Iraq: The Destruction Of A Civilization

By James Petras, Global Research.ca

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.
Top pro-Israeli policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

...Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

Thanks Homeyra for the link.

A forceful indictment of a famous Neocon

By Middle east analyst and author Juan Cole.

And will this Neocon be able to bury Israel's war crimes in Gaza ? If "The road to Jerusalem more likely leads through Baghdad than the reverse... "*, it is probably for this only purpose, to bury under another crime the central one, the rape of Palestine.

* Martin Peretz wrote this in his New Republic in 2002. The complete quote is:

"The road to Jerusalem more likely leads through Baghdad than the reverse. Once the Palestinians see that the United States will no longer tolerate their hero Saddam Hussein, depressed though they may be, they may also come finally to grasp that Israel is here to stay and that accommodating to this reality is the one thing that can bring them the generous peace they require.''

W or the incredible lightness of being

I saw Oliver Stone's biographical movie about George W Bush yesterday.

I am not particularly a Stone fan but I am never disappointed by his movies. There is deep understanding, empathy and humanity in his movies when it comes to the treatment of some of his characters, and when he is justified to do so. He approaches W with a light touch without discarding the dramatic dimension of his presidency and the decision to go to war in Iraq. He was able to convey the simplistic and intimate world of W and his internal struggles and how it was exploited by the neo-cons and the evangelicals. There is one person that comes really damaged from this movie and it is Condi Rice. She is portrayed as a follower, a Bush appeaser, and a woman without substance. She comes across as a 100% result of affirmative action, something she must be against and from which she profited without having any special merit.

Overall, it is good entertainement and a glance at the disastrous Bush presidency which is a mix of religious politics, Missionary ideology, entitlement, and special interests in the US.

On both sides of the divide created by Bush, the people of Iraq, Palestine, the Middle East, and American citizen have paid dearly for this dramatic lightness in US foreign policy which has become the hallmark of George W Bush's presidency.

Ex-MI5 chief: Response to 9/11 was 'huge overreaction'

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.
"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.
In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.
Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

Read here the interview she gave to The Guardian

With Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the official authorisation and public acceptation of torture in the name of security, the Iraq war which shattered an entire nation as well as hundred thousands lives and put the middle east in turmoil, and the politisation - not the criminalisation - of terror, I think we are way above an overreaction, we are in a delibrately planned large scale coup against civilian society conducted by a military-industrial cartel with the complicity and the responsibility of the citizen of the 'free' societies.

Baghdad's nights

A scientific study based on satellite images of Baghdad and other areas of Iraq shows that it is Ethnic cleansing and not the US troops surge that may have curbed the intercommunautary violence in Baghdad.

Iraq: From One Dictator To The Next

Via Gorilla's Guides, a team effort and bilingual (English and Arabic) source on Iraq.

Angelina Jolie Of Arabia

Celebrities' involvment in Political and Humanitarian missions in faraway and third world countries tells only about the superficiality those missions have become to acquire in our western public consciousness.

See the post on Angry Arab

The cost of wars for US households and the world economy

A grim analysis from Spiegel

Iraq's foreign militants 'come from US allies'

The last legal casus belli for the US going to war against Iran just doesn't work. Now they will have to invent the Uranium story from Nigeria, hopefully there won't be a CIA officer and her husband diplomat on their back so they can get away with their lies.
Oh and also it was repeated time and again that US allies in the ME are authoritarian regimes, and that submissiveness to the US of leaders in these countries, as well as their handling of their political opponents with the last trend in the west now, torture and unlawful imprisonement, are breeding extremism in their populations. But no sensible person in the US would look at this phenomenon. It is as if the US were determined to breed both submissiveness and terrorism in the ME, and ban moderation and common ground.

From The Guardian

"Around 60% of all foreign militants who entered Iraq to fight over the past year came from Saudi Arabia and Libya, according to files seized by American forces at a desert camp.

The files listed the nationalities and biographical details of more than 700 fighters who crossed into Iraq from August last year, around half of whom came to the country to be suicide bombers, the New York Times reported today.

In all, 305, or 41%, of the fighters listed were from Saudi Arabia. Another 137, or 18%, came from Libya. Both countries are officially US allies in anti-terrorism efforts.

In contrast, 56 Syrians were listed and no Lebanese. Previously, US officials estimated that around a fifth of all foreign fighters in Iraq came from these two countries.

