The US is no angel of peace
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:25:25
By Ismail salami, Press TV, Tehran Sheldon Richman, American political writer and academic An interview with Sheldon Richman, an American political writer and academic, best known for his advocacy of Libertarianism.

He is the editor of The Freeman, a magazine published by The Foundation for Economic Education, and is a Senior Fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation, Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, and a member of the Liberty and Power group weblog at the History News Network.

A graduate of Temple University, Richman was formerly a journalist, and a senior editor at the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

His books include:

Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families.

Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax.

Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State.

He is a contributor to the Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics.

Q- Do you believe a US-sponsored peace conference to be held next month could bring sustainable peace to the Middle East?

A- No, I don't. We've been through this many times already. The US government is not an honest broker. It is an unconditional ally of one of the parties, Israel, and has many times sided against the Palestinians, who have been the victims of injustice, including property violations, for many years. The US government wants a "peace" that serves its and its allies interests, which is not the same thing as a genuine peace with justice.

Q- Don't you think it is paradoxical for the US to sponsor the Middle East peace conference while it has practically proved to conduce to insecurity and crisis in the Middle East?

A- Of course it is paradoxical. The US government has made war on the Iraqis, it countenanced war on the Lebanese, and it now threatens to make war on the Iranians. This is a peculiar angel of peace, indeed.

Q- After the Balkan War, the West took the advantage of the vacuum of power in Eastern Europe and divided the Yugoslavia based on ethnic lines (Balkanization). Do you think the US is pushing ahead with a similar plan for Iraq? If yes, what are the reasons behind such a plot?

A- My hunch is that the Bush administration wants a united Iraq, a federation in which the US has the major influence on the central government. A broken-up Iraq would make it easier for countries in the region to exercise influence.

Q- Would the so-called privatization of “security management” in Iraq, negate the liability of the US for the war crimes that are committed in Iraq?

A- "Privatization" is not the right word. What the US is going in Iraq is a government operation. That it hires so-called private firms for particular services changes nothing about that. Whether in law this negates liability for war crimes, I do not know. But it should not do so.

Q- As you know, using mercenaries for hunting suspects and fighting adversaries dates back to early history of the US. Can we draw a parallel between what is going on in Iraq and the events of the Wild West era? In other words, has the US only succeeded to bring chaos to Iraq instead of the rule of law and security?

A- I must correct your misconceptions about the so-called Wild West. This was a period before the US federal government established itself in the western US. It was a remarkably peaceful time, as documented in a recent book by Terry Anderson and Peter Hill (http://tinyurl.com/3d55pu).

The people themselves generated a bottom-up peaceful system of property rights and law. I see no parallel whatsoever with Iraq, which is a government operation through and through, with all the negative aspects we should suspect of such an operation. The problem with the Iraq operation is that it is an attempt to establish law top-down by outsiders. This is not likely to work.

Q- What is your interpretation of Bush's recent comment about Iran that its nuclear program would lead to World War III.

A- This is an alarming statement, another ratcheting-up of the war rhetoric, as we saw previously with Iraq. While I don't believe the decision has been made to bomb Iran, I think the Bush administration wishes to maintain its options. Keeping the American people alarmed is part of the plan.

An attack would lead to disaster.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=28276...ctionid=3510302

Phantoms Over Syria

Eveything Israel wants you to know about its secret airstrike

by Philip Giraldi

On Sept. 6, Israeli F-15s and F-16s attacked a site near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria, though the strike wasn’t confirmed for nearly two weeks. The Washington Post reported on Sept. 13 that according to a former Israeli official, “it was an attack against a facility capable of making unconventional weapons.” Two days later, Syria had an accomplice: “Israel had recently provided the United States with evidence—known by the code name ‘Orchard,’” the Post reported, “that North Korea has been cooperating with Syria on a nuclear facility.”

Beyond that, details are sketchy—perhaps deliberately so. On Sept. 19, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the attack, but said it was “too early to discuss this subject.” Pressed at a White House news conference the following day, President Bush twice refused to comment—though he did warn North Korea about selling nuclear weapons or expertise.

American intelligence has been unable to confirm the existence of any Syrian nuclear program, and the Post admitted, “[M]any outside nuclear experts have expressed skepticism that Syria, which has mostly focused on chemical and biological weapons, would be conducting nuclear trade with North Korea.” But facts may not be prime property in this situation.

In the intelligence community, a disinformation operation is a calculated attempt to convince an audience that falsehoods about an adversary are true, either to discredit him or, in an extreme case, to justify military action. When such a campaign is properly conducted, information is leaked to numerous outlets over a period of time, creating the impression of a media consensus that the story is true, as each new report validates earlier ones.

We’ve been here before: the leaking of unreliable information to New York Times reporter Judith Miller was just one example of disinformation used to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. More recently, Iran has been on the receiving end of what appears to be an officially orchestrated but poorly executed disinformation campaign regarding its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now a new operation—brought to us by the old players—may be unfolding.

A chronology of the case against Syria is revealing, and the role of former UN ambassador and leading neoconservative John Bolton is key. Bolton, now at the American Enterprise Institute, has repeatedly clashed with the intelligence community over the issue of Syrian intentions, most notably in 2002 and 2003 when he was undersecretary of state for arms control. At one point, Bolton was forced to strike from a speech language suggesting that Syria had a nuclear program. On another occasion, Bolton’s judgments on Syria were challenged by Robert Hutchings, director of the National Intelligence Council, who charged that Bolton “took isolated facts and made much more of them … cherry picking … to present the starkest possible case.”

On Aug. 31, one week before the Israeli attack on Syria, Bolton wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that concluded, “We know that both Iran and Syria have long cooperated with North Korea on ballistic-missile programs, and the prospect of cooperation on nuclear matters is not far-fetched. Whether and to what extent Iran, Syria or others might be ‘safe havens’ for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons development, or may have already benefited from it, must be made clear.” Perhaps this was just good timing. Perhaps it was something more—possibly representing information provided by Bolton’s excellent contacts within the Israeli government.

Comments made by a State Department official on Sept. 14, in the wake of the Israeli attack, bolstered the neoconservative argument that Syria is a serious threat. Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear non-proliferation policy, stated that Syria was on the U.S. nuclear “watch list” and that Damascus “might have” a number of “secret suppliers” from which to obtain nuclear equipment as part of a covert program.

