California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

How Not to Win a War

by John Lawrence

1) Invade a country. 2) Set up a puppet government. 3) Pay officials handsomely or acquiesce in their corruption. 4) Spend $300 million a day none of which alters the life of the average citizen who exists on $2 a day. 5) Hire local interpreters. 6) Hire local contractors. 7) Cycle multiple generals in and out of the war each one of which thinks they're God's gift to military science.       8) Get the local people in the cities involved on your side by paying them lots of money. 9) Ignore the majority of the people living in the countryside. 10) Leave country after puppet government collapses. 11) Get half the population that sided with you out of that country and into yours.

Can't the vast military-industrial complex teach their own interpreters all the major languages of the world so they don't have to hire local interpreters who then expect the US to get them out of the country when the US loses the war? Can't the vast military -industrial complex provide their own services so they don't have to hire "private contractors"? The US never had a clear goal in invading Afghanistan except to make it a forever war. Some Afghans were OK with that because the $300 million a day the US provided made them rich. In a country which has a GDP of $20 billion, $300 million a day ($109.5 billion a year), over 5 times the GDP, totally distorts the country economically making some people fabulously rich while leaving the average Afghan tremendously poor. In 2020, GDP per capita for Afghanistan was 581 US dollars. Such a formula for success was guaranteed to lead the average Afghan to favor the Taliban who at least were on the side of the average person.

All the generals who have been interviewed have their own ideas about what could have been done better in Afghanistan, but none of them have any perspective outside of a military one. For instance, none of them ventured an opinion that maybe sending in the Peace Corps to improve the lives of the average Afhan living on $2 a day might have done more good than sending in the world's mightiest military with all the bells and whistles at its command. The first step for the Peace Corps is of course to learn the language of the people. How else to convince them that you are actually interested in them and want to help them. Improving the lives of the average person is the last thing the military thinks of. Maybe that's the lesson that needs to be learned here. An American effort devoted to peace rather than war could be done for a lot less than $300 million a day over 20 years which is the cost to Americans for this fruitless war. The Peace Corps needs to be beefed up. Actually improving the lives of poor people around the world will do more to end terrorism than the services the world's mightiest military can provide. In addition processing Americans through the Peace Corps rather than the military will do more to diminish domestic terrorism since those who have been processed through the military have a militarized mindset which predisposes them to being attracted to right wing proto military groups.

Off the Top of My Head

The Militarization of American Consciousness

by John Lawrence, January17, 2021

Is it any wonder that a culture that celebrates the military and identifies patriotism with the American flag has generated a movement to over throw American constitutional government? Most of these people had their mindsets processed through the military establishment or through the military-industrial complex where the processing is just as military oriented. This combined with a perception that the US is becoming a multicultural, instead of a white oriented, society is enough to set them off. Also the state of American mental health is at a low ebb not least caused by the pandemic and the anger generated by the necessity of closing down small businesses or even with the perceived loss of freedom from a mandate to wear masks! The people chanting "USA. USA" and carrying multitudinous flags are the type of people whose notion of patriotism has to do with America being the Number One nation of the world, is identified with American power backed by the world's largest military. These are not people who served in the Peace Corps.

For example the Oath Keepers is an American far-right anti-government militia organization. The group describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group as "heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government." The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the group's founder as a known extremist and describes his announced plans to create localized militia units as "frightening". According to the SPLC, the group espouses a number of conspiracy and legal theories associated with the sovereign citizen movement and the white supremacist posse comitatus movement.

The bloated US military establishment is funded at a level that is ten times greater than the world's next largest militaries combined. In 2019, the United States spent $732 billion on national defense, which was more than the next 10 countries combined. So it's likely that the mindsets of the Capitol rioters have been processed through an American establishment that encourages their particular notion of patriotism which deemphasizes the idea of democracy and emphasizes xenophobia. It aspires to return to those days when the US was a white dominated country and rues the day that the demographics have changed toward a multicultural one. The American military establishment itself is an anachronism. When you add in the money spent on the US intelligence agencies and the nuclear program which is located in the Department of Energy, not in the Defense Department, the US spends about a trillion dollars a year on its defense establishment and yet it was impotent to prevent a mob of hooligans from taking over the US citadel of democracy - the US Capitol. Clearly our priorities are out of whack. Any ordinary 5th grader could have seen that a Trump rally numbering tens of thousands on the same day that Pence was supposed to legitimate the election results, after lies had been perpetrated ad infinitum that the results were not legitimate, could have been a disaster which it turned out to be.

Democracy cannot prevail without an educated citizenry yet the question must be asked: what kind of education? “If we needed a reminder of the fragility of our democracy, we got one,” said Andrew Delbanco, president of the Teagle Foundation, which promotes liberal arts education. “In the long run, the only force that can save democracy is an educated citizenry -- citizens, that is, who know enough to resist the kind of lies and incitements spewed out by the current president and his enablers.” But the US educational system does not emphasize an education in the humanities. It emphasizes the learning of technical knowledge and skills with an eye on innovation, entrepreneurship and potential profit. You too can invent some product and make a billion dollars. High school graduates are confronted with basically two choices: they can gain a college education while going deeply into debt or they can go into the military where they can get a free college education and even a pension after 5 years of service plus numerous other benefits. Which makes more sense? Young people are funneled into the military which is a command and control structure based on the most powerful leader at the top. Their mindsets are then prepared to want the same thing in civilian society. Trump gave it to them.

Clearly the people who carried numerous flags and chanted "USA. USA." are also of the mindset to chant "We're Number One. We're Number One." They are not the kind of people that want to live in a world where they cooperate with other people, perhaps of a different background or ethnicity, or a world based on US cooperation with other nations. They want to be part of a world in which the US dominates other nations, and the most powerful among us dominate and lead civilian life, just as the most powerful leaders are elevated to the highest ranks in the military and exert unquestioned command over those lower on the totem pole. This is the American mindset that the rioters demonstrate. This is a military consciousness based on American exceptionalism and white supremacy. They can't stand the fact that black and brown people are ascending into positions of power in American government and the world, that there has been a demographic shift in American society that does not favor them and that they will have to live in a more progressive society.

Off the Top of My Head

Problems of American Democracy

by John Lawrence, January 16, 2021

My Dad taught a course once with the above name. The major problem now is social media. Social media allows like minded folks to find each other, and, if they are the type that wants to overthrow the government, social media allows them to organize. In addition the First and Second Amendments enable them. Free Speech must be limited and those limitations need to be made clear and evident. As for the Second Amendment, it has to be made clear that this doesn't give gun owners carte blanche. It's ridiculous that they should be able to open carry inside a state Capitol. As for social media, their algorithms encourage the gathering of like minded domestic terrorists in the same way it allowed ISIS to conspire and attract disaffected Muslims.

Facebook in particular has allowed white supremacist and domestic terrorist groups to find each other, conspire and flourish. They encourage like minded people to "friend" as many people as possible. Then if one of them makes a cleverly hateful or conspiratorial poster, they can "share" it with everyone in their group of friends. Even a Russian hacker could put up a hateful poster and share it among hundreds or thousands of people. The more people it's shared among, the more Facebook brings eyeballs to their app, and the more money they make. Facebook's profits are predicated on an advertising model in which they get paid every time a person clicks on their app. People are routinely notified by email and other means that one of their "friends" has posted something even though their friend may only have "shared" it. Empty headed sympathizers of domestic terrorists or white supremacists have only to share someone else's original creations. Meanwhile, Facebook doesn't want to diminish their profits by either changing their highly profitable algorithms or hiring more people to police their site and take down hate speech, untruthful conspiracy theories or the organizing of domestic terrorists. That would diminish their profits.

Time magazine reported:

"At a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security in September 2019, Soufan urged lawmakers to take the threat more seriously. The following month, 40 members of Congress signed a letter calling—unsuccessfully—for the U.S. State Department to designate Azov [ a right wing group based in Ukraine] a foreign terrorist organization. “Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years,” the letter said. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, later confirmed in testimony to the U.S. Senate that American white supremacists are “actually traveling overseas to train.”

"The hearings on Capitol Hill glossed over a crucial question: How did Azov, an obscure militia started in 2014 with only a few dozen members, become so influential in the global web of far-right extremism? TIME, in more than a dozen interviews with Azov’s leaders and recruits, found that the key to its international growth has been its pervasive use of social media, especially Facebook, which has struggled to keep the group off its platform. “Facebook is the main channel,” says Furholm, the recruiter.

"In a statement to TIME, Facebook defended its recent attempts to deal with the proliferation of right-wing extremists, saying it has banned more than 250 white-supremacist groups, including Azov. “As they evolve their efforts to return to the platform, we update our enforcement methods with technology and human expertise to keep them off,” the statement said."

Well, I guess Facebook isn't trying hard enough. It doesn't want to change its lucrative model and the lucrative and profitable algorithms that have made them billions of dollars. What was purportedly supposed to be a platform for sharing family pictures among real actual friends and perhaps original free speech has become a model that's used by groups seeking to organize to overthrow governments. Facebook and YouTube played a role in creating, aiding and abetting ISIS. As the story continues:

"[Azov adherents] were not the only extremists to embrace social media in 2014. When the Islamic State declared a caliphate in the Middle East that year, it began posting propaganda on social networks—mashing together memes, religious verses and scenes of gratuitous violence. The approach took the platforms by surprise, and for a time the caliphate was able to lure a class of disaffected young Muslims to fight. But by 2017, both Facebook and YouTube had developed algorithms to detect Islamic extremist material, after facing significant pressure from Western governments to act.

"No government, least of all that of the U.S., put similar pressure on social media platforms to stamp out white supremacy. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was that many counter-terrorism agencies equated terrorism with Islamic extremism, allowing white supremacy to fly under the radar just as social media platforms like Facebook were giving the movement access to a bigger audience than ever before. “In a way, Facebook tracked the failed counter-terrorism policies of the Western world,” says Heidi Beirich, the director of an advocacy group called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

"In its statement to TIME, Facebook said it began using its algorithms to detect Azov content after designating it a dangerous organization in 2016. But well after that date, members of white-supremacist groups, including Azov, were still able to evangelize on the platform.

"In some cases, Facebook’s algorithms actually nudged users into joining these groups. In an internal presentation in 2016, its analysts looked at the German political groups on the platform where racist content was thriving. They found that within this segment of Facebook, 64% of the people joining extremist groups were finding them through the platform’s own recommendation tools. “Our recommendation systems grow the problem,” the analysis states, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cited the internal document. In its statement to TIME, Facebook said the report was limited in scope and suggested the findings were misleading. It said it had adjusted its algorithms to stop pushing people toward known extremist groups."

Facebook has allowed right wing hate groups to proliferate on its platforms while doing too little, too late to eliminate their presence. It and other social media giants need to be regulated by government in order to rid the world of the threats to domestic order and constitutional government that they represent. “Because this material was allowed to proliferate so long, in particular on Facebook, we now have thousands, millions of people who have been sucked into the world of white supremacy and other forms of extremism,” says Beirich. “That problem now exists. That’s the fallout from not having acted originally.” Meanwhile, social media allows "friends" to schedule "events" that may or may not be gathering places for domestic terrorists and white supremacists. Friends, indeed!

Off the Top of My Head

Back From the Brink: You Only Get One Bite of the Apple

by John Lawrence, January13, 2021

Two things stand out: 1) how little bloodshed there was compared to the potential; 2) how much the rioters incriminated themselves. And they will pay the price for their little escapade. The extremest extremists will go to jail for a long time. They have already identified hundreds of them from the voluminous video evidence as they paraded themselves in front of tons of cameras. Stealth was not their strong suit. This was probably the most inept coup attempt in history, THANK GOD! The "USA. USA" people lost their bid to cause a revolution in the name of Trump and Congress won. Trump was the biggest loser. LOSER. LOSER. Trump, don't let the White House door bang you in the ass on the way out. Now even Republicans are up in arms so to speak because what Trump has really done is to destroy the Republican party. It will never be the same again. It might even bifurcate or disintegrate.

Trump will be silenced, neutered, taken off social media, disgraced, prosecuted and more. He brought disgrace to the USA long before he was impeached for the second time by withdrawing from and insulting our allies, refusing to cooperate with other nations of good will, cozying up to dictators and bullying those nations he decided he needed to use as enemies. Now the Republican rats are leaving the sinking Trump ship. They realize that he has destroyed the Republican party, but the Republican party has also destroyed itself long before Trump became President. They made a deal with the devil by embracing white supremicists because they needed a base, and the upper 1% wasn't big enough in terms of numbers. They went shopping for a base and they found latter day Ku Klux Klan descendents. Their grandpappies said, "Segregation Now. Segregation Tomorrah. Segragation Fawevah!" Later generations learned their lessons well, and thy found a home in the Republican party.

Proud Boys stand up and sit down. How does 20 years in an orange jump suit sound to you? This situation, as horrible as it was, as a spectacle and a possible disaster for Congress persons, staff, janitors, family members and others inside the Capitol building is also characterized by the gargantuan ineptness of the people who attempted to take it over. In the final analysis they did little more than incriminate themselves and put these domestic terrorists on the FBI's shit list. DOJ and the National Guard are on high alert. Now lawmakers in Michigan and elsewhere need to roll back the open carry laws. It's unconscionable that these assholes are currently able to bring their AR-15s into state Capitols. If you don't want an armed revolution in this country, guns need to be taken out of the hands of these domestic terrorists and white supremacists. Despite the Second Amendment, felons are forbidden to buy or own guns. That should be the fate of all the gun loving folks who invaded the Capitol of the US. No guns, boys. Sorry. your toys are being taken away from you. Maybe you can find Jesus in the penitentiary and change your thought processes. They need to be reprogrammed. Maybe they will even make friends with a black person when they find themselves in similar situations as they serve 20 years to life ... together! How ironic. Those who chanted "Lock her up" are themselves going to be locked up for many years.

The South's attempt at a second Civil War has failed abysmally. The nation's military assets are on high alert. Domestic terrorists will be on the no-fly list. They'll end up on the no everything list or in other words the shit list. Their favorite social media sites for conspiring together have been and will be taken away from them. Advertisers are withdrawing their funding for right wing media outlets. Threatening phone calls will be traced, and those jackasses will be thrown in jail. Meanwhile, the rest of the country will get to work with a massive bailout, defeating the real enemy - COVID - and putting people to work at good paying jobs building green infrastructure. Life will eventually be good again. Then we can deal with the real threats facing us - global warming, poverty and pandemics, not only in the US but everywhere on earth because in the final analysis we really are all in this together.

Off the Top of My Head

They Should Have Seen It Coming. What Happened Yesterday Was a Failed Coup Attempt.

by John Lawrence, January 7, 2021

Miraculously, very few people were hurt. The inadequate police force was totally overwhelmed. Why wasn't the National Guard there in the first place? Why did it take hours for additional police to show up? The rioters could have taken over and held the Capitol if they had had weapons. They could have taken Congress persons hostage. These guys are Second Amendment advocates. Each of them could have had a gun under their winter coats. A good question is why didn't they? I'm assuming Trump's intention was a coup, but it failed because of ineptness on the part of the leaders. It might have been a dry run for January 20. Why are our leaders so naive? Why is the decision to activate the National Guard up to the President who had to be "convinced" to call up the Guard. Really? He was the one inciting the riot in the first place. Why would he call in troops to disperse it? The only way he would want any troops there is if they were loyal to him and were there to protect and enable the rioters. Remember the military presence at the Black Lives Matter movement when Trump wanted to cross the road and hold up a Bible in front of a church. Where were the helicopters yesterday? Why doesn't the Mayor of Washington DC have the authority to call in the National Guard?