US officials have also long complained about Iranian interference in the affairs of its neighbour, accusing Tehran of shipping weapons for militants over the border. However, any assistance does not appear to extend to people, the paper said, reporting that, of around 25,000 suspected militants in US custody in Iraq, 11 were Iranian. No Iranians were listed among the fighters whose details were found."

Evaluating the Risk of a War on Iran

"Cheney derives much of his support from hawks outside the administration who fear their days are as numbered as the President's. "The neocons see Iran as their last chance to prove something," says analyst Riedel. This aim is reflected in their tone. Conservative columnist Norman Podhoretz, for example -- a father figure to all neocons -- wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he "hopes and prays" that Bush will finally bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees the United States engaged in a global war against "Islamofascism," a conflict he defines as World War IV, and he likens Iran to Nazi Germany. "Is it 1938 again?" he asks in a speech he repeats regularly at conferences.

Podhoretz is by no means an eccentric outsider. He now serves as a senior foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani. President Bush has also met with Podhoretz at the White House to hear his opinions." MORE

Yesterday In Iraq

Security Guards fired randomly, killed two women.

Israel's Role In the War on Iraq: Conquer and Divide

"The two authors devote more than 30 pages and a remarkable 175 footnotes to constructing an irrefutable case for an Israeli role in helping plan, and a large lobby role in pressing for, the war. Although they do not claim that the effort to guarantee Israeli security was the sole reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they demonstrate clearly -- citing public and privates statements by Israeli military and political officials, informed commentary in both Israel and the U.S., and analysis by foreign policy experts -- that "Israeli leaders, neoconservatives, and the Bush administration all saw war with Iraq as the first step in an ambitious campaign to remake the Middle East" in order to "make it a more friendly environment for America and Israel." Israel and the lobby "played crucial roles in making that war happen." Without the lobby and particularly the core of neocon policymakers inside government and neocon commentators and think-tank analysts on the sidelines, Mearsheimer and Walt conclude bluntly, "the war would almost certainly not have occurred" and "America would probably not be in Iraq today."

On the question of oil as a principal driver in the war, the authors demonstrate that in fact, although the oil industry was clearly happy to obtain lucrative concessions in post-Saddam Iraq, the argument that the industry pushed for the war in order to enhance profits is counter-intuitive..."More

September 11th, the Iraq War, and the Unregulated Security Business

"Blackwater is the most notorious example of this secretive, unregulated business sector. Founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, the Christian conservative beneficiary of a multi-million-dollar inheritance and a former Navy SEAL, the firm currently has about 2,300 mercenaries stationed in nine countries, of which about 1,000 are stationed in Iraq. There are another 20,000 Blackwater employees in reserve.
By its own description, Blackwater strives to achieve an honorable goal: "to support security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere." In the firm's early days, however, their actual achievements lagged far behind that lofty creed.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, Prince told the conservative news channel Fox News, "I've been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security." He added that "the phone is ringing off the hook now."
The callers included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US Department of State and the Pentagon. Soon Blackwater had secured government contracts worth almost a billion dollars -- often without any competition. The company's headquarters in the marshes of North Carolina soon mushroomed into the world's largest military base, complete with shooting ranges, ghost cities to train urban combat, an artificial lake and a runway.
Blackwater's main client is the US Department of State --- the company has been protecting US diplomats in Iraq since 2003. The firm also provides bodyguards for Congressmen and women visiting Iraq."

"Above the Law?
It was not the first time that Blackwater -- or one of the hundreds of other security contractors in Iraq -- made the headlines. Indeed, individual firms have been sent back to the United States, usually without facing any penalties for misdeeds. Each time, the storm settled again soon afterwards. And each time, the mercenaries continued their patrols. They have long become indispensable, the "whores of war." That, in any case, is what Katy Helvenston -- the mother of Blackwater employee Scott Helvenston, who was killed in Fallujah in 2004 -- called them. Helvenston believes the company's stinginess and greed is partly to blame for her son's death.
But today, no one in Iraq can do without private security contractors any more -- neither the US military nor the diplomatic corps."
..."Iraq's government is not formally authorized to discipline security firms like Blackwater or even banish them from the country. Backed by Washington, Blackwater's men operate in a legal gray zone. They are immune to Iraqi law -- and at the same time they are largely left in peace by US courts should they be sent home."

