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"Cracks in the Constitution"
Review By Stephen Lendman, August 16, 2007
Ferdinand Lundberg (1905 - 1995) was a 20th century economist, journalist, historian and author of such books as The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today; The Myth of Democracy; Politicians and Other Scoundrels; and the subject of this review - Cracks in the Constitution.
Lundberg's book was published twenty-seven years ago, yet remains as powerfully important and relevant today as then. Simply put, the book is a blockbuster. It's must reading to learn what schools to the highest levels never teach about the nation's most important document that lays out the fundamental law of the land in its Preamble, Seven Articles, Bill of Rights, and 17 other Amendments. Lundberg deconstructs it in depth, separating myth from reality about what he called "the great totempole of American society."
He does it in 10 exquisitely written chapters with examples and detail galore to drive home his key message that our most sacred of all documents is flawed. It was crafted by 55 mostly ordinary but wealthy self-serving "wheeler dealers" (among whom only 39 signed), and the result we got and now live with falls far short of the "Rock of Ages" it's cracked up to be. That notion is pure myth. This review covers in detail how Lundberg smashed it in each chapter.
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US Unilateralism: Nonproliferation and Unilateral Proliferation
Henry C.K. Liu, October 9, 2006
State policies or actions are deemed “unilateral” if they have significant impacts on people in other states but undertaken by a single state without the mandate of bilateral or multilateral treaties or in violation or defiance or rejection of such treaties.
US unilateralism did not start with the Bush administration. Its moralistic root traces to Christian Right influence on US foreign policy after WWII, especially over US policy on China. It was the ideological basis for the Cold War with a self-righteous Superpower leading subservient allies who did not have the wherewithal to resist it. It has continued after the end of the Cold War even as allies attempt to assert increasing independence with the disappearance of perceived Soviet threat. The huge power differential between the US as the sole remaining superpower and its former subservient allies gave the US a natural claim and de facto privilege to unilateralism.
President Clinton’s decision to use military force to enforce moral imperialism in the Balkans was based on the view that “US citizens and interests are threatened in many arenas and across a wide spectrum of issues.” These perceived perils as interpreted by US cultural preference range from regional conflicts and insurgency to terrorism and ethnic unrest are viewed as direct threats to US national interests raised to the level of clear and present danger. The interest of the US in maintaining geopolitical stability is predicated on its being a superpower with global economic interests. The US aims to act unilaterally by maintaining a force structure that can conduct simultaneous expeditionary military operations in widely separated theaters around the world against multiple adversaries who may not even be natural allies. This is done by revising its Cold War alliances such as NATO from defensive to offensive regional military assets that the US can deploy at will to achieve US global geopolitical objectives.
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The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically
F. William Engdahl, October 9, 2006
The September 2006 summit in Paris between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power. The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geopolitical assets in energy—most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, USA, for which it has little defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game.
The formal Paris summit agenda included French investment in Russia and the issue of Iran’s (Russian-built) nuclear program. Notably, however, it also included the question of future Russian energy supplies to the European Union, notably, Germany. It was an indication of the new strength of Putin’s Russia. Putin told the German Chancellor that Russia would ‘possibly’ redirect some of the future natural gas from its giant Shtokman field in the Barents Sea. The $20 billion project is due to come online 2010 and had been slated to provide liquified natural gas to United States terminals.
Since the devastating setbacks two years ago from the US-sponsored ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, and then Ukraine, Russia has begun to play its strategic energy cards extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin American states, to strategic market cooperation deals in natural gas with Algeria.
At the same time, the Bush Administration has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless policy has been associated with former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in Washington.
The ‘Cheney Presidency,’ which is what historians will no doubt dub the George W. Bush years, has been based on a clear strategy. It has often been misunderstood by critics who had overly focussed on its most visible component, namely, Iraq, the Middle East and the strident war-hawks around the Vice President and his old crony, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
The ‘Cheney strategy’ has been a US foreign policy based on securing direct global energy control, control by the Big Four US or US-tied private oil giants-- ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it has aimed at control of all the world’s major oil regions, along with the major natural gas fields. That control has moved in tandem with a growing bid by the United States for total military primacy over the one potential threat to its global ambitions—Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to weave the US military and energy policies together into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the early 1990’s under father Bush, Cheney was also Secretary of Defense.
