(please forward widely) No to U.S.-backed wars: Iraq, Palestine/Israel and Ukraine Iraq The politicians say that the
United States, unlike the brutal ISIS, are a civilized people under God. After all, they point out, we live in a
democracy, respect women, and do not impose any religion on others. Yes, the U.S. “humanitarian” cop
of the world acts with moderation, as when it murdered 1.5 million Iraqis
during the “civilized” decade-long war to prevent Saddam Hussein from using
“weapons of mass destruction” that everyone now knows never existed!
Nevertheless, in the name of “democracy,” George Bush did orchestrate “regime
change” in Iraq and they had “democratic” elections that the U.S. military
supervised. The U.S. puppet Nouri al-Maliki was elected Prime Minister – a real
democratic leader indeed! Today the Obama administration has
essentially forced Maliki to resign because he had little or no support among
the Iraqi people, who he persecuted and robbed with abandon, including his own
Shiite majority. His was a U.S.-supported
and approved death squad and profiteering regime, but now he is to be dispensed
with because he is no longer effective in serving U.S. objectives. Yesterday, when ISIS was on the
Syrian side of the border, there were no U.S. objections to its beheadings;
there were no objections when ISIS was armed and financed by U.S. allies in
Qatar and Saudi Arabia – today ruled by presumably “democratic-minded” monarchs.
Yesterday, ISIS was murdering U.S. enemies in Syria. No problem! Today it is
murdering “friends” of the U.S. in Iraq! Yesterday it was using stolen Syrian
oil to fund the central U.S. “regime change” objective – Assad’s removal. Today
ISIS is using the same Syrian oil to fund its Iraqi operations. Yesterday, U.S. military experts
insisted that it was Syria’s Assad who had crossed Obama’s “red line” when
Assad was charged with using sarin gas on innocent Syrians. The “evidence” was
“beyond dispute” the military experts told the world. Obama was on the verge
of bombing Syria, again in the name of “humanitarian” punishment and was
only curtailed by mass public protests.
Later, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, as
well as experts at MIT and elsewhere, presented the evidence that it was the
“rebels” - the ISIS rebels - that used the sarin gas. The matter was dropped.
Obama didn’t condemn the ISIS atrocities because after all, they were fighting U.S.
enemies! We see that U.S. weapons are
supplied to friends who later become enemies, or the enemies take and/or
purchase them from U.S. allies. ISIS
is using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of modern U.S. weapons its
fighters have seized from Iraqi forces, while current friends, the Kurds, fight
with old Soviet arms. Muqtada
al-Sadr, an influential political and religious leader in Iraq who consistently
opposed the presence of foreign forces and called for the immediate end to the
occupation, had it right when he cautioned that U.S. bombs in northern Iraq
were not meant to help the Iraqi people but rather “to protect U.S. interests.”
And what are these interests? Oil! Iraq presides over one of the world’s
largest oil reserves in the world. After more than a decade of war, the lion’s
share flows into the coffers of U.S. oil corporations. Rather
than withdrawing from Iraq, President Obama assures us that the U.S. will
continue to carry out the “limited” military missions, he claims to protect
U.S. personnel and facilities, to help stabilize the Iraqi government, and of
course, to provide humanitarian relief. Today the named enemy has changed
but the U.S. objective remains the same.
