The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?
For 2014 though, plenty of signs point to a tectonic shift in the geopolitical map of Eurasia, with Iran finally emerging as the real superpower in Southwest Asia over the designs of both Israel and the House of Saud. Now that’s (geopolitical) entertainment. Happy New Year.
The US secretary of state vowed Washington’s support for the Iraqi government in its fight to regain control of towns in its western province taken over by militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
That’s rich. The government of Syria is battling to root out these same al-Qaeda-linked militants. But in that country, Washington offers no such support.
Robert Parry, Consortium News joins Thom Hartmann. Al Qaeda is back – with a vengeance. Islamic militants linked to the terrorist group have taken over two Iraqi cities – almost 10 years after the American military took those same cities from insurgents during the bloody early days of the Iraq War. Has Bush’s Invasion of Iraq doomed the people of the Middle East to decades of sectarian violence?
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.
The stolen memos, reports and internal correspondence provided the first tangible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of American citizens then known collectively as “the New Left.”
The sad truth is that Britain sells arms to repressive regimes in the Middle East, and elsewhere, mainly because it supports them. It wants to keep them in power, and often prefers them to democratic movements which may not support Western policies. This is not simply my view. It is what policy makers have expressed in private government planning files, which are declassified after 30 years. British arms exports have for decades helped favoured regimes maintain ‘internal security’, meaning repression
Obama and Cameron also know that their unquenchable thirst to intervene in the Muslim world has yielded lethal results for their own people. Foregoing an adult-like silence, they, like mindless adolescents, cheered on the “freedom-loving democrats” in Tahrir Square, promoting and deepening the chaos that led to the Islamists’ stripping Egypt’s arsenals of modern weaponry and freeing thousands of veteran and talented mujahedin who were incarcerated in Mubarak’s prisons. Those men and weapons are now in active service from Algeria to Afghanistan to Nigeria to Syria.
The uprisings of the Arab Spring have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt.
Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”
After 500 years of a profoundly unequal relationship with the West, it is clear that we don’t have the same criteria of what is good and bad. We have deeply divergent interests. How can one not deplore the ‘yes’ votes from three sub-Saharan countries (Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon) for resolution 1973 that inaugurated the latest form of colonisation baptised ‘the protection of peoples’, which legitimises the racist theories that have informed Europeans since the 18th century and according to which North Africa has nothing to do with sub-Saharan Africa, that North Africa is more evolved, cultivated and civilised than the rest of Africa?
Following the Vietnam War, US imperial intervention passed through several phases: In the immediate aftermath, the US government faced a humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese liberation forces and was under pressure from an American public sick and tired of war.Imperial military interventions, domestic espionage against opponents and usual practice of fomenting coups d’état (regime change) declined.
One devastated country after the other has made it clear that any country which pursues independent sovereign policies and attempts to better its own position and the state of its people becomes a target for the US Empire. According to Dr. Michael Parenti, in an interview with the Voice of Russia; “… any leader who uses the resources, and labor, and substance of his country for the well-being and self-development in that country is seen as someone who is evil, has a hidden agenda, hostile toward America and is hostile toward the West.”
