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Base monetary cost of the War in
Iraq - thus far
|
“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
~George Orwell~
Brave New World: Economy, not human rights, rules the new
China-US World
Christopher Bodeen reports from Beijing for the Associated Press (AP): “The crisis that Obama is inheriting has pushed aside the old points of contention and underscored how profoundly the power equation between Washington and Beijing has changed. China now owns over half-a-trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds, more than any other country, and Washington needs Beijing to continue buying them to help finance the national debt and the $700 billion financial industry bailout. And while China's economy is heavily dependent on exports to the U.S., it is also a growing market for U.S. products, making trade retaliation — long a threat wielded solely by Washington — more of a two-way street. ‘The power shift in China-U.S. relations is making them more interdependent,’ said Cheng Xiaohe, an international relations scholar at Beijing's Renmin University. ‘This next president will need to exercise greater caution.’"
'Millions of jobs' in danger next year as worst is yet to
come, warns Obama
MSNBC reports: “WASHINGTON - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said on
Saturday that he was crafting an aggressive, two-year stimulus plan to revive
the troubled economy, warning that swift action was needed to prevent a deep
slump and a spiral of falling prices.
‘If we don't
act swiftly and boldly, most experts now believe that we could lose millions of
jobs next year,’ Obama said in prepared remarks for the weekly Democratic radio
and video address. ‘We now risk falling into a deflationary spiral that could increase
our massive debt even further,’ he said.”
How Obama is Already Taking Charge
Robert Reich: "Obama's immediate challenge is to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president with historically-low approval ratings who seems to have lost interest in his job (at this writing, he's out of the country) and who's disappeared from the media, and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on coming up with any workable solution to the crisis. But Obama doesn't become president until 12 noon eastern standard time on January 20 - and the national economy is imploding right now."
The first sign of friction in the Obama camp
as Mrs Clinton demands - and gets - a purge of her critics before accepting
Secretary of State role
Leonard Doyle reports
from Washington for The Independent (London): “Foremost among the
victims of the purges is her old Yale Law School buddy Greg Craig, a man who
more than anyone led the rescue of his presidency starting the very night
Kenneth Starr's lurid report into the squalid details of the former president's
sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky were published on the internet in 1998.
Despite his long and loyal friendship with the Clintons, Mr Craig threw his lot
in with Mr Obama at an early stage in the presidential election campaign. As if
that betrayal to the cause of the Clinton restoration was not enough, Mr Craig
did more to undermine Mrs Clinton's claims to be a foreign policy expert than
anyone else in the some of the ugliest exchanges of the battle for the
Democratic nomination.
Until this week he was poised to be the eminence grise of
the State Department, organising as total revamp of America's troubled foreign
policies on Mr Obama's behalf. Its turns out that Mrs Clinton's delay in
accepting the president elect's offer to be his top foreign policy adviser had
much to do with her negotiating the terms of the job and insisting on the right
to choose her own state department staff and possibly even some of the plumb
Ambassador postings. She wanted guarantees of direct access to the president –
without having to go through his national security adviser. Above all she did
not want to end up like Colin Powell who was completely out-manoeuvred by the
hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney who imposed neo-conservative friends like John
Bolton on the State Department and steered the US towards a policy of using
torture to achieve its aims.
Mr Craig's crime was not so much that he enthusiastically
backed Mr Obama for President and helped run his foreign policy advisory panel,
it was his lacerating attacks on the putative Secretary of State's claims that
she passed the ‘Commander-in-Chief test’ as a foreign policy expert in the
Clinton Administration. In a devastating memo of 11 March last, which he
addressed ‘to interested parties,’ Mr Craig said: ‘There is no reason to
believe, however, that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time
during the Clinton Administration. She did not sit in on National Security
Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend
meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part of the national
security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security staff.’
‘She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign
governments, whether they were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign
policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the
decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis.’
The memo went on to say that Mrs Clinton ‘never answered
the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue –
not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.’ Earlier this week Mr Craig was tapped
to become White House counsel, a totally anonymous position, and shunted him
out of the line of fire from the Secretary of State.”
