The good mercenary life in Africa

Who said being a private security thug wasn’t profitable in the age of capitalism on crack (via South African paper The New Age)?: Thirty-five Special Forces-trained South Africans were responsible for this week’s audacious operation that spirited Muammar Gaddafi’s wife and three children from Libya to safety in Algeria. The “battle hardened Iraq veterans”, who…

The gospel according to Tony Abbott (future Australian leader?)

The Liberal Opposition leader Tony Abbott is interviewed in today’s Murdoch Australian by Greg Sheridan, a man who never saw a war he didn’t love to watch (from a distance). The message? Abbott loves America, Israel, the West, the “war on terror” and anything Washington asks. That’s not a foreign policy; its sycophancy: I ask…

How 9/11 showed a West unsure of who it wanted to kill

This week’s New Statesman editorial: Above all, the doctrine of liberal intervention, even on so-called humanitarian grounds, was gravely undermined by the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Blair’s dream of a new, interdependent world order turned out to be no more than the delusion of a western triumphalist who believed that history was moving…

Concern for Tamils in Sri Lanka isn’t a new worry

A newly released Wikileaks cable from early 2007 shows how the US was allegedly worried about Colombo’s attitude towards Tamils from years ago and yet during its brutal civil war against the minority tacitly backed the bogus “war on terror” that saw tens of thousands of Tamils murdered. If only Sri Lanka had oil, like…

The tangled web of so-called freedom in Libya

So here’s how it works. Find a dictator, love him then hate him, bomb him to smithereens and look for unique business opportunities. Asia Times: Think of the new Libya as the latest spectacular chapter in the Disaster Capitalism series. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, we had R2P (“responsibility to protect”). Instead of neo-conservatives,…

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