Across the Atlantic, on Sept. 16, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times of London published an extremely detailed story on the attack that clearly derived from Israeli sources. The piece unambiguously portrayed the bombing as “a successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.” A Sept. 23 follow-up claimed that before the site was bombed, an Israeli commando unit had seized nuclear material, which had been tested and confirmed to be of North Korean origin. A second story headlined “Snatched: Israeli commandos ‘nuclear’ raid” also appearing in the Times on the same day, under the same byline, provided additional details, noting that Syria, Iran, and North Korea now constitute a new “axis of evil.” It also quoted David Schenker, of the neocon Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who described Syria as a “client” of Iran.

On Sept. 18, Bolton resurfaced, telling an Israeli journalist that the United States would stand behind any preemptive attack by Tel Aviv on neighboring countries believed to have nuclear-weapons programs. The Wall Street Journal added a piece by editorial board member Bret Stephens asserting that the bombing in Syria was a reprise of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

By Sept. 21, the Washington Post also appeared to be convinced by the story, featuring a front-page headline “Israel, US Shared Data on Suspected Nuclear Site.” The article stated that Israel provided intelligence to President Bush during the summer indicating that North Korean nuclear experts were in Syria. Bush was reportedly “troubled” by the information. The Post added, citing anonymous sources, that “the United States is believed to have provided Israel with some corroboration of the original intelligence before Israel proceeded with the raid,” but then, farther down in the article, the Post conceded, “The quality of the Israeli intelligence, the extent of North Korean assistance and the seriousness of the Syrian effort are uncertain…” To give the story even greater resonance, leading neoconservative Charles Krauthammer, in his column in the same issue, accepted as fact that Damascus was pursuing nuclear capability and warned that Israel will not accept a “nuclear Syria.”

In the days that followed, the New York Times offered a more measured headline: “Israeli Raid on Syria Fuels Debate on Weapons” and referred to allegations about Syria’s weapons program as “Israel’s private claims,” noting, “American officials have been extremely cautious about endorsing the Israeli conclusion.” Other outlets also picked up the story, but even those that were careful left the impression that Syria was seeking to obtain nuclear weapons, and North Korea was suspected of having supplied materials.

The pieces have a common thread: they rely entirely on information provided by Israeli sources without independent corroboration. And the ongoing play they are getting in the international media, without much critical commentary and without direct attribution to Israel, mark them as classic disinformation.

A review of the sources for the various stories and the descriptions of them reveals a great deal of ambiguity in the claims being made. The frequently cited Andrew Semmel’s apparently damning comments are laced with expressions like “possible,” “may have,” and “may have been.” What Semmel is actually saying is that nearly all of the information he has comes from Israel and cannot be verified. The conveniently anonymous sources who claim to the Washington Post that the U.S. is “believed” to have provided corroboration for Israeli intelligence are clearly unable to state whether it did or didn’t, rendering the comment little more than opinion. The Post editor who crafted the headline asserting that there was a “sharing” of information was disturbingly clueless or deliberately misleading as there was no evidence produced in the article or elsewhere to indicate that any American intelligence agency could confirm the Israeli allegations. Any “sharing” went only in one direction: from Israel to Washington.

Also lost in the shuffle is the fact that Syria has vehemently denied having any nuclear-weapons program, and North Korea isn’t known to have ever exported nuclear technology or material. The prevailing consensus is that Syria does not have an economic or technical base that would enable it to develop a nuclear weapon even if someone handed it the fissile material. The feverish imagination of John Bolton aside, even Syria’s enemies concede that there has been no evidence of nuclear-weapons development. It has but a small Chinese-built research reactor that, by one account, is less capable than those in use at a number of American universities.

There are other reasons that depicting Damascus as the latest nuclear aspirant is suspect. Destroying a weapons facility would scatter traces of radioactive material that could be detected, especially since the attack took place close to the Turkish border. No such evidence has been reported. Also notable is the absence of solid intelligence. If Israel knows conclusively that Syria has a nuclear program, surely it would have made its case in the wake of the Sept. 6 raid. Far from doing so, Tel Aviv has kept a security lid on the incident, suggesting that it would prefer to promote the story of a military success against Damascus without being too specific about the details.

Even the Bush White House, generally willing to use any hint of malfeasance to condemn Damascus and Tehran, has been reluctant to confirm the story. It doesn’t need to. Official silence—narrated by a compliant press taking uncorroborated dictation—is cementing a public impression. That’s the way disinformation works. Done right, no one stops to ask where it came from—or who benefits.
__________________________________________

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/article2.html

Presidential power patois?
Bruce Fein
October 23, 2007

President Bush has his Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general-designate, to defend his multiple challenges to the Constitution, just as King Henry VIII had his Cardinal Wolsey to defend his nullity suit against Katherine of Aragon.


During two days of confirmation hearings last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Mukasey echoed Mr. Bush's bloated conception of presidential powers. A few senators complained or voiced chagrin, but Mr. Mukasey's confirmation seems assured. By not leveraging confirmation to insist on an attorney general devoted to the Constitution's checks and balances, the Senate betrayed effeteness destined to culminate in government by presidential edict.


Mr. Mukasey denounced torture as unconstitutional, but declined to rebuke President Bush's signing statement issued in conjunction with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 claiming inherent constitutional power to torture to gather foreign intelligence. Indeed, Mr. Mukasey expressed no qualms about hundreds of Mr. Bush's signing statements declaring his intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law that the president believes are unconstitutional.


Signing statements are indistinguishable from absolute line-item vetoes which the United States Supreme Court voided in Clinton v. New York. They result in the enforcement of laws that Congress did not pass. Members vote to approve an entire bill, not an expurgated version prepared by the president.


The attorney general-designate did not quarrel with Mr. Bush's unprecedented assertions of executive privilege to prevent current or former White House officials from testifying before congressional committees investigating crimes or maladministration. Nor did he quarrel with Mr. Bush's concealment of spy programs from Congress and hiding their legal justifications.


In contrast to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Mr. Mukasey did not endorse government in the sunshine as the best disinfectant. He did not subscribe to James Madison's philosophy that self-government is fatuous unless the people know what their government is doing to adjust their political loyalties accordingly.


