When Love Of Profits Clashes With The Love Of The Prophet(1)

[moeen yaseen]

BLIAR THE HONEST BROKER?
WHY DON'T THE BRITS MIND THEIR OWN BUSINESS AND PACK THEIR BAGS AND LEAVE THE MIDDLE EAST


Blair fools no one in trying to play 'honest broker' in the Middle East
http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id= 744&Itemid=112

Press Release
London, UK, December 17 – On his current Middle East trip to revive the ‘Middle East peace process’ Tony Blair warned that the situation in the region “will continue to go backwards" if the peace process is not revived.

Another widely reported theme of his trip has been his bid to fashion an "arc of moderation" to draw “moderate” Muslim nations closer to the West in a bid to defuse extremism and stabilise the region.

Dr Imran Waheed, media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, said, "Blair’s visit is no more than gesture politics from an outgoing Prime Minister trying to shape his legacy. Everyone knows that he has no credibility on the streets of Gaza, Ramallah, Cairo or Basra. There, he is remembered for his support for Israel - especially during last summer’s massacre in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as his disastrous Iraq invasion that has claimed an estimated 650,000 civilian lives.”

''Blair’s talk of building an ‘arc of moderation’ means an arc of regimes that display their 'moderation' by their compliance with his colonialist policies. Blair’s 'moderates' include Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, who tortures and oppresses his people, and supports the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

''Coming only days after demonstrating his willingness to placate the Saudi dictators, we can be sure that these regimes will maintain their 'moderate' status as long as they continue to serve the colonial interests of the West - even if they continue to commit abuses of people’s rights - and especially if they support the apartheid regime that brutalises the people of Palestine.''

[moeen yaseen]

BU$H DEMANDS HIS OWN IMPEACHMENT

December 15, 2006 i
Executive Intelligence Review.
by Jeffrey Steinberg

President George Bush's infantile and defiant response to the Dec. 6 release of the Iraq Study Group report was tantamount to a demand for his own impeachment, along with that of Vice President Dick Cheney. Now, the new Democratic majority 110th Congress has a clear mandate, from a wide segment of the U.S. political institutions, spanning the leading factions in both the Republican and Democratic parties, to dispense with the Bush-Cheney regime, before another new disaster unfolds. Topping the list of such looming disasters—beyond the all-but-unavoidable crash of the global financial system—is a military strike against Iran, by either the United States or Israel. The use of nuclear weapons in such a strike is not to be ruled out, according to well-informed U.S. military experts.

As EIR already reported, just days before the final session of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker III and former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), Vice President Cheney flew off to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to attempt to forge a "Sunni bulwark" against Shi'ite Iran, built upon a U.S. and NATO military alliance with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states plus Egypt and Jordan. Such an anti-Iran politico-military alliance would also, de facto, include Israel—an Israel, capable under present leadership, of launching a "breakaway ally" air strike against Iran.

As EIR reported in a now famous memorandum "Behind Cheney's Trip to Riyadh," Cheney's action was tantamount to a declaration of intent to launch preemptive war against Iran. If carried out, such a strike would spark a Sunni versus Shi'ite war within the Muslim world that would rapidly spread into a global Hundred Years' War. While such an asymmetric conflict would be firmly against U.S. vital interests, an Anglo-American faction that steers the Vice President's every sneering move, would celebrate the chaos, seeing it as the means by which to destroy the United States and end the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states altogether. In today's parlance, this is called "globalization."

Backing Cheney's actions, President Bush preemptively rejected the most pressing recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton report: the opening of diplomatic talks with Iran and Syria, with no preconditions. Speaking in Riga, Latvia at the end of November at the NATO summit, the President rejected outright the idea of negotiating with Tehran or Damascus, and also rejected the idea of troop withdrawal from Iraq. "Victory is the only exit strategy," Bush had fulminated.

On Dec. 6, the Iraq Study Group released its final report, The Way Forward—A New Approach. The 96-page document presented 79 recommendations, which, taken as a whole, represent a call for a comprehensive change in U.S. foreign policy towards Southwest Asia, a change completely consistent with the earlier proposal by Lyndon LaRouche, "The LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia," which was first published in April 2004.

While LaRouche, addressing a group of diplomats hours after the Baker-Hamilton document's release, expressed some misgivings about missing elements in the study document—including the failure to note the onrushing collapse of the international financial system—he nevertheless heralded the report as an institutional demand for a major shift in U.S. policy. And in a correspondence the next day, he wrote that "the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report has defined a new global strategy. It is not finished work, but it defines certain essential strategic parameters within which reasonable alternatives to failed currently operating policies, or lack of policies, can emerge. This Commission's report will reverberate throughout North America and Europe, where both the immediate situation in the Southwest Asia region and the strains of a failed policy on the financial situation of governments are already painful.... The Baker-Hamilton report, taken in context, defines a new global situation for purposes of policy-shaping. The effect will be, I believe, dramatic and early."

Did Bush Hit the Bottle?
Less than 24 hours after the release of the Baker-Hamilton report, President Bush repudiated the idea of direct talks with Iran or Syria, repeating his tired mantra about how "Iran and Syria know what they have to do." Bush was appearing before White House reporters with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The President's flippant rejection of the strategic vision of the Baker-Hamilton document did not take the commission members at all by surprise.

In an extraordinarily frank exchange with reporters the day before Bush's remarks, two senior statesmen who were members of the Iraq Study Group ridiculed the President's dismissal of the study. It is not a stretch to say that their comments constituted an implicit call for his removal from office. Asked how Bush had responded to the Dec. 5 presentation by the Baker-Hamilton group of their final report, Lawrence Eagleburger, a former U.S. Secretary of State under the President's father, George H.W. Bush, said, "His reaction was, 'Where's my drink?' He was a little loaded. It was early in the morning too, you know." Considering that the President's 24-year bout of alcoholism is both well known and a highly sensitive topic around the First Family, Eagleburger's comments could hardly have been more provocative.

Asked what questions the President has posed to the group, Eagleburger added, "I don't recall, seriously, that he asked any questions." Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), another prestigious Republican on the panel, added his own denunciation of what he called "100 percenters," those who "refuse to compromise." "A 100 percenter," he explained, "is a person you don't want to be around. They have gas, ulcers, heartburn, and B.O."

Inside the Commission
Sources close to several of the commission members have reported to EIR that the Iraq Study Group was well aware of the fact that the President would reject their blueprint for a policy overhaul. A month before the final session of the ISG, the group had met for over three hours with the President. According to the sources, they came out of that session with a resolve to force a public policy debate, and hopefully put enough pressure on the White House to force a course correction.

The final report, in fact, surprised many experts, with its broad scope and blunt language. For example, in addition to the controvercial calls for direct negotiations with Iran and Syria, and the urgent need to solve the Israel-Palestine dispute—on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the Baker-Hamilton document directly rejected the Bush Administration's Sunni versus Shi'ite conflict schemes, albeit in the most diplomatic of language. The report said that the Bush Administration's "GCC plus two" approach was too narrow (!), and would not solve the Iraq dilemma.

The membership of the Baker-Hamilton commission represented a cross-section of the U.S. institutions. Virtually every member had served in the Executive Branch and/or in senior posts in Congress, and had had direct experience dealing with Presidents. When such a prestigious group of senior figures delivers such a harsh, unanimous critique of an administration's policy in a vital part of the world, there are consequences for refusal to respond.

Sources tell EIR that the White House will attempt to stall, perhaps into early Spring 2007, before issuing a clear rejection of the report. A review of the Administration's drawn-out rejection of the findings of the 9/11 Commission should make it clear that no such stall-and-appeal tactics can be accepted—with Iraq already in the throes of ethnic cleansing, and civil wars about to erupt in Palestine and Lebanon, stoked by Anglo-American covert operations and arms trafficking.

There is only one answer to the Bush-Cheney rejection of the Iraq Study Group: Impeachment. With the institutional backing of the Baker-Hamilton effort, the 110th Congress cannot waste a moment. Bruising oversight hearings must begin the moment the new Congress is sworn in.



SOLUTION MUST BE TRULY COMPREHENSIVE
December 15, 2006
Executive Intelligence Review.


On Dec. 6, 2006, economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche discussed the importance of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group bipartisan policy proposal, released that day to the Congress and to the Bush White House. This is a transcript of his remarks to his associates.
The Baker-Hamilton proposal puts what it calls a comprehensive approach on the table. However, it does not address the actual underlying problem. It is a correction against what has been the destructive policy in Washington heretofore, but it does not solve the problem it addresses, because we are in the middle of the onrush of the greatest financial crisis in modern history. It's now in progress.

At the same time, there are other structural changes in the world which have to be taken into account. We not only have to put the world back into order from the standpoint of the financial crisis. We also have to realize we face new situations. We have over 6 billion people on this planet. We have requirements for fresh water which are acute in many parts of the world. Fresh water cannot be produced in adequate amounts without the use of nuclear fission as a power. Without the rapid development of nuclear fission programs, we cannot meet that need. We also have other raw materials management problems, which can be managed, but they require new technologies. We have some growth in some parts of the world, in terms of the economy, but it's not sufficient. And it requires a change in policy among nations.

I have defined Eurasia as essentially a unit. You have an essential relationship between Western and Central Europe, and then Russia, which is really a Eurasian country. And then you have Asia. The relationship among Germany, from Berlin, to Moscow, to Beijing, and to New Delhi, generally defines the character of Eurasia.

Cooperation Among Nations and Regions
We have before us a 50-year prospect of required development of Eurasia, which needs long-term credit for the development of the countries of Eurasia; which means long-term investment in infrastructure and things of that sort, upgrading the population skills, so that we can bring development in the territory with a growing population, with China probably over 1.3 billion people and India with over 1 billion people. There are many poor in Asia in various countries, great underdevelopment. We must correct that in the coming two generations, of about 25 years each.

This requires cooperation from Europe, which must re-orient itself to supplying the supplementary needs of Asian countries. We have new cooperation which is potentially emerging in the Americas. We have some unity developing among the countries of South America, tendencies toward cooperation. Mexico is still problematic; there's a conflict there. The United States must adopt a policy toward the Americas of cooperative development. The United States and the Americas must cooperate with Eurasia. And Eurasia and the Americas must cooperate in developing Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa as a long-term mission.

Therefore, what these gentlemen are dealing with, is not simply trying to fix the chessboard, to get rid of the implications of this crazy Iraq War. We actually have to realize the damage that has been done in that process. We also have to recognize that there are long neglected questions which have now become ripe, which must be dealt with. And therefore, we have to go from the comprehensive approach to the immediate crisis situation in Southwest Asia, to the longer-term crisis problem we're dealing with in Eurasia and in the world as a whole, as a result of the presently onrushing general breakdown of the present world financial system.

The Threat of a Dark Age
And that, of course, is what you see in Washington, and generally in the capitals of Europe. You see talk about the crises, about the economic crises, talk about the housing crisis, the danger of a 30% collapse in the value of the dollar relative to its current value, which could bring on a world depression. These things exist. But beyond that, for over two generations, we have been making terrible mistakes in our international policy. We have created a mess. We have created a mess of neglected problems, as well as created problems. And therefore, we have to think in more comprehensive terms of cooperation among sovereign nation-states on a global basis, with emphasis on the three centers of world cooperation—continental Eurasia, the Americas, and Africa.

So, I think the lesson of today's address is: I saw many flaws in what was proposed by Baker-Hamilton, but the idea of a shift to a unified comprehensive approach to that region, the region of Southwest Asia as a whole, that's positive. Cooperation in that with other countries in the area—positive. It must be comprehensive. It must cover all areas. Unfortunately, it does not address the crucial problem beyond war: the fact that the world economy is on the verge of disintegration.

We are now facing a potential new dark age. We must address that problem comprehensively and take the economic factors that portends into account.

[moeen yaseen]

BRITISH INSIDER TOLLS ALARM : SYSTEMIC CRISIS IS IMMINENT

December 15, 2006
Executive Intelligence Review.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This article is reprinted from the German weekly Neue Solidarität.

Normally one is well advised to maintain a healthy distrust of the media. Yet now and then there appear certain "signal articles," which call attention to institutional speculation about impending dangers. It is in this vein that the British journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard warned, in a relatively short followup on Dec. 7 to his two previous articles in a series in the Daily Telegraph, of an immediately threatening systemic crash, namely, that the "heart of the system" and the "aorta of capitalism" will be hit by the escalating collapse of the dollar.

Evans Pritchard betrayed the fact that the insider trading by financial leaders on both sides of the Atlantic has reached the highest point since the beginning of the accounting for this then-not-yet-legal activity, and indeed, that the ratio of the sale price to the purchase price has reached the astounding figure of 60 to 1. Are the rats leaving the sinking ship?

What Henry Paulson Is Afraid Of
In any event, the dimensions of the speculative bubble have reached an astronomical size; according to Evans-Pritchard, American Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has reactivated a team for crisis management in Washington, D.C., so that they can deal with the "systemic risk of a financial meltdown." Before his appointment, Paulson quickly earned $700 million, as his own personal income, at his previous job at Goldman Sachs; now, what he is worried about, would be the 8,000 unregulated hedge funds which have $1.3 trillion in capital investment, and $370 trillion (!) in outstanding credit derivatives. According to a well-researched article in the Washington Weekly Standard, Paulson fears a death blow for the U.S. economy.

Further, Pritchard describes the dramatic collapse of the American consumer market, the "death-spirals" in which the collapsing American real estate market finds itself, and the unsustainable situation of the American current account and fiscal deficit. The "currency guru" of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, David Bloom, was quoted saying that the United States needs a yearly inflow of a trillion dollars in capital, just to compensate for this deficit. But even these capital flows for some time have been running not into the United States, but out of it. Evans-Pritchard also warns of the "inverted yield curve of satanic fame," on the mortgage markets, which one ignores at his peril. And former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has known for a long time, that the economy has already gone over the cliff.

This Evans-Pritchard got a bad name for himself when in 1989-90 he wrote against the alleged "Fourth Reich," which German reunification supposedly threatened; he also played a leading media role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and more recently, put out poison against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming that her inability to ram through radical reforms had cost foreign investors billions. Therefore if such a hired pen for the most aggressive section of the financial oligarchy is issuing such a warning about the situation in the financial system, people in Europe should rather urgently wake up.

American Election Change Offers a Way Out
No one can dispute that, up to now, none of the various European governments has done the slightest thing to put a solution on the agenda for this imminent systemic crisis. On the contrary, the young generation in the Social Democratic Party has even put out a discussion paper arguing that the financial "locusts"—the speculative hedge funds and equity funds—should be invited to invest in Germany; that, naturally, in the new ecological bubble, is, from the standpoint of reality, a totally incompetent proposal. The brutal reality is that the population of the nations of Europe is presently totally unprotected from the consequences of the coming collapse.

The only chance of averting great damage to Germany and all the other nations in the world, therefore lies in the dramatic changes which have occurred with the Democratic election victory in the United States. This election victory could never have occurred, in the estimation of professional election researchers, without the mobilization of the youth organization of Lyndon LaRouche. These youth, directly or indirectly, activated an additional 2 million new voters between the ages of 18 and 35, which led in turn to a mobilization of the Democratic Party in general. And it is this movement of the youth, which is currently fighting in the halls of Congress and the Senate for the implementation of a draft law by LaRouche for the reorganization of the world financial system, the so-called Economic Recovery Act of 2006, in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt [published in last week's EIR and available at www.larouchepac.com].

What you could never learn from the reporting in the German media, is nevertheless the case: The situation in the United States has dramatically changed; the Democratic Party, from the top, is no longer in the grip of the bankers such as Felix Rohatyn and George Soros, but a whole array of new Congressmen have been elected with the mandate to immediately carry out the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. You can therefore expect that early in January, when the new Congress takes up its work, there will be a new Watergate under way.

But the Republican Party is also undergoing a deep-seated crisis. Behind the Baker-Hamilton Report for a change in Iraq policy lies a cross-party understanding that the policy of Bush and Cheney in Iraq, but implicitly also the policy toward all the nations of the Near and Middle East, is a total disaster. And if Lawrence Eagleburger, a representative of the Republican Establishment, answered the question of how Bush reacted to the proposals of the Baker-Hamilton group, with: "His reaction was, 'Where is my drink?' He was a bit loaded. It was still early in the morning, and I don't recall whether he had any questions," then one can gauge from that what the situation is with respect to Bush's authority in his own party. Since the Republicans also have to worry about the election in 2008, people who are knowledgeable about the situation estimate that the days of Bush and Cheney in the White House are numbered, but in no case will they survive until 2008.

If Europe, and with it, also Germany, wants to survive the coming storms, then it must adapt to the coming change in financial policy in the United States, and take steps to cooperate with a New Politics, in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If the U.S.A. doesn't create and undergo this change, neither Europe, nor any other part of the world has a chance of survival. But, with a changed America, we Europeans, and all the nations of the world, have a real opportunity, to leave the last six years of insanity behind us, and reshape the world for the 21st Century.

[moeen yaseen]

9/11 ,GWOT & PROFITEERING


GRAND THEFT PENTAGON
Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror
Jeffrey ST. Clair
http://www.counterpunch.org/grandtheft.html


Grand Theft Pentagon tells the scandalous story of how some of the world's mightiest and must ruthless corporations exploited the tragic events of 9/11 to make billions upon billions in the form of government contracts with the connivance of the Bush administration. In a riveting work of investigative reporting, Jeffrey St. Clair shines a merciless searchlight into some of the murkiest corners of the Pentagon, exposing the sweatheart deals between the defense department and its favorite coterie contractors: Boeing, Bechtel, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.

Among the many explosive revelations in Grand Theft Pentagon is a first--hand account from an emissary to Afghanistan of how the Bush administration refused an offer by the Taliban to turn over Osama Bin Laden and his top leadership. They wanted total war instead. First on Afghanistan, then Iraq. In shocking detail, St. Clair unveils how the Bush administration hired a team of marketing and PR executives to sell their fraudulent war claims to a panic--striken public, a complicit congress engorged with arms PAC money and a gullible national press corps. Here you will find scathing portraits of the enablers of this corrupt system---- from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, to Senators Ted Stevens and the pseudo--maverick John McCain---- and the war profiteers themselves, from DynCorp and Lockheed to the devious machinations of the RAND, Corp and Magnequench, the missile company that outsourced its work to China.

In the wake of 9/11, the Pentagon was handed a blank check, which it used to resurrect some of the most baroque relics of the Cold War, from the B--2 steath bomber and the F--22 fighter to the most fanciful of all boondoggles, the $80 billion Star Wars missile defense system. In this hard--hitting exposé, St. Clair shows, through the use of the Pentagon's own damning internal documents, that none of these big ticket weapons systems are needed and that none of them has ever worked as advertised. Indeed, these destabilizing arms programs have backfired, hurling the nation to the brink of bankruptcy and sparking a new global arms race.

