Irak 129

De Washington Post bericht:

'Panel: U.S. Underreported Iraq Violence.
WASHINGTON -- U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said.
In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.
The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said.
"The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases." It said, for example, that a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack, and a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count, either. Also, if the source of a sectarian attack is not determined, that assault is not added to the database of violence incidents.
"Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," the report said.
A request for Pentagon comment on the report's assertions was not immediately answered.
Some U.S. analysts have complained for months that the Pentagon's reports to Congress on conditions in Iraq have undercounted the violent episodes. Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a November report that the Pentagon omits many low-level incidents and types of civil violence.'

Zie: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR2006120601325_pf.html

De Pro-Israel Lobby 17

De pro-Israel lobby heeft het druk de laatste tijd. Alle bekende retoriek wordt weer ingezet om de terreur van Israel te verdoezelen. Dit maal is de voormalige president van de VS, Jimmy Carter, het doelwit. De Washington Post bericht:

'Carter Book on Israel 'Apartheid' Sparks Bitter Debate.
Scholar Resigns From Ga. Center.

A veteran Middle East scholar affiliated with the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned his position there Monday in an escalating controversy over former president Jimmy Carter's bestselling book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," traces the ups and downs of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process beginning with Carter's 1977-1980 presidency and the historic peace accord he negotiated between Israel and Egypt and continuing to the present. Although it apportions blame to Israel, the Palestinians and outside parties -- including the United States -- for the failure of decades of peace efforts, it is sharply critical of Israeli policy and concludes that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."
Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University, accused Carter of factual errors, omissions and plagiarism in the book. "Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information," Stein wrote in a harshly worded e-mail to friends and colleagues explaining his resignation as the center's Middle East fellow.
Stein offered no specifics in his e-mail to back up the charges, writing only that "in due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins."
A statement issued by the center yesterday in Carter's name said he regretted Stein's resignation "from the titular position as a Fellow" and noted that he had not been "actively involved" there for the past 12 years. Carter thanked Stein for his advice and assistance "during the early years of our Center" and wished him well.'

Lees verder: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR2006120602171.html

Zie voor Jimmy Carters boek: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285026/sr=8-2/qid=1165524073/ref=pd_ka_2/026-7961851-4511662?ie=UTF8&s=books

De Bush Bende 30

De pro-Israel lobby en de huidige collega's van Hirsi Magan/Ali van the American Enterprise Institute, de extremistische denktank die de uitzichtloze politieke doctrine van president de Bush bedacht, zijn in grote moeilijkheden gekomen.

Common Dreams bericht: 'Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report.

WASHINGTON - To have read the neo-conservative press here over the past month, one would think that former Secretary of State James Baker poses the biggest threat to the United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein. As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991 Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as close to the devil himself. But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday, has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious" French. The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard and The National Review -- has been to discredit the ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are published. Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of a much bigger effort at training and strengthening Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008. On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen. John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region, leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as part of its diplomatic strategy. Baker himself telegraphed this aspect of his approach after meeting with Damascus's foreign minister and Tehran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif, who reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "(I)n my view, it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," he said. Those remarks set off a tidal wave of protest and criticism beginning with the published announcement in the Weekly Standard by Michael Rubin, a fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), that he had resigned from an "expert working group" advising the ISG. Rubin accused Baker and his Democratic co-chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, of having "gerrymandered (the) advisory panels to ratify predetermined recommendations" -- panels, he noted, which included Middle East experts who had actually opposed the Iraq war. In a preview of attacks that appeared with increasing frequency over the following month, Rubin also assailed Baker for what he called the former secretary of state's "legacy" in the Middle East -- namely, his approval of the 1989 Taif Accords which "sacrificed Lebanese independence" to Syria and his "betrayal" of Kurdish and Shiite rebels after the first Gulf War. Rubin was quickly followed by Eliot Cohen, a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, who, writing in the Wall Street Journal, mocked the ISG as a "collection of worthies commissioned by Congress that has spent several days in Iraq, chiefly in the Green Zone." "To think that either (Syria or Iran), with remarkable records of violence, duplicity and hostility to the U.S., will rescue us bespeaks a certain willful blindness," Cohen wrote.'

Lees verder: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1206-06.htm

De Bush Bende 29

'Oil in Iraq.

Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable. Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, everything has changed and the companies have been scrambling to grab their share of the spoils. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, "friendly" companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. The new Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon, whose 21 billion barrels are worth $1.5 trillion at today's prices. But no contracts could be signed until after elections and the formation of a new government, so that the Iraqi side would appear legally legitimate. While regional governments angle for influence over the foreign oil contracts, most Iraqis favor continued control by a national company and the powerful oil workers union opposes de-nationalization. Iraq's political future is very much in flux, but oil remains the central feature of the political landscape.'

Lees verder: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/irqindx.htm

De Commerciele Massamedia 17

Drie jaar geleden besteedde ik in het tijdschrift de Humanist en op de VPRO radio uitgebreid aaandacht aan de belangrijkste reden van de Amerikaanse inval in Irak, namelijk olie. De commerciele massamedia besteedden toen aan deze reden nagenoeg geen aandacht, maar wel uitgebreid aandacht aan de beweringen van die Westerse regeringen die beweerden dat Saddam over massavernietigingswapens beschikte en daarom uit de weg moest worden geruimd. Ik baseerde mij als onafhankelijk journalist op publiekelijk toegankelijke bronnen die al veel eerder duidelijk aantoonden dat het allemaal ging om olie, de strategisch meest vitale grondstof ter wereld. Die - vaak overheidsbronnen - hadden ook de andere Nederlandse journalisten kunnen raadplegen maar dat deden ze niet, gezagsgetrouw als ze doorgaans zijn.

Alternet bericht:

'Oil for Sale: Iraq Study Group Recommends Privatization
By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted December 7, 2006.

The Iraq Study Group may not have a solution for how to end the war, but it does have a way for its corporate friends to make money.
In its heavily anticipated report released on Wednesday, the Iraq Study Group made at least four truly radical proposals.
The report calls for the United States to assist in privatizing Iraq's national oil industry, opening Iraq to private foreign oil and energy companies, providing direct technical assistance for the "drafting" of a new national oil law for Iraq, and assuring that all of Iraq's oil revenues accrue to the central government.
President Bush hired an employee from the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq's nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization. The ISG report, however, goes further, stating that "the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise." In addition, the current Constitution of Iraq is ambiguous as to whether control over Iraq's oil should be shared among its regional provinces or held under the central government. The report specifically recommends the latter: "Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population." If these proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq's oil wealth.
The proposals should come as little surprise given that two authors of the report, James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, have each spent much of their political and corporate careers in pursuit of greater access to Iraq's oil and wealth.
"Pragmatist" is the word most often used to describe Iraq Study Group co-chair James A. Baker III. It is equally appropriate for Lawrence Eagleburger. The term applies particularly well to each man's efforts to expand U.S. economic engagement with Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Not only did their efforts enrich Hussein and U.S. corporations, particularly oil companies, it also served the interests of their own private firms.
On April 21,1990, a U.S. delegation was sent to Iraq to placate Saddam Hussein as his anti-American rhetoric and threats of a Kuwaiti invasion intensified. James A. Baker III, then President George H.W. Bush's secretary of state, personally sent a cable to the U.S embassy in Baghdad instructing the U.S. ambassador to meet with Hussein and to make clear that, "as concerned as we are about Iraq's chemical, nuclear, and missile programs, we are not in any sense preparing the way for preemptive military unilateral effort to eliminate these programs."'

Lees verder: http://alternet.org/waroniraq/45190 Zie ook:

http://home.planet.nl/~houck006/artikelen.html En:

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/madiwodo/dossiers/10840950/

Waarom wordt er in de Nederlandse commerciele massamedia aan dit aspect nu geen aandacht besteed? Weet u het?

Gods Schepping

'Are We Changing Planet Earth.
BBC Documentary.

David Attenborough explores just how much climate change is altering our planet. He looks ahead to find out what needs to be done to save Planet Earth from the worst impact of global warming and discovers what could happen to the planet once a 'tipping point' of carbon emissions is reached. He also discusses the solutions we can all adopt to prevent catastrophic change.'
Zie: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15818.htm

David Attenborough's programma's zijn bijna allen kleine meesterwerken. En toch zou ik willen dat hij een stapje verder gaat. Dat hij zich buigt over de vraag: waar komt de westerse minachting voor de natuur uit voort? Ik bedoel: de veronderstelling dat de mens de natuur aan zich kan onderwerpen, de natuur kan beheersen, kan verkrachten als het nodig is voor de materiele vooruitgang? Waar berust die vernietigende gedachte precies op? Als we dat zouden weten, zouden we werkelijk een andere houding ten opzichte van de natuur kunnen ontwikkelen.

