Here are the words of a couple of my hero’s … they’re passed, now, both from assassin’s bullets.
We don’t seem to have hero’s around, these days — Bush and Guiliani were a 21st century version, but that didn’t last long; their feet were clay and the rains came pretty quickly to dissolve that into mud. Maybe that’s good, with no “rescue” in sight, we’ll have to rescue ourselves and that’s hard, gritty and difficult work; no hero stuff involved.
Maybe we have to wise up about what a hero is — both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had messy lives, had affairs on the side, had a cumbersome collection of supporters to manage. They came to us during a time when we did not try to climb into bed with our candidates and our leaders, when we didn’t want to examine their books or their private lives; we just listened to them and responded to the humanity in their voices.
These words might have been written for today, and that’s the real horror of our times — that forty years ago these voices were silenced and we did not finish their work. History is still waiting … and if we’re going to restore this nation, their words must continue to drive us forward.
Jude
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HuffPo
04.04.2007
In 1968, my father, running for President, addressed in a speech, the White House’s proposal for a troop surge in Vietnam. Robert Kennedy had initially supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Forty years later, as Congress and the White House debate the further escalation of yet another war that has already claimed the lives of an astounding 640,000 Iraqis, killed 3,256 U.S. soldiers and wounded another 50,000, his words should have special resonance to those of our political leaders who are still searching for the right course in Iraq:
“I do not want–as I believe most Americans do not want–to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: “They made a desert, and called it peace.” …
“The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them–a “moderate” increase, it was said–would soon be sent. But isn’t this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time–at every crisis–we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before. . . . And once again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that “we are going to win”; “victory” is coming….It becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of the destruction for the nation we once hoped to help….
“Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have….
“The war, far from being the last critical test for the United States, is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades….All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent–and, if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask–we are required to ask–how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But this question the administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer–none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything yet….
“But the costs of the war’s present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop….
“You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have “the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.” I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our misguided policies–and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America….I ask you to go forth and work for new policies–work to change our direction–and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our hearts, and all around the world.”
King’s Prophetic Call for Peace
Eric Stoner, TomPaine
April 05, 2007
Forty years ago this week, on April 4, 1967, and a year to the day before his tragic assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church to deliver one of the most controversial speeches of his life.
Entitled ” Beyond Vietnam,” the address was King’s first public antiwar speech, and he gave it only after much trepidation and prayer. Believing that silence in the face of injustice is in fact complicity with evil, King wrote in his autobiography that, “The time had come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim and kill.”
As anticipated, King was roundly criticized at the time for straying from civil rights, not only by the mainstream media, but also by allies such as the NAACP. “It was a low period in my life,” he wrote. “I could hardly open a newspaper.”
Now, however, history has vindicated the truths that King so bravely spoke that day, and his testimony is rightfully seen as a prophetic masterpiece.
While still mesmerizing, listening to the speech today can also be somewhat disconcerting. It painfully reveals how little has changed and how politicians, both then and now, use the same rhetorical devices to scare the public into supporting misguided policies. By simply swapping the word ” Iraq” for “Vietnam,” and “terrorism” for “communism” King’s speech could be given today, with little need for editing.
Before describing in some depth how the U.S. betrayed the Vietnamese, first by supporting “the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam,” then by propping up the “vicious” dictator Diem and finally by nearly wiping the country off the map through its extensive bombing and use of napalm, King said: “They must see Americans as strange liberators.”
In Iraq parallels abound. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein as he massacred his own people during the 1980s, obliterated Iraq during the first Gulf War, imposed oppressive, deadly sanctions for nearly 13 years and finally invaded and occupied the emaciated country in 2003. In place of napalm, the U.S. military has now switched to another, more effective chemical to burn Iraqis—white phosphorus. And in our noble effort to bring democracy, we’ve also generously littered the country with cluster bombs and thousands of tons of poisonous depleted uranium, which will cause dramatically increased rates of cancer and birth defects for generations. Strange liberators, indeed.
