Author Archives: Paul Woodward

ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: “Hamas chalked up a real coup”

Gaza border breach shows Israel that Hamas is in charge
By Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Haaretz, January 24, 2008

A few Israel Defense Forces Engineering Corps officers surely shed a tear yesterday while viewing the television reports from Rafah: The barrier built by the IDF with blood and sweat along the Philadelphi Route, on the Gaza Strip border with Egypt, was coming down.

It was, apparently, the final remnant of Israel’s years of occupying the Strip. But Israel has better reasons to be worried by what happened yesterday. In destroying the wall separating the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of Rafah, Hamas chalked up a real coup. Not only did the organization demonstrate once again that it is a disciplined, determined entity, and an opponent that is exponentially more sophisticated than the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also took the sting out of the economic blockade plan devised by Israel’s military establishment, an idea whose effectiveness was doubtful from the beginning but whose potential for international damage was not.

Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are now forced to find a new joint border control arrangement, one that will probably depend on the good graces of Hamas. If the PA is indeed interested in taking responsibility for the border crossings, as Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has declared, it will have to negotiate with Hamas even though President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to avoid that at any cost. The other option – to leave the border untended – is even worse. [complete article]

See also, Sick Gazans rush Egypt’s chemists (AFP), Hole in the wall provides relief from misery of Israeli blockade (The Independent), and Churches decry Israel’s treatment of Gaza (Christian Post).

Editor’s Comment — In the cable TV/Israeli/neocon/Bush administration narrative, Hamas is a terrorist organization. So is al Qaeda. But here’s the difference — and this is one of the many reasons why the label “terrorist” explains so little and obscures so much. What Hamas did, al Qaeda would have found technically challenging and conceptually impossible.

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CAMPAIGN 08 & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: False rumors and memories

Obama: I’m not a Muslim! Forward this to everyone you know
By Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, January 24, 2008

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama launched an online viral counteroffensive Tuesday against persistent e-mail chain letters that lie about his religious and political background. But history suggests that the effort might backfire, according to experts in urban myths and folklore.

“The principle is that a very strong denial makes some people think: ‘Uh huh, we knew it. If he’s taken the trouble to make such a strong denial, there must be some truth to it,'” says Bill Ellis, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies contemporary folklore and popular cultural responses to societal events like the 9/11 attacks. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — While Obama’s camp should be mindful of James Carroll‘s important observation (that it is Islamophobia in America that prevents the candidate from simply asking, “And what would be wrong if I were a Muslim?”), they should also keep in mind this question: Is someone who is susceptible to being influenced by the Muslim “slur” really likely to consider voting for Obama in the first place? Some attacks really shouldn’t be dignified with a response.

A Clinton twofer’s high price
By Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2008

On foreign policy in particular, Clinton’s presidency was an era of missed opportunities. In Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda and Kosovo, U.S. policy was marred by hesitation and lack of commitment. Despite impressive rhetoric on the emerging challenges posed by globalization, nuclear proliferation, WMD and the rise of transnational terrorism and nonstate actors, Clinton developed few innovative ways to address these challenges; his approach to conflict and crisis was piecemeal. His early defeat on gays in the military left him so scarred that he steered clear of the military for most of his presidency, passively letting uniformed personnel dictate the terms of too many foreign policy decisions and ignoring hard questions about how to reshape the military to face post-Cold War threats. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — I have a feeling that there’s an element to the Clinton nostalgia that’s buoying Hilary that isn’t really nostalgia at all. It’s a presidency “remembered” that never actually occurred; it’s Bill Clinton as president on 9/11 directing America down a road that surely wouldn’t have been as awful as the one along which we actually travelled.

Anti-Bush campaign planned
By Jim Kuhnhenn, AP, January 24, 2008

A liberal advocacy group plans to spend $8.5 million in a drive to ensure that President Bush’s public approval doesn’t improve as his days in the White House come to an end.