Some in Arab World Wary of
Clinton
INTERVIEW/ Iranians to Washington: Please Let Us Be
Scott Horton of AntiWar Radio
interviews Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, an independent researcher on U.S. foreign
policy in Iran. Soraya discusses:
·
the worldwide goodwill Obama has already squandered with his
hawkish appointments,
·
the U.S.’s double standard when it comes to nuclear
non-proliferation,
·
ordinary Iranians’ desire to be left alone to form their own
government, and
·
how neocons like Max Boot support fomenting factional conflicts
to provoke an Iranian overreaction.
Bush Effigy Placed Where Saddam Statue Was Toppled in
2003, Then Burned in Anti-US Protest
Wiredispatch reports:
“Followers of a Shiite cleric on Friday stomped on and burned an effigy of
President George W. Bush in the same central Baghdad square where Iraqis beat a
toppled statue of Saddam Hussein with their sandals five years earlier. …
Before it fell, the effigy held a sign that said: ‘The security agreement ...
shame and humiliation.’"
Mahdi: New Insurgency if US
Stays Until 2011
The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com
It's the ultimate argument, the final bastion
against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made
sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact
that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative
power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war.
It really doesn't matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or
oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it's an argument
that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the
American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.
And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike
Mullen -- the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives -- wheeled it into place
and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama's 16-month
withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but
believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, "We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of
bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to
look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there,
literally the security conditions… Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it
safely." Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least
"two to three years."
For those who needed further clarification, the Wall Street
Journal's Yochi J. Dreazen spelled it out:
"In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it
would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large U.S. bases there
and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it
would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if
the fighting resumed as American forces left the country."
Once More Fear Stalks the Streets of Kandahar
Robert Fisk, The Independent (London):
"Obama wants to send 7,000 more American troops to this disaster zone.
Does he have the slightest idea what is going on in Afghanistan? For if he did,
he would send 7,000 doctors."
Washington Eyes 'Surge' of
Over 20,000 for Afghanistan
David Morgan reports
from Cornwallis, Nova Scotia for Reuters: “The Pentagon is
considering a plan to send more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan over the next
12 to 18 months to help safeguard elections and quell rising Taliban violence,
officials said Friday.
Gates said much of the infusion could take place before
Afghanistan holds elections by next autumn.” Guns vs. Butter: Gates Says U.S./Global
Financial Woes "No Excuse" in Funding Afghan War Anne Gearan for AP: “Even
in a global financial crisis, the world cannot afford to skimp on its
obligations to Afghanistan, which wants to double the size of its army but will
never be able to pay for it, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says.” One of the eerier reports on the deteriorating situation in
Afghanistan appeared recently in the New York Times. Journalist John
Burns visited the Russian ambassador in Kabul, Zamir N. Kabulov, who, back in the
1980s, when the Russians were the Americans in Afghanistan, and the Americans
were launching the jihad that would eventually wend its way to the 9/11 attacks… well, you get the idea… In any
case, Kabulov was, in the years of the Soviet occupation, a KGB agent in the
same city and, in the 1990s, an adviser to a U.N. peacekeeping envoy during the
Afghan civil war that followed. "They've already repeated all of our
mistakes," he told Burns, speaking of the American/NATO effort in the
country. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own,
ones for which we do not own the copyright." His list of Soviet-style
American mistakes included: underestimating "the resistance," an
over-reliance on air power, a failure to understand the Afghan "irritative
allergy" to foreign occupation, "and thinking that because they swept
into Kabul easily, the occupation would be untroubled." Of present
occupiers who have stopped by to catch his sorry tale, Kabulov concludes
world-wearily, "They listen, but they do not hear." Ringed by Foes, Pakistanis Fear Washington, Too Jane Perlez reports from Islamabad, Pakistan for the New
York Times: “A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among
Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated
sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged
Afghanistan to the west. That the map was first circulated as a theoretical
exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has
fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that
what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim
country with nuclear arms.” Washington’s Drone Strike Kills Five in North Waziristan Jason
Ditz reports
for Antiwar.com: In a sign of just how seriously the United States took this week’s formal protest from the Pakistani government over its recent spate of air
strikes, US drones have struck again, this time hitting a house in North
Waziristan, killing five
and injuring at least six others.