From the war room at the White House to the board room of Halliburton, Grand Theft Pentagon is a harrowing trip through the new imperial order, where the weapons companies make a killing, while the citizens of the world cower under the shadow of perpetual war.


Grand Theft Pentagon
Table of Contents

Opening Statement:
Versailles on the Potomac

Part One: Capitalism's Last Utopia
1. The Duke and the Enterprise
2. Bush Was Offered Bin Laden, But Wanted a War
3. How to Sell a War
4. No Bid, No Sweat
5. Contract Casino
6. Torture Air, Incorporated

Part Two: the Enablers
1. High Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush
2. How Bush Won (and Lost) His Wings
3. They Call Him Star Child: Rumsfeld and Star Wars.
4. Meet Rumsfeld's Enforcer: Stephen Cambone
5. The Senator Most Likely to Start a Nuclear War: John McCain
6. King of the Hill: Ted Stevens' Empire

Part Three: the Profiteers
1. Sticky Fingers: the Making of Halliburton
2. Lockheed and Loaded: The Company That Runs the Empire
3. Straight to Bechtel: "More Powerful Than the US Army"
4. The Saga of Magnequench
5. When War is Swell: the Bush Crusades and the Carlyle Group
6. Boeing and Nothingness
7. How the Rand Corp. Concocted the Colombian War

Part Four: Larcenies: Grand and Grander
1. The F-22: Tiffany's on Wings
2. Haywire: the New Navy Fighter Bombs Test
3. The Predator: Flying Blind
4. Use 'Em or Lose 'Em: Tiny Nukes are Better Nukes
5. Patriot Gore: the Fatal Flaws in the Patriot Missile
6. Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the Generals Hate the A-10
7. My Corporation Tis of Thee: the General, GM and the Stryker
8. Hey Brother Can You Spare a Million?: How Neil Bush Succeeded in Business Without Really Trying
9. It's a Family Affair: How Uncle Bucky Made a Killing
10. Bunker Busters and City Levelers

Part Five: Pie in the Sky
1. How to Restart the Arms Race in the Name of Saving the World
2. Of Sibbers and Penetration Aides
3. Star Wars Comes to Alaska
4. Treaty's End
5. Star Wars Goes Online...Crashes

Closing Statement
Looting by Contract

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

[moeen yaseen]

A GLOBAL ALLIANCE TO RID THE MIDDLE EAST FROM WESTERN INTERFERENCE IS THE NEED OF THE HOUR


PM calls for alliance over Iran
Mr Blair says moderate countries must take on Iran
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6194789.stm

Moderate Muslim states must form an "alliance of moderation" to counter Iran and challenge its influence, UK prime minister Tony Blair has urged.
He called on the world to "wake up" to the monumental struggle between the forces of moderation and extremism.

At the end of his Middle East tour, Mr Blair said the ideological battle was the challenge of the 21st Century.

His call comes as he was criticised by Iraq's vice-president on the issue of troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Speaking in New York, Tareq al-Hashemi suggested Mr Blair had supported his idea of announcing a timetable for withdrawal, but was then "brainwashed" into changing his mind by US President George Bush.

President Bush has so far refused to set a timetable for troop withdrawals.

'Partnership possible'

Mr Blair has been on a tour of the Middle East, visiting Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, the West Bank and Israel.

We must recognise the strategic threat the government of Iran poses

Tony Blair


Send us your comments

In a speech to British and United Arab Emirates businessmen in Dubai, Mr Blair said a new partnership was possible with Iran and Syria, if they were prepared to play a constructive role in the Middle East.

But he warned: "We must recognise the strategic threat the government of Iran poses - not the people, possibly not all of its ruling elements, but those presently in charge of its policy.

"They seek to pin us back in Lebanon, in Iraq and in Palestine. Our response should be to expose what they are doing, build the alliances to prevent it and pin them back across the whole of the region."

He said achieving this would need the support of moderate Middle Eastern countries, but his spokesman later said it was not a call for a confrontation between the two Muslim traditions - Sunni and Shia.

'Unconventional war'

Mr Blair, who is due to step down as prime minister next year, said: "We have to wake up. These forces of extremism based on a warped and wrong-headed interpretation of Islam aren't fighting a conventional war, but they are fighting one against us.

"And 'us' is not just the West, still less simply America and its allies. 'Us' is all those who believe in tolerance, respect for others and liberty.

"We must mobilise our alliance of moderation in this region and outside it to defeat the extremists."

During his tour, Mr Blair has met Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip to reassure him of the UK's support for Turkey's bid to join the EU.


Mr Blair has been on a tour of the Middle East

And he has met Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to discuss the peace process.

In his speech, he set out three priorities to restore momentum to that process, including an early meeting between the two leader and, a relaunch of the political process leading to a two-state solution.

He also called for an office of president of Palestine, which should be given the capacity to improve the lives of the Palestinian people.

It is hoped a stronger role would allow international aid to be channelled through Mr Abbas - bypassing Hamas, which holds a majority in the Palestinian parliament.

The Palestinians have also been suffering under an international aid boycott since Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel or give up its armed struggle, was elected to a majority of seats in January's parliamentary poll.

[moeen yaseen]

ARE BU$H AND CHENEY PLANNING AN EARLY ATTACK ON IRAN?

Dave Lindorff
Counterpunch
Sunday, December 24, 2006

Back on October 9, I wrote in The Nation that it looked like the Bush-Cheney gang, worried about the November election, was gearing up for an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, with a carrier strike group led by the USS Eisenhower being ordered to depart a month early from Norfolk, VA to join the already-on-station USS Enterprise. That article was based on reports from angry sailors based on the Eisenhower who had leaked word of their mission.

There was, thankfully, no attack on Iran before Election Day, but it is starting to look like I may have been right about the plan after all, but wrong about the timing.

As the threat of a catastrophic US election-eve attack on Iran started to look increasingly likely, reports began to trickle out of the Pentagon that the generals and admirals were protesting. They knew that the US military is stretched to the limit in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that a war with Iran would be a disaster of historic proportions. To bolster their blocking efforts, the Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican fixer and former Secretary of State (under Bush Pere) James Baker, which had been slated to release its report on what to do about Iraq in January, 2007, pushed forward its report. Baker, together with co-chair Lee Hamilton, went prematurely public with the group's conclusion that the Iraq war was a failure, and that the US should be trying to negotiate with Iran, not attack that country.

That joint effort appeared to have blocked Bush and Cheney's war plan, but the reprieve may have only been temporary.

It now appears that the idea of attacking Iran is again moving forward. The Eisenhower strike force, armed with some 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles as well as a fleet of strike aircraft, and already on station in the Arabian Sea for over a month and a half, has moved into the Persian Gulf. A second carrier group, led by the USS Stennis, is steaming toward the Gulf, too. Already in position are three expeditionary strike groups and an amphibious warship, all suitable for landing Marines on Iranian beaches. On December 20, the New York Times, citing Pentagon sources, reported that both Britain and the U.S. are moving additional naval forces into the region "in a display of military resolve toward Iran that will come as the United Nations continues to debate possible sanctions against the country." (We've all seen what "displays of force" by the Bush administration actually turn out to be.)

The idea of hitting Iran may make sense from the Bush-Cheney bunker, where the only consideration is not what's good for the country, but what's good for Bush and Cheney. After all, if you're losing your war in Iraq, and if you have hit bottom politically at home (Bush's ppublic support ratings are now down in the 20s, where Nixon's were just before his resignation, and Cheney's numbers have been in the teens for months), and if the public is clamoring for an end to it all--and maybe for your heads, too--expanding the conflict and putting the nation on a full war footing can look like an attractive even if desperate gambit.

From the nation's point of view, of course, an attack on Iran would be an unmitigated disaster. There are no more troops that the U.S. could throw into battle (the Pentagon is scrambling just to find another 20,000 or so bodies that Bush wants to throw into the Iraq quagmire), so an attack would have to be basically that--an attack.

Certainly the forces the Navy is assembling in the Persian Gulf, together with the B-52s and B-1s and B-2s available at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and at bases in other countries in the region, are capable of destroying most of Iran's nuclear facilities, as well as its military infrastructure. But in terms of conquering territory, the most the U.S. could hope to do would be to perhaps hold a beachhead on the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf links to the Arabian Sea. And even that would be a bloody challenge.

There is no way the U.S. could hope to conquer Iran.

Nor would the Iranian people rise up and overthrow their theocratic leaders--the same neoconservative fantasy that Bush war-mongers promised ahead of the Iraq invasion, and which they are re-cycling now to justify an attack on Iran. In fact, an attack on Iran, far from sparking a rebellion against the government there, would crush the new wave of reform that was evidenced in last week's local elections in Iran, which dealt a blow to the country's hardliners. Iran is a proud nation with a history reaching back thousands of years. If attacked, its people can be counted on to rally around their current rulers, and its war-hardened soldiers can be counted on to fight to the death to defend their country.

Moreover, while its military may be no match for America's, Iran has many asymmetrical options for retaliation. As the key player in Iraq, with close links to Iraq's Shia factions, Iran's military has trained and armed the Badr Brigades--the largest and best-armed faction in Iraq, and one which to date has stayed out of the fighting against US forces. Iran is also close to the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, and could unleash his fanatical troops too, against US forces in Iraq. If this happens, count on American casualty rates leaping to or even surpassing Korea or Vietnam-era levels overnight.

Additionally, Iraq's intelligence services have connections with Shia groups in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries, and can be expected to quickly organize cells to strike at economic and US military targets there.

More seriously, of course, an attack on Iran will jack the price of oil to levels never seen before. Even if the US managed to militarily control the Straits of Hormuz, Iran's hundreds of stockpiled anti-ship missiles, which are buried in bunkers all along the Persian Gulf, would cause insurance rates to soar so high that no tanker could afford to sail that route, effectively cutting off over one quarter of the world's oil supply. Virtually all of the oil produced in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the Arab Emirates would be trapped in the ground. As well, the network of pipelines that bring oil from wellheads to refineries and to storage and pier facilities would be virtually indefensible against Iran-inspired sapper attacks.

Oil industry analysts have talked of oil leaping in price to $200 a barrel or more in the event of a US war with Iran, and given how panicked this country got when oil reached $80 a barrel recently, there's no need to go into detail explaining what $200/barrel oil would do to the U.S. economy--or to the global economy.

Of course, the biggest issue is that attacking Iran would be yet another war crime by this craven administration. No one can argue that Iran poses an imminent threat to anyone, least of all to the U.S.--the only legitimate grounds under the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, for initiating a war. Attacking a country that poses no such threat is defined as the most heinous of war crimes: a Crime Against Peace.

If Bush and Cheney perpetrate this crime, the Congress should initiate immediate impeachment proceedings and should simultaneously pass legislation terminating funding for the war. The important thing now is for the American people to register their opposition to this war before it happens. Call your senators and your representative and let them know you don't want it to happen, and you want impeachment if it does. And add your name to the petition against war. Also mark down January 27 in your calendar, for the big march and rally against war and for impeachment in Washington, D.C. (to be followed by two days of lobbying Congress on Jan. 28-29.

Finally, send this story to everyone you know, and urge them to do the same. At this point, with Democrats still cowering in their offices, only the American people can stop this madness.

[moeen yaseen]

FINANCIAL CRISIS : GLOBAL SYSTEMIC CRISIS IN 2007, "ANOTHER BUBBLE CLOSE TO BURSTING"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=200612 21&articleId=4225


We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the following text published by the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB).

Global systemic crisis 2007: The four most affected sectors


With a EURUSD exchange rate now steadily above 1.30, the LEAP/E2020 researchers feel entitled to consider that the impact phase of the global systemic crisis has well started. Now in this month of December, LEAP/E2020 is able to anticipate precisely the four main sectors which shall be at the centre of the global systemic crisis in the year 2007, these are: international trade; exchange rates; financial sector; energy.


Finance is one of the four sectors identified by LEAP/E2020 in the December issue of their confidential letter (the GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin N°10) as likely to be severely affected by the development of the global systemic crisis in 2007 (1). The other three sectors are: international trade, exchange rates, and energy.

A large number of events - whose importance began to appear clearly at the end of 2006 - is about to thrust the world's financial sector into a process of deep crisis: depreciation of US dollar-denominated assets, monetisation of US debt, fast degradation of US banks' and of some EU banks' balance-sheets, low level of banks' reserves, fast depreciation of housing loans (2) and recession of the US economy.

For example, the value of US dollar-denominated assets worldwide (3) compared to the composite basket of currencies of the US main trade partners, decreased by USD 2,000 billion only because of the US currency's loss in value. Another example, because of the same devaluation, the US debt fell by more than the US trade deficit's worth (forecast: USD 750 billion) or than the balance of payment deficit's worth (forecast: USD 900 billion) (4).

World's payment balances in 2005 (States in surplus in blue (dark blue = Euroland) / States in deficit in red)
The monetisation of the US debt (anticipated in February 2006 by LEAP/E2020 (5)) directly affects the balance sheets of the big international financial players, with some effects that should become more obvious in 2007.

In the United States, a growing number of financial institutions is beginning to announce that the bursting of the real-estate bubble and the increasing amount of default on housing loan repayments has started to impact on banks' (6) and loaning institutions' results. For instance, due to the market's fast degradation, the US government non longer even tries to look into Fanny Mae's and Freddy Mac's accounts, the two giant quasi-government financial institutions who together weigh more than half of the US mortgage market (7). Thus Fanny Mae has not presented any quarterly or yearly report since 2004 and must ask for an exemption in order to remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange ( and continue to increase its market share. Less than a month ago, Kevin M. Warsh, governor of the New York Federal Reserve, warned against risks of systemic crisis for the US loan mortgage market due to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac accounting practices (9). Those risks are likely to cross US boarders since foreign investors, namely Asian, who walked away from US Treasury Bonds, have started a few months ago to buy Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac stocks.

Moreover, for many years, the US authorities have allowed banks to diminish drastically their asset reserves while making massive bets on the derivatives market where the risks are high. The chart below shows how those Wall Street's giants (such as JPMorgan/Chase or CityBank or Bank of America, who were on top of all financial news in the past months), with counterparties close to none, are in fact doomed to bankruptcy in case a big crisis occurs. This provides a rather eloquent image of the frailty of the hedging sector banks invested in so massively.


Seven largest US banks' counter-party to their investment on the derivatives market - 2005 (Source: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency / US Department of Treasury)

Notes:

(1) With a EURUSD exchange rate now steadily above 1.30, the LEAP/E2020 researchers feel entitled to consider that the impact phase of the global systemic crisis has well started. LEAP/E2020 calculated that an operator who invested 100,000 Euros and followed over the last 10 months their anticipatory advices in terms of EURUSD exchange rate or US real-estate evolution, earned a minimum of 15,000 USD (currency) or 10,000 USD (US real-estate). A good proof that strategic analysis and individual short-term choices can gather in anticipation.

(2) Source : « Mortgages delinquencies : a rising threat » AP/Yahoo, 11/12/2006

(3) Sources : International Bank of Settlements and GEAB N°2

(4) A 10% loss of the US dollar against the currencies of its main trade partners corresponds to an USD 850 billion reduction on the relative value of the US debt (source: US National Debt Clock), with a US trade deficit estimated to be around USD 750 billion in 2006 and a US balance of payment deficit over USD 900 billion (source: Roubini Global Economics Service). Thanks to the devaluation of the dollar, the US government transfers an increasing amount of its deficits to its creditors and trade partners.

(5) “With their decision to put an end to the publication of M3 and other indicators designed to measure the evolution of Dollar ownership worldwide, the US authorities initiated a policy of « hidden monetisation » of the US debt. The Bush administration's incapacity to handle the various deficits (budget, trade) and the related debt will result in a monetary creation of unequalled proportion, leading to a dilution of the American debt in an ocean of Dollars. The process has in fact already started: during the first three and a half months of the US fiscal year (beginning in October), the Federal Reserve has increased by 320 billion USD its stock of currency, that is 5 times more than it did over the same period last year”, source GEAB N°2, 16/02/2006

(6) As already announced by the world's third largest bank, HSBC. Source : [Banknet360]url:http://, 06/12/2006

(7) Source : « Time to Reform Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac », Heritage Foundation, 20/05/2006
( Source : “Fanny notes more accounting problems”, 10/11/2005, MarketWatch/DowJones
(9) Source : « Financial Markets and the Federal Reserve », Governor Kevin M. Warsh, Federal Reserve, 21/11/2006

[moeen yaseen]

CAPITALISM AND WAR

Professors Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler
Global Research, November 16, 2006

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers this thought-provoking and carefully formulated analysis on the economic underpinnings of the Middle East war.

The recent flurry of wars – from Afghanistan and Iraq to Gaza and Lebanon – has revived talk of imperialism, military Keynesianism and the military-industrial Complex. Capitalism, many radicals have long argued, needs war. It needs it to expand its geographical reach; it needs it to open up new markets; it needs it to access cheap raw materials; and it needs it to placate opposition at home and pacify rebellious populations abroad.1

The common perception is that war serves to boost the economy. According to this argument, military conflict – and high military spending in preparation for such conflict – generates overall growth and helps reduce unemployment. This feature of military spending turns it into an effective fiscal tool. In years of slack, the government can embark on military Keynesianism, increase its spending on weapons and pull the economy out of recession.

Over the longer haul, military expenditures are said to undermine the peaceful, civilian outlook of liberal regimes. Spending on the military boosts the business interests of the large armament corporations, hardens the outlook of the security apparatus and emboldens the top army brass. Together, these groups become increasingly fused in an invisible, yet powerful, military-industrial Complex – a complex that gradually comes to dominate policy and pushes society toward foreign aggression and military adventurism.

The Rise and Demise of Military Keynesianism

Theories of military Keynesianism and the military-industrial complex became popular after the Second World War, and perhaps for a good reason. The prospect of military demobilization, particularly in the United States, seemed alarming. The U.S. elite remembered vividly how soaring military spending had pulled the world out of the Great Depression, and it feared that falling military budgets would reverse this process. If that were to happen, the expectation was that business would tumble, unemployment would soar, and the legitimacy of free-market capitalism would again be called into question.

