Arafat: Murder most foul

Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands on the White House lawn (1993). They both made speeches during that event proclaiming Jerusalem as the eternal capital of their respective lands. This meant the peace agreement was bound to fail because neither side would ever give up Jerusalem to the other side. Later events proved that the 1993 peace agreement was from the very beginning infested with vested interests, resultantly the peace in the Palestine and for that matter of the whole Middle East still hangs in the balance.

WHO KILLED YASSER ARAFAT

by Eric Margolis

The ghost of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is rising from his grave to haunt Israel and the Americans.


A devastating investigation by Qatar’s al-Jazeera has found mounting evidence that Arafat’s death in 2004 was caused by the poisonous radioactive substance Polonium 210. Arafat’s widow, Suha, is now calling for his body to be exhumed and sent to the Swiss scientific institute in Lausanne that recently discovered traces of Polonium in Arafat’s clothing and personal effects.

The art of loving & lying for one’s country

by Eric Margolis

 The ongoing revelations of WikiLeaks have been great fun and a welcome antidote to the somber end of Fall. It’s been like People Magazine meets Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Ignore all the screams from official Washington about violations of security. Bureaucrats the world over hate like crazy to see their blunders, double-dealing and incompetence exposed to public gaze. 

 But far from the “9/11 of diplomacy,” as the over-excited Italian foreign minister proclaimed, so far the WikiLeak revelations don’t offer much that is new – at least to this veteran journalist and intelligence observer. Much amusing gossip, yes, but no bombshells – yet. 

 Most decent people may be shocked by reading about Washington’s heavy-handed treatment of friends and foes alike, its bullying, use of diplomats as junior-grade spies, and snide remarks about world leaders. 

 The 19^th century American cynic Ambrose Bierce aptly defined diplomacy as, “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.”

 However, WikiLeaks has given the public a sharper view of Afghanistan as a cesspool of corruption and drug-dealing.

Naïve Canadians, who believed government agitprop that they were building democracy and human rights in Afghanistan, were particularly shocked and dismayed.

 It was also interesting to see US diplomatic cables showing many of Pakistan’s politicians and senior generals revealed as little better than obsequious house servants for Uncle Sam. More Pakistanis will now believe their nation has indeed been virtually occupied by the United States.  

 As the old calypso song goes, “They’re working for the Yankee dollar!”

 For cynical professionals, WikiLeaks showed business as usual. They reaffirm that great powers really want obedience, not international cooperation or improved relations. 

What if NATO is defeated in Afghanistan?

"The ill-fated attempt by British imperialists in the mid 19th century to occupy Afghanistan", writes author Jules Stewart, "I came across an interesting detail: the Afghans refused to play cricket. During the occupation of Kabul by British troops from India, the Afghans looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players”, With NATO reaffirming its commitment once again to Afghanistan I wonder if there was a bigger lesson in this refusal to engage in cricket,  just as the Afghans have never submitted to foreign occupation — seeing off the British Raj in the 19th century and defeating Soviet occupiers in the 20th century. the Afghans will always win.” 

by Eric Magolis

Amazing as it sounds, NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, may be losing the only war the 61-year old pact every fought. All its soldiers, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and electronic gear are being beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

This weekend in Lisbon, NATO’s 28 members face deepening differences over the Afghanistan War as public opinion in the United States, Canada and Europe continue to turn against the conflict. 

President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of US foreign policy.   His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from Afghanistan next July has been brazenly – even scornfully - contradicted by US generals and strongly opposed by resurgent Congressional Republicans.  Hardly anyone believes the president’s withdrawal date.

Obama is fresh from groveling before Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.  He pleaded with Israel’s leader to impose a short, token freeze on settlement building in exchange for a multi-billion dollar bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising the value of US arms stockpiled for Israel’s use to $1 billion. Rarely has a US president crawled so low.         

Israel will likely take Obama’s bribe, with more sweeteners, but not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really runs US Mideast policy and as a warning not to mess with Israel. The last US president to challenge Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, George H. W. Bush, was ousted in 1992 after one term.