January 20, the day President elect Biden is inaugurated, should see a sufficient police and military presence to insure that everything goes according to plan without the threat of disruption by any person or group. The perimeter for the event should be extensive and well guarded. No fooling around. It is a travesty that people were able to get inside and rampage in the Capitol building putting the lives of Senators, Congress persons, staff people, media and the vice President at risk. These rioters had been egged on by President Trump, Rudy Giuliani who called for "trial by combat" and Don Junior. "It should be a message to all the Republicans who have not been willing to actually fight, the people who did nothing to stop the steal," he. said at a "Stop the Steal" rally on the National Mall. "This gathering should send a message to them: This isn't their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."

I half expected Trump to come on TV, proclaim martial law, suspend the Constitution and declare the election invalid, as troops, loyal to him, held Nancy Pelosi hostage on her knees and blindfolded. This is how coups are done, but, fortunately, the ineptness of the planners contributed to their not being able to go all the way. Also the fact that Trump didn't have any military units loyal to him, although he has put people loyal to him in important positions in the Pentagon, doomed Trump's coup attempt. In the final analysis I guess some people in important positions took their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution more seriously than their loyalty to Trump.

Now it's up to the FBI to track down all those people who invaded the Capitol and give them lengthy jail sentences. They have tons of visual records from cameras in the Capitol, and they have hotel records although a lot of them stayed at Trump's hotel. They probably have already destroyed those records. A lot of them flew there so they have those records. It's a credit to the Congress persons that they reconvened and got their business done even though they had to stay there most of the night. The election of President Biden has finally been certified. What an excruciating ordeal! By the way, Biden should not keep saying in regard to the rioters, "That's not who we are." The question is who do you mean by "we", Mr. President elect? Obviously, it is who some of us are. There are now two classes in America who are at war with each other. It has nothing to do with capitalists and proletarians. It has to do with those who have the decency of Biden and his followers and those who are basically latter day Ku Klux Klanners and white supremicists, who also by the way used the slogan "America First".

Now we have to be concerned about January 20. As Yogi Berra said, "It's not over till it's over."

Off the Top of My Head

Terrorism is in the Eyes of the Beholder

by John Lawrence, January 7, 2020

The words "terrorism" and "terrorist" are overused and have completely lost their meaning. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. The Kurds consider themselves freedom fighters. They were allies of the US in ridding Syria of ISIS. However, Turkey, a NATO ally, calls them terrorists. General Soleimani, who was just assassinated by the US, was considered a "good guy" as long as he was fighting ISIS. The U.S. and Iran are mutual enemies of ISIS and effectively fought against ISIS to crush the terrorist group’s de facto state in Iraq and Syria. General Soleimani deserves credit for leading this fight against ISIS so is he a terrorist or an anti-terrorist, an ally in the fight against ISIS or, now that that fight has been won, a terrorist? The nuances of the Middle East situation are too much for an imbecile like Trump to appreciate. His other advisors aren't much better.

The ISIS so-called caliphate has largely been destroyed. That should be considered a victory, but the US should not get all the credit for that victory. Other actors like the Kurds and the Iranians deserve credit for that outcome as well. But it will be a cold day in hell before the US gives the Iranians any credit for anything. What the US should be doing is leaving the Middle East and letting the Middle East sort out its own situation. Continuing to provoke the hostility between Sunnis and Shiites is only contributing to exacerbate the Middle East situation. Trump said he wanted to end the endless wars in the Middle East so why doesn't he do it? The answer is that Trump is drunk with power, and he has made Iran the bogieman so he can vent his animosity on them. This is only increasing tensions until they will blow up into a major war that will accomplish nothing but the deaths of millions of civilians and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property including priceless Iranian historic and cultural sites.

Finally, we can appreciate how important the Iran nuclear deal was now that Trump's first step towards war was in the abandoning of it. It at least brought Iran to the negotiating table and within reach of being included among other civilized nations. Instead it has been driven away from meaningful negotiations by Trump's refusal to have diplomatic negotiations with them. This is how hostilities leading to war begin. Put a narcissistic imbecile with a lot of pet peeves in charge of the world's largest military, and the result is that he inevitably will use that power to get his own way regardless of the destruction that that involves. The last time we saw this situation was in the 1930s, but Hitler's power to destroy civilization was trivial compared to Trump's arsenal. Hitler also started by being democratically appointed to the Chancellorship. That was before he became Fuhrer.

We can hope that cooler heads will prevail, but where are the cooler heads in the Trump administration? Trump along with his henchmen in the Senate who are totally enabling him has effectively taken over the American political structure just as Hitler took over the Reichstag. The Democratic controlled House can do nothing to stop Trump as long as the Senate under Mitch McConnell is totally on Trump's side. They are egging him on instead of putting the brakes on him. Trump is convinced that the majority of Americans are totally behind him. Like Hitler he is leading rallies of support on a constant basis unlike any President we have known hitherto. All that is missing is the torchlight parades. There is effectively no governmental constraint on his doing anything he wants to do, and that does not auger well for a salutary outcome for the US, Iran, our NATO allies or the world.

Off the Top of My Head

The Police Are Trying to Figure Out a Motive

by John Lawrence, January 4, 2020

It seems like the conclusion of every news report about another senseless killing. Why are the police even figuring? It won't do anything to prevent another senseless killing. If only we could figure out a motive, they think, it would prevent another gun nut with an arsenal from going berserk? Or a mentally ill person from gunning down innocents? Basically it comes down to one thing: we live in a sick society, a society which glamorizes guns and criminal activities. While we spend a trillion dollars a year fighting foreign terrorism, we spent nothing on fighting domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorists have been responsible for more American deaths than foreign terrorists in recent years.

In an article entitled "The Enemy Within: Why Domestic Terrorism Poses a Greater Threat than Foreign Terrorism," David Chipman writes:

Americans are much, much more likely to lose their lives to gun violence, which kills 36,000 people in the United States each year, than foreign terrorism. Despite the outsized fear of foreign terrorism in our post-9/11 world, you’re twice as likely to be shot and killed by a toddler than you are to be murdered by a terrorist. And despite the rhetoric we often hear from President Trump, Muslim Americans are more likely to be victims of terrorism than perpetrators.

[FBI Director Christopher] Wray’s statement highlights a dangerous trend—one that requires immediate action. In attacks like the bombing in Oklahoma City and the mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, shooters targeted their neighbors for slaughter. As this administration continues to focus its rhetoric and resources on enemies abroad, we must recognize that more frequently, the enemy is one of us.

...

We make it far too easy for hateful people to acquire weaponry they can use to hurt others. Investing more resources in ATF would help keep guns out of the hands of domestic terrorists. Its agents need further support to face the threats we face. ATF’s annual budget is only $1.2 billion, while the last aircraft carrier purchased for the Navy cost $13 billion. We have only 2,600 ATF agents to defend this nation against gun violence but 28,500 troops in South Korea alone.

At the root of the problem is the proliferation of guns, guns that are accessible to the average nutcase in his [and it's usually his, hmmm] quest to prove something to himself or society or to gain his 15 minutes of fame in an otherwise dull, uneventful and uninteresting life devoid of any constructive activity, a life that needs an act of violence in order to stand out from the crowd, a life fueled by a fantasy life filled with violence made to seem normal by movies, TV and video games.

While the FBI claims to have stepped up its efforts to combat domestic terrorism attacks in recent years and months, evidence suggests that these efforts are falling short. The FBI’s most recent hate crimes report indicates that while hate crimes dipped slightly in 2018, violent hate crimes reached a 16-year high. The US is not spending its money where it needs to to create a more sane and violence free society. Many of the perpetrators have come out of the military where violence is the norm. Spending less money on military activities and more to end poverty and combat mental illness might help to end the senseless violence that the US is in the grip of. Especially in schools and places of worship, where people are most vulnerable, the perpetrators, knowing this, step up their targeting opportunities.

But even more important is the elimination of guns from our society, especially high power, military style guns. They should be outlawed as well as large capacity ammunition magazines. There will still be nuts around attempting to hurt or kill other people, but if these guns were eliminated, they would just not be able to do as much damage. Reducing the size of our military and spending the money on more peaceful pursuits would also help to set a different tone in society than the militaristic one being set now.

Off the Top of My Head

Will the Real Terrorists Please Stand Up?

by John Lawrence, October 22, 2019

In this strange never never land, allies become terrorists and terrorists become allies. Let's get this straight. The Kurds were our allies, that is they were, before Turkey, which is our ally, announced that they were terrorists. One day they were our allies, the next they were terrorists as announced by our ally, Turkey. Oh, what tangled webs we weave! What happened with the abrupt pullout of American troops from Syria is that diplomacy went entirely down the drain. A diplomatic solution should have been sought before the American pullout which would have at least protected the Kurds who were American allies in the successful elimination of the real terrorists - ISIS. Now the real terrorists have been given a new lease on life while our former allies, having been completely sold down the drain by the US, have been declared as terrorists.

Without formally announcing it, the US has lost the war in Syria. Bashar al-Assad, whose regime the US sought to change, has remained in power. What's more he has formed an alliance with the Kurds, America's former allies, against Turkey which wants to annex a 20 mile by 250 mile strip of Syria. There is a possible solution to this whole mess if the countries involved were at all interested in anything other than a military solution to every problem. Start by analyzing each party's interests. As far as Bashar al-Assad is concerned, he wants to remain in power as Predident of Syria. As far as Turkey is concerned, they want to relocate Syrian refugees now living in Turkey back to Syria, and they want relief from the trouble the Kurds are causing inside Turkey. As far as the Kurds are concerned, they want a piece of land that they can call home without being hounded by Turkey.

So far only Bashar al-Assad has got his way. He will remain in power, the US having failed to oust him. The crux of the matter is giving the Kurds officially some kind of homeland especially after they fought on behalf of the US with just that in mind. The Kurdish homeland should be an autonomous region in northern Syria and possibly Iraq. If that had been negotiated successfully, Syria, Kurtdistan and Turkey could have achieved a peaceful settlement. Trump's abrupt removal of troops from Syria without at least first seeking a peace deal was shameful to say the least. The US lost all leverage and lost all credibility in one fateful stroke by the hapless and ignorant Trump. Now the situation has devolved disastrously for the Kurds whom Turkey considers terrorists. The Syrian refugees could have been repatriated, Turkey could have had a peace deal with the Kurds if they were willing to relocate to an autonomous region in Northern Syria and Bashar al-Assad could be happy. Since the US is unwilling to work things out with the various countries involved including Russia and Iran who are Bashar's allies, the whole situation is a shambles.

Perhaps Russia, Iran and Syria can work things out diplomatically. The US has foregone the privilege of being the peacemaker in the region. The US has mutated from being a peacemaker to a warmonger in the region starting with George W Bush's lies to get the US involved in war in Iraq. It has gone downhill from there. The US was at the height of its prestige and credibility after WW II. I have the utmost respect and patriotic regard for America's conduct in that era. Most of which that has happened since though, including the Vietnam and Korean wars, has only diminished US credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world. Trump has put the final nail in the coffin of the US' reputation and credibility.

Off the Top of My Head

The US is Now Arming ISIS After Spending Trillions Trying to Get Rid of ISIS

by John Lawrence

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the only Democrat bringing up the absurdity of the US continuing to arm terrorists, whom we spent trillions to eradicate, in their efforts to overthrow Assad in Syria. Since Assad is allied with Iran (his religion is a variation of Shiite Islam which is espoused by Iran), all of a sudden it's not ISIS that are the terrorists, it's Iran and everyone allied with Iran who are the terrorists. This is all a game designed to spend trillions of dollars and destroy millions of lives just so the US can maintain its military spending at a high level while accomplishing nothing but death and destruction. What the US foreign policy experts don't seem to understand is that what is going on in the Middle East is fundamentally a continuation of the Sunni-Shiite split that happened centuries ago. Add to that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you have a real mess.

Tulsi Gabbard understands the ridiculousness of this continued mucking around in this conflict which has produced nothing but death and destruction and wasted trillions of dollars:

Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If an American citizen gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, he or she would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government. The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. This support has allowed al-Qaeda and their fellow terrorist organizations to establish strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo.

Since the US has redefined Iran as the enemy and undertaken a series of provocations towards Iran, all of a sudden anyone who is fighting Iran's friend Assad, namely ISIS is a friend of ours. All of a sudden Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism and not ISIS. It all depends whose side you're on how you define who is and who isn't a terrorist. Since the brou ha ha over Jamal Khashoggi's death at the hands of Saudi Arabia has died down, we can now get on with our close relationship with the Sunni country of Saudi Arabia which spawned ISIS (who are Sunnis) in the first place. Now it's Sunnis good, Shiites bad although by taking out Saddam in Iraq we created a Shiite state affiliated with Iran since the majority of Iraquis are Shiites (Saddam was a Sunni).

So there's this big realignment of US foreign policy since Trump backed out of the JCPOA, the nuclear arms deal with Iran. This deal made Iran a partner instead of an adversary. Now Trump has accomplished the goal of turning them into an adversary and may even start a war with them. At the same time he is doubling down on his efforts to oust Assad in Syria since Assad is an ally of Iran.

Tulsi continues:

The CIA has long been supporting a group called Fursan al Haqq, providing them with salaries, weapons and support, including surface to air missiles.  This group is cooperating with and fighting alongside an al-Qaeda affiliated group trying to overthrow the Syrian government. The Levant Front is another so-called moderate umbrella group of Syrian opposition fighters. Over the past year, the United States has been working with Turkey to give this group intelligence support and other forms of military assistance. This group has joined forces with al-Qaeda’s offshoot group in Syria.

Why is she the only Democrat talking about this stuff? Who is going to define who is and who is not a terrorist? A terrorist is in the eyes of the beholder and has become a meaningless term used to justify every side in a conflict. As Tulsi points out, "Our limited resources should go toward rebuilding our communities here at home, not fueling more counterproductive regime change wars abroad."

At the root of the conflict is the continually festering situation between the Palestinians and Israel. Even though the Palestinians are essentially Sunnis, the Shiite nation of Iran is supporting them in a proxy war against Israel through its proxy, Hezbollah. If this issue were to be resolved, then maybe all parties could get along, and Sunnis, Shiites and Jews could all be friends. In any event the US mucking around in the Middle East has only made the situation worse while spending trillions of dollars that could have been better spent at home.

Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism

Why do Republicans enable right-wing extremism?

by Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 5, 2019

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, spoke Monday about the weekend’s mass shootings.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Why has the Republican Party become a systematic enabler of terrorism?

Don’t pretend to be shocked. Just look at G.O.P. responses to the massacre in El Paso. They have ranged from the ludicrous (blame video games!) to the almost honest (who would have expected Ted Cruz, of all people, to speak out against white supremacy?). But as far as I can tell, not one prominent Republican has even hinted at the obvious link between Donald Trump’s repeated incitements to violence and the upsurge in hate crimes.

So the party remains in lock step behind a man who has arguably done more to promote racial violence than any American since Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization if there ever was one — and who was recently honored by the Republican governor of Tennessee.

Anyway, the party’s complicity started long before Trump came on the scene. More than a decade ago, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about a surge of right-wing extremism. The report was prescient, to say the least. But when congressional Republicans learned about it, they went on a rampage, demanding the resignation of Janet Napolitano, who headed the agency, and insisted that even using the term “right-wing extremism” was unacceptable.

This backlash was effective: Homeland Security drastically scaled back its efforts to monitor and head off what was already becoming a major threat. In effect, Republicans bullied law enforcement into creating a safe space for potential terrorists, as long as their violent impulses were motivated by the right kind of hatred.

But why did they do that? Is the G.O.P. now a party of white nationalists?

