United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both scheduled to speak next week at the annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, D.C., AIPAC's rebuke to an infuriated Obama administration only raises the level of open confrontation between the U.S. and Israel that has come in the aftermath of Israel's approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem during the visit of Vice President Joe Biden last week.  --  "On Sunday, White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod became the latest administration figure to publicly rebuke Israel, saying on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that the move was an 'affront,' an 'insult,' and 'very, very destructive,'" Bridget Johnson of The Hill noted.[1]  --  AIPAC responded by calling White House statements "a matter of serious concern" and said that "The Administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel." ...

Taliban sources said bombings in Kandahar on Saturday night were "a warning" to NATO forces, which are reporting planning an offensive targeting Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, AP reported Sunday.[1]  --  The attack was a complex one, involving "five blasts, four of them suicide attacks -- killed at least 35 people, according to the Ministry of Interior.  Another 57 were wounded in the attacks, which hit the city's prison, police headquarters, a wedding hall next door and other areas on roads leading to the prison," Noor Khan and Kay Johnson said.  --  But "Ministry of Interior spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the attacks failed to achieve their main objective, which was apparently to repeat the success of a 2008 suicide bombing at the prison gates that freed hundreds of criminals and suspected insurgents.  Canadian troops had recently reinforced the lockup with cement block, so Saturday's blast did not break through and no inmates escaped this time."  --  "Kandahar city, population 800,000, was the seat of government for the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan, imposing its vision of Islamic theocracy for five years before being toppled by U.S.-backed forces in 2001.  --  The province of the same name is the insurgents' base, and militants control most villages surrounding the city.  Residents said Sunday that Taliban can also operate freely in Kandahar city." ...

So many Pakistanis are dying in suicide bombings in Pakistan that on Saturday an article in The News spoke of an "average killing rate" that has more than tripled in the past year.[1]  --  "Authorities investigating the unending spate of suicide bombings are of the view most of these attacks have been carried out by the Punjabi Taliban belonging to four sectarian-cum-Jihadi groups which are working in tandem with the Pashtun-dominated Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan," Amir Mir wrote.  --  "They believe several South Punjab-based members of the banned Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who had taken part in the Afghan war, have now tied up with the TTP to carry out suicide attacks across Pakistan, especially targeting key military installations." ...

Iraqi women now have fewer rights in less security than they did under Saddam, and millions of them have been displaced from their homes, Inter Press Service reported Friday.[1]  --  "'The U.S. occupation has decided to let go of women's rights,' Yanar Mohammed who campaigns for women's rights in Iraq says.  'Political Islamic groups have taken southern Iraq, are fully in power there, and are using the financial support of Iran to recruit troops and allies.  The financial and political support from Iran is why the Iraqis in the south accept this, not because the Iraqi people want Islamic law.'"  --  Maha Sabria, professor of political science at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, said:  "The real ruler in Iraq now is the rule of old traditions and tribal, backward laws.  The biggest problem is that more women in Iraq are unaware of their rights because of the backwardness and ignorance prevailing in Iraqi society today."  --  Article 2 of the Iraqi constitution declares that "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation," and "[u]nder this Article the interpretation of women's rights is left to religious leaders -- and many of them are under Iranian influence," Abdu Rahman and Dahr Jamail reported....

A resolution sponsored by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10th) to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan within 30 days was rejected by the House on Wednesday by a vote of 356-65, the New York Times reported.[1]  --  (See here for the roll-call vote.)  --  A link to a YouTube clip of the five-minute speech by Ron Paul (R-TX 14th) in support of the resolution is posted below.[2] ...

