War Without End

Alpha

The following posts appear at www.whatreallyhappened.com for today:

‘US neo-conservatives more dangerous than Jewish lobby’

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_20-4-2004_pg4_1

The neocon conundrum

Posted Apr 20, 2004 07:34 AM PSTWith the situation in Iraq darkening, hawks are saying we can't leave without unleashing a catastrophe. The problem is, that'll happen if we stay, too.
If the neocons were really worried about conditions in Iraq, they would not have invaded in the first place, because they knew full well there really weren't WMDs in Iraq, and that Saddam was not a threat, and that condition sunder Saddam were better than what was going to result from an invasion and conquest.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/conundrum.html

Bush Letter Cites 'Crusade' Against Terrorism
Posted Apr 20, 2004 08:22 AM PSTYears after President Bush set off alarm bells in the Muslim world by referring to his war against terrorism as a "crusade," the word that Arabs equate with Christian brutality has resurfaced in a Bush campaign fund-raising letter, officials acknowledged on Sunday.
"Entering the city [Jerusalem, July 15, 1099], our pilgrims pursued and killed Saracens up to the Temple of Solomon, in which they had assembled and where they gave battle to us furiously for the whole day so that their blood flowed throughout the whole temple. Finally, having overcome the pagans, our knights seized a great number of men and women, and the killed whom they wished and whom they wished they let live.... Then, rejoicing and weeping from extreme joy, our men went to worship at the sepulchre of jour Saviour Jesus and thus fulfilled their pledge to Him.... They also ordered that all the Saracen dead should be thrown out of the city because of the extreme stench, for the city was almost full of their cadavers. The live Saracens dragged the dead out before the gates and made piles of them, like houses. No one has ever heard of or seen such a slaughter of pagan peoples since pyres were made of them like boundary marks, and no one except God knows their number."
[Histoire anonyme de la premiere croisade, L. Brehier, ed. Paris: Champion, 1924 (From The Portable Medieval Reader, Ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin)]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=4858038

Alpha · Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:15 am Post subject: Re: Neo-Crazy Coup d'Etat

Read more about this JINSA/PNAC (Zionist extremist Israel firster) traitor Richard Perle at the following URL as he had no business coming back to be involved with the US government in the current Bush regime (he recently resigned but is still very much involved):

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/12/Counterpunch_1.html

foppe37 · Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:06 am Post subject: USA foreign policy

I did not read the above quite carefully, but there was a statement on how USA foreign policy is made, and the State department's role therein.

I can recommend reading a few books on real USA foreign policy, or foreign policy of any other country.
Reality is far from theory.

In all governments allways there are differences of opinion, based on real or imagined perception of facts, or based just on the fight for power.

I mentioned the now dead Afghan warlord who aftre having been in Washington quite a few times, stated 'you have no policy on Afghansitan, you just have the White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA fighting among themselves'.

Anyone should know that Truman recognised Israel in 1948 against the very outspoken advice of his state department.

BBCW radio on thursday march 25 2004 extensively reported on how the plan for attacking and occupying Iraq came into existence.
It was a Pentagon show.
The State department in vain warned about Iraqi tribal society.

A Dutch associate of our Clingendael institute, that I see as a NATO propaganda machinery, told on Dutch tv that USA general Franks before the attack had visited him at Clingendael, in The Hague.
He had warned Franks, about what is happening now, and Franks reply was 'that it would not be that serious'.

So the theory on how state machinery funtions is quite interesting, but very far from reality.

I got my first lesson in this respect in my student days when Hague official, who lectured a few hours a week, made some cynical statements about how our political top functioned at the time, since he was the aide to one of our cabinet ministers he was in a position to know.
I told him about the existing agreement between political parties on what the coalition should do.

His reply is still quite clear in my memory, he looked sarcastically at me,and then said 'I see that Groningen (the city where the university was, and is) is very far from"The Hague'.

Alpha

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.rapture ready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debat ing its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the south Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is now published in paperback

www.monbiot.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

foppe37 · Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:49 am Post subject: judeo-christian morons in Texas

French TV5 a few days ago reported on Midland Texas, where George Bush jr received his education and training for leading the free world (to destruction ?).