No, not exactly. No doubt some members of Congress, and a significant number of Trump administration officials, very much including the tweeter in chief, really are white supremacists. And a much larger fraction — almost surely bigger than anyone wants to admit — are racists. (Recently released tapes of conversations between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon reveal that the modern G.O.P.’s patron saint was, in fact, a crude racist who called Africans “monkeys.”)

But racism isn’t what drives the Republican establishment, and my guess is that a majority of the party’s elected officials find it a little bit repugnant — just not repugnant enough to induce them to repudiate its political exploitation. And their exploitation of racism has led them inexorably to where they are today: de facto enablers of a wave of white supremacist terrorism.

The central story of U.S. politics since the 1970s is the takeover of the Republican Party by economic radicals, determined to slash taxes for the wealthy while undermining the social safety net.

With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, every Republican president since 1980 has pushed through tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the 1 percent while trying to defund and/or privatize key social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

This agenda is, however, unpopular. Most voters believe that the rich should pay more, not less, in taxes, and want spending on social programs to rise, not fall.

So how do Republicans win elections? By appealing to racial animus. This is such an obvious fact of American political life that you have to be willfully blind not to see it.

For a long time, the G.O.P. establishment was able to keep this game under control. It would campaign using implicit appeals to racial hostility (welfare queens! Willie Horton!) but turn postelection to privatization and tax cuts.

But for some reason this bait-and-switch started getting less effective in the 2000s. Maybe it was the reality of America’s growing racial diversity; maybe it was the fact that American society as a whole was becoming less racist, leaving the hard-core racists feeling isolated and frustrated. And the election of our first black president really kicked hatred into overdrive.

The result is that there are more and more angry white people out there willing to commit mayhem — and able to do so because those same Republicans have blocked any effective control over sales of assault weapons.

A different, better G.O.P. might have been willing to acknowledge the growing threat and supported a crackdown on violent right-wing extremism, comparable to the F.B.I.’s successful campaign against the modern K.K.K. in the 1960s. A lot of innocent victims would be alive today if Republicans had done so.

But they didn’t, because admitting that right-wing extremism was a threat, or even a phrase law enforcement should be allowed to use, might have threatened the party’s exploitation of racial hostility to achieve its economic goals.

In effect, then, the Republican Party decided that a few massacres were an acceptable price to pay in return for tax cuts. I wish that were hyperbole, but the continuing refusal of G.O.P. figures to criticize Trump even after El Paso shows that it’s the literal truth.

So as I said at the beginning, the G.O.P. has become a systematic enabler of terrorism. Why? Follow the money.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Killing of Innocents Reprehensible Whether by Random Individuals or US Military

by John Lawrence, March 19, 2019

Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 innocent civilians in New Zealand, was fighting a war just as much as any nation that has murdered innocents anywhere. There is always an outpouring of emotion - candles, flowers and notes - and media coverage. When innocent civilians are killed by US bombs, however, there is no similar outpouring or media coverage. Such was the case for the wedding party on July 6, 2008 in Haska Meyna, Afghanistan when 47 innocents were killed. This was a similar tragic event but was just considered collateral damage by the US military. There is no similar outpouring as thousands of innocent children are killed and starved to death in Yemen either. Thank God, the US Democrat controlled House of Representatives has voted to end US involvement in that travesty. But it won't stop until the Democrats control the Senate as well.

White nationalist attacks like the one in New Zealand are terrorism pure and simple. However, they are not talked about in the same way as attacks by Muslims. President Trump is all too eager to talk about Muslim terrorists, but not so eager to talk about white supremacist terrorists like the one who carried out the attack in New Zealand even referring to Trump by name in his manifesto. The Washington Post reported:

The White House’s response to the New Zealand attack more broadly fits into a by-now expected pattern. When an apparent terrorist or hate attack has been committed by a Muslim, Trump is quick to draw attention to it. When it targets Muslims, however, Trump’s responses are slower and tonally different. That pattern itself helps bolster questions about Trump’s willingness to condemn violence against Muslims.

The murder of innocent civilians should be condemned wherever it happens and whoever is the perpetrator including the US military. It just can't be written off as collateral damage as Timothy McVeigh did after killing innocent children in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That blast killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed one-third of the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed or burned 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.

It's obvious that terrorist attacks can occur anywhere and can be perpetrated by people with widely varying motives. However, since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners. The International Criminal Court also wants to look into US war crimes in Afghanistan, but the US is doing whatever it can to impede them. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. is imposing visa restrictions against International Criminal Court officials, citing investigations by the ICC into the activities of Americans and their allies in Afghanistan." The slaughtering of innocents by the US military is just as much a threat to peace and civility in the world as the random acts of terrorists like religious or ethnic bigots. Therefore, an investigation into US war crimes is completely warranted. Pompeo is not only threatening visa restrictions. He's threatening sanctions as well as the US ramps up the sanctions war against anyone and everyone who disagrees with it.

The Guardian reported:

“I’m announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel,” [Pompeo] said.

This would include anyone who takes, or has taken, action to request or further an investigation, he told reporters.

“If you’re responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of US personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan you should not assume that you still have, or will get, a visa or that you will permitted to enter the United States,” Pompeo added.

The secretary of state said visas could also be withheld from ICC personnel involved in conducting probes of US allies, specifically Israel.

Pompeo said “implementation” of the policy has already begun but he did not provide any details, citing confidentiality surrounding visa applications.

“These visa restrictions will not be the end of our efforts,” Pompeo said. “We’re prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change its course.”

So the US isn't to be held accountable for its crimes including supporting the Saudi war effort that has killed and starved thousands of children in Yemen which is going on today. And the US needs to broaden its outlook on terrorism within the US to include white nationalist and white supremicist murderers. When innocents are murdered either by random individuals or by the US military, the perpetrators need to be held accountable. As for Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand murderer, since New Zealand doesn't have the death penalty, perhaps he should be extradited to Saudi Arabia where he will rue the day he ever became a white supremicist.

New Zealand's prime minister has promised to change the gun laws. Let's hope she sets an example by outlawing military style weapons and instituting a strict licensing procedure that would make it 100 times more difficult to own a gun than to drive a car. In my opinion that would still be within Second Amendment rights in the US.

When 'God Wills It!': An American Reckoning

Published on Thursday, March 08, 2018 by TomDispatch

The 'War on Terror' as the launching of an 'American Crusade'

by James Carroll

 

7 Comments

Former President George W. Bush speaking on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003. (Photo: Reuters/Larry Downing)

America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited the vast public disorder that is now our all-American world, has been almost completely forgotten here.  And little wonder.  It was no more than a casually tossed-off cliché, a passing historical reference whose implications and consequences meant nothing to the speaker. “This crusade,” said President George W. Bush just days after the 9/11 attacks, “this war on terrorism…”

That, however, proved to be an invocation from hell, one that set the stage for so much of the horror to follow.  The Crusades were, of course, a centuries-long medieval catastrophe. Bush’s Global War on Terror, in contrast, has already wreaked comparable havoc in a paltry 17 years, leading to almost unimaginable mayhem abroad and a moral collapse at home personified by President Donald J. Trump.

Despite the threads of causality woven together as if on some malignant loom that brought about his election -- the cult of reality-show celebrity, the FBI director's last-minute campaign intervention, Russian mischief, Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability to self-defeat and misogyny, electoral college anomalies, Republican party nihilism, and a wickedly disenchanted public -- the ease with which such a figure took control of the levers of power in this country should still stun us. Some deep sickness of the soul had already played havoc with our democracy’s immune system or he wouldn’t have been imaginable.  Think of him as a symptom, not the disease. After Trump finally leaves the Oval Office, we’ll still be a stricken people and the world will still be groaning under the weight of the wreckage this country has brought about. How, then, did we actually get here?  It might be worth a momentary glance back.

 

A Fever Dream of a War

“This is a new kind of evil.”  So said the president that September 16th, standing on the South Lawn of the White House.  “And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” In that way, only five days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush elevated a band of petty nihilists to the status of world-historic warriors. “And the American people must be patient,” he continued. “I’m going to be patient.”

He, of course, is long gone, but what he initiated that day is still unspooling. It could have been so different. September 11th was a tragic moment, but the initial reactions of most Americans to those collapsed towers and a damaged Pentagon were ones of empathy and patriotism.  The selflessness of first responders that day had its echo in a broad and surprising manifestation of national altruism. The usual left-right divides of politics disappeared and the flag, for once, became a true symbol of national unity. The global reaction was similar. From across the world, including from erstwhile adversaries like Russia and China, came authentic expressions of support and sympathy, of grief-struck affection.

But in every phrase the president would speak in those weeks -- “this is war… with us or against us… dead or alive” -- he chose to take this country on quite a different path into the future.

Two days before invoking the Crusades, for instance, he presided over a religious service, which, though officially defined as “ecumenical,” took place in the neo-Gothic National Cathedral. “Just three days removed from these events,” he said from that church’s pulpit, “Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil… This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”

In a specifically Christian setting, that is, George W. Bush answered the criminal attacks of 9/11 not by calling on international law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice, but by a declaration of cosmic war aimed at nothing less than the elimination of Islamist evil. Labeling it a “crusade” only underscored the subliminal but potent message conveyed by television cameras that lingered on the cathedral’s multiple crucifixes and the bloodied figure of Jesus Christ. Held up for all to see, that sacred icon sent a signal that could not be missed. A self-avowed secular nation was now to be a crusader, ready to display the profoundly Christian character of a culture erected on triumphalist pieties from its Pilgrim roots to the nuclear apocalypticism of the Cold War.

Bush’s message was received in the Arab world just as you might expect.  There, his reference to “this crusade” was rendered as “this War of the Cross.” Even then, many Muslims knew better than to regard the president’s characterization of the conflict to come as purely accidental and of no import, just as they would later disregard the insistence of America’s leaders that their country’s violent intrusions across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa were not “religiously” inspired in any way. Today, of course, Donald Trump’s brazen denigrations of Muslims have made clear just how on target observers in the Islamic world were about what lay behind Washington’s new “global war.”

At the time of Bush’s cavalier use of crusade, I was one of the few here to take offense and say so. I feared even then that stumbling into sectarian strife, into -- in the argot of the day -- a “clash of civilizations,” could set in motion, as the original Crusades had, a dynamic that would far outrun anyone’s intentions, loosing forces that could destroy the very principles in whose name that “war of choice” was declared. Little did I know how far short of an accurate damage assessment my thoughts would fall.

In fact, Bush’s use of that term wasn’t a stumble, however inadvertent, but a crystal-clear declaration of purpose that would soon be aided and abetted by a fervent evangelical cohort within the U.S. military, already primed for holy war. With what Bush himself called “the distance of history,” it’s now possible to see the havoc his “crusade” is still wreaking across much of the globe: Iraq and Afghanistan are in ruins; Syria destroyed (with Russian, American, Israeli, Turkish, and Iranian warplanes testing one another in its airspace); Yemen gripped by a war-induced famine; the Turks at the throat of the Kurds; the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dead; Libya a failed state; U.S. Special Ops garrisons in Somalia, Niger, and across Africa; and Europe increasingly politically destabilized by refugee flows from these conflicts. Meanwhile, Bush’s crusade became the American disease now peaking in the fever dream of President Donald Trump.

Off the Top of My Head

Evidently, the School Had No Security

by John Lawrence, February 16, 2018

The school shooter simply walked on campus and into a school building with an AK-15 and numerous rounds of ammunition. He had a backpack and a case holding the gun. The school had no security whatsoever. That was just nuts. In this day and age nobody should be allowed on school grounds, much less into school buildings without permission. The school district itself is at fault for such lax security. They are directly to blame for the loss of life.

This guy was reported to the FBI, but the FBI gets tons of these reports every day. It simply can't process them all. This says something about this country, doesn't it? The US spends a trillion dollars a year fighting terrorism, but can't stop a disturbed kid from taking dozens of innocent lives. We'll even sell him legally the means to do so. We've simply got to do better to put a stop to this epidemic. Offering "hopes and prayers" is just a mockery and a travesty for a nation that puts innocent kids at risk like this. We can't any longer say things like "we never saw this coming" or "who would have believed." It's practically a weekly occurence. Nobody should be shocked any more that this is happening. It's happening on a regular basis.

This kid had been expelled from school, had posted pictures of himself with knives and guns on the internet. If the FBI doesn't have time to deal with it, what about the school administrators who should have been suspect of any kid that has been expelled. Does he have a gun? He shouldn't have been allowed to purchase a gun legally after having been expelled from school. The kids themselves should have pointed the finger at this guy, should have gone to the authorities. Evidently, it was a running joke at the school that this guy might shoot it up one day.

Honestly, everyone involved should have done a better job of prevention like the Grandma who turned in her grandson after discovering in his journal writing that implicated him as someone who planned the next mass school shooting. Where are the Moms Against Gun Nuts chapters.? There should be one at every school checking social media on suspicious kids. And every school should have security ... evidently.

Off the Top of My Head

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program

by John Lawrence

Was there ever a stupider program than the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program which let the New York City truck bomber, Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan, into the country? But wait, there's something even stupider:

The U.S. Embassy announces the opening of the 2019 Diversity Visa Lottery Program (DV-2019). Often called the “Green Card Lottery,” DV-2019 is the only official lottery program for immigrant visas to the United States. Registration began at noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) on Tuesday, October 3, 2017, and ends at noon EDT on Tuesday, November 7, 2017. There is no fee to apply.

He carried out his deed on October 31 which means it was during the period that some other terrorist could apply for their green card. Why wasn't this program immediately discontinued and canceled? It just goes to show that the Trump administration and politicians in general are all a bunch of hot air. It's all bullshit, especially with Tweety Trump. The only intelligent discussion of the issues is on RT, a media outlet politicians want to get rid of, probably because they do have intelligent discussions which is anathema to the bullshit politicians who didn't even know there were American soldiers in Niger, nor did they know about the DIVP.

 The dimwit Democrats better come up with a new approach and a new line about immigration because that is one area where Trump had a greater appeal to the American people. However, Europeans are in a far greater bind as everyone from the Middle East and from Africa is literally dying to get in. They all want a better life.

Here's an idea: Take a few hundred billion away from the combined military budgets of the US and Europe and create a NATO Peace Corps whose mission is to improve the lives of poor people in Africa and the Middle East so they can stay in their homeland and have a good life there. Instead we've bombed the hell out of the Middle East and corporations have exploited the hell out of Africa. The result is that nobody wants to stay there. The American approach is to let corporations exploit these countries in the hopes that the few pittance level jobs that are created for the locals will elevate their standard of living. It hasn't worked. War and corporate exploitation are not the answers.

I(f we hadn't destroyed their cities, they wouldn't be trying to get into Europe and the US. Now Europe is suffering the brunt of the refugee problem. The US has escaped it for the most part, and most Americans want to keep it that way. The Democrats shouldn't just be handing over this issue to the Republicans. Trump exploited it to his advantage, The Democrats better think again.

Off the Top of My Head

OUTRAGEOUS: Google Still Provides a Link to ISIS Propaganda Magazine - Rumiyah

by John Lawrence

Even after the New York truck killer, who was inspired by ISIS propaganda including the magazine, Rumiyah, admitted as much, Google still links to it. What are you guys thinking? All ISIS propaganda material should be banned from the web. Free speech be damned. These lone wolves like Saipov are taking inspiration from them.

Here's a sampling from Rumiyah:

Therefore, O lions of the Ummah, and those living in Australia in particular, follow the path of these righteous souls for there is no other path. The Khilafah has called for you to mobilize from your dens to alleviate the pain afflicting the hearts of the Muslims by striking the kuffar [nonbelievers] in their homelands. It is only from the hikmah of Allah that he has scattered you around the earth and in the various lands of the Crusaders to see which of you are best in deeds.