Americans United for Change plans to undertake a yearlong campaign, spending the bulk of the money on advertising, to keep public attention on what the group says are the Bush administration’s failures, including the war in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the current mortgage crisis.

In selling the plan to fundraisers, the group has argued that support for President Reagan was at a low of 42 percent in 1987 but climbed to 63 percent before he left office. “All of a sudden he became a rallying cry for conservatives and their ideology,” said Brad Woodhouse, the group’s president. “Progressives are still living with that.” [complete article]

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: How to lose the battle for hearts and minds

Rummy resurfaces, calls for U.S. propaganda agency
By Sharon Weinberger, Wired, January 23, 2008

One of the many things I love about Donald Rumsfeld is that he’s totally unrepentant. Back in 2001, the Pentagon under his leadership created the controversial Office of Strategic Influence, which was closed down just a few months later after its existence became public. Rightly or wrongly, the Pentagon was accused of creating a propaganda office. Now, the former defense secretary has a bigger vision: he is advocating a “21st century agency for global communications.”

This was one of the major themes in one of Rumsfeld’s first post-Pentagon public comments at a conference today on network centric warfare sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement. According to Rumsfeld, the United States is losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, and the answer to that, in part, is through the creation of this new government agency. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The so-called battle for hearts and minds suffers from the same problem that afflicts all evangelical endeavors: it insults the intelligence of the people it aims to influence. Why would one group of people acquire mental flexibility in response to pressure from another group of people who lack mental flexibility?

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FEATURE: “We had no freedom.”

America’s forgotten Vietnamese victims
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 24, 2008

Nguyen Van Tu asks if I’m serious. Am I really willing to tell his story — to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief — during the 1968 Tet Offensive — we sit in his rustic home, built of wood and thatch with an earthen floor, and speak of two hallmarks of that power: ignorance and lack of accountability. As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have the sickening feeling that, in decades to come, far too many Iraqis and Afghans will have similar stories to tell. Similar memories of American troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments. Nightmare knowledge of what “America” means to far too many outside the United States. [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: No refuge in Kabul

In Kabul, shattered illusions
By Jean MacKenzie, New York Times, January 24, 2008

“Well, at least we’re not in Baghdad,” we used to say when confronted by the vagaries of the Kabul winter. No heat, sporadic electricity and growing disaffection among the population might make us uncomfortable, but those of us living outside the smothering embrace of the embassies or the United Nations had relative freedom of movement and few security worries.

And of course we had the Serena hotel. Its spa offered solace, a gym and a hot shower; we could pretend for a few hours that we were in Dubai.

But a week ago last Monday, Taliban gunmen burst into the lobby, one exploding his ball-bearing vest, one running to the gym and spa area, spraying bullets as he went. Eight people died, and several more were wounded.

It was a rude shock for those of us who used to feel superior to those who cowered behind their reinforced walls, venturing out only in bulletproof glass surrounded by convoys of big men with big guns.

We shopped on Chicken Street for carpets and trinkets, we dined at the shrinking number of restaurants that still serve alcohol. We partied at L’Atmosphere, “L’Atmo” to its friends, the “in” spot for the international crowd, and had our hair and nails done at the Nova salon. And we patted ourselves on the back because we knew the real Kabul.

None of us was prepared for what happened at the Serena. The Taliban are following a new strategy, their spokesman announced. They will go after civilians specifically, and will bring their mayhem to places where foreigners congregate.

So much for L’Atmo. [complete article]

The mysterious Afghan warlord trusted to spread peace in a divided province
By Anthony Loyd, The Times, January 18, 2008

Britain’s last chance of securing this treacherous corner of Afghanistan lies in the hands of a piratical, black-turbaned figure with long beard, white cloak and silver-sequinned slippers with curled toes.

Mullah Abdul Salaam may not look much like a white knight. He served as a commander in the Taleban and even today his true loyalties remain suspect. The 45-year-old former Mujahidin guerrilla could, however, decide the fate of the British mission to stabilise the lawless province of Helmand, where this week he was put in charge of the key district of Musa Qala.