With almost no public discussion or even awareness, the U.S. national security state has embarked on a vast and dangerous social experiment performed upon unwilling subjects:  a population living terrorized beneath skies invisibly controlled by a power from the opposite side of the world with whom their country is not even at war.  --  It is impossible to know the number of innocents killed in the world's first drone war, nor is it possible to foresee its consequences, but the likelihood of serious blowback would appear to be considerable.  --  On Wednesday, the Times of London reported that among the unintended consequences of the Reapers and Predators are some terrifically horrific scenes:  "The Taleban have grown increasingly convinced that spies are in the midst of the local people, planting transmitter chips -- patray, as the locals call them -- to guide the drones on to their targets.  Although no chips have yet been discovered, after every raid witnesses say that the Taleban react with rage, abducting, torturing, and killing anyone suspected of planting a chip.  --  'Sometimes we see a body a day lying by the roadside,' said Gul Rafay Jan, from Miran Shah.  'They’ve got signs around their necks saying they were spies planting chips.  Sometimes they have been tortured to make confession videos by having rods pushed through their arms or stomachs, or being suspended over a fire.'  --  In this climate of fear locals have begun to suspect one another.  'Most of them are not educated,' Amir said.  'Even if their own son is abducted and killed, they may later wonder if perhaps he was really a spy.  So now each time a drone attacks, a few are killed by the missile and a few more by the Taleban, and everyone is left suspecting everyone else.'"[1]  --  See here for a map detailing U.S. attacks in the drone war...

The way we live now:  Northrop Grumman and EADS dropped out on Monday, so Boeing is "the likely winner of one of the Pentagon's largest contracts," probably ultimately on the order of $100 billion, the New York Times reported on Monday.[1]  --  The news came only four (count 'em, four) days after our own Norm Dicks (D-WA 6th) was, as expected, elected to succeed the late John Murtha (D-PA 12th), as head of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.[2]  --  Attaining the chairmanship of this panel has been the lodestar of the one-time UW footballer and Warren Magnuson protégé for decades, since the subcommittee "controls half of the discretionary spending in the federal budget, to the tune of $708 billion for 2011," as Kyung Song noted.  --  (Boeing shares have risen about 16% since Murtha died, compared to a rise of about 6.5% of the Dow, in which Boeing is of course included, in the same period, and it's a safe bet that they will rise further.)  --  Dicks's hometown paper, the News Tribune, took a stab at pretending that Boeing might still lose the contract.[3]  --  But Les Blumenthal gave the game away:  he also reported that Dicks is pushing to scrap the bidding process altogether and "just negotiate a contract directly with Boeing."  --  COMMENT: Only two years ago Rich Thomas was chortling about Boeing's having (supposedly) failed to get the very same contract, writing:  "Boeing's arrogance and corruption lost them the contract, and to overturn the results of the open bidding to provide the USAF with a new tanker would be rewarding their misdeeds."  --  Repeat:  "rewarding their misdeeds."  --  Repeat:  "rewarding their misdeeds."  --  Now repeat "rewarding their misdeeds" 99,999,999,997 times more....

You've been reading for weeks now about the "city" or "town of Marja" and its population of 80,000 or 50,000.  --  In the Washington Post of Feb. 22, 2010, we read that "the town of 50,000 is the target of the largest U.S.-NATO military operation since 2001."  --  In reality, the place isn't a city or a town, just "a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area," take your pick.  --  On Monday, Gareth Porter, a 67-year-old historian and journalist with a Ph.D. from Cornell, called this "one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict."[1]  --  According to Porter, "The decision to hype up Marja as the objective of 'Operation Moshtarak' by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city would not have been made independently by the Marines at Camp Leatherneck.  --  A central task of 'information operations' in counterinsurgency wars is 'establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative,' according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006."  --  COMMENT: There's something to this analysis, but it paints with too broad a brush.  --  These points need more research.  --  Porter traces the image of Marja as a large town or city to a military briefing on Feb. 2, 2010, but in the New York Times of Jul. 3, 2009, Marja was already being described as "a town west of [Lashkar Gar] that has been a major opium trading post and Taliban base."  --  On Nov. 29, 2009, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post spelled it "Marjeh" and called it "a city of about 50,000 people in central Helmand that remains a major center for the opium trade."  --  As for the term city, it derives from the Latin civitas whose "primary sense was . . . ‘citizenship’; thence concretely ‘the body of citizens, the community’" (Oxford English Dictionary).  --  While "[i]n North America [the word city] usually connotes municipal autonomy or organization of a more complete or higher kind than ‘town,’ the OED also notes that "[i]n other lands now or formerly under British rule [like Afghanistan], ‘city’ is used sometimes more loosely." ...