So here before you are the doors of jihad – unhinged, and in their lands! Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror. Kill them on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown, and Bondi. Kill them at the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground], the SCG [Sydney Cricket and Sports Grounds], the Opera House, and even in their backyards. Stab them, shoot them, poison them, and run them down with your vehicles.  Kill them wherever you find them until the hollowness of their arrogance is filled with terror and they find themselves on their knees with their backs broken under the weight of regret for having waged a war against the believers, and by Allah’s will, and then through your sacrifices, this Ummah [the Islamic state] will be victorious.

So Google is linking to a terrorist organization's propaganda materials? What else is out there on the internet for other vulnerable minds to absorb? It needs to be taken down. We shouldn't be giving ISIS or any other terrorist organization access to the minds of Muslims living in our country or any country for that matter. The Silicon Valley high tech executives sit before the Congressional committee so innocently, but they are giving a sounding board to ISIS on their platforms. They need to do something about it.

Saipov's phone was loaded with propaganda videos. Where did he get them? Whatever sites are providing them need to be taken down. We shouldn't be giving a platform to those whose mission is to kill as many of us as possible. The Constitution calls for Free Speech, but this kind of speech including hate speech of neo-Nazis shouldn't be tolerated for it is propaganda with the intent of recruitment. I guess it worked perfectly in the case of Saipov who is proud of what he did mowing down and killing eight innocent people. He even wanted an ISIS flag hung in his room!

Off the Top of My Head

Why Isn't Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Taking Down ISIS Sites?

by John Lawrence

The truck bomber in New York City recently was evidently inspired by ISIS videos. While the government is obsessed with Russian ads, it doesn't show as much concern about the fact that ISIS information is transmitted over their sites. ISIS wants "lone wolves" to do exactly what that truck bomber did: mow down innocent people on sidewalks. Their propaganda videos are all over the internet. It's up to the high tech executives to hire people to police their sites and take down anything and everything that could inspire a lone wold to carry out such attacks.

While they're at it, they should take down all white supremicist sites or any sites which advocate violence. That would include any site which gives instructions for making or modifying guns so that they become automatic weapons or teach people how to make bombs. Free speech should not include advocacy of violence whether of right wing neo-Nazis or of Muslim radicals. The internet has been much too free as a place for conspirators to conspire together and egg each other on.

I understand that this effort on behalf of those high tech corporations that control the portals of the internet will cost them money. So be it. It's their responsibility to do so. Free speech has to go out the door if it means leaving the door wide open for extremists that would perpetrate horrible crimes on the American people or any people. They are doing the same thing all over the world including Nice, France and London, England.

At the same time the US government in conjunction with other governments must profile and track any Muslim with a police record as the New York City bomber evidently had. Any suspicious behavior should put such people on the FBI's watch list and other nations' watch lists. I don't agree with President Trump much, but he is right to eliminate the program that enabled this guy from Uzbekistan to get into the US on a lottery. How ridiculous. Let's have a lottery for terrorists. That's what it amounted to.

Sorry high tech corporations, but it is your job to police your networks and take down any sites or communications which advocate violence by ISIS or any other person or group. It will diminish your profits, but the world will be a lot safer. Free speech must be limited to those not advocating violence or terrorism.

After Trump Calls Gulf Nation "High Level" Funder of Terrorism, US Sells Qatar $12 Billion in Fighter Jets

Published on

Thursday, June 15, 2017

 

by Common Dreams

"Ah yes. Take that, Qatar! Feel the wrath of the Trump..."

 

by Common Dreams staff

 

 

5 Comments

 

A U.S. Air Force F-15 fighter jet does a low-level flyby over Forward Operating Base Bostick in eastern Afghanistan January 1, 2009. REUTERS/Bob Strong/File photo

Just days after President Donald Trump publicly scolded Qatar for being a "high level" exporter of regional terrorism in the Middle East, its government announced Wednesday the signing of a deal to buy $12 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets from U.S. weapons makers.

The Pentagon justified the massive sale by saying the jets—reportedly 39 of them—would increase "security cooperation" between the two countries.

Pointing towards the glaring hypocrisy, journalist Jeremy Scahill quipped, "Ah yes. Take that, Qatar! Feel the wrath of the Trump..."

Last Friday, Trump told reporters at a White House press conference that "Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level." The president then said he had decided to take a harder line with the country.

Oil-rich Qatar is home to a major U.S. airbase in the region and a longtime ally, but the latest weapons sale comes amid boiling tensions in the region centered around ongoing wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen as a well as a diplomatic crisis between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

And NBC News notes:

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates cut diplomatic and transport ties with Qatar last week and accused it of supporting terrorism and regional unrest.

Despite these allegations, Qatar is a crucial ally to Washington in the Middle East. It is home to 10,000 American troops and a major American military base that acts as the center of U.S. operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like Scahill, historian and Middle East expert Vijay Prashad, said the weapons sale in this context, if not surprising, is telling:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Civilians Killed by US Largely Ignored as Endless Global War Continues

Published on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 by Common Dreams

 

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

Borderless 'War on Terror'—now operated by President Donald Trump—continues to claim innocent lives around the world... but pattern holds that not all victims receive equal attention

"This new flawed raid by President Trump shows the US is not capable of distinguishing a terrorist from an innocent civilian."—Kate Higham, Reprieve

Contradicting a version of events presented by the U.S. military and reported widely by the corporate press, a human rights group and a journalist in Yemen are citing witnesses who said a raid by U.S. Navy SEALs on Monday night killed multiple innocent civilians and not just "Al Qaeda militants" as the Pentagon claimed.

Reprieve, a UK-based human rights group, cited witnesses from the village of Al-Jubah in Marib province, where the raid took place, and offered the names of five civilians killed as Nasser Ali Mahdi Al-Adhal; Al-Ghader Saleh Salem Al-Adhal; Saleh Al-Taffaf; Yasser Al-Taffaf Al-Adhel; and Shebreen Saeed Salem Al-Adhal.

The witnesses said that none of those five were fighting for al-Qaeda and that Nasser al-Adhal, identified as being approximately 70-years-old and partially blind, was the first one shot by the U.S. soldiers when he mistook them for arriving guests and came out to greet them. According to Reprieve:

The four other villagers were killed when they started to argue with the Navy Seals after the shooting of Nasser al-Adhal. Six villagers were seriously injured, including another elderly man who was around 69-years-old.

Al-Qaeda fighters gathering nearby, who are thought to have been the original target of the raid, were alerted by the gunshots in the village and firefight ensued in which at least two of them were killed. The Navy SEALs then left with the help of air support from a helicopter.

Politicians Don't Need Fake News to Manage Reality

by John Lawrence

They Have Other Techniques at Their Disposal

We have seen two recent examples of politicians getting themselves out of a bind. Manipulation of the news need not include producing fake news. Since reality seems to be composed of media images and talk show brou ha ha, all that is necessary is to change the subject. Case in point: the US as personified by President Trump was on the hook for dropping bombs in Mosul that killed 200 civilians. The New York Times reported on March 24:

The American-led military coalition in Iraq said Friday that it was investigating reports that scores of civilians — perhaps as many as 200, residents said — had been killed in recent American airstrikes in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city at the center of an offensive to drive out the Islamic State.

If confirmed, the series of airstrikes would rank among the highest civilian death tolls in an American air mission since the United States went to war in Iraq in 2003. And the reports of civilian deaths in Mosul came immediately after two recent incidents in Syria, where the coalition is also battling the Islamic State from the air, in which activists and local residents said dozens of civilians had been killed.

The management of this news can be discerned from the very first sentence, and in particular the word "investigating." Until the incident is thoroughly investigated, we can't be sure, evidently, that the reports are really true. And by the time the investigation is complete, the media reality will have been taken over by some more current event - it usually doesn't take more than a day or two - and that is exactly what happened in this situation.

Sure enough on April 6, a little more than a week after the purported US attack that killed 200 civilians, another event occurred which made the earlier event all but forgotten. This was a chemical bomb attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province, which left scores dead and hundreds sickened in one of the worst atrocities so far in the six-year-old Syria war. Immediately there was a hue and cry that this was the doing of Syrian President Bashar Assad. There was outrage in the American media by pundits and politicians that this called for President Trump to do something which he promptly did by bombing an airfield in Syria from which the attack supposedly originated. The massacre of civilians by US bombs in Mosul was totally forgotten and Trump looked Presidential at last because he took action where supposedly Obama had dithered.

But wait a minute. Since all we know about the gas attack are the images of pathetic children, do we really know it was perpetrated by Assad? Immediately Assad denied responsibility. President Putin of Russia even suggested it was a "false flag," a set-up to bring the US into the war. We won't know the truth, evidently, until an "investigation" has taken place, Putin suggested. Well fair is fair. If Trump and the US military can get off the hook by denying responsibility until an investigation has taken place, why can't Assad and Putin? Again, they are suggesting, we can't nail them until an investigation has conclusively concluded that Assad is responsible. Until then we have to withhold judgment just as we have to withhold judgment about the Mosul attack which, by the way, killed more than the Idib gas attack - 200 in Mosul vs 87 in Idib.

The UK Daily Mail reported:

The OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] said Thursday that a fact-finding mission was analysing samples gathered from 'various sources' and that allegations a chemical attack took place in the Syrian rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun were 'credible'.

Lavrov said Russia, Iran and Syria have demanded a 'thorough, objective and unbiased investigation' under the auspices of the OPCW, insisting it must use 'independent experts', including from Moscow.

So if Assad was responsible, by the time an investigation is concluded, the furor will have died down. So Putin and Assad are using the same techniques to get off the hot seat that Trump and others have used.

Hey News Media, You've Been Trumped!

Trump even managed to divert media attention from his alleged involvement with Putin regarding the Trump political campaign by suggesting Obama had "tapped wires" at Trump Tower. Immediately there was a media furor which took attention away from Trump's alleged nefarious activities and put it squarely on his predecessor even though Trump's allegation was patently false. I don't even know if an "investigation" was necessary in that case, but, in any event, Trump has proven himself to be a past master in managing media attention. Will there be any consequences to Trump for telling what seems to be a blatant lie implicating Obama in a nefarious deed? No, there will never be any consequences so he can lie away, and distract the pundits, politicians and American people any time he feels like it, particularly if his claims are more sensationalistic than whatever he's being charged with or implicated in. Trump knows that sensationalism Trumps more boring news especially if it's more than a day old, and he can use this to manipulate the media and public opinion. Trump stands ready to Trump your Ace reporter!

Why should we take anything the Trump administration claims to be the truth after all the lies of the Bush administration? And have we forgotten the lie that intensified the Viet Nam war - the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Vox has reported in an article, No, really, George W. Bush lied about WMDs:

Mother Jones’s David Corn has been excellent about chronicling specific examples over the years. Here are just a few:

In October 2002, Bush said that Saddam Hussein had a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons. But as CIA Director George Tenet noted in early 2004, the CIA had informed policymakers it had "no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal." The "massive stockpile" was just literally made up.

In December 2002, Bush declared, "We do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon." That was not what the National Intelligence Estimate said. As Tenet would later testify, "We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009." Bush did know whether or not Iraq had a nuclear weapon — and lied and said he didn’t know to hype the threat.

On CNN in September 2002, Condoleezza Rice claimed that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." This was precisely the opposite of what nuclear experts at the Energy Department were saying; they argue that not only was it very possible the tubes were for nonnuclear purposes but that it was very likely they were too. Even more dire assessments about the tubes from other agencies were exaggerated by administration officials — and in any case, the claim that they’re "only really suited" for nuclear weapons is just false.

On numerous occasions, Dick Cheney cited a report that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He said this after the CIA and FBI concluded that this meeting never took place.

More generally on the question of Iraq and al-Qaeda, on September 18, 2001, Rice received a memo summarizing intelligence on the relationship, which concluded there was little evidence of links. Nonetheless Bush continued to claim that Hussein was "a threat because he’s dealing with al-Qaeda" more than a year later.

In August 2002, Dick Cheney declared, "Simply stated, there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." But as Corn notes, at that time there was "no confirmed intelligence at this point establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation." Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had heard the same intelligence and attended Cheney’s speech, would later say in a documentary, "It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program."

The Bush administration on numerous occasions exaggerated or outright fabricated conclusions from intelligence in its public statements. Bush really did lie, and people really did die as a result of the war those lies were meant to build a case for. Those are the facts.

Aside from the fact that Assad and Putin are actually winning the Syrian civil war, why would Assad be so reckless as to drop chemical weapons which might have the effect of bringing the US, which had been sitting on the sidelines, back into the war? What would be his incentive? They were just sitting around and he did not want them to go to waste? He was running out of conventional bombs and didn't want to pay for new ones?

The news coming out of Idlib is completely controlled by al Nusra and the "white helmets" which are working for the ouster of Assad. They want regime change and they want the US to stay involved in the war because that's the only way they're going to get it. As Alternet reporters Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal have pointed out, Idlib is controlled by an affiliate of ISIS, al-Nusra. They control not only the population which was given a choice of becoming their radicalized brand of Islam or clearing out, but also they control all the news coming out of Idlib, and that includes the news regarding the chemical attack. This means that an objective observer can't take the blame for the attack at face value.

According to an Alternet article:

But there has been one issue major media outlets have refused to touch, and that is the nature of the rebels who would gain from any U.S. military offensive. Who holds power in Idlib, why are they there and what do they want? This is perhaps the most inconvenient set of questions for proponents of "humanitarian" military intervention in Syria.

The reality is that Idlib is substantially controlled by al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, which has gone through a series of rebranding schemes but remains the same jihadist group it always was: Jabhat al-Nusra. In the province it rules, al-Nusra has imposed what a leading scholar has described as a Taliban-like regime that has ethnically cleansed religious and ethnic minorities, banned music and established a brutal theocracy in which it publicly executes women accused of adultery.

Even analysts who have repeatedly called for U.S.-led regime change in Syria have described Idlib as the "heartland of al-Nusra."

Beneficiaries of Idlib Chemical Attack: ISIS and al-Nusra

On the Chris Hedges show On Contact recently, Blumenthal and Norton claimed that the only beneficiaries of the chemical attack on Idlib were the ISIS affiliates who want regime change in Syria, and their only way of getting it is to bring the US back into the war. Trump seems to have changed his position from non-involvement in Syria to regime change. Making a 180 degree policy change on Syria or anything else is nothing new for Trump. He also made several others of the same type in a week recently.

Modern atrocity propaganda most notably was also undertaken to cause President George H. W. Bush to get involved in the war in Kuwait. An incident related by a 15 year old girl by the name of Nayirah detailed how Saddam's army had taken babies out of incubators in Kuwait and left the babies to die. This incensed numerous United States senators and President George H.W. Bush himself in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. Later it was revealed that Nayirah was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter and the whole thing had been a set-up, a propaganda ploy to bring the US into the war. Her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by American public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, for the Kuwaiti government.

So before we get too excited about Assad's purported chemical attack we must ask the hard questions

1) what could be Assad's motive?

2) who benefits from the blame for the attack being placed on Assad?

3) who gains if the US comes back in the war as the champion of regime change?

and 4) should we wait for an investigation before we start shooting?

Even if Assad is finally to blame, it could be said that he and Putin have mastered one aspect of media manipulation which is to call for an investigation. Both investigations - the one of Trump's campaign's involvement with Russia, and the other being Assad's blame for the chemical attack - will likely take weeks if not months and both will be relegated to a small column on the last page of the New York Times. By that time those events will have been overtaken by the media's constant pursuit of the latest tidbit of sensationalism and will have been for all intents and purposes completely forgotten.

Why Are Innocent People Being Killed by Terrorists?

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Many people cannot understand why radical Islamists are killing innocent people as happened in Brussels recently. What did these people ever do to them to justify their being ruthlessly terminated as they were just going about their everyday lives in a peaceful manner?