“He’s not just the best show in town,” one British officer remarked. “He’s the only show in town.”

Mullah Salaam’s rise to power in Musa Qala, the test case for British efforts to evict the Taleban and install central authority, is a classic Afghan tale of intrigue, bloodshed, farce and fate. In an interview with The Times the former warlord explained how last year he had severed relations with the Taleban, was courted secretly by a foreign diplomat and eventually swapped sides to join the British-led effort. [complete article]

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NEWS: Getting out of Iraq; the Awakening under threat

Attacks imperil U.S.-backed militias in Iraq
By Solomon Moore and Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times, January 24, 2008

American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq’s bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military’s strategy to pacify the nation.

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Violence is also shaking up the Awakening movement, many of whose members are former insurgents, in its birthplace in the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. On Sunday, a teenage suicide bomber exploded at a gathering of Awakening leaders, killing Hadi Hussein al-Issawi, a midlevel sheik, and three other tribesmen.

Born nearly two years ago in Iraq’s western deserts, the Awakening movement has grown to an 80,000-member nationwide force, four-fifths of whose members are Sunnis. American military officials credit that force, along with the surge in United States troops, the Mahdi Army’s self-imposed cease-fire and an increase in Iraqi security forces, for a precipitous drop in civilian and military fatalities since July.

But the recent onslaught is jeopardizing that relative security and raising the prospect that the groups’ members might disperse, with many rejoining the insurgency, American officials said. [complete article]

A lesson in how to create Iraqi orphans. And then how to make life worse for them
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 24, 2008

It’s not difficult to create orphans in Iraq. If you’re an insurgent, you can blow yourself up in a crowded market. If you’re an American air force pilot, you can bomb the wrong house in the wrong village. Or if you’re a Western mercenary, you can fire 40 bullets into the widowed mother of 14-year-old Alice Awanis and her sisters Karoon and Nora, the first just 20, the second a year older. But when the three girls landed at Amman airport from Baghdad last week they believed that they were free of the horrors of Baghdad and might travel to Northern Ireland to escape the terrible memory of their mother’s violent death.

Alas, the milk of human kindness does not necessarily extend to orphans from Iraq – the country we invaded for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. For as their British uncle waited for them at Queen Alia airport, Jordanian security men – refusing him even a five-minute conversation with the girls – hustled the sisters back on to the plane for Iraq. [complete article]

Democrats attack Iraq security proposal
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, January 24, 2008

The leading Democratic presidential candidates and their allies on Capitol Hill have launched fierce attacks in recent days on a White House plan to forge a new, long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, complaining that the administration is trying to lock in a lasting U.S. military presence in Iraq before the next president takes office.

Among the top critics is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). She has used the past two Democratic presidential debates to blast President Bush for his effort, as she put it Monday in South Carolina, “to try to bind the United States government and his successor to his failed policy.”

Her concerns have been echoed by Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and other Democratic lawmakers who are focusing their fire on the administration’s plans for a long-term commitment to Iraq, after gaining little traction for their efforts to force a faster withdrawal of U.S. combat troops there. [complete article]

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NEWS ROUNDUP: January 24

Afghanistan is the bad war, Iraq the good, says White House co-ordinator
Iraq may turn out to be America’s “good war” while Afghanistan goes “bad”, the Bush Administration official responsible for co-ordinating efforts in Baghdad has told The Times.

Death sentence for Afghan student
An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

10 die in mistaken Afghan firefight
At least nine Afghan police officers and a civilian were killed early Thursday in a firefight between American forces and the officers in the province of Ghazni just south of the capital, according to local officials.

Supporters at home and abroad backing away from Musharraf
As critical elections in Pakistan approach, President Pervez Musharraf is increasingly losing support from major constituencies, including his traditional military base, amid growing questions in both Pakistan and the United States about his ability to govern.