In his column on Monday commenting on the Mar. 7 Iraqi elections, the celebrated veteran Mideast correspondent Robert Fisk admired the courage of the Iraqi people but expressed skepticism about the sectarianism it was engineered to institutionalize.[1] ...

The New York Times reported from Baghdad toward the end of the day (local time) that at least 38 people have been killed in "[a] concerted wave of attacks [that] struck Baghdad and other cities across the country on Sunday as Iraqis voted to elect a new parliament and possibly a new prime minister."[1]  --  In addition to the nation's capital, there was also violence in Fallujah, Kirkuk, Mosul, a village south of Baghdad, and "across Diyala," with an "extensive use of mortars and rockets [that] suggested that insurgents had shifted tactics, perhaps because they were unable to maneuver cars or suicide bombers into the cities because of an intense security lockdown," Steven Lee Myers said.  --  COMMENT: The tone of the New York Times's reporting on these dark events was weirdly upbeat, with inspirational remarks from U.S. President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and a neo-Orwellian characterization of the Mar. 7 election as "the most open, most competitive election in the nation’s long history of colonial rule, dictatorship, and war."  --  It is, we are to believe, "a test of the country’s democracy."  --  American readers, whose government's violence and subsequent occupation is the sine qua non of Sunday's election-day violence, are supposed to ignore this because of what Noam Chomsky calls the Doctrine of Good Intentions, which dictates that the motivations of the United States at the present time can only be good.  --  Years from now reviewers writing for the New York Times Book Review will candidly characterize U.S. policies in effect today as imperialist, hegemonic, and geopolitically motivated, and will analyze how through the election the U.S. hoped to effect the reinstallation of a former CIA asset as the elected prime minister of its proxy state.  --  But at present it is de rigueur to admit only pious hopes for genuine democracy in Iraq, and to pretend that if fond American hopes are realized there will be "a final American withdrawal now scheduled to be completed by the end of 2011."  --  Nothing could be further from the truth.  --  Who can be naive enough to doubt but that tens of thousands of U.S. troops and tens of thousands of U.S.-paid mercenaries will be still in Iraq in 2012 and beyond? ...

The U.S.'s "focus is too much on the military side and too little on the civilian side" in Afghanistan, according to departing Norwegian Kai Eide, the top U.N. diplomat in that country over the past two years, McClatchy Newspapers reported Saturday.[1]  --  "Eide will be succeeded by Staffan de Mistura, who's described as an unassuming Swedish career diplomat who'll face significant challenges in ensuring that the United Nations remains a central player in Afghanistan as the U.S. pushes forward with its military surge," Dion Nissenbaum said....

Back in March 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he said:  "This push must be joined by a dramatic increase in our civilian effort . . . that's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground. . . . Our efforts will fail in Afghanistan and Pakistan if we don't invest in their future."  --  But on Friday, one year later, the Associated Press reported that "The so-called 'civilian surge' in Afghanistan is mired in bureaucracy and may not succeed in time to help the war effort, a State Department report found."[1]  --  The problems are many, said Pauline Jelinek:  "The report released Friday said U.S. diplomats spend too much time giving war zone tours to visiting officials.  They have struggled to house, feed, and transport an influx of new civilians.  And they can't get regular sleep because bosses at the National Security Council and others in Washington call for briefings from midnight to 4 a.m., apparently unworried about the different time zone."  --  In addition, "[M]ost U.S. staff spend approximately two months of their tour on leave.  The report said that hinders their ability to develop expertise, hurts continuity, requires more people on the ground, and results in what one former ambassador called 'an institutional lobotomy.'"  --  Jonathan Landay of McClatchy added that basic clueness is also a problem:  "Some of the U.S. diplomats who are assigned to tracking and analyzing Afghanistan's complex politics and social dynamics lack training and expertise, the report said. . . . Many diplomats sent into the provinces, which are home to 70 percent of the country's estimated 32 million people, have no training in political reporting and analysis, the report said."[2]  --  COMMENT: The basic flaw of the doomed U.S. strategy is that it is an attempt at revolutionary social engineering that attempts to give to Afghans "exactly what the rural people do not want" and labels them "bad guys" for not wanting it, a research professor for the Dept. of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and a retired Foreign Service officer concluded in a study published in the November-December 2009 number of Military Review.  --  Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason pointed out in an article entitled "Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template" that "It is not a coincidence that the current conservative rural insurgency in Afghanistan led by mullahs and framed in terms of jihad has grown stronger and virulent each year since 2002 . . . 'Extending the reach of the central government' is precisely the wrong strategy in Afghanistan . . . The level of coercive social change that would be required to actually implement this radical social revolution in Afghanistan is beyond our national means.  As Jeffrey Clark observed in his final analysis of what went wrong in Vietnam, 'It was simply beyond the capacity of one power to reform and reshape the society of another.'"

