As Washington withdraws its troops from Iraq, its military operations in Afghanistan intensify with an increasing death toll and political carnage. This video features a panel discussion on the US strategy in the Middle East and South Asia investigating whether its superpower status has finally been eroded. The Afghanistan and Iraq occupation has unleashed unprecedented havoc in the world in an effort to secure global leadership. This debate investigates the ramifications of the war in the two countries, the moral justifications for it, and analyses the withdrawal of troops from Iraq as a ‘rebranding’ of the occupation.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney’s vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map:
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s vision of completely redrawing the map of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks is “not stupid,” and is “possible over time,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.
In his new book, A Journey, the former Labour Party leader wrote that Cheney wanted a wholesale reorganization of the political map of the Middle East after 9/11. The vice president “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc,” Blair wrote.
What does this mean?
Well, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the "war on terror" in the Middle East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with remaking that region's geopolitical situation to America's advantage.
We hear a lot about barbarism and backwardness and bloodthirstiness among the nations of the Middle East, where violent religious extremists are praised and supported — and often hold state power. A lot of this is hype and misinformation, of course, but sometimes it’s all too true. From the Guardian:
An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. ...
The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.
The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.
… The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident. …
The army’s official account said that Iman was shot for crossing into a security zone carrying her schoolbag which soldiers feared might contain a bomb. It is still not known why the girl ventured into the area but witnesses described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.
A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.
In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot. ….
Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."
At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.
President Obama’s announcement that all combat troops have exited Iraq, while 50,000 combat troops remain in Iraq, is fitting. Since the war began with a lie, the “end” of the war might as well be based on a lie as well.
Interventionists continue to maintain the sweet delusion that Iraq is better off as a result of the U.S. invasion. However, when they make that claim, they’re always referring to the Iraqis who are alive. They never refer to the Iraqis who are dead as a result of the invasion.
Are dead Iraqis better off because of the invasion? Unfortunately, we can’t ask them because they are dead. I’ll bet that if they could answer, many, if not all, of them would say, “We would have preferred living under a totalitarian dictator than having our lives snuffed out prematurely by a violent U.S. military invasion.”
Nonetheless, U.S. interventionists steadfastly maintain that the loss of Iraqi life has been worth it.
Let’s just get this out of the way: The CIA doesn’t hire working journalists. Not American ones, anyway. It stopped in 1976 after an embarrassing investigation by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) revealed that infiltrating news teams was just one of several bad habits dating to the 1950s. But we can’t help imagining the clinking of glasses at a certain Langley, VA, office suite over last week’s provocative Timecover story, the one treating NATO’s Afghanistan war as synonymous with standing up for maimed 18-year-old beauty Bibi Aisha.
A “straightforward reported piece,” Time’s spokesman protested after an Observer investigation explored whether the shocking cover story constituted a questionable strain of advocacy journalism, compromised by bureau chief Aryn Baker's likely profits from NATO-enabled war contracts and ties to an Afghan minister's $100 million investment project. Last week Time’s defense of its work as cooly objective seemed at odds with editor Richard Stengel’s concession, in an Aug. 2 interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, that the no-nose piece carried a “strong point of view.”
When George Bush launched the Iraq War, it was obvious to any observer that we were in that country because they had oil, and our government wanted that oil. But this isn’t the only time that our military has been used to help businesses take control of the natural resources of a country. In fact, it’s happened a lot more than you might think. Mike Papantonio talks about our war addiction, and how US corporations are helping to make these wars self-perpetuating, with David DeGraw, a founding member of the Amped Status blog.
As the Second World War drew to a close, George Orwell looked back on the various prognoses of war and peace that had emerged in recent years:
“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way,” he observed. “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”
Over the next several years, Orwell would elaborate a dystopian vision of the emerging Cold War, a vision in which warring superpowers would use distorted and self-serving political rhetoric to battle each other and their citizens.
I noted here a couple of weeks ago that I was looking "forward to seeing more of the genuine revelations of heretofore undisclosed crimes that will likely be emerging from the still largely unexplored documents" released by Wikileaks last month. I have not been disappointed. (I’ve also been in the process of revising much of my first reaction to the document dump; but more on that later perhaps.)
As the media froth surrounding the initial appearance of the documents recedes, the nuggets of hard truth become clearer, with diligent researchers digging through the trove. For example, Bretigne Shaffer findssome of the underpinning for the media blitz now obviously under way to reverse the growing public discontent with the war in Afghanistan.
