Vergeleken met uitspraken van Israelische rabbijnen over Palestijenen en ander Goyim, zijn die van Ahmadinejad over Israel en Joden kinderspel.

Het lijkt uitgesloten dat premier Benjamin Netanyahu ooit tot een blijvende bevriezing - laat staan ontmanteling - van Israelische nederzettingen in de West Bank en Oost Jeruzalem gebracht zal kunnen worden; daarvoor is zijn regering te zeer afhankelijk van de ultra-orthodoxe Zionistische Shas partij.

Shas spiritual leader: Abbas and Palestinians should perish (Haaretz, 29/8)

Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef denounced upcoming peace talks with the Palestinians, which are set to start September 2 in Washington, and called for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to "perish from this world," Army Radio reported overnight Saturday.

"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world," Rabbi Ovadia was quoted as saying during his weekly sermon at a synagogue near his Jerusalem home. "God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians."..

How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Israeli Rabbis Defend Book's Shocking Religious Defense of Killing Non-Jews (with Video) (AlterNet, 30/8)

A rabbinical guidebook for killing non-Jews has sparked an uproar in Israel and exposed the power a bunch of genocidal theocrats wield over the government..

As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha'Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book's contents as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew." According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has inner or has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."..

Israel rabbi calls for 'plague' on Mahmoud Abbas (BBC News, 30/8)

A senior rabbi from a party within Israel's coalition government has called for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to "vanish from our world".

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas, spoke out as Middle East talks are poised to begin in Washington.

The United States condemned the remarks as "deeply offensive".

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments with a statement saying that his government wanted peace with the Palestinians.

The attack on Mr Abbas, delivered in the rabbi's weekly sermon, also prompted chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat to condemn the remarks as "an incitement to genocide"..

Any bastard can be a rabbi (Haaretz, 27/8)

These masters of Jewish law act as if they have not heard of Shmaya, and contrary to his recommendations in the Mishna tractate "Avot" (Ethics of our Fathers ), they actually very much like the rabbinate.

Interior Minister: Israel will never freeze construction in Jerusalem (Haaretz, 30/8)

Yishai tells Shas daily that he has clarified this stance to the U.S., and plans to expedite construction in the capital.

Some 30 years ago, the Hebrew slogan was coined: "Medinat halakha - halkha hamedina," which means more or less that if Israel becomes a state governed by Jewish law, that will be the end of the state. Is the end near? It is coming..

Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Thursday that Israel had not agreed to freeze construction in East Jerusalem, adding that American demands to do so would never be met.

"There is not and never has been a freeze on construction in Jerusalem, nor will there ever be," said Yishai, whose approval of a 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit in March sparked tension in U.S.-Israeli ties.

Yishai, who heads the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, told his faction's newspaper that the issue would not be raised during upcoming visits by senior American officials...

HOMICIDAL RABBI FINDS WIDE SUPPORT IN ISRAEL (National Prayers Network, 31 Aug 2010)

Early this month, intrepid reporter Jonathan Cook told of a powerful Israeli rabbi, Yitzhak Shapira, under investigation for allegedly inciting the slaughter of Gentile babies. He advocates doing whatever necessary to drive out Palestinians.

So far the policy has chiefly involved violent harassment of Palestinians, with settlers inflicting beatings, attacking homes, throwing stones, burning fields, killing livestock and poisoning wells.

It is feared, however, that Shapira’s book The King’s Torah, published last year, is intended to offer ideological justifications for widening the scope of such attacks to include killing Palestinians, even children.

…Shapira was released a few hours after his questioning last Monday, dozens of rabbis, as well as several members of parliament, rallied to his side, condemning the arrest...

Judaism’s most sacred Scriptures, the Talmud and Zohar, contain many admonitions to kill Gentiles and Christians. Probably the most widely referenced by ultra-Orthodox in Israel today is that of the preeminent Talmudic sage Simeon ben Yohai. In Abodah Zarah 26b, he cries out, “The best of the Gentiles deserves to be killed.” (Jewish Encyclopedia, “Gentile,” p. 617) Simeon ben Yohai is regarded with the highest respect by modern religious Jews, meriting praise by the Encyclopedia Judaica as one of the giants of Judaism. In Israel today, during the Festival of Lhe-ba’Omer, “tens of thousands assemble in Meron, the traditional resting place of R. Simeon ben Yohai…” to honor him in a week of Kabbalistic singing and dancing. (“ Israel, State of (Religious Life),” Encylopedia Judaica, p. 903)..

 

EXAMPLES OF JEWISH HATE SPEECH

Fundamentalism into the mainstream (Haaretz, 31 Aug 2010)

Fundamentalist rabbis have approved murder, attacks on Arabs, illegal land seizures and racist segregation, and have ignored the murder of a prime minister.

...Nothing new, so far. Fundamentalist rabbis have approved murder, attacks on Arabs and their property, the illegal takeover of land, racist segregation between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi female pupils, and have ignored (at least ) the murder of a prime minister. After all, the source of authority of those same rabbis, the book of books, is full of hair-raising descriptions of the vengeance exacted by the Children of Israel on the peoples of this land.

As for the humanity of "the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate Me," killer of the Egyptian firstborn, we can hold a seminar or two. Thumbing their noses at the law of the state is not an invention by Lior or similar rabbis. As far as disrespecting the law is concerned, Lior is an excellent pupil of Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Only naivete or pretending can explain the surprise at the spitting in the face of the police as they try to investigate the rabbis who provided a wall of defense to abomination.

What is new is that these are no longer "hilltop rabbis," "wild weeds" or "fence hoppers" who are turning their backs on the instructions of great rabbinical figures and the law. They and their supporters are transforming zealous fundamentalism and the shameful "The King's Torah "into the mainstream...

‘Sinner’ singer given 39 lashes by rabbis (Jerusalem Post, 27 Aug 2010)

A singer who performed in front of a “mixed audience” of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him “repent,” after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews “back to religion” (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women...

SHOFAR is a non profit organization dedicated to disseminate Torah Judaism

(Hier moet de betreffende video op staan)

By Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, September 2010)

FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, THE PROSPECT OF A NUCLEARIZED IRAN IS DISMAL TO CONTEMPLATE— IT WOULD CREATE MAJOR NEW NATIONAL-SECURITY CHALLENGES AND CRUSH THE PRESIDENT’S DREAM OF ENDING NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION. BUT THE VIEW FROM JERUSALEM IS STILL MORE DIRE: A NUCLEARIZED IRAN REPRESENTS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A THREAT TO ISRAEL’S VERY EXISTENCE. IN THE GAP BETWEEN WASHINGTON’S AND JERUSALEM’S VIEWS OF IRAN LIES THE QUESTION: WHO, IF ANYONE, WILL STOP IRAN BEFORE IT GOES NUCLEAR, AND HOW? AS WASHINGTON AND JERUSALEM STUDY EACH OTHER INTENSELY, HERE’S AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE STRATEGIC CALCULATIONS ON BOTH SIDES—AND AT HOW, IF THINGS REMAIN ON THE CURRENT COURSE, AN ISRAELI AIR STRIKE WILL UNFOLD...

Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, I agreed with those, including many Israelis, Arabs—and Iranians—who believe there is no chance that Obama would ever resort to force to stop Iran; I still don’t believe there is a great chance he will take military action in the near future—for one thing, the Pentagon is notably unenthusiastic about the idea. But Obama is clearly seized by the issue. And understanding that perhaps the best way to obviate a military strike on Iran is to make the threat of a strike by the Americans seem real, the Obama administration seems to be purposefully raising the stakes. A few weeks ago, Denis McDonough, the chief of staff of the National Security Council, told me, “What you see in Iran is the intersection of a number of leading priorities of the president, who sees a serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime, a threat of cascading nuclear activities in a volatile region, and a threat to a close friend of the United States, Israel. I think you see the several streams coming together, which accounts for why it is so important to us.”

When I asked Peres what he thought of Netanyahu’s effort to make Israel’s case to the Obama administration, he responded, characteristically, with a parable, one that suggested his country should know its place, and that it was up to the American president, and only the American president, to decide in the end how best to safeguard the future of the West. The story was about his mentor, David Ben-Gurion.

“Shortly after John F. Kennedy was elected president, Ben-Gurion met him at the Waldorf-Astoria” in New York, Peres told me. “After the meeting, Kennedy accompanied Ben-Gurion to the elevator and said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you, I was elected because of your people, so what can I do for you in return?’ Ben-Gurion was insulted by the question. He said, ‘What you can do is be a great president of the United States. You must understand that to have a great president of the United States is a great event.’”

Peres went on to explain what he saw as Israel’s true interest. “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”

Bombing Iran: What is The Atlantic's Line?

By James Fallows in The Atlantic, september 2010)

Jeffrey Goldberg's cover story, on Israel's preparations to bomb Iran (and what that means for America), is getting a lot of attention, and deserves to. It is very much worth reading for its thoroughly-reported and authoritative assessment of what the Israeli, U.S., and Iranian governments are likely to do and why. It immediately becomes invaluable primary evidence about the complex pressures within these governments -- at least America's and Israel's. About Iran, who really knows. 

Two points about the larger argument about Iran and the context of the piece:

1) Is this article warmongering? Or to put it more delicately, is it meant to condition the American public and politicians to the prospect of an attack on Iran? Many people have portrayed it as such. I disagree. I think that those reading the piece as a case for bombing Iran are mainly reacting to arguments about the preceding war. 

Jeff Goldberg was a big proponent of invading Iraq, as I was not -- and those who disagreed with him about that war have in many cases taken the leap of assuming he's making the case for another assault. I think this is mainly response to byline rather than argument. If this new article had appeared under the byline of someone known to have opposed the previous war and to be skeptical about the next one, I think the same material could be read in the opposite way  -- as a cautionary revelation of what the Netanyahu government might be preparing to do. Taken line by line, the article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective: this is what the Israeli officials seem to think, this is how American officials might react, this is how Israeli officials might anticipate how the Americans might react, these are the Israeli voices of caution, here are the potential readings and mis-readings on each side. 

Moreover, rather than guess at Jeff Goldberg's policy prescriptions, we can read his explicit presentation of them, here.  He argues that there is one highly desirable outcome -- success of the "Obama plan," a combination of pressures, threats, and incentives to shift Iran toward a different path. If that doesn't work, as he explains, the remaining options are all bad, and we will choose among them when we have to. So disagree with him about Iraq, if you will and as I did. But after that, please take his reporting for the achievement and contribution that it is, and his "profound, paralyzing ambivalence" about military strikes on Iran on its own merits. 

2) How does it square with other things the magazine has written on the topic? In addition to Jeff Goldberg's article and subsequent posts, please read Robert Kaplan's assessment in this issue of what deterrence would mean in dealing with an Iran that did get nuclear weapons; plus Clive Crook'sresponse and a chain of others that he links to, including this and this. 

And then there was the previous Atlantic cover story about bombing Iran, which I did back in 2004. It was based on a mock war-game exercise to see what, in practical terms, it would mean to "take out" Iran's nuclear facilities. The conclusion was that, even then, Iran's facilities were too dispersed to eliminate by an aerial attack; that an attack would likely unify and motivate Iranians behind their government and the drive to become a nuclear power; that even if Israel attacked on its own, the United States would still be blamed; and that even the most "successful" attack would exchange a temporary tactical advantage (temporary delay in Iran's plans) for a major strategic setback, namely lasting complications and vulnerabilities for the U.S. around the world. Last year Anthony Cordesman, of CSIS, laid out a similar analysis of an Israeli strike, which came to similar cautionary conclusions. 

How can these two cover stories be reconciled? Well, maybe they don't have to be. They're by two different people; the magazine is meant to contain a lot of different views; and a lot of time has passed, with changes in relevant circumstances. But I think there is less tension between them than may appear. 