Nominated for best documentary in the 2010 Academy Awards, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" will open in Tacoma on Fri., Mar. 12.  --  Tacoma's Grand Cinema has announced that co-director Rick Goldsmith will be on hand at the Grand to discuss the film on Sat., Mar. 13 (see below for details).[1]  --  The film has alread won a special jury award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, a Best Documentary audience award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review, USA.  --  The last words of the trailer are Daniel Ellsberg saying:  "It wasn't that we were on the wrong side.  We were the wrong side."  --  NOTE: It was Henry Kissinger who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America." ...

Brian Turner, the soldier-poet who wrote the award-winning collection of poems Here, Bullet, happened to see "The Hurt Locker" while in Vietnam.  --  He wrote about the experience and about his reflections on the film on Thursday in the New York Times.  --  Turner concluded that it is not only Iraq war veterans but the nation itself that bears the psychological scars of that war:  "The last image of 'The Hurt Locker' expresses a theme I’ve often tried to articulate.  In the film, the main character cannot completely return to America, to the norm of a life back home. In a sense, he’s in Iraq whether he’s physically in a supermarket in the States, or in a bomb suit walking into the hurt locker.  --  That image rings true to me, but I’d take it a step further: I’d say that we, as a nation, now contain this explosive ordnance within us.  Within our national psyche.  We have generations of combat veterans and military family members woven throughout the fabric of our entire culture.  Some of us have to walk down those dusty streets.  We have to approach that which might tear us apart.  We have to try to defuse what is explosive within."[1] ...

The Wall Street Journal spoke glowingly on Thursday of Ayad (or Iyad) Allawi and the possibility that his coalition could do well, calling Allawi a "top candidate for the premiership."[1]  --  The Associated Press classified Allawi as "a moderate Shiite," and said he stood to gain support from Sunni voters as a "non-sectarian" candidate.[2]  --  But back in June 2004, it will be recalled, Allawi was reported personally to have shot and killed six handcuffed and blindfolded insurgents on a visit to a Baghdad police station in order to demonstrate to police that they need not fear to kill the enemy.  --  The New York Times reported on Jun. 8, 2004, that the CIA recruited Allawi in the early 1990s and he that ran an exile organization called Iraqi National Accord that "sent agents into Baghdad . . .  to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the CIA." ...

So far in 2010, President Barack Obama "has mentioned the Iraq war just three times during formal speeches," the Washington Times reported Thursday.[1]  --  "The White House press corps hasn't asked Mr. Obama about the Iraq war in months," Joseph Curl said, the last time being on Dec. 7, 2009, and that question came from a Turkish reporter.  --  "[T]he last time a White House reporter asked about the Iraq war was June 26."  --  The official administration line is that "We have begun to leave Iraq to its own people," as the president put it at the Democratic National Committee meeting on Feb. 6, with U.S. combat troops to be out of Iraq by Sept. 1.  --  One of the reasons reporters aren't asking Obama about Iraq:  "Ten months ago, Mr. Obama effectively handed Mr. Biden the administration’s Iraq portfolio," Helene Cooper and Mark Landler said.  --  But in fact it seems increasingly likely that election-related violence will "throw the country back into the sectarian strife that flared in 2004 and delay the planned American withdrawal," the New York Times reported Wednesday.[2] ...

