troops in harm's way for nothing else than his political survival...

ballot box elixir

The absurd expectation heaped on Afghanistan's election is a fig leaf for leaders seduced by the allure of military power

An excellent article from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian who labels the attitude of western leaders toward elections in Afghanistan as liberal arrogance. I loved he article. Jenkins is saying loud what many of us are thinking. Believe me, this is the obituary of liberalism, and it is such a pity that we should end up emptying our values and most of all our democratic values from their substance just to satisfy our imperial hubris...

Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 Nato and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230bn of US and UK taxpayers' money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won't co-operate. They even fiddle elections.

That sums up the west's response to the election staged last August by the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai. His decision yesterday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on Nato's parade.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of Sutton and Cheam. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.

Nato and the UN were warned well in advance that the election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.

Power in a dysfunctional state seldom lies with any representative of the majority. Ever since Washington flew Karzai back to Kabul in 2002, he has received billions of dollars in aid money, which he has shrewdly used to barter deals with tribal chiefs and provincial commanders. Afghanistan has never enjoyed unified central government, but what it has emanates from Karzai's status as agent for the occupying power. If America is content for him to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fuelling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?

The answer, of course, lies not in Afghanistan but in Washington and London. This war, like all hopeless wars, is haemorrhaging popularity. From the moment Obama adopted Afghanistan as "his war" and allowed himself to be led by David Petraeus – that most dangerous of generals, a clever strategist – he was engulfed by the siren call of glory. He is now truly trapped.

Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by "being given democracy", much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen. It was compensation for Kipling's white man's burden, and its "old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard".

If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then western leaders must find a reason for soldiers to die. Like Crusaders of old, they are told to die for the sacrament of a holy grail, in this case the franchise. Therefore it must not be desecrated by dodgy registers, fabricated returns and bought voters' lists.

It does not matter to the British people how the Afghans choose to conduct an election. It does not matter how one of the poorest countries in the world chooses to govern itself under the UN charter of self-determination. Few elections outside western democracies bear much scrutiny. We still hold our noses and deal with Iran, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Russia.

The excuse that we are preventing another 9/11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and America, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering $1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested Bin Laden. It must be the most extravagant punitive expedition to the Asian mainland since Agamemnon set off for Troy.

The impact on international affairs has been devastating. British foreign secretaries – not least David Miliband – strut the press conferences of the world declaring "what we want to see" in regimes that are no business of Britain. In a BBC interview yesterday, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown spoke of what "we" should do in Afghanistan as if it were in his old Somerset constituency. Every inch the liberal imperialist, he seemed to think we owned it.

We need look no further for an answer to the question posed by the American pundit Richard Haass. Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer, he asked why the west had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonised half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. America had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot.

The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that "the safety of the streets" requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.

Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

''Must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?''

The best argument to date against western troops' involvment in Afghanistan ...

Oil, Opium, etc...

Through Homeyra's blog this remarkable post about Afghanistan's opium production under Nato's watch: 'All is well in Kabul's markets', taken from a post by an Afghani blogger.
Western governments have been fighting a war in Afghanistan for the control of Oil routes while leaving to their puppets the control over world Opium production.

Canada's Harper government is an embarrassment

The Harper government is behaving submissively toward the Bush administration and toward what it represents in terms of ideological commitments. Or maybe the Harper ideology is just Bush's applied with much zeal and disregard for everything else. It is indeed the extreme of an extreme, of what Bush has embodied on the world stage for the last seven years.

Teh Harper government refused to ask for a ceasefire in Lebanon in July 2006 when Israel was bombing Lebanon and Lebanese so madly, despite Canada's large Arab, lebanese and Muslim communities. Recently, Harper went to the Bali conference on climate change with only representatives from major Canadian oil companies. Last week Canada was the only country to excuse and explain US's secretary of defense arrogant statement about Nato forces not knowing how to fight in Afghanistan.

And today, after a Canadaian foreign minstry document cited the US and Israel on a torture list, as countries that torture, it withdrew them, just like that, with excuses, because...they are allies.

Watch Harper and his government closely, they are the épitome of bad taste when it comes to foreign policy and Human rights, but, most of all, they follow so closely Bush's ideology that they have become its caricature...

More: Torture manual to be rewritten...as not to offend Israel and the US

Canadian troops must leave Afghanistan now and MacKay must resign

Our men and women in the military are dying in Afghanistan. Canada has lost 77 of its troops since 2002. For what ? To support the druglords who run the Karzai government. The Talibans are gaining ground every day and now extending their terror operations to Pakistan. Afghanistan was the US's battleground against the other 'evil', the soviet union. And to battle on this ground, the US fertilised it with terrorists and withdrew from there, not even looking to wage a serious war against the very source of the terror that struck it in its heart on september 11th, preferring to invest the oil fields of Iraq. But the US left this mess in the hands of Nato to clean it up. Nato has been unable so far to clean this mess. Part of the problem is US's policy toward the Afghan puppet government, the Pakistani puppet government, the Saudi puppet government, and every Muslim and Arab dictatorial and corrupt puppet government the US is supporting, along with a very bellicose rethoric about Islam. This combination is breeding submissive regimes in Muslim and Arab countries and fueling hatred of the US and the west.