In the final part of his article, Jeff Goldberg is unblinking about the challenges and possible failures of a military attempt to remove Iran's nuclear facilities, especially if done just by Israel. This point, in one of today's posts, is exactly congruent with the argument I made five-plus years ago:..

Living With a Nuclear Iran

By Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic, September 2010)

IRAN CAN BE CONTAINED. THE PATH TO FOLLOW? A COURSE LAID OUT HALF A CENTURY AGO BY A YOUNG HENRY KISSINGER, WHO ARGUED THAT AMERICAN CHANCES OF CHECKING REVOLUTIONARY POWERS SUCH AS THE SOVIET UNION DEPENDED ON OUR CREDIBLE WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE THEM IN LIMITED [nuclear] WAR.

Hoe - en door wie en waarom - zijn 'we' in de fataal contra-productieve oorlogen in Irak en Afghanistan geluisd? Die vragen rijzen temeer n.a.v.

WikiLeaks' onthullende 'Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010'

 Volgens Simon Jenkins van The Guardian is dat te wijten aan de te grote invloed van het militair/politiek-industriele complex in zekere landen (lees: de VS en het VK). Ik voeg daaraan toe: de te grote macht van de zionistische (Groot)Israel lobby. Deze twee lobbies dringen nu aan op het 'preventief' aanvallen van 'nucleair' Iran..

A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan

By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked warlogs bear devastating witness to our incompetence

• • Simon Jenkins
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 July 2010

...The war logs are not so much sensational as relentless. Most of the material was known. It is the detail that bears devastating witness. Afghanistan 2001 now enters firmly into the pantheon of folly, from the wooden horse to Napoleon in Moscow to Vietnam. Indeed it bears the added crassness of coming two decades after the Russians committed the exact same folly in the same place.

In 1971 the Pentagon papers revealed the deception of the Johnson and Nixon governments during the Vietnam war. The papers were credited with collapsing US morale as the war drew to a close. The Afghanistan logs convey a different message. They show George Bush, Tony Blair and their generals to be so dazzled by their massive military (and intellectual) firepower that they thought they were invincible against a tinpot Taliban.

Anyone who visited Kabul in the past eight years knew that a western war of occupation would end in tears. The Taliban were a concept, not an army. Al-Qaida was an unwelcome guest, but only the Taliban were likely to expel it. Mujahideen would ooze from the rocks if provoked and never stop fighting until the infidel was expelled. Pakistan, long holder of the key to the Afghan door, had a powerful interest in backing the Taliban, an interest promoted and financed by the CIA in the 1980s. All this was known – and is now confirmed.

What could not have been predicted is that Nato, the Pentagon and Britain's defence ministry could so ignore past history and current intelligence as to invade with main force, seek to pacify the Pashtun and then "build a nation" in a medieval land along western democratic lines – all with such incompetence. We could not have predicted, back in 2001-2, that this adventure would become the apotheosis of liberal interventionism, a good war, a righteous war, a New Labour war...

I cannot avoid the conclusion that, just as the Pashtun are said to be "hardwired to fight", so now are certain western regimes. War is about sating the military-security-industrial complex, a lobby so potent that, long after the cold war ended, it can induce democratic leaders to expend quantities of blood and money on such specious pretexts as suppressing dictators in one country and terror in another.

Like puppets dancing to manufactured fears and dreams of glory, these leaders have lost their grip on Plato's "sacred golden cord of reason". Until that grip is restored, the folly revealed by the war logs will continue.

Inside Top Secret America

A major investigation reveals the extent of America's vast and heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment.

10 Needed Steps for Obama to Start Dismantling America's Gigantic, Destructive Military Empire

The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment will condemn the U.S. to devastating consequences.

Obama's Tricky Battle with the Military-Media Complex (AlterNet, 30/8)

Will the powerful military-media complex allow Obama to remove 'all US troops from Iraq' by the end of next year?..

Given that Obama has delivered on his promise in Iraq, why should we doubt next year’s pending pullouts from both Iraq and Afghanistan? Simple: high military officials and their accomplices in the media ardently oppose both – and the president is either unwilling or simply unable to confront them...

Economics of U.S. Military Interventions, Part 1 (TheStreet, 13 Aug 2010)

Editor's note: This is the first of two parts on the economics of U.S. military interventions.

A significant portion of the U.S. GDP goes to overseas military interventions. This first will provide data on these interventions, while the second will focus on the effectiveness of the most recent invasions.

Economics of U.S. Military Interventions, Part 2 (TheStreet, 24 Aug 2010)

This is the second in a two-part series on the economics of U.S. military interventions. Thefirst part provided cost and fatality numbers of past and current wars. This one focuses on the most recent interventions: Afghanistan and Iraq. It asks whether these wars have contributed to achieving America's global strategy objectives.

De 'gemiddelde' burger heeft geen besef van de mate waarin het zionistisch (Groot-)Israel

beleid van Israel en haar lobby wordt geaccepteerd - of zelfs gesteund - door de EU en de NAVO.

Robert Fisk: Israel has crept into the EU without anyone noticing (The Independent)

The death of five Israeli servicemen in a helicopter crash in Romania this week raised scarcely a headline. There was a Nato-Israeli exercise in progress. Well, that's OK then. Now imagine the death of five Hamas fighters in a helicopter crash in Romania this week. We'd still be investigating this extraordinary phenomenon...

Israel als NAVO's wapenbroeder - en omgekeerd?

Iedereen die al tegen de bemoeienis van de NAVO in Afghanistan was, zal het eens zijn met de auteur van dit Commentaar in Der Spiegel: de NAVO moet zich snel uit Afghanistan terugtrekken. Maar hoe snel is nu mogelijk en wat zijn de consequenties? 

Why NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan -

A Plea for Common Sense (A Commentary by Christoph Schwennicke in Spiegelonline, 07/28/2010)

It is difficult for politicians to admit they were wrong. But when it comes to Afghanistan, the consequences of not doing so could be high. It is time for the West to cut its losses and withdraw...

Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War 

George W. Bush led the United States into war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein might give his country’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Now, Bush’s successor is perpetuating the war in Afghanistan with comparably dubious arguments about the danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

President Barack Obama insists that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is about "making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests and our allies" or "project violence against" American citizens. The reasoning is that if the Taliban win in Afghanistan, al Qaeda will once again be able to set up shop there to carry out its dirty work. As the president puts it, Afghanistan would "again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." This argument is constantly repeated but rarely examined; given the costs and risks associated with the Obama administration’s plans for the region, it is time such statements be given the scrutiny they deserve...

Waartoe zal de door de klokkenluiders-site Wikileaks - en zijn 'media-partners' The New York Times, The Guardian en Der Spiegel - op 26 juli publiek gemaakte 'Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010' allemaal leiden? Men mag hopen tot tenminste een algemeen realistischer inzicht bij westerse beleidsmakers en opinieleiders, ook in Nederland.

De 75.000 geheime Amerikaanse militaire documenten bevatten een enorme hoeveelheid gedetailleerde informatie over de oorlogvoering in Afghanistan.

Een blik op 'The War Logs' van Wikipedia en Google toont al meer dan 100 artikelen over diverse aspecten van het onderwerp, zoals de toenemende sterkte van de Taliban, de  

steun vanuit Pakistan, Iran en Noord Korea voor de guerilla's, de geheime coalitie- en CIA-operaties, de vele niet gerapporteerde burgerslachtoffers t.g.v. geallieerde acties (waaronder Nederlandse), en problemen met regeringsinstanties en de lokale bevolking.

Een meerderheid van de Tweede Kamer wil zo snel mogelijk een kabinetsreactie op de uitgelekte documenten op WikiLeaks over de oorlog in Afghanistan. D66-leider Pechtold kwam met dat verzoek. De SP wil de kabinetsreactie niet afwachten en eist nu al een onafhankelijk onderzoek naar de oorlog in Afghanistan.

Men kan verwachten dat het parlementaire animo om meer politie-trainers naar Afghanistan te sturen een geduchte deuk heeft opgelopen.

Zelf ben ik van meet af aan tegen de oorlogen in Afghanistan en Irak, zoals ook op deze site veelvuldig tot uiting gebracht. Ik juich de publicatie van de 'Afghan War Diary' daarom toe in de hoop dat deze zal leiden tot een beter beleid bij het voorkomen en bestrijden van moslimextremisme.

Ik vrees echter dat de neo-cons annex zionistische (Groot-)Israel lobby hun druk om 'nucleair' Iran 'preventief' aan te vallen succesvol zullen opvoeren door een verbinding te leggen tussen de regiem van dat land en Al Qaida & Taliban: 'allemaal moslimterroristen'.

Een evt. VVD-PVV-CDA-kabinet zou zulk een aanval steunen, daarvan ben ik overtuigd.

How Bush Botched the Afghan War

The 75,000 classified Afghan War reports, which were just published by Wikileaks, provide a troubling narrative of that conflict’s downward spiral as President George W. Bush concentrated the American military on the neoconservative target of choice, Iraq.

Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly Folly

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an undisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.

Het aanvallen van Iran is noodzakelijk teneinde dat land te weerhouden van het met nucleaire wapens aanvallen van israel, zo betoogt Premier Balkenende's favoriete 'waardenfluisteraar', de (Joods-Zionistische) Amerikaanse hoogleraar Amitai Etzioni, in een recent artikel in de 'Military Review'.

Balkenende is een bevlogen aanhanger van het door Etzioni met verve uitgedragen communitarianisme. Hij heeft deze professor verschillende malen uitgenodigd om in Nederland zijn visie te geven op (besloten) symposia etc..

Etzioni is zich geleidelijk aan meer gaan richten op internationaal beleid. Zijn laatste artikel past in de toenemende pressie die vanuit de zionistische (Groot)Israel lobby wordt uitgevoerd om president Obama tot het 'preventief' aanvallen van 'nucleair en anti-Semietisch' Iran.

In een eerder artikel, die mij meer aanspreekt, propageerde hij 'deproliferation', waarbij aan Noord-Korea en Iran non-agressie verdragen worden aangeboden in ruil voor het opgeven van hun militair-nucleaire aspiraties.

Opmerking terzijde:

Naast het inventariseren van standpunten t.a.v. binnenlandse onderwerpen bij de vorming van een nieuw kabinet, is het vergelijken van het voorgestane internationale veiligheidsbeleid van de verschillende politieke partijen. Een oorlog met Iran heeft potentieel catastrofale consequenties voor het Midden-Oosten en de gehele wereld.

Het eerdere kabinet-Balkenende heeft ten onrechte de invasie van Irak gesteund; dat Maxime Verhagen en Geert Wilders onvoorwaardelijk achter zionistisch Israel staan, is algemeen bekend. Maar ook de VVD, zij het in minder uitgesproken mate, behoort tot dat kamp. 

Muscular Nonrationality: Amitai Etzioni and War with Iran

Marsha B. Cohen | Posted: July 21, 2010 in IPS/Right Web

IN A RECENT ARTICLE FOR THE U.S. Army’s Military Review, Amitai Etzioni, a well known public intellectual and a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, argues that the United States will have to bomb Iran to prevent that country from acquiring nuclear weapons. Offering at times banal arguments about how the United States must demonstrate it is a real global power, Etzioni has added his voice to an increasingly raucous chorus of right-wingers and militant “pro-Israel” groups who warn that Tehran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons at all costs.

Commenting to a reporter in Israel, where his Military Review article has received widespread attention, Etzioni said recently, “The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East.” 

Etzioni’s status as a renowned scholar of social policy whose work has won praise both nationally and internationally warrants paying close attention to the potential impact of his utterances on U.S. foreign policy discourse. Additionally, his increasingly strident stance vis-à-vis purported threats to the United States and Israel comes at a time of growing polarization in the United States over whether the country—and, in particular, its Jewish community—should support the hardline policies pursued by Israel’s leaders.