They also reported on the less rich Texans, those that suffer from environmental pollution because Texas pays no heed to air pollution.
A school was shown with a 40% absence rate because of respirational diseases.

After one has seen the report one loses all hope that sense will enter USA foreign policy as long as USA citizens are as dumb, ignorant and patriotic as they are shown in the report.

Especially the next to divine happiness emanating from some Texans, when they were interviewed about their Texan president, makes one shudder.

Anyone with some common sense knows, after having seen a few Bush speeches that indeed, as a Texan, not a member of the Midland Country Club (or any other Country Club) said, 'Bush does not know anything about anything'.

Apparently Texan high society also does not know anything about anything.

King Addullah of Jordan already in 1947 wrote, in an article in a USA magazine, 'that to his surprise all that the average American knows about Palestine is what is in the Old Testament'.
And thus wars seem to begin.

Alpha · Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:09 am Post subject: Robert Fisk-Live interview

Date: Tue Apr 20, 2004 2:20 pm
Subject: Robert Fisk-Live interview

Iraq power handover 'a fraud'

Reporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: Back now to the day's developments in Israel and Iraq.

The assassination of Hamas leader Dr Abdel-Aziz Rantissi at the weekend has unleashed rage and fury on the streets of Gaza just days after President George W Bush backed Israel's sovereignty over West Bank settlements in return for a total pull-out of settlers from the Gaza Strip.

In Iraq, meanwhile, troops from Spain are preparing to go home just as America has announced the death of its 700th soldier in fighting there.

Well, joining me now is Robert Fisk.

He's a correspondent for the British newspaper the 'Independent' and is a 25-year veteran of reporting from the Middle East.

Robert Fisk, thanks for joining us.

ROBERT FISK, WRITER & JOURNALIST: Thank you.

TONY JONES: Let's start with Iraq if we can and the immense problems the United States now faces in handing the country back to Iraqis.

Just to start with that, anyway.

The June 30th deadline now looks like it's going to be postponed.

What will be the consequences if it is?

ROBERT FISK: Nothing.

The handover is basically a fraud.

The governing council, which is appointed by the Americans, and which is the Iraqi Government at the moment would merely be handing over to another group of American-picked Iraqis.

They're not democratically elected, the new institution, whatever it is.

We don't even know what it's going to be.

I notice that when President Bush gave his press conference three days ago, he said that Mr Brahimi was working on that, referring to Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister who's special envoy to Iraq for the UN's Kofi Annan, but Mr Brahimi found that quite a surprise.

He's not trying to put together a future government - he's trying to arrange elections and that may not be until next year.

Even if there was a democratically elected government to hand over sovereignty to, which is there not, the sovereignty doesn't mean anything because under the laws that Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Baghdad has already enacted for post June 30, all the Iraqi security forces will be commanded by United States officers, so that's not a handover of sovereignty.

TONY JONES: The Americans obviously were putting a lot of faith in Mr Brahimi performing some kind of miracle.

You think that's not going to happen.

Could, however, the United Nations be under much more pressure now to get seriously involved in perhaps taking over the administration of Iraq?

ROBERT FISK: Well, the poor old UN.

You know, when we wanted to rush into war, we batted the UN donkey around the ear and told them it wasn't standing up enough and now we're trying to drag the old UN donkey to save us in Iraq because after all we realise it's all gone wrong.

I don't think that the UN is going to go into Iraq on June 30.

I cannot see the end, or the depth, to which the current bloodshed is going.

I can't see a way out at the moment.

Ultimately, I think it will have to be - if it's not just going to be an abandoned Iraq with Iraqis trying to run it, I think it would be - it has to be Arab force, an Arab league force.

We're going to have to see Syrians in there, Emirates, the Saudis, Egyptians, but even that will start to fracture and fragment across the Arab world in the Middle East.

I simply can't see a way out, when you build a war on illusions and fantasies and you don't get international mandate to run it, then your occupation will fail.

The British occupation in Iraq took three years to fail between 1917 and 1920.

It took us, the British, three years to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis behind us.