Seeking to avert this prospect, in 1950 the U.S. National Security Council drafted a top-secret document, NSC-68. The document, which was declassified only in 1977, explicitly called on the government to use higher military spending as a way of preventing such an outcome. 2

NSC-68 marked the birth of military Keynesianism. In the decades that followed, military expenditures seem to have worked as the document envisaged. The basic process is illustrated in Figure 1. The graph shows the relationship between U.S. economic growth and the country’s military spending. The thin line plots the annual rate of economic growth against the right scale. The thick line shows the level of military spending, expressed as a share of GDP and plotted against the logarithmic left scale.3 Both series are smoothed as ten-year moving averages to emphasize their long term tendencies.







[Figure 1. U.S. Military Spending and Economic Growth]

The data show a co-movement of the two series, particularly since the 1930s. The rise in military spending in preparation for the Second World War coincided with a massive economic boom. Military spending had risen to 43 percent of GDP by 1944 and averaged 20 percent of GDP during the 1940s. This rise was accompanied by soaring economic growth, with annual rates peaking at 18 percent in 1942 and averaging 6 percent during the 1940s (the peak levels of the early 1940s cannot be seen in the chart due to the smoothing of the series).

After the war, military spending began to trend downward, but remained at very high levels for the next couple of decades. The adoption of military Keynesianism, along with the wars in Korea and Vietnam, helped keep military expenditures at 12 percent of GDP during the 1950s and at 10 percent during the 1960s. Economic growth during this period averaged over 4 percent – lower than in the Second World War, but rapid enough to sustain the buoyancy of American capitalism and the confidence of its capitalists.

Both big business and organized labor supported this set up. The large corporate groups saw military spending as an acceptable and even desirable form of government intervention. At the aggregate level, these expenditures helped counteract the threat of recession at home and offset the loss of civilian markets to European and Japanese competitors – yet without undermining the sanctity of private ownership and free enterprise. At the disaggregate level, many large firms received lucrative contracts from the Pentagon, handouts that even the staunchest free marketers found difficult to refuse.

The large unions endorsed military Keynesianism for different reasons. They agreed to stay out of domestic politics and international relations, to accept high military expenditures, and to minimize strikes in order to keep the industrial peace. In return, they received job security, high wages and the promise of ever-rising standards of living.

The consensus was aptly summarized in 1971 by President Nixon, who pronounced that "we are all Keynesians now."

But that was the peak. By the early 1970s, the Keynesian Coalition of big business and organized labor started to unravel, military Keynesianism began to wither and the welfare-warfare state commenced its long decline.

The Globalization of Ownership

Underlying the rise and demise of military Keynesianism was an epochal reversal in the spatial nature of ownership – a U-turn from gradual de-globalization in the first half of the century to massive globalization in the second half.

Until the 1950s, the ownership of capital, in the United States and elsewhere, was retreating into its national cocoons. The statistical footprints of the process are clear. In 1900, the ratio of foreign-held assets to world GDP reached a peak of 19 percent. But the subsequent turmoil of two world wars, depression, import substitution and capital controls have taken a heavy toll. Foreign ownership ties were broken or frozen, and the ratio of foreign-held assets to world GDP fell continuously, reaching a mere 6 percent in 1960. At the trough of the process, the accumulation of capital was conducted largely within national boundaries.

This decline ended in the early 1970s. Capital again broke through its national envelope, and as neoliberalism and deregulation gained momentum foreign ownership started to rise. The ratio of foreign-held assets to world GDP increased exponentially, doubling every decade: it rose to 25 percent in 1980, climbed to 50 percent in 1990, and reached over 90 percent by 2000.4

The effect on profit of this reversal has been dramatic. American-based firms now receive roughly one third of their earnings from their foreign subsidiaries, up from 5 percent in the 1950s – a six-fold increase.

This reversal in the global pattern of ownership fundamentally altered the power structure and institutions of capitalism. With capital bought and sold on a world scale and profits increasingly earned outside the country, capital accumulation became less and less reliant on domestic sales. With less emphasis on local activity, Keynesian policies grew out of fashion. And with Keynesianism on the decline, the business-labor accord started to unravel.

The welfare state, previously seen as a bulwark against communism, became a burden. Labor was no longer likely to revolt – particularly with jobs being shipped to "emerging markets" and with union membership on the decline. Furthermore, capitalists were no longer fearful of recession. On the contrary, they often encouraged it as a means of disciplining workers, reducing wages and reversing the hard-won social gains of working people.

The warfare state was also coming under pressure. The turning point was the collapse of Soviet Bloc. With only one superpower remaining, large military budgets were now difficult to justify. In the 1990s, military spending around the world took a nose dive, falling by as much as one-thrid from their all time peak in the late 1980s. As Figure 1 shows, expenditures on armaments in the United States, the world’s largest spender, dropped to an average of 4.5 percent of GDP in the first half of the 2000s, down from 7 percent in the 1980s.

The New Wars

The demise of the welfare-warfare state opened the door for the new rhetoric of neo-liberalism. Proponents of free markets hailed the new regime for its peaceful tendencies. Its detractors agreed – but only partly. On the one hand, they concurred that neoliberalism, in its quest to secure free trade and open capital flow, tries to establish political stability and international peace. On the other hand, they faulted neoliberalism for its invisible violence, inflicted through hyper exploitation, mass poverty, rising inequality, economic uncertainty and human insecurity.

Both the adherents and the critics, therefore, were surprised by the sudden bellicosity of the early twenty-first century. Old theories of imperialism and militarism were quickly dusted off and tucked onto neoliberalism. Instead of productivity miracles and No Logo, analysts started to talk about "new imperialism" and "neoliberal wars."

For the most part, though, these hybrid theories are misleading. The new conflicts of the twenty-first century – the "infinite wars," the "clashes of civilization," the "new crusades" – are fundamentally different from the "mass wars" and statist military conflicts that characterized capitalism from the nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The main difference lies not so much in the military nature of the conflicts, as in the broader role that war plays in capitalism.

To begin with, in a world open for business there is no need to physically conquer new territory – not for raw materials and not for additional markets (note that Iraqi oil production has nearly ceased since its conquest in 2003, while its market for foreign imports, negligible to begin with, has contracted).

The same goes for military spending: with the share of foreign profits soaring, there is no longer a business imperative for high military expenditures. While U.S. military budgets have risen marginally in the wake of the new wars – from 3.9 percent of GDP at the end of Clinton’s presidency to 4.7 percent presently – this is an increase whose effect on aggregate demand is insignificant by historical standards.

The U.S. attacks of the 2000s also make little military sense. Countries with proven nuclear capabilities, such as Pakistan and North Korea, have been left alone, while others that presented no real danger – specifically Afghanistan and Iraq – were invaded, occupied and now tie down much of the U.S. standing army, with no end in sight.

Finally, the televised war footing and constant talk about terrorism may have frightened the Western population. But unlike the success of nationalist-liberal ideologies during the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, the new rhetoric of infinite war hasn’t made the masses fall for neoliberal capitalism.

The wars of the 2000s are indeed new. And they are new, at least in part, because capitalism itself has changed.

The New Order of Capital

The central change concerns the underlying nature of capital, a transformation that began in the late nineteenth century but became evident only recently.

Existing theories, anchored in the reality of the early nineteenth century, continue to examine capital from the "material" perspective of consumption and production. Neoclassical economists anchor their analysis in utility, while classical Marxists base it on labor time. In contrast to these approaches, we suggest that, under modern conditions, capital can no longer be viewed as a "material" entity. As we see it, capital represents neither neoclassical utility nor Marxist abstract labor, but rather power – the power of its owners to shape the process of social reproduction as a whole.

Based on a power understanding of capital, we argue, first, that the analysis of capitalism should focus not on capital "in general" and many capitals "in competition," but specifically on the dominant capital groups at the centre of the political economy. Second, we claim that accumulation should be understood not absolutely, but differentially – that is, in reference to the ability of dominant capital to "beat the average" and increase its relative power.5

The implications of this power perspective are far reaching. For our purpose here, they suggest:

1. That over time, corporate mergers, rather than economic growth, become the main engine of differential accumulation (breadth); and

2. That under certain circumstances, dominant capital can benefit greatly from inflation and stagflation (depth).

In our research we found that, over the past century, global accumulation indeed oscillated between these two regimes of merger and stagflation. The most recent phase, which lasted through much of the late 1980s and 1990s, was clearly one of breadth. In that period, dominant capital benefited greatly from the opening up to corporate takeover of the former Soviet Union and other "emerging markets," as well as from the collapse of the welfare state and the massive privatization of government services.

This breadth cycle, with its emphasis on neoliberalism, deregulation, sound finance and disinflation, came to a close at the turn of the new millennium. The financial crisis that began in Asia and later spread to the core markets, the crumbling of the "new economy" and its scandalous accounting practices, and talk of global terrorism and the infinite war to defeat it, have together made capital movement look less tempting and mergers far less promising. Furthermore, two decades of neoliberalism have weakened pricing power, raising the specter of price and debt deflation for the first time since the Great Depression.

Faced with these predicaments, capitalists generally and dominant capitalists particularly began yearning for a little dose of "healthy" inflation both to avert debt deflation and to kick-start differential accumulation. As it turned out, the solution for their predicament – intended or otherwise – was a new ‘energy conflict’ in the Middle East (that is, a conflict related directly or indirectly to oil). Over the past thirty-five years, these conflicts have been the prime mover of oil prices, and oil prices have provided the spark for broad-based inflation. It was a turnkey mechanism for triggering inflation, and it was read to use.

In this sense, military conflict has come to assume a new, roundabout role in the accumulation process. Until the 1950s and 1960s, the main impact of military conflict worked through large military budgets which directly boosted aggregate demand and overall profits, as well as the income of the leading military contractors. But with the re-globalization of ownership and the on-setting of détente, military budgets started to contract. Initially, they fell relatively, as a share of GDP, but since the late 1980s, they also began to drop absolutely, in constant dollar terms. Although these expenditures still nourish the military contractors, their direct effect on capital accumulation has diminished significantly.

However, military conflict as such hasn’t lost its appeal; it still has a big impact on accumulation. The novelty is that the impact now works mostly indirectly, through inflation, relative prices and redistribution.

Energy Conflicts and Differential Profits

The key beneficiaries of this new, indirect link are the large oil companies. The geographic centre of this process is the Middle East. After the Vietnam War, the Middle East has become the hot spot of global conflict, with obvious corollaries for the price of oil. The relationship between these conflicts and the differential profits of the oil companies, however, has received little or no attention.

The reason for this neglect is not difficult to see. Most analyses of Middle-East conflict and oil are situated in the disciplinary intersection of "international relations" and "international economics." Their basic reasoning boils down to a statist struggle over raw materials. On the one hand, there are the industrialized countries that need cheap oil in order to sustain their growth and expanded reproduction. On the other hand there are the countries of the Middle East, organized through OPEC, whose intention is to extract from the process as much rent as they can. This broad conflict is complicated by various factors: inter-state rivalry – for example between the United States and the Soviet Union (previously) and Europe and Asia (presently); religious and ethnic hostilities in the Middle East itself; or the interests of various sectors and capitalist fractions in the industrialized countries.



In this polemic of high politics and resource economics, few have bothered to break through the aggregate front, fewer have done empirical work, and almost no one has dealt with the question of how exactly accumulation by the oil companies fits into the picture. Figure 2 offers a glimpse into what is missing from the story. The chart shows the history of differential accumulation by the "Petro-Core" of leading oil companies – specifically, BP, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Royal-Dutch/Shell and Texaco.6



[Figure 2. Leading Oil Companies: Differential Profits]

Each bar in the figure measures the difference between the rate of return on equity of these companies and the average rate of return on equity of the Fortune 500 benchmark (with the result expressed as a percent of the Fortune 500 average). The grey bars show years of differential accumulation; that is, years in which the leading oil companies beat the average with a higher rate of return. The black bars show periods of differential decumulation; that is, years in which the leading oil companies trailed the average. For reasons that will become apparent in a moment, these latter periods signal "danger" in the Middle East . Finally, the explosion signs show "energy conflicts" – namely, conflicts that were related, directly or indirectly, to oil.7 The figure exhibits three related patterns, all remarkable in their persistence:

First, every energy conflict in the Middle East was preceded by a danger zone, in which the oil companies suffered differential decumulation.
Second, every energy conflict was followed by a period during which the oil companies beat the average.
And, third, with only one exception in 1996-1997, the oil companies never managed to beat the average without an Energy Conflict first taking place.8
Furthermore, this pattern fits into the larger processes of breadth and depth. The figure points to three distinct periods, each characterized by a different regime of differential accumulation, and each led by a different faction within dominant capital.

During the depth era of the 1970s and early 1980s, differential accumulation was fuelled by stagflation and driven by conflict. The leading faction within dominant capital was the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition of large armament and oil firms. In this context, the oil companies managed to beat the average comfortably, with only occasional setbacks which were quickly corrected by Middle East conflicts.

During the breadth period of the late 1980s and 1990s, merger replaced inflation as the main engine of differential accumulation. The oil and armament companies lost their primacy to a "new economy" coalition led by civilian high-tech companies. Neoliberal rhetoric replaced the lingo of welfare-warfare state, conflicts in the Middle East grew fewer and farther between, and the oil companies commonly trailed the average.

Events over the past few years suggest that this second period may have come to an end, with the ebbing of the merger boom and the return to primacy of the Weaponodollar-Petrodollar Coalition. The latter coalition, whose fortunes had dwindled since the stagflationary bonanza of the 1970s and early 1980s, has come back with a vengeance. Having helped re-install the Bush family in the White House, the coalition started looking for new enemies and was only too happy to exploit the opportunity offered by the "new Pearl Harbor" of September 11.9

The argument and statistical patterns presented here were first articulated in the late 1980s, further developed in the mid-1990s, and most recently updated in 2006.10 However, the last few observations in Figure 2 are new, and they suggest a quantitative departure from past patterns. Until the late 1990s, the differential performance of the oil companies oscillated between 50 percent above or below the Fortune 500. Recently, though, the scale changed. During the period of 2000-2005, the world’s four leading oil companies earned $338 billion in net profit – one-third of a trillion –representing an average rate of return of 20 percent, nearly twice the Fortune 500’s.

The Primacy of Prices

The link that connects Middle East conflicts and differential profitability is the price of oil. This link is illustrated in Figure 3. The thick line in the chart shows the percent share of all listed oil companies in global corporate profit. The thin line shows the "relative" price of crude oil, computed by dividing the dollar price per barrel by the U.S. consumer price index, and lagged one year (reported corporate earnings represent the moving sum of the past four quarters; the full impact on profit of a change in the price of oil therefore is felt only after a year ).









[Figure 3. Oil Prices and the Global Distribution of Profits]

The correlation between the two series is extremely tight.11 This statistical fact points to the immense importance that prices have come to play in the process of accumulation. In this particular chart, the tight correlation makes much of the media discussion and learned analyses of the oil arena redundant. In order to know the reported differential profits of the oil companies a year from now, you don’t need to speculate about peak oil, about rising demand from China, or about the coming heat waves in Europe. This type of guesswork, although interesting for other purposes, is unnecessary here. The only thing you need to know is the current price of oil.

To illustrate: the official data are not yet in, but we already know that, over the past twelve months, the price of oil averaged roughly $65 in 2002 dollars. The correlation in the chart suggests that, a year from now, the reported global profit share of the oil companies will hover around 15 percent.

Now, let’s backtrack and examine the history presented in Figure 3. The data show that, during the oil crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s, the cost of crude petroleum shot through the roof. In 1979 a barrel of oil cost over $90 in today’s prices. During those happy stagflationary times, the oil companies pocketed nearly 20 percent of all global profits. But as differential accumulation moved into breadth and mergers picked up, inflation fell and oil prices dropped even faster. The oil companies’ global share of profit collapsed, reaching a mere 3 percent by the end of Clinton’s presidency.

The reversal came with the new millennium and the Bush presidency. With the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the Middle East entered a protracted period of war, oil prices have risen to $65-75, and the share of the oil companies in global profit – although not yet at historical highs – is moving higher and higher.

How big are the gains of the oil companies? During the five-year period from August 2001 to July 2006, the average net income of the global oil sector amounted to $108 billion per annum. This figure compares with an annual profit of only $34 billion in the year from August 1999 to July 2000 – a jump of $75 billion if we round the numbers.

How much did it cost to generate this jump in profits? For argument’s sake, let’s assume that since 2000 the entire increase in the price of oil – and therefore the whole increase in oil profits – was due to the new Energy Conflicts in the Middle East. Assume further that so far the U.S. government has spent on its Afghanistan-Iraq operation the annual equivalent of 1 percent of its GDP – roughly $100 billion a year.

These assumptions, although simplistic and inaccurate, indicate the overall magnitudes involved: the war costs $100 billion a year and it generates an extra $75 billion in annual oil profits. In other words, for every $1 the U.S. government spends on the wars, the owners of the oil companies earn an additional ¢75 in net profit.

Clearly, such phenomenal cost-benefit ratios can be generated only indirectly. And that is perhaps one of the important features of the new wars: a fairly modest increase in military spending brings about massive changes in prices and distribution – changes that go beyond the immediate arena of the conflict, and whose magnitude can match and even exceed the military budget itself.

Sweet Inflation

As noted earlier, the new wars came as the long breadth phase of differential accumulation was winding down. The immediate beneficiaries were the arms contractors and the oil companies of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition. But gradually, as global differential accumulation shifted from breadth to depth, the gains spread to dominant capital as a whole.

Figure 4 vividly illustrates this process for the United States. The thin line in the graph plots the rate of inflation, measured as the annual rate of change of the consumer price index. The thick line is a ratio between profits and wages. It measures the ratio of the earnings per share of the S&P 500 (the largest publicly traded corporations listed in the United States, which could be taken as a proxy for dominant capital) to the hourly wage rate in manufacturing.







[Figure 4. U.S. Inflation, Profits and Wages]

Movements in this latter ratio indicate redistribution. When the index rises, it means that the profits of dominant capital rise faster (or fall more slowly) than the wage rate. When the index falls it suggests an opposite process – namely, that the profits of dominant capital fall faster (or rise more slowly) than wages.

As the chart shows, in late 2000, inflation started falling, and in 2002 it reached 1 percent – a postwar low. The decline was accompanied by a massive drop in the ratio of profit to wages, which fell by 55 percent from its 2000 peak. In the wake of these developments, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan, warned of an "unwelcome substantial fall in inflation," and was encouraged by leading financiers to "go for higher inflation."12

These deflationary warnings came in April 2003, after the U.S. had already invaded Iraq. Our own view at the time was rather different. In January 2003, just before the invasion, we wrote:

". . . if oil prices continue to rise, inflation will most likely follow, the spectre of deflation will be removed and the large companies could sound a big sigh of relief. For these companies there would also be an icing on the cake. Inflation usually works to redistribute income from labour to capital and from small firms to larger ones. It will therefore make the leading companies better off relatively, if not absolutely."13

And indeed, Greenspan didn’t have to work too hard. The new wars have done the job for him. The neo-conservatives sent their army to the Middle East, the price of oil soared, and inflation – although hesitant at first – eventually started to follow.