Speaking of the soldiers, King said:
We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
One can only imagine the cognitive dissonance of our soldiers today, knowing that every reason that they were originally given to kill and be killed has been thoroughly debunked, even by the mainstream press. Moreover, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority’s blatant effort to privatize nearly everything in Iraq, and our current advocacy for Iraq’s new oil law—which if passed by the Iraqi Parliament will be highly advantageous to foreign, meaning American, oil companies—can leave little doubt whose side we’re currently on.
Speaking on the bogeyman of his time, King declared: “War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons.” The greatest defense against communism, he argued,
is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
The same can undoubtedly be said for terrorism, which cannot and will not ever be defeated by violence or war. Apart from the fact that terrorism is a tactic used in asymmetric warfare, not a tangible enemy, even the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that our wars have only exacerbated the threat of another attack and fanned the flames of international extremism.
King is perhaps most relevant today, however, when he takes that extra step in his analysis to address the roots of the conflict. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” King poignantly noted, brought on by what he called, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” that plague our society.
Hesitantly calling his own government, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King issued a piercing warning that reaches us across the decades loud and clear: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
As the bloated Pentagon budget swells further—this year to over $600 billion—America becomes more of a one-trick pony, known the world over not for its kindness and generosity, but rather its brutality and dangerous quick trigger.
While that spiritual death seems closer now than ever, I think that King would still hold out hope that we could see the light before its too late and live up to ourselves. But to do so, we must snap out of our culturally-induced coma and lead that “revolution of values” that King called for and that we remain so desperately in need of. ++
The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, CommonDreams
4/4/07
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”
The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.
Why?
It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 – a year to the day before he was murdered – King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here)
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”
How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.
And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
April 5th, 2007
No, it’s not a new Harry Potter title.
Three guesses who I’m talking about, here [and as I used to say in my childhood, the first two don't count.] Dubya has been more visible, more verbal, in the last weeks and frankly it hasn’t served him — we all know a horses ass when we see one. The whole nation is sneering. Well, maybe not John McCain, suck-up that he is; he’s riding the delusional Iraq hobby horse with our little buckaroo. And not Christocrat and Fredo aid Monica Gooding, who is defending her decision to take the 5th by whining that those evil Democrats are practicing McCarthyism. But the rest of us pretty well have Dubby’s number, now.
And sadly, bubbled as he is, that hasn’t stopped him from spewing out amazing statements and snitting before our very eyes; it works for our purposes, but it’s still a pity to watch. He has limited range, this president. Below, he’s going to redouble his efforts against terrorist evil … no doubt he’s factored in the evil that the traitorous Democrats, the short-sighted public and the mean spirited world would impress upon him, as well.
I know the Decider is desperate to rescue his sinking career, to redefine his legacy, to reinvigorate his fractured party and to keep Bu$hCo profits rolling in … but we’ve passed some invisible marker in credibility now. The public is doing its best to ignore him, turning to others for leadership, and viewing Bush’s doings with a nervous and skeptical eye. He ain’t right — we all know it, we just don’t know how far gone he is. I doubt that the American public will ever completely agree that he’s dark like Cheney or cruel like Rummy. Karl has handled his PR too adeptly. But we know when his pretension to greatness is “over” … and it is. He’s the equivalent of Brownie, now — never as qualified as we thought to begin with, a has-been and hack — and the only thing that keeps him standing is the tradition of presidents past, the authority of the White House and the complicity of a political system that covers its own ass first.
DO note that because Dubby can’t get anywhere in the real world, today he did another of his “recess appointments,” this time placing a previously rebuffed Swift Boater as ambassador to Belgium. The Dems are going to be furious with this, and rightly. Support whatever censure they decide on — coming soon, to a blog near you.
Which brings me to our “prayer point” during this Easter week — keep Big Light on the whole Iranian scenario with it’s leaked and much speculated upon attack [tomorrow;] the Dub has very little unexamined power at this point, but Commander in Chief is still given him by the Constitution. If he needs to push a button to keep that codpiece in place, the only one left to him is Armageddon.