Canadian military has quit turning detainees over to Afghans
The Canadian military secretly stopped transferring prisoners to Afghanistan’s government in November after Canadian monitors found evidence that they were being abused and tortured.

Most reformists appear purged from Iran ballot
When voters go to the polls on March 14 to select members of Parliament, they may be able to choose only between conservative candidates and other conservative candidates, leaders of Iran’s main reform party said Wednesday.

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OPINION: Escaping the Israeli siege

Hamas blows a hole in Bush’s plans
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 23, 2008

The hole blown by Hamas in the Gaza-Egypt border fence has finally punctured the bubble of delusion surrounding the U.S.-Israeli Middle East policy. In a moment reminiscent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, gazawall.jpgthrough the breach surged some 350,000 Palestinians — fully one fifth of Gaza’s total population, as my friend and colleague Tim McGirk observed at the scene. And what did they do on the other side? They went shopping for the essentials of daily life, denied them by an Israeli siege imposed with the Wehrmacht logic of collective punishment. And the Egyptian security forces didn’t stop them, despite Washington and Israel urging them to, because U.S.-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak would provoke a mutiny among his citizenry and even his own security forces if they were to be ordered to stop hungry Palestinians from eating because Israel has decided that they should starve until they change their attitude. [complete article]

See also, Hamas exposes Israeli weakness in Gaza (Reuters) and Hamas ‘spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation’ (The Times).

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OPINION: How to sink America

Capitalism’s enemies within
By Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Amid the mayhem on world financial markets, it is becoming clear that capitalism’s most dangerous enemies are capitalists. No one can have watched the “subprime mortgage” debacle without noticing the absurd contrast between the magnitude of the failure and the lavish rewards heaped on those who presided over it. At Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, large losses on subprime securities cost chief executives their jobs — and they left with multimillion-dollar pay packages. Stanley O’Neal, the ex-head of Merrill, received an estimated $161 million. [complete article]

Why the debt crisis is now the greatest threat to the American republic
By Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch, January 22, 2008

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — so-called “military Keynesianism,” which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call “opportunity costs,” things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs — an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & FEATURE: Orchestrated deception on the path to war

False pretenses
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, Center for Public Integrity, January 23, 2008

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war. [complete article]

See also, British government ordered to disclose draft Iraq dossier (The Guardian).

Troops felled by a ‘trust gap’
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, January 24, 2008

For many among the senior leadership at the Pentagon… the apparent successful spread of the “Awakening of the Tribes Movement” has been tempered by the realization that the initiative put in place in Fallujah and Ramadi and Babil could have been – and should have been – put into practice five years ago.

Pentagon officials are quick to blame former Iraq czar L Paul Bremer of the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for the failure. “We’re reconstituting the Iraqi military, that’s all this is” a Pentagon official notes. “A lot of these guys in Babil that we’re paying lost their salaries when Bremer disbanded the Republican Guard and broke up the Ba’ath Party. It was a stupid move. So this is a make-good.”

Another Pentagon official remembers the opening to Gaood in 2004: “This should have been done then,” he says, “and I don’t understand why it wasn’t. Think of the blood, the enormous loss of life, the lost prestige, the failures.” Pentagon officers are also quick to point out that, while Petraeus has taken credit for the shift in strategy in Iraq, the “Awakening of the Tribes Movement” actually began long before he recommended an increase in American troops levels in the country. [complete article]

Iraq’s new law on ex-Baathists could bring another purge
By Amit R. Paley and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Maj. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, a former official in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, became the commander of the Iraqi National Police despite a 2003 law barring the party from government.

But now, under new legislation promoted as way to return former Baathists to public life, the 56-year-old and thousands like him could be forced out of jobs they have been allowed to hold, according to Iraqi lawmakers and the government agency that oversees ex-Baathists.

“This new law is very confusing,” Awadi said. “I don’t really know what it means for me.”