It's not as though many innocent civilians in the Middle East have not had their lives terminated as they were simply going about their business. As many as 12 civilians were killed in December 2013 in Yemen when a US drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village. Since 2002, drones piloted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have killed hundreds of people in the country, mostly members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but also dozens of civilians, including children. The deadliest attack killed more than 40 people - including 22 children and 12 women - when a Tomahawk cruise missile fired from a naval vessel hit the village of al-Majala on December 17, 2009.

What could be more innocent than a wedding party? What I wonder is - were the victims of these and other attacks that killed innocent women and children ever compensated for their losses? I think the answer is no. US attacks in the Middle East that have destroyed real estate and many peoples' lives go uncompensated by US authorities. Not only do they not apologize, they don't compensate financially the people involved for their losses. Compensation for the grandchildren that the bride and groom will never have? Hardly.

Hulk Hogan won a $115 million settlement because someone publicized a sex tape he had made. Erin Andrews was awarded $55 million for a lawsuit over a nude video. But victims of US violence in the Middle East. Nada. They get nothing but smoldering resentment for the loss of their loved ones. Why are they resentful and whom is the resentment directed at? Guess.

Aljazeera reported:

"Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda" - a report published in October 2013 by Human Rights Watch - found the US has carried out 80 targeted operations in Yemen since 2009, including strikes from drones, warplanes and naval vessels stationed in the Gulf of Aden, killing at least 473 people.

Observers say attacks such as these are helping push Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaeda.

"It is far from the only instance of the US indirectly assisting al-Qaeda's PR machine - and even its human resources department," wrote Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi recently about the Radaa strike.

The West including the US and Europe has to come to the realization that they are responsible for the radicalization of people who have been victimized by their policy which has resulted in innocent civilians being killed throughout the world. In the minds of radicalized Islamists who commit atrocious acts and take the lives of innocent civilians in the west, these acts are balanced by the Western nations, mainly the US, which have taken innocent lives in the Middle East. It is tit for tat with not much tit comparatively doled out for a whole lot of tat. There is no comparison when you measure the number of innocent lives lost on both sides.

Republican Presidential candidate John Kasich has said:

"We must also redouble our efforts with our allies to identify, root out and destroy the perpetrators of such acts of evil. We must strengthen our alliances as our way of life and the international system that has been built on our common values since the end of the Second World War comes under challenge from these and other actors of evil."

Tell me, Mr Kasich, how this is an Act of Evil, but the destroying of innocent lives in the Middle East is not an Act of Evil? Tell me how the hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives destroyed in the Middle East is not an Act of Evil perpetrated by George W Bush who lied the American people into a war in Iraq. Tell me how this is not the result of that war that led directly to the rise of ISIS or ISIL or whatever you want to call it. Real estate destroyed with no compensation. Lives and families destroyed without even an apology. The wonder is why there are not even more terrorists than there are. They must figure two can play that game: the game of destruction of innocents with no remorse that is.

The strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which killed 32 people, including three children, was an accident. Did the US compensate Doctors without Borders including paying money to the families of the victims? I don't think so. Did the US military rebuild the hospital? That's not what the US military does. It destroys with no apologies. It does not rebuild. The US has a history of aerial military mistakes not only in Afghanistan, but in other countries including Libya and Syria. These countries have become wastelands which have undergone the most thorough destruction which has precipitated the overwhelming European refugee crisis. Is the US offering compensation to the refugees? I don't think so. There is no compensation in war.

In 1991, during the Gulf War, the US bombed a complex in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. The bombs, which were laser precision-guided, hit the complex and killed 408 civilians. At the time of the bombing, US officials said they hit the complex because they thought it was being used as a command center and accused Saddam Hussein of using civilians as human shields. Has the US rebuilt the neighborhood or offered financial compensation to the victims? No, let's blame Saddam who lost his life and his country because of US lies. Saddam had kept a lid on the seething ethnic tensions and was no threat to the US.

A Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said, "Under a well-established principle of international law, nations are not liable to provide compensation for injuries or damage occurring during combat operations." Thank you for that clarification.

"In any conflict there are unintended casualties. But we are working to make all of Iraq a better place to live." Really. Really? Is Iraq a better place to live now than it was before the US invasion led by George W Bush who said that his father had not gone far enough in his invasion? Who said that if he got a chance to invade, he'd go all the way to Baghdad and surround himself with glory as a wartime President and get all his agenda passed? “If I have a chance to invade…if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

The Guardian reported:

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm. ...

Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.

In Yemen, 17 named men were targeted multiple times. Strikes on them killed 273 people, at least seven of them children. At least four of the targets are still alive.

The U.S. government has implemented targeted killings since the Sept. 11 attacks as a counter terrorism measure and as retribution against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Under the Obama administration, many of these targeted killings have been carried out using unmanned drones. Despite the high number of civilian casualties, President Barack Obama has repeatedly defended the strikes. To paraphrase, the only way, it seems, to get a bad guy with a gun is to take out a whole bunch of good guys without guns.

Targeted killings? That's exactly what the attacks in Brussels, Paris, Turkey and elsewhere were. Targeted killings exactly as were those killings that targeted relatives of those radical Islamists. The resentment engendered by the targeted killings of civilians in the Middle East has come home to haunt those of us living in the West. It's tit for targeted killing tat, and killing civilians is what it's about on both sides. The chickens always do come home to roost.

Hulk Hogan and Erin Andrews can get millions for an illegally made or publicized sex tape. Victims of US and western violence don't get as much as an "I'm sorry for your loss."

Sunni Shiite Conflict at Heart of Middle East Problems

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Conflict Between Sunnis and Shiites Goes Back Over 1000 Years

American politicians including George W Bush and Barack Obama have ignored the fact that the Sunnis and Shiites hate each other and have been fighting for 1383 years. Their lack of knowledge and acceptance of that fact has led to their bungling and botching of Middle East policy. There are effectively two religions: Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam.

Understanding the religious composition of countries in the Middle East goes a long way toward explaining why certain countries are fighting other countries or are standing by doing nothing in the fight against terrorism. For instance, why won't Saudi Arabia fight ISIS? The answer is simple. They are both Sunnis. For the most part Sunnis won't fight Sunnis and Shiites won't fight Shiites. But they sure as hell will fight each other. Americans and the western world in general have just been snookered into getting involved in this mess, which has been going on for over 1000 years, starting with George W Bush's ill conceived and immoral invasion of Iraq.

Middle Easterners have long memories. They are fighting battles which started eons ago.This is from an article by Harold Rhode:

When Khomeini arrived in Iran in February 1979, one of the first statements he made to the media on the tarmac was that "he had come to rectify a wrong which took place 1400 years ago." Westerners thought this somewhat quaint and obviously irrelevant. All that interested them was what he had to say about the Shah, America, and Israel. To Westerners, especially Americans, who dismiss things that happened a few days ago, Khomeini mumbling about some event that took place centuries ago seemed irrelevant.

Middle Easterners, however, who never forget perceived wrongs, knew exactly what he was talking about. When the Muslim prophet Muhammad died in 632 CE, a fight broke out among the Muslims as to who would inherit the leadership of Islam. Those who supported their prophet's family eventually became known as the Shi'ites. Those who supported what might be labeled the "establishment" in Mecca became known as the Sunnis.

Rhode goes on to say, "Sadly, Middle Easterners culturally are unable bring themselves to 'let bygones be bygones' – a concept totally alien to Middle Eastern culture. Disputes therefore fester, then erupt when one side perceives the other as weak." And thanks to George W Bush, Americans are embroiled in a 1400 year old dispute involving also perceived grievances experienced in the years since then. Nothing will ever get accomplished until there is peace and reconciliation between the two branches of Islam: Sunni and Shia. And that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon.

If Khomeini was intent on righting a wrong committed almost 1400 years ago, his long memory probably also extends back to the time when the US installed the hated Shah in power in Iran. Again it was all about oil. Iran had nationalized its oil fields under the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, until a US and UK backed coup d'état deposed Mosaddegh and brought back foreign oil firms. In August 2013 the CIA admitted that it was involved in both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda. The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government."

Iran got rid of the Shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution which replaced the US backed Shah with an Islamic republic under the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, supported by various leftist and Islamic organizations as well as Iranian students.

85% of all Muslims Are Sunnis

Iraq was a country ruled by a Sunni, Saddam Hussein, in which a majority of the people were Shiites. Potential conflict there? You bet. Saddam, however, kept the lid on this seething cauldron. Getting rid of him took the lid off. Syria has a government led by Bashar al-Assad who is an Alawite, a branch of Shia, who rules over a majority Sunni populace - just the opposite situation of Iraq.

85% of all Muslims are Sunnis. Sunnis are a majority in most Muslim communities in Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, Africa, most of the Arab World, and among Muslims in the United States (of whom 85–90% are Sunnis). The country with the highest Shiite population is Iran which is 90% Shia. Naturally, Iran supports Assad, a fellow Shia. Make sense?

American leaders, who don't want to admit the fact that Islam is essentially two religions, fall into the trap of making statements like "ISIS has killed more Muslims than Christians." Yeah, Shiite Muslims. Very few Muslims identify as "just a Muslim" or generic Muslims like American Presidents like to talk about. So ISIS naturally wants to wipe out the Shiites and establish a Sunni Caliphate. If the US had its way and got rid of al-Assad, it wouldn't take long for ISIS to add southern Syria to its Caliphate. They already control northern Syria.

The attackers on 9/11 were Sunnis; the attackers in Paris were Sunnis. Let's be clear about who the terrorists really are, and they are not Shiites. That certainly does not mean that all Sunnis are terrorists.

Getting Rid of Bashar al-Assad Would be as Disastrous as Getting Rid of Saddam Was

How does this relate to what is happening in Syria now and America's role in it? Hezbollah (Iran's proxy) and Iran are naturally supporting Bashar al-Assad because they don't want a Sunni takeover of Syria. Who is America supporting? Sunnis of course. And who are the ISIS fighters who occupy parts of northern Syria? They are Sunnis. When American politicians talk about getting Muslims to put troops on the ground to take out ISIS, who do they think those troops are going to be?

Not Saudi Arabians who are Sunnis and who have supported Wahhabism, an extreme sect that has spawned terrorism. For more than two centuries, Wahhabism has been Saudi Arabia's dominant faith. Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labeling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates (takfir), thus paving the way for their execution for apostasy.

George W Bush kowtowed and pandered to the Saudi princes because he lusted after their oil.The US has been on the side of not what is morally right but on the side of rich American oil corporations. Bush and others winked at their Wahhabist extremism, and they winked back when Bush ousted Sunni Saddam Hussein and supposedly liberated Iraqi Shiites. But it didn't work out that way. Instead Bush Jr opened a can or worms that metastasized into ISIS.

Yet the US sells arms to Saudi Arabia, and, despite its riches, it will do nothing to fight ISIS. Recently, the US State Department has approved the sale of $1.29 billion worth of bombs to Saudi Arabia, as its military carries out air strikes in neighboring Yemen. Why is Saudi Arabia fighting in Yemen's civil war? Because it doesn't want the country taken over by Houthis who are Shiite rebels. Simple as that. It is fighting Shiites to keep Sunnis in power.

Saudi Arabia is the center of the Sunni branch of Islam.  It is also the center of the most violent and radical sect of Islam … the “Wahhabis”.   But the U.S. has long supported the Madrassa schools within Saudi Arabia which teach radical Wahhabi beliefs.

An article in WashingtonsBlog, The U.S. Is Supporting the Most Violent Muslim Terrorists In Order to Wage War for Oil, on May 2, 2013 states:

Sunni extremists accounted for the greatest number of terrorist attacks and fatalities for the third consecutive year.   More than 5,700 incidents were attributed to Sunni extremists, accounting for nearly 56 percent of all attacks and about 70 percent of all fatalities. Among this perpetrator group, al-Qaida (AQ) and its affiliates were responsible for at least 688 attacks that resulted in almost 2,000 deaths, while the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan conducted over 800 attacks that resulted in nearly 1,900 deaths.

I'll state it simply: The US is on the wrong side in Syria. Al-Assad was never a threat to US interests. ISIS is. The western world is waking up to that fact after the killings in Paris. Hollande and Putin and most of the Western World are now determined to wipe ISIS out. So where does Obama stand? He's backing off his position of getting rid of Assad slightly. The neocon policy of regime change has been a huge failure throughout the Middle East and before that in South America and elsewhere.

For instance, The election of Marxist candidate Salvador Allende as President of Chile in September 1970 led President Richard Nixon to order that Allende not be allowed to take office. Following an extended period of social, political, and economic unrest fomented by the CIA, General Augusto Pinochet assumed power in a violent coup d'etat on September 11, 1973; among the dead was Allende. 

So now Obama is in the position of trying to save face by sticking to his position that Assad has to go, while Putin, Hollande and the rest of the Western World are aligned in their resolve to get rid of ISIS. You have to give Obama some credit for trying to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That was his game plan; it just didn't work out due to the ongoing struggle for power in the region. Where is Saddam when you need him?

Obama's support for Sunni moderates fighting Assad in Syria was never realistic. If they had been successful in removing al-Assad, they would have installed a Sunni government in Syria. How much time would have to pass after that before their fellow Sunnis, namely ISIS, would have taken over all of Syria? Not much, I think. Remember they already control a large part of it.

Who Will the "Boots on the Ground" Fighting ISIS Be?

Where are the Muslim troops that are going to be the "boots on the ground" that will fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq? On Meet the Press Leon Panetta suggested that the "boots on the ground" could be supplied by Saudi Arabia. Really? They who arguably spawned ISIS are going to take up arms against fellow Sunnis? I don't think so.

They won't be Sunnis, so let's assume they will be Shiites. Where will they come from? Our pals in Iran? Perhaps, but not under US leadership. Even more distasteful to American politicians than allying ourselves with Russia would be to ally ourselves with Iran. However, in a report by Lara Logan on 60 Minutes, it was pointed out that the only thing that has saved Iraq from being completely overtaken by ISIS is Iranian backed "boots on the ground" who naturally have had little if any support from the US.

Even more naive than Leon Panetta is John Kasich. His comprehensive plan to deal with ISIS would include "Arab forces." Which Arab forces, Mr. Kasich? Not Sunnis. Well, then, will it be our pals in Iran? He is proud to see many moderate Muslims willing to stand up and condemn the attacks in Paris. Well, who are these moderate Muslims. Are they the 5% who identify as "just a Muslim" and don't identify as either Sunni or Shiite?

Supposedly, according to Mr. Kasich, these moderate Muslims say that their religion has been hijacked. That doesn't square very well with the documented 1400 year hatred between Sunnis and Shiites. Of course, Sunnis would say it has been hijacked by Shiites and Shiites would say it has been hijacked by Sunnis. Remember there are hardly any generic Muslims, but these guys go on pretending that there are. Naivete abounds!

The US better get its act together and get on the right side of history. Putin has visited Iran recently and Russia and Iran are forming an alliance both to repel ISIS (which has proclaimed its enmity to Iran) and to cooperate economically and strategically. I'm afraid the US is being left on the sidelines as France, Russia and Iran take over the major responsibilities of fighting terrorism. In a way this is OK. Let someone else do the job that the US has fantastically bungled at this point.

In light of the deep seated hatred between Sunnis and Shiites, American political leaders should never again say that Muslims are by and large peace loving peoples. This negates the realities of the thousands of years of hatred and fighting between the two groups. Solving this conundrum would require getting the two branches of Islam to make peace with each other. According to Sunnis, Muslims are wonderful people, but they mean Sunni Muslims are wonderful people, and the opposite holds true for Shiites. So there's no lack of Muslims willing to say that Islam is a religion of peace and love, but they don't qualify it with "if it weren't only for those terrible Shiites (Sunnis)."