The Iranians have given back the British sailors, unharmed … they’ve proven a degree of cooperation we didn’t expect … very few of us are eager to see an air strike take place. But Bush ain’t right. And that’s the skinny. Prayers for Peace are the call of the hour, including a blanket of energy impeding all that works against that Divine possibility.
A nice collection of what’s current here.
Jude
Bush ramps up attacks against Democrats
BEN FELLER, Capital Hill Blue
Thursday, 05 April 2007
President Bush said Wednesday he knows the nation is weary of war and wondering if the U.S. can win. Still, he said efforts to pull troops home from Iraq only make the U.S. more vulnerable to attack from an enemy that is “pure evil.”
“The enemy does not measure the conflict in Iraq in terms of timetables,” Bush said to soldiers here, a reference to congressional Democrats’ plans to start phasing in troop withdrawals.
“A strategy that encourages this enemy to wait us out is dangerous — dangerous for our troops, dangerous for our security,” Bush said. “And it’s not going to become law.”
While speaking to troops at Fort Irwin, where more combat units are preparing to deploy to Iraq, Bush was trying to keep public pressure on Democrats. Both the House and Senate have approved war-funding bills that would establish timelines for U.S. troops to return home from the four-year-old conflict.
“It’s a tough war,” Bush said. “The American people are weary of this war. They’re wondering whether or not we can succeed. They’re horrified by the suicide bombing they see.”
Yet Bush used a horrific tale in Iraq — one in which terrorists put children in a car to get through a checkpoint, then exploded the vehicle — to describe why he won’t pull back.
“It makes me realize the nature of the enemy we face, which hardens my resolve to protect the American people,” Bush said. “People who do that are not — it’s not a civil war, it is pure evil. And I believe we have an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil.”
Bush then left the Mojave Desert for the upscale Brentwood section of Los Angeles. There, at the home of friend Brad Freeman, he hoped to raise $2.2 million for the Republican National Committee before flying to his family ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Back in Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said congressional proposals to provide war funding only for certain missions could cause more bloodshed in Iraq.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week said he would propose legislation to cut off funds for combat operations, and provide money for only three missions: targeted counterterrorism operations, training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, and to provide security for U.S. personnel and infrastructure.
But Gates said that could pull troops from Baghdad neighborhoods, which have been the focus of the latest military buildup in Iraq.
“If we abandon some of these areas and withdraw into the countryside or whatever to do these targeted missions, that you could have a fairly significant ethnic cleansing inside Baghdad or in Iraq more broadly,” Gates said in a radio interview Wednesday with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham.
Bush is on a six-day break from Washington just as he’s in a stalemate with Congress.
The first stop was Fort Irwin, home of the U.S. Army’s premier desert training center for combat units. Created during the Cold War era of tank warfare, the National Training Center has been redesigned to teach the counterinsurgency work of detecting homemade bombs.
Before his speech, Bush stood in a dusty, rocky field as soldiers explained how they detect and disarm homemade bombs, called Improvised Explosive Devices. Bush operated a remote-control robot, playfully steering the device straight into a row of news photographers.
Bush is chiding the House and Senate for passing war-funding legislation they knew he would veto — because of the withdrawal provisions — and for taking Easter vacation with the matter unfinished.
The White House is eager to show urgency even as Bush takes a vacation of his own.
“The president can sign a bill anywhere, anytime,” said spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
His schedule calls mostly for quiet time in Crawford through the weekend. He is expected to promote his immigration policies in Arizona and return to Washington on Monday.
Bush lied today
In today’s press conference he claimed the surge was at the behest of experts…
Brent Budowsky, Alternet
April 3, 2007
“At the request of military commanders I decided to send in reinforcements,” Bush said today.
This is a lie.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff overwhelmingly were against the troop surge, unanimously according to the Washington Post, which the President said falsely he decided at their request.
The Iraq commanders overwhelmingly were against the troop surge, which the President said falsely he decided at their request.
When the man who calls himself the decider made the decision to escalate the war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our commanders in Iraq were against this escalation.
Any other assertion is a lie.
I grew up at a time when the idea of calling the President of the United States a liar was just unheard of.