How is it that Etzioni—a self-described “peacemonger”who was once dubbed “the Everything Expert” by Time magazine—has come to adopt stridently hardline prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy? And are his arguments on Iran valid?....

...“A Unifying Opportunity”?

Etzioni’s call for military strikes on Iran comes at a time of deep division among U.S. Jewish groups over U.S.-Israeli relations. Iran has “represented a unifying opportunity for groups that were facing a Jewish community more divided than ever by fundamental issues of war and peace,” wrote James Besser in the Jewish Week. Besser quotes Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn, who considers the Jewish community’s “leading the charge on the Iran issue” to have been “healthy.” “It was an opportunity for an issue on which people can agree, across the spectrum—liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.”

Yet American Jewish leaders have—until now—been reluctant to call for outright war against Iran. The perception that “if Washington initiates war with Iran over the nuclear issue, it will be primarily in response to pressure from Israel and the more Likudnik parts of the pro-Israel community in the United States”—is deeply troubling to most American Jews. If leaders of Jewish organizations become proponents of a U.S. military strike on Iran, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss such perceptions as inaccurate or unfair.    

Etzioni’s warmongering also comes at a time when the U.S. military is rethinking the premises that drew it into Afghanistan and Iraq, even as increasingly shrill voices on the right are working to push the public to support an “inevitable” attack on Iran. Beeman suspects that “people like Etzioni are hoping to goad Iran into defensive military action to allow Israel to then really launch a full-scale attack.” Etzioni’s insistence that the United States treat an attack on Israel as an attack on its own territory supports this interpretation.

It is worth noting that the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center publishes Military Review as “a forum for the open exchange of ideas about military matters of importance to the U.S. Army with a focus on the concepts, doctrine, and warfighting at the tactical and operational levels of war.”Its author submission information states, “Military Review is specifically looking for cutting-edge articles. As a result, well-researched, well-written, persuasive articles that espouse a view that differs from conventional or doctrinal views often find a home atMilitary Review whereas they might be rejected elsewhere.”

That Etzioni would interpret the publication of his article as an endorsement of his personal views and publicize it as such—as he did in his recent interview with Haaretz—is troubling. ThatMilitary Review apparently finds Etzioni’s Iran insights to be “well-researched” and “persuasive” is alarming. The possibility that U.S. military strategists might regard them as plausible is downright scary.

Dr. Marsha B. Cohen is a Middle East analyst and a contributor to IPS Right Web (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/) who specializes in Iranian-Israeli relations and U.S. foreign policy.

Ook Geert Wilders' idool Daniel Pipes propageert het aanvallen van Iran

'Aanval op Iran' op deze blogsite

Amerikaanse politieke haviken die eerder aanzetten tot de invasie van Irak, bereiden nu in toenemende mate de publieke opinie voor op een, volgens hen, onafwendbare oorlog met 'nucleair' en 'anti-Semietisch' Iran. Hierbij speelt de zionistische (Groot-)Israel lobby een belangrijke - en door president Obama nauwelijks te weerstane - rol.

Het onderkennen van de gemaakte fouten bij de besluitvorming tot de invasie van Irak, kan de mensheid hopelijk behoeden voor een potentieel catastrofale oorlog met Iran.

Bij de vorming van een nieuw kabinet in Nederland, dienen ook de standpunten van de verschillende partijen t.a.v. buitenlands- en veiligheidsbeleid te worden betrokken. Zo kan men met name gevoeglijk aannemen dat Geert Wilders' PVV het aanvallen van Iran zou propageren.

At War with Iran by Early 2011? Jim Lobe / Inter Press Service, July 14, 2010

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," explained then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card back in September 2002, in answer to queries about why the administration of George W. Bush had not launched its campaign to rally public opinion behind invading Iraq earlier in the summer.

And while it's only July - and less than a month after the U.N., the European Union (EU) and the U.S. Congress approved new economic sanctions against Iran - a familiar clutch of Iraq war hawks appear to be preparing the ground for a major new campaign to rally public opinion behind military action against the Islamic Republic.

Barring an unexpected breakthrough on the diplomatic front, that campaign, like the one eight years ago, is likely to move into high gear this autumn, beginning shortly after the Labour Day holiday, Sep. 6, that marks the end of summer vacation.

By the following week, the November mid-term election campaign will be in full swing, and Republican candidates are expected to make the charge that Democrats and President Barack Obama are "soft on Iran" their top foreign policy issue.

In any event, veterans of the Bush administration's pre-Iraq invasion propaganda offensive are clearly mobilising their arguments for a similar effort on Iran, even suggesting that the timetable between campaign launch and possible military action - a mere six months in Iraq's case - could be appropriate.

"By the first quarter of 2011, we will know whether sanctions are proving effective," wrote Bush's former national security adviser,Stephen Hadley, and Israeli Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog in a paper published last week by the Washington Institute for Near Policy(WINEP), a think tank closely tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

"The administration should begin to plan now for a course of action should sanctions be deemed ineffective by the first or second quarter of next year. The military option must be kept on the table both as a means of strengthening diplomacy and as a worst-case scenario," they asserted.

While Hadley and Herzog argued that the administration should begin planning military options now – presumably to be ready for possible action as early as next spring – others are calling for more urgent and demonstrative preparations.

''We cannot afford to wait indefinitely to determine the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions," wrote former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and Air Force Gen. Charles Wald (ret.) in a column published in Friday's Washington Post in which they warned that Tehran "could achieve nuclear weapons capability before the end of this year, posing a strategically untenable threat to the United States".

"If diplomatic and economic pressures do not compel Iran to terminate its nuclear program, the U.S. military has the capability and is prepared to launch an effective, targeted strike on Tehran's nuclear and military facilities," they wrote.

Their column was based on the latest of three reports promoting the use of military pressure on Iran released by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) since 2008 and overseen by BPC's neo-conservative foreign policy director, Michael Makovsky.

Makovsky, whose brother (David Makovsky) is a senior official at WINEP, served as a consultant to the controversial Pentagon office set up in the run-up to the Iraq War to find evidence of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as a justification for the invasion.

The BPC report, "Meeting the Challenge: When Time Runs Out", urged the Obama administration, among other immediate steps, to "augment the Fifth Fleet presence in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, including the deployment of an additional (aircraft) carrier battle group and minesweepers to the waters off Iran; conduct broad exercises with its allies in the Persian Gulf; ...initiate a 'strategic partnership' with Azerbaijan to enhance regional access..." as a way of demonstrating Washington's readiness to go to war.

"If such pressure fails to persuade Iran's leadership, the United States and its allies would have no choice but to consider blockading refined petroleum imports into Iran," it went on, noting that such a step would "effectively be an act of war and the U.S. and its allies would have to prepare for its consequences".

Of course, some Iraq hawks, most aggressively Bush's former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, have insisted that neither diplomacy nor sanctions, no matter how tough, would be sufficient to dissuade Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapons and that military action - preferably by the U.S., but, if not, by Israel - would be necessary, and sooner rather than later.

Since the Jun. 12, 2009 disputed elections and the emergence of the opposition Green Movement in Iran, a few neo- conservatives, notably Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) andMichael Ledeen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies(FDD), have argued that a military attack could prove counter-productive by rallying an otherwise discontented - and possibly rebellious - population behind the regime.

But with the Green Movement seemingly unable to challenge the government in the streets that argument has been losing ground among the hawks who, in any event, blame the opposition's alleged weakness on Obama's failure to provide it with more support.

"Unfortunately, President Obama waffled while innocent Iranians were killed by their own government," wrote William Kristol and Jamie Fly, in Kristol's Weekly Standard last month.

"It's now increasingly clear that the credible threat of a military strike against Iran's nuclear program is the only action that could convince the regime to curtail its ambition," wrote the two men, who direct theForeign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organisation of the neo- conservative-led Project for the New American Century (PNAC) that played a key role in preparing the ground for the Iraq invasion.

Neo-conservative and other hawks have also pounced on reported remarks by United Arab Emirates (UAE) Amb. Yousef al-Otaiba, at a retreat sponsored by The Atlantic magazine in Colorado this week to nullify another obstacle to military action – the widespread belief that Washington's Arab allies oppose a military attack on Iran by the U.S. or Israel as too risky for their own security and regional stability.

"We cannot live with a nuclear Iran," Otaiba was quoted as saying in a Washington Times article by Eli Lake, a prominent neo-conservative journalist.

"Mr. Otaiba's ...comments leave no doubt what he and most Arab officials think about the prospect of a nuclear revolutionary Shiite state," the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, a major media champion of the Iraq War, opined. "They desperately want someone, and that means the U.S. or Israel, to stop it, using force if need be."

Otaiba was interviewed at the conference by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, an influential U.S.-Israeli writer who in a widely noted essay published by The New Yorker magazine in 2002 claimed that Hussein was supporting an al Qaeda group in Kurdistan and that the Iraqi leader would soon possess nuclear weapons.

Goldberg, who asserted in his blog this week that "the idea of a group of Persian Shi'ites having possession of a nuclear bomb ...certainly scares [Arab leaders] more than the reality of the Jewish bomb," is reportedly working on an essay on the necessity of attacking Iran's nuclear facilities for publication by The Atlantic in September.

Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service and a contributor to IPS Right Web (http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/). He blogs at http://www.lobelog.com/

'Aanval op Iran' op deze site

De invasie van Irak heeft geleid tot radicalisering onder Britse moslims en escalatie van de terroristische dreiging, getuigde het voormalig hoofd van de Britse binnenlandse veiligheidsdienst MI 5, Barones Manningham-Buller, voor de commissie-Chilcot die de besluitvorming tot deelname aan die oorlog onderzoekt. 

Voorafgaand aan de invasie heeft MI 5 grote twijfels gerapporteerd aan de eventuele betrokkenheid van Saddam Hussein aan '9/11' en aan de, door de Geheime Dienst MI 6 beweerde, aanwezigheid van massavernietigingswapens in dat land. Door de oorlog met Irak is de strijd tegen de dreiging van Al Qaida in Afghanistan jarenlang veronachtzaamd waardoor daar een langdurig strategisch probleem is veroorzaakt, zo getuigde zij verder.

Opmerkingen:

- De voormalige premiers Blair en Brown zullen niet blij zijn met deze getuigenis en waarschijnlijk het uiteindelijke rapport van deze onderzoek-commissie met angst en beven tegemoet zien.

- Het onderkennen van de gemaakte fouten bij de besluitvorming tot de invasie van Irak, kan de mensheid hopelijk behoeden van een potentieel catastrofale oorlog met Iran.

The war in Iraq led to a huge increase in the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 has told the Iraq Inquiry.

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

July 20, 2010 "The Telegraph" -- Baroness Manningham-Buller added that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein had caused a "long-term major and strategic problem" for Britain by allowing al-Qaeda time to build a stronghold in Afghanistan unnopposed.

She told the inquiry: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam…

“Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”

The inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, released a memo written by Baroness Manningham-Buller in March 2002, in which she warned the Government that declaring war on Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.

The note made clear that MI5 did not regard Iraq as a significant terrorist threat to British interests before the war, and had discounted any link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks on the US.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, then deputy director-general of the Security Service, also revealed that MI5 refused to provide evidence for the Government's now-infamous dossier on Saddam's military capability because it doubted the credibility of the information.

"We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn't think it was reliable," she said.

She said the intelligence on Iraqi WMD - most of which came from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 - used to justify the invasion had been "fragmentary" and did not justify the weight placed upon it.

"If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that and I think there is very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision," she said.

She said the decision to go to war in Iraq meant that insufficient attention was paid to Afghanistan.

"By focusing on Iraq we reduced the focus on the al Qaida threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major and strategic problem," she said.

