French forces in Afghanistan have suffered one of the biggest single day losses in the conflict’s history, losing ten soldiers and suffering 21 additional casualties in a single engagement. The soldiers were ambushed by insurgents a mere 50 kilometers from Kabul, solidifying concerns that insurgents are closing in on the capital.

France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy, plans to travel to Afghanistan to reassure French forces, insisting that French participation in the mission will continue. Meanwhile, in France, two thirds of the population remains opposed to French involvement in Afghanistan.

From a Canadian perspective, given the size of Canada’s contingent as compared to those of other nations involved, Canada has suffered the highest mortality rate.

According to Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson, Canada may be expanding its role in Afghanistan from 2,500 members of the Canadian Armed Forces to 2,700. The additional 200 troops would, according to Emerson, be deployed to service six Chinook helicopters that are destined for the theatre as well as unmanned aerial drones.

The majority of the Canadian contingent of ISAF is stationed in the southern Province of Kandahar where they have suffered one of the worst casualty rates of the conflict. That is a fact that seems to get lost when many examine the size of our force in Afghanistan, but it remains a fact nonetheless. We have, given the size of our contingent, paid dearly.

In the end it will have been for nothing – I firmly believe that. Those who have given their lives in the line of duty, doing their jobs, will be rendered victims of policy, and that is also something that should not be overlooked. We are, to put it lightly, pawns in a game of global hegemony that think ourselves anything but, and it is high time that we woke up to that fact.

Of course, the counter arguments are many, though steeped in contradiction. The Taliban, whom I would never dream of defending, had to be stopped. Mind you, they only had to be stopped after 9/11. Prior to that the Canadian government did nothing of significance regarding the suffering of the people that endured their rule. The same is true of the United States. In fact, prior to 9/11, US oil giant Unocal was in negotiations with the Taliban in an attempt to secure the rights to build a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea into Pakistan, a project that is, not surprisingly, currently being lauded as one of the country’s economic saving graces. Hamid Karzai, the current President of Afghanistan, was, at the time, a corporate consultant for Unocal, having turned down an offer from the Taliban to act as their Ambassador to the United Nations.

Representatives of the Taliban visited the United States twice during the Presidency of Bill Clinton and once during George Bush’s Presidency prior to 9/11. On all three occasions it was made very clear that the United States did not recognize the regime as the official government of Afghanistan. After all, these were people responsible for using tanks to crush individuals to death in football stadiums. Recognizing them as the legitimate government of Afghanistan was never an option. But allowing them to be courted by a major US oil giant was.

On the first two visits to the US the Taliban’s delegation met with representatives of Unocal, actually visiting the home of Unocal’s Vice President during the second visit. During the third visit, Said Ramatullah Hashemi, then the Taliban’s Foreign Minister, met with State Department officials as well as the Afghanistan desk officer for the Office of Counter Terrorism. During that visit he delivered a letter to the Bush Administration calling for improved relations. Following the meetings Richard Boucher commented that they did not represent any US recognition of the Taliban and that the United States did not recognize any government in the country at all. That said - and this should not be overlooked - during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 the United States employed the Northern Alliance as a proxy force.

Historical reality shows that the Pakistanis have played a significant role in supporting the Taliban. It was covertly funded in the past by the government of Benazir Bhutto, a fact that was conveniently overlooked upon her return to Pakistan and certainly overlooked when she was being sainted after her assassination. But as Steve Coll’s ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden’ accurately points out…

“Benazir Bhutto, who was secretly authorizing the Taliban’s covert aid, did not let the Americans know. She visited Washington in the spring of 1995, met with President Clinton, and promoted the Taliban as a pro-Pakistan force that could help stabilize Afghanistan… During her visit and for many months afterward Bhutto and her aides repeatedly lied to American government officials and members of Congress about the extent of Pakistani military and financial aid to the Taliban… Bhutto had decided it was more important to appease the Pakistani army and intelligence service than to level with her American friends.”

It is no mystery that tensions have increased along the Pakistan-Afghan border of late, with cross border raids occurring in Pakistani tribal areas. While certain prominent voices within Pakistan have warned that unilateral operations conducted inside Pakistan represent a serious breach of the country’s sovereignty, the country’s new Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, claimed yesterday…

“Extremism and terrorism are our own problems. This is our own fight. This is our own cause”.

…an indicator that Pakistan is not open to obliging Western forces in Afghanistan with regards to independent military operations against the Taliban that include incursions into Pakistan itself.

There are several million Pashtun refugees still displaced along the Pashtun belt, providing the Taliban with a resource pool from which to draw. Given what they are prepared to pay those willing to fight, the economics of poverty have played a significant role in the Taliban’s reconstitution. Of course, the Taliban’s financial resources are not simply appearing out of thin air, another indication that aid from within Pakistan, be it from sympathetic groups within the country’s tribal areas or, dare I say, even the ISI itself, most likely represents the majority of their assistance.

If anything, the Taliban, if even uneasily, remains a Pakistani proxy force in the region, one that can be used to further Pakistan’s interests with regards to Afghanistan. To discount such ambitions is, in my view, to seriously underestimate the view that many within Pakistan’s military apparatus hold – that they are a significant player within the region and not one to be trifled with or treated as lackeys by foreign powers.

In the midst of this mess are several thousand Canadian combat troops, all of whom have been fed post September 11th propaganda without a serious study of the region’s conflict history entering into the equation.

Cluster Bombs have been employed by various nations for decades. When dropped, the initial casing releases ‘bomblets’ that then spread across a target area. There are numerous classifications for various purposes ranging from incendiary to anti-tank to anti-personnel, and numerous others aimed at affecting specific targets such as runways and electrical infrastructures. The problem with Cluster Bombs is that not all of the bomblets explode on impact and can lay dormant for decades waiting to be triggered by innocents that happen upon them. In the 70’s the United States dropped two million tons of ordinances on Laos. Of that, it is estimated that some 260 sub-munitions did not explode and, to this day, claim the lives of innocent Laotians. In Vietnam, it is estimated that 300 civilians are killed every year by unexploded bomblets. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 Cluster Bombs were also used by the Israeli Air Force. It is estimated that a quarter of the bomblets failed to explode and have since resulted in over 200 civilian casualties.

I mention this because tomorrow in Dublin a conference begins at which participants will attempt to negotiate a treaty that will ban the production, use, stockpile, and sale of cluster bombs. Unfortunately, some of the world’s foremost powers (the United States, China, and Russia) have refused to attend and, not surprisingly, oppose the treaty. Business is, after all, business.

