The March to War

The March to War: Détente in the Middle East or "Calm before the Storm?"

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Global Research, July 12, 2007

"Despite the discussions of détente in the Middle East, the peril of war is still a real menace that threatens to proliferate globally. The dialogue taking place between the U.S., the E.U., Russia, Syria, and Iran seems to be merely a transient point in the timeline of the Middle East and Central Asia. The ongoing international discussions focused on the Middle East are part of an instant in time and history that will come to pass. Attached to these discussions are the fate of the Middle East, or so it may seem. With certainty, only time will tell what will unfold in the Middle East and become recorded in the annals of history.

A deeper look must be taken at the evolving domestic conditions within the “American Homeland” and at the wave of events that are unfolding in the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, the former Soviet Union, and Iran.

There have been reports and chatter about war between Israel and Syria and a “Summer War” that could breakout in the Levant with the initiation of Israeli strikes in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. The summer-months of 2007 may see international tensions rise, but witness no regional war that could potentially spread in the Middle East and beyond......"

Khalid Mash'al asserts Hamas' steadfastness

Khalid Mash'al asserts Hamas' steadfastness,
stresses his opposition to factionalism

Contributed by Lucia

"Bethlehem - Ma'an - Khalid Mash'al, the Damascus-based head of Hamas' politburo, has asserted on Thursday the Hamas' movement's steadfastness and determination to prevail in the face of any attempts to sideline them.

He assured that the Hamas movement is not facing a dilemma regarding its future, following its overthrow of the Palestinian Authority institutions in the Gaza Strip three weeks ago.

"We are not in a dilemma, and let those who are counting on that wait one or two months or even a year," Mash'al said. "Let those who want to gamble and sustain the Palestinian schism be responsible for their position, yet they will never succeed as they have selected the wrong track which will lead them to the wrong results."

Mash'al asserted that all wars waged against Hamas and the Palestinian people would not work. "The names and the plans which the US and Israeli occupation counted on have gone with the wind, and the Palestinian legitimacy is not determined by the US and Israel, nor will it be determined by suspending the law or through deception," Mash'al explained.

In a statement distributed by Hamas' politburo, Mash'al stated that his movement is used to coping with hard conditions, and those who plan to punish the people through basic issues such as salaries must be ready for the consequences. He was referring to the Palestinian president's decision to suspend the salaries of Hamas-affiliated civil servants.

With regards to the security issue, Mash'al stressed that control of Palestinian security should be in Palestinian hands, and be free from factional interests.

"We want security for all, and the headquarters belong to the Palestinian people," Mash'al asserted. "The security services must be reformed and restructured in order to help the Palestinian homeland and to come under the command of the Palestinian Authority, without partiality. The leaders of those security services have to be decent men, who do not sign agreements with the Israeli occupation or betray the people. We do not look forward to any proportional divisions."

Mash'al also denied President Abbas' claims that Hamas has links to the Al-Qaeda network. "This is unreasonable, and any sane man can determine the invalidity of that," Mash'al said. He added that the Israeli media was behind the promotion of that idea and the incitement against Hamas......"

Hamdan: Abbas's statements lack credibility, give cover for Israeli escalation

Hamdan: Abbas's statements lack credibility, give cover for Israeli escalation

"DAMASCUS, (PIC)-- Osama Hamdan, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, described on Wednesday PA chief Mahmoud Abbas's allegations that Hamas is harboring elements from the Al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip as "lacking credibility and giving cover for Israel to escalate its aggression against and to tighten the siege on Palestinian people in Gaza."

"Accusing a large segment of the Palestinian people of being terrorists and claiming that there are hotbeds of terrorism in the Palestinian lands give the IOA a political cover to escalate its aggression and to persist in committing massacres against our people," Hamdan warned during an interview with PIC, adding that Abbas's statements are "a political price for the American and Israeli support."......

In another context, Hamas held the PA chief and Fayyad's government responsible for the collapse of the Palestinian political program through issuing illegal decrees and interfering negatively in the course of the PLC's sessions and programs taking advantage of the absence of 41 MPs from Hamas-affiliated "change and reform" Bloc in the Israeli jails.

