How Easily We Forget!

We read that within two months of the outbreak of World War I, as many as 640,000 young men had volunteered for service in the British army. They gathered outside recruiting offices in crowds so large that mounted police sometimes had to be called in to control them. 90 years on, Tony Blair had to lie to the nation trying to convince it of the moral and legal justification for invading Iraq. A century after “the war to end all wars” the British seemed convinced it should have been, and a million demonstrated against Blair’s fraud. But had popular opinion about warfare really been transformed from a stance of naïve patriotic fervour, to one of widespread aversion or abhorrence?

Cambridge visiting historian, J Winter, thought it was the consequence of a process of cultural evolution:

I do think that one reason Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction was because he couldn’t take the nation with him in support of war. That is a consequence of the contribution artists, poets, filmmakers and others have made to our understanding of the horrors of war. Only a fool would argue that cultural history only moves in one direction at any given time. Nevertheless, there is clearly something that has brought most people to the view that war is simply not a legitimate human activity any more. Time and again culture has shown us that the best defence we have against the ravages of war is the human imagination itself.

There is a certain absence of reality here. It is true that artists and poets were in the forefront of those objecting to the mass murder justified as war, but in the intervening decade, the establishment has pushed warfare down our throats continually, and now there seems to be no substantial body of people willing to object to us acting like fascists in invading other people’s countries and killing poor people, men, women and children in their own homes. The lauding of heavily armed soldiers as heroes is nothing less than obscene, yet the BBC TV does it ad nauseum. With Wootten Bassett no longer the featured town for public displays of sickening one-sided sentimentality, it has now found a new one in the appropriately named, Warminster.

Our utter failure to comprehend the scale of our crimes is that we soak up the propaganda of intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries, something that for decades after WWII was wrong because it was considered as openly fascist, the very thing that the fascist countries recently defeated, like Nazi Germany and Bushido Japan, had done in their attempts at power grabbing, but following the lead of Tony Blair—a Catholic Saint in the making when the miracle appears—in West Africa and Serbia, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of other people’s countries has become acceptable as the norm, and people now write to newspapers demanding it.

Yet, while condemning Assad in Syria for killing allegedly 8000 of his own people, the figures of how many people we are killing in Afghanistan are never published except as journalistic estimates, but they are not slight, and are certainly of the same order. The long term propaganda against Gaddafi ended up in another lie, a so-called no-fly zone, which even the Russians and Chinese were willing to accept, but which turned out to be a full scale air attack which destroyed the country’s main communications and fuelling centers, and killed 50,000 people, according to the government of the anti-Gaddafi victors. Everyone knows that at least a million people were killed in the Bush/Blair WMD attack on Iraq, and the Clinton/Blair sanctions on medicine and supplies that preceded it.

Do we seriously expect that we can treat people like rats and expect them not to bite back? Six British soldiers were killed in one explosion, to be accompanied by the usual BBC and Sky sentimentality, and mock shock.

“Ingrates! We try to help them and this is what we get.”

Just what would these people do if a foreign army landed in this “Sceptred Isle” and started to kill us in our homes, streets and fields? We certainly would not feel gratitude for the brave foreigners dying to “help” us.

Well, get real! Nor do the Afghans, and nor will the Syrians, if we try the same trick there, and nor will the Iranians, who are the real object of this continuous war build up, and propaganda.

Now we hear from politicians advocating the mayhem and their brain-dead supporters—including some parents of the dead, but not others—that we ought not to stop because, if we did, “our lads” will have died in vain. Does anyone seriously buy this? We have to keep sending in battalion after battalion to lose their lives until maybe we might win. It is the gambler’s insane way to recoup his gambling debts. Double up, each time. Eventually he must win. Yes indeed, if he has infinite resources to risk. In this case lives! These dolts are gambling with the lives of our own youth, and are murdering mostly innocent peasants abroad, assuming that we must win before our resources run out—before we run out of young men.

Well, at present we have plenty of young unemployed. They had better be ready to lose their lives as well as their incomes, if the present insane strategy is to work. Major economic crises, like the one between the world wars, ended up in mass brutality. The west is building up to a mass attack on Iran which could be nuclear, and will lead to many deaths and possibly a new World War with Russia and China.

It really is time for us all to begin objecting on a serious scale, to follow the lead of the sensitive souls who wrote moving verse, sang sad songs, made troubling images, and produced films exposing war for what it is—mass cull of human life—in the hopes that it really would end all war. Jay Winter thinks they succeeded, but we are fighting one long continuous war, and have lots of heroes, many dead and more horribly injured.

How can a mass cull of our own children be of value to us? We are not facing any serious external threat like Hitler. Our threat is right here at home. It is our warmongering rulers.

Is the US Ambassador in Kabul a Liar or an Idiot?

Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, was quoted in the UK Guardian by Jonathan Steele (The Taliban’s wishlist, 21 June, 2011) as solemnly pronouncing:

America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people.

This is staggering. Americans incessantly complain that the rest of the world hates them, and always want to do them harm, even though they are “good people”. Are these Americans, blind, or deluded, or are these just neocon lies to feed the self righteous ignorance of the US public?

Eikenberry is a diplomat and sits in the center of a ten year long war against the present occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its sycophantic allies. Nor can he be unaware that the US just fought a terrible war for no obvious moral cause in Iraq, dividing and devastating the country, and still occupy it with tens of thousands of soldiers. They have just joined with France and the UK via NATO in an unjustified attack on Libya, which has again divided the country and will require another occupying force to prevent a civil war if Gaddafi is ousted.

Richard Carter, replying to Eikenberry in the Guardian adds the following historical synopsis of significant US occupations, omitting minor ones:

There’s Honduras (seven times between 1903 and 1989), Nicaragua (seven times between 1894 and 1933, not to mention the support for the Contra terrorists in 1981-90), China (six times between 1894 and 1949), Cuba (five times between 1912 and 1933), Haiti (five times between 1891 and 2005), the Dominican Republic (four times between 1914 and 1966), El Salvador (twice: 1932, 1981-92), Mexico (twice: 1913, 1914-18) and Vietnam (once, but for 15 years)….

Isn’t it about time that the US public caught on—they have a problem with their leaders, and that means with their much vaunted democracy. These wars do not and cannot help the ordinary US citizen whether poor or middle class. Only the rich profit out of them, and the US has been ruled on behalf of this rich minority for the whole of the time R Carter surveyed.

Was Osama Bin Laden Dead All Along?

