Love Potus!!

War is Not Peace

By NORMAN SOLOMON

Eloquence in Oslo cannot change the realities of war.

As President Obama neared the close of his Nobel address, he called for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination.” Yet his speech was tightly circumscribed by the policies that his oratory labored to justify.

Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.

A few months ago, when I visited an Afghan office for women’s empowerment, staffers took me to a pilot project in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods. There, women were learning small-scale business skills while also gaining personal strength and mutual support.

Two-dozen women, who ranged in age from early 20s to late 50s, talked with enthusiasm about the workshops. They were desperate to change theirlives. When it was time to leave, I had a question: What should I tell people in the United States, if they ask what Afghan women want most of all?

After several women spoke, the translator summed up. “They all said that the first priority is peace.”

In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace.

From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But “peace” is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.

Just a couple of days before Obama stepped to the podium in Oslo, the general running the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan spoke to a congressional committee in Washington about the president’s recent pledge to begin withdrawal of U.S. troops in July 2011. “I don’t believe that is a deadline at all,” Stanley McChrystal said.

War is not peace. It never has been. It never will be.

Actual policy always, in the real world, profoundly trumps even the best rhetoric. And so, for instance, when President Obama’s Nobel speech proclaimed that “America cannot act alone” and called for “standards that govern the use of force,” the ringing declaration clashed with the announcement last month that he will not sign the international Mine Ban Treaty.

As Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams pointed out, “Obama’s position on land mines calls into question his expressed views on multilateralism, respect for international humanitarian law and disarmament. How can he, with total credibility, lead the world to nuclear disarmament when his own country won’t give up even land mines?”

At the outset of his speech in Oslo, the president spoke of his “acute sense of the cost of armed conflict.” Well, there’s acute and then there’s acute. I think of the people I met and saw in Kabul who are missing limbs, and the countless more whose lives have been shattered by war.

In the name of pragmatism, Obama spoke of “the world as it is” and threw a cloak of justification over the grisly escalation in Afghanistan by insisting that “war is sometimes necessary” — but generalities do nothing to mitigate the horrors of war being endured by others.

President Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while delivering — to the world as it is — a pro-war speech. The context instantly turned the speech’s insights into flackery for more war.

Norman Solomon is the author of Made Love, Got War.

Yeswecanistan

By WILLIAM BLUM

All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here's what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama's foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America's never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That's why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we're foreigners, and they're rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.”

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America's security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama's latest escalation:

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban.

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials.

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration's knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington's allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain's external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.”

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. 'US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,' a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.”

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president's own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don't foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

Shortly after Jones's remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal:

“Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida's primary recruits, 'it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,' said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007.

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d'être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/

By JOHN ROSS

Trinidad, California.

Each Friday afternoon since Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, my old friend Janine V. has been standing with Woman In Black here near the 101 off-ramp as a silent reminder of the on-going Bush-Obama genocide in the Middle East.

In the early days of this heroic now-nearly eight year-old vigil, patriotic motorists, often on their way to the local Tsuri Indian Casino to swill at the Firewater Lounge, would hurl invectives and sometimes loaded beer cans at the women. But as the war settled into a daily grind and the U.S. body count climbed incrementally towards 5000, the insults and the beer cans diminished and a few locals now even honk their horns in support.

In the seven years that Trinidad Women In Black have held their ground by the off-ramp, the participants, never spring chickens to begin with, have grown older and one now suffers from dementia. Now when the women stand, she turns to Janine and often asks if the war is over yet?

Barack Obama's nationally televised December 1st declaration of renewed jihad against Al Qaeda's estimated 100 Afghan warriors that will elevate U.S. troop deployment to nearly a quarter of a million in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus another quarter million mercenary contractors) will keep Trinidad Women In Black in business for at least another decade.