Unfortunately, that’s a difficult perspective to try and explain to a 13-year-old that’s had their legs blown off, but that’s the world we live in.

Over at Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt runs through 12 Answers To Questions No One Is Bothering To Ask About Iraq…

“1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military’s worst Iraq nightmare:

Few now remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a single overriding nightmare — not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into “Fortress Baghdad,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There, they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital’s poorest districts.

When American forces actually entered Baghdad in early April 2003, however, even Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard units had put away their weapons and gone home. It took five years but, as of now, American troops are indeed fighting in the warren of streets in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of two and a half million in eastern Baghdad largely controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. military, in fact, recently experienced its worst week of 2008 in terms of casualties, mainly in and around Baghdad. So, mission accomplished — the worst fear of 2003 has now been realized.

2. No, there was never an exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended to leave — and still doesn’t:

Critics of the war have regularly gone after the Bush administration for its lack of planning, including its lack of an “exit strategy.” In this, they miss the point. The Bush administration arrived in Iraq with four mega-bases on the drawing boards. These were meant to undergird a future American garrisoning of that country and were to house at least 30,000 American troops, as well as U.S. air power, for the indefinite future. The term used for such places wasn’t “permanent base,” but the more charming and euphemistic “enduring camp.” (In fact, as we learned recently, the Bush administration refuses to define any American base on foreign soil anywhere on the planet, including ones in Japan for over 60 years, as permanent.) Those four monster bases in Iraq (and many others) were soon being built at the cost of multibillions and are, even today, being significantly upgraded. In October 2007, for instance, National Public Radio’s defense correspondent Guy Raz visited Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which houses about 40,000 American troops, contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees, and described it as “one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades.”

These mega-bases, like “Camp Cupcake” (al-Asad Air Base), nicknamed for its amenities, are small town-sized with massive facilities, including PXs, fast-food outlets, and the latest in communications. They have largely been ignored by the American media and so have played no part in the debate about Iraq in this country, but they are the most striking on-the-ground evidence of the plans of an administration that simply never expected to leave. To this day, despite the endless talk about drawdowns and withdrawals, that hasn’t changed. In fact, the latest news about secret negotiations for a future Status of Forces Agreement on the American presence in that country indicates that U.S. officials are calling for “an open-ended military presence” and “no limits on numbers of U.S. forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term U.S. security agreements with other countries.”

3. Yes, the United States is still occupying Iraq (just not particularly effectively):

In June 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), then ruling the country, officially turned over “sovereignty” to an Iraqi government largely housed in the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad and the occupation officially ended. However, the day before the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer III, slipped out of the country without fanfare, he signed, among other degrees, Order 17, which became (and, remarkably enough, remains) the law of the land. It is still a document worth reading as it essentially granted to all occupying forces and allied private companies what, in the era of colonialism, used to be called “extraterritoriality” — the freedom not to be in any way subject to Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever. And so the occupation ended without ever actually ending. With 160,000 troops still in Iraq, not to speak of an unknown number of hired guns and private security contractors, the U.S. continues to occupy the country, whatever the legalities might be (including a UN mandate and the claim that we are part of a “coalition”). The only catch is this: As of now, the U.S. is simply the most technologically sophisticated and potentially destructive of Iraq’s proliferating militias — and outside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, it is capable of controlling only the ground that its troops actually occupy at any moment.

4. Yes, the war was about oil:

Oil was hardly mentioned in the mainstream media or by the administration before the invasion was launched. The President, when he spoke of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves at all, piously referred to them as the sacred “patrimony of the people of Iraq.” But an administration of former energy execs — with a National Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware of the globe’s potentially limited energy supplies — certainly had oil reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on “a sea of oil” and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil heartlands of the planet.

It wasn’t a mistake that, in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s semi-secret Energy Task Force set itself the “task” of opening up the energy sectors of various Middle Eastern countries to “foreign investment”; or that it scrutinized “a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, together with the (non-American) oil companies scheduled to develop them”; or that, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, the National Security Council directed its staff “to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields’”; or that the only American troops ordered to guard buildings in Iraq, after Baghdad fell, were sent to the Oil Ministry (and the Interior Ministry, which housed Saddam Hussein’s dreaded secret police); or that the first “reconstruction” contract was issued to Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, for “emergency repairs” to those patrimonial oil fields. Once in charge in Baghdad, as sociologist Michael Schwartz has made clear, the administration immediately began guiding recalcitrant Iraqis toward denationalizing and opening up their oil industry, as well as bringing in the big boys.

Though rampant insecurity has kept the Western oil giants on the sidelines, the American-shaped “Iraqi” oil law quickly became a “benchmark” of “progress” in Washington and remains a constant source of prodding and advice from American officials in Baghdad. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan put the oil matter simply and straightforwardly in his memoir in 2007: “I am saddened,” he wrote, “that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In other words, in a variation on the old Bill Clinton campaign mantra: It’s the oil, stupid. Greenspan was, unsurprisingly, roundly assaulted for the obvious naiveté of his statement, from which, when it proved inconvenient, he quickly retreated. But if this administration hadn’t had oil on the brain in 2002-2003, given the importance of Iraq’s reserves, Congress should have impeached the President and Vice President for that.

5. No, our new embassy in Baghdad is not an “embassy”:

When, for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, you construct a complex — regularly described as “Vatican-sized” — of at least 20 “blast-resistant” buildings on 104 acres of prime Baghdadi real estate, with “fortified working space” and a staff of at least 1,000 (plus several thousand guards, cooks, and general factotums), when you deeply embunker it, equip it with its own electricity and water systems, its own anti-missile defense system, its own PX, and its own indoor and outdoor basketball courts, volleyball court, and indoor Olympic-size swimming pool, among other things, you haven’t built an “embassy” at all. What you’ve constructed in the heart of the heart of another country is more than a citadel, even if it falls short of a city-state. It is, at a minimum, a monument to Bush administration dreams of domination in Iraq and in what its adherents once liked to call “the Greater Middle East.”

Just about ready to open, after the normal construction mishaps in Iraq, it will constitute the living definition of diplomatic overkill. It will, according to a Senate estimate, now cost Americans $1.2 billion a year just to be “represented” in Iraq. The “embassy” is, in fact, the largest headquarters on the planet for the running of an occupation. Functionally, it is also another well-fortified enduring camp with the amenities of home. Tell that to the Shiite militiamen now mortaring the Green Zone as if it were… enemy-occupied territory.

