War Handwavium

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. He proved it by putting a sign up at his carnival that said “See the Great Egress” and then took money from people as they exited (egressed) from his show.

Obama is about to give a speech outlining his plan for Afghanistan. He’s giving the speech at the U.S. Military Academy, suggesting that he might be giving General Patraeus most or all of the troops he requested.

But the question is whether or not Obama has any kind of strategy for victory, and a strategy for exiting Afghanistan, or if he views a troop increase as a political delaying action to put off the serious decisions until after elections, or maybe it’s a “tough” approach to take some heat off health care reform until HRC gets through and is signed into law. Even after Obama’s Tuesday speech, we may still not know what’s really going on in his head.

The current approach appears to be heading towards the idea of (1) increasing troops to put pressure on the Taliban. This increased pressure will then (2) nudge Taliban who are not die-hard loyalists to Al-Queda to consider switching sided if we pay them money. If successful, the sudden drop in Taliban can be declared a “victory” at which point the US can “withdraw with honor”, meaning Obama won’t have his own Vietnam hanging around his neck by 2010.

But that’s a bit of American-made nonsense, really. If the Taliban are really fighting for money, then even if we withdraw, we will have to keep paying them money indefinitely, even after we withdraw, lest Afghanistan become a terrorist haven again. And the only people who believe it are people who believe “they hate us for our freedom”.

Most Afghans are fighting American troops for the same reason Afghans fought the Soviets in the 80’s: Because they don’t like foreigners invading and occupying their land.

i.e. Wolverines!

What may transpire is that we pay off the Taliban to stop fighting us long enough to declare “victory”, then we withdraw most American troops. Once we withdraw our troops, most Afghans will cease to have a reason to join an insurgency, because there won’t be any foreign invaders to fight.

The hawks who think they hate us for our freedom will think they stopped hating us because we beat them until they loved us. But what really happened is we will have paid them to stop fighting us long enough to declare “victory” and once we withdraw, they won’t have any reason to fight us, and we won’t have to keep paying them.

We’ll have to see how the speech goes. And after that, we’ll have to see how reality goes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091130/wl_time/08599194336200

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914224,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-world-related

The American military base in Bagram Afghanistan has a prison that some call Guantanamo’s evil twin. While America is busy making the motions about shutting down the prison in Guantanamo, it’s expanding the prison in Bagram. And people who have been held in Bagram say they were tortured. Meanwhile the US military refuses even to release a list of names of the prisoners it is holding there, let alone allow them lawyers or due process.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/11/20091115114337109563.html

Apparently, the Weekly Standard doesn’t like America very much. They don’t like what America stands for, America’s committments, or any of that stuff. About all the Weekly Standard likes is the dirt within the boundaries of the nation, but they hate the principles upon which the nation was founded.

Principles like due process, trial by jury, protection from cruel and unusual punishment, stuff like that.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/18/weekly_standard/index.html

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

by Pedro M Cruz from here:

http://vimeo.com/6437816

Good article that gives a glimpse of just how corrupt the central government (the government the US supports) really is.

http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/11/17/afghanistan_corruption

Israel just approved construction of 900 illegal Jewish Settlement homes in the Palestinian side of Jeruselem.

The expansion of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land has been a major issue for the Palestinians, and Palestinians have demanded Israel stop illegal expansion onto Palestinian land before any peace agreement can be reached.

The United States government is reportedly “dismayed” that Israel would do something that would so obviously throw a monkeywrench into the peace process.

And it wasn’t until today that I realized just how gullible the current American administration is when it comes to Israel. Apparently Obama’s administration believes that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians. I can only assume this belief comes from the fact that Israel repeatedly states that it wants peace, and for whatever reason, the Obama administration took Israel’s word over Israel’s actions.

If you say you want peace while you are committing an act of war, most sane people would realize that the words are lies and the actions are what counts. But the Obama administration can’t quite seem to get this basic concept of diplomacy. People and nations and governments lie. And Israel saying it wants peace while agressively expanding illegal settlements on Palestinian land is a lie overridden by actions.

If Obama wants peace in the middle east as one of his accomplishments as president, then he needs to wake the hell up, and stop believing Israel’s words of peace while ignoring Israel’s actions of war.

Illegal Jewish Settlements on Palestinian land is an act of war.

For Americans who can’t quite grasp the concept of what illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land really is, imagine the Mexican government keeps sending bulldozers into Texas to tear down existing American homes and building new homes and putting Mexicans in those homes, and then sending the Mexican army to enforce that new arrangement.