When I was high school with Lyndon Johnson, Robert Strange McNamara, and Richard Nixon escalating the war in Vietnam things did indeed begin to change with “the crediblity gap.”
It is too late for this President to engage in profound soul searching about what has gone so terribly wrong with his presidency and with his war.
It is too late for this President to engage in profound soul searching about why he causes such intense revulsion throughout America and throughout the free world.
I do not believe George W. Bush is capable of such reflection, integrity of thought, honor of discussion. He is trapped in a world of partisanship, delusion and desperation.
He sends troops to war without adequate body armor, protected vehicles, helmets, bandages and supplies yet he accuses opponents of not supporting the troops.
He sends troops to war with such negligence and lack of support that the Marine Corps pathologist finds that up 70% of the killed and wounded were preventable casualties, yet he accuses opponents of not supporting the troops.
He allows shameful derelictions of treatment for wounded troops that should never occur in our country, yet he accuses opponents of not supporting the troops.
There is an Orwellian character to these attacks and a delusional character to this President’s inability to respect facts, common sense, truth and honor in political discourse.
The President said today he decided to surge the troops and escalate the war because our commanders asked him to.
The President lied. They pleaded with him, to do the exact opposite.
Reid And Pelosi Have Bush Flanked
Brent Budowsky, The Hill
April 4, 2007
America, Iraq and the Middle East may have entered a profound and historical turning point.
At this moment, the Reid-Pelosi flanking maneuver is brilliant and powerful. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moves aggressively to turn around the military escalation, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) moves aggressively to support Middle East peace initiatives.
Lets begin with one key point. When George Bush said yesterday that he decided to surge the troops and escalate in Iraq at the request of American commanders, he was telling a bald-faced lie.
No more niceties. This is so fundamental and important, with so many American lives at stake, that we should be crystal-clear about the truth.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff overwhelmingly advised against the surge while Bush was making the decision. The commanders in Iraq similarly, overwhelmingly, advised against the surge when Bush was making the decision. This is a matter of indisputable public record and any assertion to the contrary is a proven lie.
Period.
After Bush disrespected and overruled the overwhelming advice of the Chiefs and of the Iraq commanders, and did the surge they pleaded with him not to do, he found a new commander. He also, by the way, ignored and disrespected the advice of Republican leaders such as Sen. John Warner (Va.) and countless Senate GOPers.
When the president claims, falsely, that he decided to surge based on the requests of commanders, who in truth pleaded against the surge, there is a delusional and dishonest quality to this, which is extremely dangerous and symptomatic of what has gone wrong.
It is sad to see Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), with his famous walk in Baghdad, look equally delusional and disingenuous.
The state of play today is that Harry Reid moves boldly against the military escalation while Nancy Pelosi moves boldly in favor of the diplomatic option. In essence Bush is flanked, which explains much of his recent anger.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are home hearing the riot act from voters. When close to 70 percent of Americans want major change in the policy, when Bush attacks Democrats in demeaning terms, he is also attacking a large majority of the American people, who agree with the Democrats.
Regarding Syria, I have long argued that a diplomatic move is the potential game-changer. A deal with Syria offers potential benefits to Israel, to America in Iraq, to Lebanon and to broader Middle East progress while also isolating Iran and creating pressure on that country to make concessions.
Jim Baker has been very visible and aggressive arguing in favor of a mega-diplomatic move with Syria. It is no gimme; it would take hard and tough negotiations, with no downside for trying and huge upside for success.
Regarding the Pelosi trip, I’ve done a number of these congressional trips working for the Democratic leadership, in my case during a Republican presidency, in my case: Reagan’s.
I would predict that when all is said and done, it will be seen that the Pelosi trip supported American goals, and Israeli goals, and is most likely in line with the private thinking of the secretaries of State and Defense. (Though this is speculaton based on experience.)
As both Sen. Reid and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), among others, have said: The president is not a king. America tried that before, and we didn’t like it. Congress is a co-equal branch of government; the Senate has a major constitutional role in foreign affairs; and the Speaker of the House is challenging the Syrians to do what the Bush administration, Israel and the entire free world has called on them to do.