Mr. Mukasey has asserted that the government deserves a presumption of trust and honesty despite the notoriety of the executive branch — including the Bush administration — of lying to aggrandize power. President Lyndon B. Johnson lied about North Vietnamese attacks on the USS Mattox and USS Turner Joy to justify the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Bush followed Johnson's instruction in lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify invasion.


Mr. Bush has logarithmically inflated the danger of international terrorism and a caliphate in the United States to a combination of Josef Stalin, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, Hirohito and Benito Mussolini to justify, among other things, permanent war, indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens as unlawful enemy combatants and the kidnapping, imprisonment and torture of terrorist suspects abroad.

By indirection, the attorney general-designate saluted President Bush's defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, by ordering the National Security Agency to target U.S. citizens on American soil for electronic surveillance without judicial warrants on his say-so alone. Mr. Mukasey elaborated: "As I understand it, the president believed at the time and still believes that FISA was not the only applicable statute; that [in] part of that he was acting with authorization under the authorization for the use of military force [AUMF]. I understand that there is more than one view on that."


But President Bush belatedly concocted the AUMF theory in 2006 as part of a "dynamic" rather than a "static" process of interpretation. The theory was not present at the creation of the NSA's warrantless spying. Moreover, the president has claimed constitutional authority to intercept phone conversations and e-mails, break and enter homes, kidnap, and torture American citizens to collect foreign intelligence despite criminal prohibitions enacted by Congress. Mr. Mukasey did not challenge that imperial theory of executive power.


The attorney general-designate supports every dubious premise that President Bush has trumpeted since September 11, 2001, to cripple checks and balances: that the conflict with international terrorism constitutes permanent war in which every square inch of the United States is an active battlefield where military force and military law can be employed at the president's discretion; that global terrorists must be subject to a special system of military or quasi-military justice that shortchanges procedural protections against government abuses or overreaching; that transparency should be subservient to government secrecy under the twin banners of national security or the confidentiality of presidential advice; and, that congressional oversight is a needless vexation to the executive branch because legislators are motivated by petty and partisan ambitions.


When the Senate confirms Mr. Mukasey, it will have confirmed its own reduction to an inkblot among the Constitution's checks and balances.


Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates and chairman of the American Freedom Agenda.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/200...1012/commentary

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200710...ericas_pockets/

War Costs Spiral Out of Control

President Bush makes his case for supplemental funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, surrounded by members of veterans service organizations, a fallen Marine’s family and vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Robert Scheer

Hey, a billion here, a billion there, who’s counting? Not the State Department, which admitted this week that it can’t say “specifically what it received” for the $1.2 billion it paid DynCorp, ostensibly to train the Iraqi police—other than that somebody got an Olympic-size swimming pool out of the deal.

On Monday, President Bush demanded that Congress fork over $46 billion more to pay for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting that it be approved by the end of the year. That brings the total requested this year in “supplementary funds” for his foreign adventures to $196.4 billion, and the prez said Congress had better pony up or it will be betraying the family of the dead Marine that he was using as prop for this particular White House photo op.

Of course the Democrats, after some pussyfooting, will sign off, as they have for the rest of the more than $800 billion that will have been allotted for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts by year’s end, lest they be accused of failing the troops that Bush has put in harm’s way. “Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught in the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C.,” Bush warned darkly, while edging ever closer to the family of the fallen Marine. “I often hear that war critics oppose my decisions, but still support the troops,” he said. “Well, I’ll take them at their word—and this is the chance to show it.”

I half-expected some leading Democrat to respond: “Hey, you want support for the troops, I’ll see your $46 billion and raise you another $46 billion.” But then again, Joe Lieberman is no longer running the party. Instead, the Democrats tried to show that $46 billion is not loose change and that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, a mere 40 days of the cost of the Iraq war could provide annual health insurance coverage for 10 million American children. Harry Reid added that the money might be better spent for law enforcement, homeland security and fixing the sagging infrastructure, but his argument isn’t going to get any better traction than Pelosi’s. As Reid pointed out, “this intractable civil war in Iraq ... is being paid for by borrowed money.”

Sure, some day the Chinese communists and others holding our debt will have to be paid back with compounded interest, but for now the war has been successfully marketed as a financial freebie. Leave it to the next generation to wake up and discover that this war, which in constant dollars has already cost more than the Korean or Vietnam wars, prevents Congress from implementing any of the needed domestic programs, even those advocated by both parties, as was the children’s health insurance bill vetoed by Bush last week. But even if you think none of that domestic spending is needed, even for fixing Medicare and Social Security, the cost of this war will require a substantial increase in taxes over coming decades.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the future additional costs of these wars over the next 10 years at between $481 billion and $1.01 trillion, depending on how fast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wound down. Those are extremely optimistic projections that assume these wars will wind down and that the U.S. will be able to finally climb out of the quagmire. Much more likely is the spread of those wars to neighboring battle theaters in Pakistan and Iran. And that’s without conjuring up the prospect of WWIII, as Bush did last week.

Understand further that all of the numbers referenced above pertain only to that part of the defense budget directly attributable to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Post-9/11 defense spending, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has seen a 40 percent increase for building high-tech Cold War-era weapons in a charade that assumes that stateless terrorists present a military challenge even greater than the once mighty Soviet armed forces. The $686 billion overall 2008 defense budget is the highest since World War II.

There was a time when responsible politicians would decry this looting of the public treasury, but not now, when we are in the midst of a never-ending “war on terror.” Not now, when a Marine dies a needless death in Iraq, a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, or in any substantiated way presented a threat to the United States, and his family can be produced as cover for a president determined to morally and financially bankrupt the nation.

CBI breaks with the US dollar
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:14:09
Iran converts its dollar reserves. The Central Bank of Iran says the process of converting the country's dollar reserves to other foreign currencies has been completed.

The process of diversifying Iran's foreign exchange reserves by converting reserves held in dollars to other currencies is almost complete, Fars news agency quoted Tahmasb Mazaheri, President of the Central Bank of Iran, as having told the American publication, The Emerging Market.

He added that the procedure has been carried out in the best possible way and achieved maximum results.

Experts believe Iran has gained huge profits by adopting the measure because of the sharp fall in the value of the US dollar.