'IRAQ WAR LED TO SURGE IN TERRORISTS PLOS AGAINST BRITAIN'

London, July 20 (DPA) Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq led to an almost unmanageable increase in the number of terrorist plots against it, a former head of British intelligence revealed Tuesday.

Speaking at the official inquiry into the Iraq war, Elizabeth Manningham-Buller said: 'Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.'

British involvement in the 2003 invasion was highly controversial at the time, with two cabinet ministers resigning and more than 1 million people demonstrating against the war in London.

Manningham-Buller, head of the internal security service MI5 at the time, said: 'Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.'

'We were pretty well swamped - that's possibly an exaggeration - but we were very overburdened with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things that we needed to pursue,' she said.

Two years after the invasion, four suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London underground and bus system, killing 52 commuters and injuring more than 700 people.

Manningham-Buller also played down fears raised at the time by the government of Tony Blair, that Iraq under Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was prepared to use them.

She cited a memo in which MI5 said it had not seen 'convincing' intelligence that the Iraqi regime had developed 'useful' cooperation with al-Qaeda terrorists about chemical and biological weapons.

She also dismissed suggestions that Saddam was involved in the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. 'There is no credible intelligence that demonstrates that Iraq was implicated in planning the Sep 11 attacks.'

Ex-chef MI5 getuigt in Brits Irak-onderzoek (Trouw/Novum/AP)

(Novum/AP) - De Britse en Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten beschikten niet over geloofwaardig bewijsmateriaal dat Saddam Hussein direct of indirect betrokken was bij de aanslagen van 11 september 2001. Dat heeft het voormalige hoofd van de Britse binnenlandse veiligheidsdienst MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, tegen de Britse Irak-commissie gezegd. 

Bij het demoniseren van 'nucleair' en 'anti-Semietisch' Iran door de

zionistische (Groot-)Israel lobby worden een boel leugens verspreid ter voorbereiding van een 'preventieve' aanval op Iran.

Onderstaande quiz kan verhelderend werken voor onbevooroordeelde geinteresseerden.

Can You Pass The Iran Quiz?

By Jeffrey Rudolph

24 April, 2010
Countercurrents.org

What can possibly justify the relentless U.S. diplomatic (and mainstream media) assault on Iran ?

It cannot be argued that Iran is an aggressive state that is dangerous to its neighbors, as facts do not support this claim. It cannot be relevant that Iran adheres to Islamic fundamentalism, has a flawed democracy and denies women full western-style civil rights, as Saudi Arabia is more fundamentalist, far less democratic and more oppressive of women, yet it is a U.S. ally. It cannot be relevant that Iran has, over the years, had a nuclear research program, and is most likely pursuing the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, as Pakistan, India, Israel and other states are nuclear powers yet remain U.S. allies—indeed, Israel deceived the U.S. while developing its nuclear program.

The answer to the above-posed question is fairly obvious: Iran must be punished for leaving the orbit of U.S. control. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the Shah was removed, Iran, unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, acts independently and thus compromises U.S. power in two ways: i) Defiance of U.S. dictates affects the U.S.'s attainment of goals linked to Iran; and, ii) Defiance of U.S. dictates establishes a “bad” example for other countries that may wish to pursue an independent course. The Shah could commit any number of abuses—widespread torture, for example—yet his loyalty to the U.S. exempted him from American condemnation—yet not from the condemnation of the bulk of Iranians who brought him down.

The following quiz is an attempt to introduce more balance into the mainstream discussion of Iran.

Iran Quiz Questions  and  Iran Quiz Answers :

1. Is Iran an Arab country?

1. No. Alone among the Middle Eastern peoples conquered by the Arabs, the Iranians did not lose their language or their identity. Ethnic Persians make up 60 percent of modern Iran, modern Persian (not Arabic) is the official language, Iran is not a member of the Arab League, and the majority of Iranians are Shiite Muslims while most Arabs are Sunni Muslims. Accordingly, based on language, ancestry and religion, Iran is not an Arab country. ( http://www.slate.com/id/1008394/ )

2. Has Iran launched an aggressive war of conquest against another country since 1900?

2. No.

-According to Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Iran has not launched such a war for at least 150 years. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009; p.199.)

-It should be appreciated that Iran did not start the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s: “ The war began when Iraq invaded Iran, launching a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes, and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. Iraq was also aiming to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War)

3. How many known cases of an Iranian suicide-bomber have there been from 1989 to 2007?

3. Zero. There is not a single known instance of an Iranian suicide-bomber since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. ( Robert Baer; The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower; Crown Publishers; New York: 2008.)

-According to Baer, an American author and a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, it is i mportant to understand that Iran has used suicide bombers as the ultimate “smart bomb.” In fact there is little difference between a suicide-bomber and a marine who rushes a machine-gun nest to meet his certain death. Therefore, while Iran had used suicide bombers for tactical military purposes, Sunni extremists use suicide bombing for vague objectives such as to weaken the enemy or purify the state.

4. What was Iran 's defense spending in 2008?

4. $9.6 billion. ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25279.htm )

5. What was the U.S. 's defense spending in 2008?. 

5. $692 billion.   (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25279.htm )

-There is also little doubt that Israel could defeat Iran in a conventional war in mere hours. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009; p p.206-7.)

6. What is the Jewish population of Iran ?

6. 25,000. It is one of the many paradoxes of the Islamic Republic of Iran that this anti-Israeli country supports by far the largest Jewish population of any Muslim country. After the 1979 Islamic revolution, thousands of Jews left for Israel, Western Europe or the U.S., fearing persecution. But Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's first post-revolutionary supreme leader, issued a fatwa, upon his return from exile in Paris, decreeing that the Jews and other religious minorities were to be protected, thus reducing the outflow of Iran's Jews to a trickle. ( http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html )

7. Which Iranian leader said the following? “This [ Israel 's] Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

7. Ruhollah Khomeini. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York : 2009; p.201.)

-This wasn't a surprising statement to come from the leader of the 1979 Revolution as Israel had been a firm ally of both the U.S. and the Shah.

-According to Cole, Ahmadinejad quoted this statement in 2005 yet wire service translators rendered Khomeini's statement into English as “Israel must be wiped off the face of the map.” Yet, Khomeini had referred to the occupation regime not Israel , and while he expressed a wish for the regime to go away he didn't threaten to go after Israel . In fact, a regime can vanish without any outside attacks, as happened to the Shah's regime in Iran and to the USSR. It is notable that when Khomeini made the statement in the 1980s, there was no international outcry. In fact, in the early 1980s, Khomeini supplied Israel with petroleum in return for American spare parts for the American-supplied Iranian arsenal. As both Israel and Iran considered Saddam's Iraq a serious enemy, they had a tacit alliance against Iraq during the first phase of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It should also be noted that Ahmadinejad subsequently stated he didn't want to kill any Jews but rather he wants a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. While Ahmadinejad's preferred solution is a non-starter, Israel 's refusal to pursue a comprehensive peace creates space for Arab hardliners whose agendas do not include a realistic peace with Israel .

8. True of False: Iranian television presented a serial sympathetic to Jews during the Holocaust that coincided with President Ahmadinejad's first term.

8. True. Iranian television ran a widely watched serial on the Holocaust, Zero Degree Turn , based on true accounts of the role Iranian diplomats in Europe played in rescuing thousands of Jews in WWII.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJljqWQAqCI&feature=related )

9. What percentage of students entering university in Iran is female?

9. Over 60%. ( M. Axworthy; A History of Iran : Empire of the Mind; Basic Books; New York : 2008.)

-In fact, many women—even married women—have professional jobs.

10. What percentage of the Iranian population attends Friday prayers?

10. 1.4%. ( M. Axworthy; A History of Iran : Empire of the Mind; Basic Books; New York : 2008.)

11. True or False: Iran has formally consented to the Arab League's 2002 peace initiative with Israel.

11. True. In March 2002, the Arab League summit in Beirut unanimously put forth a peace initiative that commits it not just to recognize Israel but also to establish normal relations once Israel implements the international consensus for a comprehensive peace—which includes Israel withdrawing from the occupied territories and a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee crisis. (This peace initiative has been subsequently reaffirmed including at the March 2009 Arab League summit at Doha.) All 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, including Iran , "adopted the Arab peace initiative to resolve the issue of Palestine and the Middle East ... and decided to use all possible means in order to explain and clarify the full implications of this initiative and win international support for its implementation." ( Norman G. Finkelstein; This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; OR Books; New York : 2010; p. 42.)

12. Which two countries were responsible for orchestrating the 1953 overthrow of Iran's populist government of democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, primarily because he introduced legislation that led to the nationalization of Iranian oil?

12. The U.S. and Britain . ( Stephen Kinzer; All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; New Jersey: 2008.)

-According to Kinzer, Iranians had been complaining that the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had not been sharing profits on Iranian petroleum with Iran fairly; and Iran's parliament (Majles) had tried to renegotiate with the AIOC. When the AIOC rejected renegotiation, Mossadegh introduced the nationalization act in 1951. In response, Britain and the U.S. organized a global boycott of Iran which sent the Iranian economy into a tailspin. Later, the military coup was orchestrated that reinstalled the shah. (One irony is that Britain itself had nationalized several industries in the 1940s and 1950s.)

13. Who made the following address on March 17, 2000? “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

13. Madeleine Albright: U.S. Secretary of State , 1997 -2001. ( Stephen Kinzer; All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; New Jersey : 2008; p.212.)

14. Which countries trained the Shah's brutal internal security service, SAVAK? 

14. According to William Blum, a highly respected author and journalist, "The notorious Iranian security service, SAVAK, which employed torture routinely, was created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel in the 1950s. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. After the 1979 revolution, the Iranians found CIA film made for SAVAK on how to torture women." (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Torture_RS.html)

-According to Reed College Professor Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading writers on the subject of torture and the consequences of its use for modern society, “[T]he Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was the revolution against torture. When the Shah criticized Khomayni as a blackrobed Islamic medieval throwback, Khomayni replied, look who is talking, the man who tortures. This was powerful rhetoric for recruiting people, then as it is now. People joined the revolutionary opposition because of the Shah's brutality, and they remembered who installed him. If anyone wants to know why Iranians hated the U.S. so, all they have to do is ask what America 's role was in promoting torture in Iran . Torture not only shaped the revolution, it was the factor that has deeply poisoned the relationship of Iran with the West. So why trust the West again? And the Iranian leadership doesn't.” (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002387 )

15. Does Iran have nuclear weapons?

15. No.

-"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons

program …” “ We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.” ( U.S. National Intelligence Estimate Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities November 2007

http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf   )

-According to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, "The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] still hold true, " … We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the [nuclear weapons] program." (http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100115_1438.php)

16. Is Iran a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

16. Yes. ( http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/18/world/AP-ML-Iran.html )

17. Is Israel a signatory of the NPT?

17. No. ( http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/18/world/AP-ML-Iran.html )

18. Does the NPT permit a signatory to pursue a nuclear program?

18. Yes.

-According to Juan Cole, The NPT specifies that “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” Therefore, as long as Iran meets its responsibilities under the NPT and continues to allow inspections by the IAEA, it is acting within its rights. The sorts of research facilities maintained by Iran are common in industrialized countries. The real issue is trust and transparency rather than purely one of technology. Yet, Iran has not always been forthcoming in fulfilling its obligations under the NPT.

   The Ford administration of the mid-1970s produced a memo saying that the shah's regime must “prepare against the time … when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply.” Iran 's energy reserves are extensive, so that fear was misplaced. But Iran already uses domestically 2 million of the 4 million barrels a day it produces, and it could well cease being an exporter and even become a net importer in the relatively near future. (This helps explain Iran's focus on nuclear energy. Yet, the desire for nuclear weapons isn't irrational either.) Ford authorized a plutonium reprocessing plant for Iran , which could have allowed it to close the fuel cycle, a step toward producing a bomb.