The Cheney-Bush administration has been dominated by a coalition of interests between Big Oil and the top industries of the American military-industrial complex. These private corporate interests exercise their power through control of the government policy of the United States. An aggressive militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It is epitomized by Cheney’s former company, Halliburton Inc., at one and the same time the world’s largest energy and geophysical services company, and the world’s largest constructor of military bases.
To comprehend the policy it’s important to look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO, viewed the problem of future oil supply on the eve of his becoming Vice President.
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The Swift Boating of America
Greg Grandin, June 6, 2006
An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and -- wait for it -- the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians a good time.
Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good reason -- they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's résumé.
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How the Bush Administration Deconstructed Iraq
Michael Schwartz, May 27, 2006
 US Army in Iraq
Media coverage of the Iraq War has generally portrayed the current quagmire as the result of an American failure to achieve a set of otherwise admirable goals: suppressing the insurgency that is intimidating the Iraqi people and sabotaging the economy; stopping the destructive ethno-religious violence that has become a major source of civilian casualties; building an Iraqi army that can establish and sustain law and order; rebuilding electrical and sewage systems and the rest of the country's damaged infrastructure; ramping up oil production to place Iraq on a positive economic trajectory; eliminating the element that has made crime in the streets a prevalent and profitable occupation; and nurturing an elected parliament that can effectively rule. U.S. failure, then, resides in its inability to halt and reverse the destructive forces within Iraqi society.
This rather comfortable portrait of the U.S. as a bumbling, even thoroughly incompetent giant overwhelmed by unexpected forces tearing Iraqi society apart is strikingly inaccurate: Most of the death, destruction, and disorganization in the country has, at least in its origins, been a direct consequence of U.S. efforts to forcibly institute an economic and social revolution, while using overwhelming force to suppress resistance to this project. Certainly, the insurgency, the ethno-religious jihadists, and the criminal gangs have all contributed to the descent of Iraqi cities and towns into chaos, but their roles have been secondary and in many cases reactive. The engine of deconstruction was -- and remains -- the U.S.-led occupation.
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The Wide War
Greg Grandin, May 27, 2006
How Donald Rumsfeld Discovered the Wild West in Latin America
How fast has Latin America fallen from favor? Just a decade ago the Clinton administration was holding up the region as the crown jewel of globalization's promise: All is quiet on "our southern flank," reported the head of the US Southern Command, General Barry McCaffrey, in 1995, "our neighbors are allies who, in general, share similar values." "The Western Hemisphere has a lot to teach the world," said McCaffrey's boss Secretary of Defense William Cohen two years later, "as the world reaches for the kind of progress we have made."
Today, with a new generation of leaders in open rebellion against Washington's leadership, Latin America is no longer seen as a beacon unto the world but as a shadowy place where "enemies" lurk. "They watch, they probe," Donald Rumsfeld warns of terrorists in Latin America; they look for "weaknesses." According to the new head of Southcom General Bantz Craddock, the region is held hostage by a league of extraordinary gentlemen made up of the "transnational terrorist, the narco-terrorist, the Islamic radical fundraiser and recruiter, the illicit trafficker, the money launderer, the kidnapper, [and] the gang member."
"Terrorists throughout the Southern command area of responsibility," Craddock's predecessor warned, "bomb, murder, kidnap, traffic drugs, transfer arms, launder money and smuggle humans." Problems that Clinton's Pentagon presented as discrete issues -- drugs, arms trafficking, intellectual property piracy, migration, and money laundering, what the editor of Foreign Policy Moisés Naín has described as the "five wars of globalization" -- are now understood as part of a larger unified campaign against terrorism.
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Hamas or Kadima: True State of Terrorism
William A. Cook, May 27, 2006
How can the international community swallow the lie that Hamas can destroy Israel? How can it continue to allow a rogue state to defy international law? let's review the facts.
“Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will.” -- (Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire)
March held promise this year, the election of a new government in Palestine to replace the “irrelevant” one Sharon discarded just two years ago, and the election of a new government headed by a new party in Israel on the 28th of the month. April, the interim month, served as a month of negotiations for Ehud Olmert of Kadima to form his government while behind the scenes, the US and Olmert attempted to maneuver through the US Congress and Senate the diabolical Palestine Anti-Terrorism Act that, in conjunction with Israel’s own efforts, negates the only true democratic election held in the mid-east to date and emasculates the Palestinian people’s right to choose its government by instituting heinous draconian measures against Hamas. Thus did April fulfill Eliot’s observation as “the cruelest” month. May, the month of renewal in our cyclical calendar, should have provided promise for a resurrected peace in Palestine but instead promises to be the ugliest, meanest, most vicious and inhumane the international community has witnessed in many years.