Other countries are also said to be taking similar measures for the same reasons. Arab Persian Gulf states, for one, are believed to be holding 30 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in currencies other than the dollar.

MJ/GM/BGH
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=28261...ionid=351020102

Pentagon seeks urgent funding for massive bunker busting bomb
Washington (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - Citing an "urgent operational need," the Pentagon is seeking funds to modify B-2 stealth bombers to deliver an experimental 30,000 pound (13.6 tonne), satellite-guided bunker busting bomb, officials said Wednesday. The likely purpose of the new weapon is to strike Iran's underground nuclear facilities, experts said. "It raises a red flag," said Representative Jim Moran, a Democrat from V ... more

India test fires nuclear-capable missile
New Delhi (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - India on Wednesday test fired its nuclear-capable Agni-1 ballistic missile for the second time in less than a month and said the latest experiment was a "major success." The Agni-1 has a range of 700 kilometres (420 miles), making it capable of striking at most targets in rival and neighbouring Pakistan. It was launched from a missile test range in the eastern state of Orissa, officials ... more

Taiwan has not completed cruise missile tests: legislator
Taipei (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - A Taiwan-developed cruise missile being touted as a symbol the island could defend itself against rival China has not completed tests so it can be mass produced, a lawmaker said Wednesday. Legislator Lin Yu-fang, of Taiwan's opposition Kuomintang (KMT), said one-third of the Hsiungfeng 2E cruise missile development budget was cut since the required tests had not been concluded. "Hopefull ... more

Outside View: Russia, U.S. may deal on BMD
Moscow (UPI) Oct 24, 2007 - Daniel Fried, assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs at the U.S. State Department, said last week that Washington could change its approach to developing its anti-ballistic missile, or ABM, shield in Europe opposed by Russia if Iran were to suspend uranium enrichment in its nuclear program "and worked with the international community, and had a different approach to things." ... more

NKorea to beat nuclear disablement deadline: official
Seoul (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - North Korea is likely to disable its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor well before the year-end deadline set under a multinational deal, a senior South Korean official said Wednesday. The hardline communist state "has a clear will for denuclearisation," Baek Jong-Chun, chief presidential secretary for foreign, security and unification policy, told a forum. Baek said the North is likely ... more

Analysis: U.S. vs. Russia on all fronts
Berlin (UPI) Oct 24, 2007 - U.S.-Russian relations have hit a new post-Cold War low with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking out against U.S. policies on several contentious issues -- the Iranian nuclear conflict, the U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe and the unresolved status of Kosovo, to name just a few. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. President Bush received steadfa ... more

Defense Focus: Israel's fence -- Part 2
Jerusalem (UPI) Oct 24, 2007 - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon built his barrier to separate Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel's heartland and prevent suicide bombers from those areas wreaking havoc on civilian targets. When one drives along the length of the barrier, or flies down its winding route, as this reporter did last week, it actually looks deceptively frail to do the job. It is cle ... more

Iran "perhaps single greatest" security risk to US: Rice
Washington (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice singled out Iran Wednesday as "perhaps the single greatest challenge" to US security but stressed that diplomacy was the preferred way to end its nuclear drive. President George W. Bush last week warned that a nuclear-armed Iran evoked the threat of "World War III," and Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday spoke of "serious consequences" unless the Islamic ... more

Turkish warplanes bomb Kurd rebels
Ankara (AFP) Oct 24, 2007 - Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel targets along the Iraqi border on Wednesday as the country's National Security Council urged economic sanctions against Iraqi Kurds accused of backing the insurgents. Fighter jets bombed and destroyed several Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) mountain positions in provinces bordering Iraq and Iran, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported. Helic ... more

Outside View: Arctic oil competition rages
Moscow (UPI) Oct 23, 2007 - The Arctic is rapidly becoming a scene of "competition and conflict for access to natural resources." This is how it is defined in A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, a unified U.S. maritime strategy that explains the comprehensive role of the sea services in an era marked by increased globalization and change, presented on Oct. 17. The U.S. Senate was also urged ... more

Bush: Europe need for missile shield is 'urgent'
Washington (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - President George W. Bush on Tuesday warned that Europe urgently needs a US missile defense system to blunt a growing threat from Iran, despite vocal opposition from Russia. In a speech to the US National Defense University, Bush said the world may have less than a decade before arch-foe Tehran possesses rockets able to reach the United States and strike any country in Europe, perhaps by 2015 ... more

US may give Turkey intelligence: White House
Washington (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - The United States may provide Turkey with information enabling its armed forces to strike Kurdish rebels based in Iraq, the White House said Tuesday, downplaying talk of joint military operations. Asked about the prospects for US-Turkish cooperation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels, spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment directly but suggested Washington might ... more

US proposes Russian presence at Czech and Polish missile sites
Prague (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - The United States has offered to accept a Russian presence at planned US anti-missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, so as to address Moscow's objections to the shield, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday. Gates told reporters in Prague that both he and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had put the proposal to the Russians in a bid to increase the project's transparency ... more

Straitjacket Bush By Rosa Brooks The president's warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic
LA Times

October 25, 2007
Endgame for Iraqi Oil?
by Jack Miles and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch

Before the invasion of Iraq, while millions demonstrated in the streets, often waving homemade placards with "No Blood for Oil" – or equivalents like "Don't Trade Lives for Oil" and like "How Did USA's Oil Get Under Iraq's Sand?" – the Bush administration said remarkably little about the vast quantities of petroleum on which Saddam Hussein's regime was perched. The President did, however, speak reverently about preserving not Iraq's "energy reserves" but its "patrimony," as he so euphemistically put it. The American mainstream media followed suit, dismissing arguments about the significance of Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil as the refuge of, if not scoundrels, then at least truly simpleminded dissidents who knew not whereof they spoke. Generally, in our news pages and on the TV news, with Iraq at the edge of a shock-and-awe invasion, Iraqi energy reserves were dealt with as if no more than a passing thought, as if the Middle East's main export was hummus.

