Breaking News Headlines - January 13th

Bush calls for united front against Iran

Iran agrees to give nuke answers

Taliban kill 8 Afghan police

Afghan Police Struggle to Work a Beat in a War

'Core issues' on Mid-East agenda

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The Nature of War and a Personal Peace Treaty

This is the nature of war:

it turns us into enemies. People who have never met kill each other out of fear. War creates so much suffering -- children become orphans, entire cities and villages are destroyed. All who suffer through these conflicts are victims. Coming from a background of such devastation and suffering, having experienced the French-Indochina War and the Vietnam War, I have the deep aspiration to prevent war from ever happening again.

It is my prayer that nations will no longer send their young people to fight each other, not even in the name of peace. I do not accept the concept of a war for peace, a "just war," as I also cannot accept the concept of "just slavery," "just hatred," or "just racism." During the wars in Vietnam, my friends and I declared ourselves neutral; we took no sides and we had no enemies, North or South, French, American, or Vietnamese. We saw that the first victim of war is the person who perpetrates it. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind."

A Personal Peace Treaty

To make a personal peace treaty we can write: "Dear Self, I promise to practice and live my daily life in a way that will not touch or water the seed of violence within me." We are determined in every moment to protect ourselves from negative thinking and to nourish loving-kindness within us. We can also share this commitment with our beloved ones. We can go to our partner, our son or daughter, and say, "My dear, my beloved one, if you really love me, please do not water the seed of violence in me. Please water the seed of compassion in me. I promise to do the same for you."

Source: Daily Om

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Quick Read - Arabs sending US mixed signals on Iran

Arabs sending US mixed signals on Iran
Jittery after a confrontation between U.S. and Iranian naval vessels off their shores, the Persian Gulf's Arab countries have a contradictory message for President Bush: Be tough on Iran — but not tough enough to start a war.

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Iran: Americans can't attack

Iran believes that the Middle East region cannot not tolerate a new crisis under present circumstances, Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad-Ali Hosseini, said on Monday. Commenting on the possibility of any American military threat against Iran, Hosseini said, "Americans do not have the capability of doing that."
Stressing that most of the world leaders have opposed the idea of launching military action against Iran, Hosseini said, according to IRNA: "Even some of US officials have dismissed it, too."
However, he stressed, "Iran even takes into consideration weak probabilities to this end and makes necessary arrangements in this regard."
© 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

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Iraq by the Numbers

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com.
Americans are waiting for General David Petraeus to report to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there's no reason to wait for September. Here's a look at some telltale numbers that show the horror in Iraq.

The question is: What word best describes the situation these Iraqi numbers hint at? The answer would probably be: No such word exists. "Genocide" has been beaten into the ground and doesn't apply. "Civil war," which shifts all blame to the Iraqis (withdrawing Americans from a country its troops have not yet begun to leave), doesn't faintly cover the matter.

If anything catches the carnage and mayhem that was once the nation of Iraq, it might be a comment by the head of the Arab League, Amr Mussa, in 2004. He warned: "The gates of hell are open in Iraq." At the very least, the "gates of hell" should now officially be considered miles behind us on the half-destroyed, well-mined highway of Iraqi life. Who knows what IEDs lie ahead? We are, after all, in the underworld.

Source: Alter Net: War in Iraq

Related Article: 20 beheaded bodies found on Iraqi river bank

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President Bush's War of Choice

According to the Associated Press, as of Sunday, "the war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in ... World War II." At the same time, a new analysis of the readiness of Iraqi personnel by noted military scholar and former Reagan Administration official Anthony Cordesman concludes that the "public statements by the Defense Department 'severely distorted the true nature of Iraqi force development in ways that grossly exaggerate Iraqi readiness and capability to assume security tasks and replace U.S. forces.'" Cordesman also noted that "U.S. official reporting is so misleading that there is no way to determine just how serious the problem is and what resources will be required." As a result, Cordesman says the Iraqi army could need U.S. support through 2010.
With the Iraq War increasing in length with each passing day and no real leadership from the Bush Administration, America is ready for a new direction.

