25 Comments

1. Stan:

   Throwing this into the mix because this tension — between the US-Israel and the US political-military — is part of what seems a dangerous cascade of instability created by Obama’s playing at war.

   I was one of the minority at one point a couple of years back who said that the probability of the Bush administration or Israel-during-Bush attacking Iran was near zero. I got a lot of breathless reactions from terrified liberals on that… this Bush person is crazy, he’ll do anything, etc etc etc.

   Now let me take my turn at Iran-attack alarmism; because I believe Obama’s foreign policy is leading more directly to an attack on Iran than Bush’s ever did. From Israel wanting to create a new “facts on the ground,” or from Obama-Clinton’s increasing anti-Iran bellicosity as part of their so-called smart-power shenanigans.

   If the US-Israeli condominuim is politically unbreakable, the newly arising impasses may only be resolvable with a common enemy.

   Bush was not the problem. It’s way bigger than Bush.

   http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/final-destination-iran-1.1013151

   http://thebulletin.us/articles/2010/03/12/news/world/doc4b9a66da99d72326077419.txt

   http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100301_6099.php

   Here’s Jim Lobe from AT Online.

   16 March 2010, 9:56 am

2. Michael Anderson:

   From the FP article;

   “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers. Maybe Israel gets the message now.”

   Translated…America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as Oil and control of everyone’s access to it by us (the CORPORATE “US”). If the main export of SW Asia was Peppercorns, this wouldn’t even BE on the radar.

   Iran has the 3rd-largest light, sweet crude Petro reserves (read easy to extract—the last of the low-hanging fruit), after Iraq. At this point in time, it’s easier (and CHEAPER) to play games than mount a direct frontal attack. But stuff happens, it’s already WAY too complicated, and that could change. This only underscores the precarious energy and financial situation the industrialized world is in.

   It has been my belief for some time (and I COULD be wrong!) that the state of Israel will eventually be toast…it’s just been waiting for the appropriate situation to develop. When corporatism doesn’t need Israel anymore (at least in its STATE form), it will be discarded like a spent shell casing—like we discard other countries after we’ve extracted everything from them.

   On the comment from NTI:

   In Tehran, a lawmaker on Saturday urged the Iranian military to set a cutoff date for Russia to deliver its S-300 missile defense system to the Middle Eastern country, Xinhua reported. Some experts have expressed concern that Iran could use the system to protect its nuclear facilities from potential airstrikes.

   “A long time has passed since Russia signed a deal with Iran to sell the S-300 system to the Islamic Republic,” said Hossein Sobhaninia, deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee.

   “The Russian side has cited unspecified technical reasons for the delay in the delivery of the air defense hardware to the Islamic Republic. We hope technical problems are behind the delivery of the air defense system to Iran, not other issues,” Iranian state media quoted Sobhaninia as saying (Xinhua News Agency II/People’s Daily, March 1).

   Makes sense, from an economic and historical standpoint, for Russia to be in this game, and I think that Russia and the US are a lot closer, politically and economically, than our good old shit-up-the-troops MSM would have us believe.

   A link:

   http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14552

   PS—Stan, am reading that article on Humiliation of the Word, It’s thick for me. But the power of the word is great, and can influence people—your words, inflammatory as they might have been to you at the time, influenced me to take a train of thought down a different road than I might have. I speak specifically of the article “Wolves and Sheep”, for FTW, and the comments on the mindset of our soldiers.

   16 March 2010, 1:49 pm

3. Curt:

   I think that this reported rising in tension between Israel and the US is just a charade. It had me going for a while. The question is what is the purpose behind it now?
   Why do I think that it is a charade. Same reasons as I think the attack on the USS Liberty was staged. To make some people think that Israel has more control over the US than it actually has so that some people can pretend that they are cracking down on Israel or that they can pretend that the Israelis made them do it. The purpose of the pretending can change depending on what time of day it is.
   I have no facts to back up my case other than the things that are supposedly creating this tension are only a fraction as bad as the attack on the USS Liberty was and that did not create any tension. Instead we married Israel back then. It was truely a shot gun wedding.

