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Sarkozy and Hollande on Middle East: La Même Chose

By Patrick Galey | Al Akhbar |  May 5, 2012

When the frontrunners in France’s presidential race took their seats on Thursday evening for a final televised debate, they did so with battle lines firmly entrenched.

Incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande had spent the previous month on a vitriolic campaign trail exposing deep rifts among the French electorate over the economy, immigration, and nuclear energy.

But the most significant player in Sunday’s election, which most opinion polls predict will go down to the wire, was not even in the studio.

Both Hollande and Sarkozy are mindful that the 6.4 million who voted for Marine Le Pen of the far right National front will have a large bearing on the outcome of Sunday’s run-off. That’s why they have sought to echo Le Pen’s strident anti-immigration rhetoric which reached out to disenchanted voters and hardliners alike.

Hollande vowed to cut economic migration at a time when France is feeling the pinch from the eurozone’s financial turmoil. Sarkozy went one step further, referencing Le Pen by name and claiming only he had the experience and gumption to put a meaningful cap on immigration’s pall over France by cutting the number of people entering the country in half.

Judy Dempsey, a senior associate at Carnegie Europe, said although immigration was being touted as a domestic stand from both candidates, using the issue as a sweetener to attract far-right voters could have an adverse effect on France internationally.

“Immigration is foreign policy and when they speak about immigration now in France it’s fortress Europe,” she said. “[Hollande and Sarkozy] don’t see immigration in a positive sense and it sends completely the wrong signal to the younger generation and the emerging business community in the Middle East.”

It was not until the final minutes of Thursday’s debate that the issue of foreign policy was raised. Here, both candidates demurred.

Sarkozy was quick to point out how he took the lead as France led the way in a number of international decisions while in office.

France’s president has often sought to paint himself as a highly experienced operator in the realm of global diplomacy. As well as inheriting French involvement in NATO’s Afghanistan mission, Sarkozy oversaw the stationing of French troops in the Middle East and Africa, largely in a peacekeeping capacity.

He played a prominent role in meditation between Tbilisi and Moscow in 2008 when the fight over Abkhazia and South Ossetia threatened to boil over into all out war.

And last year, Sarkozy’s France spearheaded NATO’s campaign for military intervention in Libya.

Sarkozy avoided mentioning Libya in Thursday’s debate after embarrassing allegations that his 2007 presidential campaign had received an offer of funding from Tripoli. Sarkozy is seeking legal action over the claim, but thought better of opening that particular can of worms in the closing moments of a potentially election-changing televised appearance.

Hollande’s public statements indicate striking Middle Eastern policy similarities to the current government. Like Sarkozy, Hollande has declared that an Iranian nuclear missile would be unacceptable for Europe. Like Sarkozy, Hollande has called for a two-state solution in Palestine while trumpeting Israeli security as a key French concern.

The Socialist leader has been necessarily vague over French foreign policy. He currently lacks a dedicated adviser for overseas affairs. Instead of laying out detailed plans for France’s global relations, the Socialist challenger has made a point of criticizing Sarkozy in this regard.

Looking ahead to the next term in office, Hollande has struck a remarkably similar tone to the current government.

Sarkozy and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe have been among the most hawkish European officials to address the Syrian crisis, closing the French Embassy in Damascus and calling multiple times for President Bashar Assad to leave office. Sarkozy has issued incessant calls for a full ceasefire in Syria, and has somewhat ominously compared the restive city of Homs to Benghazi, Libya’s erstwhile rebel stronghold.

Hollande, for his part, declared last month that he would support military intervention in Syria, “if done within a [United Nations] framework.” Juppe has offered words to the same effect in recent weeks.

According to Thomas Klau, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, both Sarkozy and Hollande will wait and see what happens in Syria before veering from the French course of public criticism of the Damascus government.

“The current government and Juppe have been very active on the Syria dossier and doing all they could to get Russia to move its stance,” Klau told Al-Akhbar. “I wouldn’t expect the French policy to be different under Hollande. Much of his policy will be determined by events on the ground and the success – or the lack of it – from the [U.N./Arab League Envoy Kofi] Annan’s mediation effort.”

Dempsey added that Hollande had raised the prospect of military intervention in Syria “because he can say it without the responsibility” of having to go through with it. As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, France still has some global clout, but not nearly enough to convince Russia or China to bless any advance on Syria. Both candidates know and accept this, and continuity in the French approach to Damascus is more likely than meaningful change.

In a similar way, with Paris’ pro-Israel lobby as influential among the Socialists as they are in Sarkozy’s UMP party, Hollande, should he win, is unlikely to depart from France’s current line on Palestine.

In spite of a few diplomatic gaffes, including branding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar,” Sarkozy has spent much of the last five years offering support to Israeli officials. Hollande, with influential pro-Israeli figures such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn having the ear of many Parisian socialists, will have a hard time departing from such engagement.

“Nicolas Sarkozy was personally convinced that the national interest of Israel was very close to French national interest,” Klau said. “With Francois Hollande, his attitude isn’t very significant. Neither of them place themselves in the Arabist tradition of French foreign policy, which has lost relevance anyway.”

So if foreign policy has provided so few soundbites in the French presidential election, it is because both candidates are largely in assent.

That is not to say Sarkozy and Hollande agree on every foreign policy area.

Hollande used Thursday’s debate to repeat a campaign promise that, if elected, he would withdraw all French troops serving with NATO from Afghanistan by the end of 2012 – a full year ahead of a planned pullout, and much to the chagrin of Sarkozy. The French president has said he’d prefer not to renege on the current withdrawal timetable agreed with NATO.