I predict that before the rooster crows 60 times, our president and secretary of state will be sounding and acting like the Speaker today.
The Reid-Pelosi pincer maneuver has begun.
The future will soon be now, and it will be where the majority leader and the Speaker are standing today.
Syria tells Pelosi it’s ready for peace talks
Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Reuters
Apr 4
DAMASCUS - U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on a visit to Syria opposed by the White House, said on Wednesday President Bashar al-Assad was ready to hold peace talks with Israel.
But her remark that Israel was prepared to negotiate with Damascus prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office to underline the Jewish state’s preconditions for such talks.
Democrat Pelosi is the most senior U.S. official to visit Syria in more than two years.
Republican President George W. Bush had said her visit sent mixed signals to Syria. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called it “counterproductive” on Wednesday.
“We were very pleased with the reassurances we received from the president (Assad) that he was ready to resume the peace process. He was ready to engage in negotiations (for) peace with Israel,” Pelosi said.
“(Our) meeting with the president enabled us to communicate a message from prime minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks as well,” Pelosi, the third most senior official in Washington, told reporters after talks with Assad.
An Israeli government official said that was not the message Olmert had asked Pelosi earlier this week to convey to Assad, who seeks the return of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
“The prime minister said Israel is interested in peace with Syria, but Syria would first have to abandon the path of terror and providing support for terrorist groups,” the official said, in reference to Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
“Comments (Olmert) made to the speaker of the House did not represent any change in a policy Israel has expressed to all international figures dealing with the (Syrian) issue,” a statement from Olmert’s office said.
ARAB INITIATIVE
Washington accuses Damascus of sponsoring terrorism and estimates up to 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq enter from Syria. Syria says it is trying to stop the flow.
Assad said Syria was ready to resume talks with Israel based on an Arab peace plan calling for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab land for peace, adopted at a summit last month.
“Syria has adopted the Arab initiative. It’s strategic choice is peace,” the official news agency quoted Assad as telling Pelosi.
Peace talks between Syria and Israel, centered on normal ties in return for the Golan Heights, collapsed in 2000.
Pelosi said it was important Syria used its influence with Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“We called to the attention of the president our concern about fighters crossing the Iraq-Syria border to the detriment of the Iraqi people and our soldiers,” said Pelosi.
Syrian officials said Damascus wants to help Washington achieve an “honorable withdrawal” from Iraq but in return the United States must press Israel to return the Golan Heights.
“The United States has been working in multilateral forums with countries in the region, countries in Europe, to send a message to the Syrians that they need to change their behavior, and it’s unfortunate that she (Pelosi) took this unilateral trip which we only see as counterproductive,” White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters.
The United States withdrew its ambassador from Syria shortly after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Rafik al-Hariri in February 2005. Many Lebanese blame Syria for the killing. Damascus denies involvement.
Pelosi arrived in Saudi Arabia later on Wednesday. She is set to visit the unelected quasi-parliament on Thursday after visiting King Abdullah’s ranch outside Riyadh on Wednesday night, Saudi and U.S. officials said.
Normally close U.S.-Saudi relations suffered a rift last week when King Abdullah termed the U.S. occupation in Iraq as “illegitimate” in a speech to the Arab summit in Riyadh.
Additional reporting by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Tom Perry in Beirut and Andrew Hammond in Riyadh
The surge just died
Bush’s Ayatollah ends it…
Cenk Uygur, HuffPo, via Alternet
April 3, 2007
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has put the last piece of straw on the poor camel called Iraq. And its back is about to break. The keys to success in Iraq were never military strategies. Everyone knows this, well, except of course for George W. Bush. To be fair, even John McCain knows this — and he hardly knows what planet he’s on lately (he just came back from the planet where Iraq is a really safe place to shop).
Every week we have Michael Hirsh of Newsweek on the show. And every week he explains to us that even if the surge was going to work, it would take eight to ten…
… years — and that the US population would never allow an occupation that lasted that long.
