A Good Citizen of Humankind

To call it a dumb war is an understatement. However, under current circumstances this reasoned analysis isn't anymore likely to be heard by the viewers of Google News, CNN, Fox News, etc. than were the voices of reason and common sense who raised similar objections to our blundering into the Iraq war disaster. And no, it isn't a matter of 20-20 hindsight. And no, it wasn't a matter of faulty intelligence. It was obvious to anyone paying strict attention that it was going to be a dumb war before it began. All you have to do to know that the present war against ISIS is certain to also end badly is to take a look at who the members of the so called 'coalition' are and who they aren't. Then also take a look at what the motivations and end goals are of both the members and nonmembers are and I think you will have to conclude there is no way such a divergent group can possibly merge into an effective coalition. A major reason for the success of the allied forces in WW II was that despite their many differences they shared an overriding common purpose and a common goal. Nothing like that exists today in the second, or is it the third or fourth, dumb war in the Middle East.

Paris attacks: terror at home and away

This is a dumb war

by Serge Halimi

A little-known US senator named Barack Obama said in 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. [...] What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. [...] A war based not on reason but on passion.” Americans were angry after 9/11 and President George Bush Jr chose to channel their anger not against Saudi Arabia (most of the Al-Qaida terrorists involved came from there), but against Iraq, which the US invaded six months later. The media wanted the war and most Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton, favored it too. But the invasion of Iraq created the chaos that produced so-called Islamic State (ISIS).

The Paris killings of 13 November are about to help realize ISIS’s two main objectives. The first is to create a coalition of “apostates”, “infidels” and “Shia renegades” who will come to fight it in Iraq and Syria, then in Libya. The second is to make the majority of westerners believe that their Muslim compatriots could be a fifth column hiding in the shadows, a “domestic enemy” in the service of the jihadists.

War and fear — even an apocalyptic objective contains a grain of rationality. The jihadists have calculated that the “crusaders” and “idolaters” may launch airstrikes on Syrian cities or patrol Iraqi provinces intensively but will never manage to occupy an Arab country for long. ISIS also hopes that its attacks in Europe will stir up mistrust of western Muslims, and lead to heavy policing of them. This will breed resentment, and some will want to join the “caliphate”; only a very few, but then the followers of Salafist jihad aren’t trying to win an election. In fact, an anti-Muslim party win would advance their cause.

“France is at war,” François Hollande told the French congress on 16 November. He has been trying for a long time to intervene militarily in Syria, and has been pushing for greater US involvement. What is peculiar is that Hollande now wants to fight ISIS in Syria, yet two years ago, seized by the same war fever, he was trying to convince the US to punish Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Will Obama persist in opposing Hollande’s “dumb” war? The pressure on Obama is all the stronger because ISIS wants the same thing as Hollande. As Pierre-Jean Luizard, a researcher at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), says, it was at first “as if ISIS had consciously made a list of everything that would disgust popular opinion in the West: infringing the rights of minorities and of women, particularly through forced marriage, executing homosexuals, reinstating slavery, [...] beheadings and mass executions” (1). When this macabre catalogue was not enough, ISIS cut the throat of an American hostage, posting a video of it, then carried out deadly shootings in Paris. At this point, ISIS expected the “crusaders” to respond.

A head of state is almost duty bound to react to such spectacular acts. He is under political pressure to announce some kind, almost any kind, of response — the destruction of a warehouse or a munitions depot, airstrikes on a city. He is expected to show determination, to promise new, even tougher, legislation and condemn those in favour of appeasement. He must use martial language, talk of blood and assert that retaliation will be ruthless. Thus, he will seek standing ovations, and his approval rating will go up ten points. Eventually, all of this will prove “dumb” — but not until a few months later. And the temptation to escalate grows ever stronger, especially with frenetic 24/7 news coverage making it seem that every act, every statement, requires an immediate answer.