It's quite an achievement - the Americans have managed to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis against them in just one year.

TONY JONES: I'll come specifically to that possibility in a moment.

First, let's look at the immediate crisis faced by the US administrator, Paul Bremer, in Najaf.

The Americans have already said they're going to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.

What will happen if they go into Najaf with guns blazing?

ROBERT FISK: I don't think they will.

I think that there's a kind of discontinuation of serious political relations between Bremer and the US military.

Because what Bremer says and sometimes what Bush says doesn't bear any relation to what people like Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy chief of US operations in Iraq, or General Sanchez for that matter actually say.

I don't think Bremer ordered anyone to arrest or kill, certainly arrest but not necessarily kill, Moqtada al-Sadr.

But the direct result of what the Americans have said is quite simple.

Shiites, who would never have dreamt of supporting Moqtada al-Sadr, are now prepared to fight the Americans if they come into Najaf.

Of course, the Americans have boxed themselves in.

First of all, they were going to go into Fallujah and capture the men, the terrorists - everyone's a terrorist if you fight the Americans - who had so brutally murdered those four American mercenaries three weeks ago but they're not Fallujah, they realise they've killed so many Iraqis, at least 600, many of them women and children, that they simply can't go on.

Now they're standing around Najaf with what?

2,500 troops.

You can't conquer a city of so many Shiites with 2,500 troops.

It's going to need a massive bombardment.

To do that to the major Shiite shrine in the world, one of the major Shiite shrines, it's unthinkable.

I think the Americans have reached a point where they can't do much more militarily and politically they finished quite a while ago.

It's a terrible, terrible situation but mostly, remember, for the Iraqis.

They're doing more dying than our soldiers are doing.

TONY JONES: What role then do you think the old Ayatollahs, particularly Sistani, are going to play as this situation starts to play itself out around Najaf?

ROBERT FISK: Well, Sistani, you see, still hopes that if there is a future administration the Shiites will basically run it.

They are the majority population.

They are 60 per cent of the population of Iraq.

He doesn't want to do anything which is going to allow the Sunnis to come back and run the country as they did under Kassim, Saddam, the Ba'ath Party and so on.

There's going to come a time and he's beginning to speak much more harshly - when he's not going to be able any longer to hold back an overall Shi'ite resistance against the United States.

He's not going to be able to do it.

If the Americans do try to enter the holy city of Najaf, they're in the suburbs at the moment but they're nowhere near the shrines, if they do try to enter, then I think Sistani will have to call for a war against them.

He'll be finished if he doesn't.

TONY JONES: This is before the war, you predicted on this program, you predicted a likely civil war in Iraq if the invasion went ahead.

The Americans are now saying that the thing they most fear as you started referring to at the beginning of this interview is a temporary alliance between the Shiites and the Sunnis and some of the American analysts are pointing to what happened in Lebanon when the Sunnis and Shia got together to push the Israelis out.

They're saying that's the analogy they most fear, not Vietnam but Lebanon?

ROBERT FISK: The Americans have got it wrong.

As so often happens in the Middle East, the Sunnis played no part in throwing the Israelis out of Lebanon.

That's what the Shiites did and the Sunnis did very little about the resistance.

It was basically a Shi'ite resistance on its own that threw the Israelis out of Lebanon.

I think, although unfortunately my prediction of serious resistance more than a year ago is proving tragically to be correct, I think I was probably wrong in saying there would be a civil war.

The only people who are talking about civil war at the moment in Iraq are the Americans and the British and the Western journalists who suck up their lines and push it back out as their own analysis.

I haven't actually met an Iraqi who wants a civil war or who's talked about a civil war.

There's never been a civil war in Iraq.

I rather suspect that this danger of civil war - and I'm guilty before the war quite rightly predicting there might be --is being pushed out by the Americans and the British in order to frighten the Iraqis into obedience.

"If you don't put your guns, down look what might happen, you'll have civil war."

I think the reason why they're wrong and why I was wrong is that they never appreciated that the Iraqi tribal system covers both communities - many Shiite tribes also are Sunnis, they're in the same tribes.