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The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?
Stephen Zunes, May 27 , 2006
Breaking down the real relationship between U.S. foreign policy, Israel, and the spectrum of pro-Israel advocacy groups.
Since its publication in the London Review of Books in March, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt's article “The Israel Lobby”—and the longer version published as a working paper for Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government—has received widespread attention from across the political spectrum. These noted professors put forward two major arguments: the first is the very legitimate and widely acknowledged (outside of official Washington) concern that U.S. Middle East policy, particularly U.S. support for the more controversial policies of the Israeli government, is contrary to the long-term strategic interests of the United States. Their second, and far more questionable, argument is that most of the blame for this misguided policy rests with the “ Israel lobby” rather than with the more powerful interests that actually drive U.S. foreign policy.
The Mearsheimer/Walt article has been met by unreasonable criticism from a wide range of rightist apologists for U.S. support of the Israeli occupation, including Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel (who accused the authors of being “anti-Semites”), Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz (who falsely claimed that the authors gathered materials from websites of neo-Nazi hate groups), pundits like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, and publications like the New York Sun and the New Republic. The authors have also been unfairly criticized for supposedly distorting the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though their overview is generally quite accurate. The problem is in their analysis.
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The Storm over the Israel Lobby
Michael Massing, May 27, 2006
Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?" in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," by professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Published in the March 23, 2006, issue of the London Review of Books and posted as a "working paper" on the Kennedy School's Web site, the report has been debated in the coffeehouses of Cairo and in the editorial offices of Haaretz. It's been called "smelly" (Christopher Hitchens), "nutty" (Max Boot), "conspiratorial" (the Anti-Defamation League), "oddly amateurish" (the Forward), and "brave" (Philip Weiss in The Nation). It's prompted intense speculation over why The New York Times has given it so little attention and why The Atlantic Monthly, which originally commissioned the essay, rejected it.
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The Row Over the Israel Lobby
Alexander Cockburn
May 24, 2006
For the past few weeks a sometimes comic debate has simmering in the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an Israeli lobby, and if so, just how powerful is it?
I would have thought that to ask whether there’s an Israeli lobby here is a bit like asking whether there’s a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. For the past sixty years the Lobby has been as fixed a part of the American scene as either of the other two monuments, and not infrequently exercising as much if not more influence on the onward march of history.
The late Steve Smith, brother in law of Teddy Kennedy, and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party for several decades, liked to tell the story of how a group of four Jewish businessmen got together two million dollars in cash and gave it to Harry Truman when he was in desperate need of money amidst his presidential campaign in 1948. Truman went on to become president and to express his gratitude to his Zionist backers.
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The Israel Lobby
Letter From John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
May 15, 2006
 
We wrote ‘The Israel Lobby’ in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States. We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear that many people – including Jews and Israelis – believe that it is time to have a candid discussion of the US relationship with Israel. It is in that spirit that we engage with the letters responding to our article. We confine ourselves here to the most salient points of dispute.
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The Israel Lobby
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, April 3, 2006
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread Œdemocracy‚ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ŒIsrael Lobby‚. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country ˆ in this case, Israel ˆ are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel‚s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel‚s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA‚s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel‚s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy Œstep-by-step‚ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ŒFar too often, we functioned . . . as Israel‚s lawyer.‚ Finally, the Bush administration‚s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel‚s strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America‚s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
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Why the United States Promotes India’s Great-Power Ambitions
Monthly Reviw, Research Unit for Political Economy, April 3, 2006
In March 2005, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Washington’s decision to “make India a global power.” No doubt U.S. arms manufacturers can now look forward to large contracts from India; but this course is dictated by broader strategic considerations.
First, the United States is not worried by India’s ambitions: it knows that India is unable to project power across Asia independently. For example, India’s plans for a rapid-reaction force which could be deployed immediately in countries along the rim of the Indian Ocean cannot be pursued without fast long-range aircraft with aerial refueling capabilities, airborne early warning and command aircraft, attack helicopters, and a carrier in addition to the INS Virat. A significant share of this would have to be imported from the United States. Any drawn-out intervention abroad would require even greater infrastructure, which India lacks. (In fact, even the European Union countries are not equipped with the infrastructure for sustained projection of military force independent of the United States. This was demonstrated during the Balkans crisis, when they were forced at last to turn to the United States to intervene.)