Political commentators, academics and some terror experts are now speaking out that Osama has been dead since 13 December 2001. Bin Laden tapes made since that date are fakes concocted by Bush and Blair's secret agents to offer oxygen for the wars on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, others show him with a shorter, broad nose. On one video, Bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabis. According to the UK Daily Mail, former US foreign intelligence officer, Angelo M Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, had said before the recent news:

All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.

Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, former emeritus professor at California's Claremont School of Theology, says Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on 13 December, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan. He was buried in an unmarked grave, a Wahhabi custom, within 24 hours, according to Muslim tradition.

Bin Laden had already insisted four times in official Al Qaeda statements made to the Arab press that he played no role in 9/11. On September 28, a fortnight after the atrocity, he declared emphatically:

I have already said I am not involved. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge… nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.

Then on 13 December, 2001, the date Bin Laden really died, the US Government released a new Bin Laden video in which he contradicted his previous denials, admitting his involvement in 9/11. Moreover, in this film, Bin Laden looks quite different. Previously he had looked pale, thin and ill because he had a serious kidney condition and had been in a hospital in Dubai for treatment only weeks before 9/11. Now he was a weighty man with a black beard, not a grey one, with dark skin not pale skin, and with a different shaped nose. His original slender fingers had become those of a boxer. He also looked healthy. Lastly, he was writing with his right hand—he was left handed. Griffin adds:

A reason to suspect that all of the post-2001 Bin Laden tapes are fabrications is that they often appeared at times that boosted the Bush presidency or supported a claim by its chief “war on terror” ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

News of Bin Laden's kidney failure, or death, appeared on 19 January, 2002, four months after 9/11. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told CNN:

I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. The images of him show he is extremely weak.

Benazir Bhutto also remarked in an Al Jazeera interview with Frost before she was killed that Bin laden was dead. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd reported a prominent official of the Afghan Taliban as saying that Osama Bin Laden had been buried on or about 13 December:

He suffered serious complications and died a natural, quiet death. He was buried in Tora Bora, a funeral attended by 30 Al Qaeda fighters, close members of his family and friends from the Taliban. By the Wahhabi tradition, no mark was left on the grave.

His last will and testament was carried by a London based Arab newspaper in 2001.

Blair and Bush lied to us perhaps more even than anyone suspected. Why are they not being arrested?

Osama’s Central Role in the US Propaganda “Myth”

Adam Curtis, in the UK Guardian has written an interesting and honest piece about the death of Osama Bin Laden, and the role he had in the US political world view. He explains that although bin Laden helped to kill thousands of innocent people, the west needed him!

When communism collapsed in 1989, the scare story drilled over decades into westerners—that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force—evaporated. The story was that of the good guys against the bad guys, born out of the war against the Nazis and the imperial Japanese in the second world war—a just war. Though in Europe few honest observers will deny that it was the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler’s Germany, after the war it was communism that was set up as the original evil empire, and communists became the bad guys in the cold war, first the Russians, then the Koreans and Chinese too, then the Vietnamese, and constantly all those poor countries whose people tried to get free of the grasp of US business. Then anti-Sovietism and anti-communism were academic subjects, now it is anti-Islam and anti-terrorism.

In the confusion of a global economic crisis in 1998 Bin Laden emerged as responsible for bombing US embassies in east Africa. From 2001, neoconservative politicians took what little they knew of Bin Laden to mold him in the shape of the global monster they were now missing—an evil enemy with spies and sabateurs everywhere intent on destroying western civilisation—ie the US. Al Qaida was the new Soviet Union, and Bin Laden was its evil director, a mad puppeteer pulling strings all over the world. What was a minor threat compared with US power was magnified into something meant to replace the Soviet Union in the minds of the 25 percent or so of people who will believe everything that the pro government media offers them, for the reporting of the Islamist terror threat was always distorted to reflect this propaganda narrative.

Neoconservatives, the news media, and Bin Laden were partners in pumping up the threat of a new evil empire. It gave the neocons a perfect myth, in the pseudo Platonic jargon invented by Leo Strauss, the neofascist godfather of neoconservatism—useful lies, in truth—to feed fear to the masses that would distract them from the shenanigans going on in reality. It served the propaganda function of the media while selling plenty of hair raising copy, and it suited Bin Laden who was desperate to seem to be important to his frustrated Islamist followers. The Moslem Brotherhood, a conservative Islamic organization reject Bin Laden as ever representing Moslem views. In his announcement of the death, Obama agreed—he did not.

In Afghanistan, the neoconservative myth has led to fantasies that justify the activity there of western military, and nothing else. The good against evil myth suits the US political desire to be free to intervene anywhere they choose, but the world is no more just black and white in nature for imagining it to be so. Reality has shades of grey and even different hues. Neglect of them prevents a proper critical framework to judge the whole situation and to tailor responses accordingly.

Of course, Bin Laden’s death was immediately presented as we are conditioned to expect—cowardly, as bullies are meant to be. He was reported as dying while shooting at his assailants, sheltering behind one of his wives, who consequently had to die so that the evil master could be shot twice—blam, blam—in the head. A day later, Bin Laden turned out to unarmed and so unable to get off any shots. Why, then, he had to be shot is unclear, but he was shot in the chest then straight into his left eye. His wife was not killed but wounded in the leg, and it seems she was not shielding him. Another woman was also killed, and one of his sons, whose identity changed also. As the whole thing was reportedly videoed, the confusion seems strange.

Bin Laden’s death is actually a serious blow to the US’s propaganda paradigm. Immediately, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, hurried to assure anyone delerious with relief, that the end of Bin Laden was not the end of terrorism. They need to preserve the myth, and if it fails, they need to find a new one. What will it be? Who will be the next bad guy? The myths are written by those in power, to suit their own interests, and their interests are not necessarily, or even often, those of the ordinary American. America is run for its super rich class. When enough of them realize it, the new myth will be of a monstrous Joker ruling Gotham City from within, and every yankee will be suspect. The stage is set for it already.

NATO Civil and Military Co-ordination in Afghanistan Failing

Lillian Katarina Stene spent six months in war torn and war weary Aghanistan, serving as a major in the US military as a civil and military co-ordination (CIMIC) officer and now is submitting her research there as a PhD thesis. To connect local structures and military intentions, designated civil military coordination (CIMIC) units are set up within NATO. Their three core functions are to liaise, be a support to the civil environment and the military force. They contribute by assessment of villages and supporting basic infrastructure such as roads, water and bridges when needed.

