Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 27 June: General David Petraeus is taking command in Afghanistan to stage-manage a war that the US has decided it cannot win militarily, but from which it cannot withdraw without damaging loss of face. General Petraeus has so far said surprisingly little about Afghanistan, aside from noting how different it is…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
Paying compensation to all Afghans
Democracy Now! interviews three US soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and now returned to be campaigning vigorously against them. The interview takes place at the US Social Forum, an event that received very little mainstream coverage: VICTOR AGOSTO: Well, I think General Petraeus will be less critical of the Obama administration’s plan…
Don’t bow to the military men
This week’s firing of American commander Stanley McChrystal from Afghanistan was treated by most of the media in the US as the removal of a brave man to be replaced by another brave man, Gen. David Petraeus. Fawning and far too embedded in the mindset of military jargon. After all, what would a simple reporter…
Leading IDF lawyer explains how Israel justifies its action
My following article appears in today’s Crikey: On Tuesday lunchtime the Australian Human Rights Centre and the UNSW International Law and Policy Group (with assistance from the Israeli embassy) hosted a seminar on “The Fight against Terror: Practical Dilemmas in applying the Laws of War.” The two speakers were Professor Abraham Bell of Israel’s Bar-Ilan…
Only US-friendly terror groups are welcome
The latest decision by the US Supreme Court seems highly problematic, not least because America backs terrorists group every day (hello Afghanistan and Iraq, as two recent examples) yet wants to tell its citizens that they can only back groups that speak in lovely, warming tones about the super-power: The US supreme court has upheld…
Those who love some commerce after a US occupation
A grimly fascinating tale in the New York Times about an enterprising Lebanese man who has opened a flash restaurant in Baghdad: Mr. Hage, 51, is the most updated version of an old Lebanese story, that of a diaspora known for its willingness to follow commerce where it leads. Simply put, for a decade, he…
America’s massive carbon footprint in Iraq
During a recent talk at New York’s Revolution Bookstore, writer Raymond Lotta made the following astounding comment: The US military…is one of the world’s largest polluters. If the war in Iraq were actually ranked as a country, in terms of carbon emissions, the war emitted more CO2 each year – that is more carbon dioxide…
Melanie Philips, unplugged
A very helpful “digested read” in the Guardian of the latest work by Melanie Philips: This book arose from a sense of perplexity that almost everyone in the world thought I was clinically mad. Everywhere I looked there were people who believed boarding a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters and murdering nine people was…
Afghans don’t want foreign troops, ever
How many corporate journalists in the West bought Washington’s spin over recent “successes” in Afghanistan? The embedded mindset is a killer: Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal confronts the specter of a collapse of U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan in coming months comparable to the one that occurred in the Iraq War in late…
The war against Wikileaks
I’ve long admired Wikileaks, a clearing house for classified information (the “reasons” often used by Western governments to kill “liberated” Iraqis, Afghans etc). This news is therefore intriguing, not least because it shows that there is one (and probably more) people within the US government keen to tell the world about the “war on terror”…