   16 March 2010, 2:11 pm

4. Ms Kitty:

   Wouldn’t be infinitely cheaper to just buy the oil, rather than commit billions of dollars and our young men and women’s lives to trying to control it physically? Oh, I forgot, that would leave so many of the war support businesses out of the tax payer money stream.

   16 March 2010, 9:07 pm

5. DeAnander:

   Another way of putting it — If the US just bought the oil, the money would go to Those People (those brown backwards ones). If they steal it by overcapitalised industrial warfare, then the money “stays home” — stays in the old-boys’ club of mostly-AngloEuro finance and industrial barons. If the US just bought the oil, the industries that want the oil would have to pay for it. If they steal it via warfare, then the taxpayer foots most of the bill.

   17 March 2010, 12:11 pm

6. Henry:

   I don’t think the money or buying or not buying the oil is quite the issue, which is a larger one, namely overall control of the energy in the long run. The US has always been able to control the price of oil, and to use it as a kind of weapon of “economic warfare.” The US bases in the region seem to have the aim of blocking Russia and esp. China, should the need arise, and above all of preventing too close a connection between Iran and China. The threats against Iran may very well be addressed indirectly to China, as a way of deterring this connection, and not really intended for Iran as such which, after all, doesn’t really pose a threat to the US, except in the fantasies propagated to good effect by the media. Of course, the wild card, and the taboo subject, is always Israel, since the Zionist project has always been Eretz Ysrael; but after all, this aim dovetails perfectly well with the overall “one world” corporatist ambitions of the financial-corporate elite in the West. The real, and profound enemy of that project as regards the Middle East, I believe, is its traditional religion, which is fundamentally at odds with the basically materialist modern spirit and its ideal of indefinite “progress” and “development.” It is a deeper reality than economics and politics, and moves people more nearly. Hence the attack on Islam and the support of its degeneration by way of fundamentalist politicization and the creation of “terrorists.”

   17 March 2010, 2:49 pm

7. Rosemary:

   Wonderful presentation:

   Why The Facts of 9/11 Must Be Suppressed

   By Guns and Butter

   Understanding the Ruling Group Mind Behind the War Without End” with Dr. John McMurtry. Dr. McMurtry was one of the first academics to analyze 9/11 and the 9/11 wars. He is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of of Guelph, Ontario.

   Broadcast March 10, 2010 – Posted March 17, 2010

   http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25012.htm

   http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20100310-Wed1300.mp3

   17 March 2010, 6:55 pm

8. (Boer) Tom:

   @Henry
   What happens when the countries receiving those dollars buy the debt of countries that the USA institutions (IMF, world bank) usually ‘bails out’? Extraction industry countries typically have to ‘earn’ USA dollars, to pay USA dollar denominated debts. While I wouldn’t ascribe that as the totality of their motivation, it does lurk in their thoughts (think of Venezuela’s buying of Argentina’s debt) as a risk.

   18 March 2010, 1:43 am

9. Michaael Anderson:

   @ DeAnander:

   GREAT! That angle was something I never thought of. It was so obvious I missed it…Hornborg would be proud. Low-hanging fruit is almost gone, so, in order to keep the profit margin UP, somebody else pays! Thank You!

   18 March 2010, 12:22 pm

10. Stan:

    If the State Department had issued travel advisory warnings to US government officials about to travel to Israel, Vice President Joe Biden would have no doubt ignored them. A better friend to Israel could not have been found in the 36 years that Biden represented Delaware in the US Senate and there was speculation that his popularity among Jewish voters and major Jewish donors was the primary reason he was added to the Democratic ticket. According to all reports, Biden’s trip was to mend fences with the Israeli officials and with the Israeli Jewish public which had become disenchanted with the Obama administration where …

    FULL

    21 March 2010, 6:57 pm

11. Stan:

    Follow-up. Petraeus does his public penance. Horse still out of the barn.