Moreover, given the balance of military strength, India’s attempts to project power cannot be sustained in the face of U.S. opposition. Indeed, in 2003, then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reportedly confessed that strategic partnership with the United States was essential to his twenty-year program to attain great-power status; “otherwise India’s ability to project power and influence abroad anywhere would be greatly compromised.”
The second reason for the United States to promote Indian ambitions is that it suits U.S. interests to do so. This is spelled out with brutal candor in at least three important U.S. sources.
The first is a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense in October 2002, titled The Indo-U.S. Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions. The report is based on interviews with forty-two key Americans, including twenty-three active military officers, fifteen government officials, and four others; as well as with ten active Indian military officers, five Indian government officials, several members of the National Security Council, and outside experts advising the Indian government. The second source is the writings of Ashley J. Tellis, a former aide to Robert Blackwill during 2001–03 when Blackwill was ambassador to India; he is considered at the moment a key U.S. policy analyst on India. The third source is the October 2005 study by Stephen Blank of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, Natural Allies?: Regional Security in Asia and Prospects for Indo-American Strategic Cooperation.
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US Foreign Policy and Palestine
Bill and Kathleen Christison
November 8-15, 2005
On October 20, Bill and Kathleen Christison, former CIA analysts, spoke in Montpelier, Vermont at the first of several public forums scheduled in connection with an exhibition of Palestinian art, entitled Made in Palestine. Their presentations appear below. Sponsored by Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, Made in Palestine is the first survey exhibition of contemporary Palestinian art in the United States. The exhibition is on display at the T. W. Wood Gallery on the campus of Vermont College of the Union Institute and University from October 18 through November 20. Originally shown at the Station Museum in Houston during 2003, the exhibition had a brief run in San Francisco in April 2005, but curators have had trouble finding other venues for this powerful and therefore extremely controversial expression of Palestinian political and cultural identity. Further information on the exhibition can be found on the website of Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, http://www.vtjp.org/.
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Friedman on Iraq — the “thinking” behind the New York Times’s debacle
Bill Van Aker
October 25-31, 2005
Over the past week, the New York Times has carried pages of self-examination, mea culpas and even sharp criticism in response to the deepening debacle surrounding the case of its senior correspondent, Judith Miller.
The newspaper, which has long presented itself as the paper of record for America’s liberal establishment, has been thoroughly discredited by the Miller affair. The recent revelations regarding the investigation into the Bush administration’s leaking of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame have implicated the newspaper in a criminal state conspiracy aimed at intimidating political dissent and silencing opposition to the war in Iraq.
The newspaper suppressed information from its readers in order to protect the relationship between Miller and her co-thinkers within the administration, with whom she collaborated in making the phony “weapons of mass destruction” case for the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.
On Sunday, the Times published a critique by its public editor Byron Calame, who condemned “the deferential treatment of Ms. Miller by editors who failed to dig into problems before they became a mess.”
In addition to this special treatment, Calame cited the failure of the editors to own up to Miller’s false reporting—which mirrored the administration’s fraudulent claims—on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for more than a year after it became obvious that no such weapons ever existed.
“The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner,” said Calame. “It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn’t get a fair shake.”
The newspaper also published an internal email from its executive editor Bill Keller, who acknowledged, “By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester.” As an alibi, Keller claimed that, after he assumed the editorship in the wake of the overblown controversy surrounding the comparatively insignificant journalistic misconduct of junior reporter Jayson Blair, “It felt somehow unsavory to begin my tenure by attacking the previous regime... I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.”
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The Palestinian People Must Have the Right of Return
Richard Becker
October 11-18, 2005
If there is one subject that causes the leaders of the state of Israel and their supporters in the United States establishment to erupt in anxiety and anger, it is the right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes and homeland.
After demonstrations in New York and other cities on the issue in 2001, the Chicago Sun-Times outlandishly compared the Palestinian right of return to Hitler’s mass murder of Jewish people during World War II. “Let’s not mince words,” wrote the editors. “The ‘right of return’ is nothing more or less than Arab radicals’ final solution for the Jewish state.”