I went out the other day - and this is an interesting example, to go to the funeral of a doctor, of a Sunni, who had been murdered almost certainly by a Shiite gang of gunmen.

When I said, "What does this make you feel about your neighbours?", they said, "Nothing.

"They're our friends and our comrades and our neighbours."

"Because," he said "our tribes include the Shiites."

The brother of the doctor said, "Look, my wife is a Shiite.

"Want do you want me to do?

"Go and kill her?

"Because my brother was killed by a Shiite?

"No, we will not have a civil war."

So I think possibly there will not a civil war and I think it is becoming highly provocative of the occupying power to constantly talk about it in this way as if they almost want a civil war.

If we journalists started talking it about after the occupation we would have called irresponsible by the occupying power.

So why are they suddenly talking about civil war now?

TONY JONES: Going back to what you said at the beginning of the program and as a summary of what you just told us, are we likely to see a temporary alliance between the Shia and the Sunni to throw the Americans out?

ROBERT FISK: I think it's going that way.

We're not yet at a serious alliance.

After all the British are in Basra, a major Shiite city and compared to the Americans there is some violence but compared to the Americans they're getting off lightly.

This at the moment, remember, is primarily an anti-American resistance.

Although, we know the Italians have been attacked, the Spanish have been attacked and are leaving, the British have been a little bit attacked, it is primarily an anti-American resistance.

But if the Shiites do join in full it will become an anti-Westerner resistance just as the whole hostage-taking fiasco is turning into an anti-Western campaign.

But, again, I stress there have never been a civil war in Iraq and I think that the tribal system there which is everything, unfortunately, that stands against the possibility of democracy, the tribal system might save Iraq from that, if in the end we have to go and leave Iraq with our tail between our legs which of course Mr Bush has no intention of doing because he wants to win an election in November.

TONY JONES: Let's move to the other flash point.

We've just seen the assassination of yet another Hamas leader and only days before that Ariel Sharon was cutting a deal in Washington with the President to allow effectively the cessation of West Bank settlements.

Those two things, how do they fit together and what's the future hold do you think, at least the immediate future, in that part of the Middle East?

ROBERT FISK: Well, let's bring Iraq and the Palestine-Israeli conflict together.

They have one thing in common - they are about occupation.

President Bush in his letter to Sharon, PM Sharon of Israel, has effectively said, he has said in fact, that there is no obligation on Israel withdrawing to the '67 borders which they were behind prior to the '67 Middle East war which means that the whole of UN Security Council resolution 242, the fundamentals of peace has been overruled by the Bush Administration.

Now, it is apparently legitimate for the reality of the statements to be accepted so that land taken from Arabs illegally under international law for Jews and Jews only by the Israelis, that's now OK around Jerusalem.

Well, what we're dealing with here, and with Hamas which is an extremely brutal organisation - let's not get romantic about it - both with the Palestinians and with the Iraqis two groups of people who say, "We will not be occupied by other people, we want to keep our land."

Whether you are talking about the Palestinians who say, "We'll accept the Palestine, 22 per cent of Palestine left as opposed to all of Palestine including what is now Israel, or whether you're talking about the extremists and whether you're talking about Iraqis who don't really want warfare in their streets but hate the occupying power, what we're dealing with in the Middle East is two occupying forces coming up against an unstoppable opposition.

The brutality that that can give way we saw in Fallujah with the murder of the four American mercenaries and their mutilation and we've seen it again with the massive causalities the marines have inflicted on the people if Fallujah.

But if you want to know how bad it can get, go back to the French war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, it has followed identical patterns - the French put settlements in or the French said, "We will crush any opposition."

It started off low yield - bombs beside the road, a bomb in front of a train then it went on to kidnapping then it went onto bombs in discos, the same as pizza houses or the same as hotels in Baghdad, and then it escalated to mass killings in the cities of Algeria and, of course, it ended with a humiliating French retreat which changed French history forever.

TONY JONES: Robert Fisk on that rather grim note we will have to leave it.

We thank you once again for coming in to talking to us tonight.

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

WOODWARD BLOWS LID OFF NEOCON CONSPIRACY FOR IRAQ WAR - page 3