The President's goal of “disrupting, dismantling, and destroying” the Taliban-Qaeda Axis of Evil is calculated to tickle America's terrorist nerve. As his grip on the wheel of state grows slack, Obama's presidency increasingly depends on harpooning “America's white whale” as Robert Wright recently dubbed Bin Laden in a New York Times op-ed piece. Al Qaeda's spiritual leader, a Frankenstein fabricated by Reagan's CIA, probably died years ago dragging his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass.

Robert Fisk notes that Obama-man's West Point kowtow to the generals parallels a similar Soviet troop build-up way back in 1980 that was designed to train Afghan security forces to confront the CIA-financed Muhajadeen. We all know how successfully that plan backfired.

With Blackwater loading up the drones in Pakistan, it's only a matter of months before General McCrystal marches into Pakistan to wipe out the Taliban's safe havens and the Commander-in-Chief puts another 50,000 boots on the ground to secure that nuclear-empowered nation against “international terrorism.”

Factoring in another 120,000 “crusaders” bogged down in Iraq, Gates & Company are talking about a bigger army – actually U.S. economic calamity has translated into box office business for Army and Marine recruiters who are filling out their quotas for the first time since the 9/11 rush to vengeance thanks to the American “downturn.”

Predictably, the chickens keep coming home to roost. Major Nidal Hasan's November 5th homicidal rampage at Fort Hood, the most dastardly act of “Islamic terrorism” on U.S. turf since 9/11 as the Glenn Becks vomit, is indeed an ominous sign. Driven by years of hearing out the horror stories of returning soldiers, the Major, a military psychiatrist and a devout Muslim who recoiled at the thought of deploying to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims, created his own horror story. Fort Hood is home to such time bombs. In the month since Major Hasan opened fire with a weapon bought a few yards off base, at least two other Fort Hood soldiers have been killed in soldier-to-soldier violence.

In the first nine months of 2009, 10 soldiers have commited suicide on base – 76 in all at Fort Hood since Bush and his cronies declared war on Iraq. Soldier suicides in 2009 will again set a record (over 140) as they have every year for the past four. Another 1000 members of the U.S. Army are thought to have attempted suicide – numbers are not available for other branches of the armed forces.

Meanwhile, domestic violence is pandemic on military bases. During a visit to Fort Bragg North Carolina, the home of the Center for Special Forces and the much-redeployed 81st Airborne a couple of years ago, I was told of soldiers who returned home at noon and by nightfall had massacred their entire family – local newspapers no longer ran the stories. Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Campbell Kentucky have the highest re-deployment rates in the military.

The havoc that the Bush-Obama wars continues to wreck upon military families is of course a mere drop in the bucket of blood that these criminal aggressions have poured upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, a million of whose citizens have been slaughtered and maimed and exiled since 9/11. Despite the deadly outfall and the palpable suffering now so evident on the streets of America, Congress continues to allocate hundreds of billions of increasingly worthless greenback dollar bills to sustain this ghastly genocide.

I have been on my annual Day of the Dead pilgrimage to the land where my father croaked. I huddle in the kitchen hard by the carcass of this year's dead bird and try to divine the future from its picked-over bones. The task is not a thankful one. A full year after Obama's geyser of hope drenched North America from sea to stinking sea, the forecast is as bleak as a Cormac McCarthy novel. It's not just the venomous particulate drizzling from those few pulp mills and coal-burning plants that are still operating that batters the physical contours of our befouled lives.

Official unemployment is running 12.5% in California and 15% in Michigan but the real numbers are probably twice that if those who have given up looking for work or whose checks have run out or who are working part-time for less pay are counted into the mix. Despite Obama's scripted optimism that the “economy is growing again”, there are currently six applicants for every job available and those in the know anticipate double-digit unemployment through 2012 – the end of the world on the Mayan calendar.

A million more workers will soon have no income whatsoever when Congress, in an interlude of maximum callousness, fails to get around to extending their unemployment benefits while it debates the pros and cons of spending billions more that could nourish social lifelines to kill civilians on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. No dear, the wars are not over yet.