“Like it or not, wars settle boundaries,” the editorial continues. “Ignoring such reality only brings grief.” It goes without saying that this was not the Sun-Times’ stance when Iraq occupied the U.S. dependency of Kuwait in 1990.
The tenor of the Sun-Times editorial is more blunt than most, but its point is typical in regard to Israel and the Palestinians: The past is the past, Israel must be defended, the Palestinians just have to accept the situation and move on.
The right of expelled and excluded Palestinians to return to their land has been repeatedly upheld in international legal rulings and resolutions for more than a half-century, beginning with United Nations Resolution 194.
Nevertheless, even many anti-war, labor and other progressive organizations in the United States have declined to support what is really a basic democratic right, one not difficult to understand. When a people are made refugees, deliberately driven off their land or forced to flee by war, they have an indisputable right to return and reclaim their homes, farms, shops and so on when the fighting is over.
The war that established the state of Israel in 1948 also led to the expulsion of more than three-quarters of the Palestinian population, or close to 750,000 people. Israel’s “Six Day War” in June 1967, when it seized the remainder of historic Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, created 300,000 more refugees, many of them second-time exiles.
None of those driven out in 1948 and 1967, nor their descendants, now numbering more than 5 million people, have ever been allowed to come back or been compensated for their loss.
Adding insult to injury, the new Israeli state proclaimed that any person living anywhere in the world who could prove that he or she had one Jewish grandparent regardless of whether they or their family ever stepped foot in the Middle East, had the “right of return” to Israel and would be granted citizenship in the new exclusivist state.
Today, 57 years after “Al-Nakba” (The Catastrophe), as it is known to Palestinian and other Arab people, the right of return remains a central demand of the Palestinian people’s struggle.
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A Story of Leaders, Partners, and Clients
Zia Mian
September 27 - October 4, 2005
The past few months have seen important developments in relations between the United States and India. Much of the commentary has focused resolutely and rightly on the wisdom and possible consequences of the new agreements on military and nuclear policy and programs. But these recent agreements need also to be seen in the light of the more than 50 years of U.S. efforts to have India become a part of American political, strategic, and economic plans for Asia. What becomes clear is how difficult this proved to be over the years. It begs the question why Indian leaders have finally started to fall in step so easily in the past few years.
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Beyond the 'Vietnam Syndrome'
Norman Solomon
September 19-25, 2005
"The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula," President George H. W. Bush said of the Gulf War victory in early 1991. He told a gathering of state legislators, "It's a proud day for America – and, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
Often discussed by news media, the "Vietnam syndrome" usually has a negative connotation, implying knee-jerk opposition to military involvement. Yet public backing for a war has much to do with duration and justification. A year after the invasion of Iraq began, Noam Chomsky observed: "Polls have demonstrated time and time again that Americans are willing to accept a high death toll – although they don't like it, they're willing to accept it – if they think it's a just cause. There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication. And in this case too if they thought it was a just cause, the 500 or so [American] deaths would be mourned, but not considered a dominant reason for not continuing. No, the problem is the justice of the cause."
Overall, if history is any guide, most Americans are inclined to favor just about any war after it starts – in the short run – but if the war drags on and loses its rationale in the public mind, support is apt to plummet. "World War II support levels never fell below 77 percent, despite the prolonged and damaging nature of the conflict," writes Chris Hedges in his book What Every Person Should Know About War. In contrast, he adds, "the Korean and Vietnam Wars ended with support levels near 30 percent." The American public's initially high levels of support for the Iraq war have fallen sharply as bloodshed continues and Washington's prewar lies become more apparent. In a recent poll conducted by CNN, USA Today, and the Gallup organization, 54 percent of respondents said that the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.
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New Orleans Unmasks "Apartheid, American Style"
Jason Miller
September 12-18, 2005
What is the recipe for a toxic sludge potent enough to destroy a heavily populated city and inflict infection with a mere splash? Start with a force of nature powerful beyond belief. Mix in an ample supply of sewage, garbage, brackish water from Lake Ponchatrain, floating corpses of humans and animals, and various and sundry noxious chemicals. Blend well with a system of seriously inadequate levees resulting from cuts in federal funding. Of course this concoction would not be complete without heaping portions of racism, spiritual emptiness, and avarice fueling slow and inadequate federal relief efforts.