   In the 1970s, GE and Westinghouse won contracts to build eight nuclear reactors in Iran . The shah intimated that Iran would seek nuclear weapons, without facing any adverse consequences beyond some reprimands from the U.S. or Western Europe . In contrast, Khomeini was horrified by the idea of using weapons of mass destruction, and he declined to deploy chemical weapons at the front in the Iran-Iraq War, even though Saddam had no such compunctions and extensively used mustard gas and sarin on Iranian troops. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009)

19. Who wrote the following in 2004? "Wherever U.S forces go, nuclear weapons go with them or can be made to follow in short order. The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy. Though Iran is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, most commentators who are familiar with the country do not regard its government as irrational. ...  [I]t was Saddam Hussein who attacked Iran, not the other way around; since then Iran has been no more aggressive than most countries are. For all their talk of opposition to Israel , Iran 's rulers are very unlikely to mount a nuclear attack on a country that is widely believed to have what it takes to wipe them off the map. Chemical or other attacks are also unlikely, given the meager results that may be expected and the retaliation that would almost certainly follow.”

19. Martin van Creveld: Distinguished professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem . (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/opinion/21iht-edcreveld_ed3_.html )

-It should not be surprising that Creveld would deem it rational for Iran to want nuclear weapons. "For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran . In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran . They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called SAVAK, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world – in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.

At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the ‘international community' has remained silent.” (http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=8533 )

20. What percentage of Iranians in 2008 said they had an unfavorable view of the American people?

20. 20%. ( Juan Cole; Engaging The Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York : 2009; p.197.)

21. What percentage of Iranians in 2008 expressed negative sentiments toward the Bush administration?

21. 75%. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; ( New York : 2009); p.197.)

-One wonders what the percentage of Canadians—or Americans—held the same view?

22. What were the main elements of Iran's 2003 Proposal to the U.S., communicated during the build-up to the Iraq invasion, and how did the U.S. respond to Iran's Proposal?

22. According to the Washington Post, “Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces … an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States , and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran …” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700727_pf.html )

23. True or False: Iran and the U.S. both considered the Taleban to be an enemy after the 9/11 attacks.

23. True. According to Ali M. Ansari, Professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews, “[K]hatami, moved quickly to offer his condolences to the US President [after the 9/11 attacks]. … [T]he Iranians soon recognized the opportunity that now confronted them. The United States was determined to dismantle Al Qaeda, and in the face of Taleban obstinacy decided on the removal of the Taleban. Nothing could be more amenable to the Iranians, who had been waging a proxy war against the Taleban for the better part of five years. … The collaboration which took place both during and after the war against the Taleban seemed to inaugurate a period of détente between Iran and the United States … It came as something of a shock therefore to discover that President Bush had decided to label Iran part of the ‘Axis of Evil' … Now it appeared that the [Iranian] hardliners within the regime had been correct after all; the United States could not be trusted …” ( Ali M. Ansari; Modern Iran: The Pahlavis and After Second Edition; Pearson Education; Great Britain: 2007; pp. 331-332.)

24. Did the U.S. work with the Tehran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq both before and after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq?

24. Yes. (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_bush_created_a_theocracy_in_iraq )

-One wonders what the Bush administration thought the party name entailed? Would it have been unreasonable to assume it had good relations with Iran and might support an Islamic Revolution?

-In 2007, the party, showing good public relations, changed its name to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq .

25. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, who said the following? "The Iranians had real contacts with important players in Afghanistan and were prepared to use their influence in constructive ways in coordination with the United States ."

25. Flynt Leverett: Senior director for Middle East affairs in the U.S. National Security Council from March 2002 to March 2003. He left the George W. Bush Administration and government service in 2003 because of disagreements about Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror. ( http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8590 )

26. Who wrote the following in 2004? “It is in the interests of the United States to engage selectively with Iran to promote regional stability, dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, preserve reliable energy supplies, reduce the threat of terror, and address the ‘democracy deficit' that pervades the Middle East …”

26. A task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by two prominent members of the American foreign policy establishment, former CIA director Robert Gates and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, recommended “a revised strategic approach to Iran.” Their report included the above statement.(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/mar/24/clouds-over-iran/?pagination=false )

Jeffrey Rudolph, a college professor in Montreal, was the Quebec representative of the East Timor Alert Network, and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He prepared the widely-distributed, “Can You Pass the Israel-Palestine Quiz,” which can be found at,

http://www.countercurrents.org/rudolph180608.htm (Comments or questions concerning these quizzes should be emailed to: Israel-Palestine-Quiz@live.com.)

Generaal Petraeus wringt zich in alle bochten om afstand te nemen van zijn aanvankelijk 

gegeven realistische visie, dat de onvoorwaardelijke steun aan Israel afbreuk doet aan Amerika's mondiale belangen en de levens van haar militairen in gevaar brengt.

Een beschamende kruiperij van een opperbevelhebber die kennelijk politieke aspiraties heeft -

en weet dat die bij de Republikeinen weinig kans maken zonder steun van de zionistische (Groot-)Israel lobby.

(Zoals te verwachten reageerden op deze blog als twee eersten Hasbara-propagandisten die het zionistisch beleid van Israel door dik en dun - en waarschijnlijk tegen beter weten in -  verdedigen).

Petraeus emails show general scheming with journalist to get out pro-Israel storyline (Mondoweiss.net, 6 July 2010)

Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a rightwing writer to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.

The emails show Petraeus encouraging Max Boot of Commentary to write a story-- and offering the neoconservative writer choice details about his views on the Holocaust:

Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?!  And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome...

Petraeus passed the emails along himself through carelessness last March. He pasted a Boot column from Commentary's blog into in an "FYI" email he sent to an activist who is highly critical of the U.S.'s special relationship with Israel. Some of the general's emails to Boot were attached to the bottom of the story. The activist, James Morris, shared the emails with me.

The tale:..

Te lezen hoe Israelische regeringsleiders opeenvolgende Amerikaanse presidenten voor het blok en naar hun hand hebben gezet, is leerzaam voor hen die zich afvragen of Obama voldoende weerstand kan bieden aan de druk vanuit de zionistische (pro-Groot)Israel lobby om 'nucleair' Iran aan te vallen. Ik vrees dat de schrijver gelijk heeft in zijn eindconclusie: Today, with many powerful friends inside the United States – and with Obama facing intense political pressure over his domestic and national security policies – the Israeli government has plenty of reasons to believe that it can out-fox and outlast this new U.S. president.

How Israel Out-Foxed US Presidents

By Morgan Strong (A Special Report in The Consortiumnews.com) 
May 31, 2010

At the end of a news conference on April 13, President Barack Obama made the seemingly obvious point that the continuing Middle East conflict – pitting Israel against its Arab neighbors – will end up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

Obama’s remark followed a similar comment by Gen. David Petraeus on March 16, linking the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the challenges that U.S. troops face in the region.

"The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” Petraeus said. “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.

“Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support."

The truth behind what Obama and Petraeus said is self-evident to anyone who has spent time observing the Middle East for the past six decades. Even the staunchly pro-Israeli Bush administration made similar observations.

Three years ago in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice termed the Israeli/Palestinian peace process of “strategic interest” to the United States and expressed empathy for the beleaguered Palestinian people.

“The prolonged experience of deprivation and humiliation can radicalize even normal people,” Rice said, referring to acts of Palestinian violence.

But the recent comments by Obama and Petraeus aroused alarm among some Israeli supporters who reject any suggestion that Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians might be a factor in the anti-Americanism surging through the Islamic world.

After Petraeus’s comment, the pro-Israeli Anti-Defamation League said linking the Palestinian plight and Muslim anger was “dangerous and counterproductive.”

“Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel,” ADL national director Abraham Foxman said.

However, the U.S. government’s widespread (though often unstated) recognition of the truth behind Petraeus’s comment has colored how the Obama administration has reacted to the intransigence of Israel’s Likud government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The U.S. government realizes how much it has done on Israel’s behalf, even to the extent of making Americans the targets of Islamic terrorism such as the 9/11 attacks (as the 9/11 Commission discovered but played down) and sacrificing the lives of thousands of U.S. troops fighting in Middle East conflicts.

That was the backdrop last March for President Obama’s outrage over the decision of the Netanyahu government to continue building Jewish housing in Arab East

Jerusalem despite the fact that the move complicated U.S. peace initiatives and was announced as Vice President Joe Biden arrived to reaffirm American support for Israel.

However, another little-acknowledged truth about the U.S.-Israeli relationship is that Israeli leaders have frequently manipulated and misled American presidents out of a confidence that U.S. politicians deeply fear the political fallout from any public battle with Israel.

Given that history, few analysts who have followed the arc of U.S.-Israeli relations since Israel’s founding in 1948 believe that the Israeli government is likely to retreat very much in its current confrontation with President Obama...

...In a sense, Israel can’t be blamed for standing up for itself, especially given the long history of brutality and oppression directed against Jews. However, Israeli leaders have used this tragic history to justify their own harsh treatment of others, especially the Palestinians, many of whom were rooted from their ancestral homes.

Over the past six decades, Israeli leaders also have refined their strategies for taking advantage of their staunchest ally, the United States.

Today, with many powerful friends inside the United States – and with Obama facing intense political pressure over his domestic and national security policies – the Israeli government has plenty of reasons to believe that it can out-fox and outlast this new U.S. president.

Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history, and was an advisor to CBS News “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.

Volkomen terecht heeft president Obama generaal Stanley McChrystel op staande voet van zijn Amerikaans en NAVO opperbevel in Afghanistan ontheven. Verrassend - en politiek gezien heel handig en verstandig - is zijn aanwijzing van generaal Petraeus, chef van McChrystel, als diens vervanger.

Militair gezien betekent dit een hoogst uitzonderlijke functionele demotie van Petraeus. Het pleit voor diens loyaliteit dat hij deze overplaatsing heeft aanvaard - en waarschijnlijk zelf heeft aangeboden. 

Plaatst men dit hele gebeuren in een bredere context, dan stijgt de twijfel over het welslagen van de Amerikaanse/NAVO strategie in Afghanistan  - en rijst de vraag in hoeverre de militarisering van het Amerikaanse beleid is doorgeslagen. Enkele artikelen in de, kritische maar deskundige, Britse Guardian en Amerikaanse The Nation en Right Web, werpen hier fel licht op.

Barack Obama sacks Afghan war commander Stanley McChrystal (Guardian)

..Obama forced McChrystal's resignation because he said that while would tolerate debate on the war policy, he would not tolerate the kind of division created by the article – in which the general and his staff accused the US ambassador to Kabul of undermining the war, called the president's national security adviser "a joke", and mocked the vice-president, Joe Biden. There was also indirect criticism of the president as "uncomfortable and intimidated" by senior military officials. McChrystal left the White House within minutes of being dismissed at a short meeting and did not attend a conference of Obama's Afghan policy team shortly afterwards, which included many of the people insulted by the profile in Rolling Stone magazine. The article prompted a frenzied debate about McChrystal's future, underpinned by doubts among politicians and in the military as to whether the war can be won...

The amazing media story behind the astonishing McChrystal interview (Guardian)

..Now McCrystal is on his way to Washington to face the music by meeting Obama who, as you can see from the above video clip, is none too happy with the general he has previously had reason to slap down. But the media story behind the story is also fascinating. First off, there was a fuss about whether or not McChrystal was speaking to Rolling Stone's writer, Michael Hastings, on or off the record...

David Petraeus: Stanley McChrystal's successor (Guardian)

In Iraq, he helped to transform the US army from an organisation built to fight conventional wars against industrialised enemies

Few would argue that running a failing war is for the faint hearted, so there is some irony in the selection of David Petraeus to replace Stanley McChrystal.

