Larry Everest - Threats, Aggression, War Preparations...and Lies--U.S. and Israel Accelerate Campaign Against Iran

2012 has brought a flood of war talk and aggressive preparations for war on Iran. Indeed, war looms more ominously week by week.

The U.S., Israel, and the European Union have intensified their economic, political, and diplomatic assault on Iran. They claim it's needed to force Iran to halt its nuclear enrichment program, which they say is actually aimed at giving Iran the ability to build a nuclear weapon. Iran says its program is peaceful and is simply for generating nuclear power.

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http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/03/07/18708961.php

Sustained Attacks on Gaza: 15 Dead in Two Days

Up to 15 are now dead in what is said to be the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian flare-up in more than three years. Israeli strikes began on Friday when an air raid killed Zohair al-Qaisi, the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Gaza.

Al-Jazeera reports:

At least 14 Palestinians have been killed and a dozen others wounded, including children, in a series of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip, medical sources have said.

On Saturday an Israeli drone targetted a motorbike in Khan Younis, south of Gaza city, killing one person.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/10

US Continues Drone Strikes in Yemen

US and Yemini airstrikes beginning late Friday have killed at least 45 according to varying reports from the region. The US has increased its drone attacks in Yemen as tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced in recent violence there.

The Guardian reports:

At least 45 militants linked to al-Qaida, including a number of tribal leaders, have been killed by air strikes in south Yemen.

Twenty-five militants were killed in Bayda, about 166 miles south-east of the capital, Sana'a, on Friday, while 20 died at a base in the restive southern town of Jaar, residents told Reuters on Saturday. [...]

Working with the Yemeni authorities, the US has repeatedly used drones to attack militants from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/10-0

Ann Jones - Tomgram: Ann Jones, Playing the Game in Afghanistan

How primitive the Afghans are!  A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible “strategic partnership” agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy.  Take the dispute over prisons.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been insisting that the U.S. turn over its prison facility at Bagram Air Base to his government.  (The recently burned Korans came from that prison’s library.)  The Obama administration initially refused and now has suggested a six-month timetable for such a turnover, an option Karzai has, in turn, rejected.  No one, by the way, seems yet to be negotiating about a second $36-million prison at Bagram that, TomDispatch recently reported, the U.S. is now in the process of building.

The Times’ Alissa Rubin suggests, however, that a major stumbling block remains to any such turnover.  She writes: “The challenges to a transfer are enormous, presenting serious security risks both for the Afghan government and American troops. Many of the estimated 3,200 people being detained [in Bagram’s prison] cannot be tried under Afghan law because the evidence does not meet the legal standards required to be admitted in Afghan courts. Therefore, those people, including some suspected insurgents believed likely to return to the fight if released, would probably have to be released because Afghanistan has no law that allows for indefinite detention for national security reasons.”

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175513/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_playing_the_game_in_afghanistan/

George Lakey - The More Violence, The Less Revolution

In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?

Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?

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http://www.nationofchange.org/more-violence-less-revolution-1331133523

Robert Koehler - PTSD: A Cancer of the Spirit

Can we squeeze the glory out of the word “war”? Can we talk about savage irrationality and lifelong inner hell instead? Can we talk about the wreckage of two countries?

Can we talk about spiritual cancer?

In the extraordinary documentary On the Bridge — an unstinting look at the reality of war and the terror of PTSD, directed by Olivier Morel — each of the six Iraq vets who opens his or her heart in the course of the film has a moment of deep, almost unbearable silence at the end, staring into the camera and through the camera at the viewer . . . and at the nation they are committed to waking up. In that silence, those are the questions that begin to emerge.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/08

One soldier, one year: $850,000 and rising

Keeping one American service member in Afghanistan costs between $850,000 and $1.4 million a year, depending on who you ask. But one matter is clear, that cost is going up.

During a budget hearing today on Capitol Hill, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, asked Department of Defense leaders, "What is the cost per soldier, to maintain a soldier for a year in Afghanistan?" Under Secretary Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller, responded "Right now about $850,000 per soldier."

Conrad seemed shocked at the number.

"That kind of takes my breath away, when you tell me it's $850,000," Conrad said

A Pentagon spokesman later said a more accurate figure is $815,000 a year.

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http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/28/one-soldier-one-year-850000-and-rising/

Paul Craig Roberts - Why Can’t Americans Have Democracy?

When the american invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard set by the US after WW II, overthrew the Saddam Hussein secular government, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites went to war against one another. The civil war between Iraqis saved the american invasion. Nevertheless, enough Sunnis found time to fight the american occupiers of Iraq that the US was never able to occupy Bagdad, much less Iraq, no matter how violent and indiscriminate the US was in the application of force.

The consequence of the US invasion was not democracy and women’s rights in Iraq, much less the destruction of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist as the weapons inspectors had made perfectly clear beforehand.  The consequence was to transfer political power from Sunnis to Shi’ites. The Shi’ite version of Islam is the Iranian version. Thus, Washington’s invasion transferred power in Iraq from a secular government to Shi’ites allied with Iran.

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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29594

Marsha B. Cohen - Consequences Of An Attack On Iran Are No Joke

 A grim joke made the rounds in late 2002 and early 2003, in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. The version I recall went something like this:

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney go into a Texas bar. Over a couple of beers they plan the invasion of Iraq, taking out Saddam Hussein and taking control of Iraq’s vast oil reserves. The big question, though, is how Americans might react to their starting another war, with victory still elusive in Afghanistan. They decide to do an impromptu sampling of public opinion, and invite an average, all-American looking guy standing at the bar to join them for a friendly drink.

“What would you think of us invading Iraq and taking over their oil fields, if you knew that 30,000 Iraqis and one American bicycle mechanic would be killed if we do it?” Bush asks.

The fellow slowly sips his beer, his brow furrowed. He mulls the question and looks troubled. Finally he asks, “Why should an American bicycle mechanic have to die?”

Cheney slaps the table and grins triumphantly at Bush. “I told you no one would give a damn about the 30,000 Iraqis!”

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http://www.lobelog.com/consequences-of-an-attack-on-iran-are-no-joke/

Steven Forrest - The War on Terror: How it is Affecting Our Politics and Society Today

Retrospect is an amazing thing.  Decisions rendered in the past can many times be looked at with this tool of reason in order to protect against future mistakes. It also gives one the opportunity to recognize the motives for decisions made by others in situations which seemed at the time, confusing or conflicted.  Given the religiously charged, national security centered, political frenzy of late in the race to reclaim the Presidency, the War on Terror and the rhetoric accompanying it, now more than ever, makes poignant sense.

Post 9-11, America experienced a wave of legislative acts to combat terrorism. With these acts, political propaganda and media manipulation began to promote a wave of nationalism not seen since World War II. The cries for a Christian rebirth to battle the "evil empire" both domestically and abroad had surfaced and with it, a new form of control over the people's opinions and actions which we still today, are having to battle. In retrospect, these events were the beginning of not only our National march toward an offense-oriented military policy abroad and a police state at home but the surge of Christian Reconstructionism as well, introducing a Constitution-crushing march toward the militaristic and theocratic blindness we are experiencing now.

Read More:

http://dailycensored.com/2012/03/03/the-war-on-terror-how-it-is-affecting-our-politics-and-society-today/