September 11th, Bush, Petraeus, and The Spin From Iraq

"The general's campaign in the Senate will continue Tuesday, on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. He will appear in the morning before the foreign affairs committee, in the afternoon before the military committee, and finally Wednesday before the press. The talk in the White House is of "closing arguments."

The date for Tuesday's appearance was selected completely consciously. Bush's strategists probably know that each senator will refer to 9/11 today and thereby help to link the 2001 attacks and Iraq together in people's minds -- despite the lack of any proven connection."

Spiegel interview with US military historian Gabriel Kolko: "The US will loose war regardless what it does"

SPIEGEL: How would you describe the situation of the Bush White House today? What options does it have?

KOLKO: The Bush Administration suffers from a fatal dilemma. Its Iraq adventure is getting steadily worse, the American people very likely will vote the Republicans out of office because of it, and the war is extremely expensive at a time that the economy is beginning to present it with a major problem. The president's poll ratings are now the worst since 2001. Only 33 percent of the American public approve of his leadership and 58 percent want to decrease the number of American troops immediately or quickly. Fifty-five percent want legislation to set a withdrawal deadline. In Afghanistan, as well, the war against the Taliban is going badly, and the Bush Administration's dismal effort to use massive American military power to remake the world in a vague, inconsistent way is failing. The US has managed to increasingly alienate its former friends, who now fear its confusion and unpredictability. Above all, the American public is less ready than ever to tolerate Bush's idiosyncrasies.

SPIEGEL: What went wrong? Was the war doomed from the very beginning? How can the US military and the US government which is spending $3 billion per week in Iraq be losing the war?

KOLKO: ... Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology. Washington refuses to heed this lesson of modern history.

Also, Juan Cole's lenghty analysis on how the present situation in Iraq will affect US politics for a long time to come and block any reasonable alternative to stagnation in a state of war or escalation.

Taking George Seriously (not W.)

Do you regret being friendly with Saddam Hussein?

I regret using words that, with scissors and paste, could be endlessly used by my enemies. I was never a friend of Saddam's. I was an opponent of Saddam's when Britain and America were his best friends and I used to demonstrate outside the embassy in London when businessmen and ministers were going in and out selling him weapons. But I just believe it is immoral to kill people's children because you don't like their dictator, especially when you helped put that dictator in power in the first place.

Countdown To War On Iran

Probably many of you have already seen this article and read it but It is worth mentioning again for its clarity, objectivity, and Fact-Truth content. From Alain Gresh, Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2007.

Excerpts

Us foments unrest and spurns overtures

Faced with more US troops, many armed Iraqi groups have gone to ground ­ for the moment. Others manipulate US troops to do their dirty work for them. The US has failed to create a political settlement and appears to be blind to its own lack of progress

Silently, stealthily, unseen by cameras, the war on Iran has already begun. Many sources confirm that the United States, bent on destabilising the Islamic Republic, has increased its aid to armed movements among the Azeri, Baluchi, Arab and Kurdish ethnic minorities that make up about 40% of the Iranian population. ABC News reported in April that the US had secretly assisted the Baluchi group Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), responsible for a recent attack in which some 20 members of the Revolutionary Guard were killed. According to an American Foundation report (1), US commandos have operated inside Iran since 2004...

President George Bush categorised Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, as the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address in January 2002. Then in June 2003 he said the US and its allies should make it clear that they “would not tolerate” the construction of a nuclear weapon in Iran.

It is worth recalling the context in which these statements were made. President Mohammed Khatami had repeatedly called for “dialogue among civilisations”. Tehran had actively supported the US in Afghanistan, providing many contacts that Washington had used to facilitate the overthrow of the Taliban regime. At a meeting in Geneva on 2 May 2003 between Javad Zaraf, the Iranian ambassador, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan, the Tehran government submitted a proposal to the White House for general negotiations on weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and security, and economic cooperation (2). The Islamic Republic said it was ready to support the Arab peace initiative tabled at the Beirut summit in 2002 and help to transform the Lebanese Hizbullah into a political party. Tehran signed the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty on 18 December 2003, which considerably strengthens the supervisory powers of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) but which only a few countries have ratified.