You think maybe the US might get a little angry about that?

That’s what Jewish Settlements on Palestinian land are. They’re nothing but an act of war, a slow invasion of land.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/11/20091117153418461311.html

There’s a saying in the english language “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.

From the Anti-Defamation League website on the creation of Israel:

(1936) The Peel Commission recommended the partition of the country between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs rejected the idea while the Jews accepted the principle of partition.

(1945) The Jewish Agency and the Haganah continued to smuggle Jews into Palestine. Underground cells of Jews, most notably the Irgun and Lehi, engaged in open warfare against the British and their installations.

(1947) the UN recommended the partition of Palestine into two states ­ one Jewish and one Arab.

(14 May 1947) David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel and became its first prime minister.

(15 May 1947) the United States recognized the State of Israel

According to Palestinian history, the Palestine was declared an independent state in 1988 and accepted by over half the countries in the world. The declaration is generally interpreted to have recognized Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries.

What’s happening as of 2009 is that Palestinian officials are planning to ask the UN to recognize the State of Palestine. According to the Palestinians, they decided to turn to the UN because the Israelis have stopped making progress towards peace since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008.

Israel hates the idea of Palestine getting official recognition because that means any expansion of Jewish settlements will be an invasion. What Israel wants is for the state of Palestine to be delayed as long as possible, giving it more and more time to expand its illegal Jewish settlements into Palestinian land.

Israel and its defenders will likely claim that Palestinian militants must be stamped out first before Palestine can be officially granted existence.

But Israel was founded by militant Jews fighting the British in the 40’s. Israel came into existence during this period of time. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. There is no reason Palestine could not be officially recognized now.

When Isreal was declared in 1947, the United States was one of the first nations to recognize Israel. And that helped Israel’s existence in the Middle East.

Now, Palestine may be on the verge of asking the UN to recognize it’s existence, and the US could do for Palestine what it did for Israel: recognize the state and the people within and help foster a fledgling nation in the Middle East.

What’s good for the Israeli goose is good for the Palestinian gander.

Or, the US could continue it’s unilateral support of Israel and continue its disregard for millions of Palestinian civilians living under Israeli military occupation. The US could ignore the Palestinian’s pleas for their own nation half a century after the US helped establish the nation of Israel next door.

The US has a choice. It can either take this opportunity to move the middle east closer to peace or it can continue the status quo that has been decades of fighting, and decades of Israel slowly invading Palestinian land with illegal settlements.

If Obama is serious about peace in the Middle East, he will take this Palestinian request for UN recognition and leverage it into a lasting peace. If Obama ignores it, if Obama supports Israel without question while ignoring the Palestinians, then there is no chance for peace while Obama is still president.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/11/2009111653941671211.html

digby notes an LA Times article reporting that a provision inserted by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that would require insurance companies to cover Christian Science prayer treatment as a medical expense.

Apparently we can’t have federal money paying for abortion but we can have federal money paying for christian prayer treatments as if it were open heart surgery.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/spiritual-healing-by-digby-yesterday-i.html

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post highlighting how Jewish and Christian extremists are viewed differently from Muslim extremists.

One muslim extremist is condemnation of an entire religion and proof that all its followers are terrorists. One Jewish or Christian extremist is portrayed as either a misguided individual among the sane religious followers or as an individual hero among the cowardly religious followers.

The Professional Moron, Joe Lieberman, has called for an investigation into why Islamic extremists are allowed to remain in the US military. Yet “Tail Gunner Joe” hasn’t called for a similar investigation into why the US military is recruiting neonazis and white-supremicists. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince views himself as a Christian fighting a holy war against Islam.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/12/terrorism/index.html

A New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) report claims that Chinese citizens are kidnapped and held in informal detention centres, known locally as “black jails”, to prevent them from bringing complaints to the central government.

According to the HRW report, the “black jails” were driven by coercion and commerce, with officials and hired guards holding petitioners in squalid, sometimes brutal confinement without legal oversight, often in return for cash. The petitioners were allegedly held for days or months at a time in makeshift detention centres where most were deprived adequate food and sleep, beaten and threatened.

The report claims that up to 10,000 people are imprisoned every year.

So, China has their own black site prisons, and their own Haliburton who makes money off of running them.

Looks like all the cool kids are doing it now.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/11/2009111281953905410.html