In recent months, Sarkozy has faced the wrath of Turkey, one of France’s major trading partners, by pursuing legislation that would make it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. Amid opprobrium from Ankara, the president has pushed ahead with the controversial bill, which critics have denounced as a cynical attempt to get France’s estimated 400,000 ethnic Armenians on his side ahead of elections.

Sarkozy has made no secret of his objection to Turkey applying for EU membership, and fallout over the genocide bill is just the latest of a series of spats with Ankara during his time in office. Hollande also indicated he would oppose Turkish EU accession if elected, but, significantly for officials in Ankara, he has not ruled out future negotiations.

“Sarkozy is openly hostile to the notion that Turkey should join the EU, whereas the Socialist position is that that door should remain open,” said Klau.

France’s poor diplomatic ties with Ankara can be counted as a black mark against Sarkozy’s foreign policy initiatives, something Hollande should seek to take advantage of, according to Dempsey.

“Sarkozy had something near contempt for Turkey and there is no love lost between Ankara and Paris,” she said. “This would change slowly under Hollande. It’s time France considered [engagement with Turkey] as its long-term strategic interest but that is one thing that Hollande might be able to change if he wins.”

With France mired in discontent over domestic issues, it is no surprise that neither Hollande nor Sarkozy has been overly willing to share their opinions on global affairs.

But whoever inherits control of one of NATO’s largest troop contributing countries will need to keep plans in place.

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May 5, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO: Killing with impunity

M. D. Nalapat | Pakistan Observer | April 29, 2012

Justice K John Mathew of the Lok Adalat (Peoples Court) of Kochi in Kerala has computed the value of a human life at Rs 1 crore. That is the money paid by Italian authorities to the next of kin of each of the two fishermen who had been shot dead months ago by Italian marines. Although the victims were in waters where there had been no pirate trouble, and in a small fishing boat rather than in a much larger pirate ship, and all but one of them had been visibly asleep on deck when the attack took place, the other having died when he awoke to the sound of shots and raised his head, the Italians have claimed that the shootings were justified as “the suspicion was that these were pirates about to attack” the Enrico Lexie, an Italian tanker. Why pirates about to attack a huge ship would be fast asleep on deck, besides being visibly unarmed, has not been explained by the Italian navy, which was angry that two of its men were arrested just for shooting two innocents from India. After all, if NATO personnel were to be arrested for killing innocent civilians, tens of thousands would now be in jail for the murder of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere. To join NATO is to get an invisible 007 badge which confers the right to kill without any fear of punishment.

Admirers of Italy in India (and there is at least one prominent political family in India, one very close to the Bhuttos, that speaks only Italian when they are with each other) ensured that the lawyer for the central government sought to excuse the two Italian marines from being prosecuted by saying that the shooting took place “outside the territorial waters of India”, an untruth. If such an argument is to be accepted, should any person wish to conduct an assassination, all that needs to be done is to lure the victim beyond Indian waters and kill him or her there. According to the government lawyer, Harish Rawal, this would mean that Indian courts would automatically have zero jurisdiction over the case. The intense effort to free the two Italians may ensure that they be allowed to return to their country by next month, if the Kerala High Court accepts Rawal’s arguments. Such an outcome would mean that India would de facto have joined Afghanistan, Iraq and other locations where NATO personnel cannot be held to account by local courts, but must be sent back, usually to be freed even after committing rape and murder. Incidentally, the two Italians who killed the fishermen were first placed in a luxurious guest house accommodation and later moved to a special cell in a Trivandrum jail, where they are allowed to dress and move about as they please, and get specially-prepared meals served to them. Part of the benefits of working in NATO.

Justice Mathew ought to have decreed that at the least, the Italian government should pay Rs 5 crores for each of the dead fishermen. These days, even a middle-sized apartment in a big city costs Rs 1 crore to buy. Bringing up a family on that capital would be very difficult. Hence the fact that at the least, Justice Mathew ought to have awarded Rs 5 crores to each of the two “NATO widows”. That sum would still be much less than what was demanded of the Libyan government (and got) by European governments after the Lockerbie air disaster. It is unfortunate that authorities in India seem comfortable with a situation where the price of a human life in India is placed at a level far below that of a life in any of the NATO member-states, barring perhaps Turkey, which the EU does not accept as European enough to join the grouping. Justice Mathew is following in the path of then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, R S Pathak, who decreed that the tens of thousands killed and disabled by the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster were collectively worth only around $400 million, when in fact a much more reasonable value would have been $4 billion, at the least. The only way to teach NATO that India is still an independent country would be to set a figure for compensation that is similar to what citizens of the alliance themselves claim when a loved one is killed.

India is a democracy where the top priority of the government is the protection of the reputation and assets of the ruling branch of the Nehru family, which interestingly has much more contact with the Italian side of the family than with the Indian. While relatives from Italy come at frequent intervals to enjoy the gracious hospitality of Sonia Gandhi at her government-provided fortress, such a privilege is almost never extended to the Indian relatives,most of whom meet her – if at all – only during special occasions such as weddings,that too in public locations. Officials who know that if their identities get revealed will face severe punishment claim that Sonia Gandhi’s Italian relatives have interceded “several times” in the matter of the arrested Italian marines,and that they themselves and their illustrious sister have been “regularly contacted” by Italian authorities to ensure an early release of the two NATO personnel.We do not know if such claims are correct. However,what is clear is that the Government of India has gone the extra ten thousand miles in accommodating the wishes of the Italian side.There have also been reports that the Vatican in Rome has interceded with prominent Indian politicians to secure an early release of the two marines. Again,such a report is difficult to accept.Why would the Vatican get involved in a muder case,just because the alleged perpetrators are Italian?