Hamas also warned that a human catastrophe had occurred as a result of Abbas and Fayyad's abolition of the customs code of the Gaza Strip and held them responsible for the consequences of collaborating with the IOA in starving the Palestinian people.

Hamas on Wednesday had deplored Abbas's accusation of harboring elements from Al-Qaida, considering it an attempt to incite the world and the EU on the Palestinian people and its cause after positive European and international indicators started to surface regarding the Palestine question."

When will these gullible Arabs understand?

When will these gullible Arabs understand?

by Khalid Amayreh in East-Jerusalem

"The decision of the Arab League to dispatch a delegation to Israel to discuss the already moribund Arab Peace initiative can only be interpreted as another exercise in futility, gullibility and impotence.

First of all, Israel itself is utterly uninterested in any genuine peace process that would end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bring about a just resolution of the Palestinian refugee plight.

Indeed, a country that has built hundreds of Jewish-only colonies on stolen land, and is now mutilating the West Bank with a hateful, gigantic wall that is reducing Palestinian population centers to open-air concentration camps, is obviously not interested in peace and reconciliation, neither with the Palestinian people nor with the Arab and Muslim nations.......

In the final analysis, the Arabs are acting as beggars, and beggars, as we all know, can’t be choosers.

Only when the Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East possess a strategic force, will Israel start thinking about peace."

IOF soldier killed, two wounded in Gaza incursion

IOF soldier killed, two wounded in Gaza incursion

"GAZA, (PIC)-- An IOF soldier was killed and two others wounded in the IOF incursion into central Gaza at an early hour on Thursday while two Palestinian resistance fighters were injured, one seriously, in the same area.

PIC correspondent reported that the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas Movement, ambushed an IOF unit that was attempting to infiltrate into the Gaza Strip east of Breij refugee camp.

He added that after the unit advanced 600 meters into Palestinian lands the armed wing's fighters blasted a new device in the troops and fired at them inflicting the casualties.

Security sources and eyewitnesses said that Israeli choppers were sent to evacuate the casualties as ambulance cars rushed to the borders with Gaza to carry a number of them.

The armed wing said in a communiqué that its fighters monitored the advancing unit and ambushed its members at 02.30 am (local time) Thursday......."

Giuliani, the Likud Candidate?

By Jim Lobe

"Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani announced his foreign-policy advisory team Tuesday, and it looks from the membership as if he’s bidding for the Likud vote (for which he will no doubt receive tough competition from John McCain, Fred Thompson, and, eventually perhaps, Newt Gingrich)....."

Planet Pentagon: The Earth, seas and skies

The Pentagon is one of the world's biggest landlords, with at least 766 bases in the US and around the world, including control of 20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa. In this way, the US avoids colonies, but nonetheless manages to garrison the globe

By Nick Turse
Asia Times

"Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the number of US troops in Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional support for the long-term (read: more or less permanent) garrisoning of that country.

The troops are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq's major cities". This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19, 2003, just as US troops were preparing to enter Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon expects long-term access to four key bases in Iraq", it laid out a US plan.....

Shortly thereafter, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied any such plans: "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting ... " and, while the bases were being built, the story largely disappeared from the mainstream media.

Even with the multi-square-kilometer, multibillion-dollar, state-of-the-art Balad Air Base and Camp Victory thrown in, however, the bases in Gates' new plan will be but a drop in the bucket for an organization that may well be the world's largest landlord. For many years, the US military has been gobbling up large swaths of the planet and huge amounts of just about everything on (or in) it. So, with the latest Pentagon Iraq plans in mind, take a quick spin with me around this Pentagon planet......"

'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'

Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq

A Good Article
The Independent

"It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.

That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.

The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."......

Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits acts of cold-blooded violence. A number of interviewees revealed that the military will attempt to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents, often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of unarmed Iraqis. The veterans said the troops involved would round up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifles beside corpses to make it appear that they had died in combat......