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Robertson Doesn't Just Speak for Himself
Ramzy Baroud
September 5-12, 2005
The comments made by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of the popular and democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are repellent, nonetheless customary of a confused man who has purposely swapped the compassionate teachings of Jesus with his spiteful doctrine of murder and mayhem.
The Associated Press transcribed Robertson’s comments made during his 700 Club on August 22. "If he [Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.
"We have the ability to take him out, and I think that the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Knowing that some would point at the links between Robertson and the Republicans, including President George W. Bush himself, the Republican figures went into crisis management mode, reproaching the man who once ran for the Republican nomination for presidency.
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Deconstructing disengagement
Azmi Bishara
August 29 - September 5, 2005
Sharon's disengagement plan opens as follows: "The State of Israel is committed to the peace process and aspires to reach an agreed resolution of the conflict based upon the vision of US President George Bush. The State of Israel believes that it must act to improve the current situation. The State of Israel has come to the conclusion that there is currently no reliable Palestinian partner with which it can make progress in a two-sided peace process.
Accordingly, it has developed a plan of revised disengagement, based on the following considerations: "One: The stalemate dictated by the current situation is harmful. In order to break out of this stalemate, the State of Israel is required to initiate moves not dependent on Palestinian cooperation.
"Two: The purpose of the plan is to lead to a better security, political, economic and demographic situation.
"Three: In any future permanent settlement, there will be no Israeli towns and villages in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including major Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel." (Disengagement Plan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- revised, 28 May 2004).
I cite the foregoing passage because with all the fanfare surrounding the withdrawal people may have forgotten what it is really about. Let me clarify.
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War of the Future : Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur
David Morse, August 22-28, 2005
A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.
No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.
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Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse
William Clark
August 15-21, 2005
Contemporary warfare has traditionally involved underlying conflicts regarding economics and resources. Today these intertwined conflicts also involve international currencies, and thus increased complexity. Current geopolitical tensions between the United States and Iran extend beyond the publicly stated concerns regarding Iran's nuclear intentions, and likely include a proposed Iranian "petroeuro" system for oil trade. Similar to the Iraq war, military operations against Iran relate to the macroeconomics of 'petrodollar recycling' and the unpublicized but real challenge to U.S. dollar supremacy from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency.
It is now obvious the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam's long-gone WMD program and certainly less to do to do with fighting International terrorism than it has to do with gaining strategic control over Iraq's hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market. Throughout 2004 information provided by former administration insiders revealed the Bush/Cheney administration entered into office with the intention of toppling Saddam.[1][2] Candidly stated, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. government in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of global Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency ( i.e. "petroeuro").[3] However, subsequent geopolitical events have exposed neoconservative strategy as fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia evaluates this option with the European Union.
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Occupied zones : Unacceptable regimes in Iraq and the United states
By Howard Zinn
August 15-21, 2005
IT has quickly become clear that Iraq is not a liberated country, but an occupied country. We became familiar with that term during the second world war. We talked of German-occupied France, German-occupied Europe. And after the war we spoke of Soviet-occupied Hungary, Czechoslovakia, eastern Europe. It was the Nazis, the Soviets, who occupied countries. The United States liberated them from occupation.
Now we are the occupiers. True, we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but not from us. Just as in 1898 we liberated Cuba from Spain, but not from us. Spanish tyranny was overthrown, but the US established a military base in Cuba, as we are doing in Iraq. US corporations moved into Cuba, just as Bechtel and Halliburton and the oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The US framed and imposed, with support from local accomplices, the constitution that would govern Cuba, just as it has drawn up, with help from local political groups, a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation. An occupation.
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U.S. Imperialism, Europe, and the Middle East
By Samir Amin, November 2004
The analysis proposed here regarding the role of Europe and the Middle East in the global imperialist strategy of the United States is set in a general historical vision of capitalist expansion that I have developed elsewhere.1 In this view capitalism has always been, since its inception, by nature, a polarizing system, that is, imperialist. This polarization-the concurrent construction of dominant centers and dominated peripheries, and their reproduction deepening in each stage-is inherent in the process of accumulation of capital operating on a global scale.
In this theory of the global expansion of capitalism the qualitative changes in the systems of accumulation, from one phase of its history to another, shape the successive forms of asymmetric centers/peripheries polarization, that is, of concrete imperialism. The contemporary world system will thus remain imperialist (polarizing) throughout the visible future, in so far as its fundamental logic remains dominated by capitalist production relations. This theory associates imperialism with the process of capital accumulation on a worldwide scale, which I consider as constituting a single reality whose various dimensions are in fact not separable. Thus it differs as much from the vulgarized version of the Leninist theory of "imperialism, the highest phase of capitalism" (as if the former phases of global expansion of capitalism were not polarizing), as from the contemporary postmodern theories that describe the new globalization as "post-imperialist."