    Commander of the U.S. Military’s Central Command Gen. David Petraeus phoned his Israeli counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi, this week to deny reports that he had blamed Israeli policy for the failure in a regional solution and for endangering U.S. interests.

    FULL

    Read on.

    29 March 2010, 12:12 pm

12. Michael Anderson:

    Do they teach a class in political doublespeak at West Point, too? (smile)

    29 March 2010, 1:05 pm

13. Stan:

    War College. (:

    Here’s Kathy Kelly on the ground truths.

    There are others who know where this war will lead and know that our leaders know, and have simply become too fatigued, too drained of frightened tears by this long decade of nightmare, to hold those leaders accountable anymore for moral choices.

    It’s worthwhile to wonder, how did we become this pacified?

    30 March 2010, 2:37 pm

14. Stan:

    Another up close and personal on the Democrat War. Mab Segrest talked about “the anesthesia of power.” This is the ultimate anesthesia of power.

    Suicide rates among soldiers are the highest they have been in nearly three decades and are exceeding suicide rates for the general population. There are months that there are more suicides among soldiers than soldiers killed in the line of duty. Each and every day an average of five soldiers try to take their own lives; compare this to 2001 statistics, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when there was an average of one suicide attempt a day among soldiers.

    FULL

    Combine the two accounts above, and you have a better snapshot of evil than a Heironymous Bosch canvas. Straight-up, no-shit, no-exit evil. Its name is war.

    30 March 2010, 4:33 pm

15. Stan:

    Wanted to post this on the JSOC thread, but it’s boogered up somehow. This is the second-best spot, I s’pose.

    Why would McChrystal continue to tolerate a tactic that is so clearly at odds with the population-centric approach to counterinsurgency that he has publicly embraced?

    McChrystal has only a brief period before President Barack Obama’s exit strategy comes into play in mid-2011. He desperately needs to be able to convince the U.S. public during that period that he is making progress.

    FULL

    3 April 2010, 1:49 pm

16. Stan:

    Now US President Barack Obama has plunged into the cesspool of AfPak diplomacy, he should make it a point to understand why Hamid Karzai feels so alienated. Since the US tried to oust him, the Afghan president has become deeply disillusioned, frustrated that the Americans are either too naive to comprehend that he has little choice but to seek reconciliation with the Taliban or are pursuing a hidden geopolitical agenda…

    FULL

    Karzai as Diem.

    3 April 2010, 1:53 pm

17. Stan:

    NY Times April 3, 2010
    Hurting U.S. Efforts to Win Minds, Taliban Disrupt Pay
    By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

    MARJA, Afghanistan — Since their offensive here in February, the Marines
    have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The
    tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for
    property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the
    Taliban for support.

    The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marja,
    where the Taliban seem to know everything — and most of the time it is
    impossible to even tell who they are — they have already found ways to
    thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some
    who take the Marines’ money, or pocketing it themselves.

    Just a few weeks since the start of the operation here, the Taliban have
    “reseized control and the momentum in a lot of ways” in northern Marja,
    Maj. James Coffman, civil affairs leader for the Third Battalion, Sixth
    Marines, said in an interview in late March. “We have to change tactics
    to get the locals back on our side.”

    Col. Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan National Police commander here, says his
    informants have told him that at least 30 Taliban have come to one
    Marine outpost here to take money from the Marines as compensation for
    property damage or family members killed during the operation in February.

    “You shake hands with them, but you don’t know they are Taliban,”
    Colonel Sakhi said. “They have the same clothes, and the same style. And
    they are using the money against the Marines. They are buying I.E.D.’s
    and buying ammunition, everything.”