The worst abuses seem to have been during raids on private homes when soldiers were hunting insurgents. Thousands of such raids have taken place, usually at dead of night. The veterans point out that most are futile and serve only to terrify the civilians, while generating sympathy for the resistance......"

Reading the Ban

Ban Ki Moon needs to put some distance between himself and Washington: John Bolton could help - by attacking him.

By Ian Williams
The Guardian

"......when a German reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was asking Ban Ki Moon how he proposed to resolve that perennial friction between the US and the UN the new secretary general seemed to be occupying a parallel universe. He replied, "The US plays the main role in the coalition forces in Iraq. America has suffered many casualties. Nobody can doubt that America has played a major role in stabilizing Iraq. We have to appreciate the contribution of the US and their sacrifices. How the US will develop their military presence and strategies in future, they will have to decide themselves, in close cooperation with the coalition forces. The UN will not directly be involved in this."

Even most Americans now seriously question just how much "stability" the US has contributed to Iraq, so this seems to be taking politeness to rather unrealistic extremes......

Certainly Ban has betrayed some lack of appreciation of the finer points of the Middle East until now, instinctively taking the American view: on a recent visit to East Jerusalem where he met a group of Palestinian notables he seemed to be under the impression he was in Israel - an impression shared only by the Knesset, since no other government recognizes the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, and the official position of the UN and its members is that until there is a peace settlement, both East and West Jerusalem are supposed to be a UN-administered "corpus separatum", which precludes them being either Palestinian or Israeli capitals without a further resolution......"

a possible future in which there is only one race

In Brazil I glimpsed a possible future in which there is only one race

By its own definition it is a mixed country, but extreme poverty and violence occur mainly at one end of the spectrum

Timothy Garton Ash in Rio de Janeiro
Thursday July 12, 2007
The Guardian

"Some time ago, Brazil's census takers asked people to describe their skin colour. Brazilians came up with 134 terms, including alva-rosada (white with pink highlights), branca-sardenta (white with brown spots), café com leite (coffee with milk), morena-canelada (cinammon-like brunette), polaca (Polish), quase-negra (almost black) and tostada (toasted). This often lighthearted poetry of self-description reflects a reality you see with your own eyes, especially in the poorer parts of Brazil's great cities......

It is precisely this mixing that has helped to make Brazilians among the most handsome human beings on earth. What is foreshadowed here - but I repeat, only if Brazil can correct its dreadful social and economic imbalances, including a heritage of discrimination - is the possibility of a world in which skin colour is nothing more than a physical attribute, like the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose, to be admired, calmly noted, or joked about. And a world in which the only race that matters is the human race."

Delayed Updates Today

I will not be able to update the blog for the rest of the day. I ask as a favor from Lucia, Fatima, Ahmad, Irish Eyes, Datta, Steven Rix (the list is not complete by any means) to please supply links to good items of news and to commentaries in the comments section. I would appreciate that immensely. I will resume updating tomorrow.

***

Thanks to all the contributors (spammers not included) who, through their supplied links, more than made up for my inability to update yesterday.

Tear Down the Ghetto Wall, Now!

Egypt deploys along Gaza Strip border fearing militant breakout

"Egypt has begun deploying hundreds more police to strengthen security at its border with the Gaza Strip over fears Palestinian militants could try to storm it, security sources said on Wednesday.

The deployment began late on Tuesday, and the sources said additional Egyptian security forces had already taken up positions along the border north of the Rafah crossing to reinforce the existing 750 border police.

A security source said that a demonstration on Tuesday by dozens of Palestinians demanding the crossing be opened had increased Egyptian government fears it could be stormed or parts of the cement wall torn down.

Thousands of Palestinians have been stranded in Egypt by the closure of the Rafah crossing.

Palestinian authorities technically control the crossing, but it can be blocked by Israel. Rafah was closed on June 9 and has remained closed since Hamas Islamist forces took over the Gaza Strip days later.