The world is a much less secure place because of the James Bond-style 007 privileges given to NATO personnel in action. A human being is a human being, and just because she or he is Afghan, Indian or Iraqi does not mean that a murder should be ignored by the international human rights brigade, the way such killings are at present. In Libya, to take just this example, several thousand civilian lives were lost in NATO military action, besides much more as a result of the ongoing rampage of those armed, funded and trained by NATO to kill their fellow citizens. There is no longer any security for life or property for Libya, and yet neither BBC nor CNN nor Al Jazeera refer to the country at all in their broadcasts, having moved on to the next target, Syria. Here too, armed gangs have sprouted up so that it is no longer safe to go about in some parts of the country. Countries across the world that have lost lives as a consequence of NATO action need to come together and shame the UN into conducting an investigation into the matter, rather than ignoring it because the headquarters of that venerable institution is dominated by members of NATO,whose license to kill with impunity needs to be taken away before more tens of thousands of innocents perish in bombs, bullets and missiles.

As for the two Italian marines who killed innocent fishermen off the Kerala coast, the chances are that the power of NATO will ensure their escape from justice. They will not be the first NATO personnel to get away with murder. Interestingly, those such as Bradley Manning who sought to expose such crimes are now in prison rather than celebrated for their ethics and courage. But why blame NATO? When governments crawl before the alliance, who can blame them for continuing to regard themselves as above international law and morality?

—The writer is Vice-Chair, Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair & Professor of Geopolitics, Manipal University, Haryana State, India.

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April 29, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

US nuclear arms in Europe should now be removed: Senior expert

Press TV – April 19, 2012

A prominent international affairs expert says it is time for the United States to remove its tactical nuclear arsenal in Europe as the dangerous stockpiles “serve no legitimate strategic purpose.”

“[T]here is no good reason to keep them (the US tactical nuclear arsenal) there (Europe) and plenty of good reasons to remove them,” Stephen M. Walt wrote on the Foreign Policy website.

“It’s hard to imagine that these weapons are helping Dutch, German, or Turkish elites sleep soundly at night, or helping reassure their respective populations. If anything, local populations should worry about having these devices on their soil,” he added.

The senior international relations author described the situation as “rather ludicrous,” saying the theories that justified these weapons during the Cold War “never made sense” to him in the first place either.

“There is no threat of a conventional invasion of Western Europe, and thus no need to ‘link’ the US strategic deterrent to Europe’s defense via tactical weapons physically deployed on the continent,” he wrote.

Walt suggested that the US failure to discard the weapons will undermine the basic logic of nuclear disarmament, and threaten global efforts to “de-legitimize” nuclear weapons as status symbols, thereby dealing a blow to broader nuclear security objectives.

The persistence of the weapons, he added, will also question the pledges that the United States made when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Though there is no single agreed-upon definition of a tactical nuclear weapon, it is generally characterized by a lower yield and shorter range than a long-range (strategic) nuclear weapon. Tactical nuclear weapons are also sometimes referred to as battlefield nuclear weapons.

The US has not made public the number of its tactical nuclear weapons, but according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US is believed to deploy approximately 500 tactical nuclear warheads, including about 200 B61 gravity bombs deployed in five NATO states (Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands).

The US also maintains approximately 700-800 additional tactical warheads in storage.

The original pretext offered by the US for deploying the tactical nuclear weapons in Europe was to deter a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe.

US military leaders increasingly suggest that the European deployment serves no military purpose, and a growing group of NATO members, including host nations such as Germany and Belgium, have called for the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.

Given their small size and mobility, tactical nuclear weapons are also particularly vulnerable to loss or theft.

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April 19, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US creates Afghan insecurity to keep military presence: Iran lawmaker

Press TV – April 19, 2012

A senior Iranian lawmaker says the US creates instability in Afghanistan to depict the war-torn country as insecure, thereby paving the ground for maintaining its military presence there.

The US orchestrates the explosions in Afghanistan in order to instill this idea in the minds of the Afghans that Afghanistan will experience insecurity and tension once more without the US presence, Chairman of Iran’s Majlis Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Alaeddin Boroujerdi said.

Washington seeks to make the Afghans believe that only the US can provide security for their country, he noted, adding that, however, “experience has shown the US presence has not brought about security but has in fact led to conflicts, bombings, and numerous other security problems in the Asian country.”

He said the US has long been after signing a strategic treaty with the Afghan government in order to make its military presence official and lawful.

Under the US Constitution, Washington cannot deploy forces to a country without obtaining judiciary immunity for its forces in that country, Boroujerdi said, adding that “signing a strategic treaty with the Afghan government will give the US judiciary immunity and permission to maintain its military presence.”

The US has been seeking to sign a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghan government, which would set the framework for the US presence in Afghanistan after international combat troops leave the country in 2014.

There are increasing doubts as to whether Washington and Kabul will be able to reach a long-term deal as US-Afghanistan relations have been heavily strained in recent weeks.

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April 19, 2012 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Hundreds arrested for swarming NATO HQ in Belgium

Press TV – April 1, 2012

Police in Belgium have arrested some 483 peace activists from hundreds of protesters, who tried to break into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels.

The Sunday demonstration organized by the Belgian Association Action for Peace was called to protest NATO intervention in Afghanistan and Libya, and nuclear arming.

The activists crossed fields and sought to climb over fences leading to the NATO compound but were stopped by the five to six hundred police officers who were deployed to counter the protesters.