    One tribal elder from northern Marja, who spoke on condition of
    anonymity for fear of being killed, said in an interview on Saturday
    that the killing and intimidation continued to worsen. “Every day we are
    hearing that they kill people, and we are finding their dead bodies,” he
    said. “The Taliban are everywhere.”

    The local problem points to the larger challenges ahead as American
    forces expand operations in the predominantly Pashtun south, where the
    Taliban draw most of their support and the government is deeply unpopular.

    In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the
    Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the
    movement appears more akin to the only political organization in a
    one-party town, with an influence that touches everyone. Even the
    Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.

    “We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said
    Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary
    brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as
    Taliban.”

    “We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the
    Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We
    have to deal with these people.”

    The Marines hoped the work programs would be a quick way to put to work
    hundreds of “military-aged males,” as they call them. In some places,
    that has worked. But the programs have run into jeopardy in other parts
    of Marja, an area of about 80 square miles that is a patchwork of lush
    farmland and small bazaars and villages.

    In northern Marja, the biggest blow came when the local man hired to
    supervise the work programs was beaten by the Taliban and refused to
    help the Marines any more. The programs are “completely dead in the
    water” there, Major Coffman said.

    In addition to work programs, the Marines are using compensation
    payments to build support for the newly appointed district governor of
    Marja, Hajji Abdul Zahir, telling people that to receive money they must
    get his approval. That effort has proved equally vulnerable.

    In late March, an Afghan man was beaten by the Taliban hours after he
    had gone to the Marine outpost that houses Mr. Zahir’s office to collect
    his compensation. The Taliban took the money and stole a similar amount
    as punishment, said Colonel Sakhi, the police commander.

    “My greatest fear right now is not knowing if I have put money into the
    pockets of the Taliban,” Major Coffman said.

    Despite those reservations, the Marine strategy depends on sowing this
    community with buckets of cash. The money is a bridge to a day when, in
    theory, the new Marja district government will have more credibility
    than the Taliban.

    That would be a difficult goal even if the Americans did not intend to
    rid the region of its lucrative poppy crop. While the United States has
    abandoned the policy of widespread eradication of the crop, efforts to
    discourage planting it will still cost farmers and power brokers huge sums.

    “There are lots of people with lots of money invested here, and they are
    not just going to give that up,“ General Nicholson said. “Now is the
    heavy lifting. We have to convince a very skeptical population that we
    are here to help them.”

    A steady flow of Taliban attacks have added to the challenge. After the
    February offensive, the Marines used cash payments to prod more than 20
    store owners at one bazaar in northern Marja to open their doors, a key
    to stabilizing the area and reassuring residents.

    By late March, all but five shops had closed, Major Coffman said. A
    prominent anti-Taliban senior elder was also gunned down in northern
    Marja, prompting most of the 200 people in his district to flee.

    “They have completely paralyzed all the folks here,” Major Coffman said.

    In another sign of how little the Marines control outside their own
    outposts, one week ago masked gunmen killed a 22-year-old man, Hazrat
    Gul, in broad daylight as he and four other Afghans built a small bridge
    about a third of a mile from a military base in central Marja.

    Mr. Gul’s boss, an Afghan who contracted with the Marines to build the
    bridge, says he has been warned four times by the Taliban to stop
    working for the Americans.

    And even as the NATO-backed Mr. Zahir struggles to gain credibility as
    Marja’s leader, the Taliban are working to fortify their own local
    administration.

    According to Colonel Sakhi, the Taliban’s governor for Marja returned to
    the area on Monday for the first time since the February assault and
    held a meeting with local elders, many of whom Mr. Zahir is trying to
    win over. The Taliban governor warned them not to take money from the
    Marines or cooperate with the Afghan government, Colonel Sakhi said.

    In central Marja, where the work projects have had more success, about
    2,000 Afghan men are employed by programs financed by the First
    Battalion, Sixth Marines, said the unit’s civil affairs leader, Maj.
    David Fennell.