Obama appears to want out of the Afghan War. His final gamble of sending 30,000 more troops into the $7.5 billion monthly war has so far failed to produce the hoped-for decisive victory. But powerful pro-war groups, including the Pentagon, the arms industry and Republicans, are thwarting the weakened Obama’s attempts to wind down the war. 

US, Canadian and European politicians who backed the Afghan War fear admitting the conflict was a huge waste of lives and treasure. Their political careers hang in the balance.

Canada’s prime minister, who is trying to assume the former role of Britain’s Tony Blair as Washington’s most obedient ally, just announced 900 Canadian soldiers will remain in Afghanistan after his own pullout date, ostensibly for “training.” 

That, of course, is the new euphemism for staying on as a permanent garrison to keep the Afghan client regime in power. “Training,” as with US forces in Iraq, really means the old British Raj’s native troops under white officers.

Canadian journalists who opposed continuation of the Afghan War, or exposed many of the lies that justify it, have been purged from their newspapers under pressure from the Harper government – which claims, ironically, to be fighting in Afghanistan for “democracy.” 

While the US heads deeper into war and debt, its European allies are fed up with what was supposed to have been a limited “police action” to eliminate al-Qaida bases. 

Instead, Europe got a full-scale war against Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes raising uneasy memories of its 19^th-century colonial “pacifications.” 

France’s new defense minister, Alain Juppé, openly called the Afghan conflict a “trap” for NATO and called for an exit strategy.   He is quite right.

By contrast, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, warned, "NATO now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role.”  In short, permanent occupation. That may be the bottom line, at least for the imperial camp. Central Asia’s resources are the real reason.

The US-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is demanding the US scale back military operations and night raids that inflict heavy civilian casualties. Washington counters that Karzai is mentally unstable.  He is marked to be overthrown once Washington can find a suitable Pashtun replacement.

America’s rational for invading Afghanistan was to destroy al-Qaida. But CIA chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 al-Qaida operatives left in Afghanistan. The rest – no more than few hundred - fled to Pakistan years ago. 

So what are 110,000 US troops and 40,000 NATO troops doing in Afghanistan? Certainly not nation-building. Most reports show Afghanistan is in worse poverty and distress than before the US invasion.    

While the platitudes and synthetic optimism  flowed thick at Lisbon, giant US Army bulldozers, demolition teams and artillery were busy leveling wide swathes of Afghan homes around the Pashtun stronghold, Kandahar. In 2006, US Marines conducted a similar ruthless campaign to crush the rebellious Iraqi city of Falluja. 

The US is using the same punitive tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq as Israel employs on the occupied West Bank: targeted assassinations, death squads, demolishing buildings and whole neighborhoods to punish and open fields of fire. In fact, the US military has often been guided by Israeli advisors in such operations. 

Destroying large parts of Kandahar is a sign of growing US frustration and a sense the war is being lost. It certainly won’t win hearts and minds of the locals, the stated goal of US proconsul Gen. David Petraeus. 

Like the rest of the Pentagon, Petraeus is determined that the mighty US military must not be defeated by Afghan tribesmen. The humiliation would be intolerable. Defeat in Afghanistan would bring demands for major cuts in the bloated US military, a Leviathan that consumes 50% of world military spending.

Washington’s so-called national security establishment (in Britain they used to be called “imperialists”) also fears failure in Afghanistan threatens to undermine the entire NATO alliance.

Europe is slowly re-emerging as a world power, however fitfully and painfully. NATO has been the primary tool of US geopolitical control of Western Europe since the late 1940’s. The Japan-US security pact has played the same role in north Asia. 

The loss of the Afghan War by the US and its reluctant allies will call into question the reason for the alliance and likely hasten Europe building an integrated military independent of US control. America’s grip on Western Europe would be ended.

