Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010
Gareth Porter
4th February, 2010
On the surface, it would seem unlikely that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who presides over a politically feeble government and is highly dependent on the United States military presence and economic assistance, would defy the United States on the issue of peace negotiations with the leadership of the Taliban insurgency.
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Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Afghanistan London Conference, End of empire, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010
Daniel Larison
The American Conservative
30th January, 2010
One of the reasons why I keep revisiting the illegality and immorality of the intervention in Kosovo long after most people have forgotten about it is precisely because so many opponents of the Iraq war don’t want to acknowledge that Kosovo was every bit as unjustifiable and wrong as Iraq was. By endorsing the war in Kosovo even now, as Obama did again in Oslo, many opponents of the Iraq war have opened themselves up to the attack that Iraq hawks were using from the beginning. If someone pointed out that invading Iraq would violate international law and not have U.N. sanction, the hawks would throw the precedent of Kosovo in his face. Unless he was a principled progressive or antiwar conservative, the opponent of the invasion was always at a loss to respond. If invading Iraq was based on phony or exaggerated intelligence about WMDs, Kosovo was based on lies about preventing genocide and protecting human rights. Unless you are among the fairly small percentage that opposed both, the odds are that you are outraged over invading Iraq in inverse proportion to how outraged you were over bombing Serbia.
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Posted in Drive to Global War | Tagged: Tony Blair-war criminal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010
3rd February, 2010
Through a column in The Times, Sir Malcolm Rifkin has called for a new “entente cordiale” with France within the NATO structure.[1]
As former British Minister of Defence and of Foreign Affairs, he considers that only a Franco-British military pact would make it possible to harmonize expensive military equipment. This would result in significant savings that would enable the United Kingdom to continue to rank as a great power.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: End of empire | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 2, 2010
Bankrupt or not, Britain seems intent on reaffirming itself as a military-imperial power whatever the cost. We continue to fail to see that the game is up for the cause of full spectrum dominance and that the London-Washington-Tel Aviv axis is doomed to defeat. We need now , as a matter of urgency, a movement for imperial retreat and the dismantling of the MIC. Britain needs to reduce its military to that of an average nation and seek to rebuild friendly relations with the rest of the world especially our creditors. Only in this way can we find the funds and continued capital inflows to finance a programme of national civil reconstruction which can prevent us becoming a failed state.
1st February, 2010
Gordon Brown will put two new aircraft carriers at the heart of his vision for the military this week as he commits Labour to billions of pounds of extra defence spending.
Posted in Drive to Global War | Tagged: Britain into Europe-Europe out of NATO, dismantle military-industrial complex | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 2, 2010
Tom Engelhart
2nd February, 2010
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.
So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated … and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out”.
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23 piece on the trip:
Mr Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s “trust deficit” with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.
His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching Seven Days in May, the Cold War-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.
Posted in Drive to Global War | Tagged: dismantle military-industrial complex | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 2, 2010
22nd March, 2008
The U.S. government has concluded that childhood vaccines contributed to symptoms of autism in 9-year-old Hannah Poling. The unprecedented concession was in response to one of three test cases that allege the mercury-containing vaccine preservative thimerosal caused autism in children.
Posted in Ecological and Public Health Crisis | Tagged: mercury and autism | 1 Comment »
Posted by seumasach on February 2, 2010
1st February, 2010
The real story behind the grotesque US takeover of Haiti
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On January 22, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti and to “secure” roads.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Haiti, Obama agenda | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 