The attack consisted of two or three missiles and struck in a small village called
Ali Khel. Among those reportedly killed was a dual British/Pakistani citizen
named Rashid
Rauf,
who was arrested in Pakistan in 2006 in connection with the infamous “liquid
explosives” plot in Britain. Saudi militant Abu Zubair al-Masri was
also apparently among those killed, though local Taliban spokesmen insist only local
civilians died in the attack.” British lawmakers demand clarity over Washington’s attack killing plane bombing suspect in
Pakistan Tariq Ali, Flight Path to Disaster in Afghanistan
Washington Goes Begging: US seeks $300B from Gulf states...
AFP reports:
“The United States has asked four oil-rich Gulf states for close to 300 billion dollars to
help it curb the global financial meltdown,
Kuwait's daily Al-Seyassah reported Thursday.Quoting ‘highly informed’ sources,
the daily said Washington has asked Saudi Arabia
for 120 billion dollars, the United Arab Emirates
for 70 billion dollars, Qatar for 60 billion dollars and was seeking 40 billion
dollars from Kuwait.
U.S. power to dim
by 2025, analysts say
A new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies predicts
that U.S. influence in the world will decline over the next two decades, as
surging powers such as China and India, as well as independent entities
including tribes and criminal networks, gain international clout.
The report, released
Thursday and meant to serve as a guidepost for the incoming administration of
President-elect Barack Obama, offers a vision of a global future in which the
United States, while the most powerful, is just “one of a number” of important players
on the world stage.
Describing
the findings, Tom Fingar, the deputy director of National Intelligence for
analysis, said there would be a “diminished gap between the United States and
everybody else. … The unipolar moment is over.”
"In terms of size, speed,
and directional flow, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now
under way -- roughly from West to East -- is without precedent in modern
history," according to a NIC report entitled "Global Trends 2025."
"Growth projections for
Brazil, Russia, India, and China indicate they will collectively match the
original G7's share of global GDP by 2040-2050 ... If current trends persist,
by 2025 China will have the world's second largest economy and will be a
leading military power."
Video/Bush
Shunned at G20 Meeting
New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead
soldiers
Salon Editor's note: “Hours after Salon revealed evidence that two Americans were
killed by a U.S. tank, not enemy fire, military officials destroyed papers on
the men. On Oct. 14, 2008, Salon published an article about the deaths of Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger
Suarez. The Army attributed their deaths in Iraq in 2006 to enemy action; Salon's investigation, which included graphic battle video and eyewitness testimony, indicated that their deaths were likely
due to friendly fire.”
Commentary: Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no
virtue
Joseph L. Galloway
November
18, 2008
McClatchy Newspapers
With
two months still to go before his inauguration as the 44th President of the
United States, Barack Obama and his transition team are already getting off on
the wrong foot, signaling that they have no intention of investigating anyone
in the Bush administration for possible war crimes.
What we're talking about here is the
torture of detained terrorist suspects in American custody in a grotesque
violation of both our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and our
historic principles as a democratic nation.
By their own machinations and attempts
to redefine and pervert both treaties and our own laws, President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorneys
General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, Cheney's chief of staff David
Addington and any number of lesser suspects sought to shield themselves from,
or put themselves above, justice.
They did so knowing full well that what
they were doing — clearing the way for interrogators at Guantanamo and in the
Central Intelligence Agency’s secret dungeons around the world to do anything
it took, short of murder, to extract information from terror suspects.
The "harsh interrogation
methods" included water-boarding, stripping and humiliating prisoners,
subjecting them to extremes of temperature, putting them into stressful
physical positions for hours, the use of psychotropic drugs and doubtless other
equally uncivilized practices.
Water boarding has always been treated
as a criminal act in this country. Military officers were court-martialed at
the turn of the last century for water boarding Filipino guerrillas. More
recently, an East Texas sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for
water boarding a suspect and extracting a confession from him.
Hebron Settler Mob Caught on Video Clashing With Israeli
Troops
Video / Prof. Avi Shlaim: Settlements turned Israel into apartheid
state
Video/"Al Nakba"--The Palestinian
Catastrophe of 1948
Candidate for Washington’s Security
Adviser Wants NATO Force in West Bank
Bits & Pieces
A
classic and extremely trenchant TV comment by General Norman Schwarzkopf and
Robert Gates - Deputy National Security Advisor to Bush Presidents Jr. and Sr.
Why Invading Iraq Was An Incredibly Stupid Idea
(Click on blinking dot above for
video)