I also know that Iraq is already irreversibly broken. The three main sects in Iraq have no sense of national unity. They are far more loyal to their ethnic group than to a fanciful, united Iraq.
The Shiites are only going along with the surge for now because they know they will be left in a much better position afterward. And after the US military is done pounding the Sunnis they will sweep in and try to seize control of the whole country. At which point, larger hostilities would commence inevitably anyway.
But because I am a hopeless optimist, deep in my heart of hearts, I still hoped that the new strategy in Iraq might work (I even wrote about good news coming out of Iraq recently). Not because I thought more troops would help or because George Bush magically knew what he was doing, but because there was a genuine new strategy to reach a political solution behind the scenes, which has always been the only hope.
Ironically, it was Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that started that hope when he blessed a moderate colaition to run Iraq in December 2006. This isolated Moqtada al-Sadr and gave the Iraqi government a chance to work together. A very small chance, but a chance nonetheless.
Condoleezza Rice even set up regional talks where we would engage in dialogue with Iran and Syria. We would talk to Iran and Syria! In a world where George W. Bush is president, that’s gigantic news. Diplomacy at long last!
Our ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, also had the right goals (even though he is one of the original neo-cons, he is a rare person from this administration who I thought did a stand up job in Iraq). Khalilzad wanted to get an oil sharing deal among the different sects, reform the Iraqi constitution and get rid of de-Baathification which was leading to resentment among Sunnis because they were shut out of government jobs. It’s crucial that we undo the damage that Paul Bremer did by de-Baathifying in the first place and driving Sunnis to the waiting arms of the insurgency.
Unfortunately, this is where Ayatollah Sistani just snapped Iraq in two (probably three). After that snake Ahmed Chalabi talked to him, he has put the word out that he will not back the de-Baathification program (this NYT article explains it best). That means Sunnis will not get the stable jobs that would give them an incentive to join the Iraqi government. That means they will feel alienated and fight back against a government that completely excludes them. The insurgency will grow. The civil war which has already begun will now spiral out of control.
The Sunnis no longer have any incentive to make a deal. The only place where they think they might make gains is on the battlefield (I believe they are also sorely mistaken in that belief). So, it’s on. Iraq no longer exists.
By the way, in case you missed it — yes, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani makes the most important decisions in Iraq. The real power in Iraq runs through Sistani. He decided who would be elected to the Iraqi government in the first place when he selected the religious Shiite bloc that won the 2005 elections. George Bush handed Iraq over to a Grand Ayatollah. Brilliant work. Genius. Is it possible to be more incompetent?
So, now the rest of this will play out predictably. The Sunni insurgency will not let up at all. At some point, either we will start to withdraw and be replaced by Shiite militia (by the way, where is the Iraqi army, do they still exist?). That’s the best case scenario.
Or more likely, the Shiite militias will grow impatient and return to challenge the reign of the US military. They will attack the Sunnis, not us. If we then choose to engage them, we will have more trouble than we know what to do with. The civil war will rage out of control (significantly worse than it is now, if you can imagine such a thing) and we will be stuck in the middle of it, fighting both sides.
At which point, we will hastily decide to leave Iraq in helicopters. We will abandon that billion dollar embassy we’re building in the so-called impenetrable Green Zone. And the dire consequences of failure that George Bush and Dick Cheney keep talking about will come to fruition.
And that failure will have nothing whatsoever to do with how many troops we sent over or any kind of withdrawal date we might or might not set. It will have everything to do with a failed political solution in Iraq. This is what George Bush never fully understood and why he has always been sadly overmatched by his position.
The withdrawal that Congress is debating now will only effect whether we leave somewhat gracefully or in complete panic and humiliation. Sistani has already made the decision. The Sunnis will not be coming back into the Iraqi government. The die is cast. The civil war will continue. George W. Bush will leave office a complete embarrassment. And he still won’t know what happened to him.
Nigh As Hell: The End?
Ben Tripp
Apr 5 2007
I cannot help think that we are approaching the endgame.
Bush and his minions do everything that ever worked for them, again and again. And everything that didn’t work, too. They figure they just need to try it one more time.