The US administration swept all these overtures aside since its only objective is to overthrow the mullahs. To create the conditions for military intervention, it constantly brandishes “the nuclear threat”. Year after year US administrations have produced alarmist reports, always proved wrong. In January 1995 the director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency said Iran could have the bomb by 2003, while the US defence secretary, William Perry, predicted it would have the bomb by 2000. These forecasts were repeated by Israel’s Shimon Peres a year later. Yet last month, despite Iran’s progress in uranium enrichment, the IAEA considered that it would be four to six years before Tehran had the capability to produce the bomb.

What is the truth? Since the 1960s, long before the Islamic revolution, Iran has sought to develop nuclear power in preparation for the post-oil era. Technological developments have made it easier to pass from civil to military applications once the processes have been mastered. Have Tehran’s leaders decided to do so? There is no evidence that they have. Is there a risk that they may? Yes, there is, for obvious reasons.

During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s regime, in breach of every international treaty, used chemical weapons against Iran, but there was no outcry in the US, or in France, against these weapons of mass destruction, which had a traumatic effect on the Iranian people. US troops are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran is surrounded by a network of foreign military bases. Two neighbouring countries, Pakistan and Israel, have nuclear weapons. No Iranian political leader could fail to be aware of this situation.

How to prevent escalation?
...Contrary to common assumptions, the main obstacle is not Tehran’s determination to enrich uranium. Iran has a right to do so under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but it has always said it was prepared to impose voluntary restrictions on that right and to agree to increased IAEA inspections to prevent any possible use of enriched uranium for military purposes.

The Islamic Republic’s fundamental concern lies elsewhere. Witness the agreement signed on 14 November 2004 with France, Britain and Germany, under which Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily on the understanding that a long-term agreement would “provide firm commitments on security issues”. Washington refused to give any such commitments and Iran resumed its enrichment programme.

The European Union chose not to pursue an independent line but to follow Washington’s lead. The new proposals produced by the five members of the Security Council and Germany in June 2006 contained no guarantee of non-intervention in Iranian affairs. In Tehran’s reply to the proposals, delivered in August, it again “suggest[ed] that the western parties who want to participate in the negotiation team announce on behalf of their own and other European countries, to set aside the policy of intimidation, pressure and sanctions against Iran”. Only if such a commitment was made could negotiations be resumed.

If not, escalation is inevitable. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president in June 2005 has not made dialogue any easier, given his taste for provocative statements, particularly about the Holocaust and Israel. But Iran is a big country rich in history and there is more to it than its president. There is much tension within the government and Ahmadinejad had severe setbacks both in the local elections and in elections to the Assembly of Experts in December 2006. There are substantial challenges, economic and social, and forceful demands for more freedom, especially among women and young people. Iranians refuse to be regimented and the only strong card the regime has to win their loyalty is nationalism, a refusal to accept the kind of foreign interference suffered throughout the 20th century.

Despite the disaster in Iraq, there is no indication that Bush has given up the idea of attacking Iran. This is part of his vision of a “third world war” against “Islamic fascism”, an ideological war that can end only in complete victory...

Archives:
Ali Akbar Velayati: 'Iran Strives Only for Security'

Few Foreign fighters in Iraq: Many are Saudi

From Juan Cole.

Why did the US go to war in Iraq and why France will be joining in against Iran

Because both countries are financially flat broke. And because the neocon dogma (and France now has a neocon president) dictates that instead of fixing internal problems, which is time consuming and not profitable for those who are at the top of the financial pyramid, it is easier, in order to stay in power and satisfy the Big Money who elect presidents now, to invade another country in order to hide these internal problems and open new economic opportunities, not for the country, but for the few financiers in the country,s top corporations and the Politicians whom they feed. The New 'humanitarian' wars are conducted on the expenses of the people to open new economic and financial opportunities for Big corporations looking for new business horizons in a national context of economic stagnation. This is exactly what happened in the US with the Iraq war and this what will happen in France with the coming Iran war.
Thanks to fellow blogger Stef for finding and displaying the information below.
The CIA publishes, among other things, information about the current accounts of the balance of payments for different countries. What is interesting in this information is that the countries who led the war against Iraq have actually the worst balance of payments.

The current account of the balance of payments is the sum of the balance of trade (exports minus imports of goods and services), net factor income (such as interest and dividends) and net transfer payments (such as foreign aid). A current account surplus increases a country's net foreign assets by the corresponding amount, and a current account deficit does the reverse. Both government and private payments are included in the calculation.