6. No, the Iraqi government is not a government:

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has next to no presence in Iraq beyond the Green Zone; it delivers next to no services; it has next to no ability to spend its own oil money, reconstruct the country, or do much of anything else, and it most certainly does not hold a monopoly on the instruments of violence. It has no control over the provinces of northern Iraq which operate as a near-independent Kurdish state. Non-Kurdish Iraqi troops are not even allowed on its territory. Maliki’s government cannot control the largely Sunni provinces of the country, where its officials are regularly termed “the Iranians” (a reference to the heavily Shiite government’s closeness to neighboring Iran) and are considered the equivalent of representatives of a foreign occupying power; and it does not control the Shiite south, where power is fragmented among the militias of ISCI (the Badr Organization), Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the armed adherents of the Fadila Party, a Sadrist offshoot, among others.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been derisively nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul” for his government’s lack of control over much territory outside the national capital. It would be a step forward for Maliki if he were nicknamed “the mayor of Baghdad.” Right now, his troops, heavily backed by American forces, are fighting for some modest control over Shiite cities (or parts of cities) from Basra to Baghdad.

7. No, the surge is not over:

Two weeks ago, amid much hoopla, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker spent two days before Congress discussing the President’s surge strategy in Iraq and whether it has been a “success.” But that surge — the ground one in which an extra 30,000-plus American troops were siphoned into Baghdad and, to a lesser extent, adjoining provinces — was by then already so over. In fact, all but about 10,000 of those troops will be home by the end of July, not because the President has had any urge for a drawdown, but, as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote recently, “because of simple math. The five extra combat brigades, which were deployed to Iraq with the surge, each have 15-month tours of duty; the 15 months will be up in July… and the U.S. Army and Marines have no combat brigades ready to replace them.”

On the other hand, in all those days of yak, neither the general with so much more “martial bling” on his chest than any victorious World War II commander, nor the white-haired ambassador uttered a word about the surge that is ongoing — the air surge that began in mid-2007 and has yet to end. Explain it as you will, but, with rare exceptions, American reporters in Iraq generally don’t look up or more of them would have noticed that the extra air units surged into that country and the region in the last year are now being brought to bear over Iraq’s cities. Today, as fighting goes on in Sadr City, American helicopters and Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones reportedly circle overhead almost constantly and air strikes of various kinds on city neighborhoods are on the rise. Yet the air surge in Iraq remains unacknowledged here and so is not a subject for discussion, debate, or consideration when it comes to our future in Iraq.

8. No, the Iraqi army will never “stand up”:

It can’t. It’s not a national army. It’s not that Iraqis can’t fight — or fight bravely. Ask the Sunni insurgents. Ask the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s not that Iraqis are incapable of functioning in a national army. In the bitter Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Iraqi Shiite as well as Sunni conscripts, led by a largely Sunni officer corps, fought Iranian troops fiercely in battle after pitched battle. But from Fallujah in 2004 to today, Iraqi army (and police) units, wheeled into battle (often at the behest of the Americans), have regularly broken and run, or abandoned their posts, or gone over to the other side, or, at the very least, fought poorly. In the recent offensive launched by the Maliki government in Basra, military and police units up against a single resistant militia, the Mahdi Army, deserted in sizeable numbers, while other units, when not backed by the Americans, gave poor showings. At least 1,300 troops and police (including 37 senior police officers) were recently “fired” by Maliki for dereliction of duty, while two top commanders were removed as well.

Though American training began in 2004 and, by 2005, the President was regularly talking about us “standing down” as soon as the Iraqi Army “stood up,” as Charles Hanley of the Associated Press points out, “Year by year, the goal of deploying a capable, free-standing Iraqi army has seemed to always slip further into the future.” He adds, “In the latest shift, the Pentagon’s new quarterly status report quietly drops any prediction of when local units will take over security responsibility for Iraq. Last year’s reports had forecast a transition in 2008.” According to Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that the military will not be able to guard the country’s borders effectively until 2018.

No wonder. The “Iraqi military” is not in any real sense a national military at all. Its troops generally lack heavy weaponry, and it has neither a real air force nor a real navy. Its command structures are integrated into the command structure of the U.S. military, while the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy are the real Iraqi air force and navy. It is reliant on the U.S. military for much of its logistics and resupply, even after an investment of $22 billion by the American taxpayer. It represents a non-government, is riddled with recruits from Shiite militias (especially the Badr brigades), and is riven about who its enemy is (or enemies are) and why. It cannot be a “national” army because it has, in essence, nothing to stand up for.

You can count on one thing, as long as we are “training” and “advising” the Iraqi military, however many years down the line, you will read comments like this one from an American platoon sergeant, after an Iraqi front-line unit abandoned its positions in the ongoing battle for control of parts of Sadr City: “It bugs the hell out of me. We don’t see any progress being made at all. We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up there helping these guys out we are making very little progress.”

9. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and fragmentation:

The U.S. invasion and the Bush administration’s initial occupation policies decisively smashed Iraq’s fragile “national” sense of self. Since then, the Bush administration, a motor for chaos and fragmentation, has destroyed the national (if dictatorial) government, allowed the capital and much of the country (as well as its true patrimony of ancient historical objects and sites) to be looted, disbanded the Iraqi military, and deconstructed the national economy. Ever since, whatever the administration rhetoric, the U.S. has only presided over the further fragmentation of the country. Its military, in fact, employs a specific policy of urban fragmentation in which it regularly builds enormous concrete walls around neighborhoods, supposedly for “security” and “reconstruction,” that actually cut them off from their social and economic surroundings. And, of course, Iraq has in these years been fragmented in other staggering ways with an estimated four-plus million Iraqis driven into exile abroad or turned into internal refugees.

According to Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times, there are now at least 28 different militias in the country. The longer the U.S. remains even somewhat in control, the greater the possibility of further fragmentation. Initially, the fragmentation was sectarian — into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia regions, but each of those regions has its own potentially hostile parts and so its points of future conflict and further fragmentation. If the U.S. military spent the early years of its occupation fighting a Sunni insurgency in the name of a largely Shiite (and Kurdish) government, it is now fighting a Shiite militia, while paying and arming former Sunni insurgents, relabeled “Sons of Iraq.” Iran is also clearly sending arms into a country that is, in any case, awash in weaponry. Without a real national government, Iraq has descended into a welter of militia-controlled neighborhoods, city states, and provincial or regional semi-governments. Despite all the talk of American-supported “reconciliation,” Juan Cole described the present situation well at his Informed Comment blog: “Maybe the US in Iraq is not the little boy with his finger in the dike. Maybe we are workers with jackhammers instructed to make the hole in the dike much more huge.”

10. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and civil war:

As with fragmentation, the U.S. military’s presence has, in fact, been a motor for civil war in that country. The invasion and subsequent chaos, as well as punitive acts against the Sunni minority, allowed Sunni extremists, some of whom took the name “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” to establish themselves as a force in the country for the first time. Later, U.S. military operations in both Sunni and Shiite areas regularly repressed local militias — almost the only forces capable of bringing some semblance of security to urban neighborhoods — opening the way for the most extreme members of the other community (Sunni suicide or car bombers and Shiite death squads) to attack. It’s worth remembering that it was in the surge months of 2007, when all those extra American troops hit Baghdad neighborhoods, that many of the city’s mixed or Sunni neighborhoods were most definitively “cleansed” by death squads, producing a 75-80% Shiite capital. Iraq is now embroiled in what Juan Cole has termed “three civil wars,” two of which (in the south and the north) are largely beyond the reach of limited American ground forces and all of which could become far worse. The still low-level struggle between Kurds and Arabs (with the Turks hovering nearby) for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the north may be the true explosion point to come. The U.S. military sits precariously atop this mess, at best putting off to the future aspects of the present civil-war landscape, but more likely intensifying it.

11. No, al-Qaeda will not control Iraq if we leave (and neither will Iran):

The latest figures tell the story. Of 658 suicide bombings globally in 2007 (more than double those of any year in the last quarter century), 542, according to the Washington Post’s Robin Wright, took place in occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly Iraq. In other words, the American occupation of that land has been a motor for acts of terrorism (as occupations will be). There was no al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia before the invasion and Iraq was no Afghanistan. The occupation under whatever name will continue to create “terrorists,” no matter how many times the administration claims that “al-Qaeda” is on the run. With the departure of U.S. troops, it’s clear that homegrown Sunni extremists (and the small number of foreign jihadis who work with them), already a minority of a minority, will more than meet their match in facing the Sunni mainstream. The Sunni Awakening Movement came into existence, in part, to deal with such self-destructive extremism (and its fantasies of a Taliban-style society) before the Americans even noticed that it was happening. When the Americans leave, “al-Qaeda” (and whatever other groups the Bush administration subsumes under that catch-all title) will undoubtedly lose much of their raison d’être or simply be crushed.

As for Iran, the moment the Bush administration finally agreed to a popular democratic vote in occupied Iraq, it ensured one thing — that the Shiite majority would take control, which in practice meant religio-political parties that, throughout the Saddam Hussein years, had generally been close to, or in exile in, Iran. Everything the Bush administration has done since has only ensured the growth of Iranian influence among Shiite groups. This is surely meant by the Iranians as, in part, a threat/trump card, should the Bush administration launch an attack on that country. After all, crucial U.S. resupply lines from Kuwait run through areas near Iran and would assumedly be relatively easy to disrupt.

Without the U.S. military in Iraq, there can be no question that the Iranians would have real influence over the Shiite (and probably Kurdish) parts of the country. But that influence would have its distinct limits. If Iran overplayed its hand even in a rump Shiite Iraq, it would soon enough find itself facing some version of the situation that now confronts the Americans. As Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the Nation recently, “[D]espite Iran’s enormous influence in Iraq, most Iraqis — even most Iraqi Shiites — are not pro-Iran. On the contrary, underneath the ruling alliance in Baghdad, there is a fierce undercurrent of Arab nationalism in Iraq that opposes both the U.S. occupation and Iran’s support for religious parties in Iraq.” The al-Qaedan and Iranian “threats” are, at one and the same time, bogeymen used by the Bush administration to scare Americans who might favor withdrawal and, paradoxically, realities that a continued military presence only encourages.

12. Yes, some Americans were right about Iraq from the beginning (and not the pundits either):

One of the strangest aspects of the recent fifth anniversary (as of every other anniversary) of the invasion of Iraq was the newspaper print space reserved for those Bush administration officials and other war supporters who were dead wrong in 2002-2003 on an endless host of Iraq-related topics. Many of them were given ample opportunity to offer their views on past failures, the “success” of the surge, future withdrawals or drawdowns, and the responsibilities of a future U.S. president in Iraq.

Noticeably missing were representatives of the group of Americans who happened to have been right from the get-go. In our country, of course, it often doesn’t pay to be right. (It’s seen as a sign of weakness or plain dumb luck.) I’m speaking, in this case, of the millions of people who poured into the streets to demonstrate against the coming invasion with an efflorescence of placards that said things too simpleminded (as endless pundits assured American news readers at the time) to take seriously — like “No Blood for Oil,” “Don’t Trade Lives for Oil,” or “”How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” At the time, it seemed clear to most reporters, commentators, and op-ed writers that these sign-carriers represented a crew of well-meaning know-nothings and the fact that their collective fears proved all too prescient still can’t save them from that conclusion. So, in their very rightness, they were largely forgotten.

Now, as has been true for some time, a majority of Americans, another obvious bunch of know-nothings, are deluded enough to favor bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq at a reasonable pace and relatively soon. (More than 60% of them also believe “that the conflict is not integral to the success of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.”) If, on the other hand, a poll were taken of pundits and the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia (not to speak of the officials of the Bush administration), the number of them who would want a total withdrawal from Iraq (or even see that as a reasonable goal) would undoubtedly descend near the vanishing point. When it comes to American imperial interests, most of them know better, just as so many of them did before the war began. Even advisors to candidates who theoretically want out of Iraq are hinting that a full-scale withdrawal is hardly the proper way to go.

So let me ask you a question (and you answer it): Given all of the above, given the record thus far, who is likely to be right?”

The US occupation of Iraq has been, from the beginning, an exercise in plugging holes, ones that continue to spring up in a variety of different areas only to be met with more corks, more excuses, and the ultimate reality that the United States is responsible for plunging a nation, and a region of the world, into disarray while its own population, for the most part, goes on with their daily lives oblivious to the traumatic realities in what has become one of the most dangerous and troubled nations on earth in which to live.

Thus far, the United States has pumped $25 billion dollars into attempts to reconstitute various elements of Iraq’s infrastructure. Unfortunately, despite that fact, 43% of the Iraqi population lives in poverty, 28% of Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition (prior to the invasion 19% suffered from malnutrition and that was while UN sanctions were in place that, over a decade, aided in the deaths of approximately 1 million Iraqis), only 30% of Iraqi children currently attend school at the elementary level (last year 75% of them did), and 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water (which is up 20% post invasion). Electricity and basic sanitation are still precarious at best in numerous locations, as is access to fuel.