They amped up the ‘hostage’ crisis with Iran, obviously thirsting for any excuse to start a war. I was caught in a bar once with a drunken asshole that started a fight with a stranger at the other end of the room. Started knocking chairs over and broke his victim’s nose. Practically begging everyone else in the bar to try to take him on.
Nobody did, because there was something about the guy that said he was more crazy than we were. The police came, and we were all in the parking lot, and it wasn’t until this prick was led off in irons that we found out he had a gun on him the whole time. He was just waiting for the rest of the folks to make a rush at him, and then he was going to elevate the situation.
That guy might as well be the president.
I am terrified –I mean that, actually living in real fear– that these lunatics running the country are going to attack Iran, or stand by and allow Israel to start something, or for that matter just wait until somebody out of the millions of enraged, violated enemies America has recently made herself decides to walk into some prominent public American place with a nitroglycerin waistcoat. Then the Executives can declare martial law and be done with elections.
It’s all so ripe and conspiracy-theoristy, but it’s starting to look like equal odds that something like this will happen, versus we just limp along and put the American Dream back together over the course of the next thirty years or so.
So I’m checking the Internet news feeds every couple of hours (I don’t watch cable; my blood pressure can’t take it). Waiting for one of the big pieces to fall out of our increasingly rickety system. It doesn’t have to be a war. It could be an outbreak of disease, or the economy could finally choke on its own vomit.
The long-predicted ripple of foreclosures and loan denials in the real estate bubble: will that trigger an economic disaster? Oil prices? Think gas is expensive now, wait ’till we’re bombing around the Straits of Hormuz, through which our oil is shipped. Or maybe we’re one ‘free trade’ agreement away from the final collapse of the American manufacturing base.
I don’t know. There are fifty worst-case scenarios and only a couple of good ones.
My point is not that there’s no hope. I continue to develop movie projects that probably won’t get made, but what the hell– they might. I continue to work at a day job that involves more optimism than good sense, designing theme parks and resorts for a world population we believe will have the liberty and the money to enjoy our products. I’m engaged to be married, even. These are the acts of an optimist.
My concern, the thing that fills me with fear, is that the people running our country are nihilists, men and women for whom hope is as alien as morality or a sense of consequence beyond self-gratification.
The hour is nigh, in any case. They have to do something, these wicked people running our country. They are threatened by the mewlings of a weak opposition that at last finds itself compelled by popular will to do something. As the opposition continues to reap the rewards of unity and public support, it will grow bolder. Impeachment is not off the table forever, and beyond impeachment there is the chance of some kind of ’soft revolution’ in which the military ceases to respond to orders from the executive. A constitutional crisis (one out of many available) could come to a head and paralyze the government. There is as much bad news for them as there is for the common man.
So they must act, and soon. Right now, despite the gentle siege on the Unitary Executive presently underway, the power of Bush’s government is at its absolute zenith. Anybody can be spirited away for any reason at any time, forever, to name just one of the instruments of its control. Congress will begin the slow journey back to relevance in the next months. The mightiest president this country has ever had, in terms of his reach and command over the governance of America, will find himself weak as a kitten, and thereafter as a private citizen hounded by his victims and enemies until his demise.
They must act: start another war, suffer another outrage on American soil, do something to dampen this bothersome oppositional will that has risen against them. And they must do it very soon. They say that history repeats itself. That is too kind to humanity. Rather, history is repeated by men. If Bush, Cheney, and the flying monkeys around them intend to retain their historic power over the world, they must repeat the very history they recently made. And they way they’re throwing their weight around at home and abroad, it’s pretty clear they’ve brought a gun to the fistfight.
They figure they just need to try it one more time.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
abkahan ujala mp3mp3 lahdo ablahadableton mp3 djingabm bop mp3creep abney park mp3abnocto mp3 prophecymp3 abo aliarthur mp3 aboab planete Mapringtone stewart alringtone tout le monde afree ringtone 3285 nokiaringtones $1.99harrington alexanderwave lg to add ringtonesringtones for lg com phones amazonfree alan jackson ringtones Map
April 5th, 2007