There is no humanitarian will to aid the Azidi minority or the
Kurds. Protecting U.S. interests (synonymous
with the interests of the international energy corporations) is always central
to any mission. Many military experts agree that airstrikes will not be
sufficient and boots on the ground are next. The U.S. has been fighting against
the people of Iraq militarily and with sanctions and occupation for over 20
years. These crimes against humanity must end. Our demands are the same as ever:
Palestine With greater brutality and
disregard for world opinion than ever before, Israel, with the full backing of
the United States, has once again engaged in a genocidal collective punishment
of a heroic people who refuse to leave their land or give up their rights. To date, 2000+ Palestinian Gazans were murdered, 10,000
wounded, and 278,000 displaced from their homes. 75-85 percent of the
Palestinian dead and wounded were civilians, many women and children. Medical facilities were bombed, and Israeli
tanks shelled UN schools and refugee centers killing over 50 and wounding
hundreds more. UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has indicated
that Israel was guilty of war crimes. The infrastructure of Gaza has
been obliterated, with the only power plant bombed to smithereens, virtually
all water supplies and sewage treatment facilities wiped out, and 50,000 Gazan
homes blown to bits. This horrendous death and destruction comes from one of
the world’s most powerful military states, Zionist Israel. On the Israeli side, three
civilians died, one via a mortar and two by primitive rockets. 64 Israeli IDF
soldiers were reported to have been killed. Israel says they have the “right to defend its
citizens,” and claims its very existence is threatened by Hamas. By international law, however, the
disproportionate use of force is a war crime and particularly heinous when used
to attack an occupied people. “Israel must attack Gaza even more
mercilessly, expel the population and resettle the territory with Jews.” These
are the words of Israel’s Deputy Speaker of the Knesset (parliament) Moshe
Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party. (See
Israeli news website Arutz Sheva, July 15.) Feiglin’s program on how it must be
done includes attacks using maximum force, with no consideration for “human
shields” or “environmental damage.” He calls
for a total siege on Gaza, allowing nothing or no-one to enter or leave. After the devastating use of firepower, he
calls for “conquering” Gaza and eliminating all armed enemies. Those who are not connected to the
“terrorists”, he says, will be allowed to leave Gaza permanently. He further states that “Gaza is part of our
Land and we will remain there forever.” Subsequently, Gaza will “become part of
sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews”. Those who manage to stay after
a number of years will receive permanent resident status and even Israeli
citizenship, contingent on accepting “upon themselves Israel’s rule, substance
and way of life of the Jewish State in its Land”. In truth, Feiglin’s proposal differs little, if at all,
from Israeli’s long-standing official policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. We must never forget
that the US is entirely complicit, and in fact, Israel could not continue its
racist policies of brutal control and subjugation of a captive indigenous
population without the political, economic and military backing of the
U.S. The totality of U.S. support was
blatantly demonstrated in the Senate’s unanimous bi-partisan “Vote of Shame” on
July 17 to pass a resolution supporting the Israeli assault on Gaza in order to “defend
its citizens and ensure its survival.” Palestinians and their rights by international law to self-defense and their very
survival are never considered.
Included in the resolution was
the real reason Israel and the U.S. were alarmed and the trigger for the latest
wave of violence against the Gazans: “Whereas Hamas entered into a unity
government arrangement with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority,” it called on
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “to dissolve the unity governing
arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel.” In fact, the feared unified
Palestinian resistance is why the Israeli government had laid plans to attack
Gaza long ago.
Armed to the teeth to the tune of
$3.1 billion yearly – the largest recipient of U.S. “foreign aid,” – an
additional $500 million was almost immediately supplied to the settler state to
replenish the bombs, missiles and other weapons of war that were “used up” on a
near-defenseless Palestinian population.
Another $500 million was contributed for the Iron Dome missile defense
system, presumably to defend against the fairly ineffectual Palestinian
rockets. The struggle for Palestinian
freedom and rights has gone on for close to 70 years. We must continue our
efforts to stand with them, not just at times of heightened Israeli escalation,
and as Americans, to particularly focus on ending the criminal collusion of the
U.S. government. Our demands remain:
Ukraine The U.S.-backed bombing of Donetz, a city of one million in
eastern Ukraine, continues, with U.S.-trained Blackwater-type fighters directly
involved along with several well-armed neo-Nazis-led militias that have emerged
as storm troopers flying banners emblazoned with swastika-like emblems. An August 9 New York Times article by Andrew E.