Those that have fled the country, or are displaced within it, number in the millions, and the civilian death toll, which the Pentagon thought best not to bother keeping track of, is devastating. And while an entire generation of Americans will live with the traumatic remembrance of September 11th, an entire generation of Iraqis will spend the rest of their lives traumatized by years of bloody conflict that is not limited to the immediate first hand experience of the population of a single city, but a nation as a whole. Unlike the majority of Americans that watched the events of September 11th on their televisions, the majority of Iraqis have had to only open their front doors.

One of the most dangerous aspects of a reckless foreign policy doctrine is the politicization of war. Iraq provides one of the best examples of this reality in US history, even more so than Vietnam.

The politicization of the war in Iraq is entirely prevalent when one examines the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, two men who, for all intents and purposes, are not testifying objectively before Congress, but rather defending the politicization of a war that is, by no means, anything less than an utter disaster. Their unwillingness to admit as much only proves the point all the more.

One of the key elements of their testimony is the inclusion of anti-Iranian rhetoric that supports the current administration’s position to the letter. The assertion that the United States, and the current Iraqi government, are now confronting Iranian proxy forces in Iraq is not merely a slippery slope given the fact that President Bush has more than half a year left in the Oval Office, but one that could lead the United States into an open conflict with a nation that, no matter the Bush administration’s view of it, represents a far more dangerous affair than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

It has been suggested that a US assault against Iran would be primarily limited to aerial operations, which obviously speaks to the reality of the present condition of US ground forces, that being that they are in a state of serious over extension. Thus, a ground assault against the Iranians is not a realistic option that Washington can consider, and if the Bush administration is, then the loss of US lives in such an operation would make the war in Iraq look like a mild affair. I, for one, would not put it past those neoconservative Beltway voices that have been routinely relied upon to produce some of the most ridiculous analysis regarding US operations in the Middle East to suggest that Iran be ‘dealt with’ before a Democrat secures the White House and the opportunity is lost. In fact, I would expect no less of them or others in Washington with similar views.

Such voices, of course, represent a chorus of individuals that do not have to enact the policies that they engineer from the safety of their offices. That particular task is left to others whom they then have the audacity to call heroes who have been, from the get go, nothing but fodder for what is arguably one of the most dangerous and highly politicized foreign policy doctrines in American history.

With regards to the testimony of Petraeus and Crocker, take the following into account…

“Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were critical of Iran when they testified Tuesday before the Senate, barely giving credit for an Iranian-brokered cease-fire that curbed the killing after a week of Shiite-on-Shiite bloodshed in southern Iraq and Baghdad.

As they spoke, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr threatened to unleash his Mahdi Army militia against U.S. and Iraqi forces. Once again, it was Iran that stepped into the political vacuum and urged a halt to militia attacks into the heavily fortified Green Zone, where U.S. and Iraqi officials, including Petraeus and Crocker, have their offices.”

Of course, if objectivity is to be employed, the Iranians could very well be playing both sides of the fence – a tactic cultivated and perfected by the Americans and Russians on a global scale over the last sixty-one years. All one need do is employ a Google search to confirm that. And if the Iranians are dealing with both hands in two different fashions, it’s not as if they wrote the playbook on how to do it. Therein lies one of the immense ironies of this fiasco.

The ramifications of Petraeus and Crocker’s testimony may very well affect Americans more than they realize. And in doing so, the politicization of a conflict that has not only devastated a nation, but the lives of thousands of American families, may very well aid in not only prolonging the war, but perhaps even expanding it. There are those that will argue that it has been worth it, and that a confrontation with Iran is an unavoidable necessity. Such are the voices of those that have the luxury of creating and supporting wars that they do not have to fight. That, in the end, will never have to take their children to a monument so that they might run their fingers over the name of a father or mother that, when all is said and done, died for nothing more than the opportunistic ideology of individuals no better than those they perceived as enemies.

As expected, the testimony of both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker today was predictable.

First, Petraeus recommended that planned US troop withdrawals in July be postponed to ensure that ‘gains’ made are not jeopardized. He also claimed that security in Iraq is currently better than it was when he last testified before Congress in September of 2007. Unfortunately, when one looks at the numbers, that simply isn’t the case. Attacks against US forces and Iraqi security forces this month are higher than they were in February of 2007, and significantly higher than they were in September of last year when Petraeus first appeared before congress. Iraqi civilian deaths increased in March by 43% compared to February. Ironically, such data may very well be used to support Petraeus’ position that troop withdrawals be suspended.

That said; and of considerably more import, as Gareth Porter rightfully points out today…

“A key objective of the congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W. Bush administration’s strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq.

Based on preliminary indications of his spin on the surprisingly effective armed resistance to the joint U.S.-Iraqi Operation Knights Assault in Basra, Petraeus will testify that it was caused by Iran through a group of rogue militiamen who had split off from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and came under Iranian control.

But the U.S. military’s contention that “rogue elements” have been carrying out the resistance to coalition forces was refuted by Sadr himself in an interview with al-Jazeera aired March 29 in which he called for the release from U.S. detention of the individual previously identified by Petraeus as the head of the alleged breakaway faction.

The idea of Iranian-backed “rogue” Shi’ite militia groups undermining Sadr’s efforts to pursue a more moderate course was introduced by the U.S. military command in early 2007. These alleged Iranian proxies were called “Special Groups” – a term that came not from Iran or the Shi’ites themselves but from the Bush administration.

In April, after U.S. forces captured a former spokesman for Sadr, Qais al-Khazali, Petraeus himself announced that they had detained “the head of the secret cell network, the extremist secret cells,” he said. Petraeus referred to it as “the Khazali network.”

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner asserted in early July that Khazali’s network was a “Special Group,” which was financed, armed, and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and in some instances was even “directed” by it. He said Iran was using a Hezbollah operative to organize such groups to do its bidding in Iran.

The identification of Khazali as head of a “rogue” faction was highly suspect, however. One of Sadr’s most trusted aides, Khazali had played a key role in recruitment for the Mahdi Army in its formative stage in 2003. He had gone underground in late 2004, just after heavy fighting in which the Mahdi Army had suffered heavy casualties and just as Sadr was entering into a long period of retreat from military operations.

In a March 30, 2007, press briefing, Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero of the U.S. Joint Staff said both Khazali and his brother were linked with the “Sadr organization.”

A pro-war military blogger named Bill Roggio, who maintains close relations with the U.S. command in Baghdad, revealed in February 2007 that the real purpose of the line about Iranian-controlled “Special Groups” was to facilitate Petraeus’ strategy of dividing the Mahdi Army. “The ‘rogue element’ narrative provides Mahdi Army fighters and commanders an ‘out,’” wrote Roggio. A Mahdi Army unit commander could either “choose to oppose the government and be targeted,” he observed, “or step aside and join the political process.”