The current head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), Petraeus passed out while giving testimony on Afghanistan to the US Congress last week.

But as the man credited with turning round the conflict in Iraq when it was at its most desperate, the decision to send Petraeus to take command of 120,000 US and allied troops in Afghanistan could be seen as an inspired choice.

Petraeus did not just save the US's bacon in Iraq (earning rumours that he could one day run for presidential high office), he helped to transform the US army from an organisation built to fight conventional wars against industrialised enemies, to a fighting force that became the world leader in fighting against lightly armed guerrillas.

He has unrivalled knowledge of the theory and practice of counterinsurgency – the incredibly difficult and time-consuming business of simultaneously killing insurgents while winning the support of the indigenous population. Indeed, the highly intellectual scholar soldier rewrote the US army manual on how such counterinsurgency campaigns should be waged...

With such concepts seen as critical to victory in Afghanistan, it was necessary for Obama to find a new commander whose mastery of fighting such multi-faceted battles cannot be challenged...

Fears for Afghan strategy after 24 hours of turmoil (Guardian)

Counterinsurgency is not working, say experts, and critics warn that replacement strategy indicates more of same

..Obama insisted that in sacking McChrystal he was making a change of personnel, not policy. The appointment of General David Petraeus, the architect of the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, was a signal that Obama does not plan to shift from the plan he committed to last year.

But the Rolling Stone story has focused attention on the serious divisions and personality clashes among those in charge of the military and political strategies. That in turn has led to further questioning of whether McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy is working.

There is growing scepticism in Congress about rising casualties, the delay to some combat operations and a lack of confidence in the Afghan government. It is also a conflict with no end in sight. It is now America's longest war. Increasingly, it is called Obama's war.

Two of the most senior diplomats to have worked in Afghanistan in recent years told the Guardian that McChrystal's departure would help to force a full review of a counterinsurgency strategy which is being increasingly attacked by policy experts as unworkable..

General McChrystal and the militarisation of US politics (Guardian)

America has settled into being a nation perpetually at war. In this climate it's no surprise generals sometimes get out of control

Barack Obama has a problem with America's generals that is unlikely to be solved quickly or easily, whatever the outcome of the Stanley McChrystal affair. The disrespectful behaviour of the US commander in Afghanistan and his aides was symptomatic of a more deeply rooted, potentially dangerous malaise, analysts suggest. This week's events might thus be termed a very American coup.

One reason for Obama's difficulty lies in his own inexperience. As a greenhorn commander-in-chief and a Democrat to boot, Washington watchers say Obama has had scant opportunity to win the military's respect, let alone its affection. His unease with his violent inheritance in Afghanistan and Iraq is evident.

Another reason appears to be the willingness of American conservatives of all stripes, in an increasingly polarised society, to buy into the "wimps in the White House" narrative peddled by General McChrystal's army staffers. It echoed rightwing criticism that Obama, who has never served, is personally unfit to lead.

It is not a big step from there to outright accusations of cowardice. "The ugly truth is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge," wrote New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on Tuesday. "The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it – or had the courage to pull the plug."

But perhaps the main reason why Obama's problem with the generals is bigger than McChrystal is the continuing impact of the post-9/11 legacy. George Bush defined the US as a nation perpetually at war. The Pentagon produced a theory to suit: the Long War doctrine postulating unending conflict against ill-defined but ubiquitous enemies. Unquestioning patriotism became an official ideology to which all were expected to subscribe...

Whatever misgivings he may harbour about his uppity generals, Obama remains largely at their mercy while he perpetuates the idea of the US as a nation at war and pursues the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon is already resisting this December's White House policy review and next July's "deadline" for the start of an Afghan troop withdrawal. Petraeus, meanwhile, last week refused to rule out the deployment of yet more troops – a potential second Afghan surge...

Bad News from Afghanistan (Right Web)

While U.S. officials insist they are making progress in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.

Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of "clear, hold and build" in contested areas of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned despite the "surge" of some 20,000 additional U.S. troops over the past six months.

Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly..

Obama, who last November set a July 2011 as the date after which Washington would begin to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, has said his administration will conduct a major review of U.S. strategy and whether it is working at the end of this year.

The latest polling here shows a noticeable erosion of support for Washington's commitment to the war compared to eight months ago when Obama agreed to the Pentagon's recommendations to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to bring the total U.S. presence there to around 100,000.

An additional 34,000 troops from NATO and non-NATO allies are supposed to be deployed there by year's end.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Thursday, 53 percent of respondents said the war in Afghanistan, which last month, according to most measures, exceeded the Vietnam conflict as the longest-running war in U.S. history, was "not worth fighting". That was the highest percentage in more than three years.

The same poll found that 39 percent of the public believe that Washington is losing the war, compared to 42 percent who believe it is winning.

While public scepticism about the war appears to be growing, the foreign policy elite, including within the military, also seems increasingly doubtful for a number of reasons...

AFGHANISTAN: Shades of Iraq in 2006?

(Right Web)

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal confronts the spectre of a collapse of U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan in coming months comparable to the one that occurred in the Iraq War in late 2006.

Last Thursday, McChrystal's message that his strategy will weaken the Taliban in its heartland took its worst beating thus far, when he admitted that the planned offensive in Kandahar City and surrounding districts is being delayed until September at the earliest, because it does not have the support of the Kandahar population and leadership.

Equally damaging to the credibility of McChrystal's strategy was the Washington Post report published Thursday documenting in depth the failure of February's offensive in Marja.

The basic theme underlined in both stories - that the Afghan population in the Taliban heartland is not cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces - is likely to be repeated over and over again in media coverage in the coming months.

The Kandahar operation, which McChrystal's staff has touted as the pivotal campaign of the war, had previously been announced as beginning in June. But it is now clear that McChrystal has understood for weeks that the most basic premise of the operation turned out to be false.

"When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them," said McChrystal, who was in London for a NATO conference.

He didn't have to spell out the obvious implication: the people of Kandahar don't want the protection of foreign troops...

In Afghanistan, the Beginning of the End?

(The Nation)

Amerikaanse opperbevelhebber in Afghanistan door Obama op het matje geroepen

NAVO/ISAF-missie op dit blog

Generaal McChrystal, de  Amerikaans opperbevelhebber in Afghanistan, is op het matje geroepen door president Obama vanwege zijn negatieve uitlatingen over zijn politieke leiding in een artikel in Rolling Stones. Hoewel hij daarover  zijn verontschuldigingen heeft aangeboden, blijkt uit deze rel hoe slecht - zo niet hopeloos - de, door hemzelf geinitieerde, 'counter insurgency' strategie in Afghanistan uitwerkt.

Normaal gesproken zou deze generaal moeten worden ontheven van zijn post en zelfs worden ontslagen, maar dat zou/zal in feite de erkenning van het falen van de Amerikaanse strategie in Afghanistan inhouden - (weer) een moeilijke beslissing voor de veelgeplaagde president Obama..

Ondertussen groeit de tegenstand tegen deze oorlog onder het Amerikaanse volk: 53 % meent dat zij de kosten niet waard is, blijkt uit een recente opiniepeiling. 

McChrystal recalled to Washington over Rolling Stone article 

By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL — The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan was recalled to Washington on Tuesday after he was forced to make a "sincerest apology" over a magazine article in which he and unnamed aides criticized and lampooned senior Obama administration officials.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in charge of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan, managed last year to persuade Obama to send thousands more American troops to the conflict to back his new counter-insurgency strategy to rescue the failing war there.

In the article, in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone magazine, an aide ridicules Vice President Joe Biden — who had opposed the troop surge for Afghanistan — while another aide described U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ricahrd Holbrooke as a “wounded animal.” McChrystal is quoted saying that the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who also opposed the extra troops, “covers his flank for the history books.” An aide calls national security adviser James Jones, a retired general, a “clown." Only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gets good reviews from McChrystal’s staff.

“It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened. Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard,” McChrystal said in a statement...

The Runaway General (Michael Hastings in RollingStone.com)

The Runaway GeneralStanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

..From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass...

Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak...

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."..

Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. "The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population." When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting...

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge. 

McChrystal calls Marjah a 'bleeding ulcer' in Afghan campaign 

By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers

..The operation in Marjah is supposed to be the first blow in a decisive campaign to oust the Taliban from their spiritual homeland in adjacent Kandahar province, one that McChrystal had hoped would bring security and stability to Marjah and begin to convey an "irreversible sense of momentum" in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Instead, a tour last week of Marjah and the nearby Nad Ali district, during which McClatchy had rare access to meetings between McChrystal and top Western strategists, drove home the hard fact that President Barack Obama's plan to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.

There aren't enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that's needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign. The Afghan government hasn't dispatched enough local administrators or trained police to establish credible governance, and now the Taliban have begun their anticipated spring offensive.

"This is a bleeding ulcer right now," McChrystal told a group of Afghan officials, international commanders in southern Afghanistan and civilian strategists who are leading the effort to oust the Taliban fighters from Helmand.

"You don't feel it here," he said during a 10-hour front-line strategy review, "but I'll tell you, it's a bleeding ulcer outside."

Throughout the day, McChrystal expressed impatience with the pace of operations, echoing the mounting pressure he's under from his civilian bosses in Washington and Europe to start showing progress...

McChrystal recall culminates months of tensions with White House

By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/22/96318/mcchrystals-comments-underscore.html#storylink=omni_popular#ixzz0rci3umk1

WASHINGTON — The White House decision to order Afghanistan commander Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Tuesday to leave a flailing war and answer to President Barack Obama about comments he and aides made in a forthcoming magazine article culminates months of tension between the military and political leadership over how to conduct the war and who's in charge.

The friction between the military leadership and the Obama administration began almost immediately after the president took the office last year and has grown as the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated.

It reached its apex in December, when Obama gave an address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and set a date — July 2011 — for American troops to start withdrawing, which goes against the principles of counterinsurgency that guided the military in the latter part of the Iraq war.

Military commanders said privately that the White House didn't understand war; White House officials said the military didn't understand political realities...

In a White House briefing Tuesday, Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said the president remained committed to the July 2011 timetable to start drawing down troops, but he noted that Obama also said he'd review those plans late this year.

"The president is committed to that timeline, and he’s also committed to making sure that we have a full review at the end of this year, as he announced in his West Point speech," Burton said. "And we will go from there."

If Obama accepts McChrystal’s resignation or fires him, it would be the second time under Gates’ tenure that a high-ranking military official has resigned over controversial comments made in a magazine piece. In March 2008, then-CENTCOM commander Adm. William “Fox” Fallon resigned over remarks he made to Esquire magazine criticizing the Bush administration.

Gates replaced him with Petraeus.

U.S. intelligence: 'Time is running out' in Afghanistan

 By Thomas L. Day and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL — As the U.S. and its allies try to overcome logistical hurdles and rush some 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2010, intelligence officials are warning that the Taliban-led insurgency is expanding and that "time is running out" for the U.S.-led coalition to prove that its strategy can succeed.

The Taliban have created a shadow "government-in-waiting," complete with Cabinet ministers, that could assume power if the U.S.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai fails, a senior International Security Assistance Force intelligence official said in Kabul, speaking only on the condition of anonymity as a matter of ISAF policy.

As the Obama administration and its European allies face dwindling public and political support for the eight-year-old Afghan war, the Taliban now have what the official called "a full-fledged insurgency" and shadow governors in 33 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, including those in the north, where U.S. and other officials had thought the Islamic extremists posed less of a threat.

The Taliban's return to the northern provinces, including Baghlan, Kunduz and Taqhar — which McClatchy reported Aug. 28 — poses serious security, logistical and political problems for the U.S.-led ISAF and Karzai's government.