Thanksgiving 2009 was a particularly cruel season for the homeland. 15% of your fellow citizens – one in every seven families – are struggling to put food on the table if the mal gobierno's indicators are to be believed. According to the numbers, 17.5 million Americanos suffer “food insecurity”, that is they have been forced to reduce their daily caloric intake at some point in the past year. Such belt tightening has not much slimmed down the poor. The physique of poverty is now corpulence – 34% of those living under the poverty line are considered obese and Precious is the new Miss America. And as with every set of stats cranked out by Obama's bean counters, those of darker hue suffer the brunt of deprivation – 70% of those families who go to bed hungry every night are brown or black. Meanwhile, Wall Street, a gated community where white skin privilege is rewarded, is making a killing again.

The turkey bones yield apocalyptical visions of melting icebergs and Palin/Dobbs in the White House. The portents for this dynamic duo are particularly favorable. As the self-styled “rogue of the right” zooms to the top of the airport best-seller list, Lou Dobbs gloats that times are so tough for “illegal aliens” (read Mexicans) that they will soon be driven from the country – impoverished families back in hardscrabble Michoacan and Oaxaca are now sending relatives stranded at the bottom of the Yanqui Depression money from home. Remittances from Mexican workers in El Norte, the lifeblood of the Mexican rural economy (10,000,000 Mexicans are dependant on them), dipped 35% this October.

To spice up this end-of-the-world scenario (“2012″ is boffo at the Multiplex), plague stalks the republic. The Center for Disease Control reports 6,000,000 case of H1N1 in 48 out of 50 states. The swine flu is spread exponentially by infected workers obligated to punch in and send their kids to school every day because they have no paid sick leave – 40% of all U.S. workers suffer this affliction. Even those ostensibly covered do not stay home for fear that they will lose their jobs. The New York Times reports on one Wal Mart worker sent home after he turned pale on the job and who fell gravely ill with the swine flu but failed to visit a doctor because he couldn't afford the co-pays on the mega-corps' health care plan.

Nonetheless, this worker's forced furlough may well have saved his life this past Black Friday when hordes of berserk consumers are wont to break down Wal Mart doors and trample the help underfoot in their eagerness to spend money they do not possess. This year's toy to die for is a Chinese-made mechanical hamster at $17 a crack (one to a customer), a no-nuisance substitute for the real thing.

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry. 2010 is expected to be a peak year for foreclosures – business is percolating for the Flint Michigan sign maker in Michael Moore's “Capitalism – A Love Story” who has landed a contract from local banks to churn out “Foreclosure” signs.

As evictions soar, the homeless overrun the shelters. Perhaps the cruelest twist of the holiday season was the 90-day jail sentence meted to an elderly rancher in San Luis Obispo California for housing a score of homeless clean-and-sober vagrants on his property.

The mood of the country as the Yuletide season heaves into view is decked with dark resentment. One AP story reports that food stamp eligibility workers in Detroit fear for their safety. Irritated applicants herded into long lines that snake into the street throw chunks of concrete through the windows. The cops are called to control unruly clients.

The rule of thumb posits that hard times drive the underclass together. Class distinctions become viscerally clear and solidarity flows. But given American exceptionalism, this is not a likely trend in Obamalandia.

This is a nation where the Great Unwashed have been coerced by vulture consumerism that puts them at each other's throats over mechanical hamsters. American workers have become independent contractors battling with their neighbors over scraps. Most of us do not even know who lives on the other side of the sheetrock. Racism has raised the walls even more precipitously in this post-racialist year. Hate crimes are on a roll – how about the thug who butchered a Florida Greek Orthodox priest because he thought he was a Muslim? President Obama is said to have spiked at nearly 400 death threats a day.

Recent revelations by those who purportedly speak for the Left have not been helpful. Moore's “Capitalism” seriously soft soaps criminal capitalism. The 1950s and'60s were hardly the working class paradise the filmmaker portrays – strikers were beaten, workers were red baited and blacklisted, black people dangled from poplar trees, fieldworkers were poisoned by the Agribiz kings. The bosses may have seemed like so many benevolent Scrooge McDucks to Moore when he was a lad growing up in a Catholic Caucasian industrial elite household but he is indeed spreading a white lie.