“We neither want the anti-missile shield, nor intervention by NATO in Libya or Afghanistan, nor nuclear bombs that are illegal in our country,” a spokesman for Action for Peace, Benoit Calvi said.

Demonstrators most of them in their twenties, came from 10 European countries including Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden.

“A military alliance that intervenes all over the world and has nuclear weapons is a threat to world peace,” Action for Peace said.

The protest came ahead of next month’s NATO summit in Chicago.

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April 1, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chicago bans anti-war march during NATO Summit

RT | 30 March, 2012

A judge has rejected the demands of anti-war activists for a march to be held in Chicago during a planned NATO summit.  The activists say the city’s arguments against the march defy logic.

­Anti-war activists filed a request to court after their initial demands for a march to be rescheduled were rejected by the City of Chicago.

Andy Thayer, an activist leader, says he will still be marching on May 20, the day the NATO summit opens.

“I can say definitively we are marching on May 20,” he noted, as quoted by Reuters. “We will hold a peaceful protest.”

The anti-war demonstrators originally planned to hold a march on May 19, the day another meeting of global leaders, the G8 Summit, closes in Chicago. However, when the summit’s venue was changed to Camp David, the activists decided to move their march a day forward to coincide with the start of the NATO summit.

But this request was rejected by the Chicago Transportation Department.

The department wrote back to Thayer, saying there were not enough on-duty police officers or other employees authorized to regulate traffic.

“The commissioner finds that there are not available at the time of the parade a sufficient number of on-duty police officers, or other city employees authorized to regulate traffic, to police and protect lawful participants in the parade and non-participants,” the assistant commissioner of the department wrote to Thayer.

But Thayer says the argument makes no sense – as the police assured the public it had enough personnel to deal with the protests on May 19.

“It defies logic,” Thayer remarked. “Ultimately the city is … pursuing a political agenda of denying meaningful First Amendment expression of anti-war views.”

The city did advise the protesters to change their itinerary, but the alternative route will not pass through Daley Plaza in the city center, and will take much longer.

Thayer argues that the city’s reluctance to allow the peaceful demo is part of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s efforts to silence dissent.

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March 31, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

UNAC: A Real Anti-War Movement in the Belly of the Beast

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | March 28, 2012

With passage of a short and elegant plank in its Action Plan for 2012, the United National Anti-War Coalition is building a peace movement that is finally prepared to confront President Obama’s global military offensive, cloaked in “humanitarian” interventionist rhetoric. The language states: “End all threats of war and intervention against Iran and Syria! No to sanctions, blockades and embargoes!”

It is a simple expression of the singular mission of anti-warriors in the belly of the beast. That mission is to disarm the beast– not to quibble with the war machine about where best to deploy its overwhelming firepower, or to advise corporate warmongers on the most efficient killing-mix of live troops and automated drones, or to pick and choose from a Democratic administration’s menu of regimes that might be changed to make the world more amenable to Wall Street. Our task as Americans – our overarching responsibility, for which we are uniquely positioned and, therefore, solemnly obligated – is to dismantle from within the monstrous apparatus of imperial aggression. Period.

I was privileged to present the coordinating committee’s draft of the Action Plan to UNAC’s national conference in Stamford, Connecticut, this past weekend. “This action plan does not just target some U.S. wars,” said the committee’s statement. “It does not target the currently unpopular wars. It does not shy away from condemning wars that remain acceptable to half the population because the real reasons for them are obscured in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention. It does not advocate that we avoid putting U.S. boots on the ground by mounting embargoes that bring economic devastation on the peoples of Iran. It does not condone war by other, more sanitized, means. It does not cheer on wars that minimize U.S. combat deaths by the use of robotic unmanned planes or the highly trained murder squads of the Joint Special Operations Command. It does not see war by mercenary as somehow less threatening to the peoples of the world and the U.S. than war by economic draft. It does not give credit to Washington for removing brigades from one country in order to deploy them in the next.”

The document demands an end to “all wars, interventions, targeted assassinations and occupations” and U.S. withdrawal from “NATO and all other interventionist military alliances.”

UNAC’s reasoning is rooted in the principle that all the world’s peoples have the inherent right to self-determination,to pursue their own destinies – the foundation of relations among peoples, enshrined in international law but daily violated by the United States.

American exceptionalism – the belief that rules of international conduct, or even the rules of history and human development, do not apply to the United States – is deeply entrenched in the popular American psyche and has long been the bane of the U.S. anti-war movement. It encourages Americans to think they have a privileged perspective on the world and a consequent right to preach, lecture and ultimately intervene in other people’s affairs – just as their government does. In anti-war movements, this national arrogance (deeply entwined with racism) allows self-styled peaceniks to behave like little imperialists, imposing conditions and caveats on their willingness to confront their own government’s aggressions. They reserve the right to pick and choose which U.S. violations of international law to oppose. Unmoored by principle and crippled by national chauvinism, such “peace” movements inevitably disband at the earliest opportunistic juncture.

UNAC emerged with the disintegration of United for Peace and Justice, which showed itself to be more of an anti-Republican formation than an anti-war movement. UFPJ disintegrated at the first whiff of the new Democratic administration, clearing the way domestically for a new imperial strategy: “humanitarian” intervention. At its founding conference, in July of 2010, UNAC tackled the first taboo of American foreign policy with a plank to “End all U.S. aid to Israel, military, economic and diplomatic!” – a direct confrontation with Israeli “exceptionalism.” Last week, UNAC broke decisively with Obama’s humanitarian “exception” to the rules of international behavior. There now exists a place for genuine anti-imperialists to gather and plot for peace – and that is a beginning. No repeats of Libya, no more equivocations in the face of U.S. carnage.