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Ayatollah Khamenei: Iran Will Strike U.S. If Attacked

NewsMax.com Wires
Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007
TEHRAN, Iran --
If the United States were to attack Iran, the country would respond by striking U.S. interests all over the world, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday.
President Bush has ordered American troops to act against Iranians suspected of being involved in the Iraqi insurgency and has deployed a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf area as a warning to Iran. The U.N. Security Council has imposed sanctions because of Iran's refusal to cease uranium enrichment.
"Some people say that the U.S. president is not prone to calculating the consequences of his actions," Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state television, "but it is possible to bring this kind of person to wisdom.
"U.S. policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response," Khamenei added.
He's right - Bush does not consider the consequences of his actions. He thinks he is omnipotent. People who are willing to comitt suicide bombings if needed to get us out of their country are not prone to make idle threats. If Bush goes ahead with an attack on Iran, which I believe he will in the not-to-distant future (months) we are so screwed. That's My View of It!

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Justifications for attacking Iran on shaky ground

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is escalating its confrontation with Iran, sending an additional aircraft carrier and minesweepers into the Persian Gulf as it accuses the Islamic regime in Tehran of arming Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq for attacks on American troops.

The fact that some Iranian weaponry is flowing to the Mahdi Army, and that Mahdi Army fighters have attacked Americans, doesn't prove that the Iranians are targeting Americans, said a second U.S. intelligence official, who also agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
Moreover, a third intelligence official said, Iraq is awash in weapons purchased by Saddam's regime and never secured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion. Plenty of Iranian weapons are also "floating around" because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps created the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and forces loyal to the Dawa party of U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, the official added.
Further compounding the problem, the three U.S. intelligence officials said, is that the Bush administration supports not only Dawa's Maliki, but also two major SCIRI leaders, Abdul Aziz al Hakim and Abdul Adel Mahdi, who are also in the government.
"So what do we do?" said one of the officials. "Accuse the Iranians of supporting the same guys we support? That's awkward."

My View of It is that Bush is a meglomaniac who is going to get us all killed! Why the hell is he messing with Iran knowing they can have nuclear weapons up an running in a relatively short period of time, all they need is some uranium and we are all screwed!

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Former Iraqi Official Offers Blueprint for Peace

Ali A Allawi was Minister of Trade and Minister of Defence in the Iraqi Governing Council Cabinet (2003-2004). He was in the Transitional National Assembly, and Minister of Finance, Transitional National Government of Iraq (2005-2006). His book, 'The Occupation of Iraq Winning the War, Losing the Peace' will be published in March.
The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its successor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos. The collapse of the entire order in the Middle East now threatens as the Iraq imbroglio unleashes forces in the area that have been gathering in virulence over the past decades.
What was supposed to be a straightforward process of overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with a liberal-leaning and secular democracy under the benign tutelage of the United States, has instead turned into an existential battle for identity, power and legitimacy that is affecting not only Iraq, but the entire tottering state system in the Middle East.

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Top Ten Things Not to Do in Iraq

By Ivan ElandDecember 19, 2006

Editor's Note:

George W. Bush seems determined to "double down" his bet on the Iraq War despite overwhelming public opposition and recommendations for a phased withdrawal from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Bush is now toying with the idea of adding 15,000 to 30,000 more U.S. troops, a scheme called "The Surge."
While many of Bush's neoconservative advisers are in favor, the President is running into opposition from the top Pentagon brass, including the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to a Washington Post article on Dec. 19. Clearly, however, prospects for an early end to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq continue to dim.
In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland takes note of that fact and offers his Top Ten list of things not to do in Iraq:

Ever since the Iraq Study Group (ISG) issued its recommendations, the debate in Washington has swirled around what to do about the mess in Iraq. Unfortunately, both the recommendations of the study group and the contradictory inclinations of the Bush administration are “bridges to nowhere.”
Both groups are in denial about the chaos in Iraq and are not yet ready to offer the tough solutions that could stabilize the country. Perhaps they should accept the top ten things not to do in Iraq:

The term "Acceptable Losses" keeps ringing in my ears!

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A Miracle In London Or a Lying Government?

No terror attack over holidays proves one of two things

Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Do miracles really happen? Jesus turned water into wine, but do the spooks that staff the hierarchies of the British and American intelligence establishment possess the same divine powers? Or were they simply lying again when it was sternly reported that only a "miracle" would prevent London from being attacked by terrorists over the holiday period?
British Home Secretary John Reid, former hardcore Stalinist, member of the Scottish Communist Party and an alcoholic bully with a penchant for thumping people in the face, reiterated the threat that it was "highly likely" that terrorists would attempt an attack before the first of the year.
"It will be a miracle if there isn't a terror attack over the holidays in London," a senior American law enforcement official told ABCNews.com on December 21st.By that logic, the fact that a terror attack did not happen proves one of two things - that miracles really do happen in the modern world or governments are lying to us about terrorism in order to scare populations into accepting the deliberately engineered drift towards authoritarianism.
Which do you think it is?