The northern region is under the command of German forces, but they and other European contingents operate under restrictions imposed by their governments that limit offensive operations against the Taliban...

Experts: U.S. has no long-term political strategy for Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is focused on meeting its July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but it has no political strategy to help stabilize the country, current and former U.S. officials and other experts are warning.

The failure to articulate what a post-American Afghanistan should look like and devise a political path for achieving it is a major obstacle to success for the U.S. military-led counter-insurgency campaign that's underway, these officials and experts said.

The result is "strategic confusion," said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005-07...

The focus on a withdrawal is creating mounting concerns inside and outside the administration that the president's July 2011 timetable is obstructing the development of a long-term political strategy for resolving such key issues as the Taliban's rejection of Afghanistan's constitution and democratic parliamentary system of government.

"There was a general consensus (at last week's Central Command conference) that we don't have much of a political strategy," said a former senior U.S. official who also attended the session, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "As a result, the other things going on in that country are disconnected tactics to try to get to an unstated goal."

Such a political strategy should chart "a pathway to the future shape of a peaceful Afghanistan and its relationships with its neighbors and the wider world," British diplomat Shercliff wrote. "At the end of that pathway is a steady-state situation: an Afghanistan . . . robust enough to sustain its own economic and political stability, and repel the likes of al Qaida from setting up shop there."

"We have a great many people working hard to produce progress," said Neumann, the former U.S. ambassador. "But there is no common definition of what that progress is. No one knows if we're getting there and we don't know if we can't get there, and that produces strategic confusion."

While the military's counter-insurgency strategy is well understood, "there is plenty more uncertainty over the political strategy which needs to complement ISAF's (International Security Assistance Force) work," wrote Simon Shercliff, a British diplomat, on his Internet blog after a two-day conference last week of U.S. officials and outside experts at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla. "Everyone agrees that we need to develop one, but there is little consensus on what it should look like."

Congress, too, appears primarily concerned with the July 2011 timeframe, which coincides with the beginning of the 2012 presidential and congressional election campaigns...

'Is Geert Wilders een spion?, zo luidde de kop van een artikel van Emile Fallaux op 15 mei 2007 in 'Vrij Nederland'. Het is een intrigerende vraag die actueel is nu de PVV mogelijk

deel gaat uitmaken van het kabinet. Daarnaast speelt een recentelijk openbaar gemaakte verklaring van het echtpaar Kwint-de Roos waarin het stelt dat Wilders eind 1991 mevrouw

Kwint-de Roos vertelde dat hij als spion was gerecruteerd door de Israelische inlichtingendienst

en dat hij ook een Israelisch paspoort bezat.

Dat Wilders een pion is van de Israelische regering, is al lang duidelijk. Hij komt rond uit voor zijn revisionistisch ('Groot-Israel') Zionisme en de PVV heeft in haar verkiezingsprogramma staan:

Israël is een weergaloos succes. Geboren in het donkerste moment van de twintigste eeuw en uitgegroeid tot een centrum van technologische vooruitgang. Israël is de enige democratie in het Midden-Oosten, de thuisbasis van het Joodse volk na tweeduizend jaar ballingschap en het land dat als geen ander de klappen van de jihad opvangt. Israël vecht voor ons. Als Jeruzalem valt, dan zijn Athene en Rome aan de beurt. Daarom is Israël het centrale front in de verdediging van het Westen.

Daarom moeten we alles op alles zetten om het offensief van de linksen en de mohammedanen om Israël te vernietigen te stoppen. Nederland en de EU dienen onmiddellijk op te houden met eisen dat Israël zichzelf met het doen van territoriale concessies veroordeelt tot onverdedigbare grenzen. Land voor vrede heeft geen zin. Het is geen territoriaal maar een ideologisch conflict, een conflict tussen de rede van het vrije Westen en het barbarisme van de islamitische ideologie. (blz 41) en

• Strijd tegen islam moet het kernpunt van ons buitenlands beleid worden

• Banden met frontlijnstaten van de islam die in het defensief zitten aanhalen

• Staak alle subsidies aan de anti-Israël-industrie, zoals ICCO, OxfamNovib etc.                                                              • Sinds 1946 bestaat er een onafhankelijke Palestijnse staat, daarom noemt de Nederlandse regering ‘Jordanië’    voortaan gewoon ‘Palestina’ 

• Onze ambassade moet verhuizen naar de hoofdstad van Israël: Jeruzalem (blz 43)

Zolang in onze Grondwet staat dat de regering de ontwikkeling van de internationale rechtsorde bevordert (Art.90), mag revisionistische 'Groot-Israel' Zionist Geert Wilders geen deel uitmaken van enig kabinet. 

Laat dat duidelijk zijn bij de onderhandelingen over een coalitie.

Het nastreven van een Groot-Israel waar geen plaats is voor een soeverein Palestina met Oost-Jeruzalem als hoofdstad, is strijdig met alle VN/VR-resoluties terzake. 

De sociaal-economische crisis in de VS versterkt de opkomst en politieke invloed van de fundamentalistische 'Christian Right' beweging aan de onderkant van de maatschappij, op angstwekkende wijze. De aanhangers van deze beweging baseren zich op, wat zij zien als, de letterlijke tekst van de Bijbel - en bereiden zich voor op de wederkomst van Christus. Ondertussen bestrijden zij afwijkende religies, ideologieen en geaardheden meedogenloos.

(Hoe hun verhouding is t.a.v. 'evangelicals' die als christen-zionisten - deel uitmakend van de 'Groot-Israel' lobby - juist joden beschermen, is mij niet bekend). 

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,” already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe...

Those gathered into the arms of this Christian fascist movement are desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. We failed them; we owe them more: This is their response. The financial dislocations, the struggles with domestic and sexual abuse, the battle against addictions, the poverty and the despair that many in the movement endure are tragic, painful and real. They have a right to their rage and alienation. But they are also being used and manipulated by forces that seek to dismantle what is left of our democracy and abolish the pluralism that was once the hallmark of our society.

The spark that could set this conflagration ablaze could be lying in the hands of a small Islamic terrorist cell. It could be in the hands of greedy Wall Street speculators who gamble with taxpayer money in the elaborate global system of casino capitalism. The next catastrophic attack, or the next economic meltdown, could be our Reichstag fire. It could be the excuse used by these totalitarian forces, this Christian fascism, to extinguish what remains of our open society.

Let us not stand meekly at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching toward Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for our working class. Let us reincorporate these dispossessed into our economy. Let us give them a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, will use this rage to snuff us out.

The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger (By Chris Hedges in Truthdig)

..

In a Gallup poll taken last month, 26 percent of respondents said the economy in general is their top concern. Unemployment came in second at 22 percent, while healthcare took 15 percent.

Down near the bottom of the list, at 4 percent, was "Ethics/Moral/Religious/Family Decline."

The "culture war" issues - opposition to gay rights, legal abortion and church-state separation - have always been the obsession of the shock troops of the Religious Right and their leaders. Firmly convinced that God (who, conveniently, shares all of their right-wing political opinions) has ordained them to run everyone else's lives, followers of the Religious Right constantly seek government power to enshrine their aggressive theology in law.

Most sensible Americans are mature enough to realize that in a nation of more than 300 million people and hundreds (if not thousands) of different faiths and philosophies, there will be some disagreement on moral issues. Their way of dealing with this is to respect differences, give a nod to diversity and not meddle in their neighbor's private affairs.

But to the Religious Right, meddling in other people's lives isn't just recommended - it's required. Their tiresome "my-way-or-the-highway" theology wedded to far-right politics is a recipe for division and discord - yet they claim the moral superiority to lord it over the rest of us...

Truce Or Consequences: Religious Right Shoots Down Talk Of Cease-Fire In The `Culture Wars'

"Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States."

Toxic to Democracy - CONSPIRACY THEORIES, DEMONIZATION, & SCAPEGOATING

De Amerikaanse pacificatie strategie in Afghanistan zal niet slagen volgens Franklin C. Spinney. Er zijn te weinig bondgenootschappelijke troepen om zowel veroverde gebieden te behouden als verdere offensieve acties uit te voeren. Daarbij komt dat het Afghaanse leger etnisch te versplinterd, ongeoefend, slecht uitgerust en zwak geleid is, om effectieve steun te verlenen - laat staan om de taken van ISAF binnen afzienbare tijd over te nemen. 

Zijn kritiek op het Afghaanse leger wordt onderschreven door een recente evaluatie ven de International Crisis Group.

Bound to Fail -

The Inevitable Collapse of McChrystal's Afghan War Plan

In the 11 May issue of CounterPunch, apparently based on White House and Pentagon sources, Gareth Porter, one of the most able journalists covering the Afghan debacle, reported that General McChrystal’s war plan is in the early stages of unravelling. To appreciate why this was entirely predictable, consider please, the following:...

Without being critical, I note that neither Porter nor his sources mention the role of Afghan army and police forces in the unravelling of McChrystal’s plan. Porter is certainly aware of these limitations, having written several important reports on this subject. Nevertheless, the implication of the Taliban re-infiltration of the Marjah region is clear: the Afghan security forces in the region are either insufficient or ineffective (or both) to perform their job of protecting the people by permanently cleansing the area of Taliban...

This hydra of emerging pressures, which is probably just beginning to be appreciated, is probably why the looming offensive to secure Qandahar that McChrystal was broadcasting in April is now being scaled back in its aims.

Later this summer, as these problems become more apparent and American mid-term elections loom, we can expect to be subjected to a unseemly spectacle finger pointing and a search for scapegoats. In the end, the debacle will be fault of Obama and by extension the Democrat’s, because the President ignored Sun Tzu’s timeless wisdom, when he approved McChrystal’s fatally flawed plan, despite the cabled warnings of retired Army general Karl Eikenberry, his ambassador to Afghanistan.

The Afghan National Army: A Force in Fragments

Although the Afghan National Army could help stabilise the country, many challenges remain, including lack of leadership, low literacy, and poor logistics capabilities.

A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan National Army , the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the development of the Afghan national defence forces. The report assesses the corrosive effects of an arcane military bureaucracy, of ethnic factionalism and of corruption, and identifies measures to improve cohesion through legislative initiatives and the empowerment of government institutions...

Since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, the Afghan National Army (ANA) has developed its operational capacity and increased its numbers under the international community’s direction. The Afghan military has been promoted as the cornerstone of counterinsurgency in the country. Yet, there appears to be little agreement between the government of President Hamid Karzai and its international backers on what kind of army the country needs and how to build it. Ethnic frictions and political factionalism among high-level players in the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the general staff have also stunted the army’s growth. As a result, the army is a fragmented force, serving disparate interests, and far from attaining the unified national character needed to confront numerous security threats.

Failure to develop a sustainable, comprehensive long-term defence posture could risk the army’s disintegration after the withdrawal of international forces. The Afghan government as a whole must assume a more prominent role in shaping its defence doctrine and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of its armed forces, so that they are no longer perceived as serving NATO first and Afghanistan second...

Afghanistan/ISAF blogs

Het redden van vrijzinnig Zionisme in de VS - zodat Amerikaanse Joden vrijzinnig Zionisme in Israel kunnen helpen redden - is de belangrijkste Amerikaans-Joodse uitdaging van deze tijd, volgens Peter Beinart in New York Review of Books The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment .

..Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes...

Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”..

In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPACcelebrates Israel’s commitment to “free speech and minority rights.” The Conference of Presidents declares that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.” These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire...

On Israel, Jews and Leaders Often Disagree

..But the recent tension between the Obama administration and the Israeli government over the stalled Middle East peace process has put the questions underlying those long-avoided family discussions directly in the public spotlight. They have raised serious questions about whether the traditional leadership of the American Jewish world is fully supported by the mass of American Jews...