The US has supported the epicenter of Sunnis, Saudi Arabia, because supposedly we need their oil. Well, reality check, we don't need it any more. The US needs to convert away from oil and towards renewables to forestall the disaster of global warming but, as far as oil is concerned, the US is self-sufficient. The US needs to realign its Mideastern policy.

What we need is a coalition, a partnership among France, Russia, Iran and the US with France, Russia and Iran supplying the boots on the ground. America's role in that regard has a sorrowful legacy. Let someone else step up. The US doesn't have to be the "leader." The partnership should be equal with the military Chain of Command being comprised of officers from all four countries on a merit based basis.

Eliminating ISIS' nascent Caliphate in Syria and Iraq in terms of lands occupied, however, will not prevent them and others from pulling off Paris style attacks. Those attacks could just as easily have been planned and executed without any help from ISIS outside Europe. They were essentially homegrown European cells that then activated themselves. They were just taking a page out of American domestic terrorists' book (who have no political agenda).

VIDEO: Bush’s Failed Hunt For Bin Laden

by Jeff Spross

From ThinkProgress, May 11, 2011

One of the more staggering developments to emerge in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s elimination has been the attempt by many on the right to shoehorn George W. Bush into the narrative of how the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11 was successfully tracked down and ultimately killed. Soon after Obama’s announcement of Bin Laden’s death, House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) attempted to spin the accomplishment as a continuance of Bush’s “vigilance,” Sarah Palin thanked the former president without even mentioning Obama, the news shows on the Sunday following the event featured no less than five former Bush administration officials (versus only two from the Obama administration), and Bush himself reportedly declined an invitation to a commemorative ceremony at the World Trade Center because he reportedly felt like he did not receive enough credit for Bin Laden’s death.

But attributing Bin laden’s death to “vigilance” on Bush’s part is a stretch (to put it kindly) as an analysis and a timeline by ThinkProgress demonstrate. Bush’s missteps included not focusing on Bin Laden prior to 9/11, undermining the search for Bin Laden by abandoning the fight in Tora Bora, and above all, by shifting resources away from a focus on al Qaeda and into the massive folly that was the invasion of Iraq. Watch a ThinkProgress video documenting Bush’s failures:

 

 

Update Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz on Wednesday night that President George W. Bush wasn’t interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. “I don’t think they really wanted to get bin Laden,” Wilkerson said

Memo to Cheney and Rumsfeld: Crawl Back Into Your Respective Holes!

by John Lawrence

Cheney and Rumsfeld were all over last Sunday's TV talk shows trying to eke out an iota of credit for the Bush administration in the capture and killing of bin Laden by way of talking about how the torture they espoused played a role in locating him. It was a pathetic attempt to exonerate themselves and at the same time claim a share of the credit. The fact of the matter is that waterboarding played no role in the killing of bin Laden whatsoever and all the credit should go to the Obama administration. However, Obama administration spokesmen will not come flat out and say that. Instead, they want to  leave the door open to give Bush some kind of credit by saying that bits and pieces of the puzzle were gleaned from a variety of sources. Obama has bent over backward not to criticize Bush and his henchmen. What he should have done in my opinion was to come right out and say, "Torture played no role in the capture of bin Laden." But he is too nice a guy so he leaves the door open for Cheney and Rumsfeld to grasp at straws in an effort to vindicate their lack of competence.

Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush had a secret agreement with Pakistan or some elements of the Pakistan government not to go after bin Laden. I make my case in terms of the close relationship between the bin Laden family and the Bush family. Here are three facts: 1) Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, financed George W Bush's oil company, Arbusto, which is Spanish for Bush. 2) On 9/11 as the planes were flying into the World Trade Center, Bush's father, George H W Bush, was sitting down to breakfast with another of Osama's brothers, Shafig bin Laden, at the Carlyle Group, a hedge fund that invests in defense contractors. 3) And the fact that other members of the bin Laden family were flown out of the country the next day after the 9/11 attacks at a time when no other planes were allowed to fly raises suspicions.

In the Boston Globe, March 11, 20004, Carl Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties, states that the 9/11 commission should ask who authorized the evacuation of 140 Saudi nationals on at least 8 aircraft making stops in 12 cities immediately following the attacks. "Many of the passengers were high-ranking members of the royal House of Saud. About 24 of them were members of the bin Laden family, which owned the Saudi Binladin Group, a multibillion-dollar construction conglomerate." Unger obtained passenger lists for 4 of the flights, which are posted on his website: www.houseofbush.com and includes the name of Prince Ahmed bin Salman.      "As reported last year by Gerald Posner in 'Why America Slept,' Prince Ahmed not only had alleged ties to Al Qaeda, but may also have known in advance that there would be attacks on 9/11. According to Posner, Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative who was part of Osama bin Laden's inner circle and was captured in 2002, made these assertions when he was interrogated by the CIA. The commission should ask Mueller about Zubaydah's interrogation. They should also ask whether the FBI interrogated Prince Ahmed before his departure.      "But Prince Ahmed will never be able to answer any questions because not long after the CIA interrogation, he died of a heart attack at the age of 43. Yet we do know that he was on one of the flights."      Unger believes that this episode "raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration. Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he know and when did he know it?"

So it wouldn't be out of the question that Bush might have made a secret deal with Pakistan not to come after bin Laden. Besides Bush needed a bogeyman out there to justify all his expenditures on defense and the War on Terror. If Bush wasn't in active collusion with Pakistan to harbor Osama, then at the very least he was totally incompetent in his capture. If they had such great evidence as Rumsfeld and Cheney said they had, that they obtained from waterboarding, why didn't they capture or kill bin Laden. Osama had been living in plain sight since 2005. So Bush had his chance to get him for the last three years of his administration. Instead he shut down the CIA unit, Alec Station, whose goal it was to find bin Laden. At the time Bush said publicly, "I don't know where he is. I just don't spend that much time on it." Of course not. When Bush took over as President in 2000 former members of the Clinton administration like Richard Clarke, Clinton's chief counter-terrorism advisor, were running around with their hair on fire trying to get the Bush administarion to take seriously the threat from bin Laden. On August 6, 2001 Bush was delivered his Presidential Daily Brief (PDF) which was titled "bin Laden determined to strike in US." Did he ignore it? Bush truly didn't seemed that concerned about terrorism when he first took office or about getting bin Laden after 9/11. He spent the entire month of August on vacation at his ranch in Texas.

On the other hand Obama reignited the CIA and told Leon Panetta, his CIA director, that it  was his top priority to get bin Laden. President Obama's determination should be contrasted with Bush's listlessness and seeming indifference to whether or not bin Laden was captured or killed. In my opinion Obama deserves all the credit; Bush doesn't deserve even a smidgeon. Obama finally has the right strategy of surgical strikes against high value al Quaeda targets. The strike on bin Laden not only resulted in his killing but also resulted in minimal collateral damage in that most of Obama's wives and children lived through it. In addition a treasure trove of information was retrieved from bin Laden's house. It seems that Obama has all but wiped out al Quaeda while all Bush did was fart around and waste money on land invasions including lying us into war with Iraq which had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with weapons of mass destruction. Hey, but I bet the Carlyle Group made tons of money investing in defense contractors while Bush was President. And Bush's Daddy as well as some of the bin Laden brothers made plenty by investing in the Carlyle Group.

Finally, the fact that Pakistan is so righteously indignant about the fact that they weren't clued in about the pending attack on bin Laden would lead me to believe that there is something to the theory that they thought they had a secret agreement with the US not to come after bin Laden. However, that agreement, if there was one, was with the Bush administration. Obviously, it didn't carry over to Obama, and maybe that's why the Pakistanis are so pissed. After all their airspace has been violated many times before with drone strikes on al Quaeda targets and they didn't say a word in protest. It's a fact that Bush lied us into war with Iraq. Could it be that he lied about his efforts to get bin Laden too? Or was he just totally incompetent? At the very least Bush's incompetence has been shown off in sharp contrast compared to Obama's due diligence, determination and guts. President Obama stands head and shoulders above Bush both in intelligence and accomplishments. And this is why Cheney and Rumsfeld were trotted out in a pathetic attempt to claim some credit for Bush or at least to get the American public to take their eye off the ball and not question whether or not Bush even was trying to get Osama. They would like us to believe that their contribution to the War on Terror was "enhanced interrogation techniques." However, they don't mention the fact that the guy who didn't use these techniques was the guy who got the actual result of killing bin Laden.

I'm Proud of the Way President Obama Has Conducted Himself in Getting Osama

by John Lawrence

President Obama not only got Osama bin Laden; he did it in such a way that made me proud. First, he had the determination and the stick-to-itiveness to task the CIA with finding bin Laden after President Bush had given up the search and dismantled the CIA unit known as Alec Station that was supposed to find bin Laden in the first place. Obama made up for Bush's dilatoriness and negligence by again firing up the search for bin Laden as soon as he became President. CIA director Leon Panetta deserves much credit for keeping his eye on the prize. Then the way Obama went about getting bin Laden is the thing I'm most proud of. He did it with the minimum amount of collateral damage and at minimum cost. He could have done it with a drone strike that would have killed everyone inside bin Laden's compound. That included, reportedly, 23 children and 8 women. Compounds have been bombed before killing innocents in order to get one high value target. This is unjustified. In many cases the high value target wasn't even home, perhaps having been tipped off by the Pakistani ISI. So all that was accomplished was the killing of innocents. In this case the strike was entirely surgical so that, while accomplishing their mission of killing bin Laden, there was little other loss of life especially to women and children. This is the thing that makes me the proudest of Obama.

The US has been criticised again and again for killing innocent civilians including whole wedding parties in some instances. This is why stealth operations using Navy Seals and Army Rangers are the way to go when what is sought is the elimination of particular individuals. This is the antidote to terrorism not land invasions of sovereign nations. The Israelis pioneered this approach tracking down and eliminating all those involved in murdering the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Recently, they have been reportedly involved in eliminating Iranian nuclear scientists by attaching magnetic bombs to their cars while en route and hacking their computers. All these methods make sense because they minimize collateral damage especially the loss of innocent life. Rather than bomb Iran they throw a wrench in the Iranian nuclear effort. Their methods are targeted and surgical. Makes sense, doesn't it?

The remaining high profile figures in al Quaeda must be quivering in their sandals since they know the US has the capability for tracking them down and taking them out by means of the same methods. These methods cost pennies on the dollar compared to a full scale invasion. Maybe it's the Pentagon who should be quaking in their boots as it becomes apparent that trillion dollar military-industrical complex budgets are unneccesary and are running the US into financial ruin - just the scenario that Obama was intent on achieving. The operation that killed bin Laden cost practically nothing. The CIA and Navy Seals involved were all going to receive their paychecks regardless of whether this mission was carried out or not. So the major cost was the loss of one helicopter. Other than that there was the cost of a few bullets compared to the half million dollar Cruise missiles and other highly expensive weaponry used in more conventional operations. The amazing thing about this mission, in addition to its surgicality which minimized the loss of innocent life, was that it minimized costs and was so inexpensive. A few bullets compared to a bomb, the sheet to bury bin Laden in - these were the only costs involved. If it weren't for the mishap with the helicopter, that would have come back intact too. One wonders why a helicopter should lose lift while hovering over bin Laden's compound. A design flaw perhaps?

The Pakistanis are up in arms because they weren't informed of the impending operation. But if they had been informed, they probably would have tipped off bin Laden and he would have been out of there. Previous operations have confirmed the liklihood of this happening. In some cases bombs have been dropped on compounds killing everyone there - including innocent women and children - except the high value target. Many of these people were and are being sheltered in Pakistan. So Pakistan has some splainin' to do. Instead they have gotten righteously indignant at the US for not informing them. But Obama did the right thing. How embarrassing it would have been if the operation had been carried out and there was no bin Laden there, but there would still have been minimal loss of life compared to dropping a bomb on the compound. bin Laden must have wondered why the Pakistani military, that were supposed to tip him off, failed to do so. At any rate Obama's intelligence outsnookered the Yahoos in Pakistan who aren't really our friends although they dearly love the $20 billion we've squandered on them which brings up the following question? Why do we have to buy off every military dictatorship in the world? Couldn't that money be better used at home if for no other purpose than lowering the deficit which everyone is so upset about? The US is spending a fortune paying corrupt governments all around the world. This is ridiculous. And many of them turn around and lambast the US. The US is acting like a total masochist. We give them money to essentially buy them off, and they kick us in the face in return. Take Hamid Karzai, for example. He never tires of trying to kick the US out of his country while raking in billions under the table. Meanwhile, he's sold off Afghanistan's mineral rights to the Chinese. The US has been snookered again. Uncle Sucker has been bamboozled. And that goes double for Iraq where the oil rights have been sold off to other countries after the US spent hundreds of billions of dollars there. What did we get for it? Nothing. This has got to stop. It's ridiculous to go into debt to fight wars that accomplish nothing. They don't gain us friends (unless we keep paying them) and they don't gain us treasure.

So what is our attitude when Karzai tell the US to leave his country? We shovel in more money and say in effect that we can't take Karzai at his word. He doesn't really mean it. And we are going to stay there anyway regardless of what Karzai, who happens to be running one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, says. Meanwhile, we are firing teachers, librarians, police and firemen here at home because there is no money to pay them. Yet we shovel money to corrupt regimes that tell us to get out of their freakin country. Could anything be more idiotic? As we're being kicked in the teeth we say, "You want more money; here is more money." We'll give you more money that we have to borrow from the Chinese. But that's OK. It's OK to run up our budget deficit and cut services for the American people themselves because after all our first duty is to protect the American people even if we impoverish them in the process and even if we run the US into bankruptcy at which point we won't be able to protect the American people any more.

So while I'm proud of the way that Obama got Osama, I would be prouder still if he declared that there was no need to keep large scale troop deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and that, henceforth, his model for dealing with terrorism was going to be essentially the one he used to get Osama - stealth and surprise attacks using a small number of elite, highly trained troops, surgical targeted operations to take out high value targets. And as a footnote, the fact that bin Laden was killed and not captured did the US and the world and even bin Laden himself a big favor by not subjecting everyone to a big media brou ha ha that would go on and on until Osama was eventually killed anyway. And it would cost a lot of money.

US in Afghanistan: Like a Jobless Couple Adopting a Special Needs Child

by John Lawrence

Tom Friedman came up with this metaphor on Fareed Zakaria's GPS Sunday show. The US in Afghanistan is like a jobless couple trying to adopt a special needs child. 46 out of 50 US states are bankrupt, the Federal government is deeply in debt, yet the US is "committed" to fighting a war in Afghanistan that doesn't seem to have any purpose or any chance of success. Originally the US went into Afghanistan to "get" Osama bin Laden whose name has hardly been mentioned by the current administration or anybody else for years. Now the war has morphed into a counterinsurgency which means that we need to build waste water plants and power stations in addition to winning the hearts and minds of the people and defeating the Taliban. This always happens in unwinnable wars: we decide to do nation building instead of winning the unwinnable. It puts a nice patina on a ridiculous situation and covers up a lack of knowing what the hell we're there for. And it saves face. The world's greatest superpower can't be seen as losing a war to the world's most retarded country, now can it?

Friedman asks "why do we have to train the Afghan army? The Taliban don't need any training, and they're fighting us to a draw. They're illiterate, they can't even read a map, yet they're being successful and the US is not." He says these are the questions even a child would ask. I agree. A child might wonder 1) why we're using military force to win the hearts and minds of the people instead of just building infrastructure without the guns being involved, and 2) why we are training an Afghan military force when the Afghans have been doing nothing but fighting foreign intruders for hundreds of years. Don't they have enough military training already? And a child might ask why we are fighting them with military equipment which costs millions of dollars that can be blown up with a $10. IED?