He is not alone. More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.

Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists — primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi — toward the Shiite-led government.

Yet U.S. officials and even legislators who voted for the measure, which still requires approval by Iraq’s presidency council, acknowledge that its impact is hard to assess from its text and will depend on how it is implemented. Some say the law’s primary aim is not to return ex-Baathists to work, but to recognize and compensate those harmed by the party. Of the law’s eight stated justifications, none mentions reinstating ex-Baathists to their jobs. [complete article]

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FEATURE: Sibel Edmonds’ claims demand investigation

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets
By Philip Giraldi, The American Conservative, January 28, 2008

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.” [complete article]

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NEWS: Cheney calls for permanent warrantless wiretapping

Cheney calls for permanent warrantless wiretapping
By William Branigin, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Vice President Cheney called on Congress today to permanently extend the Protect America Act as the White House launched a drive to secure the tools it says are needed to fight a continuing terrorist threat beyond the law’s Feb. 1 expiration.

In a speech to a sympathetic audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, Cheney also said the law must include immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that assisted the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance efforts after Sept. 11, 2001. [complete article]

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NEWS: Pakistan Taliban directed to focus on NATO; retired officers call for Musharraf to resign

Taliban wield the ax ahead of new battle
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 24, 2008

With the Taliban’s spring offensive just months away, the Afghan front has been quiet as Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been heavily engaged in fighting security forces in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

But now Taliban leader Mullah Omar has put his foot down and reset the goals for the Taliban: their primary task is the struggle in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistan state.

Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, highly placed contacts in the Taliban told Asia Times Online. Mullah Omar then appointed Moulvi Faqir Mohammed (a commander from Bajaur Agency) but he refused the job. In the past few days, the Pakistani Taliban have held several meetings but have not yet appointed a replacement to Mehsud. [complete article]

Prominent Pakistani group urges Musharraf to step down
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2008

President Pervez Musharraf should immediately step down as a way to promote democracy, combat religious militancy and restore the reputation of Pakistan’s military, according to an influential group of retired officers.

The Pakistan Ex-Servicemen’s Society made its demands late Tuesday, two days after Musharraf left on an eight-day European swing to assure world leaders that Pakistan — and its nuclear arsenal — were in safe hands.

“This is in the supreme national interest and it makes it incumbent on him to step down,” said a statement released after a meeting in Rawalpindi attended by dozens of former army generals, three air force air marshals and eight naval admirals. [complete article]

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FEATURE: U.S. military breaks ranks – part one

A salvo at the White House
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, January 23, 2008

The fact that the Iraq war has been pushed off the front pages of America’s newspapers has given the US military a seeming respite from the almost endless spate of disastrous stories coming out of the Middle East, as well as the almost endless round of embarrassing questions from the press about what they intend to do about it.

But military officers say that the American public should not be fooled: the relative quiet in Iraq – and it is, after all, only a “relative quiet” – does not mean the “surge” has worked, or that the problems facing the US military have somehow magically gone away. Quite the opposite. For while the American public is consumed by the campaign for the presidency, the American military is not. Instead, they are as obsessed now, in January of 2008, with the war in Iraq as they were then, in 2003 – except that now, many military officers admit, the host of problems they face may, in fact, be much more intractable.

“Don’t let the quiet fool you,” a senior defense official says. “There’s still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the ‘surge’ has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That’s just ludicrous. There’s increasing quiet in Iraq, but that’s happened because of our shift in strategy – the ‘surge’ had nothing to do with it.” [complete article]

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CAMPAIGN 08: Growing youth movement; Americans ready to elect black president

Candidates take note as young Americans re-embrace politics
By Karin Zeitvogel, AFP, January 21, 2008

America’s youth are undergoing a political rebirth, and politicians have noticed.

People under 30 are flocking to the polls and leaving their mark on the 2008 White House race. Long moribund activist groups are being revived. Nickelodeon, a television station geared to teens, is holding mock primaries.