Little has changed. When former Fed chief Alan Greenspan recently indicated in passing in his memoir that the war was "about oil," there was a brief firestorm of scorn in Washington; an administration spokesperson termed it "Georgetown cocktail party analysis" ("A refill of crude, please, straight up…") and Greenspan quickly began to backtrack under the pressure. Oil? Who us? The Bush administration's plans to protect the Oil Ministry in Baghdad and Iraq's major oil fields amid otherwise unchecked chaos in April 2003 were certainly noted in the news, but went largely uncommented upon (unless you were an Internet news jockey).

Here's the strange thing about the Iraq oil "debate" in our media world. Call me crazy, but if you were going to invade Iraq and oil wasn't right at the forefront of your brain, you would be truly derelict, even if you hadn't run a major energy services corporation or hadn't had a double-hulled oil tanker named after you. Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book God: A Biography and the first writer to consider Iraqi casualties at Tomdispatch (or probably much of anywhere else) back in July 2003, now takes up the oil endgame – of which, except in the Web world, there has largely been neither a beginning game nor a middle game. Tom

Endgame for Iraqi Oil?
The Sovereignty Showdown in Iraq
By Jack Miles

The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29th, like a landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq announced that the next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council mandate for a multinational force in Iraq – the only legal basis for a continuation of the American occupation – will be the last. That was, it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion Security Council mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues.

By December 31, 2008, according to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral security agreement with the United States, an agreement of the sort that Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries in the Middle East. The Security Council has always paired the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with the renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues. This happens through the "Development Fund for Iraq," a kind of escrow account set up by the occupying powers after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when Iraq announces that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain in favor of resource-development agreements that – like the envisioned security agreement – match those of other states in the region.

The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed out last March in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?":

"Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia… have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced."

By contrast, the oil legislation now pending in the Iraqi parliament awards foreign oil companies coveted, long-term, 20-35 year contracts of just the sort that neighboring oil-producers have rejected for decades. It also places the Iraqi oil industry under the control of an appointed body that would include representatives of international oil companies as full voting members.

The news that the duly elected government of Iraq is exercising its limited sovereignty to set a date for termination of the American occupation radically undercuts all discussion in Congress or by American presidential candidates of how soon the U.S. occupation of Iraq may "safely" end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to resume full and independent control over the world's third-largest proven oil reserves – 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as much as $30 trillion at today's prices – a politically incorrect question might break rudely out of the Internet universe and into the mainstream media world, into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently thought so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When asked, Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half years of the American occupation of Iraq, agreed. "Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford University. These confessions validated the suspicions of foreign observers too numerous to count. Veteran security analyst Thomas Powers observed in the New York Review of Books recently:

"What it was only feared the Russians might do [by invading Afghanistan in the 1980s] the Americans have actually done – they have planted themselves squarely astride the world's largest pool of oil, in a position potentially to control its movement and to coerce all the governments who depend on that oil. Americans naturally do not suspect their own motives but others do. The reaction of the Russians, the Germans, and the French in the months leading up to the war suggests that none of them wished to give Americans the power which [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski had feared was the goal of the Soviets."

Apologists for the war point out lamely that the United States imports only a small fraction of its oil from Iraq, but what matters, rather obviously, is not Iraq's current exports but its reserves.

Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." In the twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf – a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people – but perhaps not.

Blackwater and the Sovereignty Showdown

In any case, a kind of slow-motion showdown may lie not so far ahead; and, during the past weeks, we may have been given a clue as to how it could unfold. Recall that after the gunning down of at least 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad square, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded that the State Department dismiss and punish the trigger-happy private security firm, Blackwater USA, which was responsible for the safety of American diplomatic personnel in Iraq. He further demanded that the immunity former occupation head L. Paul Bremer III had granted, in 2004, to all such private security firms be revoked. Startled, the Bush administration briefly grounded its diplomatic operations, then defiantly resumed them – with security still provided by Blackwater. Within days, though, Bush found himself face-to-face in New York with Maliki for discussions whose topic National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley revealingly named as "Iraqi sovereignty." Who would blink first?

We're still waiting to see, but in the wake of an Iraqi investigation ended with a demand for $8 million compensation for each of the 17 murdered Baghdadis, Blackwater is reportedly "on its way out" of security responsibility in Iraq, probably by the six-month deadline that Maliki has demanded. Despite its disgrace, the well-connected private security company continues to win lucrative State Department security contracts. Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill told Bill Moyers that losing the Iraq gig would only slightly affect Blackwater's bottom line, but could grievously inconvenience U.S. diplomatic operations in Iraq. In forcing such a crisis on the State Department, the Maliki government, whose powerlessness has been an assumption unchallenged from left or right (in or out of Iraq), suddenly looks a good deal stronger.

But oil matters more to Washington than Blackwater does. In September, when the effort to enact U.S.-favored oil legislation – a much-announced "benchmark" of both the White House and Congress – collapsed in Iraq's legislature, the coup de grace seemed to be delivered by a wildcat agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas, headed by Ray L. Hunt, a longtime Bush ally and a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This agreement, undertaken against the stated wishes of the central government, provides for the separate development of Kurdistan's oil resources and puts the Kurds in blatant, preemptive violation of the pending legislation. It makes, in fact, such a mockery of that legislation that the prospect of its passage before the Development Fund mandate expires is now vanishingly small.

Endgame for Iraqi Oil?

If the mandate expires and the law is not passed, then what? Then others in Iraq may well seek to follow the Kurdish example and cut comparable deals with whomever they wish. The central government, even if it has lost effective control of the Kurdish north and the Sunni west, could well ratify resource-separatism by contracting for the development of the oil resources in the territory generally remaining under its control. Thus, a new, Iran-allied, oil-rich, nine-province Shi'ite Iraq could match Kurdistan's deal with one of its own, perhaps even with ready-and-willing China. Will any combination of American military and diplomatic pressure suffice to stop such an untoward outcome?

Clearly, some in Washington still think so. Shortly before the collapse of the Iraqi oil legislation effort, Bush's Commerce Department began quietly advertising for an Arabic-speaking legal advisor to help it in "providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." (Read: starting with oil.) As it happens, the job description overlaps heavily with that of the Development Fund for Iraq's existing International Advisory and Monitoring Board, whose responsibility, according to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, has been to see to it "that all export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq…. shall be made consistent with prevailing international marketing best practices." Is the Commerce Department already planning for the demise of this board? Like the super-embassy and the super-bases, this bit of Commerce Department staffing-up bespeaks the urge to continue an invasive American presence in Iraq, including Iraq's energy sector, long after December 31, 2008.