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Bush 'to reveal Iraq troop boost'

Justin Webb BBC Tuesday, January 2, 2007

US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt. The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces.
The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs.
The US president arrived back in Washington on Monday after a week-long holiday at his ranch in Texas.
The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.
Its central theme will be sacrifice.
The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.
The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

Damnit! How much more of a "sacrifice" are we supposed to make? 3000 dead already! Every single one of these deaths represents someone's son,daughter,mother.father,husband.or wife. Enough already!

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Reach of War

BAGHDAD, Jan. 1 —
With thousands of Iraqis desperately fleeing this country every day, advocates for refugees, and even some American officials, say there is an urgent need to allow more Iraqi refugees into the United States.

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Support our Troops !!!

A tribute to our brothers and sisters who protect us, where-ever they are sent. Support our troops!

***Click Title to watch video***

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Arab blogs on the Saddam hanging

Video image released by Iraqi state television shows Saddam Hussein's guards wearing ski masks and placing a noose around the deposed leader's neck moments before his execution. Photograph: AP

By Simon Jeffery / Iraq/ World news 12:47pm

On English language Arab blogs there is little mourning for Saddam but plenty of qualms about his execution. Issandr El Amrani on The Arabist laments what the former dictator has taken to his grave.

I do regret, however, that more information was not obtained out of Saddam Hussein. About his life, his regime, his relationship with various countries.

He would have been a fascinating source of information for regional historians. A real trial, at the international criminal court, the Hague or elsewhere, would have yielded real, valuable information.

On the Angry Arab blog, As'ad is finding the al-Jazeera coverage "way too somber and way too melancholic" but is concerned "this execution will go down as a sectarian decision and not as a political or legal decision, as it should be." The writer suggests it may even lead to a resurgence of Saddam's Ba'ath party.This will not represent the end of the Ba'ath party. In fact

A dictator created then destroyed by America
Robert FiskLondon IndependentSaturday, December 30, 2006
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.
"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.
I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.
But we will have got away with it.

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Ford disagreed with Bush over Iraq war

‘Ford disagreed with Bush over Iraq war’
WASHINGTON: President George W Bush and his top advisers made a “big mistake” in their justification for invading Iraq, Gerald Ford told journalist Bob Woodward in an interview embargoed until after the former president’s death. Ford, who died on Tuesday at his home in California at age 93,... “I don’t think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly,” Ford said, “I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.”

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Taliban confirm Osmani killed in US air strike

CHAMAN: A Taliban commander on Wednesday confirmed that that the movement’s military chief in southern Afghanistan had been killed in a United States air strike on Dec 19, adding that his death represented a blow to the Islamist movement. The US military said last week that Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, who had close links to Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, had been killed in an air strike in Helmand province - a claim that had at the time been rejected by Taliban commanders and spokesmen. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\12\28\story_28-12-2006_pg7_34

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Ethiopia launches Somalia offensive

MOGADISHU, Somalia— Ethiopia sent fighter jets into Somalia and bombed several towns yesterday in a dramatic attack on Somalia’s powerful Islamic movement, and Ethiopia’s prime minister said his country had been “forced to enter a war.”

Another Holy War! (groan)

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Bush's 'Global War on Radicals'

George W. Bush is laying the groundwork for a wider war in the Middle East by stretching the parameters of the "global war on terrorism" to add to his enemies list what he calls "radicals and extremists."
The change makes the struggle so amorphous that Bush theoretically could strike at anyone he doesn't like whether there's a credible link to international terrorism or not. The word shift also portends an endless war between the United States and the world's one billion Muslims.
To see the full story about how Bush has expanded the "war on terror," go to Consortiumnews.com at.

We couldn't see this coming? Right!!

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A Very Dangerous New Year
Political pressures on George W. Bush make the first few months of 2007 a very dangerous time for an escalation of war in the Middle East. Intelligence sources say Bush -- along with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- are weighing the possibility of Israeli-led attacks on Syria and Iran, with the United States providing logistical back-up. In this view, the proposed "surge" of U.S. troops to Iraq and the dispatch of a second aircraft carrier task force to Iranian waters are part of the plan. December 21, 2006 http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122006.html
All three leaders could salvage their reputations if a wider war broke out in the Middle East and then broke in their favor.This, ladies and gentlemen is called an agenda and the only reason we are still in Iraq! IMOSHO!

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