The distributional consequences weren’t lost on investors and workers. While wages remained flat, profits – particularly those earned by dominant capital – surged. As a result, the ratio of profit to wages climbed rapidly – rising 250 percent since 2001 and sending the overall share of profit in GDP to its highest level since data began to be collated in 1929.

The huge distributional impact of a small increase in inflation is symptomatic of the new order. During the welfare-warfare state, inflation usually involved a wage-price spiral that worked to limit the differential increases in profits. For instance, a 4 percent increase in prices typically would be accompanied by a rise in wages – say, of 3 percent. A result, the markup ratio of sales to wages would increase by 1 percent, generating a relatively modest rise in profits. The situation now is very different.

Workers in the United Stares are locked in global competition with workers in China, India and other ‘emerging markets,’ which means that wages do not rise –and sometimes even fall – in the midst of price inflation. In this context, a 4 percent inflation translates to a 4 percent increase in the markup and to a far larger increase in profits.

All in all, then, the new wars are definitely cheap. For a minimal cost, they stir up inflation and generate large increases in profits. But cheap wars have another side to them. They are hard to win.

Cheap Wars

The idea of a mass, "voluntary" army was born out of the French Revolution. The new soldiers turned out to be cheaper and more loyal than mercenaries, and they fought well. However, the masses needed to be educated so that they could read the newspapers and follow the propaganda – hence the birth of compulsory "elementary" schooling. Later on, the proles started to demand additional perks. They wanted culture, insurance, pensions and veteran benefits. In the 1910s, the elites cheated them. They sent the masses to be butchered by the millions in the trenches of World War I, and then abandoned those who returned as veterans. This experience raised the ante. In the early 1940s, the citizens-soldiers had to be offered a whole welfare state, so that they would be willing to get butchered, again, in the Second World War. What initially looked like "soldiers for free" turned out to be a rather expensive way of fighting wars.

The last expensive war was Vietnam. With neoliberal globalization replacing the welfare-warfare state, there was no longer a need for mass armies with high overhead. Instead, the capitalists started to invest in "smart weapons" that could be operated by high-school dropouts and cause plenty of damage. They abandoned the draft in favor of purely professional armies – partly governmental, partly private.

A similar process has taken place in Israel. During the 1970s, in the hay days of the Israeli welfare-warfare economy, military spending amounted to 25 percent of GDP, the draft included most Jewish citizens (excluding the ultra-orthodox), and the government spent heavily on social services.

But with the breadth regime of the late 1980s and 1990s, Israeli capitalists became decreasingly dependent on the war economy. Israel began its reconciliation with its neighboring Arab states, and the military was both reduced and transformed. Military spending dropped to 6 percent of GDP, and many military activities were privatized. The duration of military service has been shortened, and fewer get drafted. In parallel, the welfare state has been progressively dismantled, with education, public health care and other social services consistently eroding. Hundreds of thousands of guest workers have been brought in, and the labor unions have been reduced to token institutions.

The consequences of this process are illustrated in Figure 5. The chart contrasts the average monthly wage rate with the Tel Aviv stock price index (both expressed in constant prices and rebased for comparison purposes, with January 1980=100).





[Figure 5. Capitalists Against Workers]

The figure shows that, until the early 1990s, the fortunes of workers and capitalists moved more or less in tandem. But with the onslaught of the breadth regime, their roads parted. During the 1990s and early 2000s, wages have hardly increased, while capital gains have risen to the stratosphere.

Israeli reservists, who are now being called to fight in the unfolding war, probably have not seen this graph, but the reality behind it is certainly familiar to them. They know about deteriorating social services, about job insecurity, about overly expensive housing, about the loss of open spaces. They know that getting wounded in a war is a bad deal that yields meager compensation. Most importantly, they know that the elite that sends them to fight doesn’t really care about them.

These sentiments are quite explicit and appear regularly in the press. The following is a typical report of the difficulties faced by reserve soldiers:

"Defense Minister Amir Peretz has refused to use a law allowing IDF reservists called up for service recently to enjoy an exemption on fines and interest associated with debts they incur during their call-up period. The reservists are furious after discovering they are still required to pay the fines and interest even though they were unable to issue payments on time because they were called up. 'The reservists are forgotten, the way they always forget us,' said one of the reservists organization’s leaders, Alex Minkovsky. 'We're calling on the social-minded Defense Minister Amir Peretz to wake up and do something. We’re flooded by inquiries of reservists who are suffering crises on a daily basis.'"14

Dominant capital has no such complaints. As it turns out, a day before Defense Minister Peretz refused to heed the reservists’ plea, his government privatized the country’s oil refineries for $800 million. In an interview, the winning bidder, Tzadik Bino, sounded almost embarrassed:

"The state should not have privatized the refineries, and neither should it have privatized El-Al [the national airline], Bezeq [the national phone company] and Magen David Adom [the emergency medical service]. . . . The next stage would be to privatize the IDF. . . . We are still fighting for our existence, and it doesn’t pay to transfer strategic assets to private hands."15

The old warfare-welfare state was dominated by charismatic figure heads, "leaders" such as Churchill, de Gaulle and Ben Gurion who seemed removed from any "particular" interests. By contrast, the neoliberal state tends to be populated by retainers – many of them corrupt and criminal – like Bush, Chirac, Berlusconi, Sharon, Netanyahu and Olmert, who don’t even try to hide their true loyalties.

The capitalist elite, which is served by and sustains these politicians, no longer bears a clear national attachment. Many of Israel’s largest companies are owned by foreign investors and multinational companies. Similarly, most of Israel’s large owners – from the Recannatis, to Fishman to Khan – have become global investors. Israel for them is merely one of many assets in a diversified world portfolio. Unlike during the 1970s, when they had all their eggs in the same Israeli basket, now they don’t need to worry too much about what happens in the country. Their local holdings represent only a fraction of their investments, and they are highly vendible.

A recent quote from the financial section of the daily Ha’aretz, written in the midst of the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza, indicates the extent to which foreign asset diversification has been accepted as natural by "ordinary" investors:

"Over and above the 'regular' risks of emerging markets such as China, Brazil or Russia, Israel has a continuous security risk. . . . This risk cannot be ignored even in peace time. The global diversification of investment therefore is not a privilege. It is a necessity. . . . It means that, in the interest of reducing risk, Israeli investors have to permanently allocate a fixed proportion of their assets to investment overseas. How much is 'enough'? Until recently, the convention was 25 percent, but perhaps the share of foreign assets should be raised to 50 percent. Our bodies have to stay here. But why should our savings suffer the same fate?"16

Under these circumstances, it is little wonder that the Israeli "war machine" has lost much of its military edge. The incentive to fight for “one’s country” when that country is so socially fractured is much reduced – particularly when confronted with socially embedded and highly motivated religious militias.

And so the cheap wars linger, death and destruction mount, and the profits continue to accumulate.


Jonathan Nitzan teaches political economy at York University in Toronto. Shimshon Bichler teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel. Most of their publications are freely available from The Bichler & Nitzan Archives.

Endnotes

1. Not all radical thinkers share this view. Some argue, to the contrary, that war and militarization, although embedded in and often caused by the capitalist reality, are harmful to capitalism and undermine its vitality.

2. United States, National Security Council, NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of
January 31, 1950. Top Secret. Washington DC, 1950.

3. A logarithmic scale has the effect of amplifying the size on the chart of smaller values and compressing the size of larger ones. This transformation is useful when there are very big jumps in the data – such as during the 1940s – jumps that would otherwise make the variations of smaller values look too miniscule to discern on the chart.

4. Data on the ratio of foreign assets to GDP are from Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 52-53, Table 2-1.

5. These issues are articulated in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, "Dominant Capital and the New Wars," Journal of World Systems Research, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 255-327.

6. Due to mergers, the data in Figure 2 pertain to British Petroleum until 1997 and to BP-Amoco since 1998; to Chevron and Texaco until 1999 and to Chevron-Texaco since 2000; to Exxon and Mobil until 1998 and to ExxonMobil from 1999; and to Royal-Dutch/Shell throughout.

7. The conflicts include the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict; the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict; the 1979 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the 1979 Iranian Revolution; the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the 1980 beginning of the Iraq-Iran War; the 1990/1 first Gulf War; the 2000 beginning of the second Intifada; the 2001 Coalition invasion of Afghanistan; and the 2003 Coalition invasion of Iraq (whose publicized preparation began in 2002).

8. Although there was no "official" conflict in 1996-7, there was plenty of violence, including an Iraqi invasion of Kurdish areas and U.S. cruise missile attacks.

9. In 2003, as the Iraq war unfolded, we wrote the following text:

"Our own view is that Middle East conflicts were integral to the power processes of global accumulation. . . . In the process, [the Weapondollar-Petrodollar] coalition had become increasingly fused with its ‘parent’ governments on the one hand and its OPEC ‘hosts’ on the other, leading to a growing ‘capital-state symbiosis’ between them. Whether or not there was ‘conspiracy’ here, and what the precise nature of such a ‘conspiracy’ was, remains an open question. Unfortunately, these types of issues are not the usual staple of primetime television. Occasionally, however, the truth does come to light, albeit with a little delay. . . . Perhaps in due course someone will publish the secret ‘Exxon Papers’ or a declassified ‘NSC Report on Energy and War in the Middle East,’ thereby opening a window into the back-room story of Energy Conflicts in the region" ("Dominant Capital and the New Wars," Journal of World Systems Research, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 313).

As it turned out, the relevant documents surfaced rather quickly. Less than a year after the publication of our paper, Greg Palast uncovered the existence of two secret – and rather different – plans for the future of Iraq’s oil. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Palast argued, reflected the conflicting strategies of two opposing factions. The first, vocal faction, led by the neo-cons and the Pentagon, planned to privatize Iraqi oil, flood the market and undermine OPEC. The other faction, led by the large oil companies and elements within the State Department, shared none of these fantasies. It let the neo-cons finish the job of conquering Iraq, and then sent its representatives to take control of the country’s oil production. In the end, there was no privatization, no flooding of the market and no undermining of OPEC – an organization of which the United States, as the ruler of Iraq, was now a de-facto member. See Greg Palast, "Secret US Plans for Iraq’s Oil," BBC News, March 17, 2005; Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse (New York: Dutton, 2006).

10. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, "New Imperialism or New Capitalism?" Review, 2006, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, pp. 1-86.

11. The correlation coefficient between the two monthly series measures 0.80 (out of 1) for the period since January 1974, and 0.92 for the period since January 1979.

12. Alan Greenspan, "Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan Before the Joint Economic Committee," U.S. Congress, May 6, 2003; Bill Dudley and Paul McCulley, "Greenspan Must Go For Higher Inflation," Financial Times, April 23, 2003, pp. 17.

13. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, "It's All About Oil," News From Within, Vol. XIX, No. 1, January 2003, p. 11.

14. Tani Goldstein, "Reservists Want Peretz to Okay Perks," Ynet, August 1, 2006.

15. Tani Goldstein, "Bino to Ynet: 'There Was No Need to Privatize the Refineries.'" Hebrew, Ynet, August 1, 2006.

16. Ami Ginsburg, "What Did We Learn From the First Two Weeks of the Second Lebanon War?" Hebrew, Ha'aretz, July 28, 2006.

[moeen yaseen]

MUSLIM HOLOCAUST & HOLOCAUST DENIAL BY BUSH US ALLIANCE

Gideon Polya
Aljazeera.info
Thursday, 21 December 2006

Christmas is almost upon us and the World – especially the mainly nominally Christian Western World - pauses to remember the birth of Jesus Christ and to celebrate the sanctity of Mother and Child. Yet much of the Western World through the Bush US Alliance is complicit in horrendous crimes against humanity in Occupied Palestine, Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan – in gross violation of the teachings of Jesus and of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) of the Abrahamic religions that declares “thou shalt not kill”. Much of the West is complicit in war criminal mass murder, genocide and mass infanticide led by Bush America in the Muslim World – yet the carnage continues due to the IGNORING of this Muslim Holocaust by Western politicians and racist, lying, holocaust-denying Mainstream media.

MASS MURDER. Dr Burnham's medical epidemiology research group at the prestigious American Johns Hopkins University has estimated 0.7 million post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq (published in the top medical journal The Lancet in October 2006) - this falls between estimates from 3 other authoritative data sets of 0.6 to 0.8 million. Taking a Jordan/Syria baseline for death rate comparison and the latest Lancet data yields a 0.9 million estimate for post-invasion excess deaths in US-occupied Iraq (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11293/42/ and http://mwcnews.net/content/view/10528/42/ ). The post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories presently total 0.3, 0.9 and 2.1 million, respectively, as determined from the latest UN and medical literature demographic data (for analysis and documentation see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11293/42/ ).

This carnage is due to UK, US, Australian, Coalition, Israeli and NATO violation of the Geneva Conventions which demand that Occupiers must do everything in their power to keep their Conquered subjects alive. Thus Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ) state:

Article 55

To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.

The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.

In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory.

GENOCIDE. The UN says the departure rate from Iraq is 100,000 per month; since the US invasion nearly 2 million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries – this amounts to US, UK, Australian and US-led Coalition complicity in UN-defined Genocide in Iraq.

According to the conservative, Mainstream Melbourne newspaper The Age: "Since the US-led invasion in 2003, nearly 2 million Iraqis have fled to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, where their numbers and, in many cases, their money are causing political and social tensions. The United Nations estimates the departure rate from Iraq at about 100,000 a month." (see: http://www.theage.com.au/...)


Human Rights Watch estimates that there are about 3.7 million Afghan refugees. For a map indicating the disposition of most of these refugees see:

http://www.cnn.com/... ).

It is estimated that there are 6 million Palestinian refugees (over 4 million registered with the UN), 80,000 leave the Occupied Palestinian Territory every year, 80% of West Bank Christians have fled their Homeland and swathes of the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights have been ethnically cleansed or otherwise rendered uninhabitable (e.g. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugees ).

The UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm ) states in part:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

MASS INFANTICIDE. It has been estimated from the latest UN Population Division data that the post-invasion under-5 year old infant deaths in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories total 0.2, 0.4 and 1.7 million, respectively (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/10528/42/ ).

About 90% of these deaths have been avoidable and are due to Occupier violation of the Geneva, Universal Human Rights, Genocide and Rights of the Child Conventions (see: Geneva Conventions: http://www.genevaconventions.org/ ; Geneva Conventions Relative to Protection of Civilians in Time of War: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ; UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ; UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html ; UN Rights of the Child Convention: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/k2crc.htm ).

A crucial Commandment of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments of the Abrahamic religions) is “thou shalt not kill”. Mass murder of infants is utterly evil.

CONCLUSION. Bush and Blair (and their associates Rumsfeld, Cheney, Dr. Rice (Dr Death), Olmert, Australia's Bush-ite government and other Western Bush-ite governments) are actively involved in racist, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-Asian Holocaust commission – they are complicit in a Muslim Holocaust involving Mass Murder, Genocide and Mass Infanticide. These atrocities continue due to Western politician and Mainstream media Holocaust Denial (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11293/42/ ).

What can decent people do? Silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people are obliged (a) to inform others about horrendous abuses of humanity and (b) to act ethically in all their personal and business dealings with those complicit in such atrocities. Peace is the only way – the continuing mass murder, genocide and mass infanticide by the UK, the US, Australia, the US-led Coalition, Israel, US-Israeli State Terrorism (USIST) and NATO in the Muslim World cries out for comprehensive intra-national and inter-national Sanctions and Boycotts against those responsible.

Source: Aljazeera.info

[moeen yaseen]

ZIOPEDIA NEWSFLASH

Dear Activists,

We have all watched TV shows in which the lawyer of the defendant produces a psychologist who claims that the defendant should not be held accountable for his or her actions because he or she has a certain mental illness that interferes with his or her reasoning capacity. And there are a lot of people who can’t help themselves but thinking that George W. Bush and most of his Neocon cohorts are insane. Does that mean that they are not responsible for the death and misery they brought upon millions of Iraqi, Afghanis, Palestinians and Sudanese people?

In legal cases, the defendants who were found to be not guilty by reason of insanity are locked up in mental institutions until they are no longer a threat to society. As much satisfaction I would get out of having George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield and Condi Rice locked up in such an institution for the rest of their lifes, I would be even happier to see them be put through some American style ‘alternative interrogation techniques’ plus a show trial, like the one Saddam Hussein had to go through, and see all four of them hanging on their neck facing each other. No kidding.

There are, admittedly, lots of elements in the Bushoviks’ behaviour that raise suspicions of insanity. How can they reduce taxes for America’s rich and superrich while increasing spending by hundreds of billions for a war that doesn’t seem to go anywhere? How can they insist that Afghanistan and Iraq are not a complete disaster? And, most importantly, why don’t the Democrats change those policies, now that they have a chance to do so, instead of making them even worse?

If the Republicans – and the Democrats, for that matter - had the best interest of the American people in mind, this kind of behaviour obviously wouldn’t make any sense. However, what makes us think they care? What if it was their intention all the way to destroy the US economy? What if Afghanistan was never about ousting the Talibans for good but about restoring Afghanistan’s traditional role as supplier of 95% of the world’s opium/heroin? What if George W. Bush always intended to cause so much bloodbath, chaos and civil war in Iraq that there is no alternative but to break up the country along ethnic lines? Suddenly, Bush’s claim to have done a fine job would make much more sense.

Having said that, wouldn’t such outrageous goals be even more reason to claim that George W. Bush was insane? Again, that all depends on the perspective. From a democratic nation state point of view, where governments are supposedly elected to act in the best interest of their voters, the Neocon policies appear indeed to be insane. But what if George W. Bush sees himself much more as part of a global elite and his role similar to that of an imperial governor of a 19th century style European colony who couldn’t care less about the negative consequences of his policies for his ‘subjects’? Wouldn’t he then indeed be one of the most successful US presidents ever?

What kind of international elite though would willingly destroy the economy of the United States of America by producing obscene budget and balance of payment deficits, making the US government conduct wars in the interest of unhindered opium production and kill millions of innocent civilians for the sake of changing the map of the Middle East? Who would engage in such parasitical behaviour of destroying the very people he is nurturing off and then simply dumping them and move on to the next host country? The answer to this question would be very obvious, if it wasn’t for decades of brainwashing by the media of exactly that parasitical elite.