But if the occupation is shut down legally after that date and if Iraqi control over Iraqi oil reverts – legally, at least – to something close to pre-war status, that Commerce Department expert may find him or herself playing a less-than-major role in Baghdad. Instead, expect a new role for Iraq's hitherto excluded pool of domestic expertise. The Iraq National Oil Company began operations back in 1961; its legacy includes a skilled work force of trained oil workers. Notable, in fact, among those opposed to the failed oil legislation is the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions. Its members object to provisions in the legislation that permit the hiring of foreign oil workers rather than Iraqis and – in classic Bush Administration fashion – exclude the union from any participation in contract negotiations. The Federation's protests have attracted a letter of support signed by six Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

Even with Iraqi expertise duly factored in, oil remains a complicated business, and foreign expertise and capital will remain indispensable in Iraq. Still, for the Shi'ite-dominated central government, the most trusted foreign supplier of supplementary expertise, manpower, and even capital would seem to be Iran. For now, the United States is paying many of the salaries in Baghdad; but Iran's president, predicting an American withdrawal, has lately declared his readiness to "fill the [regional power] gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation." This invitation to regional collaboration will surely strike the less populous, militarily more vulnerable Saudis as disingenuous in the extreme, but Iran may be hard to stop. As former ambassador Peter Galbraith has explained: "Since 2005, Iraq's Shi'ite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraq government." On Oct. 17, the Maliki regime flexed its supposedly non-existent muscle yet again by awarding $1.1 billion in contracts to Iran and China to build enormous power plants in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City and between the two Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The prospect that, in the endgame for Iraqi oil, the victor might be Shi'ite Iran (and indirectly Communist China) may help explain recent American calls for the replacement of the devoutly Shi'ite Prime Minister Maliki. Yet, even if American pressure leads to Maliki's ouster, the Iraqi parliament cannot be ousted with him. The prime minister's announcement that the next renewal of the multi-force mandate would be the last came, in fact, in response to a binding resolution in parliament that the next renewal, unlike previous ones, may not be at the request of the prime minister alone, but only with the advice and consent of parliament. It has voted once already, in a non-binding resolution, to require the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal.

Fragile as it is, the government of Iraq enjoys international legal recognition, and the underestimated Maliki is evidently not without resources when it comes to asserting Iraqi sovereignty over American autonomy within Iraq's borders. In "Blackwatergate," he found a remarkable pressure point, declaring that no new law would be passed in Iraq until the Blackwater matter was resolved to his satisfaction. Nor was Maliki necessarily whistling in the dark when he warned his American critics, "We can find friends elsewhere."

The expiration date that Iraq has now set for the operation of a multinational force on its territory coincides almost exactly with the end of the Bush administration. As that date nears, the endgame question may become: How far can the administration go in repudiating its own erstwhile agenda and returning Iraq to its pre-war status – that is, to U.S.-backed Sunni domination of Iraqi domestic politics. That would, of course, result in armed Iraqi hostility to the administration's enemy of enemies in the region, Iran, and a resigned return to collaboration with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the management of the world oil market, all under a largely offshore U.S. military umbrella. Will the fallback dream now be the one the President's father entertained after Gulf War I – the creation in Baghdad of a kinder, gentler Saddam Hussein with whom, to use the classic phrase, the U.S. can "do business"?

Time will tell, but not too much time. The eerie silence of the Bush administration about oil grows all the more deafening as the price of crude climbs toward $100 a barrel. Blood for oil may never have been a good deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem a far worse one.

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, among other works.

Copyright 2007 Jack Miles
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=11808

Kurdish Fighters Defy the World From Mountain Fortress as Bombing Begins

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8037956
Hawkish handlers guide Giuliani on foreign policy
By Michael Cooper and Marc Santora
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Rudolph Giuliani's approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.

But in developing his views, Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Giuliani's thinking is with theirs.

Giuliani's team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran "as soon as it is logistically possible"; Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the U.S. ban on assassination. The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Giuliani a variety of perspectives.

Based on his public statements, Giuliani does not share all of their views and parts company with traditional neoconservative thinking in some respects. But their presence has reassured some conservatives who have expressed doubts about Giuliani's positions on issues like abortion and gun control, and underscored his efforts to cast himself as a tough-minded potential commander in chief.

While Giuliani, like other New York mayors, liked to be seen as conducting his own brand of foreign policy from City Hall, he had little direct exposure to many of the specific issues the next president will confront and is still meeting for the first time with some of his advisers to develop detailed positions on particular subjects.

Giuliani has taken an aggressive position on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear program, saying last month it was a "promise" that as president he would take military action to keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.

Warnings like that one and his reliance on advisers like Podhoretz, who wrote an article in June for Commentary magazine called "The Case for Bombing Iran," have raised concerns among some Democrats.

Senator Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware, a Democratic candidate for president and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said recently that the specter of a Giuliani presidency frightened him.

"I mean, here's a guy making statements about Iran that, if he means them, guarantee there is no option but a war," Biden said in a recent interview.

Asked in a recent interview if he agreed with Podhoretz that the time to bomb Iran has already come, Giuliani said: "From the information I do have available, which is all public source material, I would say that that is not correct, we are not at that stage at this point. Can we get to that stage? Yes. And is that stage closer than some of the Democrats believe? I believe it is."

Like the neoconservatives, who played a major role in developing the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq, Giuliani is a strong supporter of Israel who has expressed skepticism about how far the United States should go to back the creation of a Palestinian state.

But Giuliani has distanced himself somewhat from what was once a central neoconservative tenet, the belief that the United States could spread democracy through the Middle East.

Giuliani rejects the democracy effort as premature, and overly idealistic, noting that the policy led to the sweeping victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

"Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy," Giuliani wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs, the policy journal. "Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors."

Neoconservatives said they were generally supportive of Giuliani's positions and saw them as being in line with those taken by the other leading Republican presidential candidates.

"I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy, that I think Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice - and Romney," said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.

Kristol said that none of the leading Republican candidates "buys any of these fundamental criticisms that Bush took us on a radically wrong path, and we have to go to a pre-9/11 foreign policy."

