The parliamentary rebellion against Cameron and Obama came as a big surprise to just about everyone in mainstream UK politics, mainly because it was not organized by any of the main political parties. It came, rather, from the grassroots of society – ordinary people who lobbied their MPs before Thursday’s vote, and from the legacy of protests against the Iraq war.
The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”
However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.
By Michael Parenti The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington—in which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famed “I Have a Dream” speech—has recently won renewed attention from various print and electronic media in the United States. But the more attention given to King’s extraordinary speech, the less we seem to know about King himself, the less aware […]
Parliament Debates Military Action Against Syria. George Galloway speaks as The British House of Commons holds an urgent debate on possible military action against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Prime Minister David Cameron recalled parliament following reports of a chemical weapons attack against Syrian citizens.
The US is about to commit another holocaust in the Middle East based on lies, just like the huge Iraqi WMD lies. Millions of people in the Middle East are in grave risk of being slaughtered. YOU MUST SPEAK UP AND PUT AN END TO THIS CRIMINAL PLOT. Force the American public to think – FOR ONCE!
To disbelieve the lies we are now told – that the Syrian government killed hundreds of innocent Syrians in a chemical weapon attack – means we must disbelieve our leaders and all the media who report and parrot their words. But this is only the start of it; we often mistrust these leaders anyway, and we can usually choose from different viewpoints in our media and select which ones we trust. It’s only the start of it because this time it is different – all our media and all our leaders say the same thing so if we disbelieve one we must disbelieve them all.
Last night’s vote in the Commons is welcome, but a blip. It owes more to political tribalism than to principle. Miliband and New Labour did not oppose military action, they merely wanted to be seen to be dictating the terms. As neither Tories nor Labour were prepared to accept the other’s terms for military action, the anti war minority could combine with the tribalists of each to make sure everything got defeated. Good but fortuitous.
During an inspection visit in 2001, a team of specialists from the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), confirmed the existence of US chemical weapons in Panama, left behind –like other war materials and poisoning items- by the US armed forces who had to evacuate the country to comply with the Canal Treaties, signed in 1977 by Omar Torrijos and James Earl Carter.
The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), formulated at the 2005 UN World Summit, is based on the idea that state sovereignty is not a right but a responsibility. Where offending states fail to live up to this responsibility by inflicting genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity on their own people, the international community has a responsibility to act. Economic sanctions and the use of military force can thus be employed as ‘humanitarian intervention’.
The goal of the United States, which they are rapidly approaching fulfilling, is to be able not just to collect and monitor everybody’s electronic communications, but to store them for increasingly long periods of time. They are building a massive facility in Utah that has as its purpose storage of electronic data that they are collecting. They are collecting electronic data in such large quantities that they are incapable of storing it for very long, and they want to make sure that they can keep it for as long as they want.
Britain, France and the US are committing to another disastrous military intervention. Apart from the inevitable casualties, any attack on Syria can only inflame an already disastrous civil war and would risk pulling in regional powers further.
Most people in this country have learnt from the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. According to a Telegraph/YouGuv poll on Sunday only 9% of the British public would support troops being sent to Syria, and only 16% support sending more arms to the region. Our politicians however have learnt nothing.
Our economy is based on a model of constant growth – growth in production, consumption and population. Economic growth has provided rising standards of living in the West and seen millions in China and India lifted out of poverty. This model has been disrupted in many countries by the global financial crisis, which is now seeing another round of casualties, particularly in Europe. Will things settle down with growth resuming, or will our economies bump up against a wall of finite resources? And if they do, what will this mean the global balance of power?
