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Continue reading ‘زئيفي:جهود امريكا واسرائيل لسنين ضيعها نصر الله بليلة واحدة’ »

Compiled by Hugh Galford

Pro-Israel PAC Contributions to 2008 Congressional Candidates

 [snip - table show candidates who took contributions by state, name, party, amounts]

• TOTAL for 2007-2008 Election Cycle
  1,107,604
• TOTAL 1978-2008 Funds to Congressional Candidates
  45,530,258
• TOTAL No. of Recipient Candidates, 1978-2008
  2,065

Read in full:  Pro-Israel PACs Swett It Out in New Hampshire

Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel’s responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. “The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it’s not going to do them any good,” he reportedly warned. “I don’t see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters.”

The new “surge” strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military’s application of the “lessons of history” from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security. Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq’s population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.

While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms “Gated Communities.” In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.

While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:

Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.

The Israeli Laboratory

Continue reading ‘The New Walls of Baghdad - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum’ »

DAMASCUS, Apr 26 (IPS) - More than a million Iraqis were lucky enough to flee into Syria. But in this relatively safe haven, there is no getting away from poverty.

Mohammad Saleem ran a successful supermarket in Baghdad. “I was leading a comfortable life with my family, despite the 13 years of UN sanctions,” Saleem told IPS in Damascus. “My four sons worked together to keep our supermarket running, and so we passed the dark sanctions period successfully. The big suffering started with the 2003 occupation that brought closed roads and reduced income for people.”

The day came when they were told by militias to leave within 24 hours, he said. “It is not possible for us to start over in Syria, and so my brother is selling our property piece by piece so that we can survive.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates there are 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria. But the economy of Syria itself is struggling under U.S. sanctions. Jobs for refugees on the black market bring no more than 100 dollars a month.

Continue reading ‘IRAQ: Poverty Gets the Survivors’ »

Is history repeating itself, asks Ayman El-Amir*

The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has completed the first phase of negotiations with the US over the long-term strategic agreement that will govern relations between the occupying power and occupied Iraq for decades to come. It will be supplemented by a “status of forces” agreement outlining the privileges and immunities of the 50,000-strong US military force that will be stationed in Iraq well beyond the formal withdrawal of the occupation army. Iraq will thus be incorporated into the “Axis of the Good” that includes the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council where the US has developed and maintains sprawling military bases and other facilities, encircling Iran and controlling the southern entrance to the Straits of Hormuz. Fifty years after the demise of the Baghdad Pact (1955-1958) the military alliance has not only been reborn, but is more expansive, with US Central Command at the helm and Iran replacing the former Soviet Union as the adversary.

In 1955, when the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the former Soviet Union and the US had reached fever pitch, the Arab world was also undergoing deep transformation triggered by the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian revolution. Egypt’s emerging role as a beacon of national liberation in the Arab region and in Africa was coveted by both superpowers though for different reasons. The Soviet Union, reversing the old-era Stalinist approach, wanted to embrace Third World revolutionary movements as a bulwark against the old imperial and colonial powers. The US secretary of state at the time, John Foster Dulles, was obsessed with the idea of blocking Communist expansion towards the Middle East which occupied strategic routes, waterways, and possessed burgeoning oil wealth.

Continue reading ‘A reincarnation of the Baghdad Pact’ »

Continue reading ‘صحف: رايس تسعى للإفادة من حملة البصرة سياسيا وتنتقد "تقاعس العرب" تجاه العراق’ »