The emerging Giuliani doctrine, which is being created through conference calls, policy papers, and seminar-like meetings, contains a number of main elements.

Giuliani calls for continuing the war in Iraq and building up the military by adding at least 10 new combat brigades to the army. He takes a dim view of the United Nations, which he sees as good for little other than humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, but wants to expand NATO and invite Israel to join it.

He would continue the Bush administration's efforts to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa, but would tailor policy toward Africa to emphasize trade over aid.

If there is a central tenet to his thinking, it may be that the United States must project strength to keep itself safe.

"Weakness invites attack," he warned to cheers in a speech he gave recently to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

On the question of diplomacy, Giuliani makes it clear that he would impose a number of conditions before opening talks with unfriendly countries. In the Foreign Affairs article, he wrote that it might be advisable at times to hold serious diplomatic talks with the nation's adversaries, but not with "those bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements."

In a recent speech to the Jewish Coalition, he went further, accusing the Democrats of putting too much stock in diplomacy. "This is the great fallacy in this now very strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate," he said. "You've got to know with whom to negotiate and with whom you should not negotiate."

Instead of talking about "the war on terror," Giuilani speaks of "the terrorists' war on us," or, as he put it in a recent speech to a group of conservative Christians, the "Islamic terrorists' war against the United States." He sometimes faults Democrats for failing to mention that the terrorist threat comes specifically from Muslims.

When Giuliani was asked in a recent interview if he could be viewed as an evenhanded broker when it came to Israeli-Palestinian issues, he questioned the premise of the question.

"America shouldn't be even-handed in dealing with the difference between an elected democracy that's a government ruled by law, and a group of terrorists," he said. "I think that was part of the mistake of the 1990s that led to the debacle that we saw in the Middle East in the way Clinton was handling it."

Resources for Responding to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

By Sheila Musaji
updated 10-17-2007
http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamo_fascism_awareness_week/0014805

Islamo-fascism Awareness Week polarizes the campus community and keeps stereotypes alive, The Daily Californian.
If schools are willing to host such events, then Horowitz has every right to bring Islamo-Fascism week to universities. However, to place it under the guise of awareness, as if it's under the same umbrella as Mental Health Awareness Week or Breast Cancer Awareness Week is misleading. No matter what its organizers say, Islamo-fascism Awareness Week does not serve to educate, but rather to fuel bigotry and fear.
The most glaring indication that the program has a sinister motive is in the name itself. By branding the week as "Islamo-Fascism," it immediately sets up a charged atmosphere targeting a group of people based on race and religion. It also immediately simplifies very complex issues into the current stereotypes of terrorism perpetuated by media and pundits.
These events are reminiscent of the Red Scare Era, when fear of Communism swept across the nation. Many innocent people, targeted because of their jobs, sexual orientation and other miscellaneous reasons, became victims in the infamous witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Islamo-fascism week feeds that same fear, the fear of an unknown or misunderstood entity. The fear that gripped this country during the '50s has now transformed into a fear of a racial group who practices a peaceful religion. In this country, ignorance and the media have helped maintain the stereotype that a terrorist is Muslim, looks a certain way and is from a certain region. Islamo-Facism Awareness Week only contributes to keeping this wrongful image alive.
These events also contribute to the divide and the unnecessary "us-versus-them" mentality. By linking the week to Islam and Muslims, it creates the binary atmosphere and alienates individuals. Already, there are dozens of Web sites promoting the event; one urges "Americans" to mark their calendars and learn about "Islam and their quest for world domination ... Learn what the Religion of Peace does not want you to know about their agenda to dominate the world much like Adolf Hitler desired before starting World War II."

Project for a New American Century's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (satire), David Swanson
In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an "Islamophobe." According to the academic left, the Islamo-Fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are "oppressors." This can be easily disproven in two ways. First, we can curtail our tolerance and freedom and test whether they still hate us. Second, if - as seems to be the case- they do still hate us, we can oppress the academic left to give it a better understanding of oppression.