That is why Afghanistan so unnerves Washington’s right wingers. The defeat of Soviet armies in Afghanistan in 1989 began the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Could the same fate be in store for the American Raj?    

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

Source: Eric Margolis

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WELCOME TO INDIA, OBAMA SAHIB

by Eric Margolis

Getting out of the Washington goldfish bowl is also good for American presidents, particularly after an electoral shellacking.

It must have been a relief for President Barack Obama to see smiling Indian officials on his visit to Delhi rather than snarling Republicans back home.

India is a hugely important nation by any measure, so it was right for the president to continue the Washington-Delhi dialogue begun by former President George W. Bush.

After six decades of hostility and distrust, the United States and India appear set on a course of warm relations and strategic cooperation.

One million talented Indians already live in the United States, with many more to come. They already play an important fundraising role in US politics.

The catalyst for US-Indian amity was the 9/11 attacks that shocked the US and India into an alliance of convenience against foes in the Muslim world. But the looming threat of China, and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal that worried Israel, also played a key role. To Republican strategists, the most obvious way to contain China’s growing power was to build up its great rival India as a counterweight.

India is now the latest international Klondike. Its $1,070 trillion economy, freed of oppressive government regulations know as the “license Raj,” is booming at over 8% annual growth while the US has a mostly negative image around the globe, it is wildly popular in India.

US arms makers and high-tech industries are salivating at the thought of entering India’s market. India’s rapidly expanding military forces need modern equipment and replacement for aging Soviet-supplied weapons systems. America’s military-industrial-financial complex pushed Bush hard to make nice to India and pry open its formerly sealed gates. The pressure continued on Obama who dutifully continued Bush’s Indian policies.

However, some perspective is in order. The GDP of 1.2-billion person India is still only half of that of Italy. Forty percent of India’s 1.2 billion people subsist below even that nation’s dire poverty level. Almost half have no indoor plumbing. Childhood malnutrition and child labor are rampant. India’s evil caste system remains entrenched in spite of government efforts to uproot it, a racist system that condemns darker skinned Indians to a life of penury and servitude.

While the western media fulminates against Taliban’s or Iran’s treatment of women, a leading British medical journal reports an estimated 40,000 Indian women are burned alive each year by their in-laws to grab their dowries. Infanticide of female children is endemic. But few in the west seem to care.

India is a giant with feet of clay. A senior western diplomat in unhealthy Delhi told me that at any given time, half his staff is ill with serious maladies. India is plagued by grave health and environmental problems.

India is really two nations: modern, dynamic, high-tech urban India of about 100 million, and antique, timeless rural Mother India of 1.1 billion souls. The two are often in conflict and uneasily coexist. Per capita income is about $1,050, up 10% in 2010. By contrast, per capita income in rival China is three times higher – provided we believe Beijing’s statistics.

To China’s annoyance, President Obama proclaimed in Delhi that India should have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. India is becoming a great power and deserves a seat among the world’s big boys. But so do Germany, Japan, Turkey and Brazil.

India and its people, long disparaged by British racist jokes, are delighted to be called equals by the great powers. In fact, nuclear-armed India sees itself very much as regional hegemon of the entire Indian Ocean extending from East Africa to Australia.

The Bush administration’s deal with Delhi to sanctify and facilitate India’s nuclear weapons programs was thought at the time a clever move. But it dismayed the rest of the world, made a mockery of non-proliferation, and outraged the entire Muslim world, which has been blasting the US for hypocrisy by threatening war against Iran, which is under UN nuclear inspection, while playing nuclear footsie with India, which rejected all UN inspection.

India’s leaders are no fools and will not be easily pushed or bribed into a stronger anti-China and anti-Iran stance by Washington – unless doing so suits Delhi. India needs oil from the Gulf even more than the US and is expanding its naval power to assure its supply lines.

Delhi maintains cool but correct relations with Beijing, but behind the wintry, trans-Himalayan smiles lies growing rivalry over Chinese-occupied Tibet, Indian-ruled Ladakh and Kashmir, their long, poorly demarcated Himalayan border (another gift of the British Empire), strategic Burma, and their intensifying nuclear and naval rivalry.