After destroying Russia and Germany those descendants of Attila’s Huns, under the disguise of being a persecuted minority, are now about to repeat the exercise with their current main host, the United States. Most of the manufacturing sites under their control have already been moved to their next designated host country, China. The imminent collapse of the US dollar, engineered by them through their obscene deficit policies, will enable them to buy everything that’s of any value in the United States and those countries which will be dragged down economically with them. China is ready to welcome them with open arms, hoping for a further increase of its living standard. Sure, the imminent world depression, compared to which the 1929 depression will look like a family picnic, will be a setback for the next 5, 10 years. But that’s a small price to pay for China to become the world’s number one super power, at least for the next 50, 60 years, until the parasite moves host again. (Source: ZioPedia.org)

Apartheid sucks - dismantle IsraHell!

Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
ZioPedia - All There Is To Know About Zionism

[moeen yaseen]

OH! LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM ... WHERE ART THOU?

James Zogby
December 28 2006
Dr. James J. Zogby is President of Arab American Institute in Washington
http://europe.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/39168


"Most Americans, it turns out, don’t even know where Bethlehem is. Six in ten thought it was an Israeli city. The same number believed it was either a Jewish or a mixed Jewish-Muslim city. Only 15% correctly identified Bethlehem as a mixed Christian-Muslim city in the West Bank."

This time of year, hundreds of millions of Christians in the West turn their attention to Bethlehem. But what they think about is not the living, breathing and suffering Palestinian city that is real, but a Bethlehem that exists in their imagination.

This gap between American perceptions of Bethlehem and its reality came through quite vividly in two studies issued this week. The first was a survey of Bethlehemites conducted by the Palestinian Center for Research & Cultural Dialogue. This survey provided residents of the Biblical city the opportunity to report on the conditions of their lives and the difficulties they face. The second was a study of U.S. public opinion conducted by Zogby International (ZI). It examined what Americans know of Bethlehem and its people.

Most Americans, it turns out, don’t even know where Bethlehem is. Six in ten thought it was an Israeli city. The same number believed it was either a Jewish or a mixed Jewish-Muslim city. Only 15% correctly identified Bethlehem as a mixed Christian-Muslim city in the West Bank.

The U.S. survey further found that most Americans would like to visit Bethlehem, because of its historical and religious significance. They also believe that the city ought to be protected by UNESCO and declared a World Heritage Site. But because they have only have an imaginary idea of Bethlehem, what they want to visit or protect is a site of “sacred stones” – not a city of real people.

There is so very little appreciation for the real situation of Bethlehem’s people – and so little understanding of the hardships they have endured at the hands of a four decade long occupation. For example, Americans demonstrate no recognition of the devastating impact to Bethlehem created by Israel’s confiscation of the community’s land to construct settlements and the insidious wall that now cuts Bethlehem off from Arab Jerusalem, dividing families and economically strangling the city. (In fact, a plurality of Americans covered in the survey didn’t even know about the wall.) The loss of income and loss of hope, both caused by the settlements and the wall, have resulted in a mass emigration of Bethlehem’s population – further negatively impacting the character and quality of life of the biblical city. This too is not known in America.

This lack of recognition in the West for the plight of Bethlehem’s people is a metaphor for the entire Palestinian situation. When Americans think at all about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they do so through the prism of the Israeli narrative. They either do not see the Palestinian side of the story, or see a Palestine gutted of its human content.

In this context, Palestine becomes merely a “problem to be solved,” or an issue of terrorism to be stopped, or refugees to be resettled.

The result is that the Palestinian story, as told in the West, is never about real people struggling to survive, living as they do under the yoke of occupation. But the reality is that Bethlehem, like the rest of Palestine, is, in fact, populated by real people facing conditions of harsh foreign domination not unlike that experienced by the city’s inhabitants 2,000 years ago.

And so, it might be a good thing this Christmas to think about the real Bethlehem and the real people of Bethlehem, Christians (living there since the time of Jesus) and Muslims, the lives they live and what might be done to improve their lot. If we do, we might be able to join the heavenly hosts whom we are told greeted the birth of Jesus singing “peace on earth, goodwill to men,” and help bring some of each to the land of Palestine.

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT, BLIAR, NEW LABOUR AND YOU


WEALTH IS GUSHING UP IN BRITAIN, NOT TRICKLING DOWN[/size][/color][/b]
Michael Meacher
Sunday Telegraph 24 Dec

Britain is now one of the most unequal countries in the world. A recent report on boardroom pay reveals that the average salary of chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now a staggering £46,154 a week. That is 115 times the average wage in Britain today, 249 times the national minimum wage, and 519 times the basic state pension.

The latest Government figures, entombed within their publication Households Below Average Incomes, shows that the rich have made quite a killing out of the last decade and that inequality rose sharply between 1997 and 2002. It has, however, fallen back somewhat since then, but it remains above the level of 1997. This reflects the fact that though child credits, working family tax credits, and pensioner benefits have given a modest and very welcome lift for the poor, the rich have done hugely better. Official statistics now show that 1.5 million people now earn more than £1,100 a week.

The super-rich, the top 1 per cent, have done better still. Their share of national income fell from 13 per cent in 1937 to just over 4 per cent in 1974, but then in the Thatcher-Major years rose rapidly back to nearly 11 per cent in 1997. The latest figures now suggest they are back at pre-Second World War levels. Their share of national wealth has ballooned even more. It shot up from 17 per cent in 1990 to 23 per cent in 2002. So fewer than half a million adults now control nearly a quarter of the nation's entire wealth, while half the population (more than 20 million adults) have seen their share fall to just 6 per cent in 2002: a case of "gushing up" rather than "trickling down".

The mega-rich, the top 0.1 per cent, have done best of all. Some 75,000 individuals now own almost half the liquid assets in Britain, and they are on average 66 per cent richer than they were five years ago. Those at the very top, the 1,000 richest people in Britain, have seen their wealth triple from £99 billion to £301 billion in the nine years since 1997. In the past year alone, the overall wealth of this tiny group has soared by 21 per cent or by more than £50 billion, and the number of billionaires has more than tripled from 14 to 54.

This matters for at least three key reasons. First, the corollary to this extreme mal-distribution in income and wealth is the persistence of poverty and deprivation. If all the gains made by the top 1 per cent since 1997 were transferred to the poor, poverty would be abolished overnight.

Second, such excessive widening of inequality cannot conceivably be justified. It does not reflect a comparable improvement in business performance (indeed, rewarding failure has become routine), but rather greed on a mega scale. In 1980, the chief executive of a top company might have earned some 25 times more than the average worker; today it is around 120 times.

But there is a third, more profound reason why such drastically widening inequality matters. There is now abundant international data that shows the greater the degree of inequality between richest and poorest, the higher the level of ill-health, crime and social breakdown in society as a whole. The price of extraordinary material success is often social failure and higher dysfunction within society.

In his painstaking and methodical analysis of the evidence in his book The Impact of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Nottingham, has demonstrated that in those countries where income differentials between rich and poor are smaller, there is less violence, including substantially lower homicide rates, and prison populations are smaller. Community life is stronger, and people are more likely to trust each other. Health is better, life expectancy is several years longer, and teenage birth rates are lower. There is also more social mobility, and educational attainment at schools tends to be higher.

It might be said that putting this all down to inequality is going too far. But all these relationships are statistically highly significant, and there are now 170 studies showing that health is better in more equal societies, and 40 showing that violence is worse in more unequal ones. The implication is that further rises in absolute living standards no longer reduce social tensions; indeed, in the absence of a drive to limit inequality, they may well aggravate them.

Thus, for example, the US, which has extreme wealth but also extreme inequality, is beset by the highest homicide rates, the highest teenage pregnancy rates, the highest rates of imprisonment, and comes 26th in the international league table for life expectancy: not a model that we should follow, though our rising inequality is pushing us in that direction. By contrast, Japan, Sweden and Norway, also very rich but not nearly so unequal, do well on all these measures.

Nor should this be surprising. What really matters to people about income is where it puts them relative to others in status and self-evaluation. Increased social hierarchy and inequality significantly raises anxieties about personal worth, and for those who lose out, the feelings of inferiority, resentment and inability to compete inevitably generate anti-social reactions to the structures that demean them. There are lessons here for the Government.

Peter Mandelson told us charmingly that "New Labour is relaxed about people getting filthy rich", and indeed the Government's ideological commitment to unfettered market forces, neo-liberalism and globalisation has certainly let inequality rip. At the same time, New Labour has commendably tried hard to limit social dysfunction by a relentless array of targets to deal with inefficiency, misdemeanours, crime, poor performance and inadequate effort.

What is not perceived is that these policies are incompatible: that the pursuit of inequality persistently undermines the very real efforts of New Labour to improve health and educational outcomes, cut crime rates, improve social mobility, and build sustainable communities — as well as obviously reduce poverty.

• Michael Meacher is a former minister of state for the environment and Labour MP for Oldham West

[moeen yaseen]

THE OLD ECONOMICS IS DEAD & AND THE NEW ECONOMICS MUST BEGIN

Thursday, January 11 on your calendar. That's the date for the next webcast address by statesman Lyndon LaRouche.
http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/press_releases_files/2006/1226_jan11w ebcast.shtml


The webcast, to begin at 1:00 p.m. EST, will occur one week after the newly-elected, Democratic-majority Congress is sworn into office. LaRouche's address will drive an economic agenda into the House of Representatives, just as the New Politics was driven by a new generation of voters, led by the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) on Nov. 7, 2006.
There's no better gift for ourselves and the nation than LaRouche's proposed agenda for the Congress of the New Economics and double impeachment!

[moeen yaseen]

IRAN AND AMERICA SLIDE TOWARDS COLLISION AS IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE SEEMS DIALOGUE IS IMPOSSIBLE

27 December 2006
Mahan Abedin
SEE http://www.gv2000.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=143&pid=1010#pid1010

A hopeless situation

Given this state of affairs, it is very difficult to see under what circumstances the current US Administration would even consider implementing the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that relate to dialogue with Iran. The animosity between Iran and the US is without parallel in the modern world and is also arguably the most dangerous friction point in international relations. While there is enough wisdom and self-restraint on both sides to prevent this Cold War from escalating into a military conflict (at least for the foreseeable future), there is nothing which gives hope to resolving the impasse. It is an intractable historical, ideological and geopolitical conflict that is deeply woven into the psyches of the protagonists. It may take another generation before the deep freeze begins to thaw.

[1] “Jaryaneh ertejayee mantaghe nemeetavand ghodrateh Iran ra bepazirad” (The reactionary tendency in the region can not accept Iran’s power), Baztab, http://baztab.com/news/55813.php

[2] Henry A. Kissinger, 'The Next Steps with Iran', The Washington Post, 31 July 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...00546.html

[moeen yaseen]

HAJJ 2006/1427
SYMBOL OF THE UNIVERSAL PARADIGM SHIFT &
GLOBAL MUSLIM DEFIANCE OF NWO

Pilgrims Stand on Mount `Arafat
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite

CAIRO — A sea of Muslim pilgrims started streaming early on Friday, December 29, to Mount `Arafat where prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) delivered his last sermon 14 centuries ago.
Standing on Mount `Arafat before sunset is the high point of hajj, and pilgrims who fail to make it on time must repeat their pilgrimage in future.

Men clad in a two-piece seamless white cloth -- which mark a state of purity that erases all differences of race, class or culture - and women fully covered except for the hands and face, had flocked to Arafat on foot or in buses, small vehicles and pick-ups.

"We thank Saudi authorities for smoothing the trick," Egyptian Fatima told the Saudi television.

"I'm really speechless to describe what I feel at the moment. I pray that God would accept our hajj and that all Muslims would embark on such magnificent journey," added Zainab, from the occupied Palestinian territories.

At sunset, the faithful would go to nearby Muzdalifa, a few kilometers from the plain of `Arafat, where they will stay for the night and collect pebbles for the stoning ritual.

On Saturday, December 30, they will return to the valley of Mina to throw pebbles at three pillars on the spot where the devil appeared to Prophet Abraham.

The four-day `Eid Al-Adha begins the same day, with the sacrificial of sheep, goats and cows as a reminder of the great act of sacrifice Prophet Ibrahim and his son Isma`eel were willing to make for the sake of God.

The pilgrims will stay the night in Muzdalifa where they will collect pebbles for the symbolic stoning of the devil at the Jamrat in Mina for three days beginning tomorrow.

The pilgrims will spend another two days in Mina to complete the stoning ceremony that symbolises a willingness to renounce evil.

Saudi Arabia spent more than $1bn over the past year on a project to renovate the stoning site. New entrances and exits were added around the walls to ease the flow, and this year authorities made repeated announcements to pilgrims not to bring luggage to the site.

Saudi Arabia expanded the Jamrat Bridge into a multi-storey structure. The first phase, completed in time for this hajj, allows up to 250,000 pilgrims to move across the bridge each hour.

At least 362 pilgrims were killed in a stampede in Mina in the last Haj, the fourth fatal overcrowding incident to occur at hajj since 2001.

[moeen yaseen]

HAJJ 2006/1427
SYMBOLIC OF HUMANITY'S CLASH WITH THE AXIS OF EVIL


Fri. Dec. 29, 2006
Pilgrims Ready for Devil Stoning
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?


Standing on Arafat is the most important rite of hajj. (Reuters)

MOUNT `ARAFAT — Nearly two million pilgrims are readying themselves for the symbolic stoning of Devil on Saturday, December 31, after standing on Mount `Arafat at the climax of the soul-searching journey of hajj.

A sea of white-clad Muslim faithful started moving to nearby Muzdalifa, a few kilometers from the plain of `Arafat, where they will stay for the night.

Early Saturday, the faithful will make the animal sacrifice ritual, marking the start of the four-day `Eid Al-Adha.

They will also start as of Saturday the stone-throwing ritual.

Pilgrims hurl seven pebbles from behind a fence or from an overhead bridge every day for three days at each of the three 18-meter (58-foot) high concrete pillars symbolizing the devil.

Satan appeared on the same site to Prophet Abraham, son Isma`il and wife Hagar, who each threw seven stones at the devil.

One of the five pillars of Islam, hajj consists of several ceremonies meant to commemorate the trials of Prophet Abraham and his family.

Every able-bodied adult Muslim -- who can financially afford the trip -- must perform hajj once in their lifetime.

Muslim Unity


"Make the Muslim interest your supreme goal," said the mufti. (Reuters)
Sea of Muslim pilgrims stood on Mount `Arafat earlier Saturday where Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) delivered his last sermon 14 centuries ago.

"O, Muslims, wake up," the mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, told the Muslim faithful.

He called on Muslims to cement their unity.

"Make the Muslim interest your supreme goal," he said, warning that the Muslim infighting was playing into the hands of enemies.

The Saudi mufti urged the Muslim leaders to preserve the Islamic identity of the Muslim countries.

He further urged the Muslim youth to stick to their faith to protect their countries.

The Mufti also warned against staging political demonstrations during hajj.

"The hajj rites are not the place for slogans, postures and name-calling," he said.

"The world today is full of hateful party and nationalistic slogans ... all we see is fighting, blood and terrorism, the result of erroneous ideological struggles."

While listening attentively, the Muslim pilgrims were wishing for Allah's forgiveness.

"Whenever I stand on Jebel al-Rahma (Mount `Arafat)I feel reborn," Ruquia Manouzi, a Moroccan woman, told Reuters.

Mohamado Thiam, a telecoms engineer from Senegal, said pilgrims are praying for Muslims in hotspots around the world.

"I'm very happy, look how our nation is expanding," he said.

"But we have to pray for our brethren in Iraq, in Palestine, in Sudan. There are people dying there."

[moeen yaseen]

THE COSMIC DIMENSION TO THE BATTLE AGAINST EVIL

Pilgrims Stone Devil
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=116599431 1901&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout

MENA, Saudi Arabia — More than two million Muslim pilgrims began the symbolic stoning of the devil on Saturday, December 30, putting to the test new safety measures at a stage of the hajj that has seen tragedy in the past.
"This is a symbolic gesture that reminds you of the historic animosity between Satan and human beings, and this stoning is something that Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) showed us to do," Habib al-Wazzani, a Tunisian pilgrim, told Reuters.

Pilgrims hurl seven pebbles from behind a fence or from an overhead bridge every day for three days at each of the three 18-meter (58-foot) high concrete pillars symbolizing the devil.

Satan appeared on the same site to Prophet Abraham, son Isma`il and wife Hagar, who each threw seven stones at the devil.

Saudi authorities have announced the completion of the first phase of the Jamrat Bridge to help avoid bloody accidents during the ritual.

The phase included the setting up of two entry points to the area on the upper level of the bridge where pilgrims throw pebbles during the symbolic stoning of the Devil.

Pilgrims will be allowed to move only in one direction toward the Jamrat Bridge to ensure their safety.

In the worst hajj tragedy in 16 years, 362 pilgrims were crushed to death last year as crowds surged across the bridge to throw stones at the three large walls.

Record Pilgrims

Overnight, an elated mass of pilgrims, clad in white robes symbolizing equality and selflessness, streamed down to Muzdalifah near the holy city of Makkah after a day of prayer.

They chanted prayers in Arabic as they slowly moved along a vast floodlit avenue towards Muzdalifah.

Many carried their belongings on their backs, and some pushed along relatives in wheelchairs. Others climbed onto motorbikes, buses and any other means of transport at hand.

Earlier, pilgrims spent the day at Mount `Arafat, a sacred zone outside Makkah where Prophet Muhammad gave his last sermon 1,400 years ago.

A record 1.65 million pilgrims have come from abroad, a 6 percent rise on the last hajj.

Several hundred thousand people inside Saudi Arabia usually receive permits too.

But anecdotal evidence suggests total pilgrim numbers this season have swelled to more than the record of 2.6 million, as local residents sneak into the holy city of Makkah without official permits.

One of the five pillars of Islam, hajj consists of several ceremonies meant to commemorate the trials of Prophet Abraham and his family.

Every able-bodied adult Muslim -- who can financially afford the trip -- must perform hajj once in their lifetime.

[moeen yaseen]

AND THE EMPIRE MOURNED…. DISSECTING THE BIG LIE

Jason Miller
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16023.htm


“If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'.” ---Will Rogers

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them." --Noam Chomsky


12/30/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- With the intensity of Dale Earnhardt, Jr vying for victory in the Daytona 500, America’s mainstream media outlets have been racing furiously to imbue the citizenry of the Empire with unusually large doses of heavily choreographed agitprop.

