Antony Loewenstein

The search for a reason to attack Iran continues apace. While demonstrating a remarkable ability to maintain a straight face, the Bush administration and indeed, both political parties, continue to insist that Iran has no business in Iraq.

A senior US official in Baghdad told the Guardian in May that Iran was fighting a proxy war in Iraq. He accused Tehran of “committing daily acts of war against US and British forces”, including weapons and other assistance to militias and ad hoc cooperation with individual extremists tied to al-Qaida.

The hypocrisy here is stunning. Not only has the US repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to support this claim, but they themselves are backing the same Shiite party that Tehran has supported all along, while more recently, arming the Sunni insurgents. Even worse is that the US is supporting Pakistan based Jihadist groups and Marxist revolutionaries to launch attacks against Tehran.

War critics and most of the public remain highly skeptical of the accusations, especially some of the allegations that fall apart under the most minimal scruitiny. For example.

Gen Bergner indicated that interrogation of captured insurgents was partly the basis for the US intelligence assessments. He detailed alleged al-Quds involvement in training, at camps inside Iran, weapons supply, and funding of the special groups to the tune of $3m a month.

Again, this can so easily be debunked, seeing as Al Qaeda recently issued a very public warning to Iran not to interfere in Iraq.

Why then, would Iran be supporting a sworn enemy? The US propaganda machine has not seen fit to explain this paradox.

Of course, there is also the recent report that came out recently that revealed that no foreign fighters in Iraq are coming from Iran. Nevertheless, reality never got in the way of a sideshow on Capitol Hill, where the house voted 97-0 in condemnation of Iran for attacks on US forces – an amendment sponsored by neocon bottom feeder, Joe Lieberman.

The fact remains that for a country that shares a border with Iraq, Iran has every reason to be involved in the affairs of Iraq. What would be Washington’s response if Iran demanded that the US stay out of the affairs of Canada or Mexico after they had been invaded?

ABC Radio National interview about blogging and new media

David Remnick, The New Yorker, July 30:

In this atmosphere of post-traumatic gloom, Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, managed to inflame the Israeli public (left, right, and center) with little more than an interview in the liberal daily Ha’aretz, promoting his recent book, “Defeating Hitler.” Short of being Prime Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His father was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority.

While on the subject of torture, in spite of Israel’s abysmal human rights record, the abduction of children is rarely mentioned.

A report issued by Defense for Children International (DCI), called “Children Behind Bars”, found that during 2006 and the first half of 2007, the vast majority of children apprehended by the Israeli forces were imprisoned.

Only 3 to 5% of the juveniles abducted were granted bail pending trial.

DCI also noted that over 99% of the children tried pleaded guilty and the tiny minority that pleaded not guilty were eventually found guilty and sentenced.

Needless to say, their captors are more than happy to introduce them to the realities of torture.

One child, Rashed Radwa, recalls being beaten whilst blindfolded. He was then forced into stress positions for ten hours in cold weather. He was then asked to sign papers in Hebrew and when he refused his interrogator smashed his head against a desk.

What better way to ensure guilty verdicts 100% of the time? And yet, we still wonder why some of these people grow up to be suicide bombers. Has to be something to do with the Quran, right?

Chalmers Johnson on the sordid and utterly unaccountable activities of the CIA.

It must make the Americans so proud (the handful who know about it, that is.)

Over to Johnson:

The CIA’s incessant, almost always misguided, attempts to determine how other people should govern themselves; its secret support for fascists (e.g., Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g., the Congo under Joseph Mobutu); its uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and religious fanatics (Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) — all these and more activities combined to pepper the world with blowback movements against the United States.

Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States than the CIA’s “clandestine” (only in terms of the American people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these armed assaults run into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked “Why do they hate us?” From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, “Who does not?” 

As if the Iraqis need yet another problem in their lives:

Iraq’s environment minister blamed Monday the use of depleted uranium weapons by U.S. forces during the 2003 Operation Shock and Awe for the current surge in cancer cases across the country.