A luta continua – the struggle continues, in the belly of the beast.

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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March 28, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Ambassador-Designate: Georgia To Join NATO

Civil Georgia | March 22, 2012

Tbilisi – U.S. Ambassador-designate to Georgia, Richard Norland, outlined priority areas of U.S. cooperation with its “reliable partner”, Georgia, during a nomination hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 21, saying that upcoming elections would be “a very important litmus test” for Georgia’s NATO aspiration. […]

He reiterated the U.S. support to Georgia’s NATO aspirations and said that the Alliance’s upcoming summit in Chicago would provide an opportunity “to highlight Georgia’s progress towards meeting membership criteria, as well as its significant partnership contributions.”

He stressed on importance of Georgia’s contribution to the Afghan operations, where “brave” Georgian soldiers operate without caveats in the Helmand province, noting that Georgia would become the largest non-NATO contributor to ISAF after it deploys an additional battalion in Afghanistan this fall.

Responding to Republican Senator Richard Lugar’s question about Georgia’s NATO integration, the Ambassador-designate said that the Alliance had already declared that Georgia would become a NATO member.

“So the issue really has to do [with] how and when,” Norland said. “There is no single path to NATO membership. As it stands now, I understand, the Annual National Program and the NATO-Georgia [Commission] are the primary mechanisms to which Georgia and the Allies are pursuing the issue of Georgia’s membership.”

He also said that “a lot of emphasis” was also placed on steps Georgia was already taking, including its contribution to the ISAF mission, defense reforms, as well as steps towards democratic and economic reforms.

“These are all part of the package that go[es] into meeting the criteria for NATO membership,” Norland said.

He said that “serious efforts” were being undertaken by the U.S. administration to use upcoming NATO summit in Chicago “to signal acknowledgment for Georgia’s progress in these areas and to work with the Allies to develop a consensus on the next steps forward.” … Full article

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March 25, 2012 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East’ took part in AIPAC meeting

Al-Manar | March 22, 2012

The Lebanese Al-Akhbar daily published a report Thursday in which it revealed that the “Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East”, which was funded and established by the late Lebanese prime minister’s son, Bahaa, took part in an AIPAC meeting on the fifth of March.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, holds yearly one of the most significant conferences in the United States in support of Israel, its policies, and its politicians; and “Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East” took part in this conference along with Zionist PM Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Perez.

The center’s director Michele Dunne, who attended as a representative to the center, chose to share her dialogue session with Israeli Brigadier General Michael Herzog, and discussed with him the Egyptian situation and the future of the region.

The paper clarified that the “Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East is part of the ten programs that go under the Atlantic Council, which on its part, is a 50-year-old council that aims at promoting Atlantic cooperation with international security.”

The council is the “representative of the Middle East” and its interests lay in “the future of the NATO, financial stability, energy security, and fighting extremism and violence.”

“While “the Atlantic Council” holds conferences on US diplomacy in Iran, global defense strategies, the new challenges for NATO, in addition to energy and global financial markets problems, the “Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East” specializes in Arab countries’ issues, especially at these transitional phases, like Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt and Tunisia,” the paper explained.

It added: “After examining the content of those sessions, it turns out that what unites them is achieving the US as well as the NATO’s financial, security, and political benefits in those countries.”

Al-Akhbar daily said that Michele Dunne worked in the US Foreign Ministry’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, and was a specialist in Middle East affairs in the White House.

In addition, “she took part in “special missions” for the National Security council, and worked in the US embassy in Cairo and in the Consulate General in occupied Al-Quds.”

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March 22, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pakistan parties warn against reopening of NATO supply lines

Press TV – March 21, 2012

Pakistan’s main religious parties, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Difa-e-Pakistani Council (DPC), have warned the country against reopening NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, Press TV reports.

Addressing a large crowd in the Bat Khela area of the Malakand division in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, JI Chief Amir Syed Munawar Hassan said the members of the party along with Pakistani people would close all the routes if the parliament decided to reopen the passageways.

“The leaders and government are following a US agenda,” he said.

Meanwhile, DPC Chairman Maulana Samiul Haq said reopening the routes was unacceptable.

“Democratic tactics would be used for blockade of supply to NATO forces in Afghanistan,” he added.

Samiul Haq announced that a related protest rally would be held in front of Pakistan’s parliament on March 27.

The gathering comes days after a meeting between high-ranking Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, Amy Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani along with his senior ministers.

The meeting was held to discuss channels to normalize the relations with the US-led forces in Afghanistan and restore the supply routes.

In November 2011, Islamabad closed the routes to the supplies headed for the US-led foreign forces deployed in Afghanistan in reaction to the Western military alliance of NATO’s airstrikes that killed 26 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border earlier in that month.

The relations between Pakistan and the US have also significantly soured in the past year over the unsanctioned US drone strikes against the former’s northwestern tribal belt.

There have been large-scale protests in Pakistan against the drone strikes, which might force Islamabad to condition the reopening of the supply lines to the halting of the attacks.

March 21, 2012 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

On Power and Delusions of Grandeur

By Deepak Pritawi | International Policy Digest | March 18, 2012

First the video of United States Marines urinating on bodies of Afghans who had been killed. Then the revelation that copies of the Quran had been burned at Bagram Air Base, which also serves as an American prison camp in Afghanistan. Nearly thirty Afghans and several NATO troops died in the violent reaction. And as I mentioned in my column of March 4, the BBC Kabul correspondent described these events, and the violent public reaction to them, as the tipping point for NATO in the Afghan War.