During the Gulf war in 1991, US hawks criticised George Bush Sr for not ordering the troops that had just freed Kuwait to go on to Baghdad. Four years later, chief of staff General Colin Powell justified their relative restraint: “From the geopolitical standpoint, the coalition, particularly the Arab states, never wanted Iraq invaded and dismembered. [...] It would not contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd political entities. The only way to have avoided this outcome was to have undertaken a largely US conquest and occupation off a remote nation of twenty million people. [...] It is naïve however, to think that if Saddam had fallen, he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran. Quite possibly, we would have wound up with a Saddam by another name” (2). In 2003 George Bush Jr completed his father’s military project. The neocons hailed in him a new Churchill, courage, even democracy. But Powell had forgotten to read his own book, as the fears he had once expressed came true under the president he was serving as secretary of state.

Bush Jr was criticised for the childish, almost criminal naivety of his war on terror. He seems to have found his true heirs in Paris. “Let’s put it simply,” France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius said, talking down to us like a teacher to a class of small children. “ISIS are monsters, but there are only 30,000 of them. If all the countries in the world are unable to eliminate 30,000 people who are monsters, then nothing makes sense any more” (3).

Let’s try to explain it to him: the 30,000 monsters have widespread support in the Sunni regions of Iraq and Syria, where the armies they face are often seen as instruments of Shia dictatorships, themselves responsible for many massacres. That is why ISIS was able to capture some cities without any fighting, when the soldiers holding them fled, abandoning their weapons and uniforms. The US has tried funding the training and equipment of more than 4,000 “moderate” Syrian fighters but, according to the Americans, only four or five are operational — and the unit cost has been several million dollars. At Mosul, 30,000 Iraqi troops were defeated by 1,000 ISIS fighters, who captured more than 2,000 armoured vehicles and hundreds of millions of dollars from the vaults of local banks. At Ramadi, the jihadists defeated 25 times their number of Iraqi troops. Syria’s armed forces are exhausted by four years of war. And the Kurds are not prepared to die for territory they do not claim. “In reality,” Luizard observed, “ISIS is only strong because its opponents are weak, and is flourishing on the ruins of institutions that are in the process of collapsing” (4).

It’s the same in Libya. Under the influence of strong emotions and led by the shock team of Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard-Henri Lévy, France made an important contribution to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. It imagined that getting a dictator lynched would be enough to bring about a western-style liberal democracy. But Libya has fallen apart and ISIS controls several cities from which it attacks neighbouring Tunisia. France’s defence minister has admitted: “I am very concerned about Libya. Daesh [ISIS] has moved in, taking advantage of internal clashes between Libyans,” but “if Tobruk and Tripoli were to work together, Daesh would no longer exist” (5). That problem had presumably been solved, three years ago, when Lévy explained: “Contrary to what the Cassandras predicted, Libya has not split into three confederate entities. [...] Tribal law has not prevailed over the sense of national unity. [...] Compared to Tunisia and Egypt, Libya appears to have achieved a successful [Arab] Spring — and those who helped it can be proud of themselves” (6). Proud indeed: apart from Bernard Guetta, who broadcasts the French foreign ministry’s viewpoint (7), nobody is better at tall stories.

Hollande now wants “a grand and unique coalition” against ISIS. This would include Assad. But Assad has already replied: “You cannot fight Daesh and still be allied with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are arming the terrorists” (8). President Vladimir Putin feels that Turkey, another presumed member of the coalition, has stabbed Russia in the back by shooting down one of its planes on 24 November. As soon as the motley coalition that France is trying to cobble together had won the war, it would face the question of what next, under even more difficult conditions than in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. US neocons have already forgotten all these failures (as has Hollande), and are demanding that 50,000 troops be sent into the ISIS-occupied zone (9).

In Foreign Affairs, Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, experts on the Middle East, list the conditions for a sustainable western military success on territory currently controlled by ISIS: “the support of the American public; a large cadre of deployable civilian experts in reconstruction and stabilisation; deep knowledge of the society for whose fate a victorious United States would take responsibility; [...] a sustained military force to provide security for populations and infrastructure [...] local constituents or clients, or indeed allies, to assist.” They point out that “if this sounds familiar, it is because it is the same list of things that Washington wasn’t able to put together the last two times it launched major military interventions in the Middle East [Iraq and Libya]. [...] The United States would likely lose another war in the Middle East for all the same reasons it lost the last two” (10).