As a result of “at least 350 sites in Iraq being contaminated during bombing” with depleted uranium (DU) weapons, Nermin Othman said, the nation is facing about 140,000 cases of cancer, with 7,000 to 8,000 new ones registered each year.

Speaking at a ministerial meeting of the Arab League, she also complained that many chemical plants and oil facilities had been destroyed during the two military campaigns since the 1990s, but the ecological consequences remain unclear.

“Our ministry is fledgling, and we need international support; notably, we need laboratories to better monitor air and water contamination,” she said.

But they shouldn’t worry. Leading war booster Daniel Pipes reassures them that, “The coalition gave Iraqis a fresh start; it cannot take responsibility for them nor rebuild their country.” Of course not. How unreasonable. We’ll invade and occupy your country, then stay indefinitely for our own interests alone.

My following article appeared in yesterday’s Guardian Comment is Free section:

In a country where the government maintains a tight grip on information across all media formats, recent statements by a senior Chinese Communist party official were revealing.

Wang Guoqing, a vice-minister with the cabinet’s information office, said that mobile phones and the internet were making the job of censors almost impossible. “It has been repeatedly proved that information blocking is like walking into a dead end,” he said.

Mr Wang chastised local governments for still believing information could be kept secret when, he said, they should see their roles as controlling and managing information rather than simply hiding embarrassing news.

There is a growing realisation within the world’s largest nation that China’s massive online population wants to discuss issues that were taboo only a few years ago. A collection of websites across the country has started to debate endemic corruption of low-level officials, environmental degradation and product regulation. The situation is far more complex than the portrayals by many western observers suggest. This doesn’t mean, however, that the Chinese authorities will accept these changes without a fight.

Take the recent news that authorities in the town of Xiamen are planning to force local bloggers to register with real names. As Time.com‘s China blogs dryly noted: “This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the internet [played] a huge role in the protests that roiled the city in early June when thousands of residents poured on to the streets to denounce a plan to build a chemical factory in a Xiamen suburb.”

It would be practically impossible to implement such rules, but this hasn’t stopped local officials talking about it anyway.

Gary Wang is founder of Tudou, China’s equivalent of YouTube. He told me in Shanghai that government officials called virtually weekly to demand that one video or another be pulled. According to bureaucrats in the censorship department, “red lines” are routinely crossed. Despite 60 million clips viewed daily and 40 million users per month, Wang recognised that the authorities were fighting a battle they could never win, but were unlikely to give up any time soon. It was simply a price of doing business in the country.

It’s something I noticed myself in China, too. There is a profound disconnect between President Hu Jintao‘s calls in January for the internet to only “spread more information that is in good taste” and the reality on the ground. At internet cafes in both Beijing and Shanghai, I saw users accessing softcore pornography and western news sites that are allegedly blocked. The task of monitoring around 140 million net users is an impossibility – something more senior officials may be starting to realise.

With the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games just over one year away, these issues are becoming more relevant than ever. Will the government care that the hordes of foreigners coming for the Olympics may be unable to access vital information online? Perhaps filtering will magically disappear for the two-week event or simply be drastically curtailed. Such “unblocking procedures” are a regular occurrence. For example, the long-banned English Wikipedia is supposedly now available, though last week it was still inaccessible. As one blogger told me, trying to impose logic on a system that was ultimately controlled by the whims of a faceless bureaucrat was pointless.

The rise of China and its massive environmental challenges is already causing some in the west to claim that these problems will keep it from becoming a truly global super-power. This is probably wishful thinking. Controls over the internet (along with blocks on satellite television) may be signs of a nation that is struggling to define itself in the 21st century, but a weakened post-Iraq America suits the Chinese authorities just fine. After all, it was only recently that armchair economists predicted Japan would be the world’s next major player. China doesn’t want to make the same mistakes.

