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The Iraq war laid bare

I'll never forget the 15th of February 2003. I woke up and with my family I went to protests against the impending war in Iraq in the centre of Sydney with 200,000 other people. The energy of the crowd, the anger and the sheer numbers made me feel like it would be impossible for anybody to ignore us -by Sean Maguire


Fast forward nearly 8 years. 

Iraq is a mess, thousands lie dead, Saddam Hussein is disposed but WMDs have never been found. A smoke-screen of misinformation and lies have constantly been told to us; finding the truth of what is happening has been impossible.

Today though, Wikileaks has released nearly 400,000 war logs or SIGACTS (Significant Acts) as written by soldiers which will change all that. The new site is incredibly user-friendly (as opposed to the 40,000 Afghanistan war documents which were a jumble) and it will be easy for anyone to sift through the blood-stained rubble the U.S. government doesn't want us to see. 

And now as I sit here, thinking back to that day in Hyde Park in Sydney, I find it impossible to ignore the pain that ambassadors of my country have caused and I will always find it impossible to trust anybody that says I shouldn't see the results of something I desperately wanted to stop. 

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The pointless battle against binge drinking
5 may  |  By Stephen Myles

Since the days of Alexander the Great, binge drinking has been a very popular past time - leading to him apparently killing a friend and burning down Persepolis while drunk.

Those are some Great shoes to fill.

Yet, governments, schools and the media have repeatedly tried to teach us of binge drinking's dangers. 

Dartmouth University has taken the lead, instigating a new nationwide policy to curb heavy drinking by their students.

Pour me another glass.

Binge drinking is defined as "the consumption of five or more drinks in a row by men — or four or more drinks in a row by women — at least once in the previous 2 weeks. Heavy binge drinking includes three or more such episodes in 2 weeks."

Seems I don't know anyone who isn't a heavy binge drinker.

Do you think this definition should be changed or should we change people's attitudes? Or should you follow HPD's no fools guide to drinking a lot but not dying?  . . read more

Articles of Impeachment - From Dennis Kucinich
13 nov  |  In his conduct while Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office... and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests...

[Cheney has] purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests... [He] has openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States, and done so with the United States proven capability to carry out such threats, thus undermining the national security of the United States...

The Vice President's deception upon the citizens and Congress of the United States that enabled the failed U.S. invasion of Iraq forcibly altered the rules of diplomacy such that the Vice President's recent belligerent actions towards Iran are destabilizing and counterproductive to the national security of the U.S. In all of this, Vice President Cheney has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as Vice President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and the manifest injury of the people of the United States [and] by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office. . . read more

International Law?- by Sean Maguire
27 jan  |  Like hundreds of thosands of others, on February 15th 2003 I protested with my family against the oncoming Iraq War in Sydney's Hyde park.

I was fourteen, which meant a lot of my opposition to the war came from what I'd been taught as a kid- we are good, war is bad, war as a last resort.

At that point I knew nothing of international law.

I didn't know about the crime of aggression, I didn't know most of the provisos of the Geneva Convention, nor how the UN Security Council mandated military action.

After hearing from respected advisor to the Foreign Secretary Sir Michael Wood at the Iraq Inquiry, I'm starting to think, maybe the British government didn't know much more about the law than I did.  . . read more

Why the Snake is Scared - From 'The Alchemist'
13 oct  |  An entrenched PM who believes he has shaped the nation to reflect his own values will cling to power at any cost. He will lie and cheat and strike like a funnel web to keep contenders at bay. That’s normal in an authoritarian democracy. But something beyond power-lust is panicking Howard. Could it be the fear of being found out? Many a skeleton lies dangling in his closet, many a public servant has been bullied into silence, the blood of Afghanis spreads thick on the mountains, the blood of Iraqis soaks thick on sand.

Many a crime he’s turned a blind eye to, many a treaty he’s blatantly thwarted. He spurned the UN to appease a mad President, our military tried to keep Abu Ghraib secret. Neither torture, rendition or the slayings of civilians has copped a rebuke from the saviour of Oz. Check the reports of Oxfam and Amnesty – descriptions of hell. Dirty water spreads cholera. Black Water spreads death. Bush spreads propaganda. Soldiers admit “the entire war is an atrocity”. Howard says it is “just”, but history will not absolve him, and he knows it. What becomes apparent in Iraq – once you peer beyond the confines of Australian media – is a slow motion genocide. This is a war crime. Key perpetrators will be brought to account.

Out of office, Howard becomes vulnerable. Major figures are positioning themselves to be witnesses for the prosecution. Today, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq called the handling of the war “incompetent” and said those responsible for its “catastrophic failure”, must be held to account. Ominously, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez described the occupation as a “nightmare with no end in sight.” One day, John Howard’s nightmare will begin.

More on Iraq's humanitarian challenge . . read more

How Could Hillary Have Known? - From William Blum
5 mar  |  Hillary Clinton and many other members of Congress claim that their support of the invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence reports. How could they dispute the research and analysis of all those experts, so well trained and experienced in their fields? Well, apart from the fact that American intelligence agencies and their reports were by no means of one opinion (one well-publicized CIA paper, for example, predicted all manner of devastating consequences which could result from an invasion and occupation).

Apart from the fact that there were several public statements, including some on American TV, from Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, and other statements made by Iraqi scientists to American media and to American intelligence that Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. Apart from the fact that UN nuclear inspectors had determined before the war that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program.