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Jewishness versus democracy
By Azmi Bishara
November 2004
Azmi Bishara examines the contradictions at the heart of attempts to steamroll an Israeli constitution
The 16th Knesset is strenuously working to hammer together a constitution at a time when the right controls both the Israeli parliament and its Law and Constitution Committee. One of the most important missions of the forthcoming constitution in the view of the Israeli right is to reinforce the notion of the Jewishness of the Israeli state. In order to promote this drive in the media and academic circles the Israeli Institute for Democracy, that elitist establishment that holds its annual conventions in Herzliya, has launched a campaign "for the sake of constitution by consensus".
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Myth and Denial in the War Against Terrorism: Just why do terrorists terrorize?
By William Blum
November 2004
It dies hard. It dies very hard. The notion that terrorist acts against the United States can be explained by envy and irrational hatred, and not by what the United States does to the world -- i.e., US foreign policy -- is alive and well.
The fires were still burning intensely at Ground Zero when Colin Powell declared: "Once again, we see terrorism, we see terrorists, people who don't believe in democracy ..."{1}
George W. picked up on that theme and ran with it. He's been its leading proponent ever since September 11 with his repeated insistence, in one wording or another, that terrorists are people who hate America and all that it stands for, its democracy, its freedom, its wealth, its secular government." (Ironically, the president and Attorney General John Ashcroft probably hate our secular government as much as anyone.)
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The Masterminds of Torture, Humiliation and Abuse. From Supermax to Abu Ghraib
By Leah Caldwell
October 2004
Just a year ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed to the Iraqi prison system as a shining example of the freedoms that the U.S. would bring to Iraq.
He said, "Now, all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system, based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."
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Against terrorism or expansion of the American Empire?
By William Blum
October, 2004
The first time I spoke in public after September 11 of last year, I spoke at a teach-in at the University of North Carolina. As a result of that, I and some of the other speakers were put on a list put out by an organization founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of you know who. The organization's agenda can be neatly surmised by a report it issued, entitled "Defending Our Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." In the report and on their website they listed a large number of comments made mainly by faculty and students from many schools which indicated that these people were not warmly embracing America's newest bombing frenzy. These people were guilty of suggesting that some foreigners might actually have good reason for hating the United States, or what I call hating U.S. foreign policy.
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Amnesty International: A false beacon?
By Paul de Rooij
October 2004
Given the current escalation of Israeli depredations in Gaza and the daily US bombings of Falluja, it is interesting to examine Amnesty International's (AI) statements on the situation. AI is widely viewed as an authority on human rights issues, and thus it is of interest to analyze its output on these recent events. Careful scrutiny of AI's record reveals that, its typical response to the daily obscene deeds by either Israeli or US armies is a few barely audible ruminations with an occasional lame rebuke. The impotence of these responses raises many questions.
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The Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
By Sasan Fayazmanesh
October, 2004
It is now three years since nineteen young men from Saudi Arabia and Egypt opened the Pandora's Box by attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon with hijacked planes. But the answer to "why did they do it?" still remains unsettled. "They did it because of what we do," some say. Others contend, "they did it because of who we are." Alternatively, the answers appear as "they hate us for what we do," or "they hate us for who we are."
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Macro Micro: Beyond Tyranny in the Modernist Form of Democratic Governance
By Amr Ismail, October 2004
In reference to core principles of Democratic Governance, the United States is no longer a free or a democratic society.
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The American ideology
By Samir Amin, Al-Ahram Weekly
October 2004
Today, the United States is governed by a junta of war criminals who took power through a kind of coup. That coup may have been preceded by (dubious) elections: but we should never forget that Hitler was also an elected politician. In this analogy, 9/11 fulfils the function of the "burning of the Reichstag", allowing the junta to grant its police force powers similar to those of the Gestapo. They have their own Mein Kampf -- the National Security Strategy --, their own mass associations -- the patriot organisations -- and their own preachers. It is vital that we have the courage to tell these truths, and stop masking them behind phrases such as "our American friends" that have by now become quite meaningless...
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