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Archive for the ‘Drive to Global War’ Category

Facing total economic meltdown at home US/UK, spear-heading NATO, have chosen the path of confrontation with the rest of the world, a path which will lead us to the brink of war with Russia and China

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The winner takes all in Afghanistan

Posted by seumasach on February 12, 2010

The ascendancy of malleable Islamist forces also has its uses for the US’s containment strategy towards China (and Russia). Islamists lend themselves as a foreign policy instrument. The rise of Islamism in Afghanistan cannot but radicalize hot spots such as the North Caucasus, Kashmir and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China.

M.K.Bhadrakumar

Asia Times

13th February, 2010

The Nobel Peace Prize has a tradition. In the entire period from 1901 to 2009, it has never been awarded twice to any of its 97 individual recipients. 

United States President Barack Obama is thus unlikely to win a second Nobel. Yet, in an historical perspective, Afghanistan promises to become the first country in which Islamists will have been ushered into power on the wave of America’s newfound smart power. 

That too may only be the beginning. “Of course Afghanistan is not an island. There is no solution just within its borders,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a security conference in Munich last weekend.

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Sophists for sanctions

Posted by seumasach on February 11, 2010

Stephen Gowans

What’s Left

9th February, 2010

Tony Hawkins, a professor of economics at the University of Zimbabwe, thinks that Western sanctions on Zimbabwe should be maintained but that their effects “are minimal” and that “their continued existence really plays into the hands of some people in Zanu-PF.”

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Iran Speaks Up

Posted by seumasach on February 10, 2010

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Wars Sending U.S. Into Ruin- Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford

Posted by seumasach on February 10, 2010

Eric Margolis

Global Research

9th February, 2010

U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health.

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The Myth of the Good War: America in World War II 60 Years Ago, February 13-14, 1945: Why was Dresden Destroyed

Posted by seumasach on February 10, 2010

Many put the death toll at well above 40,000 including eyewitnress and longstanding student of this massacre Kurt Vonnegut

Jacques R. Pauwels

Global Research

9th February, 2010

In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.[1] Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,”[2] so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation. The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan.

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Defeat of all defeats: Giants from Afghanistan changed the world

Posted by seumasach on February 4, 2010

General (retd) Mirza Aslam Beg

Rupee News

3rd February, 2010

Obama announced the New Strategy for Afghanistan, and “has come to the determination through a series of deliberations, and getting a strategy for how to go forward in Afghanistan” with the intention “to finish the job.” He has thus ordered a surge of 30,000 troops, increasing the total US commitment to about 100,000, bolstered by 45,000 NATO troops.

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US, Karzai split over Taliban talks

Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010

Gareth Porter

Asia Times

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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Blair’s Monstrous Consistency

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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Brown goes into battle with billions for defence

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.

Times

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.

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Seven days in January

Posted by seumasach on February 2, 2010

Tom Engelhart

Asia Times

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.

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NATO Calls Air Strike Against Afghan Army Base, Killing Four Soldiers

Posted by seumasach on January 31, 2010

Jason Ditz

antiwar.com

30th January, 2010

NATO troops in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province had a brief overnight gunbattle with Afghan Army forces, with both sides apparently assuming the other was Taliban. The troops called in an air strike against a newly established Afghan Army base, killing four soldiers and wounding six others.

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