Kramer was among the few in the corporate media that formally citied the role
of neo-Nazis forces. Kramer wrote: “The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern:
The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic,
violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups
surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat. “Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate
their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry
and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village
of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” These rightwing militias and
self-appointed politically-led forces (bolstered by neo-Nazis from countries as
far away as Canada and Sweden) are employed especially when the official
Ukrainian Army has often proven to be ineffective when ordered to fire on
civilians or on volunteer soldiers who have mobilized to defend their cities
from a regime they consider illegitimate as well as anti-Russian and
chauvinist. Thousands of Ukrainian troops have refused to fight, left Ukraine
or joined the Russian Army. The Ukrainian Army, increasingly equipped with high-tech
U.S./NATO supplied modern weapons of war, and instructed by U.S. and NATO
“advisers,” now operates with modern fighter jets that daily bomb eastern
Ukraine cities – exacting terrible casualties on civilian residents. The present Ukrainian government drew its authority from
the February 20 U.S.-backed and neo-fascist-led coup that stormed the Ukrainian
Rada (parliament) and forced the elected President Viktor Yanukovych to flee.
The neo-fascist, anti-Semitic, hyper-nationalist, Svoboda (“Freedom”) Party,
accompanied by the virulent pro-Nazis, Right Sector formation, led the coup.
They trace their ideological roots to the pro-Nazi Ukrainian movements of World
War II. These armed, club-wielding, and often Molotov-cocktail
bomb-throwing “democrats” had been let loose by the rump Fatherland Party
“opposition” Ukrainian parliamentary oligarchs who seized on the now-refuted
false flag accusation that Yanukovych had employed snipers to attack and murder
89 Independence Square (Maidan) demonstrators while wounding 100 others on Feb.
20. A now confirmed phone call between the Estonian Foreign
Minister Urmas Paet and European Union Foreign Affairs Minister Catherine
Ashton, reported in the British Guardian and other newspapers, reveals
Paet’s view, stated in a verified taped conversation, that “the same snipers
[were] killing people from both sides..… behind the snipers, it was not
Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” This rump “new coalition,” in violation of the Ukrainian
constitution, appointed a new government that included five Svoboda and Right
Sector ministers including the two top posts in the Ukrainian military as well
as the Minister of Agriculture. The
United States rapidly moved to recognize the coup government as the legitimate
authority in Ukraine. While the original Independence Square mobilizations
demanded democratic rights and protested government political corruption, they
rapidly devolved into militarized neo-fascist-controlled, anti-Semitic and
violent racist outpourings and confrontations. Undoubtedly, the CIA, having
poured $5 billion into funding a huge number of Ukrainian anti-government NGO’s
over the past decade, played a role. Indeed both Senator John McCain and U.S.
Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland joined the protests, with McCain
appearing on the same platform as Svoboda Party leaders. The U.S. and European Union (EU) interest was to force the
Yanukovych government to sign an “Association Agreement” that would guarantee
Ukrainian repayment of EU bailout loans via the imposition of massive Greek-style
austerity measures. These included huge layoffs of public workers, increased
taxes and a 50 percent rise in the cost of basic utilities. On the military side, the EU/U.S.-pressured agreement was
aimed at moving Ukraine into the NATO orbit and eventually at the permanent
stationing of NATO troops – posing a more direct military threat to Russia. This
has led to heightened tension and concerns about a new Cold War. A key, but infrequently mentioned element in the present
Ukraine government war concerns the U.S. move to acquire the unimpeded right to
frack Ukraine’s shale gas reserves, the fourth largest in the world. Indeed,
these resources figure highly in U.S. corporate efforts to replace Russia’s
exports of fossil fuels to Europe with U.S.-produced natural gas. Behind the
U.S.-backed arming and training of the Ukrainian Army and its support to the
bombing of eastern Ukrainian cities, lies $ trillions in natural resources that
the U.S. seeks to transfer to its privileged corporate interests. Once again, we are compelled to demand:
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