Currents are shifting in the shoals of the Iran-P5+1 stand-off.  --  "[D]ebate over stronger measures [against Iran] -- from a sanctions-enforcing blockade to military strikes -- is hotting up," Jim Lobe commented on Wednesday in an IPS piece.[1]  --  Promoted by the Israeli government and "its supporters here," the drive for action against Iran has included a demand to "build up U.S. naval forces in the [Persian] Gulf both to demonstrate Washington's resolve and prepare to use them 'to prevent critical imports and exports from' Iran as part of any enhanced unilateral or multilateral sanctions regime, according to an Israeli member of Barak's delegation quoted in this week's Defense News."  --  Cooler heads like Michael O'Hanlon and Bruce Riedel said this week in a Financial Times Op-Ed that "Given Iran's ability to retaliate against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is simply not credible that we would use force in the foreseeable future."  --  But out in the heart of the "homeland" the drums of war are pounding, with people publishing wild, rabid, meretricious pieces like "We must act on Iran," which appeared in Tuesday's *Independent Record* (Helena, MT).[2]  --  Despite the fact that no concrete evidence of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons is known, the Big Lie campaign by U.S. media that we have followed for the past five years on this website has had its effect:  a CNN poll last week showed that 71% of Americans believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons.[3]  --  And "if economic and diplomatic efforts fail, support for military action rises to 59 percent, with only 39 percent opposing military action under those circumstances." ...

On the afternoon of Nov. 11, 2009, Malalai Joya spoke to a packed house in Pierce County, on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University, then went on to an even bigger reception in Seattle.  --  Now she is back in Afghanistan, as we see in a profile/interview published in the Feb. 18-24 number of Paris Match, translated below.[1]  --  Flore Olive reported that Malalai is just as committed, just as uncompromising, and just as harried as ever, denouncing in equal measure Afghan warlords, the Taliban, the Karzai government, and the U.S occupation.  --  "[My] country is occupied.  Obama couldn't care less about peace.  What has he done in one year?  By sending more soldiers, he is only spreading the war and the massacres that have fallen on the Afghan people, especially women; they risk returning the Taliban to power.  His policies are dangerous, worse than Bush's.  It's all a waste of blood and money for nothing.  Even if I have often looked death in the face, what I'm most afraid of for my people is silence, the victory of power over justice.  We must not be abandoned in this fight.  Foreigners have had eight years to make of this country a paradise and they have made it a field of ruins." ...

The Supreme Court that has now been effectively installed by an oligarchical corporatocracy has, in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers (2001) and Rapanos v. United States (2006), reinterpreted the Clean Water Act of 1972 so as to limit its jurisdiction and free many corporations once again to pollute with impunity.  --  The *New York Times* reported Monday in its lead story that recent rulings interpret "discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters" not to apply to "waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems," though ""pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water."[1]  --  This desipte decades of precedent broadly (and sensibly) interpreting the law "to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers," Charles Duhigg and Janet Roberts said.   --  "[F]or EPA and state regulators, the decisions have created widespread uncertainty.  The court did not define which waterways are regulated, and judicial districts have interpreted the court’s decisions differently.  As regulators have struggled to guess how various courts will rule, some EPA lawyers have established unwritten internal guidelines to avoid cases in which proving jurisdiction is too difficult."  --  The development has a direct impact on public health, since "[a]bout 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to EPA reports." ...

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on "a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver" in Poland who "had to stop hating Jews in order to become one."[1]  --  It all began when his wife, a fellow skinhead, "suspecting she had Jewish roots, went to a geneaological institute and discovered Pawel's maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents," Dan Bilefsky said....