France, already heavily engaged in Africa, cannot win a war in the Middle East. The fact that ISIS is trying to draw it into this trap should not lead Hollande to rush into it, taking with him a coalition of countries that are often more cautious. Terrorism kills civilians, but so does war. The intensification of western airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, which will create as many jihadist fighters as they kill, will not restore the territorial integrity of those countries, nor the legitimacy of their governments in the eyes of their peoples. A lasting solution will depend on the peoples of the region, on a diplomatic solution, not on former colonial powers or the US, which are disqualified both by their support for the worst policies of Israel and by the disastrous results of their military adventurism — disastrous from their own viewpoint too, since by invading Iraq in 2003, after supporting Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran (which killed more than a million) for eight years, they turned Iraq into an ally of Iran. And states that sell arms to the oil dictatorships of the Gulf, propagators of Salafist jihad, are not qualified to talk of peace, or to teach Arabs the virtues of pluralist democracy.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that when they operate in stable states with stable regimes and do not have significant support from a section of the population, small groups of terrorists are a police problem, rather than a military one. He added that it is understandable that such groups make the population very nervous, especially in major western cities, and especially when government and media are working together to create a climate of fear (11).

This creation of a climate of fear, and repeated denigration of those who refuse to face up to reality, make it possible to stifle the voices of those who reject the accumulation of repressive measures that are not only ineffective but threaten civil rights. Xenophobic measures (as demanded by the National Front) have been added to the mix, such as revoking the French nationality of some citizens with dual nationality. The declaration of a state of emergency was approved almost unanimously by French parliamentarians, and, as if this was not enough, the prime minister asked them not to refer to the constitutional council the legally shaky measures he wanted them to approve.

Obama told Bush in 2002: “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that [...] the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. [...] Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East [...] stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality [...] so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.” Obama has not taken his own advice, and neither have other heads of state. Hence, the situation we are in today. ISIS attacks and France’s disastrous foreign policy have led to a new “war”, solely military and therefore already lost.

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

We sell weapons around the world and locally to terrorists. by RRO

Monday, November 30, 2015

Our Stories by RRO

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Disenfranchised :When You Don't Have Hope by RRO.

When you don’t have hope then lots of things look good:

Drugs
Radical religion
Riots
Protests
Guns
Violence
Hate Groups
Revolution
Terrorism

Do you know where most of the terrorists came from in Paris? Well, the answer is Brussels. What part of Brussels. The Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. What’s it like? Well it might be called the Fuller Park of Brussels. Fuller Park is a rough neighborhood in Chicago. Both have high unemployment, poverty and a great deal of hopelessness. Kids in schools in these two neighborhoods don’t graduate from high school, they don’t go to college. Sometimes, they don’t even eat.
Last week the Chicago please released a video of a teenager in Chicago being gunned down in what looks old fashion murder to me. He was on drugs, PCB, and had a knife in his hand. He was walking down the middle of the street. The police pulled up and shot him. The first bullet took him to the ground. He was shot an additional 15 times. You can see the puffs of steam rise from his body as each bullet penetrates his body. That certainly solved his drug problem.
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Detached from our reality

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A moderate amount of PCP often causes users to feel detached, distant, and estranged from their surroundings….may be accompanied by a sense of strength and invulnerability. Its bad stuff. But, who is to JUDGE that we would not want to feel detached from our surroundings if we grew up in Gaza, or Fuller, or Molenbeek.
Personally, drugs are not my style. I think I would detach by starting a violent revolution, which might look like terrorism to some.