Last summer, Hamas gunmen blew a six-metre (20 foot) hole in the Gaza-Egypt border wall, allowing nearly 1,000 stranded Palestinians to cross home during a border closure......."

Abu Zuhri: Abbas' accusation against Hamas aims to bring int. forces to Gaza

Abu Zuhri: Abbas' accusation against Hamas aims to bring int. forces to Gaza

"DAMASCUS, (PIC)-- Sami Abu Zuhri, the Hamas official spokesman in the Gaza Strip, has described PA chief Mahmoud Abbas's accusations against Hamas of harboring Al-Qaida elements as a serious development in the rivalry with Hamas and as incitement against it in order to create an atmosphere for bringing international forces to the Gaza Strip.

Abu Zuhri charged that Abbas's incitement is part of the international campaign against Hamas, and questioned Abbas: "If what you said was true, why didn't you try to arrest these elements when the security in Gaza Strip was under your control and your security apparatuses?!"

For his part, Abu Obaida, the Qassam Brigades' spokesman, denied the allegation made by Abbas that Hamas is harboring Al Qaida and allows it to establish a foothold in Gaza.

Abu Obaida highlighted that what happened in Gaza was "a mere intifada of the Palestinian people and resistance forces spearheaded by Qassam Brigades against corruption and Israel's collaborators who had imposed a foreign agenda on the Palestinian people."

He added: "This nonsense coming out of Abbas every once in a while proves without any doubt that this man is extremely in a mess and doesn't know what to do," calling upon him to return to the arms of his people before it is too late.

For its part, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PLFP-GC) criticized Abbas' accusations against Hamas of harboring elements from Al-Qaida, and considered it a direct incitement to besiege the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and a statement deepening the internal division.

The PFLP-GC called upon Abbas to "reconsider his positions and his serious statements, to break the cycle of political hatred and to return to dialog for the sake of national unity.""

One of Latuff's Latest

Death from above

From Dresden and Tokyo to Hanoi and now Iraq's Baquba and Afghanistan's tribal villages, the US military has been "hooked on air power". The addiction will only grow stronger as US ground troops gradually withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, increasingly leaving civilians, not insurgents, to continue to take the heat.

By Tom Engelhardt
Asia Times

"......All these 1968 dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former Associated Press reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service virtually no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village - the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. More than 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies were slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Barker Jr, in a nearly day-long rampage......

Recently, however, in Afghanistan, such isolated incidents from US or NATO (often still US) air attacks have been occurring in startling numbers. They have, in fact, become so commonplace that, in the news, they begin to blur into what looks, more and more, like a single, ongoing airborne slaughter of civilians......

Ours is, of course, a callous and dishonest way of thinking about war from the air (undoubtedly because it is the form of barbarism, unlike the car bomb or the beheading, that benefits us). It is time to be more honest. It is time for reporters to take the words "incident", "mistake", "accident", "inadvertent", "errant", and "collateral damage" out of their reportorial vocabularies when it comes to air power. At the level of policy, civilian deaths from the air should be seen as "advertent". They are not mistakes or they wouldn't happen so repeatedly. They are the very givens of this kind of warfare.

This is, or should be, obvious. If we want to "withdraw" from Iraq (or Afghanistan) via the Gates Plan, we should at least be clear about what that is likely to mean - the slaughter of large numbers of civilians "including women and children". And it will not be due to a series of mistakes or incidents; it will not be errant or inadvertent. It will be policy itself. It will be the Washington - and in the end the US - consensus."

A fallacy that bombs - literally

By Khody Akhavi
Asia Times

"......In the changing landscape of 21st-century warfare, a technologically superior US military has been forced to adapt its strategy to combat counterinsurgency tactics. Guerrilla warfare is waged on city streets, often amid civilian populations. Hence air power can never be an effective substitute for ground fighting.

This was witnessed during last year's war between Israel and the Islamist resistance group Hezbollah. During a four-week period, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) relentlessly bombed Lebanon, destroying much of the country's infrastructure in the process. But the objective of the IDF's massive use of air power - to eliminate the threat of Hezbollah permanently - was never accomplished.