Not surprisingly, that was exactly the position taken by both Crocker and Petraeus today…

“Iran came in for condemnation in both testimonies.

Gen Petraeus accused it of funding and training Shia militias through cells the US terms “special groups”.

On top of all of this is an article that has surfaced in today’s Guardian…

“A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.

The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security” without time limit.

The authorisation is described as “temporary” and the agreement says the US “does not desire permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq”. But the absence of a time limit or restrictions on the US and other coalition forces - including the British - in the country means it is likely to be strongly opposed in Iraq and the US.

Iraqi critics point out that the agreement contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries. The agreement is intended to govern the status of the US military and other members of the multinational force.

Following recent clashes between Iraqi troops and Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Basra, and threats by the Iraqi government to ban his supporters from regional elections in the autumn, anti-occupation Sadrists and Sunni parties are expected to mount strong opposition in parliament to the agreement, which the US wants to see finalised by the end of July. The UN mandate expires at the end of the year.

One well-placed Iraqi Sunni political source said yesterday: “The feeling in Baghdad is that this agreement is going to be rejected in its current form, particularly after the events of the last couple of weeks. The government is more or less happy with it as it is, but parliament is a different matter.”

Removed from a situation, so much so that it has become an informational inconvenience, not to mention social taboo with regards to conversation, how do societies at war deal with the realities of war given the distance from which they are viewed?

With regards to fighting abroad, this reality provides those promoting conflicts abroad with the ability to use disingenuous justifications and rhetoric to not merely defend their purpose, but to casually address the failures produced by them. Besides those fighting in Iraq, what experience does the average American have with regards to what has, and is, transpiring there? How many Americans realize that the same problems that have plagued many parts of the country, such as intermittent power and other major deficiencies in Iraq’s civic infrastructure, have not been seriously address five years after the invasion of the country? How many Americans realize that their soldiers, and those private contractors in the employ of The State Department, are immune from prosecution for war crimes by the very government that the current administration has promoted as a democratic body steeped in the rule of law? Not even the International Criminal Court has any power over the prosecution of war crimes committed by US personnel.

Given that, and the remove at which we view the war, how entirely out of touch are we with regards to the temperament of Iraqis when it comes to such realities? That in their own country, members of an occupying force cannot be tried for crimes by Iraqi courts, nor tried by an internationally recognized body? Iraqi courts were sufficient enough to try Saddam Hussein and other members of his regime, but they are deemed insufficient to try US Marines guilty of raping and killing a teenaged girl, as well as members of her family. Likewise, Iraqi courts have no jurisdiction over private contractors, and cannot prosecute them for crimes committed against civilians either.

One fact that must never be overlooked, no matter how unpopular or tired this subject might be, is that Iraq is an occupied nation. It is home to well in excess of 100,000 foreign troops and countless private contractors. This reality does not reinforce the deliverance of stability whatsoever, but merely the presence of a military force that remains to ensure the survival of a government hastily put into place to ensure that American domestic perceptions of the operation as a whole were justified.

During the last five years, the occupation has led to the emergence of Jihadi groups in Iraq that were not present prior to the invasion, not to mention using methods of literal separation in an attempt to quell sectarian violence through the use of concrete walls surrounding neighbourhoods in locations such as Baghdad. Such methods helped curb violence for a time, something that, again, was used domestically to promote the success of ‘the Surge’, despite the fact that it did nothing to actually address the root of the problem itself. To claim that with the creation of a more stable security situation that such root problems can be address is a fallacy being that were those walls not to exist, the very same level of violence would no doubt resume.

The words of Donald Rumsfeld should, in truth, haunt Americans for decades to come. That pre-war planning was more than adequate and that all measures were taken during it to prepare for a variety of outcomes. Rumsfeld represented a community belief within the administration that the invasion would be both cost effective and that the occupation to follow would be short lived. This perception was sold to the American public, with continual excuses being provided in the aftermath of the invasion to justify why the Pentagon’s initial preparations were not adequate. This leads back to the remove at which we experience the war and the flexibility that that provides those that initiated it to continually excuse their complicity in what has since become a disastrous venture.

The removal of Saddam Hussein can no longer be provided as a justification for the invasion. While his regime was brutal, it was no more so than many others that, to this day, remain in power and continue to be the cause of various regional instabilities. Claims regarding his desire to amass weapons of mass destruction were blatantly false, with only the remnants of chemical weapon caches from the Iran-Iraq having ever been found. Given that, it should not be overlooked who supported him during that period, providing detailed satellite coverage of Iranian troop movements so that the use of chemical weapons would be devastatingly accurate – the CIA. Likewise, the use of the example of Halabja is not relevant with regards to US military justifications, as after the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja, the Reagan White House issued the weakest of statements, vetoed a Congressional bill that would have immediately stopped military support to Hussein’s regime, and then continued to fund it.

Following the Gulf War, the sanctions implemented against Iraq would take a devastating toll on the Iraqi population, killing in excess of 1 million people. At the time, the United Nations was deemed a viable vehicle with which to impede Hussein. But when it refused to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration declared it to be as ineffectual as The League Of Nations, and unilaterally proceeded with military operations. Mere weeks later, President Bush declared combat operations at an end. Five years, and 4,000 US deaths later, his declaration has not only been proven false, but exposed the reality that an altogether arrogant and undereducated cabal within the administration planned a major military action that completely failed to take into account any of Iraq’s social realities.

No matter your view of the war, that is one aspect of it that cannot be argued away. That pre-war planning was, in effect, almost non-existent, that it completely failed to take into account a myriad of cultural and historical factors, not to mention the military requirements that were necessary to realistically implement the operation itself. It was, in essence, no different than the belief that a bridge made of steel and concrete could be held together with scotch tape.

By now it has become more than evident that the trauma caused by 9/11 was used by a group of individuals to enact one of the most devastating foreign policy doctrines in US history and that Iraq provided the perfect context with which to enact it with regards to the Middle East. Given that claims that Hussein’s regime had ties to al-Qaeda, or was involved in the attacks of September 11th have, since day one, been entirely false, the hegemonic realities of the invasion and occupation are abundantly clear. And yet, given our otherworldly distance from the realities of the conflict, we remain apathetically comfortable with not seriously confronting that fact.