Michael Moore's egregious absolution of Barack Obama for his complicity in beefing up the fat cats while the rest of us grovel for carfare is “Capitalism's” most painful flaw. MM affirms that the Obamanator's candidacy so discombobulated the rulers that they threw gobs of money at him out of fear of what he represented and abracadabra he became the first Afro American president of these United States. We see Obama surrounded by jubilant throngs. We do not see the money. We see nothing about how the first Afro American president feathered the nests of the Wall Street vultures. Nothing about the sleazy White House backroom deals with pharmaceutical industry creep Billy Tauzin to greenlight the steepest rise in prescription drug prices in 20 years as a prelude to Obamacare. Nothing about dishing up the whole enchilada to the insurance vampires so they can more commodiously gouge the aged and infirm.

Since I was diagnosed with liver cancer eight months ago (now in remission), I have accumulated a foot-high stack of bills and am dunned daily to pay off California-Pacific Medical Center to the tune of $34,000, nearly five times my yearly social security checks – from which Medicare deducts a hundred bucks a month to allegedly cover my health needs.

Obama's health care pogram has never been about reforming a deformed system to treat the medically indigent. Obamacare was conceived to insure re-election and the health of the Democratic Party and the insurance tycoons. Let’s face it. We're all on the Jack Kevorkian health plan.

Another apostle of the Left I bumped into during my recent foray in Obamalandia was Amiri Barraka who as Leroi Jones I sometimes ran with back in the Village during the bebop '50s. Performing before a packed house in an auditorium named for a notorious San Francisco sweatshop at the main branch of the SF Public Library, Barraka read a love letter to Obama written soon after the election of the first Afro-American President and reviled those on the Left who continue to take to the streets to protest his tainted policies, as “infantile anarchists” and closet racists.

The former Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Stalinist poet laureate of New Jersey (a dubious distinction of which Amiri was stripped after claiming that 1400 Jews employed at the World Trade Center stayed home on 9/11 day) raised eyebrows by hailing Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel, who was a civilian volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces during the first Gulf War, as his chief of staff, a clever trick on the Zionists Baraka called it. He urged his audiences to continue to vote vote vote for fork-tongued Democratic candidates. We have to grow the unlikely coalition that elected these charlatans! Other evasions and foolishness followed. Barraka was not much alarmed by his president's firing of Van Jones, the first Afro-American green jobs czar.

I was one of the first to take the mic for q's and a's. For 22 days prior to Obama's stirring inauguration on the Capitol mall, I pointed out, the Israelis had rained death down on Gaza, slaughtering 1400 civilians – 360 more have died since – and then the Zionists judiciously paused for Obama's historic oath-taking. Throughout this grotesque bloodletting, Obama (and Emanuel) remained stonily silent. All they had to say were three little words: Stop the Killing! Why had they not responded?

Baraka was irritated by my question and waved me away from the mic. Then poet Michael McClure pointed out that Amiri had not once mentioned the other elephant in the room, Afghanistan. “He's trying to get us out of there,” Amiri blathered. Sure, by sending in another 30,000 dead soldiers, we yodeled back.

“Is the war over yet?”

With Barack Obama calling the shots, and lefties like Michael Moore and Amiri Baraka defending him, the Trinidad Women In Black will all be slipping into dementia before the war is over.

John Ross's El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City is now available at your local independent bookseller. Ross is plotting a monster book tour in 2010 – readers should direct possible venues to johnross@igc.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross12102009.html

Love Potus!!

War is Not Peace

By NORMAN SOLOMON

Eloquence in Oslo cannot change the realities of war.

As President Obama neared the close of his Nobel address, he called for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination.” Yet his speech was tightly circumscribed by the policies that his oratory labored to justify.

Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.

A few months ago, when I visited an Afghan office for women’s empowerment, staffers took me to a pilot project in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods. There, women were learning small-scale business skills while also gaining personal strength and mutual support.