Spend any time with bloggers, writers or journalists and you’ll soon discover that Internet filtering is little more than a distraction, an issue to be circumvented.

The idea of Iran sitting down to talk to America is rather comic. The setting is Baghdad. The US is desperate for any way to reduce the violence. Iran would be fairly pleased with its massive power in the country. Good luck, diplomats.

Conflicts Forum correspondent in Baghdad has posted this dispatch:

One of the more interesting — and quiet — visits to Washington was made recently by Sunni parliamentary leader Mohammed al-Dayni, who visited Capitol Hill during May to meet with Congressional leaders and administration officials. A Sunni member of the Iraqi parliament and head of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Front, al-Dayni showed up in Washington for an extended 25-day visit to talk with policymakers about Washington’s Iraq strategy. The point of al-Dayni’s visit? To convince the Bush administration to begin talks with what al-Dayni described as “the real representatives of the Iraqi resistance” and not the “make believe resistance leaders.” What al-Dayni had in mind was that the Bush administration — and members of Congress — would reopen negotiations with Iraq’s Baathists, the same leaders it had accused of meeting with and harboring al-Qaeda operatives and hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The outspoken al-Dayni is known as a Sunni partisan, a strong anti-Shia activist, a long-time critic of Iran and a controversial and sometimes volatile critic of the Maliki government. More importantly, al-Dayni has strong ties to key figures in the Sunni resistance, a fact that has led him into increasingly disturbing clashes with Maliki — and which brought him to Washington in the first place. Then too, as head of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Front (a disciplined political bloc that controls eleven seats in the Iraqi parliament) al-Dayni’s power cannot be ignored. “He is an articulate, if outspoken, political leader,” one Congressional aide remembers of his meeting with him. “He is a man of strong opinions, as well as a superb salesman.”

A superb salesman? That’s clearly an important consideration for making peace in the nation. Chances are he’s selling what very few people want to buy.

Suffice to say, during last night’s CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential debate, most of the candidates had no real ideas about Iraq. Soundbites ruled.

Whenever right wing pundits and bloggers try to make a blanket observation about their political opponents, they always get themselves into a rhetorical knot.

Take  Dean Barnett for example.

The strain of the “9/11 Generation” of which Barnett is a part, which is represented by the Weekly Standard and National Review Agenda of Endless War and led by George Bush and Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romeny and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, is captured perfectly by those passages, which reveal the core mentality of this movement:

We need to prove to the world how powerful and tough and strong we are by kicking ass and starting wars and putting our boots on the ground and getting our hands dirty and bombing and invading and fighting like the Real Warriors we are because Civilization is at Risk. And the way we should do that is by sending those people — the ones way, way over there — to go and fight and risk their lives in the wars I love.

I am a full-throated Supporter of the Epic War of Civilizations, but I can’t fight in it, because my knee hurts and I need to collect advance checks from Regnery and I want to stay at home and wipe dribble from my baby’s chin. But those people over there can and should fight. And between watching Star Trek on television and playing war video games, I will log off periodically to write articles and posts about how great these wars are and I, too, will therefore be strong and noble and resolute and brave. That is the grotesque and principle-free face of the “9/11 Generation” which believes there is wisdom in the Weekly Standard and praises Barnett’s article and cheers on one American war after the next.

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To begin with, while Barnett contrasts two significant groups of the Vietnam era — those who bravely volunteered for combat and/or who were drafted (Jim Webb and John McCain and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry) and those who protested the war — he revealingly whitewashes from history the other major group, the most ignoble one, the one which happens to include virtually all of the individuals who lead Barnett’s political movement: namely, those who claimed to support the war but did everything possible to evade military service, sending their fellow citizens off to die instead in a war they urged.

Most revealingly, Barnett condemns those who refused to fight because they opposed to war and chose instead to work against it, but ignores completely those who favored the war but sent others to fight and die in it. Barnett has to ignore this group. He has no choice. He cannot possibly criticize such individuals because this group includes the editors and writers of the magazine in which he is writing, his blogging boss, and virtually the entire leadership of the political movement which he follows.