Stene thinks President Hamid Karzai and NATO’s leadership are mistaken in relying on the withdrawal of foreign troops to bring peace. Though more “boots on the ground” are needed, she says:

We must differentiate better between military and civil tasks, and present ourselves more clearly. The military is the prolonged arm of politics, but soldiers are neither politicians nor aid workers. Nevertheless, the NATO strategy presupposes interference with civilian life. This gives rise to concern, and it is not an easy task to win the “hearts and minds” of local people

In short, a peaceful solution requires stability to be enforced with more troops, but the actions of the military and civilian aid in the war effort have to be better co-ordinated. One is inclined to think that none of us would be easily winnable by a foreign coalition whose soldiers kept shelling our villages and breaking into our homes boot first in the early hours of the morning making our lives intolerable, even if they claim to be protecting us form other gangsters. Indeed, the whole situation is reminiscent of the old gangsters’ protection rackets. You had to humor and cough up your hard earned dollars to both sides just to stay alive until one or the other won the territory war between them. Then you just paid your insurance premium, or taxation, to the winner.

That must be how Afghan people feel, not to mention the Iraqis, Vietnamese, and all the others who have gone before in the history of US imperialism. In history, people get rid of their own gangsters, even if they have to wait until the gangsters’ kids are fat and smug before they can do it. They can feel then that they have solved their own problems without any unasked for help from some other gang wanting to rob them instead.

Stene says that as long as war skirmishes are taking place within and among local inhabitants, a popular justification is TINA—there is no alternative. She admits that this is maybe the greatest challenge, a nuanced criticism of the NATO (ie US) strategy. Perhaps she has to humor her own employers, or former employers, from whom she hopes for a pension, but seems in no doubt when she says:

The war in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means. There are only political solutions to crises and conflicts. The Afghan people itself, through its leaders and representatives, must take the lead in finding a solution. Which is quite a challenge as the international community—meaning the UN, NATO’s coalition forces and numerous governmental and non governmental organisations—are all deeply involved in the development of the country.

Conflicting roles among military and civilian personnel is counterproductive to NATO’s strategy for peace in Afghanistan, for, as military forces continue to build infrastructure and cooperate closely with large civilian organizations, local people must find it increasingly hard to distinguish between the different agents’ roles and objectives. Isn’t it obvious that, when there are no military present to interfere with civilian assistance, then there is no problem of co-ordinating them, and the various agencies involved should be at least halved? In her opinion, too little effort is put into long term planning for reconstructing the country. Different national caveats and ingrained practices, attitudes, training and interpretations conducts different operational modes among the countries working under the NATO umbrella. Stene says:

Since there is no unified way of doing things in Afghanistan, NATO has a problem. While Americans like to act quickly, Germans and Scandinavians prefer to consider the long term effects of civil military coordination. The Americans are likely to dig a well on the spot, while Germans prefer to let the Afghans dig the well themselves.

It is the difference of attitude of the arrogant young imperialism with the long in the tooth old one. The young imperialists, the Americans think these inferior races ought to submit to their betters, and when they don’t, then a bullet will encourage them to do so, while the European powers, who have had the same attitude in the past, and have even fought crippling wars among themselves to share out portions of the world pudding, are now more circumspect, if not more humanitarian. While Afghan civilians are being killed in dawn raids and by drone or warplane attacks, it is hard for any rational being not to appreciate why their skepticism over US intentions continues to grow.

So, the military alliance’s “comprehensive approach” is counterproductive to both civilian and military parties operating in Afghanistan, since this strategy enables role conflicts among them. From her access to the inner workings of the NATO forces, Stene believes NATO is too top heavy. When grey zones between military and civilian participants appear, it is harder for locals to separate the two groups, and to establish who does what. Aid workers, whose safety depends on being trusted by the local communities, may be seen as representatives of the occupation force, and thus become more vulnerable.

A case in point is the dramatic increase in the killing of aid workers over the last years. When some of these organizations profess to be impartial, while simultaneously running development projects paid for by Afghan authorities and the international community, they are not considered neutral by local inhabitants. Such organizations suffer more frequent attacks, and their security situation is deteriorating. Stene says:

Building trust takes time. In order to succeed in Afghanistan, we have to spend time in the country and perform our tasks in accordance with the Afghans’ terms.

Spending more time seems to be her justification for more boots on the ground for longer, but the rest of her case might be better served by a withdrawal and an emphasis on civilian aid, as long as it is not allowed to be skimmed off by the US crooks set up as the country’s “proper” representatives to milk the country dry. That perhaps is why she sees the need for a continued NATO military presence:

Civil military coordination is about working behind the scenes, and handing over tasks to the Afghans:

• It is vital to separate between strictly humanitarian organizations, whose task it is to supply basic utilities such as water, food and medicines to everyone in need—regardless of who they are—and international or independent organizations which are building schools and infrastructure and cultivate land in compliance with the international community’s or the Afghan government’s development plans.
• It is vital to gain insight into people’s real needs, and to involve local projects and contractors. Building schools may not always be the answer to everything.

If local structures are not sufficiently developed, I’m afraid we are building a house of cards which will fall down after we have left.

Help the Heroes Day?

In the UK we are coming to the end of “Help the Heroes Day”, a day of fundraising for the charity, Help the Heroes, recently started by an army officer to provide for war wounded soldiers. It has had vast media coverage in its short life and has raised an enviable amount of money, money at least that the Royal British Legion (poppy day) might envy, since it was set up for the same purpose.

Well, no one would disagree with helping seriously hurt people, would they? but, beside the British Legion, the UK has, or had, a comprehensive National Health Service (the NHS) for which we all pay a National Insurance Stamp while we are working which entitles, or entitled, us to free health care, a basic pension in our old age so that we are not destitute or forced to beg, and benefits when we are sick or unemployed, for the same reasons. Soldiers, of course, were entitled to all of this together with any special care the government or military were willing to provide for the wounded, together with what the RBL provided on top.

The issue I have is that all the publicity that the new charity has received is more than simple advertising for a good cause, it is tantamount to a military and militarization campaign across the country.

Take the word “heroes”. Is it proper to call these soldiers “heroes”? A hero these days is considered simply to be someone who is courageous, and I don't doubt that soldiers involved in active service are courageous. But with this definition so too are many others, and among them are people who the public would not agree were heroes. The 9/11 attack involved people willingly driving aeroplanes into high buildings with death a sure consequence. These people were courageous, and so must have been heroes. Were they?

Then again, when we fight a war we fight an enemy who are also facing us as their enemy, and they too are facing death, just as our soldiers are. They too are courageous, so must be heroes, mustn't they?

Indeed, in the middle of the twentieth century we lost many myriads of heroes facing the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy, and 55 million people in total lost their lives on both sides, soldiers and civilians. Were they all heroes?

