Glenn Greenwald & Murtaza Hussain

Just three years after NATO’s military intervention in Libya ended and was widely heralded by its proponents as a resounding success, that country is in complete collapse. So widespread is violence and anarchy there that “hardly any Libyan can live a normal life,” Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer wrote in The Boston Globe last week. Last month, the Libyan Parliament, with no functioning army to protect it from well-armed militias, was forced to flee Tripoli and take refuge in a Greek car ferry. The New York Times reported in September that “the government of Libya said . . . that it had lost control of its ministries to a coalition of militias that had taken over the capital, Tripoli, in another milestone in the disintegration of the state.”

Sectarian strife and economic woes destroyed efforts by the U.S. and U.K. to train Libyan soldiers, causing those two nations last week to all but abandon further programs: “not a single soldier had been trained by the U.S. because the Libyan government failed to provide promised cash.” AP reports this morning that an entire city, Darna, has now pledged its allegiance to ISIS, “becoming the first city outside of Iraq and Syria to join the ‘caliphate’ announced by the extremist group.” A report issued by Amnesty International two weeks ago documented that “lawless militias and armed groups on all sides of the conflict in western Libya are carrying out rampant human rights abuses, including war crimes.” In sum, it is almost impossible to overstate the horrors daily faced by Libyans and the misery that has engulfed the country.

Bill Van Auken

Given its track record, today’s human rights imperialism makes the old “white man’s burden” of colonialism’s heyday seem like a noble cause by comparison. Nothing has been more rapidly discredited. When Washington tries to peddle it, people all over the world recognize it for the garbage that it is.

Wednesday saw back-to-back atrocities in Gaza that made it clear to anyone with eyes to see that Israel is carrying out a war of terror against civilians. Its aim is to break the will of the Palestinian people through the murder of children, the destruction of homes, and the driving of an entire population back to Stone Age conditions.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck first at a UN-run school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, where some 3,000 people driven from their homes had sought shelter, killing at least 16 and wounding over 125 more. Then, in the middle of an IDF-announced cease-fire, shells were rained down on a crowded market place in Shejaiya, killing 17 and wounding over 200. As the horrific images of these massacres emerged from Gaza, newspapers carried the report that the Obama administration had agreed with the European Union to impose sweeping sanctions—not against Israel, but against Russia.

The punitive actions by the US and the EU are being carried out in the context of a provocative global propaganda campaign blaming Moscow and President Vladimir Putin personally for the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine and the deaths of its 298 passengers and crew.

While indicting Putin and the anti-Kiev militias in eastern Ukraine as mass murderers, Washington and its allies have kept a stony silence on the killing of over 1,000 civilians in the region, as the Ukrainian regime they installed through a fascist-led coup last February continues to unleash artillery and rocket fire on residential neighborhoods.

John V. Walsh

The Bolsheviks took Russia and then the rest of
the USSR out of the Western orbit, out of the am-
bit of the Western colonial powers. Rothschild
now wants it back. - And he wants China too...

Does it not seem strange that, with the Cold War long over, the Paramount Enemies of the United States remain Russia and China? That is not a bad question to ponder with Vladimir Putin’s visit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

And there is no doubt that Russia and China hold this pariah status in the eyes of the U.S. imperial elite. In the last months we have watched the US try to push Russia East and tear it apart. At the same time Obama traversed East Asia trying to stitch together an anti-China military and economic alliance in the Western Pacific with Japan as the linchpin.

In fact it is striking that the US has allied itself with neo-Nazism in Ukraine and Japanese militarism on the other side of Asia. This is happening despite the considerable changes that have taken place in both Russia and China, neither of which would any longer claim to be interested in an anti-capitalist crusade. The only country that comes close in the opprobrium heaped upon them by the West is Iran.

Why do these countries, especially Russia and China, remain the enemies of the West? With the struggle against Soviet-style Communism long over, the reason is certainly not ideological.

This riddle finds its answer in a suggestion by Jean Bricmont in his Humanitarian Imperialism. He observes that the main political development of the last 100 years was not the defeat of fascism nor the fall of Soviet style Communism, but the battle against Western colonialism.

And this battle is far from over, for most of the world is still subject to total or partial domination by the West, a condition that Sartre and Nkrumah dubbed neocolonialism. The colonized peoples of the world, the overwhelming majority of humanity, still live under the worst of material conditions.