Two-dozen women, who ranged in age from early 20s to late 50s, talked with enthusiasm about the workshops. They were desperate to change theirlives. When it was time to leave, I had a question: What should I tell people in the United States, if they ask what Afghan women want most of all?

After several women spoke, the translator summed up. “They all said that the first priority is peace.”

In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace.

From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But “peace” is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.

Just a couple of days before Obama stepped to the podium in Oslo, the general running the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan spoke to a congressional committee in Washington about the president’s recent pledge to begin withdrawal of U.S. troops in July 2011. “I don’t believe that is a deadline at all,” Stanley McChrystal said.

War is not peace. It never has been. It never will be.

Actual policy always, in the real world, profoundly trumps even the best rhetoric. And so, for instance, when President Obama’s Nobel speech proclaimed that “America cannot act alone” and called for “standards that govern the use of force,” the ringing declaration clashed with the announcement last month that he will not sign the international Mine Ban Treaty.

As Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams pointed out, “Obama’s position on land mines calls into question his expressed views on multilateralism, respect for international humanitarian law and disarmament. How can he, with total credibility, lead the world to nuclear disarmament when his own country won’t give up even land mines?”

At the outset of his speech in Oslo, the president spoke of his “acute sense of the cost of armed conflict.” Well, there’s acute and then there’s acute. I think of the people I met and saw in Kabul who are missing limbs, and the countless more whose lives have been shattered by war.

In the name of pragmatism, Obama spoke of “the world as it is” and threw a cloak of justification over the grisly escalation in Afghanistan by insisting that “war is sometimes necessary” — but generalities do nothing to mitigate the horrors of war being endured by others.

President Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while delivering — to the world as it is — a pro-war speech. The context instantly turned the speech’s insights into flackery for more war.

Norman Solomon is the author of Made Love, Got War.

Yeswecanistan

By WILLIAM BLUM

All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here's what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama's foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America's never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That's why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we're foreigners, and they're rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.”

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America's security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama's latest escalation:

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban.

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials.

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration's knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington's allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain's external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.”

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. 'US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,' a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.”

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president's own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don't foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

Shortly after Jones's remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal:

“Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida's primary recruits, 'it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,' said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007.

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d'être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/

By JOHN ROSS

Trinidad, California.

Each Friday afternoon since Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, my old friend Janine V. has been standing with Woman In Black here near the 101 off-ramp as a silent reminder of the on-going Bush-Obama genocide in the Middle East.

In the early days of this heroic now-nearly eight year-old vigil, patriotic motorists, often on their way to the local Tsuri Indian Casino to swill at the Firewater Lounge, would hurl invectives and sometimes loaded beer cans at the women. But as the war settled into a daily grind and the U.S. body count climbed incrementally towards 5000, the insults and the beer cans diminished and a few locals now even honk their horns in support.

In the seven years that Trinidad Women In Black have held their ground by the off-ramp, the participants, never spring chickens to begin with, have grown older and one now suffers from dementia. Now when the women stand, she turns to Janine and often asks if the war is over yet?

Barack Obama's nationally televised December 1st declaration of renewed jihad against Al Qaeda's estimated 100 Afghan warriors that will elevate U.S. troop deployment to nearly a quarter of a million in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus another quarter million mercenary contractors) will keep Trinidad Women In Black in business for at least another decade.

The President's goal of “disrupting, dismantling, and destroying” the Taliban-Qaeda Axis of Evil is calculated to tickle America's terrorist nerve. As his grip on the wheel of state grows slack, Obama's presidency increasingly depends on harpooning “America's white whale” as Robert Wright recently dubbed Bin Laden in a New York Times op-ed piece. Al Qaeda's spiritual leader, a Frankenstein fabricated by Reagan's CIA, probably died years ago dragging his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass.