Surely, a hero is not just brave, a hero is also noble, so we can count out the 9/11 bombers, and soldiers who are fighting for any cause that is itself not noble, like the fascist soldiers of Germany and Italy, and the soldiers of imperial Japan. They were all invading foreign countries and killing innocent civilians in those countries to make them submit to the conqueror. We are not like that. We do not send troops into foreign countries to make other people submit to us, do we?

By now, I hope you have got my point. Soldiers who are forcing themselves into the homes of innocent people in a foreign country can hardly be regarded as doing anything noble, they are not being heroes. They are acting like Nazis. We are not fighting them because their governments, with the support of their people, have invaded our country. The government of Afghanistan is in place because the US has put it there. The leader of the Iraqis was in place because the US had put him there. We are killing innocent farmers and their wives and children while fully aware that most of them would prefer it if we just went away.

The whole point of the current militarization campaign is to condition us to permanent warfare, just as the people of the US have been conditioned, and just as George Orwell prophesied. We are not helping heroes, and if we want to help heroes, we would do much better to force our governments not to make young men into heroes, dubious as the title is, by killing innocents abroad. Young men would be better served by an anti-war movement, not one that gives help too late to young people with shattered bodies all for a political myth.

All we have to do to see the injustice of it is to imagine that a foreign army was raiding our houses at dawn, killing or detaining our fathers and sons, and killing or raping our mothers and sisters, and all on some pretext given them by a few extremists. That is what we fought the Nazis and the Japanese to stop. But we are now doing it ourselves, and calling our bullying troops, when they suffer in retaliation, “heroes”.

Are we to suppose that we would not fight back if we were invaded and misused by some foreign bullies? Have Americans so completely forgotten that they set up their own state by fighting off the invading soldiers of the British that they are now repeatedly determined to bully other people into submission?

And what of 9/11 itself? Is that a sufficient pretext for killing tens of thousands of foreign people who had no part in the original monstrous plot? Indeed, if we had already shown our own lack of basic justice for others by supporting oppression of poor Arabs, are we supposed to stand by and expect them not to want to retaliate against the mean spirited unfairness of our own previous actions.

You can keep whipping your dog to keep it cowed, but when it gets the courage to bite you, whose fault is it? If we treat these poor foreign farmers like dogs then we can expect to get bitten, and there is nothing noble or heroic about beating innocent animals or humans that have done us no harm, and who could not kill and maim our dubious “heroes” if they were not there to be harmed.

We still need to oppose foreign wars, and not be beguiled by bogus sentimentality disguising military propaganda. Help our heroes by stopping foreign wars and bringing them home before they are wrecked.

Church’s Koran Burning will Endanger US Troops

Afghans demonstrate against US Koran burning

Reuters, the BBC, Voice of America and thousands of other media sources reveal that the commander of the 150,000 strong US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, says an obscure American church’s plan to burn Korans on September 11 could put the lives of US troops in Afghanistan in danger, and damage the overall war effort in that country. The US embassy in Kabul issued a statement condemning the plans. It said it was deeply concerned about the deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups, and condemned the plan as an “act of disrespect” toward Islam. General Petraeus said in a statement to US media:

It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort. It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world, we are engaged with the Islamic community.

The planned burning of the Moslem holy book could be used to stoke sentiment against the US, not only in Afghanistan, but across the Moslem world. The White House and Nato have also expressed concern over the plan. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said:

Any type of activity like that that puts our troops in harm’s way would be a concern to this administration.

The Nato chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, attacked the church’s plans, telling reporters that burning Korans violated the Nato alliance’s values. AFP quoted him as saying:

There is a risk that it may also have a negative impact on security for our troops.

Pastor Terry Jones, of the Gainsville, Florida, Dove World Outreach Center, a small evangelical church, plans to put copies of the holy book in a bonfire to mark this week’s anniversary of the 9/11, 2001 attacks. The church has a right to do so under the US constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. Authorities in Gainesville are preparing special security measures to prevent trouble at the event by the church, which has about 30 members and calls itself a “New Testament, Charismatic, Non-Denominational Church”. The city’s mayor and police department repeated appeals to Jones call off the Koran burning. They warned that while his First Amendment constitutional rights guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly and religion, he would violate city ordinances if he went ahead without proper authorization. Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe condemned what he called the church’s “offensive behavior”. Mayor Lowe said on his Facebook site:

The Dove World Outreach Center is a tiny, fringe group and an embarrassment to our community. They are opposed to the true character of Gainesville.

City officials ahave denied his request for a burn permit.

Mr Jones said he takes General Petraeus’ warning seriously. He said the church was praying on the matter but they had “firmly made up our minds”, adding:

How long do we back down?

And:

We must send a clear message to the radical element of Islam

Mr Jones’s Florida unknown church is reported to have 50 members. Its incendiary plans haven’t emerged out of nowhere. 53 per cent of Americans view Islam unfavourably, and only 42% favourably. American Moslems say they feel more isolated than at any time since the 2001 attacks. Its website labels Islam “violent and oppressive” and has prompted protests elsewhere. Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets in the capital, Kabul, to protest against the plan, chanting “Death to America” as they rallied outside a mosque, burning an effigy of Pastor Jones. Similar protests were earlier held outside the US embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Claims that US soldiers have desecrated the Koran in both Afghanistan and Iraq have caused bloodshed in the past, and this new controversy comes just when religious fanatics in the US are worked up over a proposal to build an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from Ground Zero, site of the 9/11 attacks, in New York. Lives were lost in Afghan riots in 2005 when Newsweek told that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The story was false and was retracted, after the damage was done. In 2008, protests in Afghanistan followed a US soldier deployed to Iraq shooting up a copy of the Koran.

War Criminal Blair Tries to Buy Redemption

Catholic Demon tries to buy Sainthood.

This man along with his master, George Bush, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people, and disrupting and destroying  what had been a stable country, albeit under a dictator supported for decades by the US. He has reaped his reward addressing conventions of rich Republicans, advising banks and businesses, getting unknown expenses and no one knows what other rewards as a so called Middle East ambassador for Israel the United Nations, and now getting an advance on his memoirs of around £5 million. This latter sum and any additional royalties from the book, he has donated to a military charity for damaged servicemen, of which there are quite a number to add to those who are dead. Some of the families of dead soldiers say this is blood money.

Charles Taylor, a petty but cruel dictator of another country, Liberia, is standing trial for much lesser crimes than Blair and Bush, supporting the bloody rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone, financed allegedly by “blood diamonds”, where Blair, attempting to imitate his heroine, petit bourgeois Tory shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher, by sending in a British battalion, got his first taste for military glory.