Juan Cole

A Palestinian man kisses the hand of a dead relative in
the morgue of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Palestinian leaders are responding to the aggressive policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, deploying new legal strategies, and, in Gaza, a mass rally reminiscent of Arab Spring protest tactics. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is reportedly considering taking Israel to the International Criminal Court over Netanyahu’s recent announcement that Israel will build 3,000 new dwellings for settlers in the E-1 area of the West Bank. Abbas indicated that this step would be a last resort, but it is a threat to be taken seriously.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal joined a celebration of tens of thousands in Gaza over the weekend and repeated his long-standing opposition to ever giving up an inch of Palestinian land to Israel. Israeli politicians condemned him for refusing to recognize, and wanting to destroy, the Israeli state. Israeli opposition leader Shaul Mofaz of the Kadima Party said that Meshaal should have been assassinated while in Gaza. None of the Israeli leaders who condemned the Hamas leader seemed to grasp that the real threat to Israel comes not from tiny, impoverished Gaza, but from the policies of Israel’s increasingly right-wing politicians.

By denying the Palestinians a state, Israelis are actively destroying the Palestine they agreed to create in the Oslo Accords that Israel signed in 1993.

Israelis prevent Gaza from exporting most of what it makes. The territory is denied an airport or seaport, and severe restrictions are placed on imports, plunging many of the Palestinians there into food insecurity and creating high incidences of anemia. In the West Bank, Israeli authorities are resorting to an ever more robust Israeli apartheid, which the world is signaling it will not accept.

Alan Ireland

Murray Dixon and the specter of Christian Zionism

PART THREE - Twisting the history of the Middle East

In view of the deep-seated contempt for Islam, it is not surprising that someone like Murray Dixon invariably comes up with the worst possible interpretation of Arab / Muslim actions. For instance, in the Page 1 article in the Manawatu Standard on July 26, 2006, on the reaction of Lebanese people to the Israeli leaflets telling them to flee their homes, he said: "And we've seen on television — you may have too — they have these leaflets and have just torn them up and laughed (emphasis added)."

Where others, myself included, saw the actions as gestures of contempt or defiance — perfectly understandable feelings in the circumstances — Dixon professed to see only inappropriate levity. Elsewhere in the article, he drew a distinction between Hezb Allah and the Lebanese by saying that when Israel pulled out of the south of Lebanon a "few years ago", Hezb Allah moved into the "vacuum" and then proceeded "to [push] Lebanese out of their homes". In reality, the members of Hezb Allah are Lebanese, and were in south Lebanon throughout the Israeli occupation of 1982-2000. It is also highly ironic that Dixon leveled the charge of evicting civilians against Hezb Allah at a time when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were being driven from their homes by the Israelis. He claims that Israel launched its assault partly because — in the words of the article — it "has had rockets being fired over the border for a long time and has had enough". But only four of the 19 border incidents listed by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs between May 2000 and July 2006 involved the (localized) use of rockets by guerrillas in Lebanon; and as Nazareth-based British journalist Jonathan Cook pointed out in his article in Al-Ahram Weekly, August 3-9, 2006, Hezb Allah "paused five days, while Israel wrecked Lebanon with aerial bombardment, fulfilling its promise to 'turn the clock back 20 years', before raining down its rockets on Haifa".

Chris Floyd

Although Britain is acting as the beard[*] in this case, the government of the Nobel Peace Laureate is clearly driving the action.

[Updated below] It is apparent that the nation of Ecuador will now be in the frame for what American foreign policy elites like to call, in their dainty and delicate language, "the path of action." Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange [last week] for one reason only: the very real possibility that he would be "rendered" to the United States for condign punishment, including the possibility of execution.

None of the freedom-loving democracies involved in the negotiations over his fate -- Britain, Sweden, and the United States -- could guarantee that this would not happen … even though Assange has not been charged with any crime under U.S. law. [And even though the sexual misconduct allegations he faces in Sweden would not be crimes under U.S. or UK law.] Under these circumstances -- and after a sudden, blustering threat from Britain to violate the Ecuadorean embassy and seize Assange anyway -- the government of Ecuador felt it had no choice but to grant his asylum request.

As we all know, some of America's top political figures have openly called for Assange to be put to death for the crime of -- well, what was his crime, exactly, in American eyes?

Bill Van Auken

Multiple reports of widespread torture in the detention centers run by the new imperialist-backed Libyan regime and NATO’s “rebels” give the lie to all those who justified last year’s war in the name of human rights and “liberation.”

It is just over 100 days since the lynch-mob murder of Libya’s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi, a grisly act that marked the culmination of the eight-month US-NATO war. At the time, President Barack Obama took to the White House Rose Garden to hail the assassination as the advent of “a new and democratic Libya.”

The evidence and testimony provided by aid groups and human rights organizations over the past week paint a very different picture. A criminal imperialist war that ended with a brutal murder has, unsurprisingly, yielded a regime of terror, torture and repression.

According to a report released by Amnesty International (AI), “torture is being carried out by officially recognized military and security entities as well as by a multitude of armed militias operating outside of any legal framework.”