Just as the U.S. commander Gen. John Allen and President Obama hoped that apologies from them would help calm the situation comes another disaster. If official accounts are to be believed, an American soldier left his base in the middle of the night, entered villagers’ homes, woke up Afghan families from sleep and shot his victims in cold blood. After committing the murders, the soldier was reported to have turned himself up to U.S. commanders, and was flown out of the country. He has since been named as Sgt. Robert Bales. Other reports tell a different story, indicating that a group of soldiers was involved. Looking drunk and laughing, they engaged in an orgy of violence, while helicopters hovered above.

The massacre was committed in Kandahar, a province where NATO forces regularly carry out night raids on Afghan homes. They capture and kill men sweepingly described as Taliban, their supporters or sympathizers. Male family members therefore leave their homes at night to escape foreign forces. This explains why 9 of the 16 murdered were children. The rest included at least four women, and five Afghans were wounded. Several bodies were burned.

The massacre of Kandahar has echoes of My Lai––a village in South Vietnam where American troops massacred unarmed civilians including women, children and old people almost exactly 44 years ago, on March 16, 1968. The full horror of the My Lai massacre took time to surface, for many attempts were made to downplay it. Soldiers who had tried to stop the killings were denounced by U.S. Congressmen and received hate mail and death threats. It took thirty years before they were honored. Only one American soldier, Lieutenant William Calley, was punished. He spent just three years under house arrest, despite being given a life sentence.

The conduct of the U.S. authorities following the massacre of Afghans will be under critical scrutiny. Those who must bear ultimate responsibility will have to live with the guilt for years to come. And the carnage will continue to haunt the conscience of many people in America and elsewhere. The general sentiment in Afghanistan had already been turning dangerously hostile to foreign troops. Now, reports from Kabul say that Afghans “have run out of patience.”

In the midst of these events (U.S. Marines urinating on dead bodies in January, Quran burning in February, massacre in March), President Obama decided to invoke a comparison between himself and two of history’s legendary figures, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. To me, the latest events in Afghanistan are dismaying, and the timing of the president’s attempt to invoke parallels with Gandhi and Mandela is sickening. It goes to show what power does to its holder.

Much has been written about the New York fund-raiser, where President Obama gave his address as he sought support for a second term. I repeat the obvious to say that the country he leads has been engaged in a number of wars resulting in deaths and destruction on a vast scale. Their legacies will continue to take a heavy toll. Even when U.S. forces have withdrawn from occupied lands, or high-altitude bombing without deploying American troops on the ground has ceased, we will not know how long and in how many places Obama’s secret wars are waged. In the November 2008 election, he had offered a hope of change for good. It remains as illusive as it was under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Obama and NATO have moved and expanded the war theater––in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Kenya, Somalia and possibly places we are not aware of. His tactics have steadily become more threatening with foes and friends alike, linking ever more war and routine matters of international relations, trade and so forth.

Despite the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and the Afghan project heading toward an end, there exists a more explosive situation from South Asia to North Africa. The scenario of a major war in the region haunts many. Obama may appear reluctant to attack Iran or Syria. But that clandestine warfare by major powers and their proxies continues is hardly in doubt. The Obama administration’s aggressive, interventionist instinct is on open display. And to draw parallels between himself and great souls such as Gandhi and Mandela is a grotesque parody of their historic struggles.

At the New York fund-raising event, Obama said that “the change we fought for in 2008 hasn’t always happened as fast as we would have liked … real change, big change, is always hard.” Next, making a leap into history, he continued, “Gandhi, Nelson Mandela––what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term …”

Corruption infects our world in many forms: material and moral, visible and invisible, direct and indirect. But the underlying motive behind all things corrupt is a strong opportunistic instinct to benefit oneself at the cost of others by allurement or deception. No wonder politics has fallen so much into disrepute. The aphorism of the nineteenth-century English historian Lord Acton that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has acquired a special meaning today.

Employing his political mantra of “change” and attempting to show likeness with Gandhi’s and Mandela’s life and achievements is one thing. Truth is a different matter. Gandhi never aspired for any political office, never held one, and did not fight any election. After his incarceration in prison for 27 years, Mandela was a reluctant president of South Africa. And he made clear that he would serve only one term while a new generation of successors was groomed.

Above all, Mandela used his presidency to avoid a bloodbath and stabilize the country as apartheid collapsed. Precisely for these reasons, both Gandhi and Mandela were such formidable opponents of the unequal and unjust systems which they fought.

Non-violence was Gandhi’s tool. When violence erupted, Gandhi withdrew his movement against the British. He thought of others, Muslims and Untouchables he called Harijans (Children of God). He paid the ultimate price when a Hindu fundamentalist assassinated him in 1948. Neither Gandhi nor Mandela considered attacking another country, signing assassination orders, exaggerating or inventing facts about people they saw as adversaries.

Mandela’s African National Congress was inspired by Gandhi. But once the organization had realized that South Africa’s vast black majority was up against an apartheid regime whose brutality was exceptional, the ANC did engage in a low-intensity war. And the United States and Britain listed Mandela as a “terrorist.”

President Obama recently justified his drone attacks inside Pakistan by saying that they “have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.” It is impossible not to interpret this as an admission that drones do kill and wound civilians. But it is a minor matter in the president’s eyes. Only a few days ago, the German news magazine Der SPEIGAL said that while under the Bush presidency there was a drone attack every 47 days, the interval now under President Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is just four days. The Americans have “already executed 2,300 people in this manner.” Nobody has a chance today if this president decides that their time is up.