India claims China is trying to surround it, using Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma. The two Asian superpowers have been locked in a strategic and conventional arms race for a decade. In 1999, this writer postulated that the two giants would one day clash over their contested borders.

India will follow its own strategic and diplomatic interests – which are not synonymous with those of the United States.

Delhi has a long record of clever diplomacy that has isolated Pakistan and kept the world and UN out of the burning Kashmir problem, where 40,000–80,000 Kashmiris have died in a long independence struggle against Indian rule.

But the United States is now slowly being drawn into the dangerous Kashmir dispute – which triggered the 2008 terror bombing in Mumbai. Just look for example at the embarrassing revelations that one of the men involved in the 2008 Mumbai massacre was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

The more Washington backs and arms India, the more its relations with China will deteriorate. Japan is also quietly building up India against China, to Beijing’s mounting anger.

The US could even be drawn into an India-China regional conflict. So caution is advised to US diplomats as they charge into the murky, tangled, poorly understood geopolitics of South and East Asia.

We also wonder if President Obama was briefed on India’s growing strategic arsenal. India has been steadily developing a family of long-ranged intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads behind the cover of space-launcher vehicles.

Delhi already has enough medium-ranged Agni-series missiles to cover potential foe China. Why then is Delhi spending billions to develop a reported 12,000 km ICBM whose only targets could be North America, Europe or Australia?

India is also developing nuclear submarines and subs armed with nuclear-armed cruise missiles capable of striking distant targets, as well as the powerful BrahMos anti-ship missile whose primary function is to attack aircraft carriers and large warships. Only the US Navy operates such large vessels in the Indian Ocean. India is also intent on building more aircraft carriers to project power.

The US and India appear destined to become rivals for Mideast and Central Asian oil and influence. There is no guarantee that today’s bonhomie between Delhi and Washington will be permanent. Great powers have their special interests – and no permanent friends or enemies.

Euphoria over the new US-Indian love-in should not cloud our judgment of South Asia’s realities, nor make us believe we can cajole India into becoming a regional policeman for US interests.

Meanwhile, Pakistan, Washington’s vital ally in the failing Afghan War, is seething with ill-concealed fury over Obama’s Delhi love-in and his claim that India has an important role to play in Afghanistan – which Pakistan sees as its strategic backyard.

South Asia is a minefield. Caution, and more caution, is advised.

(Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and other news sites in Asia).

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Source: There are no sunglasses

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GEORGE BUSH RISES FROM THE GRAVE JUST IN TIME FOR HALOWEEN

by Eric Margolis

As widely predicted, American voters, angry and frightened by their nation’s serious economic problems and persistent unemployment, took it out on the Democrats.

Republicans scored a big win in last week’s US mid-term elections, taking control of the House of Representatives and leaving Democrats seriously weakened in the Senate. Right in time for Halloween, George Bush seemed to have has risen from the grave.

Independent voters, who played the key role in Obama’s smashing 2008 electoral victory, swung sharply to the Republicans by stunning 34 points.   Many liberal Democrats, deeply dismayed that Obama had intensified the Afghanistan War and remained engaged in Iraq, did not vote.

Liberals and independents had backed Obama in 2008 hoping he would end President George Bush’s aggressive foreign polices, the so-called war on terror, close Guantanamo, and end curtailment of civil liberties.   Liberals are dismayed Obama has continued many of Bush’s most draconian policies, calling him  “Obusha.”

The much-ballyhooed “Tea Party” movement of far right-wing Republicans got some members elected, but did not do quite as well as expected.   However, the Tea Party has moved the Republican Party, and some moderate Democrats, further to the right. 

Though the president commands foreign policy, the new Republican House will control spending and thus have  significant influence on US foreign and military policy. 

