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Showing posts with the label iraq

Is There Any Honour in War?

“Despite  being funded  in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).” This is a liberal nationalist view of a former American military professor and Air Force officer. All his emphasis on ‘lies’ by the military and the propaganda of war without mentioning what he calls the ‘truth’ is keeps the reader wondering, bewildered perhaps. Not a single mention of the political economy of war , especially of the nature and functioning of American capital. You just get the impression that a few liars at the top cause wars as if politicians, strategists of empire, ruling classes, advisors, etc think and work outside a socio-political frame work of power structure and power relations domestically and internationally. There is a mention of ‘honour’ and the hu

Condoleezza and Madeleine

  What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. Popular literature and films often depict the opposite — policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions.   —Henry Kissinger  A mild take on two women complicit in an imperialist crime 

Two Stories from the Levant

Palestinian-Syrian refugee opens Iraq’s first cat and dog hotel I wonder how many English would like this. Dozens of migrants killed as boats sinks off Syrian coast Good that ‘killed’, not ‘died’, has been used in the headline.

Muthaffar al-Nawwab - Al Jazeera’s Approach

 

War Crimes. Whose Crimes?

When they commit them, they are war crimes . When we do it, it’s fighting insurgents and terrorists; it’s a mistake or they were rogue soldiers involved; or it’s a collateral damage. I think the article concludes with a utopian vision in the current international balance of powers and the prospects of more wars and instability. Who is going to make the ICC function impartially in every war?  One needs to question the existing regimes East and West and interconnect wars with major social and political-economic issues engulfing the world. Listing war crimes committed by ‘liberal democrats’ and authoritarians, does not go beyond recalling events that have become common knowledge and exposing hypocrisy and double standards that many ordinary people have already noticed. More than ever the type of journalism required today is radical, ‘extremist’ journalism in a very extremist world; as Mark Mazower put it, we urgently need a journalism that is able to “ overcome  the frangmentation of mode

Counting the Cost of the Iraqi Invasion of Iraq

Albright. No, it Wasn’t All Bright

No tears to shed over a woman who was part and parcel of an imperialist criminal state. “[Madeleine]  Albright was also champion of Nato expansion , overseeing the addition of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1999 - a move whose repercussions are being keenly felt today.” On May 12, 1996, Albright defended  UN sanctions against Iraq  on a  60 Minutes  segment  in which  Lesley Stahl  asked her, "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it." In the context of the 1998 Iraq campaign, Albright expressed another justification , saying, "But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."  In 2014, a released diplomatic cable  revealed  that as amba

Highlighting Ugly Truths

A good summary. “There is no contradiction between standing with the people of Ukraine and against Russia’s heinous invasion and being honest about the hypocrisy, war crimes, and militarism of the U.S. and NATO. We have an undeniable moral responsibility to prioritize holding our own government accountable for its crimes because they are being done in our names and with our tax dollars. That does not mean we should be silent in the face of the crimes of Russia or other nations, but we do bear a specific responsibility for the acts of war committed by our own nations.” On hypocrisy: “ How many of the people with Ukrainian flag avatars on their Twitter profiles have spent days or weeks pleading for the world to stand up for ordinary Yemenis living under the hell of American bombs and Saudi warplanes? The same question applies in the case of the Palestinians who live under an  apartheid state  imposed by Israel and backed up by a sustained campaign of annihilation  supported  and  encoura

Invasion or War

The Russian regime refuses to call the invasion of Ukraine a war. It was not until 1999 that the French Assembly designated the Algerian War (1954-62) as a war . The American Congress never designated the war on Vietnam as a war . In October 2002 the American Congress adopted ‘Iraq Resolution’ that would be known as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, and was not designated as a war. …..