Gandhi’s agitation for boycott of British goods in favor of home-made products and his advocacy for an austere life were fundamental elements of the anti-globalization movement of his time. His ethos was “to consume less for the uplift of others from poverty and deprivation.” He lived the life he preached, for which Winston Churchill, then leader of the Empire, disparagingly called him the “naked fakir.”

In the world ruled by President Obama today, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, were he not in his nineties and so frail, would be his greatest enemies. And they could well have been on Obama’s list for drone attacks. Mercifully that is not the case, and this president can indulge in comfort.

Great people like Gandhi and Mandela use power to curb power. Barack Obama stands among those who use power to accumulate more of it. Therein lies the moral of any comparison in this debate.

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Opposing War in France

By JEAN BRICMONT | CounterPunch | March 15, 2012

Nowhere in NATOland is public opposition to “humanitarian wars” more muted than in France.  Only a few prominent voices were raised against last year’s assault on Libya.  Today, the few who attempt to arouse opposition to Western military intervention in Syria are the targets of a strangely obscure and yet effective campaign of slander designed to stigmatize and silence them.

The campaign operates like this. A rather small number of obscure journalists writing on obscure websites calling themselves “anarchist” and “anti-fascist” specialize in denouncing individuals who oppose war or criticize the European Union as fascists and anti-Semites.  Their targets are usually intellectuals who are normally considered to be on the left. The technique is to identify opposition to war as “supporting dictators” and serious criticism of the EU as “rightist nationalism”. It is strongly implied that reluctance to go to war to overthrow the dictator du jour is tantamount to refusing to act to prevent Hitler from exterminating the Jews.

The other technique is plain old guilt by association.  The targeted leftist has been seen somewhere in the company of someone identified as on the far right, therefore…

This primitive slander goes unnoticed by the overwhelming majority of the population.  However, these obscure slanders are then used to put pressure on leftist groups to silence the heretic. Amazingly, this works.

Recently, such pressure has persuaded several supposedly progressive organizations to cancel speakers who were targeted by this campaign. The leftist Belgian writer and activist Michel Collon was abruptly barred from a scheduled presentation of his latest book on media lies about the war in Libya at the Bourse du Travail, a labor union center in Paris. Other outspoken opponents of imperialist wars have had their speaking engagement abruptly cancelled, or encountered groups of “anti-fascist” militants intent on preventing them from speaking.  In recent days, the writer Jacob Cohen was physically attacked as an “anti-Semite” by the Jewish Defense League, which boasted of this action on a video. A fortnight ago, the University Paris VIII (formerly Vincennes) cancelled a long-scheduled international conference entitled “Israel: a state of apartheid?” on grounds that it could constitute a “threat to public order”.

The silencing of anti-war opinion is not unrelated to the existence in France of official censorship of “racist” speech and “Holocaust denial”.  In the past thirty years, the Holocaust, or Shoah, has virtually become the state religion in France, especially in the schools, where pupils are repeatedly reminded of French guilt in allowing deportation of Jewish children during the World War II Nazi occupation of France (many more Jewish children were hidden and sheltered than were deported, fortunately). An atmosphere has been created in which there is no presumption of innocence when it comes to accusations of anti-Semitism.  Thus there is understandable haste to avoid such accusations by ostracizing anyone who is suspected of this gravest of sins (on a par only with pedophilia).

Last month, Jean Bricmont received a series of questions for an interview from a young journalist who had already attacked him under a pen name in the context of the “antifascist” campaign against anti-war advocates. Just this week her slanders and threats of disruption caused a Paris church center to cancel a program on intervention in Syria. This young woman is suspected by at least one of her targets of being a US agent, and a law suit against her has been filed.  However, Jean Bricmont, who as a matter of principle accepts debate with all adversaries, answered her questions in detail.  Unsurprisingly, she chose not to publish them.

Diana Johnstone

Letter to A French Journalist

By Jean Bricmont 

You have asked me about my “support for dictators” (especially Assad). You suggest that this amounts to interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and pose questions about my “links with the far right” as well as with what you call “conspiracist” websites and the rationalist and progressive “support” that I allegedly thereby provide them.

Here is my answer:

You raise two important questions: my “support for dictators” and my “links with the far right.” These questions are important, not because they are pertinent (they are not), but because they are at the heart of the strategy of demonization of the modest forms of resistance to war and imperialism that exist in France . It is thanks to such false identifications that my friend Michel Collon (who runs the website http://www.michelcollon.info/) was banned from speaking on NATO propaganda about the Libyan war at the Bourse du Travail in Paris, after a campaign led by self-styled anarchists.

First of all, since you mention rationalism, let us think of the greatest 20th century rationalist philosopher, Bertrand Russell. What happened to him during the First World War, to which he was opposed? He was, of course, denounced for supporting the Kaiser. The trick consisting in denouncing the opponents of a given war as supporters of the other side is as old as war propaganda itself. Thus, in recent decades, I have allegedly “supported” Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Gaddafi, Assad… and maybe tomorrow Ahmadinejad.

Actually, I do not support any regime.  I support a policy of non-intervention, that is to say, I not only reject the “humanitarian” wars, but also the purchase of elections, the color revolutions, the coups organized by the West, the unilateral sanctions, etc.(see http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/20/the-case-for-a-non-interventionist-foreign-policy/).  I propose that the West endorse the policy of the Non-Aligned Movement, which, in 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, wanted to “strengthen international cooperation to solve international problems of a humanitarian character in full compliance with the Charter of the United Nations” and reiterated “the rejection by the Non-Aligned Movement of the so-called right of humanitarian intervention that has no basis either in Charter of the United Nations or in international law.” This is the constant position of the majority of mankind, of China, Russia, India, Latin America, the African Union. Whatever you think of it, this position is not on the far right.