De befaamde Kiowa-Indiaanse auteur Scott Momaday schrijft in The Man Made of Words: 'I tell my students that the American has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation. The tenure has to be worth something in itself -- a great deal, in fact. The Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here. That simple and obvious trust is one of the most important realities of the Indian world, and it is integral in the Indian mind and spirit. How does such a concept evolve? Where does it begin? Perhaps it begins with the recognition, the realization that the physical world is beautifull... This comprehension of the earth and air is surely a matter of morality, for it brings into account not only man's instinctive reaction to his environment but the full realization of his humanity as well, the achievement of his intellectual and spiritual development at an individual and as a race.' Zie ook: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/momaday/momaday.htm

Als ik kijk naar het gelaat van christelijke politici, die zichzelf als rentmeesters van Gods schepping beschouwen, dan zie ik onmiddellijk dat het enige dat hen drijft geldzucht en macht is. Hoe komt het dat het besef van schoonheid in het instrumentalistisch bewustzijn van de blanke Westerling is verdwenen, dat materiele zaken belangrijker zijn dan esthetica? Of is er geen waarom?

Het citaat van Momaday toont ook onmiddelijk aan hoe flinterdun de oproep van premier Balkenende is om normen en waarden te handhaven. Een politicus die in alles de neoliberale ideologie propageert, heeft geen echte doorleefde normen en waarden. Het neoliberalisme hamert op steeds meer productie en consumptie, de drijfveer is begeerte, een begeerte die via de alom tegenwoordige reclame en propaganda in leven wordt gehouden. In een wereld vol begeerte is de ander altijd per definitie de concurrent, de vijand. Hoe kan een dergelijk bewustzijn normen en waarden handhaven? Zolang de begeerte de belangrijkste drijfveer is kan er ook geen sprake zijn van gemeenschap. Scott Momaday maakt dat op een beschaafde manier duidelijk in zijn boek wanneer hij schrijft over het gemeenschappelijke bewerken van het land. 'It was a spirit of communion, of the life of each man in relation to the life of the planet and of the infinite distance and silence in which it moves.' In plaats van te beseffen hoe ver hij/zij in de westerse wereld is afgedreven van dit bewustzijn, proberen wij onze ontspoorde ideologie aan andere culturen op te leggen.

'Dark disputes & artful teazing.

Folly is an endless maze,

Tangled roots perplex her ways.

How many have fallen there!

They stumble all night over bones of the dead,

And feel they know not what but care,

And wish to lead others, when they should be led.'

William Blake

Israelisch Expansionisme 33

De Guardian: 'There has to be equality.
If Britons can join the Israeli army, those who fight for Palestine can't be treated as terrorists.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is unlike any other regional conflict. As the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, put it: "No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield." Not surprisingly, this has had its impact on multicultural Britain, with different communities aligning themselves to varying degrees with the Israeli and Palestinian causes.Everyone in a democracy has the right to argue for their views and engage in public debate. But there is no equality when it comes to how the British government treats those who want to give physical support to Israel and those who want to do the same for the Palestinians. Such double standards feed resentment in Britain's Muslim community at the government's failure to recognise its legitimate grievances, as highlighted in yesterday's report by the thinktank Demos.In recent months the media have reported on the recruitment of British Jews to fight in the Israeli army, now in its 40th year of occupation of Palestinian territory in defiance of international law and UN resolutions. Some are intending to emigrate; others to return to Britain after serving in the Israeli army. But we have not had a word of concern from the British government. In the Muslim community, however, the question is widely raised as to how British citizens can travel to another country and fight in its army of illegal occupation without any repercussions. Would that be the case if, say, a young Muslim or Briton of Palestinian origin travelled to the occupied Palestinian territories - let alone occupied Iraq - to protect his or her homeland or co-religionists? Of course not: such volunteers could expect to be arrested under this government's anti-terrorism legislation as soon as they returned.These Britons who go to fight for Israel are volunteering to serve in the frontline of Israel's war in the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Some have acknowledged that they have been or will be engaged in the killing of Palestinians. Under international law they and those who facilitate their enlistment are committing war crimes.'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15815.htm

Hetzelfde geldt voor Nederland. Als joodse Nederlanders in het Israelische leger mogen dienen en dus mogen deelnemen aan de Israelische terreur tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking, dan zouden arabische Nederlanders voor de Palestijnen mogen vechten. Sterker nog: het steunen van het Israelische leger dat een illegale bezetting voortzet is in feite in strijd met het internationaal recht, terwijl het steunen van het Palestijnse verzet hiertegen niet illegaal is.