We know very well that Jacques Chirac did not go to war against Saddam, not because of some humanitarian principle but because of Chirac's proximity with eminent sunni Arab Politcians including Saddam. Rumsfeld and the US had the same old friendship with Saddam but everybody knows that the US treats its friends very badly . We also know that Sarkozy, the new french president, was sorry for Chirac's attitude toward the US at the onset of the Iraq war and always wanted to apologize. Well now that he is a president, he may be able to apologize in a very special way and France's attitude toward US wars in the ME might change very quickly.

There is actually a war being prepared by the neocons, it is the war against Iran which entered, according to some specialists, its final phase, and Sarkozy is impatient to embark on this one. First, he is going to choose as his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, the liberal French doctor who advocates conflicts for the purpose of Humanitarian intervention and who was an advocate for the Iraq war. At the same time, Sarkozy is preparing the public opinion for a long war like the one the US is waging in Iraq. He asked that a text written by communist French resistant Guy Mocquet to his parents, while he was 17 and fighting in the French resistance to the Nazi occupation, be read by college students. Although the wars against Iraq or Iran are colonial wars and not wars of resistance, Sarkozy has been defending, all along his campaign for presidency, colonial wars as civilizing missions. And although Sarkozy is a neocon, it does not bother him to read a text written by a communist. Indeed neocons have revealed themselves as much dogmatic and indoctrinating as old commies. Because despite the demise of the communist party, communist resistance to Nazis in France is part of the common glorious history of the nation and its identity. An identity Sarkozy wants to restore to the French people by pitting them against immigrants...He even alluded that this loss of identity is due to immigration by creating a ministry for national identity and immigration.

The letter of Guy Mocquet goes like this (my translation): My Life was short.

«[...] I am going to die! All I ask and all I want from you my 'petite maman' is to be courageous, which is how I am right now, exactly as other brave people before me. My natural choice was to live. But from the bottom of my heart I hope now that my death can serve a purpose. [...] 'Petit papa', I take my leave from you, for the last time, knowing all the sorrow I caused to both of you. I want you to know that I did my best to follow the path you traced for me. I send my adieu to all my friends and to my brother whom I love very much. I want him to study hard and to become a worthy man. Seventeen and a half, my life was so short. I regret nothing except leaving you all. I am going to die. [...] I embrace you with a child's heart. Courage ! [...]»

Read here my article about the moral dilemma of our modern societies sending their children to war. Sarkozy is not going to make France any better...He is going to hide France's ailing economy and his inability to do anything about it by sending France's youths to wars against foreign countries. This is the core idea of the new triumphant capital. After having failed to deliver on economic progress and reforms, the new capital, aided by the neocon ideology, conducts policies of wars, not only to hide the ailing economy but to subjugate the working and struggling classes and silence their dissent. Sarkozy has already shown us his colours, from his vacation on the yacht of the billionnaire Vincent Bolloré to his choice of the young Guy Mocquet letter, and to his closeness to Tony Blair, the man who played second fiddle to George Bush and the neocons and who is happy with the election of Sarkozy and cannot wait to meet with him as a president. Blair will be giving Sarkozy some advise on how to lie into going to war and staying the course. Sarkozy will surpass Blair as a neocon, he already stifled rational debate in France while thriving on the misery and the divisions of the French people....He will build his popularity exactly like celebrities by radicalising the presidency around his persona, provoking, instead of rational debate, flat admiration, hate or indignation, all of which contributing to his omnipresence in the media and the minds of the French people who will become obsessed and addicted to him for some time to come...Sarkozy strives for our attention, negative or positive, and his policies will thrive on the bed of hate and indignation...
The only way to counter Sarkozy is to fight him on facts without emotions, positive or negative, without rethoric, without sentiments, without anger. Because he will be seeking to provoke, above everything else, sentiments and emotions, in order to stifle rational debate. We have an arduous task before us and we have the obligation to do it well for the sake of France's destiny and the destiny of its people...

P.S. Bush threatens Iran with new sanctions

Western Liberals Humanitarian Values on Trial: Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Darfur, Somalia, Congo, and the rest...