    At one of the battalion’s outposts, shipments of cash arrive regularly.
    The last was 10 million afghanis, or $210,000, stuffed into a rucksack.
    The battalion doles out $150,000 a week, Major Fennell said.

    On one afternoon in late March, 40 Afghans could be seen clearing away
    several acres of rubble remaining from a bazaar leveled during a NATO
    bomb strike two years ago. The $190,000 contract is expected to take a
    month to complete.

    But intimidation is still rife — even inside the walls of the Marines’
    outpost. One woman who came to the base crouched behind a Humvee and
    begged for help, saying that her husband had been killed during the
    February operation.

    First Lt. Aran Walsh offered her $1,700 worth of Afghan currency. He
    asked her why she hid herself.

    “If they see me, they’ll inform the Taliban,” she said.

    Moises Saman contributed reporting from Marja, and Taimoor Shah from
    Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    4 April 2010, 12:55 pm

18. Stan:

    Here’s one of Obama’s officers… just to show the tip of an iceberg inside his own military…

    An Army flight surgeon apparently is sticking to his vow not to deploy until he is satisfied that President Barack Obama is a “natural born” citizen.

    FULL

    Obama cannot buck the military-security axis within his own administration because there is a simmering resentment there that can boil over.

    15 April 2010, 7:58 am

19. Michael Anderson:

    Obama is certainly the Jackie Robinson of the Military-Industrial Complex….

    15 April 2010, 12:55 pm

20. Stan:

    It is hard to tell whether a major Middle Eastern war is inevitable at this point, but the clouds are getting significantly darker, and the US appears to be rapidly warming up to the idea of a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, whether carried out by the Americans themselves or by Israel.

    FULL

    25 April 2010, 3:27 pm

21. Stan:

    Although Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s plan for wresting the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar from the Taliban is still in its early stages of implementation, there are already signs that setbacks and obstacles it has encountered have raised serious doubts among top military officials in Washington about whether the plan is going to work.

    Scepticism about McChrystal’s ambitious aims was implicit in the way the Pentagon report on the war issued Apr. 26 assessed the progress of the campaign in Marja. Now, it has been given even more pointed expression by an unnamed “senior military official” quoted in a column in the Washington Post Sunday by David Ignatius.

    FULL

    ***

    “We’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” declared Attorney General Eric Holder last Sunday, referring to the May 1 attempted car bombing of Times Square in New York City. “We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it, and that [Faizal Shabad] was working at their direction.” Days earlier General David Petraeus had told reporters Shabad was probably “a lone wolf” and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that the abortive bombing was nothing “other than a one-off.”

    FULL

    12 May 2010, 11:06 am

22. Stan:

    The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan.

    FULL

    13 May 2010, 6:27 pm

23. Stan:

    Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in London Saturday as US generals express doubts that they are having any success in fighting the Taliban.

    The US and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen Stanley McChrystal, who was boasting of military progress only three months ago, confessed last week that “nobody is winning.” His only claim now is that the Taliban have lost momentum compared to last year.

    FULL

    A report by Jonathan Landay and Dion Nissenbaum for McClatchy Newspapers provides important insights into our rapidly diminishing prospects for success in Afghanistan, some direct, others inferential

    < FULL

    18 May 2010, 9:30 am

24. Stan:

    This could also go into the aging JSOC thread.

    “It isn’t clear if it really makes a difference if the “black jail” is run by JSOC or DCHC. After all, Task Force 714, which DCHC is serving, is itself a JSOC special ops force:”

    FULL

    “For those who think that President Obama banned torture centers like this, think again. Obama’s Executive Order only banned CIA secret prisons. This administration thus apparently intended from the beginning to maintain its torture facility, only under a Defense Department rather than CIA label.”

    21 May 2010, 1:36 pm

25. Stan:

    Obama’s Contractors

    FULL 21 May 2010, 2:05 pm

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