If this petty murderer is standing trial, then why isn’t Blair and his puppet master G W Bush. Impeach the War Criminals and have them face a judge and jury too.

The Rules of Chaos in Afghanistan Today

Stephen Vizinczey wrote “The Rules of Chaos”, a much quoted book, which considered the problems offered by the Vietnam War. So Vizinczey can claim some authority as an analyst of American political and military strategies. An article by him in the UK Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet not known for leaning leftwards, had the headline:

Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it. The only consequence of long-term conflict in Afghanistan, and anywhere else, is to increase the number of our enemies

For Vizinczey, the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago. The reason is one that is so plain to see that it is surprising Americans have not worked it out for themselves, even the rednecks with the IQ of a passenger pigeon who often call themselves Republicans. It is what Vizinczey calls an iron law of human conflict—almost everyone hates it when foreigners occupy their country forcing them to do what they do not want to do. People like to rule themselves, and anyone in a democracy ought to be glad to let them get on with it. Not Americans, though. They suffer from a self centered blindness that allows them to see good only in their own acts, however barbarous they might be, and blinds them to the complaints of others that they are indeed acting barbarously.

The aim of some New York Moslems to demolish an old tenement and convert it into a Moslem center, including a mosque, has some other New Yorkers objecting on the grounds that it is an insult to 3000 dead Americans, killed in the 9/11 atrocity of 2001. The Moslems wanting to build the Islamic center are not the ones who killed the 3000 Americans—they are, in fact, mainly Americans themselves. The Americans who object think it is insensitive that Moslems want to build a mosque so close to “ground zero”. As ever, these Americans can only see the motes in the eyes of the Moslems they consider as their antagonists. They never see the beams in their own eyes.

An imam suggested that Americans had some responsibility for the original atrocity, but few of them could see that, and accused him of being a terrorist himself! Killing 3000 innocent people is an incomprehendable and unpardonable act, but the killing of 2,000,000 Vietnamese was a shocking failure of “the good guys’” will. It is not at all evil to kill 2,000,000 peasants in a foreign land—their own—but to have the temerity to mount an effective retaliation when the Americans had used Zionists for decades to kill and humiliate Moslems in Palestine labels all Moslems as terrorists and their sympathizers. Americans cannot see that what is good for the goose is good also for the gander.

Why then does Obama persist in protracting the agony? Ignorance, perpetuated by the baneful influence of the US megarich class via their ownership of the media, the op-ed influence of their gentlemen servants among the academies, and the open scheming of the Washington caste of professional politicos. That is the thinking of the otherwise thoughtless, conditioned Pavlovian style. The ignorant majority, taking all its cues from the megarich, then forces any progressive US presidents to go with its views. Needless to say, this majority is gung ho about foreign invasions, persuaded that they are angels and the rest of the world are devils.

Obama continues the Afghan war because too many Americans have been persuaded by the gaggle of oil barons and gunrunners that rule the country that just one more push will bring victory. More troops are sent, more money spent on armaments, and energy demanding manufacturing, keeping the gunrunners and oil moguls happy, and US unemployment lower than the depression levels it would otherwise reach. No one seems to think the whole country, not to mention the peasants of Afghanistan, and unfortunates elsewhere suffering US torture and oppression, would be better off if workers manufactured socially useful products by working in health and welfare.

Vizinczey pointed out that there has to be a shared purpose between a population and the invading armies for an invasion to triumph. When the Americans fought in Europe, they were not fighting the people, who were themselves thoroughly opposed to the Nazi occupation. The Americans fought for over a decade in Vietnam and lost because they were fighting practically the whole people, not—as the propaganda made out—an invading army from the north, the communists. The situation was the same in Iraq, even though there was at first a considerable body of people glad to be shut of Saddam. The long period of US sanctions that had not harmed Saddam or his own cronies but only ordinary Iraqi children, the old, and the poor, alienated many. Subsequent murderous attacks like that on Fallujah alienated the rest.

It is still the same in Afghanistan. The propaganda story is the usual manifest rubbish, so easily believed by the brain dead redneck, that outsiders called Al Qaida, were causing the trouble, and the people welcomed them being attacked by the allies. As there turned out to be no one from Al Qaida conveniently handy to shoot, soon the enemy had become the Taliban, but they too were outsiders, or at least were morally—most people, especially women and children, did not want them to resume their oppressive rule. But the US soldier has never been bothered to distinguish one gook or raghead from another.

Now there are few Afghans who do not support the Taliban, because everyone wants the US and its allies out, and it is the Taliban who are determined enough to try to effect their eviction. Even Afghan soldiers are not interested in serving the putridly corrupt Hamid Karzai government, favored by the Americans. Why should it come as a shock that Afghan soldiers turn around and shoot the occupiers? These are the impatient ones. The patient ones are simply waiting until they get some autonomy, then they will get rid of the corrupt Karzai, and use their weapons to revert to home rule!

It’s simple enough—every enemy killed in a foreign country increases the number of enemies exponentially. In Afghanistan, the parents, the in-laws, the relatives of the dead, turn against the West. They may not take up arms and they may not join the Taliban, but they will certainly not oppose anybody who wants to kill the men who killed their loved ones.

Stephen Vizinczey

The military documents revealed by Wikileaks show what is obvious to everyone except a Yankee—Nato has been promoting Islamism by the day. Vizinczey argues that Bush would never have started the Aghan war without a deep faith in US invincibility. Faith, for a lunatic Christian, like Bush, and many more uncritical Americans is the appropriate word. They entertain the belief that “the good guy always wins”. Like the neoconservative belief that the truth is what you decide it to be, this is utterly self destructive. It requires the facts to be ignored in favor of hope and prayers—it conditions them to disregard all contrary evidence, just as Bush did over Saddam’s WMD.

The idiotic excuse for the war is the supposed necessity of defeating terrorists at source. Yet the terrorists who have been found in the UK have all been British Moslems, mainly of Pakistani descent. At home, terrorists can be tailed, their phones tapped, they can be seen on surveyance cameras, their language is our own. Were they to succeed, their success does not get them allies but angers the mass of the people. The truth is that we can fight terrorists here at home because the people are predominently on the side of legality, even the Moslems, reluctant though some are to accept that the Quran can be read in shocking ways by extremists.

In the UK only lunatics support bombing innocent people as long as we have effective democratic methods of protest available. The similar but more serious threat from the northern Irish nationalists, who felt they were justified in bombing because the political system of northern Ireland had been heavily weighted against them, did not cause anything like the panic in government circles as the present Islamist threat, despite being more destructive. In fact, in the streets, neither threat bothered many people at all. London had been blitzed by Hitler and had not yielded. A few IRA bombs was unlikely to cause a panic. The same remains true of the Islamic threat.