Alain Gresh

Interrogé il y a quelques jours pour savoir quand Israël attaquerait l’Iran, Patrick Clawson, chercheur au Washington Institute for Near East Policy (Winep), un think-tank lié au lobby pro-israélien, répondait : « Il y a deux ans » (cité par Scott Shane, « Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions », The New York Times, 11 janvier).

Cette déclaration venait après le meurtre à Téhéran d’un jeune physicien nucléaire, qui faisait lui-même suite à plusieurs autres meurtres « mystérieux », dont on s’étonne qu’ils aient été si peu dénoncés par les défenseurs des droits humains — une pétition circule toutefois pour les condamner, « Petition against the Murder of Iranian Scientists »). L’Iran a aussi été victime ces derniers mois de cyber-attaques par le virus Stuxnext (lire Philippe Rivière, « Cyber-attaque contre Téhéran », Le Monde diplomatique, mars 2011).

Cette escalade est incontestablement le fait d’Israël, qui ne cherche même pas à démentir. En revanche, il est plus difficile de saisir quelle est la stratégie du président Obama. Au moment même où l’administration américaine affirme, haut et fort, sa solidarité totale avec Israël et sa détermination à empêcher l’Iran de se doter de la bombe atomique, les manœuvres militaires entre Israël et les Etats-Unis sont reportées et les explications avancées pour ce report sont loin d’être claires ; Hillary Clinton condamne fermement le meurtre du chercheur à Téhéran ; les services de renseignement « occidentaux » (en fait américains) faisaient filtrer des informations sur la responsabilité du Mossad dans les meurtres des scientifiques iraniens (Karl Vick and Aaron J. Klein, « Who Assassinated an Iranian Nuclear Scientist ? Israel Isn’t Telling », Time Magazine, 13 janvier) ; parallèlement, ils divulguaient des informations sur des agents israéliens qui tentent de se faire passer pour des membres de la CIA afin de recruter des combattants sunnites opposés au régime iranien (Mark Perry, « False flags », Foreign Policy, 13 janvier). Enfin, les Etats-Unis ont lancé une sévère mise en garde à Téhéran contre tout blocage du détroit d’Ormuz et mobilisent leurs alliés pour arrêter les achats de pétrole iranien. Comment expliquer ces contradictions ?

Adnan Al-Daini

The sectarian and ethnic divisions among Iraqi politicians have now become so deep that trust across the sectarian and ethnic schisms, Shia, Sunni, Kurdish, is now practically non-existent. Any action or statement by any politician, whether well-intentioned or not, is viewed through this destructive prism.  Where do we go from here?  Is there any action that all politicians could agree upon that could not possibly be interpreted as suspicious?

Of all the statistics that describe the devastation wreaked upon Iraq by the illegal war, I find the figures describing the plight of Iraqi children the most troubling and heart-wrenching.   These children are the ones who will determine what sort of future Iraq will have.  Their well-being, or lack of it, will impact on the lives of all Iraqis regardless of sect, religion, or ethnicity.

A study by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists in collaboration with the World Health Organization found that 70% of children (sample 10,000) in the Sha’ab section of North Baghdad are suffering from trauma-related symptoms.  Even if this study is not completely replicated in the whole of Iraq, it clearly shows that huge numbers of children are growing up with mental problems. Many of these children have seen close family members killed; they have walked in streets where they have seen dead and mutilated bodies just lying around. If left untreated, what impact will these mental problems have on the future of Iraq?  First, of course, the suffering, the stress, and the depression that afflicts these children must be alleviated.  All of Iraqi society must see that providing expert medical intervention to help these children cope is a moral imperative.

Adnan Al-Daini

A local farmer from the Fedaliyah area of New Baghdad
herds his jammous into the Diyala River to cool off.

As a seventeen year old, in 1962, I was one of a group of about 10 Iraqi students doing A levels in a college in the UK.  The group included three Christians, one Kurd and the rest were Muslims.  Please do not ask me how many of the Muslims were Shia and how many were Sunni.  I had no idea and neither had anyone else.  I only knew of the religion and ethnicity of others through casual conversations. That is not how we defined ourselves. The only label that mattered was that we were all Iraqis.

Not long ago I was sent a list of Iraqi politicians and members of the Iraqi parliament, and against each name was written the label Shia, Sunni, Kurdish, Christian and other designations defining ethnicity or sect.  I wrote back decrying the fact that if  intellectuals and opinion-formers were engaging in defining people with these labels, how could we blame the rest of Iraqi society for doing the same?

The illegal Iraq war has melted the glue that bound Iraqi society together. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in charge of Iraq after the war, headed the Coalition Provisional Authority whose members were based on quotas representing the mosaic of Iraqi society.  It thus deliberately employed the maxim of divide and rule.  But why should the Iraqis expect otherwise?  The American aim, supported by Britain, was to occupy Iraq and control its oil, and this is the tried and tested way of all occupiers and colonizers.