As I have written a whole book on this subject (Humanitarian Imperialism, Monthly Review Press, 2006), I will not explain in detail my reasons, but I will simply note that, if the Westerners are so capable of solving the problems of Syria, why do they not solve first those of Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia? I will also note that there is a basic moral principle when one is interfering in the internal affairs of other countries – suffer yourself the consequences of that intervention. Westerners of course think they are doing good everywhere, but the millions of victims caused by their wars in Indochina, Southern Africa, Central America and the Middle East probably see things differently.

Concerning my relationship with the far right, there are two distinct questions: what do we mean by “relationship” and what does “far right” mean? I’d love to protest alongside the entire left against interventionist policies. But the left in the West has been almost completely persuaded by the arguments in favor of humanitarian intervention and, in fact, often criticizes Western governments for not intervening as rapidly or as often as they should. So, on the rare occasions when I protest publicly, I can do so only with those who agree to protest, who are not all on the far right, far from it (unless, of course, one defines opposition to humanitarian wars as being on the far right), but who are not on the left in the usual sense, since the bulk of the left support the policy of intervention. At best, a part of the left takes refuge in the “neither-nor” position: neither NATO nor the country being attacked at the time. Personally, I consider that our duty is to fight first against the militarism and the imperialism of our own countries, not to criticize those who defend themselves against their onslaught, and that our situation, as citizens of the attacking countries, is anything but neutral, contrary to what the  rhetoric of the “neither-nor” position suggests.

Moreover, I feel that I have the right to meet and talk with whomever I want: I sometimes talk with people whom you would describe as being on the far right (although, in most cases, I would disagree with this characterization), but more often with people on the far left, and even more often with people who are neither one nor the other. I am interested in Syrians who oppose the policy of intervention, since they can provide me with information about their country that goes against the dominant discourse, while of course I know, through the media, the discourse of the pro-intervention Syrians.

As for websites, I write wherever I can – again, if the mainstream left want to listen or even to debate with me on the policy of intervention, I am quite willing to do so. But this is not the case. I note that the “conspiracist” websites, as you call them, are far more open, because they accept me even though they know in general that I disagree with their analyses, particularly on September 11.   Moreover, the people I know who publish on these sites are not on the far right, and simply being skeptical about the official story of September 11 is not, in itself, a far-right position.

The world is far too complicated to keep a “pure” attitude, where one only meets and talks with people from “our side”. Let us not forget that in France it was the Chamber elected at the time of the Popular Front which voted to grant full powers to Pétain in 1940 (after the exclusion of the Communist deputies, and with the assistance of the Senators). And the opposition to the collaboration brought together the Stalinists (at the time, all the Communists revered Stalin) and the Gaullists, many of whom were, before the war, definitely on the right. The same thing happened during the Algerian and Vietnam wars, since the opposition to these wars included, among others, Communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Christian leftists, pacifists. By the way, were Stalin, the Algerian NLF and Ho Chi Minh democrats? Was it wrong to “support” them, that is, to fight Nazism or colonialism alongside them? And in the anti-Communist campaigns of the 80s, did not the human-rights left make common cause with a variety of nationalists or anti-Semites (Solzhenitsyn, for example)? And today, do not supporters of intervention in Libya and Syria make common cause with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and a number of Salafist movements?

I also have a problem with the definition of “far right”. I know what you mean by that, but, for me, what matters are ideas, not labels. Feeling free to attack countries that do not threaten you (which is the essence of the proclaimed right of intervention) for me is a far right idea. Punishing people because of their opinions (as do the laws punishing “Holocaust denial”), for me is a far right idea. Depriving countries of their sovereignty and therefore of the very foundation of democracy, as is increasingly done by the “construction of Europe”, for me is a far right idea. Saying “Israel is sharply criticized because it is a great democracy,” as if there were no other reason to criticize Israel, to quote the person for whom most of the left will vote in the second round of the French presidential elections (François Hollande), for me is a far right idea. Simplistically opposing the West to the rest of the world, particularly Russia and China (as much of the left does today in the name of democracy and human rights), for me is a far right idea.

If you want to find a place where I would unhesitatingly agree with the “left”, travel and go to Latin America. There, you will find a left that is anti-imperialist, popular, pro-sovereignty and democratic. Leaders like Chavez, Ortega or Kirchner are elected and reelected with scores unthinkable here, including for the “democratic left”, and they face a media opposition far more dangerous than “Holocaust revisionists” (their opposition actually does support military coups), but they never consider banning them.

Unfortunately, in Europe and especially in France, the Left has capitulated on many fronts: peace, international law, sovereignty, freedom of expression, the condition of workers, and the social control of the economy. The left has replaced politics with moralizing: it decides, in the entire world, who is democratic and who is not, what is the far right and whom one can meet. They spend their time swelling out their chest, “denouncing” dictators and their accomplices, politically incorrect phrases, or anti-Semites, but they have no concrete proposals to offer that would meet the concerns of the people they claim to represent.

These multiple betrayals of progressive causes do indeed open a boulevard to a part of the far right, but the fault lies with those who have accomplished and accepted these changes, not with those trying modestly to resist the world order.

This letter has appeared in French (http://www.legrandsoir.info/lettre-a-une-journaliste.html) and in Spanish (http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=145117).

JEAN BRICMONT teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is author of Humanitarian Imperialism.  He can be reached at Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be

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March 15, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

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