The real danger has always been that governments will suppress democratic rights in the so called war against terrorism to such an extent that Parliament and the police lose popular backing. Then either the government falls, or it becomes utterly oppressive. That is now a much greater danger than any threats from terrorists.

Time for Obama to be Tough on Banksters not in Afghanistan

Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the US military nor the US government can afford to waste.

Andrew Bacevich, former US Colonel, Professor of history at Boston University

NY Times columnist, Bob Herbert, told Obama as soon as he began his new job over a year ago that “the US military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan”:

The troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional men and women—some to die, some to be horribly wounded—on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness.

He thought Obama may feel he had to demonstrate his toughness, and that Afghanistan was the place to do it. It seems that is just what Obama felt. The US is still in there with more troops than ever!

Obama could show his own courage as commander in chief by quitting this absurd war. Dwight D Eisenhower, a Republican president, was not ashamed to say, “I hate war”. Eisenhower described “its brutality, its futility, its stupidity”, and could say it in defiance of his redneck supporters, having lived and breathed a proper war for four long years (1941-1945) against a real army, Hitler’s German army of well equipped and battle hardened troops. In Afghanistan, Obama wants to prove his courage against a rag, tag and bobtail army of farmers and peasants, brave but ill-equipped with largely home made weapons, whose defenseless wives and children cower in mud huts being bombed and shot at by well equipped and battle hardened soldiers, who are our own!

And what is Obama achieving? He is driving angry men into Pakistan, a nuclear power, plainly destabilizing it and threatening to make it a failed state whose natural enemy rather than natural friend would be the US, and its spineless allies in the west.

No country poses a greater potential threat to US national security—today and for the foreseeable future—than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake.

Professor Colonel A Bacevich

It is absurd to attempt to restrict potential terrorists by occupying a large and mountainous country. It should not need the spending of countless tax dollars when we face far more dangerous crooks, robbers and terrorists at home sitting behind the desks of Goldmann Sachs executives, and those of other infallible banks. The banks have become a fetid hothouse of corruption, a haven of gangsters and weasels whose salute is the upturned palm. Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, our banks are shot through with corruption and graft. They are no longer offering a public service for which they want a fair return, but exist only for the enrichment of those who run them.

Are our soldiers putting lives on the line for the corruption of banksters, Like Richard Fuld, and political monsters like Richard Cheney?—described now as the two Dicks!

Let us kill two birds with one stone by putting the desk clerk crooks and slime bag politicians in uniform and sending them to Afghanistan. US prospects might not be so good in Afghanistan, but they will be much improved at home.

Impeach the War Criminals

When American POWs were shown on TV by the Iraqis, Donald (von) Rumsfeld suddenly became a spouter of international law, the Geneva Convention. Why then was he, and the US leadership not interested in international law when they ignored the rule of the UN and started the war? Are we supposed to admire or believe this hypocrisy? Saddam was not the only criminal. These men were too, and they know it. That is why the US still refuses to ratify the International Court of Justice.

Mr Blair boasted that the removal of Saddam was a good deed in itself, so it did not matter that he lied to Parliament and the country over WMDs. Saddam, he told us killed 300,000 of his own people and they were buried in mass graves, but the invasion led to more deaths, and that is justified in Blair”s perverted mind. In the Vietnam war, Blair’s ally in mutual sycophancy, the USA, had already killed 60,000 of its own soldiers fighting an unjust war, and killed two million Vietnamese, as well as destroying the country with defoliants and poisons, and damaging the genetic make up of the Vietnamese forever with horrific results. What does the selective Christian conscience say about all this?

Bush was not elected but twice defrauded the US electorate to get into power. Yet, the people of the US seem unabashed that this man should have led their sons into a mad adventure on the basis of hatred of Moslems, or greed for oil. The call among peace loving and democratic people now is to punish the crypto-Nazis and strengthen the democratic process so that the same disaster cannot happen again.

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Impeach the war criminals Bush and Blair.

Stop the Afghan War—Save our Public Services and Jobs

Dozens of soldiers are spilling out of choppers around the villages. The insurgents are on their radios, getting ready to strike. [Captain] Dan is not going to let them, and soon the night sky lights up with air strikes, gunships, rockets and bombs. Around dawn, Dan's lieutenant radios. He is with the village elder. There are five dead and 11 wounded women and children. Dan is depressed. he wants to go down and explain. He wants the villages to know there were bad guys there… NYTimes, writer, Elizabeth Rubin

Rubin asked Captain Dan whether he knew this would happen. “Yeah, I did”, he replied. She adds that his choice was “my soldiers or the Afghans”.

Rubin is content to leave it at that, but Captain Dan was attacking Afghan people, men, women and children in their own homes in their own villages, and to Captain Dan—doubtless one of our heroes—the Afghan men, by defending their homes and families, are defined as being “bad guys”. Naturally, the Afghans, defending what is theirs, do not realize they are bad guys at all and have to have it explained to them—if they are still alive!

Is it right that we should be killing people in their own homes, thousands of miles away from our own homes, because our odious and gruesome leaders have decided that they are bad guys who will kill us in our beds if we do not kill them in their beds first? It plainly is not. The enemy has metamorphosed from being international terrorists, Al Qaida, to being the Taliban, a local Moslem sect who had nothing to do with 9/11! They are the heroes, not our brave boys. Our brave boys are the bad guys, by any standard of morality. Which one of us would not defend our own homes if we were placed in the situation the Afghans have been put in? The Americans did it against the British. Why then are they objecting to others doing the same? Why are they acting as imperialists, like king George's British? Are they hypocrites?

Stop the War!

Incidentally, the UK’s heroic Christian leader, Dr Gordon Brown, says he will spend an extra £5 billion on the war next years, yet he is cutting public services and sacking people allegedly to save a few million pounds. Are our leaders insane idiots, or do they just take us to be? Do not vote for a war party!

UK Election: 6 May. Who to Vote For!

The PM, Mr Gordon Brown, has asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament so that there can be an election on 6 May. The electorate now have a month to make up their minds who they want to rule them for the next five years.

They should not vote for any candidate who will not agree to:

• Tax the banks to get back the money New Labour gave them.
• Repeal all the bad and oppressive laws that New Labour introduced and are lying unused until some fascist decides to do so.
• Abandon the neoconservative myth of the War on Terror that Blair got from Bush and Cheney to keep people worried about nothing, and pull out of Afghanistan.