David Horowitz Slanders Ron Paul, Iraq Vets - American Fascism Awareness Day Flier is a hoax.
You would think that David Horowitz could find enough to attack without making stuff up.
Today's FrontPageMag.com has a "story" about "American Fascism Awareness Day" to counter Horowitz's own "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." The supposed flyer for the event asks "Who Hates Americans? We Do. Your typical American is: A racist. A sexist. A homophobe. An Islamo-phobe. Is willing to invade other countries for oil and pleasure. Is easily manipulated by Rush Limbaugh and Jews. Is the cause of global warming." The "event" is supposedly co-sponsored by a number of organizations, including Iraq Veterans Against the War and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and speakers include Ron Paul and others.
Here's the punch line: The Event is scheduled for NOVEMBER 31, 2007. Of course, there is no Nov. 31 on the calendar. And none of the organizations listed mentions the "event" on their websites, and a Google search for "American Fascism Awareness Day" produces only mentions of the FrontPageMag article.
- see also "Admission of responsibility" from students who admitted responsibility for the flier.
Islamo Fascism Awareness Week, Matthew Yglesias - regarding petition
In short, the main goal of the "David Horowitz Freedom Center" here is to write up a petition deliberately designed to be unlikely for Muslim groups to sign and then to use Muslim groups' failure to sign the petition as evidence that they're on the side of "our terrorist adversaries." This is a great way to go about things if you want to (a) be a campus troublemaker, ( over the long run turn hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world into hardened enemies of the United States, and © create a large group of disaffected Muslims inside the United States who've been made to feel that adherence to their faith is unwelcome in America and fundamentally incompatible with loyalty to this country.
- see also actual petition on Terrorism Awareness site.
America's Fascists Call for "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week", by Reggie Dylan
A particularly racist component of this week is the targeting of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) around the country. Claiming it ise sponsored by fanatical religious movements, MSA is already being "baited" by these brownshirts-insisting that it sign on to their "Islamo-Fascism Petition" to prove that it "reject[s] the hateful agendas of its sponsors, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas." This vilification of immigrants from the Middle East and Muslims of all countries is meant to appeal to and inflame the most ugly, nativist passions. In his speech to the SAF in March Santorum explained: "What losing looks like is pretty easy, in my mind. Look at Europe..The most popular male name in Belgium-Mohammad. It's the fifth most popular name in France among boys. They [native Europeans] are losing because they are not having children, they have no faith, they have nothing to counteract it."
Spreading Awareness or Smearing a Religion?, GARY LEUPP.
Those seeking to link contemporary Islam with European fascism emphasize feelings of victimization and dreams of restoring lost glory. But where in the Muslim world is the charismatic leader? Bin Laden? The Baathists and Shiites hate him. Where's the mass-based party? Where's ultranationalism or racism? Islam emphasizes the equality of peoples before God, while the Qur'an explicitly states that righteous Christians and Jews will enter Paradise.
The real intention here is to couple "Islam" with a powerful epithet, devoid of analytical content, conjuring up images of a universally detested past. Bush insists on comparing the constitutionally weak Iranian President Ahmadinejad, leading a country that hasn't attacked another in hundreds of years, with Hitler (as his father compared Saddam to Hitler). Similarly, the proponents of the "Islamofascism" concept want to play upon emotions rather than really spread "awareness." Their historical analogies are absurd, while their planned week is more than an affront to Muslims. It is an insult to everybody's intelligence.
Resist Islamo Fascism Awareness Week and [2] and [3]
A Campaign of Hate and Racism Coming to Campus?, By Yousef Munayyer
The Web site for IFAW lists approximately 150 institutions, including this one, at which it will be held. ADC contacted the presidents of each of these universities to let them know that the hate-filled campaign was scheduled to take place on campus. ADC expressed serious concerns that such rhetoric and speech will not serve to educate but only to promote hate and bigotry. The points of view espoused by this campaign are not ones that belong in any reasonable debate, as they serve to promote hatred of an entire religion or ethnic origin. While there is, and should be, ample discussion on college campuses about U.S. Middle East policy, with a diverse range of opinions present, the kinds of ideas that this campaign is trying to put forward are dangerous, hateful, and will only obviate the learning process and further Islamophobia and racism. The overwhelming response ADC received from universities was that they did not want to be associated with this campaign. Numerous universities expressed outrage that their name was being associated with Mr. Horowitz's IFAW hate campaign. ADC is glad to say that university presidents from Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University and other evangelical schools, to Princeton, Cornell, and to the chancellors of various public state system universities and private colleges are firmly opposed to this type of campaign.
Although 150 schools are listed at the Web site, it seems very few, if any, are actually participating in IFAW. It appears that if Mr. Horowitz can gather a small group of narrow-minded students in a dorm room to watch one of his poorly produced propaganda films, he thinks he can list a university as a participant.
MPAC Releases Tips for Tackling 'Islamo-Fascism' Events at Universities
What You Need to Know about Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week , MPAC
MPAC is here to help you and other campus student organizations effectively respond to IFAW's campaign with Islamic ethics, clear vision and open hearts: PRACTICE ISLAMIC ETHICS. As we are challenged by Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry, we must remind ourselves of Islamic ethics in confronting social evils. Our style of work and speaking should be a demonstration of the Quranic verse: "Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better - so that he between whom and yourself was enmity, may then become your closestfriend." [Quran 41:34] SUPPORT FREE SPEECH Any action must be taken with the understanding that freedom of speech is integral to the academic setting and its participants. We advise against any move to censor or shut down the operations of the student organizations involved in the event. DO NOT RESPOND. Refrain from drawing attention to events that are part of IFAW to prevent controversy, backlash, or an escalation of tensions from occurring. IFAW organizers are seeking an angry protest from Muslim students - we should avoid this at any and all costs, both in events and statements. CONTACT CAMPUS ADMINISTRATORS. Student groups should contact appropriate campus administrators - such as the dean of student affairs, religious leaders, the university president - to address concerns raised by the presence of outside agitators on their campus whose inflammatory and controversial views could have negative consequences to student life on campus. TALK TO OTHER STUDENT GROUPS. Muslim students and Muslim student groups should initiate or enhance dialogue with other campus groups to unite efforts against hate and all manifestations of extremism on campus. REPORT INCIDENTS. Individuals and groups should report hate incidents and hate crimes that may occur as a result of backlash from IFAW to campus police and administration, city/county law enforcement, and community organizations.
Hate crimes and hate incidents can be reported to MPAC's Hate Crime Prevention Department by calling the toll-free hotline number at (800) 898- 3558 or emailing hatecrimes@mpac.org. The following definitions may be useful in determining the types of hate acts that may take place on campus. For further information, visit http://www.mpac.org/hate-crime-prevention. Hate Crime - any criminal act or attempted criminal act directed against a person(s) based on the victim's actual or perceived race, nationality, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. Hate Incident - an act directed against a person(s) based on their actual or perceived race, nationality, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. The difference between a hate incident and a hate crime is that a hate incident is a non-criminal act.
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week: David Horowitz Intends to Spread Fear, Hatred, Chelsey Perkins
Iran Chosen As Official Poster of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Azadeh Enshah
David Horowitz' Reactionary Road Show Must be Confronted and Exposed, Reggie Dylan
Islamic Fascism: The New Hysteria, Alan Maass
No one seriously attempts to equate the tenants of the Muslim religion with the political phenomenon of fascism--historically, an extreme right-wing movement of the middle class that aims to smash all working-class organization and eliminate democracy. Fascism is nationalist and usually virulently racist--with the Nazis' genocidal policies the classic example.
Islam and Fascism? What Next?, Dr. S. Khurshid
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, The Guardian Special Report
Book Review: American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges), Stephen Lendman
Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America, Stan Goff
VIDEO: America Freedom to Fascism
VIDEO: There Is Fascism, Indeed, Keith Olbermann
The Big Lie About 'Islamic Fascism', Eric S. Margolis
There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism. ... However, there are plenty of modern far rightists with neo-fascist tendencies. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. They advocate `preemptive attacks against all potential enemies,' grabbing other nation's resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of `liberal' political rights.
The Christian Right and `Islamo-Facism`, Dan Jennejohn
'Islamo-fascism' is an Oxymoron, Enver Masud
As for Islamo-fascism, Islam has no central authority - it does not meet the definition of fascism. Even when the community of Muslims (the ummah) had a central authority (the caliphate), it was neither totalitarian nor fascist.
Moral Superiority, 9/11, Islamic-Fascism: The Smokescreens of War