Meanwhile, our men and women in the military are dying for the US to be able to perpetuate tragic errors and to cast them as 'War on Terror'.

The arrogance of the US doesn't stop there. Not only are they able to cast their own tragic failure in Iraq as a success but they are unable to recognise the hard work of small countries investing huge amounts of money and human flesh in a war they did not start, unable to recognise that the failure of these countries in Afghanistan is due to the local and global policies of the US in the 'War on Terror'.

Today, secretary of defense Robert Gates criticised Nato for not 'knowing how to fight a guerilla insurgency'. The comment was judged 'outrageous' even by conservative commentators in Canada. Holland and the UK are asking for apologies. But our own conservative Bushminded government and defense minister are trying to excuse Mr Gates by saying that Gates did not criticise the work of Canadian troops in particular. I find Mr. MacKay's answer very disturbing when Canadian troops are dying for the US's mistakes and when Canada's participation in a war that could not be won is hugely largely condemned and decried by Canadian citizens.

More Here: Shaming Nato over Afghanistan

What is going on in Afghanistan ? Listen to Malalai Joya

While Nato and the Canadians are congratulating themselves on 'progress' made in Afghanistan, political activist Malalai Joya, who was recently ousted from the Afghan parliament, is denouncing US policy there. I listened to her speaking with Anna Maria Tremonti at The Current's CBC.

She is describing a reality that is hidden from us here in the West. The US, she says, is not interested by democracy in Afghanistan. The US is financing the Northern Alliance thugs against the Taliban thugs. It is supporting a corrupt government and alienating the population.

There will be more on this blog on this courageous young woman. Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali defenders, Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri Lévy, are keeping mumm about Joya and her likes. Her case is not mediatic enough for them, neither neo-con friendly enough, nor Islamophobic enough.

The difference betweenn Hirsi Ali and Joya is that Joya is telling the truth about her government and Ali has been always telling lies about Islam. The other difference is that Hirsi Ali is telling the west what it wants to hear and Joya is telling the west what it does not want to hear.

US Policy New 'Turn' in the ME: 'Iraqi Bloodshed Is Not Our Responsibility'

What did I tell you before ? When I heard of an invitation made to Syria and Iran to join talks on security for Iraq's neighbours in Baghdad, I didn't think, like most professional western analysts, that this was a turn in the Bush's adminstration policy in the ME. I immediately thought that this was the Bush adminstration's way to pin the blame of the bloodshed in Iraq on Syria and Iran !

Zionists and Neocons alike have been promoting the idea of a bloodshed between Sunnis and Shias as the main obstacle to peace and stabilisation in Iraq. Forgotten are the first gulf war, the embargos on Iraqi populations, the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq and the destruction of a whole country and society, the looting of Iraq's oil resources and cultural heritage, and the presence of 150000 active US soldiers making sure Iraqi puppet politicians are doing what the US asks them to do. Now we are invited to believe that the problem of Iraq is between the hands of Sunnis and shias in Iraq and the rest of the ME. From now on, the nightmare in the ME is not the US and Israel's faults, it is the fault of Muslims fighting each other and Palestinian factions fighting each other. Some Arab fools are buying into this narrative, king Abdullah of Jordan for example. Speaking of, why Jordan is not named as responsible for Iraq's security ? That's a question the Bush adminstration would have to answer and that no journalist will ask.

Today, at the opening of the talks, US puppet Iraqi prime minister Nouri El Maliki is reproted to have ''issued a stern warning that unless Iraq's neighbours - including Iran and Syria - united to help to shut down networks supplying both Sunni and Shia extremists, Iraq's escalating sectarian bloodshed would inevitably engulf the Middle East.''

And to realise that this conference on the stabilisation of iraq is a farce one must listen to puppet Maliki asking neighboring countries to stop their interference in Iraq while he seems to be confortable with 150000 USW soldiers in his country and a US adminstration dictating Iraqi policies.

Bagdad demande l'arrêt des ingérences étrangères
LEMONDE.FR 10.03.07

©

Well, the US wages illegal wars in the world and asks others to take responsibility for the post-war stabilisation. As in Afghanistan where an alliance, once powerful, is battling a guerrilla made of few radicals and fundamentalists.

Nobody should follow the US on this path. Reason must prevail and countries around the world should boycott the Bush adminstration or any adminstration who conducts such a failing and irrational policy. This nonsense must stop ! We shoudl ask our governments not only to stop supporting this policy but to fight it tirelessely to curb the actual terrible state of the world !

Angry Arab's first comment on the conference of Iraqi neighbours.
Angry Arab's second comment on the conference of Iraqi neighbours.