Robert Fisk notes that Obama-man's West Point kowtow to the generals parallels a similar Soviet troop build-up way back in 1980 that was designed to train Afghan security forces to confront the CIA-financed Muhajadeen. We all know how successfully that plan backfired.

With Blackwater loading up the drones in Pakistan, it's only a matter of months before General McCrystal marches into Pakistan to wipe out the Taliban's safe havens and the Commander-in-Chief puts another 50,000 boots on the ground to secure that nuclear-empowered nation against “international terrorism.”

Factoring in another 120,000 “crusaders” bogged down in Iraq, Gates & Company are talking about a bigger army – actually U.S. economic calamity has translated into box office business for Army and Marine recruiters who are filling out their quotas for the first time since the 9/11 rush to vengeance thanks to the American “downturn.”

Predictably, the chickens keep coming home to roost. Major Nidal Hasan's November 5th homicidal rampage at Fort Hood, the most dastardly act of “Islamic terrorism” on U.S. turf since 9/11 as the Glenn Becks vomit, is indeed an ominous sign. Driven by years of hearing out the horror stories of returning soldiers, the Major, a military psychiatrist and a devout Muslim who recoiled at the thought of deploying to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims, created his own horror story. Fort Hood is home to such time bombs. In the month since Major Hasan opened fire with a weapon bought a few yards off base, at least two other Fort Hood soldiers have been killed in soldier-to-soldier violence.

In the first nine months of 2009, 10 soldiers have commited suicide on base – 76 in all at Fort Hood since Bush and his cronies declared war on Iraq. Soldier suicides in 2009 will again set a record (over 140) as they have every year for the past four. Another 1000 members of the U.S. Army are thought to have attempted suicide – numbers are not available for other branches of the armed forces.

Meanwhile, domestic violence is pandemic on military bases. During a visit to Fort Bragg North Carolina, the home of the Center for Special Forces and the much-redeployed 81st Airborne a couple of years ago, I was told of soldiers who returned home at noon and by nightfall had massacred their entire family – local newspapers no longer ran the stories. Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Campbell Kentucky have the highest re-deployment rates in the military.

The havoc that the Bush-Obama wars continues to wreck upon military families is of course a mere drop in the bucket of blood that these criminal aggressions have poured upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, a million of whose citizens have been slaughtered and maimed and exiled since 9/11. Despite the deadly outfall and the palpable suffering now so evident on the streets of America, Congress continues to allocate hundreds of billions of increasingly worthless greenback dollar bills to sustain this ghastly genocide.

I have been on my annual Day of the Dead pilgrimage to the land where my father croaked. I huddle in the kitchen hard by the carcass of this year's dead bird and try to divine the future from its picked-over bones. The task is not a thankful one. A full year after Obama's geyser of hope drenched North America from sea to stinking sea, the forecast is as bleak as a Cormac McCarthy novel. It's not just the venomous particulate drizzling from those few pulp mills and coal-burning plants that are still operating that batters the physical contours of our befouled lives.

Official unemployment is running 12.5% in California and 15% in Michigan but the real numbers are probably twice that if those who have given up looking for work or whose checks have run out or who are working part-time for less pay are counted into the mix. Despite Obama's scripted optimism that the “economy is growing again”, there are currently six applicants for every job available and those in the know anticipate double-digit unemployment through 2012 – the end of the world on the Mayan calendar.

A million more workers will soon have no income whatsoever when Congress, in an interlude of maximum callousness, fails to get around to extending their unemployment benefits while it debates the pros and cons of spending billions more that could nourish social lifelines to kill civilians on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. No dear, the wars are not over yet.

Thanksgiving 2009 was a particularly cruel season for the homeland. 15% of your fellow citizens – one in every seven families – are struggling to put food on the table if the mal gobierno's indicators are to be believed. According to the numbers, 17.5 million Americanos suffer “food insecurity”, that is they have been forced to reduce their daily caloric intake at some point in the past year. Such belt tightening has not much slimmed down the poor. The physique of poverty is now corpulence – 34% of those living under the poverty line are considered obese and Precious is the new Miss America. And as with every set of stats cranked out by Obama's bean counters, those of darker hue suffer the brunt of deprivation – 70% of those families who go to bed hungry every night are brown or black. Meanwhile, Wall Street, a gated community where white skin privilege is rewarded, is making a killing again.