Apart from the fact that Colin Powell, speaking in February 2001 of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, said: "And frankly they have worked. He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Apart from all that, this question must be asked: What did the millions of Americans who marched against the war before it began know that all those members of Congress didn't know? [More] . . read more

The Agenda Behind the Hoax - From Paul Craig Roberts
24 apr  |  Why does the Bush Regime want to rule Iraq? Some speculate that it is a matter of “peak oil.” Oil supplies are said to be declining even as demand for oil multiplies from developing countries such as China. According to this argument, the U.S. decided to seize Iraq to insure its own oil supply. This explanation is problematic. Most U.S. oil comes from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. The best way for the U.S. to insure its oil supplies would be to protect the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. Moreover, $3-5 trillion would have purchased a tremendous amount of oil...

The more likely explanation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq is the neoconservative Bush Regime’s commitment to the defense of Israeli territorial expansion. There is no such thing as a neoconservative who is not allied with Israel. Israel hopes to steal all of the West Bank and southern Lebanon for its territorial expansion. An American colonial regime in Iraq not only buttresses Israel from attack, but also can pressure Syria and Iran from giving support to the Palestinians and Lebanese. The Iraqi war is a war for Israeli territorial expansion. Americans are dying and bleeding to death financially for Israel. Bush’s “war on terror” is a hoax that serves to cover U.S. intervention in the Middle East in behalf of “greater Israel.” [More]

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. . . read more

Clueless Americans - From Juan Cole
12 jan  |  I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people, directly or indirectly. It strikes me as a bitter joke that 4 million are displaced, often facing hunger and disease, and the right-wing periodicals and presidential candidates are talking about how the "surge" has "turned things around."

For whom? How many orphans have we created? How many widows? How many people who weep and cry every night while trying to fall asleep on straw mats? I estimate on the basis of a UN study of refugees in Syria that as many as 600,000 or 700,000 Baghdadis were ethnically cleansed from the capital under the nose of the American troops implementing the surge. There is an old Chinese proverb, "Children throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest."

Bush has gutted American civil liberties, and turned us into a hateful nation of spies, torturers, bigots, and colonialists occupying someone else's country... Surveying civilian deaths in Iraq is like walking through Lincoln, Nebraska, after it was hit by a neutron bomb, with everyone dead. Everyone. [More] . . read more

Papal Benedictions - From Andrew Wimmer
22 apr  |  Act One: In January 2004 Dick Cheney concluded his tour of Europe with a visit to the Vatican where he was received by John Paul II. Ten months earlier the United States had invaded Iraq in a display of “shock and awe” and was now settling into its occupation. The U.S. was still waging war in Afghanistan, and it had been two years since the first detainees had arrived at Guantánamo. The New York Times wrote, “the pope did not mention Iraq... but about the importance of peace and respect for human life.” Dick Cheney presented the pope a crystal dove. The pope accepted it.

Act Two: Josef Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, traveled to Washington where he was received by George Bush at the White House. Three more years have passed, and the country of Iraq is in chaos, its civilization shattered. More than a million Iraqis are dead while 4,500,000 have been forced to flee their homes, most saying they will never be able to return... George Bush and the pope met privately before issuing a joint statement in which they “reaffirmed their total rejection of terrorism as well as the manipulation of religion to justify immoral and violent acts against innocents.” During their personal meeting George Bush presented the pope a crystal cross. The pope accepted it.

Act Three: [Last Wednesday] Barack Obama assured Americans that when it comes to Iran he “will take no options off the table,” a position he shares with the Bush administration and the other presidential candidates. [More] . . read more

Greatest Stick-Up in History - From Naomi Klein
7 jul  |  Paradoxically, it is Iraq's suffering - its never-ending crisis - that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain Iraq's treasury of its main revenue source. The logic goes like this: Iraq's oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology, while the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq needs to start producing more oil urgently. Why? Also because of the war. The country is shattered and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to western firms have failed to rebuild it.

And that's where the new contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Several of the architects of the Iraq war no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator for the invasion. On US National Public Radio, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as "a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future". Chalabi, who served as Iraq's oil undersecretary of state and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as "a primary objective".

Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva conventions. That means the huge task of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure - including its oil infrastructure - is the financial responsibility of Iraq's invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations, just as Saddam Hussein's regime paid $9bn to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion. Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation. [More]
 . . read more
The Strange Success of the Surge - From Patrick Cockburn
3 aug  |  The ability of America to make unilateral decisions in Iraq is diminishing by the month, but the White House was still horrified to hear the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki appearing to endorse Barack Obama’s plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops over 16 months. This cut the ground from under the feet of John McCain who has repeatedly declared that ‘victory’ is at last within America’s grasp because of the great achievements of ‘the Surge’, the American reinforcements sent to Iraq in 2007 to regain control of Baghdad.

The success of ‘the Surge’ is becoming almost received wisdom in the U.S. This is strange since, if the U.S. strategy did win such an important victory, why do America generals need more soldiers, currently 147,000 of them, in Iraq than they did before ‘the Surge’ started? But belief in this so-called victory is in keeping with the American tradition of seeing everything that happens in Iraq as being the result of actions by the U.S. alone. The complex political landscape of Iraq is ignored.

U.S. commentators have never quite taken on board that there are not one but three wars being fought out in the country since 2003: the first is the war of resistance against the American occupation by insurgents from the Sunni Arab community. The second is the battle between the Sunni and Shia communities as to who should rule the Iraqi state in succession to Saddam Hussein. The third conflict is a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran to decide who should be the predominant foreign power in Iraq. The real, though exaggerated, fall in violence in Iraq over the last year is a consequence of developments in all three of these wars, but they do not necessarily have much to do with ‘the Surge’. [More] . . read more

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"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -- Ronald Reagan (1986)