Another un-indicted US war criminal has casually ridden off into a peaceful crimson sunset. In response, pundits, talking heads, reporters and various other infotainment personnel are working feverishly to perpetuate America’s collective delusion that we embody integrity, decency, and enlightened values.

Like virtually all of his predecessors and successors in the White House (regardless of their party affiliation), Gerald Ford was guilty of a host of egregious offenses against the human race. But the Big Lie must not die.

So in the wake of the United States’ recent facilitation of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, we in the self-proclaimed “bastion of human rights” are in the midst of six days of mourning for a man would have swung from the gallows long ago had he been judged by the same standards as Saddam.

In apparent deference to Ford’s tireless efforts to advance America’s savage brand of Capitalism, both the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ will be closed on Tuesday. Federal employees and postal service workers will also take the day off to mourn the loss of the 38th president (1).

Despite the deeply hypocritical show of reverence for one so maleficent, it is fitting that a military escort will deliver Ford’s casket to the Capitol’s Rotunda for viewing. Why wouldn’t soldiers bear the body of the former leader of a fascist state replete with rampant corporatism, militarism, and pathological nationalism? And why wouldn’t he lie in state in the Capitol’s Rotunda? After all, Congress has been deeply complicit in creating and preserving the nightmare some refer to as Pax Americana.

Since much of the Empire’s strength is derived from its stable base of obedient workers and consumers, preserving their illusions of the United States’ inherent “goodness” is crucial. Toward that end, consider a sampling of some of the mainstream media’s recent “Ford-lore”.

On 12/27, Newsweek published a piece by Barry Werth. Genuflecting to his corporate paymasters, Barry asserted:

Gerald Ford assumed the presidency when his government was sundering, qualifying him as one of history's bravest leaders.

As Werth continued with his seemingly benign discourse, it is highly likely that his facial appendage began to resemble Pinocchio’s:

Many of those people who originally deplored the (Nixon) pardon for short-circuiting history and eroding the notion that no one, not even the president, is above the law, came around to agree that it was best for the country.

The Washington Post eulogized Ford with a favorable comparison to another perpetrator of wanton slaughter, a man who was responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Japanese civilians:

Truman, Ford used to say, "had guts, he was plain-talking, he had no illusions about being a great intellectual, but he seemed to make the right decisions."

Many would say the same of Gerald Rudolph Ford.

The New York Times, the mainstream media’s “bulwark of liberalism” fueled America’s collective delusion with these choice quotes and observations:

….“He assumed power in a period of great division and turmoil,” President George W. Bush said in a statement broadcast early this morning. “For a nation that needed healing, and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we need him most. During his time in office, the American people came to know President Ford as a man of complete integrity who led our country with common sense and kind instincts.”….

….After a decade of division over Vietnam and two years of trauma over the Watergate scandals, Jerry Ford, as he called himself, radiated a soothing familiarity. He might have been the nice guy down the street suddenly put in charge of the nation, and if he seemed a bit predictable, he was also safe, reliable and reassuring. He placed no intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens on a weary land, and he lived out a modest philosophy. “The harder you work, the luckier you are,” he said once in summarizing his career. “I worked like hell.”….

(Author’s Note: Citizens of the American Empire needed soothing reassurance of their greatness after the humiliating results of the imperial invasion of Vietnam. And like the mainstream media, “Jerry” put no “intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens” on them).

….The pardon, intensely unpopular at the time, came to be generally viewed as correct. In May 2001, Mr. Ford was honored with a “Profile in Courage” Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Senator Edward M. Kennedy spoke and said he had originally opposed the pardon. “But time has a way of clarifying past events,” he said, “and now we see that President Ford was right.”….

….His basic philosophy involved fiscal prudence, strong national defense, suspicion of alien lands and a belief that citizens should earn a living rather than be given one…..

(Author’s Translation: Ford believed in slashing federal spending on programs benefiting humanity to enable increased military spending, was xenophobic, and was opposed to using public funds to aid the poor).

Now that you have perused samples of the rubbish our oligarch overlords are attempting to burnish into the minds of their unsuspecting plebeian underlings, consider how the affable “Jerry” enabled or caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings and ensured that the ruling elite in the United States would reclaim the power they had begrudgingly ceded to the masses in the face of economic upheaval, civil unrest, and powerful progressive movements.

Like our current unitary executive, Ford did not get into the Oval Office by winning an election. Also like Bush, in spite of the fact that the people did not vote him into office, Ford brazenly defied the will of the American public on an issue of great magnitude. Exercising the integrity of the mythologized Ford, “Jerry” fulfilled his end of the bargain he had made with Alexander Haig (3). In exchange for his ascendancy to the Empire’s throne, he shielded Richard Nixon from facing consequences for his multiple grievous transgressions of international and domestic laws.

Paving the way for Reagan and his successors to marginalize America’s poor, minorities, and working class and to gut our Constitution, Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, chose to keep habitual war criminal Henry Kissinger(4) on as his Secretary of State, and elevated future mass murderers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to key White House positions.

Letting Nixon off the hook was a particularly sinister act in at least two ways. Ford, an unelected president in a purported constitutional republic, absolved a fellow patrician of grave violations of international law, the public trust, and the US Constitution. Thus Ford became Nixon’s accomplice. At the same time, he landed a crushing blow for the moneyed class in their persistent assault on the republic envisioned by men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Bear in mind that Ford pardoned a man who was responsible for the deaths of at least 600,000 innocent civilians. During the invasion and occupation of Vietnam, Nixon ordered secret bombings of neighboring Cambodia. The goal was to strike North Vietnamese supply and transit routes, but unfortunately for the Cambodian people, the B-52 carpet bombings did not distinguish the nationalities of victims(5).

Nixon’s use of illegal wire-taps was such a flagrant abuse of executive authority that Congress passed the FISA Law in 1978 to prevent similar breaches of Constitutional law (6). In the wake of Nixon’s immunity from prosecution, the Bush Regime has subsequently ignored the FISA Laws and run roughshod over the Constitution, without consequence. Thank you for setting the precedent, “Jerry”.

Ford also enabled Nixon to evade prosecution for obstruction of justice, perjury and possible income tax evasion (7). The IRS eventually ordered Nixon to pay $467,000, a relative pittance for a man of his means.

Despite the damage and suffering they left in their wake, Nixon and Ford both lived in security and wealth until their mortality finally caught up with them. Saddam met his maker as he dangled from the end of a rope.

Like his predecessor, Ford was quite enamored with Henry Kissinger. He once summarized him with this quip: “wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class Secretary of State. But Henry always protected his own flanks.”

Once Ford assumed the Empire’s helm, he wasted little time before collaborating with Kissinger in another imperial escapade. Consider the US role in Indonesia’s genocide that killed over 200,000 East Timorese:

"Jakarta Godfathers" by John Pilger, Guardian, 7 September, 1999:

"No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally, not even Pol Pot matched Suharto's spree. Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger, climbed out of Indonesian airspace the day the bloodbath began. "They came and gave Suharto the green light," Philip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, told me. "The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesian military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free-fire zone. Women and children were herded into school buildings that were set alight - and all because we didn't want some little country being neutral or leftist at the United Nations." And all because western capital regarded Indonesia as a "prize"."

Declassified in 2001, several US government documents ( clearly demonstrate that “Jerry” and Kissinger gave Suharto, Indonesia’s leader, their blessing to do as he wished with East Timor. Shortly thereafter Suharto launched a wave of US-supported state-sponsored terrorism (9) that lasted until 1999.

Obviously, Gerald Ford was far more shrewd and Machiavellian than the mainstream media’s recent wave of white-washing would indicate. Aside from his complicity in Nixon’s crimes (for which our Ministry of Truth has exculpated Ford by concluding that the pardon was necessary to “heal the nation”), and his role in the carnage in East Timor, he also aligned himself closely with J. Edgar Hoover. Ford played a pivotal role in the Warren Commission’s affirmation of Hoover’s “lone-assassin theory”. As a member of the Warren Commission, Ford convinced the group to alter the final version of their report to conclude that the same bullet killed Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Governor Connally. Robert Morningstar, who has researched the Kennedy assassination extensively, stated that the Ford revision was “the most significant lie in the whole Warren Commission report."(10)

Admittedly, some of the positive qualities and deeds the corporatized Fourth Estate has recently been attributing to Gerald Ford are true. However, their apotheosis of a man who harmed far more people than those whom the US state and federal governments murder each year (in open defiance of the Eighth Amendment) reveals the truly deceitful and malignant nature of the mainstream media in the United States.

Ostensibly, our society in the United States is based on democratic principles. In such a society, the purpose of the press would be to act as an independent check on the government’s power. However, our evolution into a corporate-dominated fascist state has obliterated the media’s independence. A handful of colossal corporations owns or controls over 90% of the mainstream media outlets in the United States.

As a result of this incestuous relationship, the Washington Post, CNN, and a mélange of others are but mouthpieces of the government singing a seductive chorus that engenders and sustains the Big Lie. Occasionally they bleat feeble opposition to imperialism and our rapid regression into a nation resembling a banana republic, but most of the time they beat the drums of war, promote the interests of the wealthy, manipulate the hoi polloi with fear, and perpetuate the myths of America’s virtue. Ethical journalists have little or no opportunity to ply their craft in such an environment.

Those who remain captive to the Big Lie will spend the next few days mourning the passing of a man who was fortunate to escape the death penalty with which his country is so infatuated. Those same comforting delusions of superiority, entitlement, and invincibility that enable men like Gerald Ford to act with impunity will entice many Americans to continue wearing the intellectual manacles of the Empire.

As frightening as it may be, it is spiritually and mentally liberating to realize and admit that one of “our own”--an Eagle Scout, a football hero, a Christian, a White heterosexual male, a Capitalist, and an “American”--was capable of the savagery and lawlessness that minds shackled by the Big Lie can only ascribe to “terrorists” like Saddam Hussein.

Despite its tendency to inflict pain, the truth will indeed set you free.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16393733/

(2) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006 122700528.html

(3) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/ford-d28.shtml

(4) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Preface_TOHK.html

(5) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Nixon_Cambodia_LFE.h tml

(6) http://www.alternet.org/story/30350/

(7) http://www.albionmonitor.com/9901b/copyright/nixontax.html

( http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/

(9) http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1206-03.htm

(10) http://www.crimemagazine.com/06/ford-jfk,1111-06.htm

[moeen yaseen]

A DICTATOR CREATED THEN DESTROYED BY AMERICA

By Robert Fisk


12/30/06 "The Independent" -- -- Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.

I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.

It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.

But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".

When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

[moeen yaseen]

THE BLACK BULL DIED TODAY

By Mirza Yawar Baig

12/30/06 "Information Clearing House"-- -- They did it. They gave this Ummah a sacrifice on the day of Eid ul Adha. What an unforgettable Eid!! A human sacrifice. Not a sheep or goat. What a message!! Wow!! What a powerful message that I am sure has shaken all the thrones of the puppets who are watching the events. Poor puppets!!

Saddam Hussain, they say, is dead. The news reporting is one good example of the pimp press in full swing. If anyone who is not suffering from amnesia can recall, 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' was a phrase coined by American foreign policy experts to lie to their own nation and the world and justify their invasion of Iraq. Then their lie was exposed but by then their objective of looting Iraq's oil had also been accomplished. They had control of the oil fields. And in the process a few hundred thousand Iraqis died at the hands of Americans; well that is inevitable - collateral damage. As they say Weapons of Mass Deception - which of course the pimp press is responsible for and continues to perpetrate on the world.

Death is not the "item" in the news. It is the death of the myth of American justice and freedom. So now we can all breathe freely as we see the true nature of the animal before us. Even those who continued to insist on living in doubt can deny it no longer. But watch out!! This news item and a million like it, floating on the net or shouting themselves hoarse on the TV are all focused on trying to make you and me distracted from the reality of what we are seeing here. So they talk about how brutal Saddam was and how many people he killed and how he 'started' the Iraq-Iran war.

The issue of course is none of those things. If these were in fact issues, then we would see Bush and all his cronies and most of their puppets sitting on thrones in their gilded prisons, swinging from the gallows long before Saddam came anywhere near them. The issue is America's right to invade a sovereign nation. Any country's right to invade and occupy another sovereign nation and loot its wealth. That is the issue. Are we, the people of the world saying that it is the right of America or anyone with the power to do so, to take by force what they want from whoever they want? Are we, the people of the world, saying that it is the right of the rapist to rape? Are we, the people of the world, saying that it is the right of the bandit or the highway robber to hold you up and take from you what he wishes by force? Because in my opinion, by remaining silent, that is exactly what we will be saying. You decide what you want to do. I have already made my decision as you can see.

The pimp press and all those who it serves want you and me to forget these issues. And they believe that if they make enough noise, we will.

Remember O People! The name of the animal is Empire. And you and I have a choice. Sell your soul and bow your head in submission to the King. Or raise your head and it will be cut off. It's as simple as that. Freedom is as it will be defined for you. Justice is as will be given to you. Democracy is as is approved for you. If you elect Hamas as your party of choice, that is not democracy. It will be sabotaged and ever willing pimps will be put in the place of the people you really wanted. If you have any sense you will see the writing on the wall and next time around you will elect Abbas. If not the Empire has unlimited power, money and people to enforce its will. All that will happen is that a 100 of you will die for every American soldier who comes to enforce the will of the Empire. That is a price that the Empire can and will extract. After all it did not get to where it is today by being made of sugar candy, did it?

Resources are for those who can take them and use them. Where they happen to be located is immaterial. Their owners are still the same. Those who come in the way because they happen to be located physically on those resources have a choice; move away quietly and maybe you will even be paid something. If not, you will be moved by force...not sideways...but 6 feet below. Now even the dumbest in the world should be able to understand that, no??

But no!! There are those who are dumber than the dumb. They are those who believe in their right to determine how they will live, by what code. They are those who believe that it is their right to live by their laws in their lands without apology to anyone. They are those who believe in their right to choose who will lead them. They are those who believe that foreigners can't dictate to them, who they should elect to their councils. They are those who believe in their right to use what they own, to sell it to who they want, in whatever currency they choose to sell and at whatever price. They are those who believe that it is the right of the owner of a property to decide to sell or not and at what price. They believe that the buyer can't dictate those terms to them. They are those who believe that all humans are equal irrespective of race, color or religion. They believe that a lack of melanin in the skin is not a sign of human superiority just as a surfeit of it is not. They believe that if this life is to be lived, then it must be lived with honor. They believe that a death with honor is far more preferable than a life without honor. They believe that enslavement is in the mind. And that until they accept in their minds and hearts that they are slaves, they cannot be enslaved. And such people will never be enslaved. No matter how many they kill.

What they don't understand is that every head that is cut off to terrorize only strengthens the resolve that injustice must be removed from the face of the earth. And whatever price is to be paid, is worth the result. The plant of justice is fertilized by the blood of martyrs.

As I write this post I am reminded of the Arabic legend of the White Bull: At Thawr il Abyadh

Once upon a time three bulls lived in the forest. One white, one brown and one black. They were brothers and lived together in harmony. In that forest also lived a tiger who had his eye on the bulls. But every time he attacked one of them the others came to his aid and together they drove the tiger away.

The tiger decided that he needed to change his strategy. So one day when the Black Bull was away, he went to the other two and said, "You know, the Black Bull is black and dirty and evil. Why do you keep him with you? His is a disgrace to you. You are beautiful and noble. If the Black Bull is no longer there, you will have all the grazing to yourself. He takes away your food and adds no value to you." The two bulls listened to the tiger's spiel and said, "Well, you know, he is our brother. What can we do?"

"You need not do anything at all," said the tiger. "I am your friend. I will do what needs to be done. Just don't come to the aid of the Black Bull when he calls you." The others agreed.

The next day, they heard the voice of the Black Bull calling for help in anguish and fear. They listened to him and went back to their grazing. Gradually the calls stopped. The two brothers could not look each other in the eye but then, nice green grass wipes away memories and after a little while it was as if the Black Bull never existed.

Then one day the tiger came to the White Bull when he was alone and said, "So are you happy with the advise I gave you? Didn't I advise you well? Now here is another advise. You are the real king of the forest. You are White and clean and pure and holy and beautiful. You are wise and good. You deserve to live in solitary splendor like a king. Not with some dirty brown trash who you have to share your food with. Why do you need him? He is a liability and an embarrassment to you."

"Well, what should I do?"

"You know the score. Nothing at all. I am there to take care of everything for you. Just relax."

Next day, the White Bull heard the dying screams of the Brown Bull and closed his ears and went back to his grazing.

The White Bull lived for a few days all by himself, grazing where he wanted and drinking from the clean streams of the forest. Then one morning the tiger came again. From the look in his eyes, the White Bull knew that this visit was different. All his life flashed before his eyes. He recalled the time when the three brothers stood together, shoulder to shoulder. Then he recalled all the incidents since then. As the tiger sat before him, not in any hurry, knowing that the result was pre-determined, the White Bull said to him, "I have one last wish. Will you grant it to me?"

"Anything at all my friend", said the tiger.

The White Bull then climbed a hill and when he got to the top of it, he called out to the people of the forest, "O! People, I do not die today. I died the day the Black Bull died."

[moeen yaseen]

THE US DEFEAT: A CHANCE FOR CHANGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Zafar Bangash
December 2006
http://www.muslimedia.com/reflect1206.htm


Visiting Vietnam last month, US president George Bush tried to put a positive spin on the US’s defeat in Iraq by comparing it with the US experience in that country. The truth, however, is that the US defeat in Iraq surpasses the humiliation it suffered in Vietnam in terms of its political implications. Already, its reverberations are being felt in such places as Latin America, where the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua last month. He joins other regional leaders, such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Eva Morales of Bolivia, in standing up to US bullying. Domestically, the Republican party’s defeat in last month’s congressional elections shows the American public’s anger at Bush’s failures. In this column last month, we discussed the US’s certain defeat in Iraq. What Muslims must now do, to reclaim control of their own destinies, is avoid losing the peace, as they did after defeating the Red Army in Afghanistan.

The US drive for “full spectrum dominance”, outlined by the neo-conservatives in the now-infamous “Project for the New American Century”, was the direct result of the sacrifices of Muslims in Afghanistan. That the New American Century, launched with Bush’s election victory in 2000, should last even less time that Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” has profound implications for the Muslim world. The present geo-political map of the Middle East, shaped by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, could be radically transformed if Muslims understand what has happened and act accordingly. It would be an immense tragedy if the US were allowed to reclaim power in the political vacuum created by its defeat, or if the Europeans, Chinese or Indians step into this.