Over the last five years, 4,000 American families have paid the price for the abuse of their trust. Driving around New York City it is not uncommon to see stickers on the backs of vehicles that read never forget with an image of the twin towers in the background. The irony, of course, is that 4,000 Americans, and countless innocent Iraqis, have died since 2003 because of a handful of politicians and pundits that, without hesitation, took advantage of the corruption of patriotism. Thus, if there is anything that the people of this nation should never forget, it is that.

I’m going to go on a bit of a tirade, so prepare yourself.

Let’s cut the shit and be honest - Muslims blow people up, right? Since September the 11th, and even preceding it, that has been much of the Western world’s perception. Since 9/11, Islam has been attacked by right-wing hacks the world over as being a faith that is steeped in intolerance and hatred. Of course, those same people, even if they’ve read the Qu’ran, usually have zero experience with regards to Muslim cultures. Their intolerance of Islam is steeped in a perspective that lumps an entire faith into a single category – that being one represented by extremists.

That said; how many of you Catholics out there appreciate being branded child molesters simply because there are those within the church that have been guilty of it? What if I were to say that you’re all child molesters – every last despicable, Papist one of you?

Let’s get off our high horse and, for once, smell the bullshit. The current tensions in the Middle East have roots. One of them is the creation of Israel without the involvement of the Arab League. The other is that much of the region was exploited by imperial powers for centuries.

The latter of those two was reason enough for the people of the American Colonies to rise up against the British and employ both conventional military force and the use of militias to oppose them. Of course, some of those same freedom loving people, now historically glorified, were also responsible for genocidal practices with regards to various Native American peoples. But we needn’t dwell on that.

A very long time ago, numerous Popes - that would be God’s chosen representative on earth - proclaimed that killing Muslims was the path to heaven. In fact, that belief held water for two entire centuries. During that time, Christian nations in Europe sent armies into Palestine, among other places, to retake what they deemed rightfully theirs and to wipe out whomever happened to disagree with their views. And the Jews? Well, they were demonized as well.

Interestingly, if you open a history book, you’ll discover that during the 4th Century Jews were banned from Jerusalem altogether by a Christian Roman Emperor, lasting until 638. And what happened in 638? Well, Arabs captured the city and, believe it or not, allowed Jews access to it again. In fact, up until the first Crusade, Jews and Muslims both worshipped openly in Jerusalem. And then, in 1099, Christian Crusaders murdered the majority of its population, Jews and Muslims alike, during and after their siege of the city.

In the centuries that followed, Jerusalem was ruled by a variety of others – Muslims again, Christians again, the Turks, the Mamelukes, the Ottomans and the British. Ultimately, thousands of years after last controlling it, the creation of Israel established much of Palestine as a Jewish state, including parts of Jerusalem.

But I digress.

One of the highest crimes during the Inquisition was being labeled a ‘Jewdite’. The punishment? Death. If you were suspected of being Jewish in Spain during that time you faced ‘The Question,’ were imprisoned, and then put to death. Of course, conversion was always an option, but that didn’t automatically mean that your life would be spared. The same went for Protestants, though they would employ their own special brand of intolerance in those parts of Europe that were under their control, doing the same to Catholics.

In any event, you’ve got well in excess of a thousand years of Christian brutality, extremism and murder to reflect on. And that’s not even taking into account those conquests of the new world sanctioned by Rome that inevitably led to the eradication of entire peoples.

So do you honestly believe that when it comes to religious extremism we possess the moral high ground? If you do, you’re one of two things – either on crack or looking for some.

If you scan the headlines right now, you’ll be confronted by the news that militants killed eight Israelis today in Jerusalem. In Gaza, news of the murders was met with celebratory gunfire. Given what’s happened in Gaza over the last two weeks, it doesn’t surprise me that sympathetic morons would shoot bullets into the air to celebrate the cold blooded murder of innocent people. But that’s to be expected, just as Western bias regarding what transpired over the last two weeks in Gaza is to be expected. As for the Israeli government, what happened today shouldn’t come as a surprise. I mean, after the events of last two weeks, what did they expect? In the words of Forrest Gump – stupid is as stupid does.

They’re extremists, the lot of them. They just conduct their wars of piety and revenge, of ideology and intolerance, in ways that can be spun to suit the rage required to sustain dedication to such moronic behaviour on both sides.

Killing’s, killing’s, killing’s kids. 54 people were blown to bits in Baghdad today, with another 100 more injured. But it’s just another day in Iraq. Iraqi extremists, or foreign extremists that have ventured to Iraq to play their little role in a game as ignorantly old as the sun and the moon, killed innocent Iraqis. It’s to be expected. Muslims blow people up, right?

Old news, or not white people, or not steadfast allies. Eight dead Israelis, on the other hand, is news – and certainly vastly more important than the deaths of innocent Palestinians. Because Muslims blow people up, right? Theirs is a faith steeped in violence and hatred and intolerance and that’s proven to be the case since its inception, right? Ours, on the other hand, is a belief steeped in love and glorious instant noodle salvation.

In God we trust. I’ll tell you this, flat out – God, in his many forms, is an untrustworthy fucker. Because if you’re going to buy into the belief that it’s best to put your faith in placing all of your eggs in one basket, then if you drop it you lose everything. And that, at its core, is nothing but the roots of extremism.

Religion is as old as man. So is stupidity. Coincidence?

While the Israeli government looks into the legality of targeting civilian areas from which rockets have been fired into Israel, the Israeli Defense Force has claimed that of the 100 plus Palestinians killed in their recent incursion into Gaza, 90 of them were Hamas militants.

During operations in Gaza’s suburbs, the IDF have been guilty of employing snipers that have taken the lives of civilians. In one instance, a 12-year-old girl was shot in the stomach as she stood several feet from a window after it was blown in following an explosion. The ambulance called to attend the little girl was also fired upon, and unable to reach the home. When the girl’s father attempted to step outside with a white flag and his daughter in his arms, IDF troops in a nearby tank fired warning shots over his head forcing him back inside. The little girl died shortly after.

I don’t care who you are – but shooting 12-year-old girls is flat out murder and makes you no less a monster than the terrorists that you are supposedly combating. Unless, that is, you believe that a 12-year-old girl is one.

In other, similar instances, a 16-year-old boy and 17-year-old girl were shot while in a sitting room. Both were killed by sniper fire that targeted them through a window.

The Egyptians, who have sent 27 ambulances to the Rafah crossing, have collected between 150 and 200 injured people.

Thus far, one Israeli civilian and two members of the IDF have been killed in the same period of time. Others have also been wounded in rocket attacks, and like those affected in Gaza, are represented by the young and old alike.