There is no doubt Obama has been  weakened; many moderate Democrats were swept away by the Republican deluge. The losses of Sen. Ross Feingold of Wisconsin, one of the most intelligent and principled senators, was a major blow.

Europe has always been uneasy with right-wing Republicans and the US “national security establishment” – which in Britain was traditionally known as `imperialists.’ 

Republicans will try to block deals with the EU on climate change, financial regulation, and trade. “Red” Washington will work harder to block the EU’s Mideast sensible peace initiatives. Republicans will press demands  the EU fall in line with harder-edged US policies toward Russia, the Muslim world, and China.  

Washington is already annoyed by growing EU-Russian cooperation. Republicans, deeply hostile to Russia, will try to block this entente and press US influence deeper into the Caucasus, Caspian, Central Asian and Black Sea regions. Such action is sure to put Moscow and Washington on a collision course. 

Why the US continues to provoke nuclear-armed Russia in its sensitive backyard is a mystery.   Imagine how the US would react if Russia did the same in Mexico, Central America or the West Indies.   

Many Republicans oppose the US-Russian nuclear arms reduction pact being discussed, demanding major changes  that Moscow may reject. This, even though the nuclear arms treaty changes very little and has been watered down. 

Expect US-Russian relations to grow more discordant and jagged. America’s military-industrial-financial complex needs those nasty Russians back as serious enemies.  

The Republican victory is a big win for Israel’s right wing and leader Benjamin Netanyahu. 

It’s hard to imagine the US Congress being any more pro-Israeli than it already is. The brilliant Israeli writer Uri Avnery once quipped that if so ordered by Israel, Congress would rush to repeal the Ten Commandments. 

But some of Israel’s most ardent partisans are now in key positions in the House: among them, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen the likely new House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman; and Eric Cantor, the designated majority leader. Both are ardent members of what critics call the “American Likud Party” and speak for Israel’s hard-line right.   Bush’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, hailed the election as “great news for Israel.”

Obama’s feeble efforts to halt Israel’s colonization of Arab lands is likely over. He no longer has to face being humiliated by Israel.  More US arms and money will flow to Israel. US hostility to Israel’s special enemies - Syria, Hamas, Hezbullah, and Iran -  will intensify.  

Equally important, Israel’s enhanced power-block in Congress will now push even harder for a US attack on Iran and Lebanon. Chances of Mideast war have risen sharply.

Republicans will become Obama’s primary war supporters, urging widening US military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.   They already strongly oppose  Obama’s plans to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Remember: born-again Christian evangelicals, passionately pro-Israel and deeply anti-Muslim, make up 44% of Republican voters.  

Pakistan and its nuclear weapons will become a prime target of the pro-Israel bloc in Congress.  

Already tense US relations with China are likely to further deteriorate. Right-wing Republicans have traditionally backed Taiwan and believe China is an inevitable enemy of the US. They are set on punishing China over trade and currency issues. 

The so-called ‘national security establishment’ is already pressing Obama for a more assertive naval policy in Asian waters and confrontation with China over its claims to the region’s disputed islands.  

There is  deep Republican hostility to North Korea, which the neocons call a threat to Israel. Expect a harder US line towards Cuba and Venezuela. Foreign policy will be increasingly remilitarized. 

Obama may join America’s unemployed in 2012 unless the economy perks up.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

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Source: Eric Margolis

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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ATTN. ALL FLAG-WAVERS. YOU WANT WAR? PAY FOR IT.

 

 

Eric Margolis

A national frenzy has seized America. Fierce debate and name-calling has raged about job losses, the nation’s growing $12 trillion debt, mandatory health care, socialism – and even witchcraft.   Sarah Palin, the patron saint of low IQ Americans, has hovered over this sordid contest like an evil Halloween wraith.    

If we believe polls, the Democrats look like toast. President Barack Obama may be ready to join the ranks of the unemployed.  

What did Democrats think would happen when they eagerly took over the monumental financial and military mess created by George W. Bush and the Republicans?   No wonder Republicans are gleefully rubbing their hands. But now they may be next to get stuck with Bush’s Tar Baby.