Before we consider the implications of the new reality in the region, let us be clear about the architects of the US’s failure. Two names immediately spring to mind: Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Both are well-known zionists who served in the US defence department while also having close links with Israel. In 1992, soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Wolfowitz outlined his ideas in a paper presented to Dick Cheney, now Bush’s vice president. He argued that the US must ensure that no rival power emerges to challenge the US’s hegemony, and advocated the total domination of the world by the US, through endless war if necessary. These ideas were further developed by Perle. In a 1996 paper called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, Perle advocated an Israeli alliance with Turkey and Jordan to overthrow Saddam Husain’s regime in Iraq, and military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a prelude to creating “a New Middle East” in which Israel would enjoy unrivalled supremacy. Thus the neo-con agenda explains not only the US war on Iraq but also Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon this year (described as the “birth pangs of a New Middle East” by Condoleezza Rice) and the US’s continuing political pressure on Iran and Syria. (Perle also predicted, during hearings in the Senate in November 2002, that the US’s war on Iraq would be financed entirely by the sale of Iraqi oil.)

There is indeed a new Middle East in the making but it is not the one envisioned by Perle. Instead, it is one forged by the sacrifices of mujahideen determined to take control of their people’s destinies by throwing off the yoke of US imperialism. The new dominant players in the region are Islamic Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas. These are all indigenous and popular Islamic movements, leading the resistance to imperialism. Following the defeat of the US, the logical next step is for its local proxies—the governments of Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf States—also to be consigned to the dustbin of history. The Muslim masses have suffered enough at the hands of these dictators; now that their foreign sponsor stands exposed, these local tyrants must go as well.

Achieving this, however, will require clear thinking and bold action by local political forces, particularly the Islamic movements in these countries. They must rise above nationalist and sectarian loyalties, and realize that Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas are their natural allies. In particular, those movements that have chosen to work within existing state structures, for example by operating as political parties within electoral political systems, must ensure that they are not manipulated into defending the status quo against popular forces demanding total, revolutionary change. Instead, they must take the initiative and lead the movements for the liberation of their societies. If Islamic movements in the Arab world fail to seize this moment, the defeat of the US/Zionist alliance is liable to become just another tragic and costly missed opportunity in the Muslims’ long, painful struggle for liberation.

[Abandoned Ego]

Moeen,

Beyond the usual puppets and scapegoats, are you prepared to name the REAL powerbrokers ?

Or are you going to continually piddle around with the deputies ?

Are you simply being polite by refusing to go beyond the "Neo cons did it" kinda nonsense ?

Or are you blind ?

Or are you scared ?

Or are you being respectful to some higher order ?

Or what ?

I'll leave the question open to you to answer.

Anything else, would of course be completely disrespectful to your good self.

[moeen yaseen]

Presumably your comments are referred to the last post on this thread. I am NOT the author but it is Zafar Bangash a noted international Islamic thinker/ editor based in Canada. Your questions are best re-directed to him. I do not accept the writer's argument that it is the Neocons(whether of the rightwing Christian or Zionist variety) that are manipulating everything. The diagnosis and analysis by Zafar Bangash is deficient in that respect. But he has made some valid points from a nonwhite Eurocentric world view which makes it useful. That is exactly why there is a need for truth seekers and truth activists to show more humbleness in our search as well as learn from others who may have something to contribute towards this process. However, as this thread has been developing in terms of events on 9/11, GWOT and the crisis of global capitalism there is no doubt that there are forces much greater than the Neocons in operation. Indeed Abandoned ego you have clearly not read this thread properly as there are several avenues being explored here. Your questioning shows that you have not read other posts on this thread and I suggest you read the entire thread fully as the answers to your questions are there. You have over 500 posts here some which are from world class thinkers. Happy reading! Then do come back. But underpinning this search is an assumption that there is a global web of deceit and evil for that matter. Exactly what manifestation it takes is another matter. Indeed I think those who are dismissive of the religious and spiritual dimension are going to find the search for truth rather difficult if NOT IMPOSSIBLE. The reason is that if one takes the assumption that the global web of deceit is intrinsically evil and de facto evil and is a reflection of Cosmic evil we will not realise what we are up against here and are banging our heads against a brick wall. And it is not surprising that in terms of the Hajj which has just finished in Makkah that one of the climactic acts in the Hajj was for the 2 million plus pilgrims throwing stones at certain stone pillars. The stone pillars were symbolic of the SHAYTAN-IBLIS( Satan) and the need for mankind to identify and oppose this force. The point being made is that there is a direct correlation between the spiritually invisible and materially-physical worlds. That the web of deceit and evil is in direct communion with cosmic evil and if we are going to diagnose and deal with this problem we need to hook up with Cosmic forces of good. This obviously involves a leap of faith which many are not prepared to take. Thus all truth seekers also need to reflect in the ocean of consciousness and look in the mirror.

[moeen yaseen]

SECTARIANISM: THE WEST's SECRET WEOPON IN ITS WAR ON ISLAM
Abu Dharr
January 2007 / Guest Editorial
http://www.muslimedia.com/abudhar205.htm


All over the world, the confrontation between the forces of Islam and kufr is intensifying, with the forces of the Islamic movement taking on the kuffar – represented in the modern world by the zionist-US dominated West – in many very different ways. And all over the world, we are seeing the kuffar hitting back in one very dangerous way: the promotion of sectarianism and internal discord among Muslims.

In Iran, for the first time in contemporary history, the leaders of the Islamic state have taken the initiative to open up the most controversial issue in imperialist-zionist circles: the so-called holocaust. Despite all the Western liberal propaganda about “freedom of speech”, this is a part of the zionist mythology that has never been put on the table and openly debated with open minds and without prejudice. The centrality of the holocaust in the zionist justification for their occupation of Palestine is such that those who want to counter them must address it. However, like anything else that Islamic Iran does to support the Palestinians, this move will no doubt be used by the zionists to spin more accusations against them, and to justify their own plans against the Islamic State. At the same time the Islamic leadership in Lebanon represented by Hizbullah, leading a coalition of other patriotic Lebanese and anti-zionist forces, are slow-roasting the American-sponsored government of the Saudi affiliate Fuad Siniora. In occupied Palestine, the refusal of the beleaguered Hamas movement to compromise has forced the Palestinian president Mahmud ‘Abbas to expose himself as the spearhead of zionist and imperialist provocations. Isma‘il Haniyyah returns from a tour of Muslim countries with tens of millions of dollars for the foodless Palestinian people, and the old guard of Fatah harass him at the border, prevent him from bringing money into Palestine, and then try to assassinate him. Desperate people do desperate things; and the politicians of the PLO are showing themselves willing to inflict any degree of suffering on the Palestinians in order to try to protect the political empire they have built in the Palestinian Authority.

Meanwhile political pressure is being felt in the cities of Washington and Tel Aviv. The US capitalist establishment, seeing its domination threatened by the fall-out of the Iraq fiasco, are telling Bush and his coterie that they must deal with Tehran and Damascus to get things sorted. Some are even talking about reaching a “grand bargain” after detailed negotiations on a broad range of issues. In other diplomatic and political quarters, the sirens are sounding the alarm about the ascendancy of Tehran in the whole Middle East. As the smoke begins to clear, it appears to some observers that the US is on the run across the Middle East: Iraq is more than a disaster; Lebanon is less than a success; Afghanistan is slipping away; and Saudi Arabia is in the twilight zone. The American imperium is dangerously close to failing; and yet, like a cornered animal, the Bush administration is as dangerous and aggressive as ever.

Knowing that direct military confrontation has got them nowhere in the Islamic world – a lesson they should have learnt years ago, from Saddam Hussein's total failure to defeat Islamic Iran in the 1980s – the Anglo-American-Israeli axis of evil is now reverting to a last-ditch strategy: exploiting the sectarian fault-lines within the Ummah in order to weaken the enemy that they face. The Sunni/Shi‘i schism is the last diplomatic bombshell in their political arsenal, and Iraq – poor suffering, burning Iraq – is where this bombshell has been detonated, to spread its poisonous fall-out across the Middle East. All talk of a democratic Iraq is finished now; now the US's closest ally in the Muslim world, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, wants to come to the rescue of its Sunni brothers in Iraq. Forget about its Sunni brothers in Palestine; their decades of struggle and suffering against zionists merit no Saudi assistance. But the Sunni Muslims of Iraq are must be encouraged and assisted to fight against the Shi'i Muslims alongside whom they have lived peaceably for years. But it is not the love of Sunni Muslims that motivates the politics and the policies of the Saudi ruling family; it is rather the instructions and guidelines that come to them from Washington – and if things continue to develop as they have been in recent years, the orders will soon be arriving in Riyadh directly from Tel Aviv, instead of taking the indirect route through Washington.

So what is the new political development in Iraq that will save the administration in Washington, or at least help it create a more favorable political climate before the presidential elections in less than two years time? The answer is as simple as it is bloody: sectarian warfare leading to the break-up of Iraq. For the US, violence that can be blamed on sectarianism has the advantage of being somebody else's fault, while the “inevitable” break-up of the country and the establishment of pro-Western rulers in at least parts of it can be presented as a success of sorts. So the Saudi government, which has placed tight restrictions on fund-raising and contributions to Islamic charities and brotherhoods around the world, is now funding Sunni groups in Iraq. For this deadly game to work, the Iranians will have to finance and support Shi‘i sectarians in Iraq. This, of course, is not something that the US and Israel can order, as they can give orders to Riyadh; however, they confidently expect, and are probably not wrong, that Tehran will play along as a matter of national interest or “Shi‘i solidarity.”

There are two words coming into vogue in this new zionist-imperialist scheme; they are Wahhabi and Safawi, used by Shi'is and Sunnis respectively to label and condemn their opponents. If things continue to slide down this dangerous sectarian slope, two stronger words will become more common; they are already being heard in places. These are nawasib and rawafid respectively. These two words were the “nigger” words for Sunnis and Shi‘is way back in the early centuries of Islam, when sectarianism reached a fanatical climax. Recently around 40 ulama’ in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia signed an edict that virtually declares open hostilities against Shi‘is. The timing could not be more crucial as it comes just weeks before the annual hajj in Makkah. We can only pray that the fanatics will not ignite their sectarian fuel in the Holy Lands at these Holy Times. However, whatever happens or does not happen during this hajj season should not prevent us from viewing the larger picture, in which officials and politicians in Egypt, Jordan, and Arabia are seeing a “Shi‘i arc” extending from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. They fear that, at the minimum, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon will become one political bloc. This governmental mindset has to take a sectarian course of action; therefore, protecting the Sunnis, according to this twisted and maligned logic, begins with fighting the Shi‘is in Iraq. The fear hiding behind this fear is the zionist fear of an Islamic bloc of people (140 million) on its northern border.

If the sectarian bomb explodes in Iraq, the fall-out could contaminate Muslims around the world. Let us not be drawn into this massive political and “religious” trap. Let us, both Sunnis and Shi‘is, confess that we all have our own types of fanatics, and let us take the lead in opposing the fanatics on our own side, instead of contributing to the polarization by pointing the finger only at fanatics on the other side. If the Islamic State in Iran cannot do that with the Shi‘i component of the Ummah, and the wider Islamic movement cannot do that with the Sunni component of the Ummah, we will almost inevitably find ourselves moving down a path of self-destruction. In recent times our relative solidarity has caused our enemies to split, divide and shatter. Now is the worst possible time to listen to sectarians, schismatics and stooges who are working to promote the zionist-imperialist agenda.

Abu Dharr

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT, NWO AND HUMAN SACRIFICE


Saddam Immortalized by `Eid Hanging
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=116599431 4057&pagename=Zone-English-News%2FNWELayout


"Hanging him on the occasion of `Eid Al-Adha has once again made him a hero," Shujaat Hussain said.

CAIRO — Images of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein being led to the gallows on one of Islam's most important feast days and the sectarian and politicized nature of the execution have immortalized the late leader and risks further fueling civil strife in the occupied country, politicians and experts said on Sunday, December 31.
"Executing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussain on `Eid day has made him a hero from zero," Pakistan Muslim League President Shujaat Hussain told Pakistan Tribune Sunday, December 31.

"It is no doubt that Saddam Hussain had committed many atrocities and was involved in several crimes but hanging him on the occasion of `Eid Al-Adha has once again made him a hero."

The ousted strongman was executed in Baghdad at dawn on Saturday as Muslims began celebrating `Eid al-Adha, one of the major feasts in the Muslim calendar.

Grainy footage of a grey-bearded and calm-looking Saddam being prepared for the gallows was aired on Iraqi state television and re-broadcast across the Arab world.

Even the West's leading Middle East allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, publicly spoke out against the choice of the first day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice to put Saddam to death.

The European Union denounced the death sentence as "barbaric," saying it would turn Saddam into a "martyr."

"Unfortunately Saddam Hussein risks to appear as a martyr, and he does not deserve that. He is not a martyr, he committed the worse things," European Union's aid and development Commissioner Louis Michel told Reuters in a phone interview.

"The death penalty is against the values of the European Union ... we are against by principle, whatever the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein."

US President George W. Bush termed the execution an important milestone. Bush carefully measured words in a written statement from his Texas ranch.

"Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself," Bush said in his statement. "Many difficult choices and further sacrifices lie ahead."

Sympathy


"Saddam was being dragged away like he was the sheep waiting to be slaughtered," said Gad.
Experts say that the `Eid execution has won Saddam's sympathy from Arabs and Muslims worldwide whether they support him or not.

"Saddam was being dragged away like he was the sheep waiting to be slaughtered," Emad Gad, researcher with the Cairo-based Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Sunday, December 31.

"The main issue here is that the execution took place on the morning of the `Eid Al-Adha. This will stir anger and humiliation in people, whether they supported him or not."

Gad said the hanging images would further alienate Muslims and Arabs against the United States.

"Generally in the region, people's emotions are already anti-US, and these images will add to that feeling," he warned.

The executive editor of the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, Nabil Khatib, agreed.

"The pictures will re-create the anger and frustration among a large part of the Arab masses," Khatib told AFP.

"Once more, ordinary Arabs felt that there is a conspiracy against their symbols."

Prominent Jordanian criminal lawyer Sameeh Khreis criticized the swift appeal process and execution and said the hanging's timing disrespected Arabs and Muslims.

The execution "was very, very fast, and in my mind to execute him today on the first day of our Eid, the American policy decided to challenge us and our feelings as an Arab people and Muslim people," he told The Associated Press.

Saddam Hussein's execution drew outcries from human rights activists who condemned the hanging as too hasty and said they feared the trial may taint the future of Iraq's justice system.

"The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge these actions harshly," Richard Dicker, director of New York-based group's International Justice Program, was quoted by The International Herald Tribune as saying on Sunday.

Saddam's execution came nearly two months after his November 5 sentencing for his role in the 1982 slayings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill him.

Fueling Sectarianism

Pundits have also warned that sectarianism and violence would be further fueled in already volatile country.

"Saddam's death would give rise to sectarianism in Iraq," Shujaat Hussain, the Pakistani scholar, said.

Though spilling Muslim blood is forbidden during some Arab months including this Dhul Hiijah, Iraqi Shiites feted his demise, dancing and cracking off bursts of automatic fire.

Sectarianism was present when Saddam Hussein was sent to the gallows with a final taunt by hangers, who chanted the names of two of Shiite leaders while the noose was readied.

In video footage of the execution, apparently captured on a mobile phone and spreading across the Internet on Sunday, December 31, the hangers can be clearly heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada," and "Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr," according to Al-Jazeera satellite channel.

Samer Hamzeh, news consultant for state-run Dubai Media Incorporated which groups Dubai Television and three other channels, warned that the graphic footage of Saddam being led to the gallows risked sparking a violent backlash in Iraq.

"This is not our daily news picture. It is a historic, very emotional picture ... and the effect of emotional pictures does not show right away," he said.

Hamzeh said the fact that Saddam looked composed as he was readied for execution would not diminish the negative impact of the footage.

"It is not about his behaviour. The normal viewer will see the picture as humiliating," he argued. "Humiliation can provoke anger, violence."

On Saturday, soon after Saddam was hanged, at least 77 people were killed in a series of bomb attacks, mostly against crowded Shiite areas.

A car bomb exploded in a fish market in the Shiite town of Kufa, and a triple bombing ripped through a Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad.

The abyss of civil strife into which Iraq has sunk since the US-led invasion has cast a shadow over `Eid in Iraq.

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT, NWO , HUMAN SACRIFICE AND MUSLIM UNITY


Shiite Scholars Deplore Saddam Hanging

"Choosing the first day of `Eid Al-Adha to execute Saddam was in violation of the rules banning executions during religious occasions," said Moayed

CAIRO — Iraqi Shiite religious authorities (Marjaiyas) have condemned as "un-Islamic" the way ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was executed on the first day of `Eid Al-Adha, slamming the secret filming of the grisly hanging.
"Choosing the first day of `Eid Al-Adha to execute Saddam was in violation of the rules banning executions during religious occasions," Sheikh Hussein al-Moayed told IslamOnline.net on Friday, January 5.

"It also clashed with the manners that any Muslim should abide by."

Saddam was executed on Saturday, December 30, the same day `Eid Al-Adha, one of the major feasts in the Muslim calendar, began in the Muslim world.

The first chief judge who presided over Saddam's trial on Monday, January 1, blasted as "illegal" Saddam's execution on the first day of `Eid Al-Adha.

Rizkar Mohammed Amin said Iraqi law banned executions during the Muslim feasts.

The Shiite authorities also denounced taunting Saddam while he was taken to the gallows.

"It was an insult and humiliation to shoot Saddam's execution," Moayed said.

"Islam calls for observing noble manners and calls for respect of moral and human principles."

"Muslims should follow in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) who has urged his companions to be soft on the captives and respect their dignity and never insult a man when he is put to death."

Grisly video captures of Saddam's execution showed guards mocking the ousted president by shouting the name of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a bitter opponent of Saddam, minutes before he was put to death.

The two-and-half minute film shot on a mobile telephone camera has spread like wildfire on the Internet and triggered angry outbursts from the Muslim and international leaders.

The audio of the video clearly captures a voice shouting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" at a sneering Saddam, inspiring some observers to compare the execution to a sectarian lynching.

Unity


"All developments in Iraq, including Saddam's execution, are taking place by a US green light," Gabbori said

Shiite authority Ali Al-Gabbori blamed the US occupation for the timing of Saddam's execution on the first day of `Eid Al-Adha.

"All developments in Iraq, including Saddam's execution, are taking place by a US green light," Gabbori told IOL.

US officials denied their knowledge of the timing of Saddam's execution on the beginning of the Muslim occasion.