Where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference

The UN estimates that 3 million to 4 million Congolese have been killed, compared with the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths in Darfur. A peace deal agreed in December 2002 has never been adhered to, and atrocities have been particularly well documented in the province of Kivu - carried out by paramilitary organisations with strong governmental links. In the last month alone, thousands of civilians have been killed in heavy fighting between rebel and government forces vying for control of an area north of Goma, and the UN reckons that another 50,000 have been made refugees.
How curious, then, that so much more attention has been focused on Darfur than Congo. There are no pressure groups of any note that draw attention to the Congolese situation. In the media there is barely a word. The politicians are silent. Yet if ever there were a case for the outside world to intervene on humanitarian grounds alone - "liberal interventionism" - then surely this is it.

Read the whole article

The same people who are calling for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur were calling for the continuation of Israeli bombings of south Lebanese populations last summer with cluster bombs and for the non intervention of the UN and the international community to stop these bombings. These people are making more harm than good to the people of Darfur because their voice is sullied by their calls for belligerant and lethal policies elsehwere...

The Israeli sponsored US invasion of Iraq and the ethnic cleansening of Baghdad and the Middle East

Four years after the US invasion, an ethnic cleansening in Baghdad has been achieved.
Le Monde has a map of Baghdad's neighbourhoods in 1919, 1956 with an assessment of post-Saddam Baghdad. If you look at the 1956 map, the yellow covers mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad. The light yellow is mixed neighbourhood with a Muslim majority and the strong yellow is simply a mixed neighbourhood with no majority.

It emerges that ethnic mix between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad was well advanced in the fifties and maintained afterward by the Baath party secular regime. However, the US invasion has prompted an unprecedented ethnic cleansening in Baghdad with displaced families by the hundreds thousands and that is probably the only achievement of the US occupation.

It is ironic that today I read an article by former Israeli Knesset member and Gush Shalom director Uri Avnery about to which lenghts Israel is ready to go against those who, even by peaceful and legal means, defy its founding idea as democratic and an ethnically pure state. Avnery underlines the oxymoron that is the definition of Israel as a 'Jewish democratic state', democratic only for its Jewish population.

''According to Ha'aretz, the Israeli Security Agency... "would foil the activity of anyone seeking to harm Israel's Jewish or democratic character, even if that activity was carried out by legal means." This is an admission, ''not only that anyone who strives to alter the Jewish character of the state is considered an enemy and will be treated as such but that the secret service has no respect for democratic practices and procedures.''

Many reasons were advanced for the Iraq invasion, among them Oil. However, an invasion and an occupation of this magnitude might have more than one reason. And I believe that among the many reasons the US went to Iraq is the desire to create small ethnic states at the image of Israel, as we all know by now the prominent role of pro-zionists in the advocacy for the 2003 Iraq invasion. However these new small ethnic states will be unchallenging for Israel because of their submission to the US and because their forced divisions will bring about tens if not hundred years of internal strife leaving Israel the only superpower in the Middle East as the rest of the Middle east will be ruins. At least, the Iraq invasion seems to have achieved this objective very quickly. And the war of agression on Lebanon, despite failing to crush Hezbollah, succeeded in pushing the internal divisions of the country to the surface once again by underminig a fragile national dialogue through an inconditional support for the corrupted sanyura government from the US and the criminalisation of lebanon's high profile and popular party, the Hezbollah. As for Palestine and Israel, the new generation of Israeli Politicians like Gaydamak and Lieberman, if the Israeli electorate is not going to stop them, will make sure that the ethnic cleansening project will take place. Syria will be destabilised by continuous pressure, a refusal to broker a peace deal on the Golan, and support for anti-baathist islamist organisations, until the baathist regime falls apart to be overtaken by Islamist extremists who are already on the wait in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the recently 'liberated' Lebanon from Syrian baathist influence.

It is easier to divide rather than unite. Breaking the fragile social and ethnic cannevasses of the Middle East and stigmatizing part of its population while providing the other part with support and weapons and access to supervised power, are certainly a 'good' start for the Neo-cons. However, despite their troubled history, the peoples of the Middle East have always lived together. Zionist and neo-cons may distort narratives, provoke wars, displace populations, implement government sponsored terror, the natural order of things for us, peoples of the Middle East, is to live together.

Bagdad, quatre ans après : la partition confessionnelle
LE MONDE | 10.04.07

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L'extension de Bagdad au 20e siècle
LEMONDE.FR | 10.04.07

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Un désastre américain en Irak, par Patrice Claude
LE MONDE | 10.04.07

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