Amidst all the low-brow invective, Tom Brokaw, the respected former national news host for NBC News, recently wrote a fine opinion column, “The Wars That America Forgot About.”

He quite rightly asked why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been ignored during the election race. After nine years of combat, 5,000 US dead and 35,000 seriously wounded soldiers, and expenditure of over $1 trillion – silence.    

These longest and second most expensive wars in US history have dropped off the radar. Not even the latest WikiLeaks shocker, which revealed the US condoning death squads, torture and mass human rights violations in Iraq, became a campaign issue.

No one raised the scandalous fact that US-run Afghanistan and Washington’s political satraps there produce and export 94% of the world’s heroin. Russian drug authorities just claimed that Afghan heroin kills 10,000 Russians annually.

The Iraq and Afghan wars are ignored, Brokaw rightly says, because Americans are totally focused on high unemployment and economic insecurity. America’s wars have become irrelevant. 

The US professional military represents less than 1% of the population, mostly working-class people from small towns in America’s rural, poorly-educated heartland.  

It’s not like Vietnam War days, when millions of Americans were drafted to serve in the war, creating huge public protests that eventually ended the war. 

The US has adopted Imperial Britain’s model of small, all-volunteer armies fighting in remote colonial wars to supposedly bring the light of Christianity and justice to benighted natives.

However, it now costs $1 million per annum to keep each of the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The US has also deployed over 40,000 armed mercenaries in that nation.

Americans have become psychologically detached from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even as the specter of stalemate or even defeat in both conflicts looms.  

Brokaw calls on Americans to re-engage and give their wars the public and politicians the attention they urgently need.

Waging stealth wars is undemocratic and unwise.

During World War II, America’s “Home Front” was engaged in the conflict by war taxes, rationing, buying war bonds, collecting clothing and metal, and accepting shortages of consumer products.

By contrast, President George W. Bush actually cut income taxes in wartime, the only time in US history this has happened. 

In an act of profound financial deception, instead of funding the Afghan and Iraq Wars through higher taxes, the Bush White House and subservient Congress financed the wars by “Emergency Supplement Requests,” which were supposed to be only used short-term for natural disasters and the like.  

Bush’s view appears to have been, “après moi, le deluge.” He raised the national debt to vertiginous levels, vastly expanded the size of government, increased military spending by 50%, on top of cutting taxes.

The first wave of the deluge came in 2007-2008, as a financial cataclysm hit America. More is on the way as the US stumbles from one financial crisis to another - the latest being bankrupt states and pension funds.

The real $1 trillion plus costs of the wars were quietly added to the $12 trillion national debt, America’s credit card.   Funds to finance these huge war loans were borrowed from China and Japan, putting America ever deeper in thrall to the Asian powers, and undermining its finances.

The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress continued Bush’s dishonest method of war finance, hiding costs from the public.

America’s wars should be fully funded through direct taxes.  History shows great powers cannot long go on waging imperial wars on credit. Look at Spain, Holland, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Which empire do we think will be next?

A special war tax ought to be levied on all Americans to fully cover the mounting costs of Afghanistan and Iraq. We must pay for our wars and world hegemony.

It will be interesting to see how all the flag-waving Republican “patriots” will react when asked to pay for the wars they so passionately support from the safety of their sofas, and at no apparent cost. 

Make Americans actually pay for Afghanistan and Iraq and these wars would be ended in short order.  

But if Republicans likely retake Congress, it is most unlikely a war tax – or any major new taxes –will be implemented.   Republicans have gone from being the party of balanced budgets and pay as you go to a northern version of Argentina’s wild spending Peronista Party. 

Right-wing Republicans will press for more war, in more places – financed, of course, by the magic of credit.   Few stop to think that this manic borrowing is wrecking America.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 29 October 2010

 

Source: Eric Margolis   Image: City Times http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/28/Citytimes/Where_free_speech_flo.shtml

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