In a surprising move after reports that Turkey’s offensive in northern Iraq would be sustained for the foreseeable future, Turkish forces began withdrawing yesterday in force. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the withdrawal occurred just after President Bush called on the Turkish government to end the offensive and a day after US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Turkish capital to deliver Washington’s message that the incursion must not be open ended. Of course, the Turkish government and military is claiming that the withdrawal was preplanned and that it had nothing to do with US pressure, but that’s obviously transparent given the fact that the withdrawal itself began before any official Turkish statements were made regarding it.

Were I to venture a guess, I would say that behind closed doors Washington rubber stamped the Turkish invasion and then used condemnation of it to remove suspicions of complicity. And, of course, the Turks played along and got what they wanted out of it.

That would be my guess anyway.

Gaza

Here’s the back story via the BBC…

I want to state, for the record, that the use of violence by both sides in this matter is, in my opinion, unforgivable given the toll that it has taken on civilians, both at present and in years past.

That said; when one looks at this in a very hard, cold light, there are a few realities that must be addressed, though many of you might disagree.

The governing issue of Israel and Palestine as entities and the decades old arguments about how that region has found itself where it is now aside, there are a few truths that we should be willing to admit as members of a society that is primarily pro-Israeli.

The first is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, one that is supported by numerous benefactors throughout the Middle East. They fire homemade rockets into Israel from the slums of one of the world’s foremost ghettos where millions rely on international humanitarian aid to simply survive. That aid, by the way, is also one of the most outstanding examples of international blackmail in modern history.

Israel, on the other hand, is supported by the world’s foremost military super power and is the recipient of immense military aid. They possess a state of the art air force, replete with US made fighters, bombers, and attack helicopters. They possess state of the art armour and boast one of the best-trained and equipped armed forces in the world. They also possess a nuclear arsenal, a navy, and one of the world’s most feared covert intelligence outfits.

Were Palestinian militants to possess the same military capabilities as the Israelis, the need to lob homemade rockets and employ suicide bombers wouldn’t be required. In short, they would possess the same ‘honourable’ weapons of war as the Israelis and be in the position to employ them in the exact same fashion that the IDF does. That is, of course, not something that Israel, nor those that support it, would ever stand for. Thus, those who believe in the ridiculous use of violence as a measure with which to lash out against Israel wouldn’t be lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza and, in the process, endangering the lives of innocents that end up paying the price when Israeli forces retaliate – not to mention killing Israeli civilians.

That is, if you actually believe that a fair brawl between conventional forces doesn’t produce civilian deaths, which is, of course, a fallacy. In truth, they produce far more.

In this neck of the woods, the math is simple. A single Israeli life is equal to that of maybe 100 Palestinians. Let’s face it, they’re terrorists and extremists, or at least that’s what they’re painted as being by our media. The Israelis, on the other hand, are simply trying to defend themselves. Never mind the massive economic disparities between the two, never mind that Gaza is little more than a massive prison camp for all intents and purposes, which provides the sort of atmosphere in which those desperate enough are willing to focus their anger in ways that are unconscionable. If you cage an animal long enough it’s going to do one of two things. Wither away to nothing or start taking swipes through the bars at those on the other side.

Gaza is not internationally recognized as being a part of any sovereign entity, nor is it claimed by any, though it’s currency remains the Israeli Sheqel. After Hamas’ victory in Parliamentary elections in 2006, Israel, The United States, Canada, and the EU froze all funds to the Palestinian government, economically crippling it. Due to the fact that Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, it is not viewed as a legitimate governing body, even within the tenuous confines of a government that never really had any international recognition beyond that required to placate those responsible for providing it economic aid. Thus, as long as Hamas remains in power, their presence will be used as an excuse to continue to punish the people as a whole, despite the fact that it was democratically elected – a process that those who refuse to recognize it claim to champion the world over (that is, as long as it conforms to their ideology).

Now, let me state for the record that I am not defending Hamas. Obviously, the recognition of Israeli’s right to exist is something that must occur. After decades of the same tired argument, the time has come to consider the welfare of the Palestinian people as a whole, which, for some, is a bitter pill to swallow. That said; there is certainly a reason why Hamas was successful in the elections in 2006.

Gaza is 41 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide; that’s 360 square kilometers. In that space there are 1.4 million people, 1 million of which are officially recognized by the United Nations as refugees. Some 18% of children in Gaza between the ages of 6 months and 5 years old suffer from chronic malnutrition. 53% of women of reproductive age and children are anemic. Given such facts, one can begin to see why support for an organization that undertakes initiatives within the community to secure popular support, not to mention striking at those they view as their oppressors, might attract the support of the suffering and the disenfranchised. In truth, it’s not a phenomenon that is, by any stretch of the imagination, limited to that area of the world. It is a phenomenon that has been quintessential in the birth of Western democracies and, if we’re going to be completely honest, Israel itself.

Now, you can rush out and get a copy of The National Post and succumb to the bias that we’re exposed to on a daily basis regarding this issue, or you can spend some time trying to look at it from the other side of the fence (literally). I’ll not condone the use of violence as a method with which to enact change, but I will also not condemn those that feel they have no way out of a situation that is, in truth, entirely comparable to an existence in prison. There are better ways to go about it, I will admit that freely, and also not hesitate to suggest that such methods be embraced, but I do not live in Gaza, nor do I have to endure its realities, so that position remains one of a lofty Western idealist.

The Iranian Laptop Nuke Data

Gareth Porter provides some valuable insight regarding this issue…

“The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

In its latest report on Iran, circulated Feb. 22, the IAEA, under strong pressure from the Bush administration, included descriptions of plans for a facility to produce “green salt,” technical specifications for high explosives testing and the schematic layout of a missile reentry vehicle that appears capable of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked to provide full explanations for these alleged activities.

Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyze, but the United States had refused to do so.

The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by “an Iranian dissident group.”

A German official familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop documents. “I can assure you that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organization.,” the source said.

The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear program. According to a story by Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004, US officials said they had been stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying to recruit, and had been given to intelligence officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.

The German account of the origins of the laptop documents contradicts the insistence by unnamed US intelligence officials who insisted to journalists William J. Broad and David Sanger in November 2005 that the laptop documents did not come from any Iranian resistance groups.

Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organization., the MEK was a favorite of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilize Iran. The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years. It was considered a credible source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. after 2002, mainly because of its identification of the facility in Natanz as a nuclear site.

The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very skeptical about their authenticity.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is “doubt over the provenance of the computer.”

A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, “I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt.”

Scott Ritter, the former US military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.

The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.”