When it comes to starting a diplomatic crisis or a war, truth is never an option.

In spite of being treated with kid gloves by the media, the governments in Washington, London and Canberra are suffering from major credibility deficits.

A parliamentary report into the ‘hostage’ crisis some months back has conceded Craig Murray’s point that the maritime map published by the Ministry of Defence was actually confected from thin air – that between the ears of defence ministers. The report says that the map could be regarded as “deliberately misleading”, that there is no certainty in the coordinates given by the British government, and that the government was lucky that Iran didn’t contest it. There hasn’t been much time, given the very rapid lurches by the Brown government, to reflect on the extraordinary mendacity of the regime we’ve recently ousted. The Blair era might well have been known for nothing much more exciting than sell-outs and sleaze had it not been clear early on that the priggish lawyer in charge was also a fervent imperialist. From the first bombing of Baghdad in 1998, the usual spate of very British lies and hypocrisy were augmented by a blood-curdling moralism drawn directly from Cold War B-Movies.

And as the policies became more outrageous, the deceptions became more egregious, never reaching such a ridiculous height as during the summer of death in Lebanon. And so, by the time the troops were siezed in the Gulf, hardly anyone could believe a word the government said. And they still didn’t get it: they confidently expected that if they pressed the old buttons, brought out the flags and the imperial bunting, and issued resolute messages via The Sun and the usual scum press, they would galvanise a mass of support against the Mad Mullahs. It must have been a shock to discover that people were more willing to believe the Iranian government than the British one. From start to finish, the farrago showed what a dwindled figure the former Prime Minister cut, what a petty crook he had become in the eyes of most. Most Americans would be happy to see Cheney impeached, and quite a few would like to see the same happen to Bush. I believe that most Britons would probably be content to see Blair hanged. Either by the Mahdi army, or on the end of stockings with an orange in his mouth after a failed erotic asphyxia transaction, it makes no difference.

An excellent article on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel.

The myth goes like this: In 1948, when the Arabs attacked the newly declared state of Israel, the Arab population fled by the hundreds of thousands. They left not because of attacks by Israeli soldiers but because of the calls of their own Arab leaders, who guaranteed them a speedy return once the Arab armies had triumphed over the upstart Jewish state. Indeed, they fled despite the attempts of many Israelis—as was movingly portrayed in the film “Exodus”—to convince their Palestinian neighbors to remain. Why should such treacherous people have the right to return? Not to mention the fact that their return by the millions would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

This is the story that Israel’s leaders and Jews throughout the Diaspora have clung to for more than half a century. But since the early 1990s a new generation of Israeli historians and investigative journalists—drawing on formerly classified documents as well as recollections of Israeli leaders of the War of Independence—has demolished the traditional Israeli position.

According to their research, the Palestinians fled their villages not in response to a call from Arab leaders but because of a concerted campaign of terror—including massacres and rape—perpetrated by military units of the newly declared Israeli state.

As Gideon Levy, a leading columnist from Haaretz, put it, “1948 was Israel’s finest hour, the culmination of a mad dream: the formation of an independent Jewish state.” At the same time he declared, “it was our darkest hour, in which we committed war crimes on a large scale. And did so in all good conscience.”

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In 2004, Benny Morris wrote a new study concluding there had been far more “ethnic cleansing”—far more massacres and rapes than he had originally thought. The Israeli fighters had been given explicit orders “to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.” In October 1948 in the Galilee, he said, “There was an unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion. This can’t be chance. It’s a pattern.” The orders for expulsion followed the visit of Prime Minister Ben Gurion to the headquarters of the units that undertook them.

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As if to destroy evidence of the Palestinian past, over the following years some 400 out of 500 Palestinian towns and ancestral villages were burned, dynamited and bulldozed, obliterated from the maps of Israel.

I highly recommend reading this article.