The turkey bones yield apocalyptical visions of melting icebergs and Palin/Dobbs in the White House. The portents for this dynamic duo are particularly favorable. As the self-styled “rogue of the right” zooms to the top of the airport best-seller list, Lou Dobbs gloats that times are so tough for “illegal aliens” (read Mexicans) that they will soon be driven from the country – impoverished families back in hardscrabble Michoacan and Oaxaca are now sending relatives stranded at the bottom of the Yanqui Depression money from home. Remittances from Mexican workers in El Norte, the lifeblood of the Mexican rural economy (10,000,000 Mexicans are dependant on them), dipped 35% this October.

To spice up this end-of-the-world scenario (“2012″ is boffo at the Multiplex), plague stalks the republic. The Center for Disease Control reports 6,000,000 case of H1N1 in 48 out of 50 states. The swine flu is spread exponentially by infected workers obligated to punch in and send their kids to school every day because they have no paid sick leave – 40% of all U.S. workers suffer this affliction. Even those ostensibly covered do not stay home for fear that they will lose their jobs. The New York Times reports on one Wal Mart worker sent home after he turned pale on the job and who fell gravely ill with the swine flu but failed to visit a doctor because he couldn't afford the co-pays on the mega-corps' health care plan.

Nonetheless, this worker's forced furlough may well have saved his life this past Black Friday when hordes of berserk consumers are wont to break down Wal Mart doors and trample the help underfoot in their eagerness to spend money they do not possess. This year's toy to die for is a Chinese-made mechanical hamster at $17 a crack (one to a customer), a no-nuisance substitute for the real thing.

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry. 2010 is expected to be a peak year for foreclosures – business is percolating for the Flint Michigan sign maker in Michael Moore's “Capitalism – A Love Story” who has landed a contract from local banks to churn out “Foreclosure” signs.

As evictions soar, the homeless overrun the shelters. Perhaps the cruelest twist of the holiday season was the 90-day jail sentence meted to an elderly rancher in San Luis Obispo California for housing a score of homeless clean-and-sober vagrants on his property.

The mood of the country as the Yuletide season heaves into view is decked with dark resentment. One AP story reports that food stamp eligibility workers in Detroit fear for their safety. Irritated applicants herded into long lines that snake into the street throw chunks of concrete through the windows. The cops are called to control unruly clients.

The rule of thumb posits that hard times drive the underclass together. Class distinctions become viscerally clear and solidarity flows. But given American exceptionalism, this is not a likely trend in Obamalandia.

This is a nation where the Great Unwashed have been coerced by vulture consumerism that puts them at each other's throats over mechanical hamsters. American workers have become independent contractors battling with their neighbors over scraps. Most of us do not even know who lives on the other side of the sheetrock. Racism has raised the walls even more precipitously in this post-racialist year. Hate crimes are on a roll – how about the thug who butchered a Florida Greek Orthodox priest because he thought he was a Muslim? President Obama is said to have spiked at nearly 400 death threats a day.

Recent revelations by those who purportedly speak for the Left have not been helpful. Moore's “Capitalism” seriously soft soaps criminal capitalism. The 1950s and'60s were hardly the working class paradise the filmmaker portrays – strikers were beaten, workers were red baited and blacklisted, black people dangled from poplar trees, fieldworkers were poisoned by the Agribiz kings. The bosses may have seemed like so many benevolent Scrooge McDucks to Moore when he was a lad growing up in a Catholic Caucasian industrial elite household but he is indeed spreading a white lie.

