1. Occupational Hazards
As'ad AbuKhalil's headline
on his brief post says it all:
"Tragic accidents happen – every single day." He is referring to the
latest killing of civilians by American occupation troops – not in
Afghanistan this time, but in the now-forgotten war in Iraq, where
death, corruption, repression and blowback are still raging.
2. Tony Blair: Liar, No. 876
It turns out that Tony Blair was told
years before the Iraq invasion
– in fact, even before the 9/11 attacks "that changed the world" and
"made everything different" – that invading Iraq would be illegal
(i.e., a Nuremberg-level war crime), as well as costly, destablizing
and ineffective. This is revealed in documents from 2000 which the
Independent has obtained, even though the "blue-ribbon"
Chilcot Inquiry
has refused to release it. What's more, the documents give the lie to
Blair's recent testimony to the panel, and his claims elsewhere, that
he had never discussed using troops to remove Saddam Hussein until
after 9/11. Tony Blair, a liar? Imagine that!
3. All the Warmongering That's Fit to Print
Peter Casey at Antiwar.com
does a remarkable thing:
he actually reads the recent IAEA report, and finds that the New York
Times deliberately distorted, even falsified the report's findings, in
order to demonize Iran and mendaciously inflame fears of mad mullahs
dropping nukes on America's holy heartland, and its
plucky little outpost over in Israel. The NYT, plumping for imperial war? Imagine that!
4. Suburban Warfare
The Los Angeles Times
brings us yet another story
about America's brave, brave long-distance warriors: the Homeric heroes
who sit in front of computer screens 10,000 miles away from battle,
push buttons to kill people with robot-fired weapons, then go home to
cozy suburban homes. Naturally, the story focuses on the great stress
suffered by these bold 'soldiers,' as they go from shredding the
viscera of some ragged Afghan walking around in his native land to
pitching a ball with Junior in the backyard. In 10 years time, or less,
most of our imperial slaughter will be carried out this way: no muss,
no fuss, no risk, no mess – except for those piles of viscera on the
other end.
5. Package Deal
Chris Hedges reminds us
of why we should boycott FedEx, and how the unchallenged ascendancy of
corporate power is, literally, crippling and killing working folk.
6. The Bitter End
Juan Cole brings word of a learned Theban at Harvard who has come up with a novel solution for the Middle East crisis:
stop feeding the Palestinians,
so they will quit breeding. Harvard Fellow Martin Kramer goes on to
laud Israel's strangulation of Gaza for helping "break Gaza's runaway
population growth." It is of course superfluous in us to point out that
the deliberate decimation of a people by starvation and neglect is not
unknown in recent history, and was in fact the first fatal step toward
a somewhat more – how to put it? – final solution to a religio-ethnic
conflict. The ironies here, as in so many policies of the plucky little
outpost, are the bitterest imaginable.