When the US is just as likely to be struck by a terrorist who happens to be a US citizen, the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to wipe out al Quaeda and ending up killing hundreds of innocent civilians instead is absolutely ridiculous. Meanwhile, other contries like China are building infrastructure in Afghanistan at the same time we're fighting a war there. They are the ones winning hearts and minds. We could be doing the same thing too for far less money and minus the military prescence. Hasn't the Pentagon noticed - al Quaeda isn't even there any more? They're in Somalia and Yemen among other places. The military always has to have some rationale for their interminable claim on US Treasury funds. Why it's unthinkable that the military budget should be slashed; better to make up some excuse to stay in Afghanistan forever.

China has taken a different approach in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Behind an electrified fence, blast-resistant sandbags and 53 National Police outposts, the Afghan surge is well under way. But the foot soldiers in a bowl-shaped valley about 20 miles southeast of Kabul are not fighting the Taliban, or even carrying guns. They are preparing to extract copper from one of the richest untapped deposits on earth. And they are Chinese, undertaking by far the largest foreign investment project in war-torn Afghanistan. Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China. While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce. S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.” “We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.” The reality is more complicated than that. The Chinese bid far more for the mining rights to the Aynak project and promised to invest hundreds of millions more in associated infrastructure projects than other bidders. It is a risky venture that has not yet proved to be economical, and it has already been dogged by allegations of bribery. But the Aynak investment underscores how China’s leaders, flush with money and in control of both the government and major industries, meld strategy, business and statecraft into a seamless whole. In a single move, Beijing strengthened its hold on a vital resource, engineered the single largest investment in Afghan history, promised to create thousands of new Afghan jobs and established itself as the Afghan government’s pre-eminent business partner and single largest source of tax payments.

So I ask you - who is winning the hearts and minds of the Afghani people - the US who is mainly killing there and by the way is building a few water treatment plants or China who is investing big time, becoming a business partner and building infrastructure? Why isn't China worried about bin Laden, al Quaeda or the Taliban? I hate to say it but the US is there like it was in Vietnam, like it is in Iraq - mainly to save face. They've staked their rep on "winning" in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the world goes on with China taking the lead in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a peaceful mission right in the middle of a war. How much more ridiculous does it get?

And then there is Greg Mortenson. One individual, Greg Mortenson, has built hundreds of schools there. Why do we think it takes the US military to build infrastructure? This is just so dumb, it's unbelievable! And to think a smart guy like Obama got sucked into this mess. He and Petraeus should use all their smarts to buy off the Taliban like they bought off the "bad guys" in Iraq (under the guise of a surge), declare victory and get out. Most Americans believe we "won" in Iraq although the same crap is still going on there - mosques being blown up, millions without electricity etc.

They should put Greg Mortenson in charge of an agency to build schools in Iraq, give him a billion dollars and let it go at that.

The US spends a pittance on Homeland Security and a paltry sum on US infrastructure while it devotes the major part of its resources to military adventurism. The US is spending $1 billion per year for every soldier in Afghanistan! Shouldn't that give us pause? Shouldn't we reevaluate our priorities? Then we have a huge recent victory in the Senate to pass a $15 billion jobs bill? [Ed. note: A more recent unemployment extension was voted down in the Senate!] That's just 15 soldiers worth a year in Afghanistan! It's nothing. And while the US military destroys Afghanistan and kills civilians, one guy is going around and building schools. In "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson tells about his experiences in Afghanistan that led him to go back there and build schools - one at a time. If one guy can do this kind of good, how much good could the US government with all its might and resources do if it chose to, instead of choosing to kill civilians in a quest for the fool's gold of eliminating Taliban leadership?

Counterinsurgency is just another name for "let's just keep a military prescence there forever." Meanwhile, the peaceful world is just going on without us including China which is cutting deals in Afghanistan in the midst of a war in which the US thinks it's the central actor. China is simply ignoring us, and Greg Mortenson is building schools without taxpayer money. Go figure!

And I must say that the Chinese form of state capitalism allows it to do things that the US can't. The US can get unlimited amounts of money for its military, but it can't (as a nation) spend billions for peaceful purposes or cut business deals like China can because that would be socialism. The US model requires that only private enterprise can cut business deals. The Chinese model allows cooperation between business and government; government can even direct business and that's why China (as a nation) can be in Afghanistan extracting raw materials and building infrastructure. The US model would not let the US government be involved in such proceedings. Instead, billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would have to do that. But they're more interested in health issues and working in "pacified" nations.

And then there is this:

Sun Tzu, the Chinese philospher who wrote The Art of War emphasized the Taoist approach of obtaining one's goals without firing a shot if possible. China is well on its way to becoming the 21st century's ascendant nation uses Sun Tzu's principles. China is running its chief rival into debt while the US fights futile wars. At the same time China is tying up valuable world resources by peaceful means not wasting a yuan on ammo. A totally brilliant strategy! Mark McNeilly writes in Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare that a modern interpretation of Sun and his importance throughout Chinese history is critical in understanding China's push to becoming a superpower in the 21st century. Modern Chinese scholars explicitly rely on historical strategic lessons and The Art of War in developing their theories, seeing a direct relationship between their modern struggles and those of China in Sun Tzu's time. There is a great perceived value in Sun Tzu's teachings and other traditional Chinese writers, which are used regularly in developing the strategies of the Chinese state and its leaders. I have blogged previously on this: Sun Tzu in "The Art of War" said that the best way to overtake your enemies is without even firing a shot. This is happening before our eyes as the Chinese have overtaken the US economically, effectively turning the US into a client state. The role of Europe in providing adequate safety nets for its citizens while not investing heavily in weaponry has had somewhat the same effect ironically. The Europeans do not have the same fear of terrorism evidently that the US does. Why else are they not sending a whole lot of troops to Afghanistan? It's as if they're saying "well, if you (the US) want to waste your money on military adventures, go ahead, but we'd rather spend ours on the welfare of our people." If the US is foolish enough to continue espousing "free trade" when the result has been massive trade deficits and the export of its manufacturing base to China, then the US has become a sclerotic old man who can't act with any intelligence in his own interests. If the US political system allows one party to say "no" to everything when it is of paramount importance to act now with no time to waste, then the US is only hastening its own decline.

Terrorism is Not Just a Problem for US

by John Lawrence

Terrorism is not simply confined to the US as so many self-centered Americans seem to think. Russia, for example, has had far more major terrorist attacks than has the US. With the exception of the 9/11 attacks, the US has fared rather well. Russia has had several attacks on its Metro (subway) system, something the US has never experienced. They have also had a major attack on a school, a theater, a sports stadium, airplanes, passenger trains, government buildings, hospitals and apartment blocks. Terrorism is far more widespread in Russia than in the US. Yet the US acts as if terrorism was only a threat to itself, and all the world's terrorists were dead set on doing harm to the US. The world's victims of terrorism should band together, pool their resources and assets and cooperate to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Luckily, several terrorist attacks have been averted in the US either due to good police work, good intelligence or the ineptness of the terrorists. Still the US devotes huge sums of money pushing a string in Afghanistan on the theory that if we can stop them over there, it will protect the US homeland here. Nothing could be more ridiculous. Terrorists can spring from anywhere and can attack anywhere in the world. So spending billions of dollars to send troops to Afghanistan and elsewhere is just plain foolhardy. Instead the money should be put into real defense instead of fighting offensive wars which are only pissing off potential terrorists even more and making it more - not less - likely that they will perpetrate  terrorist attacks on American soil. Real defense means knowing who is in the US at all times and who is coming and going and where they are coming from or where they are going to. Persons in the US illegally should not be tolerated. Yet, as we know, terrorism can arise from US citizens themselves. That's why good intelligence and good police work are very important.

Here is a list of some of the terrorist attacks in Russia:

March 21, 2010: This week’s terrorist bombings on the Moscow metro killed at least 39 people and injured many more.

September 1-3, 2004:  Armed insurgents seize a school in Beslan, in the southern Russian Republic of North Ossetia, taking some 1,000 adults and children hostage. Russian security forces storm the school two days later. More than 330 people -- half of them children -- die in the resulting violence. Radical Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev takes responsibility for the raid.

 

August 31, 2004:  A female suicide bomber kills nine people outside a Moscow subway station. A 10th person later dies of injuries. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov speaks to reporters the night of the blast: "This was a terrorist act. It was carried out by a woman suicide bomber. There was a large amount of explosives involved. [The bomb was] filled with various bolts and metal objects."

August 31, 2004:  A female suicide bomber kills nine people outside a Moscow subway station. A 10th person later dies of injuries. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov speaks to reporters the night of the blast: "This was a terrorist act. It was carried out by a woman suicide bomber. There was a large amount of explosives involved. [The bomb was] filled with various bolts and metal objects."  

August 24, 2004: Two Russian passenger planes crash almost simultaneously, killing all 90 people on board. Female Chechen suicide bombers are later blamed for the crashes.

February 6, 2004: A suicide bombing kills at least 40 people on a subway train in Moscow. A Chechen rebel group claims responsibility. "There was an explosion in the second [metro] car," a woman who survived the blast said. "For a long time, we couldn't open the doors. Then, finally, the driver opened them, and we started walking. We walked for about 2 kilometers. There was panic and a lot of screaming."

December 9, 2003:  A suicide bomber kills five people near the Kremlin in Moscow. At least 13 people are wounded.

December 5, 2003: Forty  people are killed and more than 100 injured when a bomb explodes on a passenger train traveling between Kislovodsk and Mineralnye Vody in southern Russia.

August 1, 2003:  A suicide bomber driving an explosives-packed truck blows up a military hospital in Mozdok, North Ossetia, bordering Chechnya. The blast kills 50 people.

July 5, 2003: Two female Chechen suicide bombers kill 15 other people when they blow themselves up at an open-air rock festival at Moscow's Tushino airfield.

May 12, 2003:  Two suicide bombers drive a truck full of explosives into a government complex in Znamenskoe, in northern Chechnya, killing 59 people.

October 23-26, 2002:  Armed Chechen militants take 700 people hostage in Moscow's Dubrovka theater. Some 129 hostages and 41 guerrillas are killed when Russian special forces storm the building. Most of the deaths are caused by a gas used by the forces to incapacitate the hostage takers. 

The best strategy for combating terrorism is an international network of intelligence operations combined with truly defensive defense expenditures. Strong border, port and critical infrastructure protection, protection against cyber attacks, a national ID card and other measures will prevent more terrorist attacks than sending American troops into other countries ever will. As a byproduct the problems of illegal immigration and importation of drugs will be solved. For a fraction of the cost of fighting offensive wars the American homeland could be well protected. It's time to wake up and smell the coffee. The Pentagon budget and the Homeland Security budgets should be changed around. More should be devoted to Homeland Security than is devoted to the Pentagon. Terrorism is a tactic used not only by jihadis but by any group or individual who has a grievance and wants to cause havoc, and the US should assume a strictly defensive posture. This will actually cause the diminution of potential terrorist incidents as fewer civilians are killed by US troops abroad, one of the main causes of terrorism in the first place.
 

Death Toll: Natural disasters 29 (and Counting), Man Made Disasters 36, Terrorists 0

by John Lawrence

With the proliferation of natural disasters like the recent Nashville, Tennesee, floods and man made disasters like the oil rig explosion and the West Virginia mine explosion taking a far greater toll on American lives than terrorism, maybe it's a good idea to reevaluate our priorities. Natural disasters are far more likely to account for more casualties going forward than terrorism is, and we should be prepared for them instead of considering each one some kind of rare event or Act of God that no one could have anticipated or predicted. Massive snowstorms and rainstorms which produce massive flooding are becoming normal events due, no doubt, to global warming. Global warming results in more moisture in the atmosphere. In fact water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased about 5% over the 20th century and 4% since 1970. Monster snow storms like Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse which hit Philadelphia and Baltimore this winter are caused by excess moisture in the air due to global warming. Although global temperatures have increased they are still cold enough to produce snow and ice storms. 

There are also an increased number and size of tornadoes like the one that hit Yazoo City, Mississippi, on April 24 that left 10 people dead. Disaster preparedness needs to be put on a par with anti-terrorism measures because natural disasters are causing far more deaths and destruction of property. And after each disaster, the Federal government has to step in and provide relief. That means that the taxpayers are on the hook for increasing amounts of money which is only borrowed and added to the national debt because not enough is budgeted for these increasingly more common events. President Obama announced after the oil rig disaster that British Petroleum would pay the full amount for the cleanup which is expected to reach $10 billion, but subsequently it has been pointed out that, because of a loophole in the law, actually BP is only on the hook for $75 million and guess who bears the rest of the cost? The US government aka the taxpayers. No wonder national deficits are increasing. While record amounts go to the military industrial complex each year, far too little is budgeted for the events that actually take the worst toll on American lives - natural and man made disasters. While record precipitation is bad for areas prone to flooding, it actually has produced something beneficial for California - large snow packs in the Sierra Mountains from which emanates California's water supply.

As far as man made disasters are concerned, most of them are caused by deregulation. Stricter regulatory standards might have prevented both the mine disaster in the Upper Big Branch mine and the oil rig disaster. Both companies fought off stricter safety standards which would have cost them more money to implement. Massey Energy had a panoply of violations which it managed to evade paying any penalties for or correcting do to loopholes in the law which allowed them to continue violating as long as they challenged them in court. British Petroleum lobbied against systems which might have provided a more fail safe shut off of the gushing oil. Now they will undoubtedly get out of paying for it due to another loophole in the law no doubt placed there by oil company lobbyists.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for both terrorism and natural disasters, has to have its budget beefed up while at the same time decreasing the military budget. There needs to be a realignment between the US' actual needs for protection and its imagined needs. As natural disasters take an increasing toll, the monetary cost (hundreds of millions in property damage from the Nashville floods alone) needs to take prority over military spending. The cost of cleaning up natural disasters cannot just simply continue to be added to the defict and the national debt. BP will probably tie up their portion of the responsibility for the oil rig disaster in court with the result being that taxpayers will foot most of the bill. Exxon Mobil tied up the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound and over 20 years later has not paid the full amount for the aftermath which was court ordered. Exxon Mobil has dragged its feet in paying the costs of damages to local fishermen while making record profits for itself. The original amount of punitive damages to be paid to the fishermen was $5 billion. That amount was reduced to 4 billion, raised back up to $4.5 billion, then cut to $2.5 billion, then further reduced to $507 million. A Supreme Court ruling is expected soon on whether Exxon should pay interest on this payment after 20 years of waiting. BP will likely use the courts to leave taxpayers holding the bag for the spillage in the Gulf especially since we have belatedly found out that the law limiting their liability is on their side.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil made record profits in 2007 ($40.61 billion) and 2008 ($45.2 billion) as it continued to shortchange Alaskan fishermen. It also paid no US taxes in 2008.

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS: Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

So US corporations (and no doubt BP will follow suit) continue to make record profits while dumping any losses on US taxpayers just as Wall Street bankers did. While other countries such as Norway tax the profits on oil drilling 50% thereby generating profit for the national treasury, the US foolishly just gives away the oil leases so that all profits go to the corporations while the majority of the losses are paid by US taxpayers. No wonder the US has an immense national debt! And global warming produced natural disasters (unbudgeted for) will only continue to get worse adding even more. While the Times Square bomber didn't manage to kill a single person and was caught immediately thanks to excellent police work by the FBI and others not to mention citizen vigilance, which helped to prevent an event which could have produced a number of casualties, the casualties and property damage due to excessive precipitation and high winds continues to mount. Do we have our priorities straight when we continue to allocate billions to the military-industrial complex and paltry amounts to Homeland Security? Homeland Security in addition to being responsible for terrorism and natual disasters is also reponsible for protecting our borders against illegal immigration. Although illegal immigration continues to take its toll on American society, relatively paltry amounts are allocated to it while fantasy wars of aggression continue to be fought abroad. And the cost of supporting over 1000 military bases on foreign soil continues to mount.

