Middle East – Page 23 – Antiwar.com Blog

How to become collateral damage #37

Israeli military ‘regrets’ killing wrong man in Hamas raid, Unarmed Palestinian Amr Qawasme was shot dead during IDF operation to arrest militants in Hebron, Harriet Sherwood, guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 January 2011 16.03 GMT

OOPS!

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops killed a 65-year-old Palestinian civilian named Amr Qawasme in a pre-dawn house raid earlier today in Hebron. Amr Qawasme’s wife Sopheye said the troops stormed into his bedroom while he was sleeping.

Sopheye Qawasme: "He wasn’t even awake. They just entered the door and shot him right away. I had gone to pray. When I came back, they told me. I have no idea how they just broke into the house and shot him. They came at me and put a rifle to my head, and they shot him again."

The Israeli military confirmed that Amr Qawasme was a civilian, but said the raid was justified because a member of Hamas was living in the building. –Israeli Troops Kill 65-Year-Old Man in Home Raid, Democracy NOW! Headlines, January 7, 2011

So you better know ALL your neighbors – – – AND their politics.

But don’t worry, it couldn’t happen here! At least not too often – – –

Iran: Parallax view

NOAM CHOMSKY: The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. …They show that Arab opinion …â€”holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, thatâ€™s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, thatâ€™s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that …it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. …
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When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. Thereâ€™s also a minor problem. Thatâ€™s the major problem. The minor problem is that we donâ€™t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So thereâ€™s a filtering process. We donâ€™t know how much it distorts the information. But thereâ€™s no question that what is a radical distortion isâ€”or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesnâ€™t matter, even if itâ€™s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere…. –Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”

Something they should still fear?

The first [British anti-Iraq-war] march in which I took part must have numbered something like a million. …this huge crowd, which was being really very crudely manhandled by the police at the edges. We stopped. We were all wedged together and looking into Downing Street, where the Prime Ministerâ€™s residency is. And nobody seemed to speak, but a kind of feral roar of popular will rose. And I tried to imagine what it must have been like for [Tony] B liar sitting inside that building and hearing that sound…. –British Novelist John le CarrÃ© on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, “Our Kind of Traitor,” Democracy NOW!, Thursday, November 25, 2010 .

Dubya was right??

From film-maker Oliver Stone’s interview with former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, we discover:

Oliver Stone: "Were there any eye-to-eye moments with President Bush that day, that night?"

Nestor Kirchner: "…I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. …He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war."

Stone: "War. He said that?"

Kirchner: "He said that. Those were his exact words."

Stone: "Was he suggesting that South America go to war?"

Kirchner: "Well, he was talking about the United States. …All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by the various wars. He said it very clearly. –Fmr. Argentine President Kirchner Dies of Heart Attack, Democracy Now!, Oct. 28, 2010

So, WAS Dubya right?

"War" [1] is indeed a key part of the U.S. economy. Some folks call this "military keynesianism."

Consider: Despite one of the most defensible geographic situations on earth — unless you fear the Canadians — the U.S. Government spends more on "defense" than almost the rest of the world combined. AND, not surprisingly, U.S.A. is the biggest arms merchant in the world.

So, Mr. Bush was exactly right.

If you’re a U.S. Citizen, approximately 43% of your income taxes go to pay for wars, past and present. And that’s before Uncle Sam is forced, kicking and screaming, into officially admitting PTSD is nearly universal in combat veterans, lasts a lifetime, and is expensive to treat. According to former IMF Chief Economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the two current "wars" will eventually cost U.S. taxpayers between four and six trillion dollars. That’s trillion. With a "T."

And don’t fret about the militaryindustrial budget. While Mr. Obama isn’t yet responsible for killing as many men, women and children as Mr. Bush — and hasn’t spent as much doing so, give him a chance — he’s not even two years into his presidency and he’s already sent at least 60,000 new U.S. troops into Afghanistan and has plans to escalate the U.S. presence in Pakistan, and the largely ignoredU.S. presence in Yemen too.

With these kinds of numbers — that 43% of your income tax spent for “wars” for example — maybe a bit of money invested in antiwar.com to stop them might be a good investment, not only for you, but for your kids, grand kids and the yet unborn. What do you say?

Notes:

[1] The U.S. Government hasn’t been at war according to its Constitution since the end of World War II. That would require the U.S. House of Representatives to vote for war, which it hasn’t done. This means the so-called "wars" — the Korean "War," the Vietnam "War," The Iraq "Wars," the "War" in Afghanistan, etc. — must be something else. Or, since they insist on calling them "wars" anyway, unconstitutional. But as George W. Bush is reported to have claimed, "The constitution is just a damned piece of paper." So, who cares? return

Is THIS why they hate us?

AMY GOODMAN: A former US Marine who killed two unarmed Iraqis is running for a congressional seat in North Carolina… Ilario Pantano has said he has no regrets about fatally shooting the two at point-blank range after detaining them near Fallujah in April 2004.

JUSTIN ELLIOT: These two Iraqi men had been searched. They didn’t have any weapons. And he was — Mr. Pantano was having them search their own car when he opened fire, and shooting as many as fifty or sixty rounds at them. And that includes reloading his M-16 rifle.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite his admission, the military cleared Pantano of wrongdoing in 2005. He is now in a tight race with incumbent Democrat Rep. Mike McIntyre in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District. –From Murder to Congress?

Do you think this sort of thing might be why they hate us?

Krauthammer: WikiLeaks show the U.S Military’s “Restraint”

This has got to be the quote of the day — maybe the week, maybe the month. After agreeing all around on FOX News’ Special Report tonight that there was “nothing there, there” in the 400k documents dumped by WikiLeaks on Friday (a massive release of classified reports that martyr-hero-analyst Juan Williams deemed “unnecessary and mischievous”), neoconservative war hawk Charles Krauthammer said, “the overall the impression I got was how restrained the United States was.”

Yeah, I’m sure to Mr. Krauthammer, the killing ofÂ 681 civilians, including 50 families and 30 children — non-insurgents all — in their cars, at manned checkpoints, over a five-year period is pretty restrained (only 120 actual insurgents were killed at checkpoints in that same period, by the way). It’s pretty hard, however, to read the emerging individual stories of what actually happened and think “restraint” had anything to do with it.

But I guess the Americans were showing tremendous restraint when they turned over all those Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi military torture chambers that make the latest “Saw” installment look PG-13. They could have questioned their “orders” to ignore the abuse because international laws and the laws of humanity certainly prohibit torture — but our soldiers showed restraint (which is pretty impressive considering how many “Christians” there are filling the evangelical church services on any given forward operating base these days). They also showed great restraint in not questioning their Iraqi brothers doing the torturing — many of whom were part of the deadly U.S trained Wolf Brigade, so you could say there was some familiarity there. But the Americans followed orders and looked the other way. Restraint.

Sarcasm aside, just what might be “unrestrained” in Mr. Krauthammer’s world? — I am afraid to find out.