If they don't agree, then don't vote for them. Simple!

WikiLeaks Leaks the Truth about the Afghan War

WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, feels threatened by US counterintelligence designs. It is reported in www.france24.com that WikiLeaks twittered:

If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our April 5 film. And you know who is responsible.

The film, Pentagon Murder Cover-up, apparently shows US military personnel killing civilians and journalists in Afghanistan. While the British media constantly publish propaganda featuring our “brave heroes” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in hearses, they say nothing about the many hundreds of Afghans being killed each month, most of whom are innocent. Weeping British mothers bewail their dead sons, but seem not to give a thought to the sons and mothers being killed daily by our heroes. WikiLeaks has a reputation for reliability, having been given a prize as Best New Media by The Economist in only 2008.

The US intelligence agency, in a classified document, described WikiLeaks as “a threat to US troops abroad”, but WikiLeaks published the report, forcing the Department of Justice to confirm the story was true. The report described ways to bring down the website. The report also lists embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq and violations in the attack on Fallujah, as well as human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.

Oceania, a Quarter Century after 1984, the USA

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes a superstate called Oceania where truth and lies are indivisible, so that lies become truth when they passed into history, and peace is not peace but a permanent war. Oceania used to be thought of as being the USSR, but obviously it was not. What then was Oceania? What is it? The USA!

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. He is the Supreme Commander of a country that fights a permanent war, yet it is peace, and Obama wins The Nobel Peace Prize for faithfully leading it, like his neofascist predecessor. Obama says the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no such authority. It “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan to disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”, he tells us. A decade after invading Afghanistan, the President of Oceania says to the Afghans, “We have no interest in occupying your country”. US forces remain in Iraq, invaded with the support of the whole world after 9/11 except that it was not—all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup were overwhelmingly opposed to it, yet Iraqis and others remain in Guantanamo Bay. This is “global security”.

Another lie is that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden”, yet Pakistan, the adjacent country, said that the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, in 2001, and Oceania ignored them. Two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Bush administration told Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik that an American military assault would take place. The Taliban regime in Kabul, secretly supported by Clinton, was too unreliable to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines in the Middle East.

Though we hear continuously from Oceania’s new President, and his surly puppet, Brown in the UK, that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for Al Qaida, General James Jones, a national security advisor, said in October there were less than 100 Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and US intelligence admits that all but a handful of “Taliban” are tribal rebels “opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud, and, while in the UK, sycophantic media, notably the BBC, play upon the coffins of “our boys” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in Wiltshire on being flown in from Asia, no mention is made of the body count of the Afghans, over 1000 a month—all Taliban murderers of course, and deserving of it.

Meanwhile Americans do their utmost to set Afghan against Afghan just as they set Iraqi against Iraqi, Sunnis against Shia against Kurds, destroying communities that had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunni, driving millions abroad, and ravaging the country of Abraham, a multiethnic society which included Christians. So much for the Godliness of these self proclaimed lovers of God. They created a desert and called it peace. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite of peace was true.

The British in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century tried to tame Afghanistan and failed, though after terrible bloodshed in each case. Cemeteries are their memorials. In the latter case, the Taliban were armed and financed by the USA. Though Yankees are proud of their revolutionary past, they have all now adjusted comfortably to imperialism, and perpetual wars called peace. The old revolutionaries are now the neocolonialists. Yet barring superficial differences, people are the same everywhere, and these Asians, whether Vietnamese, Palestinians, Iraqis, or Afghans all do not differ a jot in wanting to defend their own land against the machinations of foreign powers, just as the American states did against the British.

Orwell was describing what has turned out to be the USA. Even then US propaganda was working overtime against Asia, then against the communist countries, who were never the threat they were painted as. Events have shown that the USSR was a paper tiger, if it was any sort of tiger at all, but the real monster is the USA, Oceania today, a military state inhabited by pious idiots and run by rich maniacs.

From an article by Jon Pilger

Afghanistan, yet another US Imperialist War

Geoff Simons, author of many books on geopolitics, describes George Bush as a semi dictator who ignored the constitution and pretended that he was a war leader so as to rule by diktat. But before Bush there were plenty of lies, torture and invasions. This legacy has left Barack Obama trapped in a culture that regards military aggression and subversive operations as normal tactics. This is the deep seated, enduring and global militaristic culture with which Obama has to contend.

Before Barack Obama became president, US military strategists briefed him on the war in Afghanistan. He asked them what was their exit strategy from Kabul. Silence! Whatever Obama thought about this, the US are still deeply involved in killing Afghans approaching the anniversary of his election. Obama is surrounded by people in the US intelligence and military who don’t want themselves or their policies subjected to too much scrutiny.

After eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden remains free, despite the technology of the mightiest power on earth, and the liberal intervention to democratize the country is stuck in the mire of corruption. Al Karzai, the supposed leader of the country, is a US puppet, who was for long a CIA agent. So it is hardly surprising that any aid sent to Afghanistan simply disappears long before it gets to its targets. The UN suggest that barely 10% of outside aid gets through. It still proves US benevolence, or so the average Yankee seems to think, scared as shit that if they do not keep the front line 6 to 12 thousand miles away, they will have to defend their own back yard. The trouble is their own back yard has continued to expand since the Monroe Doctrine, and for a long time now has covered the whole world.

The Afghan war is what the Vietnam war was, and dozens of other US wars have been in the last 100 years since the Spanish American war, aggression against a foreign state started with whatever excuse and for whatever real reason the US deemed appropriate in its role of world bully. The initial excuse here was the handing over of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaida perpetrators of 9/11. Then it became the noble neocon desire to bring democracy to a backward country—whether they wanted it or not—a banner eagerly waved by Blair, then Brown, as philanthropic imperialism.

On 2 December 1823, president James Monroe outlined the points that defined the Monroe Doctrine—the “American continents” were not subjects for European colonisation and any such attempt would be seen as “dangerous to our peace and safety”. This doctrine yielded the idea of “manifest destiny”, supposedly giving divine sanction to any expansionist policy. The New York journalist, John L O’Sullivan, wrote in 1845 that it was “the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly expanding millions”. This meant that the racist genocide of indigenous people would rightly contribute to the enlargement of a Christian nation. In 1822-5, US forces repeatedly invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Since then, the US has been an imperial junkie, unable to break the habit of killing foreigners in their own lands as a route to expansionism and resource exploitation. They had begun by breaking treaties with the native Americans and slaughtering them.