The Homeland Security budget for 2010 is $55 billion while the miltary budget is about $1 trillion - orders of magnitude greater. US budget priorities are totally out of whack. While good intelligence and police work has done much to protect US citizens from terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only increased their liklihood due to killing of civilians and stoking the fires of resentment towards the US who are considered to be foreign invaders. Protection against terrorist attacks which have killed very few US citizens and caused very little property damage compared to natural disasters primarilyshould consist of defensive not an offensive measures. The Times Square bomber was caught in part due to a fingerprint database. His finger prints matched those left on the Nissan Pathfinder. A national ID card including links to a fingerprint database would do more to prevent terrorism than the combined efforts of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force because terrorists are just as likely to be American citizens as foreign citizens. And it would identify people in the country illegally at the same time. A national database of student visa holders would have prevented the 9/11 attacks since a lot of them had overstayed their student visas. It can be shown categorically that defensive measures can and will prevent future attacks at a fraction  of the cost of military adventurism which is only increasing their liklihood.

But the real wild card here - and something which can bankrupt the US unless it's figured into the annual budget - is preparedness for natural disasters. Increased moisture in the atmosphere caused by global warming will continue to produce massive rainstorms, snowstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes, increased casualties and billions of dollars of property damage, much of which will be borne privately by American citizens who will become destitute in the process. As if the recession in and of itself weren't enough to devastate the middle class! The US hasn't even recovered from Hurricane Katrina 5 years ago! The US can expect to be devastated by ongoing natural disasters. In order to prevent a fiscal disaster as well we have to budget and plan for them.

US Killing Civilians in Afghanistan: How Is This Winning Hearts and Minds?

by John Lawrence

The stated goal of the US military in Afghganistan is to "win hearts and minds." But yet they are killing many more civilians than supposed bad guys. This creates a complete contradiction. It's impossible to win hearts and minds if you are constantly killing civilians.

NATO forces in southern Afghanistan bombed a civilian convoy, killing 27 people including women and children and injuring many more, Afghan officials said. The airstrike in a remote part of Oruzgan province yesterday capped a bloody week for Afghan civilians that has seen some 60 innocent people killed by NATO weapons. Afghanistan's cabinet called the attack "unjustifiable" and condemned the raid "in the strongest terms possible".

This should be enough to stop the war right there. The US is not winning. It is defeating itself because it can't pursue the Taliban without killing large numbers of civilians. Then after each attack General McChrystal has to get up and abjectly apologize to the Afghani people about American "mistakes." Oh we just knocked off another dozen women and children. So Solly! It's ridiculous. The Americans are losing the war not because of superior Taliban military tactics but because of inept and stupid US military tactics resulting in killing the wrong people. Winning hearts and minds would be building roads and dams; not winning hearts and minds is killing civilians. Oh, by the way that's what China is doing - building roads and cutting business deals while the US is killing civilians. Who do you think is really winning the hearts and minds?

And the US is spending billions upon billions of dollars to kill civilians in Afghanistan. That's money that can't be used to build roads and bridges in the US. That's money that's not being spent to protect US borders. That's money not being spent to create jobs in the US. How does killing civilians abroad and letting infrastructure crumble at home while going deeper into debt make the US more secure or more "free" or a better place? It's just so obvious that for a fraction of the cost the US could actually be winning hearts and minds around the world by sending in the Peace Corps instead of the Marines.

The US spends a pittance on Homeland Security and a paltry sum on US infrastructure while it devotes the major part of its resources to military adventurism. The US is spending $1 billion per year for every soldier in Afghanistan! Shouldn't that give us pause? Shouldn't we reevaluate our priorities? Then we have a huge recent victory in the Senate to pass a $15 billion jobs bill? That's just 15 soldiers worth a year in Afghanistan! It's nothing. And while the US military destroys Afghanistan and kills civilians, one guy is going around and building schools. In "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson tells about his experiences in Afghanistan that led him to go back there and build schools - one at a time. If one guy can do this kind of good, how much good could the US government with all its might and resources do if it chose to, instead of choosing to kill civilians in a quest for the fool's gold of eliminating Taliban leadership?

And the thing is no matter how many Taliban you kill, there will always be others to spring up elsewhere and everywhere around the world because the root cause is poverty and ignorance. The root cause is that earth is a Planet of Slums. One billion of earth's people live in abject poverty, living on less than a dollar a day, drinking filthy water, eating filthy food, ill housed, ill clothed. For a paltry sum, the majority of the world's people could be given a decent life, and this would do more for world peace and for the security of the US than all the civilian killing now in progress in Afghanistan ever will. Because you can't win hearts and minds by killing the hearts and minds you're trying to win. Winning and killing don't go together when the people you're trying to win are the people you're killing. Oh, I know it was just an accident - killing all those civilians - another accident, an ongoing accident. We're so solly. There's really no excuse  especially when it happens over and over and over.

When McChrystal took over last year as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, he promised to reduce the number of civilian casualties after a series of similar errant bombings. A total of 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed last year, the highest number in any year of the war, according to a U.N. report. Further complicating the U.S. effort, the deadly airstrike Sunday took place in an area under Dutch military control. A day earlier, the Dutch government collapsed over an effort to extend the mandate of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The 2,000 troops from the Netherlands may leave by the summer. The Australian and Canadian governments are also under public pressure to pull out. And while the U.S. military and its allies continue to push forward, they wait for Afghan troops to catch up. Several media reports from the field have cited the high illiteracy rate within the Afghan National Army, and an inability of some of its troops to read maps. A report in The New York Times cited an American Marine unit whose members said they led every one of its engagements against the Taliban, organizing the Afghan forces, transporting them in American vehicles, and supplying them with weaponry and ammunition. The Afghans' lack of preparedness raises questions about President Obama's declaration that American forces will hand over more responsibility to Afghan security forces as they work toward a target date to begin withdrawing in July 2011.

2,412 Afghani civilians killed in 2009 - that's 2,412 hearts and minds that won't be won over to the American cause. Multiply that by 100 to include all the victims' relatives and townspeople and there's a whole lot more that won't be won over. How many bad guys were killed compared to the number of civilians? A handful, probably. And for all the bad guys killed there is a new generation of young men ready to pick up their banner and become freedom fighters because far from winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan what the US is really doing is creating enemies. They are losing hearts and minds and for this reason alone they are losing the war. They're creating a people who will hate America if for no other reason then that America has killed a relative, a friend, someone they knew.

The US spends more on its war machine than all the other countries of the world combined while spending a pittance on its own Homeland Security and being the world's largest debtor. US values are so out of whack that it's totally pathetic. And it has a political structure that, despite the noble efforts of a few, seems bound and determined to keep on conducting business as usual until there is a complete collapse. The level of political ignorance that is actively inculcated in the American people is alarming. The amount of money corrupting the political system is frightening. President Obama, who is to the right of Dwight Eisenhauer and Dick Nixon, is painted as a socialist! It's laughable. America is becoming a joke in the eyes of the rest of the world. It would be laughable if it wasn't also so pathetic because the US owns a nuclear arsenal that can pulverize the rest of the world. It owns military assets that can utterly destroy the rest of the world. When the likes of Dick Cheney take power again, they will be all too prepared to use it.

Right now there are over 700 US military bases in Afghanistan. There are that many or more in other countries throughout the world. The planet is literally being militarily dominated by a financially bankrupt nation whose only real asset is its military arsenal and its millitary-industrial complex. And this is the way America intends to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world? Instead it is losing hearts and minds, day by day, civilian death after civilian death.

US Spends $2 Billion a Day on Its Military and What Are We Getting For It?

by John Lawrence

Despite spending $2 billion per day on defense, the US is still not a safe place. This begs the question - is most of this money not being spent in the best possible way? A paltry sum is being spent on protecting our borders, ports, coastlines, transportation system, electrical grid, chemical and nuclear plants. In other words a paltry sum is being spent on true defense while most of the money goes into defense contracting for high tech weapons systems and offensive wars. Instead of real defense the US military system is preoccupied with rooting out the bad guys. And there are an unlimited number of bad guys with new ones sprouting up every day. And we create as many bad guys as we eliminate by killing and maiming innocent civilians and destroying their property in the process of eliminating bad guys. It is a war of attrition in which a single person, a so-called terrorist, can take out a million dollar military vehicle with a $10 explosive. In and of itself the financial asymmetry is appalling.

From a financial perspective alone, the money is better spent on real defense instead of the pseudo-defense of offensive war. Real defense works to prevent the destruction of real property as well as real human beings while not wreaking havoc on an "enemy" as well as all the innocent civilians and property surrounding him. The value of real defense can be measured in planes not being blown up as well as the human and financial destruction of the lives of the people aboard the plane. Real defense can be measured in all the illegal persons and contraband that doesn't gain entry into the US. Real defense can be measured in terms of all the plots against us that get thwarted. And real defense, once it is in place, costs little to maintain compared to wars fought on foreign soil to eliminate bad guys. With the money saved, development in the underdeveloped world, which is the source of terrorism, can be undertaken. The Peace Corps could replace the Army and Marines who are ill suited to winning the hearts and minds of civilians since, by their very nature, they are an occupying force. Sowing good will is much more preferable to the ill will sown by military adventurism. This policy change would amount to a concern for the welfare and development of foreign peoples replacing a willingness to blow them up in order to root out the bad guys among them. 

With the money saved by instituting real defense of US persons and property, a policy of economic development inside the US could be undertaken. A high tech electrical grid hardened against sabotage could be built. Water and sanitation infrastructure could be rebuilt and hardened against sabotage. FEMA could be expanded and developed so that, when a disaster occurs, as it did in Haiti, well-rehearsed teams are available for search and rescue as well as triage units. Logistical nightmares, as occurred in Haiti, could be avoided if disaster preparation were better rehearsed and planned for. There needs to be more thought and planning put into the logistical aspects. There should be a general in charge just as there is in a military operation. Complete units such as the Israelis provided can be dropped in by helicopter where needed. These units contain all the supplies and equipment needed to provide medical assistance as well as the security assets needed to protect the providers as well as all the food and water necessary so they can be self-sufficient. The fact that the Haiti operation was such a debacle despite all the money donated is a tribute to the underfunding of our disaster preparation agencies. Military units do training daily, but what training or prepartion does FEMA do besides stockpiling emergency supplies which then are delivered in a logistically disastrous way?

Disaster preparation is an important part of defense, but how much money or attention is devoted to it? A paltry sum. Why? Because defense contractors employ lobbyists to lobby for their preferred weapons systems and their preferred modes of war which are those that net them the largest profits. Meanwhile, no one is lobbying for the real defense of the American people. Real defense would mean bringing infrastructure up to date with the idea of protecting it as much as possible from natural and man-made disasters. That means, for example, undergrounding utilities so that every ice strorm doesn't result in massive power outages. Real defense would mean a health care system that wouldn't result in millions of deaths and bankruptcies. Real defense would mean a well thought out plan for recovering from an earthquake as well as a terrorist attack. Real defense would be one that attained minimal illegal encroachments over US borders by foreigners while expediting legal traffic across our borders for the purpose of increased commerce.

While defense contractors are gorging themselves on public taxpayer dollars while lobbying for a version of defense which profits them the most and neglecting the true defense needs of the American people, real defense and disaster preparedness is largely left to the amateurs. Instead of invading other countries we should be devoting the bulk of our defense dollars and thought processes to protecting this one.

The Problem with the Response to Terrorism: Too Many People Talking to Too Many People

by John Lawrence

All the talk about what went wrong with the failure to detect the underwear bomber misses the point. They say that there was a failure to connect the dots among all the different agencies and all the people talking to each other. That's the problem right there. There shouldn't be an endless loop of people talking to each other and a whole slew of different agencies involved. You could fire 80% of the people involved and still have a better system for preventing terrorists from getting on airplanes. Instead of the system that's in place now involving too many people talking to too many people which in and of itself almost insures that there will be fiascos like the underwear bomber because of its sheer complexity, one might consider how to design a system from scratch that would reduce the complexity and actually work. Such a system would involve one and only one database and a terrorist hotline, similar to the 911 emergency hotline, that anyone - in or out of government - could call with information about any potential terrorist. The line would be manned by specially trained human operators who in one step could put the information on the one and only one database.

The only consideration that the person who answered the phone would have is whether or not the person calling was credible. That is are they sincere and not perpetrating a hoax. This could be encouraged by having tough sanctions against anyone who chose to trifle with the system. But if the information was deemed to be credible, the operator would immediately put the reported person on the no fly list. This database would be accessed by every ticket agent before a ticket was issued and in addition at the gate before boarding. If the person purchasing an airline ticket was on the no-fly list, they just wouldn't be able to fly, that's all. What's the worst that could happen in this scenario? That an innocent person would not be able to fly or would be temporarily inconvenienced. Compare that with a system which goes out of its way to let everyone fly unless there is conclusive proof they are a terrorist. The worst that can happen in that scenario is that they bring down a plane.

Anyone placed on a no-fly database would have the opportunity of proving that they were not a terrorist so that the no-fly designation does not have to be permanent. Temporary inconvenience vs taking a chance on the deaths of 300 innocent civilians, it seems like a no brainer. But the crux of the problem is that rather than design from scractch a simple system that might be the most effective, we have a system in which there are too many agencies all of which have to coordinate with each other and too many individuals that have to talk to each other. It's a recipe for disaster. It's not a failure to connect the dots. It's a failure to design an effective system that minimizes the number of steps taken before a potential terrorist gets put on the no-fly list. The problem is that there are too many bureaucrats involved all of whom simply want to protect their desk jobs. There is an implicit ethic in government that the more people involved the better, when in many instances including this one, the opposite is true - the less people involved, the better.

It is nobody's constitutional right to fly. If someone gets put on the no-fly list, they can take alternative transporation including rail, automobile and boat. Even donkey, horse or camel might suffice. If they are put on a no-fly list, they should have the right to petition to get off. It is better to have too many false positives (people put on the no-fly list that shouldn't be there) than even one false negative (a person deemed safe to fly is carrying a bomb in his underwear). If the system that I'm suggesting had been in place, when Abdulmutallab's father went to the CIA saying he thought his son might be a terrorist, the agent he talked to could have called the terrorist hotline immediately and had Umar Farouk put on the no-fly list. Instead, talking heads would have us believe that this was only one bit of information that would have to be combined with other bits of information sent up a chain of command, sifted and mulled over by various people in various agencies until a final determination would come down that yes, indeed, Umar Farouk shoud not be allowed to get on an airplane. I repeat this is a prescription for disaster. The fewer people involved in this decision the better, even if it turns out to be the wrong decision. The bias should be in favor of protecting the flying public not in protecting the likes of Umar Farouk's right to fly. The CIA agent that Mutallab's father talked to should have had the ability to have him on the no-fly database without further adieu or deliberation simply by making one phone call. Deliberation in this situation is not a good thing. False positives are so much more desirable than false negatives, and this is what all the talking heads on TV fail to see. It's almost as if they're afraid that the airlines will lose some money if the no-fly database gets too large. However, anyone on it should be given the right to a hearing at which time they can present their case for getting off it. And one common failing that all these government officials and talking heads seem to have is that they can't conceptualize any sort of efficient and effective system for anything - other than a bunch of bureaucrats mulling things over and deliberating among themselves. They are too people centered and not system oriented enough.

There are too many people in governmental agencies sifting information. You could fire half of them and still come up with a better system.