"Military historians have a name for the logic behind Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. It's called 'strategic bombing fallacy'," Brookings Institution fellow Philip H Gordon wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post during the 2006 war. "Far from bringing about the intended softening of the opposition, bombing tends to rally people behind their own leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland."

As the US public's tolerance for troop casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan steadily shrinks, the Bush administration finds itself in a precarious situation. Reliance on air power and the cumulative effect of errant bombs portends an ominous future for US political goals in the region. "

Bush’s Pakistan Paradox

By Robert Scheer

"As Iraq continues to disintegrate, and our top generals and in-country ambassador predict that U.S. troops will need to die there for decades in order to prevent a full-scale regional blood bath, it is important to recall the reasons why we got into this mess. The marker of what will go down in history as “Bush’s folly” is that this idiot of a president invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorist attacks on the United States or WMD threats to America while coddling the military junta in Pakistan, which was guilty on both counts.....

Heckuva job, Bushie."

Hamas' stand

An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine.

A very Good Piece

By Mousa Abu Marzook, MOUSA ABU MARZOOK is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.

The Los Angeles Times

"Damascus, Syria — HAMAS' RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention......

Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend in Abu Mazen, a "moderate" in the American view but one who cannot seriously expect to command confidence in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after having taken American arms and Israeli support to depose the elected government by force. We deplore the current prognosticating over "Fatah-land" versus "Hamastan." In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state.......

......Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants......

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians......"

Palestine: Zionist Starvation Plan

A Great Piece

By Mary Sparrowdancer
(Mary Sparrowdancer is a writer and the author of a bestselling book, The Love Song)

"Over 6000 (six thousand) Palestinian refugees from Gaza, including children, babies, pregnant women, the sick, the elderly, and unarmed civilians have been stranded on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border of Gaza for over one month now.

Stranded in the scorching heat, they are without adequate shelter, food, or money with which to solicit help because the Zionist Israeli military regime decided to close the border passage between Gaza and Egypt. The Zionists had earlier built an enormous wall between Gaza and Egypt, destroying hundreds of Palestinian homes without notice in the process. The wall is a wall that is too high to be scaled, and those now trapped on the other side of it are being denied by Zionists reentry into Gaza. The Palestinians of Gaza cannot go home. (1).....

Stranded now in what former Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya describes as "appalling conditions," the death toll of the tormented has begun. Twenty-eight have died. In what should be causing flags of great concern to be raised, the EU personnel who monitor the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt are being sent home because it appears the border is going to remain closed. Chillingly, one must quickly ask if this is tantamount to removing potential foreign witnesses from a scene where a plan of torture and murder by the deliberate acts of withholding food and water from a civilian population could be underway. (4) (5)......

Among those wounded in the latest "routine operations" by the Zionist military aggression into Gaza refugee camps, were children and a young documentary news cameraman for the Al-Aqsa TV satellite channel. The cameraman, Imad Ghanem, 21,who was filming footage of rescue efforts, was gunned down by a tank as he filmed, and then several more shots were fired into him as he lay helpless on the ground next to his camera. Only one side of this military occupation in Gaza has tanks. Both of the young man's legs were later amputated. Although Israel claims it does not intentionally fire upon news media members who are gathering footage of Israeli military activities within refugee camps, other reporters also claimed to have been fired upon during this military incursion, as well. (7) (8) (9)......

The entire world should demand that the 6000 stranded refugees receive immediate humanitarian supplies as well as entry back into their own homes in Gaza. Their reentry will be into the concentration camp of Gaza, but that is all they have. It is better than standing at the border and dying under the sun of exposure, dehydration and starvation. And then, immediately, we, the world, need to come together as human beings and liberate all of the Palestinians-all of the world-from Zionism. We need to liberate the Palestinians from their state of torture and despair.
We need to liberate the Palestinians from starvation and from the concentration camps, the same as we once liberated the Jews and other minorities from similar torture. The long list of crimes against humanity and war crimes carried out by Zionist Israel must end immediately......."