"US statements about having no idea about the timing of Saddam's hanging are nothing but attempts to fuel sedition and instability in Iraq," added Gabbori.

The Shiite leader said that sneering Saddam before his death only aimed to fuel sectarian tension in the war-weary country.

"Words pronounced by guards during the execution party did not represent any Iraqi trends (in reference to Sadr or Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq)," he said.

"These words were motivated by the Americans who have many spies who seek to put the blame on certain trends for sparking sedition."

Gabbori said that developments of Saddam's trial and execution were part of foreign political schemes.

"These schemes serve no good for the Iraqis," he said, adding that the furor triggered by Saddam's execution caused to distract the Iraqis away from the atrocities committed during Saddam's rule.

The Shiite cleric called on the different Iraqi sects to cement their unity.

"Divisions and sectarianism will only break up the country, which would only play into the hands of the occupation."

Moayed agreed.

"We should not give way to our enemies to use Saddam's execution to fuel sectarianism or spark sectarian reprisals," he said.

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT, IRAQGATE AND NWO PROFITEERING SUFFOCATE TRUTH


"Secrets" Buried With Saddam: Experts
Ahmad Atta
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=116599439 7969&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout


Some argue that Saddam was about to spill the beans about the Anfal operation.

CAIRO — The hasty execution of Saddam Hussein has buried many "secrets" that could have otherwise embarrassed, if not implicated, Western officials, some analysts believe.
"There are secrets known only to Saddam and his top aides, now on death rows," Mohamed al-Sheikhli, director of the Iraqi Transitional Justice Center, told IslamOnline.net.

"They not only executed Saddam but also buried the truth with him," he opined.

The ousted Iraqi president, 69, was hanged on December 30, the first day of the `Eid Al-Adha, and leaked mobile phone video footage showed him being taunted as he stood on the gallows.

The execution has sparked global criticism and condemnation and continues to draw almost daily protest in and outside Iraq.

Saddam, his half brother and intelligence chief Barzan Hassan al-Tikriti and revolutionary court judge Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, were convicted of ordering collective punishment against the village of Dujail after agents of incumbent Premier Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party tried to assassinate the strongman there in 1982.

The rapid execution has raised eyebrows.

Rizkar Mohammed Amin, the first chief judge who presided over Saddam's trial, has blasted the execution as "illegal".

A few hours before Saddam was sent to the gallows, his deputy premier Tariq Aziz expressed an urgent desire to testify in the trial.

"Aziz has told me he has very important information that he wishes to explain to the world," said his lawyer Badih Aref Ezzat.

"This information will cause as much embarrassment inside the country as outside."

Anfal Secrets

Pundits believe that Saddam was about to spill the beans about the Anfal, the 1980-1988 military campaign against ethnic Kurds in which prosecutors say 180,000 people were killed, many of them gassed.

They say the hangmen wanted to lay to rest with Saddam classified information implicating regional and western heavyweights, including the US, in the Anfal genocide.

"The last hearings of the Anfal case unveiled a secret protocol between Saddam's regime and the Turkish government at the time to deal with Kurds in northern Iraq before the attack," Sheikhli said.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an armed separatist group listed as a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the US, has for years found safe haven in the mountainous, Kurdish-run region in northern Iraq.

Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan has earlier this week accused Washington and Baghdad of failing to keep promises to cut off channels for PKK financing and close down PKK offices in Iraq.

"The Anfal trail was further expected to expose the involvement of western companies, especially German, in supplying Iraq with chemical weapons during its eight-year war with Iran," Sheikhli said.

"The US was at good terms with Saddam at the time and also helped him acquire chemical weapons," the activist added.

"Iraqgate: Saddam Hussein, US Policy and the Prelude to the Persian Gulf War," a book by a team of Middle East experts from the US Harvard and Columbia universities, has shown documents outlining US weapon supplies to Iraq during its war with neighboring Tehran.

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, met Saddam in 1983 in his capacity as the personal envoy of later US President Ronald Regan to cement bilateral ties.


Iraqis Implicated


Baathists say that Samarrai is implicated in the Anfal and Halabja operations.
Experts further believe that the rapid execution of Saddam served best some of the incumbent Iraqi officials, who did have blood on their hands under Saddam's regime.

"Revealing the secrets of the Anfal campaign would have embarrassed key figures in the incumbent government, including presidential security advisor Wafiq al-Samarrai," Ragai Al-Fayed, an Egyptian expert at Iraqi affairs, told IOL.

Samarrai was the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Services under Saddam. He also headed the Iran unit in the Military Intelligence during the Iraq-Iran war.

Fayed said many Baathists consider Samarrai the driving force behind both the Anfal and Halabja campaigns.

Maliki rushed the execution of his former enemy despite reservations from his Kurdish coalition partners, who had expected the appeal process to run for months to allow more time to have their grievances heard.

The question many Kurds ask today is: "Why didn't they wait until the Anfal case was finished to execute him?"

[moeen yaseen]

THE DEMONIZATION OF MUSLIMS AND THE BATTLE FOR OIL

Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO200 70104&articleId=4347


Throughout history, "wars of religion" have served to obscure the economic and strategic interests behind the conquest and invasion of foreign lands. "Wars of religion" were invariably fought with a view to securing control over trading routes and natural resources.

The Crusades extending from the 11th to the 14th Century are often presented by historians as "a continuous series of military-religious expeditions made by European Christians in the hope of wresting the Holy Land from the infidel Turks." The objective of the Crusades, however, had little to do with religion. The Crusades largely consisted, through military action, in challenging the dominion of the Muslim merchant societies, which controlled the Eastern trade routes.

The "Just War" supported the Crusades. War was waged with the support of the Catholic Church, acting as an instrument of religious propaganda and indoctrination, which was used in the enlistment throughout Europe of thousands of peasants, serfs and urban vagabonds.

America's Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East

In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds.

America's Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East is no exception. The "war on terrorism" purports to defend the American Homeland and protect the "civilized world". It is upheld as a "war of religion", a "clash of civilizations", when in fact the main objective of this war is to secure control and corporate ownership over the region's extensive oil wealth, while also imposing under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank (now under the leadership of Paul Wolfowitz), the privatization of State enterprises and the transfer of the countries' economic assets into the hands of foreign capital. .

The Just War theory upholds war as a "humanitarian operation". It serves to camouflage the real objectives of the military operation, while providing a moral and principled image to the invaders. In its contemporary version, it calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against "rogue states" and "Islamic terrorists", which are threatening the Homeland.

Possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central to the Bush administration's justification for invading and occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Taught in US military academies, a modern-day version of the "Just War" theory has been embodied into US military doctrine. The "war on terrorism" and the notion of "preemption" are predicated on the right to "self defense." They define "when it is permissible to wage war": jus ad bellum.

Jus ad bellum serves to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It also serves to convince the troops that the enemy is "evil" and that they are fighting for a "just cause". More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda.

The Battle for Oil. Demonization of the Enemy

War builds a humanitarian agenda. Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again. The Crusades consisted in demonizing the Turks as infidels and heretics, with a view to justifying military action.

Demonization serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth. The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.

The US led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region. (See table and maps below).

Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate. (See table below).

In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Western countries including its major oil producers ( Canada, the US, Norway, the UK, Denmark and Australia) control approximately 4 percent of total oil reserves. (In the alternative estimate of the Oil and Gas Journal which includes Canada's oil sands, this percentage would be of the the order of 16.5%. See table below).

The largest share of the World's oil reserves lies in a region extending (North) from the tip of Yemen to the Caspian sea basin and (East) from the Eastern Mediterranean coastline to the Persian Gulf. This broader Middle East- Central Asian region, which is the theater of the US-led "war on terrorism" encompasses according to the estimates of World Oil, more than sixty percent of the World's oil reserves. (See table below).

Iraq has five times more oil than the United States.

Muslim countries possess at least 16 times more oil than the Western countries.

The major non-Muslim oil reserve countries are Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, China and Brazil. (See table)

Demonization is applied to an enemy, which possesses three quarters of the world's oil reserves. "Axis of evil", "rogue States", "failed nations", "Islamic terrorists": demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America's "war on terror". They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.

The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. (See map). The oil fields are encircled: NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN "peace keeping" operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian deployed as part of the "war on terrorism".



USS Enterprise Strike Group

The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under "free market" supervision. This control also extends to strategic oil and gas pipeline corridors (e.g. Afghanistan).

Demonization is a PSYOP, used to sway public opinion and build a consensus in favor of war. Psychological warfare is directly sponsored by the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus. It is not limited to assassinating or executing the rulers of Muslim countries, it extends to entire populations. It also targets Muslims in Western Europe and North America. It purports to break national consciousness and the ability to resist the invader. It denigrates Islam. It creates social divisions. It is intended to divide national societies and ultimately trigger "civil war". While it creates an environment which facilitates the outright appropriation of the countries' resources, at the same time, it potentially backlashes, creates a new national consciousness, develops inter-ethnic solidarity, brings people together in confronting the invaders.

It is worth noting that the triggering of sectarian divisions and "civil wars" is contemplated in the process of redrawing of the map of the Middle East, where countries are slated to be broken up and transformed into territories. The map of the New Middle East, although not official, has been used by the US National War Academy. It was recently published in the Armed Forces Journal (June 2006). In this map, nation states are broken up, international borders are redefined along sectarian-ethnic lines, broadly in accordance with the interests of the Anglo-American oil giants (See Map below). The map has also been used in a training program at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers.

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST


Map: click to enlarge

Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

The Oil Lies in Muslim Lands

The oil lies in Muslim lands. Vilification of the enemy is part and parcel of Eurasia energy geopolitics. It is a direct function of the geographic distribution of the World's oil and gas reserves. If the oil were in countries occupied predominantly by Buddhists or Hindus, one would expect that US foreign policy would be directed against Buddhists and Hindus, who would also be the object of vilification..

In the Middle East war theater, Iran and Syria, which are part of the "axis of evil", are the next targets according to official US statements.

US sponsored "civil wars" have also been conducted in several other strategic oil and gas regions including Nigeria, the Sudan, Colombia, Somalia, Yemen, Angola, not to mention Chechnya and several republics of the former Soviet Union. Ongoing US sponsored "civil wars", which often include the channelling of covert support to paramilitary groups, have been triggered in the Darfur region of Sudan as well as in Somalia, Darfur possesses extensive oil reserves. In Somalia, lucrative concessions have already been granted to four Anglo-American oil giants.

"According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco [now part of BP], Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there." (America's Interests in Somalia, Global Research, 2002)

Globalization and the Conquest of the World's Energy Resources

The collective demonization of Muslims, including the vilification of Islam, applied Worldwide, constitutes at the ideological level, an instrument of conquest of the World's energy resources. It is part of the broader economic, political mechanisms underlying the New World Order.

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT AND THE CLASH OF OIL AND ZIONIST LOBBIES

Defeat in Iraq leads to ‘civil war’ in the US
http://www.muslimedia.com/reflect0107.htm

America’s defeat in Iraq is resulting in unforeseen consequences that will affect global politics in profound ways. Virtual civil wars have erupted both in Washington and in Riyadh among the hordes of Saudi “royals”. Fought only rhetorically, the war in Washington is more serious as it involves two powerful groups within the establishment: the oil lobby and the zionist lobby. Having wielded considerable influence for several decades, the zionist lobby took effective control of US foreign policy when George W. Bush became president in 2000. There were also other players who backed the zionists’ aggressive policy prescriptions—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice—but the fact that its intellectual underpinnings were provided by the zionists gave them almost total control. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed were their pet projects, and part of their plan for world domination.

The oil lobby’s spokesperson is James Baker. He is a close confidant of the Bush family and a Texan wheeler-dealer who was instrumental in securing the presidency for Bush in 2000 through a legal coup, when Bush failed to garner the requisite votes to enter the White House. Baker is thus no ordinary American; he is the quintessential establishment insider. As co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, he has outlined a strategy for the US’s exit from Iraq because the establishment realizes that the war in Iraq is lost. Despite talk of sending more US troops to Iraq, ostensibly to lay the groundwork for a final withdrawal, this is a non-starter as there is no equipment to arm them. Besides, Baker cannot be dismissed so easily. He has enormous influence with several important groups, and he can make life very difficult for Bush and the Republican Party if his prescriptions are not followed.

The question we must ask is why Baker is so adamant about changing course in Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Baker has crossed some zionist red lines; he has stated bluntly that the root of all problems in the Middle East is the issue of Palestine and that Washington must pressure Israel to find a solution. He has also broached another subject declared taboo by the zionists: the US’s dealings with Iran and Syria. It was the Canadian-born neocon David Frumm who coined the phrase “axis of evil” for Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2002, bracketing Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea. This was part of the neocon-zionist agenda to target Iran. Nobody had imagined at the time that five years later the US would be facing disaster in Iraq. Worse still, the US has lost much of the influence in the Middle East that successive US administrations had carefully nurtured over 60 years. Thanks to Bush’s stupidity and the zionists’ adventurism, all that lies in rubble now. But the Texas oilmen—Baker and his colleagues—are not going to allow their interests to be sacrificed to advance the zionist agenda. In 1991, Baker told Israel that Washington would deduct whatever money Tel Aviv spent on Jewish settlements from aid given by the US; and he followed through with this threat. The Iraq Study Group’s real intent must be seen in this light. Baker has made clear he will not take no for an answer. He has let it be known that the recommendations of his study must be accepted in full. “This is not a fruit salad that you can pick and choose from,” he told Bush pointedly.

The zionist lobby has been challenged from another quarter as well. In his latest book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, former president Jimmy Carter denounced Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Despite the zionists’ hysterical denunciations, and the fact that many Democrats have distanced themselves from him, Carter has stuck to his guns. Such criticism of Israel is unprecedented in the US, where politicians recoil at the thought of offending the mighty zionist lobby. Carter has felt able to break this taboo as he does not plan to run for office again; he is considered an elder statesman of Democratic politics. As a result, for the first time in US history, the Israeli lobby finds itself confronted by two powerful segments of the establishment that regard Israeli policies as inimical to US interests. Jewish writers, such as Norman Finkelstein of New York State University, have predicted that if the US establishment ever considered Israeli policies to be damaging its interests, Israel would be abandoned immediately.

Coupled with economic difficulties because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Bush’s tax-breaks for the rich, the prognosis for America’s future is bleak. With the military stretched to breaking-point and no money left to finance additional wars, the US is vulnerable today. Wars are a systemic need of the American establishment to sustain the illusion that the US is “making progress”. This myth is no longer sustainable. The civil war in the US political establishment caused by its defeat in Iraq should hasten the day when the world will finally be rid of the menace of this rogue superpower.

[moeen yaseen]

GWOT SPREADS TO THE HORN OF AFRICA

Somalia - the Next Afghanistan + Iraq?
12 Jan 12, 2007, 00:29
http://www.garoweonline.com/stories/publish/article_7035.shtml
Issa Shivji**


On 9th January 2007, while we were basking in the limelight of Dr Migiro's appointment, BBC reported that an American Air-Force AC-130 jet had bombed a site in Somalia near the Kenyan border. The excuse was the usual one - to destroy alleged Al-Qaida agents who, the Americans have constantly propagandized, are part of the Union of Islamic Courts. The planes flew from an American air base in another African country, Djibouti.

This is a very, very ominous turn of events. Africans have constantly warned of the American military design on the Eastern seaboard. Yet, our "leaders" have thoughtlessly been currying favour with this vicious military power. In the horn, the heavily militarized Ethiopia has become their 'on the scene agent', doing the dirty work of the American warmonger.

First, the Americans pushed through a Security Council resolution to send an African peace-keeping force to Somalia. This was only a cover; anyone could have seen it. The most important part of that resolution was not so much the peace-keeping force but the lifting of the United Nations (UN) embargo on arms sales to Somalia. The resolution provided some legitimacy - albeit fig-leaf - to the Ethiopian military presence in that war-torn country. Unilaterally, with of course the green light from the US, Ethiopia invaded Somalia ostensibly in support of the so-called Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

The TFG is a cruel joke. It is made up of former warlords who have kept the murderous killings alive in Somalia for the past 15 years. These warlords are supported by the US and the Ethiopians. It has simply no base in Somalia. No government in Somalia with even little roots could have ever allied with Ethiopia, which is essentially an occupying force.

Regrettably, Tanzania co-sponsored the Security Council Resolution. Worse, Tanzania is the only African country which is a member of the American sponsored International Contact Group. The other members are the US, UK, Norway, Sweden, Italy and the EU. The AU, Arab League and Kenya attend as observers. The contact group ploy was clearly meant to by-pass ??what is IGAD (IGAD). No wonder Kenya was angered when Tanzania, without proper prior consultations with Kenya, agreed to be part of the Contact Group.

Ethiopia broke ranks with IGAD when it invaded Somalia. The US broke ranks with the Contact Group when it struck Somalia. So much for regional and international collective peace-keeping!

Who authorized the US to strike deep into Africa's heartland? Let us not be taken in by the so-called Al-Qaida presence. This is not the first time the Americans are telling a blatant lie. They did it in August 1998 when Clinton ordered his cruise missiles to attack the al-Shifa Pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The Americans said it was producing VX gas. In reality, it was producing medicine. Clinton knew it, but human lives, except American, matter little to US presidents. Again, Bush told a lie that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He told another lie that Saddam was connected with terrorists. We have seen the results.

If we keep quiet about American military planes flying over African skies, they will paint our lands red with blood. Within less than a decade, the Americans have razed two countries to the ground, allegedly in search of terrorists. This air-strike is a curtain raiser to expand the Middle East War theatre to Africa. We forget this only at our peril. The US 'war on terror' is worse than the proxy-hot wars that the US instigated on the continent during the Cold War era. Now, it is fomenting and instigating civil wars in which Africans will fight Africans, not only across borders but within borders - Muslims against Christians, moderates against extremists, radicals against liberals. It does not matter to them. During the Iran-Iraq war Kissinger quipped: "Let both houses burn"! And when asked about the death of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions, Madeline Albright shamelessly intoned: "It is worth the price".

The US has just announced the formation of an African command within its military forces to "train African troops" to hunt down terrorists (meaning our own people). The truth is, and the American spokesmen and women say it openly - that the command has been set up to protect oil resources as 25 per cent of US oil needs come from Africa.

Somalia today has all the ingredients of becoming the next Afghanistan or Iraq. God forbid! The people of Africa must rise up to condemn the American strike without reservations. The youth of Africa must understand that the MacDonaldisation of the world is accompanied by MacDonnelisation [MacDonnel Douglas is an American firm supplying defense needs.]. Don't be mesmerized by globalization.

Globalization is the most militarized phase of imperialism, just as it is the beastly face of capitalism.