“We’ve been hearing for years, ‘Where is the youth movement?’ Well, it’s been growing slowly and now it’s here,” said Samantha Miller, 22, who helped to revive Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing group that has lain dormant since the late 1960s. [complete article]

White Americans ready to elect black president, poll shows
By Ros Taylor, The Guardian, January 22, 2008

Barack Obama’s prospects of beating Hillary Clinton to the Democratic presidential nomination received a boost yesterday after 72% of white Americans told a CNN poll they believed the US was ready to have a black president.

The poll will make glum reading for Obama’s rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, however: fewer than two-thirds of respondents thought the country was ready for a female commander-in-chief.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp poll, which was published on Martin Luther King day, found notably fewer black Americans (61%) than white believed the US was ready for a leader who shared their skin colour. [complete article]

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OPINION: Challenging a unipolar world

Challenging a unipolar world
By Conn Hallinan, FPIP, January 21, 2008

One of the more interesting phenomena to emerge from the U.S. debacle in Iraq is the demise of the unipolar world that rose from the ashes of the Cold War. A short decade ago the United States was the most powerful political, economic, and military force on the planet. Today its army is straining under the weight of an unpopular occupation, its economy is careening toward recession, and the only “allies” we can absolutely depend on in the United Nations are Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands.

Rather than the “American Century” the Bush administration neo-conservatives predicted, it is increasingly a world where regional alliances and trade associations in Europe and South America have risen to challenge Washington’s once undisputed domination. [complete article]

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OPINION: Punishing Gaza

Where does it end?
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, January 21, 2008

Much of Gaza is once again in darkness, as Israel cut off the fuel to its only power plant. Hospital patients have reportedly died, communications are out, and movement and commerce in an already beleaguered economy have come to a near halt.

Michele Mercier, spokesperson for the the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Gaza hospitals still had medications “but it won’t last for more than two or three days.” Now, Gazans must also contend with the possibility of already scarce food supplies being cut off. Christopher Gunness of UNRWA, the UN relief agency, said the agency could be forced to suspend food distribution to 860,000 people because of the shortage of fuel and plastic bags.

The New York Times, always to be counted on to provide the right euphemisms, reported that “Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, ordered a temporary halt on all imports into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip late last week. The measure, along with stepped-up military operations in Gaza, was meant to persuade Palestinian militants there to stop firing rockets at Israel.” (Isabel Kershner, “Fuel Shortage Shuts Gaza Power Plant, Leaving City Dark,” 21 January 2008.)

Terms like “measures” and “persuasion” sound so gentle. But they cover up a brutal reality that Israeli leaders are keen to boast about: they are acting with premeditation to inflict suffering on the Palestinian civilian population, and they display an extraordinary degree of callousness for their victims. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Looking beyond feudal politics in Pakistan

Looking beyond feudal politics in Pakistan
By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, January 22, 2008

For Ishaq Khan Khakwani, a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, the sooner people like him are out of a job, the better.

Khakwani, 58, calls himself and other lawmakers “brokers” between the people and “the oppressive arms” of the state, such as police officers and tax collectors. It is a system held over from British rule, he explained, in which politicians from powerful families act as intermediaries, often using methods such as extortion and false arrests to extract bribes for their services.

Instead, people should be protected by the rule of law, “so that justice is given without the help of people like me,” Khakwani, whose family has been in politics in Punjab province off and on for 45 years, said in a recent interview. “If you provide them justice, people like me will also reform. Even if it destroys our livelihood, this is what reform is all about.”

As Pakistan prepares for elections scheduled for Feb. 18, political analysts say the country’s feudal political system — organized around ethnic tribes, family dynasties and personality cults — has retarded the development of democracy. Numerous seats in the National Assembly have been kept in families for generations, and the military regularly uses political turmoil as an excuse to seize power, the analysts said. [complete article]

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