Michael Moore's egregious absolution of Barack Obama for his complicity in beefing up the fat cats while the rest of us grovel for carfare is “Capitalism's” most painful flaw. MM affirms that the Obamanator's candidacy so discombobulated the rulers that they threw gobs of money at him out of fear of what he represented and abracadabra he became the first Afro American president of these United States. We see Obama surrounded by jubilant throngs. We do not see the money. We see nothing about how the first Afro American president feathered the nests of the Wall Street vultures. Nothing about the sleazy White House backroom deals with pharmaceutical industry creep Billy Tauzin to greenlight the steepest rise in prescription drug prices in 20 years as a prelude to Obamacare. Nothing about dishing up the whole enchilada to the insurance vampires so they can more commodiously gouge the aged and infirm.

Since I was diagnosed with liver cancer eight months ago (now in remission), I have accumulated a foot-high stack of bills and am dunned daily to pay off California-Pacific Medical Center to the tune of $34,000, nearly five times my yearly social security checks – from which Medicare deducts a hundred bucks a month to allegedly cover my health needs.

Obama's health care pogram has never been about reforming a deformed system to treat the medically indigent. Obamacare was conceived to insure re-election and the health of the Democratic Party and the insurance tycoons. Let’s face it. We're all on the Jack Kevorkian health plan.

Another apostle of the Left I bumped into during my recent foray in Obamalandia was Amiri Barraka who as Leroi Jones I sometimes ran with back in the Village during the bebop '50s. Performing before a packed house in an auditorium named for a notorious San Francisco sweatshop at the main branch of the SF Public Library, Barraka read a love letter to Obama written soon after the election of the first Afro-American President and reviled those on the Left who continue to take to the streets to protest his tainted policies, as “infantile anarchists” and closet racists.

The former Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Stalinist poet laureate of New Jersey (a dubious distinction of which Amiri was stripped after claiming that 1400 Jews employed at the World Trade Center stayed home on 9/11 day) raised eyebrows by hailing Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel, who was a civilian volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces during the first Gulf War, as his chief of staff, a clever trick on the Zionists Baraka called it. He urged his audiences to continue to vote vote vote for fork-tongued Democratic candidates. We have to grow the unlikely coalition that elected these charlatans! Other evasions and foolishness followed. Barraka was not much alarmed by his president's firing of Van Jones, the first Afro-American green jobs czar.

I was one of the first to take the mic for q's and a's. For 22 days prior to Obama's stirring inauguration on the Capitol mall, I pointed out, the Israelis had rained death down on Gaza, slaughtering 1400 civilians – 360 more have died since – and then the Zionists judiciously paused for Obama's historic oath-taking. Throughout this grotesque bloodletting, Obama (and Emanuel) remained stonily silent. All they had to say were three little words: Stop the Killing! Why had they not responded?

Baraka was irritated by my question and waved me away from the mic. Then poet Michael McClure pointed out that Amiri had not once mentioned the other elephant in the room, Afghanistan. “He's trying to get us out of there,” Amiri blathered. Sure, by sending in another 30,000 dead soldiers, we yodeled back.

“Is the war over yet?”

With Barack Obama calling the shots, and lefties like Michael Moore and Amiri Baraka defending him, the Trinidad Women In Black will all be slipping into dementia before the war is over.

John Ross's El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City is now available at your local independent bookseller. Ross is plotting a monster book tour in 2010 – readers should direct possible venues to johnross@igc.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross12102009.html

Also, it's very telling that he used this speech to justify his war in Afghanistan. I know that to some folks Obama cant do any wrong…but it is wrong, immoral and disingenuous to use 9/11 to justify the bombings and occupation of Afghanistan. The people of Afghanistan DID NOT attack us. Moreover, if you're going to say that Al Quaeda trained there thus we must occupy them, then let me remind you that, according to the official story, all the folks from Al Quaeda (at least the ones that attacked us) were from Saudi Arabia! And what about all the other countries where Al Quaeda is at? Yemen, somalia?

This is an immoral war, started by George W. Bush and Dick for political purposes…..what does Barack Obama gains from fighting their war? Especially when folks in his own country are going hungry and losing their homes?

http://blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2009/12/10/presi…