The Spanish-American war began in 1898, bringing further opportunities for US expansion across the world. The Cuban war of liberation was converted into a US war of conquest. Cuba had a liberation movement heroically fighting against Spanish colonialism and the US would have to intervene. On December 24 1897, US undersecretary of war, JC Breckenridge, commented that the inhabitants of Cuba…

…are generally indolent and apathetic. Its people are indifferent to religion and the majority are therefore immoral. They only possess a vague notion of what is right and wrong. As a logical consequence of this lack of morality, there is a great disregard for life.

It would of course be “sheer madness” to annex such a dissolute and depraved people into the virtuous US. Cuba was invaded and occupied in what US secretary of state John Hay dubbed “a splendid little war”, which crippled the Cuban economy and reduced the people to destitution. Havana stank, and sick and starving people roamed the city or lay in the gutters. Streets were lined with the corpses of horses, dogs and human beings. All efforts to bury the dead had been abandoned. Breckenridge observed:

We must clean up the country, even if this means using the methods Divine Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We must destroy everything within our cannons’ range of fire. We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and disease undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army.

The academic Brian Linn graphically described the response of the US army to the Filipino liberation struggle. Suspects were hung by their thumbs to make them talk. Water was forced down the victim’s throat—“the water cure”—Americans seem fond of water torturing, and euphemisms for it! Villages were burned. US Colonel Benjamin F Cheatham urged his troops to “burn freely and kill every man who runs”. Villagers were forced into concentration camps with food shortages and appalling sanitation. A report said that “malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, disease and demoralisation”, had cost 11,000 Filipino lives.

The twentieth century gave many more opportunities for US imperial expansion. In the first decade of the century, troops were active in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Syria, Panama, Abyssinia, Korea, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua. Just before World War I, the US found reasons to send troops to Cuba, Haiti, China and Turkey. In 1915, president Woodrow Wilson ordered General John J Pershing to invade Mexico with 10,000 troops to crush the insurrection led by Francisco Villa—Pancho Villa. China was again invaded in 1916, while in the same year US troops began an eight-year occupation of the Dominican Republic to combat a popular uprising.

The US invasions continued in China, Guatemala and Russia (all in 1920), China and Turkey (1922), China and Honduras (both invaded in 1924 and 1925), China again (1926 and 1927). In the prelude to World War II, US forces again invaded Cuba and China. In 1940, the US acquired from Britain the lend-lease bases of Newfoundland, Bermuda, St Lucia, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and British Guiana, and in April 1941, Greenland and Iceland were taken under US protection. In October 1945, 50,000 US marines were sent to north China to aid the nationalist battle against the communists. World War II and the Korean war resulted in permanent US occupations of parts of Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain and of many island bases taken over from the Japanese.

On 7 August 1964, the US Congress, responding to president Lyndon B Johnson’s deliberate lie that US ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese vessels in international waters, approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution affirming “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States… to prevent further aggression”. The blatant lie had produced a presidential authorization that led to almost 60,000 US fatalities. Vietnamese dead, like the earlier Korean dead, numbered in the millions. The Vietnamese war included the Phoenix programme, which involved the systematic torture of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants.

William Blum, in his book Rogue State, has profiled US interventions since the end of the Vietnam war. Washington launched military or subversive actions in the Dominican Republic, Zaire, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Grenada, Honduras, Chad, Bolivia, Iraq, Panama, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Liberia, Turkey, Kuwait, Somalia, Yugoslavia, the Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Afghanistan, East Timor, Serbia, Yemen, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Pakistan, South Ossetia, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Uruguay, Ghana, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, Portugal, Angola, Jamaica, Seychelles, Diego Garcia, Marshall Islands, Albania, Costa Rica, Georgia and other countries.

In Afghanistan, back in the present, bombing by pilotless airplanes continues, and is extended into Pakistan. Neither Obama nor General David Petraeus seem able to stop rogue officers from doing just as they like. They are undisciplined and irresponsible, but determined to have fun soldiering, just as the captain of the USS Vincennes had fun in 1988 shooting down an aeroplane with 290 passengers and crew on board, in a similar utterly undisciplined act. Many say the Lockerbie bombing, later the same year, was a reprisal for that US atrocity—an eye for an eye, so to speak—but the US did not want any such conclusion to be drawn, so the CIA set up Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, whom most of the British relatives of the dead now consider to be innocent. Yet the US, with the same evidence before them refuse to accept that the conviction of al-Megrahi is, to say the least, unsafe, and the rage is fomented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and one of the men responsible, CIA chief Robert Mueller.

So the Yankees continue their policy of invasion, utterly unable to accept that it is a long time failure. Or is it a failure? The US military industrial complex have their own economic reasons. It gets huge government appropriations, and these make for vast profits in the military linked armaments and supply industries. For Cheney and the like of his puppy, Bush, these overseas adventures are ways of siphoning tax dollars into personal profit. And who allegedly pays most tax dollars? Cheney’s own Republican voters! They do not seem to notice they are the ones being conned the most.

The British in Afghanistan

James Fergusson (A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan) has reported from several trouble spots in the world besides Afghanistan, which he has visited several times since 1997. Fergusson was a supporter of the invasion of Afghanistan, and accepted the line about the democratization of the country. Yet he concludes:

It’s all over. We’ve lost the consent of the people. It’s finished.

The troops were sent on “a fool’s errand”, he says, because all the options were not properly considered before the military one was chosen. The aim of democratization given as the purpose of the intervention required the winning over of the people.

It’s not good for winning hearts and minds when you keep bombing wedding parties. How would you feel if it happened in this country? One Taliban commander said, “Supposing thousands of Afghans had invaded your country and bombed your villages and killed your wives and children, what would you do?” You’d be furious. Each one of those people affected by such atrocities is a recruit for the Taliban. They all have fathers, and brothers and sisters. Yet it keeps on happening.

The occupation of Afghanistan is bound to fail, and the use of air power is a disaster, Fergusson says:

It’s part of the problem not part of the solution.

Moreover the strategy called “decapitation”—despite appearances, not literally the blowing off of Afghan heads, whether they are Taliban fighters or women and children—but the targetting of the leadership is counter productive, he tells us, because they are replaced by younger men who are bitterer, more fanatical, and less likely to compromise than the old guard. Carrying the war into Pakistan is also futile and counter productive, Fergusson thinks:

It’s turning into a honey pot for global Jihad, and that’s our fault!

The Taliban and Al Qaida ought to be treated as separate entities, but the west conflates them. The Taliban are not monolithic, and were not, at least initially, concerned with the west. They had no foreign policy. Their revolution was internal, and divided on many issues. They are uniting against the western invaders. Al Qaida’s, on the other hand, was entirely a foreign policy—to defeat the west.