Many other prominent Jews, representing the conservative organizational leadership that has been the dominant voice of the Jewish community for decades, have also recently criticized the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel. Some have even accused the White House of sabotaging the foundations of the Jewish state...

But while those voices have been strong and their message unmistakable, a newly outspoken wing of Israel supporters has begun to challenge the old-school reflexive support of the country’s policies, suggesting that one does not have to be slavish to Israeli policies to love Israel.

“Most Jews have mixed feelings about Israel,” said Rabbi Tamara Kolton of the Birmingham Temple, a secular humanistic congregation in Farmington Hills. “They support Israel, but it’s complicated. Until now, you never heard from those people. You heard only from the organized ones, the ones who are 100 percent certain: ‘we’re right, they’re wrong.’”

In the 2008 election, 78 percent of Jewish voters supported Mr. Obama, and surveys have suggested that most continue to back his policies...

The Vaudeville routine that has taken over American Jewry

No matter how the Mideast conflict ends, American Jews will lose, says J.J. Goldberg of The Forward.

..

There is one certain loser, though: the American Jewish community. However things turn out in the Middle East, we are going to end up looking silly.

As a well-organized community with a big footprint on the national stage, we have developed a habit of staking out firm positions on abiding principles of fair play that have an unfortunate tendency to change while we’re not looking. Israel, like most countries, makes policy on the fly, bobbing and weaving daily in response to pressures from Washington, rockets from Gaza or domestic coalition politics. And yet, whatever word comes forth from Jerusalem, we adopt it as holy writ. You’d think somebody would be embarrassed by now, but that doesn’t seem to be the case...

REPORT: HOLLAND'S SYMPATHY FOR ISRAEL IN DECLINE

Internal Foreign Ministry document obtained by Ynet points to decrease in Dutch public's 'historic support' for Jewish state. Reasons: Operation Cast Lead, negative media coverage

Israel has been slowly losing its allies around the world – but it seems that even those countries with a special relationship with the Jewish state are steadily growing their distance.

An internal document prepared by the Foreign Ministry and obtained by Ynet shows that the Netherlands joined the list of countries whose support for Israel has been on a constant decrease.

According to the document, "In recent years there has been a decline in the historic support for Israel among the Dutch public. The Netherlands is a country that places human rights high on its international agenda, as well as the issue of international law.

"The prolonged conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, along with negative coverage in the Dutch media have been the central factors leading to the declining support," the document notes...

However, members in the Foreign Ministry laud Dutch Foreign Minister Maxim Verhagen, who is considered "very friendly toward Israel," while Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende also gets good marks for "keeping a balanced policy toward Israel within the Dutch government."

De zionistische (Groot-)'Israel lobby' in Nederland: een noodzakelijke inventarisatie

Eretz Yisrael (Groot-Israel) zionisme blogs

Sander van Walsum's tendentieuze oproep om niet te vergeten 'dat Wilhelimina vluchtte voor de nazi's', lijkt gebaseerd te zijn op een combinatie van Van Walsum's 'product zijn van de opvatting dat we er zeventig jaar geleden niets van gebakken hebben', een latente rancune over de bejegening van zijn grootvader na '45, en een anti-koningsgezindheid.

Deze oproep mag niet onweersproken blijven. Ik hoop dat terzake deskundige (en objectieve) historici dat als reactie op zijn Volkskrant Opinie- en Geschiedenis stuk zullen doen. Zelf geef ik een eerste reactie.

Van Walsums' aantijgingen dat de vlucht van Wilhelmina 'funeste gevolgen had voor de moraal van de troepen, die op dat moment de wapens nog niet hadden neergelegd, en haar onderdanen.' 
en: 
'Ze droeg evenzeer bij aan het defaitisme in de eerste bezettingsmaanden als de brochure 'Op de grens van twee werelden' waarin oud-minister-president Colijn zijn landgenoten maande zich bij ‘de gewijzigde verhoudingen’ neer te leggen', 
zijn duidelijk bedoeld om afbreuk te doen aan het door hemzelf geconstateerde feit: 'In bezet Nederland kon echter de opvatting postvatten die tot op de dag van heden stand houdt, namelijk dat de belangen van volk en vaderland beter konden worden gediend door een staatshoofd in ballingschap.'

Dr. L. de Jong's standaardwerk (deel 3) er op nalezend, krijgt men inzicht in de omstandigheden waaronder Wilhemina in mei '40 verkeerde, de toenemende druk die de ministerraad op haar uitoefende om het land te verlaten, haar eigen gemoedstoestand en haar overwegingen om uiteindelijk aan dit aandringen gevolg te geven; 
ik citeer:

'De koningin had dus het ministerieel advies naast zich neergelegd; wat zij in de loop der dagen van de beraadslagingen der ministers gehoord had, had haar vertrouwen in enig advies uit die besluiteloze kring niet versterkt; bij haar zou slechts een mededeling gewicht in de schaal leggen - een mededeling van de man die zij als een stoer krijgsman had leren kennen: generaal Winkelman' (blz. 278/279).

Toen ook deze haar liet weten 'dat het wenselijk was dat
Hare Majesteit wegging', heeft zij daar, volstrekt contre-coeur, gevolg aan gegeven:

'Had de koningin uitsluitend naar haar hart geluisterd, dan zou zij die maandagochtend naar de Grebbeberg vertrokken zijn om er, schreef zij later, "zoals Willem III het uitdrukte: als de laatste man te vallen in de loopgraaf". Dat, zo zal zij het wel gevoeld hebben, haar jongens zich doodvochten en zijzelf buiten schot bleef, was haar onverdraaglijk - even onverdraaglijk was het haar dat zij niet bij machte geweest was, het land voor welks lot zij zich verantwoordelijk stelde (had zij in de jaren '20 en '30 toen de defensie zo verwaarloosd werd, dan toch moeten aftreden?), het lijden te besparen dat er sinds die vrijdagochtend, drie eindeloze dagen geleden, over gekomen was.
De dood op het slagveld leek verkieslijker boven het verder leven.
Maar het gezond verstand verzette zich tegen die impuls
bij welke, dunkt ons, enerzijds schuldgevoel een rol speelde, anderzijds de romantische behoefte, de Nederlandse historie in te gaan als de vorstin die de nederlaag van haar krijgsmacht niet overleefd had; die historie was het scherm waartegen Wilhelmina steeds haar daden geprojecteerd zag. Zij besefte evenwel op die 13de mei dat zij, zelfs als zij dat wilde, in de zich voordoende chaos de Grebbeline niet eens zou kunnen bereiken. Blijven en zich gevangen laten nemen? Dat nooit! Had Willem de Zwijger de komst van Alva soms afgewacht? Was Hitler niet een even duivelse figuur als de Spaanse dwingeland?
"Het had geen zin", verhaalde zij ons, "mij als gevangene
naar Berlijn te laten voeren en van mijn volk gescheiden te zijn. Dan had ik niets meer kunnen doen. Dus moest ik weggaan".

Was dat een vlucht? Zou dit niet zeker een vlucht lijken, en zou zulks, eenmaal bekend geworden, elke strijdende militair niet als een dolksteek treffen en haar de achting van het volk dat haar boven alles dierbaar was, op slag doen verliezen? Aan een gaan naar Engeland dacht zij niet: het moest toch mogelijk zijn, van Zeeland uit leiding te geven aan de voort te zetten Nederlandse weerstand, zoals koning Albert I van Belgie in de eerste wereldoorlog zijn volk bezield had van het kleine restant Belgisch gebied uit dat achter de IJzer lag! 
"Bericht Winkelman", tekende de koningin vier jaar later aan, " liet geen andere keus als een een poging Albert". Poging - meer niet.
Het stond niet vast dat zij Zeeland zou kunnen bereiken.
Hoe dan ook: rondom Den Haag werd nog gevochten, Dordrecht en Rotterdam verdedigden zich, een veldslag was gaande bij de Grebbeberg - en zij verliet haar residentie, het zenuwcentrum der landsverdediging. Er stak voor haar gevoel een een element van smadelijke desertie in dat zij niet kon verkroppen."Ik wist", zei zij ons, "dat alles wat ik deed, fout was. Als ik bleef, was het fout. Als ik wegging, was het ook fout. Ik wist ook dat de mensen het verkeerd zouden begrijpen. Ik had natuurlijk ook de regering aan mijn dochter kunnen overdragen" - maar waar bevond die zich op dat moment? Er was nog geen bericht van haar aankomst in Engeland' (blz. 279).

De Jong beschrijft verder hoe Wilhelmina's streven om, aan boord van het Britse marineschip, naar Zeeuws Vlaanderen te gaan, onderweg te riskant werd bevonden gezien de aanvallen van de Luftwaffe aldaar. Terugvaren naar Hoek van Holland was inmiddels ook onmogelijk geworden vanwege de vijandelijkheden in die Hoek. Zodoende moest de koningin wel besluiten door te varen naar Harwich.

Enkel uit dit relaas valt al op te maken dat Wilhelmina onder druk van het kabinet en de hachelijke en onvoorspelbare omstandigheden naar Engeland moest uitwijken.

Van Walsum's stelling: 'De gangbare opvatting dat de koningin in ballingschap meer voor haar volk heeft kunnen betekenen dan wanneer zij in Nederland was gebleven heeft hooguit de kracht van een hypothese',
wordt ontkracht door zijn eigen constatering 'dat in bezet Nederland de opvatting kon postvatten dat de belangen van volk en vaderland beter konden worden gediend door een staatshoofd in ballingschap.'

Zijn hypothese: 'Mogelijk was van haar als gegijzelde van de Duitsers meer invloed uitgegaan op de bezettingsautoriteiten en op haar landgenoten. Feit is dat de Duitsers gevoelig waren voor haar gezagspositie, en dat zij op enigerlei wijze rekening met haar hadden te houden. Zij zou weliswaar onttroond zijn, maar daarmee niet machteloos zijn geworden', is uitermate zwak en onbewijsbaar. Minister-president de Geer is door de Duitsers afgevoerd naar Duitsland; het is zeer de vraag of de bezetters de koningin in staat hadden gesteld haar (gegijzelde) gezagspositie op een invloedrijke wijze uit te oefenen zoals door Van Walsum geimpliceerd.

Het feit dat de regering niet heeft gecapituleerd maar haar zetel heeft verplaatst naar Londen, heeft - volgens de Enquetecommissie 'regeringsbeleid 1940-1945' -:
'de gehele verdere oorlogvoering van Nederland beheerst;

het heeft de invloed van Nederland in de bondgenootschappelijke beraadslagingen verzekerd; 
het heeft de organisatie van de activiteit van marine en koopvaardij in de strijd ter zee mogelijk gemaakt; 
het heeft het internationale prestige van Nederland hoog gehouden; 
het heeft aan het verzet in het bezette gebied een onontbeerlijke morele en daadwerkelijke steun verleend en tenslotte heeft het de mogelijkheid geschapen tot een effectieve voorbereiding van de bevrijding en het herstel van Nederland..' 

De Jong plaatst hierbij als aantekening: 'Was het niet veleer zo dat het, met name na het voorbeeld dat de Poolse regering gegeven had, eigenlijk niet de natuurlijkste van de wereld dat ook de Nederlandse ministers alle moeite zouden doen uit handen van de vijand te blijven?

Waarbij nog te bedenken valt dat het Poolse kabinet geen verantwoordelijkheid droeg voor

overzeese gebiedsdelen' (blz. 292).

De regering bestaat uit 'koning' en kabinet. Over de rol van koningin Wilhelmina in Londen kunnen wij hier verder kort zijn. Bekend is dat Churchill een grote bewondering voor haar had: 'She is the only man in the Dutch Government'..

Nederland had haar daar niet kunnen missen, wat revisionistische historici als Sander van Walsum, Nanda van der Zee en Pauline Micheels (?) ook mogen beweren.