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Bigotry is one Response to “Such People”

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We respond to drugs, terrorists, and all forms of radical behavior in this country with one simple emotion: Judgment. It is one thing to condemn such behavior, but to make a Judgment that we are superior to all these people, to say that if we were raised in a pocket of hopelessness that we would quietly suffer and do no harm is a huge judgment against a large part of humanity in the world today — much of it inside our own borders.
And our primary action to deal with all these problems. Violent force. Guns. Bombs. Military Task Forces. Drones. Wars. Prison. Capital punishment. And yet, has we kill millions, millions more rise up from the infinite supply of the disenfranchised.
Trump is the champ of bigotry. Never in my nearly 70 years on this planet have I seen anyone that is a dangerous as this man. He is bigoted against Mexicans, Immigrants, Palestinians, Muslims, handicapped, Democrats, his fellow Republican candidates for President, and anyone else that he can make fun of to feel superior. Trump would never look below the surface to find out where terrorism, drug use, and all other forms of disenfranchisement is coming from … it would be beneath him to treat others as humans. And what is worse, he speaks to what is the worse parts of all of us: that little (or big) core of bigotry that exists in all of us. Hitler was the last one that did this well. Trump is going down the same road disguised as a savior appealing to disenfranchised religious right.

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Compassion, Loving our Neighbor, Being our Brother’s Keeper

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If we want to change the world, make it a better place, using deadly violence against all the disenfranchised in our country and the world will lead to the long advertised apocalypse. If we do not look at the core problems behind wealth inequality in our country and much of the globe, then the world will continue to unravel as we mass produce the disenfranchised. If we ever needed some serious dialogue on the issues, it is now. Two of the candidates for President in my mind are approaching some of the issues with openness and candor. Bernie is good on helping the working man and down trodden. Rand Paul is good on addressing the financial mess our congress has got us in. Both are against attempting to solve everything with our price gouging military industrial complex.
We need to start talking … and taking the best of every point of view.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Where is the Arab Coalition Fighting ISIS? by DRJ

Without condoning it, I can understand why the Sunni majority countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, etc. are reluctant to attack ISIS, but where the hell is Israel? The United States spends billions arming them to the teeth with the most sophisticated high tech weapons in the world so they can bomb the civilian population in Gaza back to the stone age, but when it comes to ISIS, all we hear from them is how it is the duty of the Americans and Europeans to destroy Israel's enemies in Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. In other words, those who along with the Kurds are providing the only effective ground forces fighting ISIS.

For reasons I certainly don't understand, it appears that ISIS and the other jihadist terrorists operating in neighboring Syria are beyond consideration as targets for the US supplied F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers that make up the Israeli air force. As if that isn't enough to make you wonder what the hell is going on, consider this; apparently the United States is prohibited from deploying its own combat aircraft for operations against ISIS from the territory of Israel, our greatest ally in the war against terrorism. You figure, I can't.

Donald Johnson

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Elderly Black Man Paralyzed by Police. ...by RRO

A few years ago, an older man was walking down the sidewalk from his son's house to his grandson's house. Someone called into the police that a black man was wandering down the sidewalk looking into garages. Further, he had done the same thing the day before. He was a 57 year old man from India. He had been in the country for one week. He knew little English but enjoyed spending time with his grandson. His real crime, being black.

Elderly black man paralyzed by Alabama Police

Well, the police shows up and asks him what he is doing walking down the sidewalk. He tries to point to his house and tell them he is from India and doesn't speak English. As he tries to point toward his son's house, where he lives, they tell him in a language he doesn't understand not to walk off again. Shortly after that, he tries again to point at his house and of course walks toward it pointing. The policeman, Eric Parker, body slams him to the ground. He then tells him to stand up, but being paralyzed of course, the Indian man can't stand up.

Eric Parker, the policeman, was fired. He was charged with assault and has gone to court twice to face these charges. Both time the jury has been hung up, unable to come to a consensus. His defense, the man from India should know how to speak English if he is going to be in America.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Sunday, February 07, 2016

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Monday, January 25, 2016

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Monday, December 14, 2015

Monday, December 07, 2015

Saturday, December 05, 2015

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Monday, November 30, 2015

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Drugs

Radical religion

Riots

Protests

Guns

Violence

Hate Groups

Revolution

Terrorism

Detached from our reality

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Bigotry is one Response to “Such People”

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Compassion, Loving our Neighbor, Being our Brother’s Keeper

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Thursday, November 19, 2015

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