Obama's War on Yemen

Stephen Lendman

"What's at stake? At most, Yemen has four billion proved barrels of oil reserves and modest amounts of natural gas, hardly a reason for war. More important is its strategic location near the Horn of Africa on Saudi Arabia's southern border, the Red Sea, its Bab el- Mandeb strait (a key chokepoint separating Yemen from Eritrea through which three million barrels of oil pass daily), and the Gulf of Aden connection to the Indian Ocean.

Besides waging direct or proxy wars on multiple fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Sudan, Eastern Congo, elsewhere in Africa, and likely to erupt almost anywhere at any time, Yemen is now a new front in America's "war on terror" under a president, who as a candidate, promised diplomacy, not conflict, if elected.


Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System

Chris Floyd


The corpses of 11 dignitaries of the Shah's regime lie
on the floor of a Tehran morgue in April 1979. Among
them are Khalatbari, former Minister of Foreign Affairs
and General Hassan Pakhravan, first chief of the Savak,
the brutal and much-despised political police. Abbas,
Magnum (AdBusters)

Let me say -- or rather, reiterate -- up front that it is my personal view that the form of vigorous activism known as non-violence is the only way, or the best way, that we can hope to even begin to address the inherent and intractable conflicts of human existence in a genuinely effective profound, sustainable and humane manner. That is the ideal I strive toward.

Of course, I also recognize that being what I am -- a white man of Christian heritage living safely and comfortably under the penumbra of empire -- it is easy for me to espouse this ideal. No drone fired in the distant black sky is going to kill my children tonight as they sleep warmly in their beds. No raiding party of assassins is going to tear down the door of my parents' house tonight and shoot them at the dinner table. No one with a grudge against me -- or simply in need of quick cash -- is going to sell me into the captivity of a worldwide gulag. I'm not going to be caught in the crossfire of marauding mercenaries on my way to work. I'm not going to wake tomorrow in a refugee camp, my home and livelihood abandoned in the wake of a ravaging "counterterrorism" operation. No foreign soldier is going to shoot me, or abuse me, or humiliate me, or simply refuse to let me pass down the street of my own city. I'm not going to be stopped, "profiled," or regarded with suspicion or hatred simply because of my skin color or the cultural or religious etymology of my name.

If I lived under the bootheel of such forces, I don't how I would react, how firmly I could hold to my ideal. I don't know if I would have the strength of mind and will, or the fortitude and wisdom it would take to resist our primal pull to violence -- especially if I grew up in a culture that exalted certain forms of violence as cardinal virtues. (Of course, as an American, I did grow up in such a culture -- and so has almost every other human being in history. To take the non-violent way is to appear -- and yes, often feel -- unnatural, deracinated, alien.)

Nonetheless, despite all these caveats and complexities, the ideal abides. I decry, denounce and mourn for the use of violence. Each act of violence -- however understandable it might be in context -- is a vast, ruinous defeat for our common humanity.


Carpathian Mount Athos

Evgeni Kolyada

On October 25, the 2nd European Congress of the Carpathian Rusyns which convened in Mukachevo, Transcarpathia, adopted the resolution proclaiming the restoration of the Rusyn nationhood within Ukraine. The development may have come as a surprise to many, but for the Rusyns it was certainly long-awaited.

In the USSR, Rusyns were regarded as an ethnic subgroup of the Ukrainian nation. The strategy adopted by the independent post-Soviet Ukraine which has by now existed for almost two decades is to suppress everything that does not fit with its notion of political expediency. This explains the ire drawn by the Mukachevo resolution in the official Kyiv.

Already in 1991, 78% of the population of the Transcarpathian oblast had voted for the region's autonomy. In 2007 the local parliament passed the legislation which restored the Rusyn nationality. The main objective set by Rusyns is to be recognized as a distinct Slavic people with a language of their own rather than as a branch of the Ukrainian nation speaking a dialect of the Ukrainian. The resolution on the restoration of the Rusyn nationhood is a milestone in the history of the ethnic minority struggling over the recognition of its status (which they want to be the same as that of Rusyns in European countries) with the Ukrainian administration. However the Ukrainian authorities treat the resurging small nation as a bunch of separatists, thus violating the rights to which they should be entitled as citizens.

The number of Rusyns in Ukraine is a contentious issue. Priest Dmitro Sydor who presides over the parliament (Soim) of the Carpathian Rusyns estimates the Rusyn community in Ukraine at 800,000, while Ukraine's State Committee on Nationalities and Religions says that it numbers at most 10,000. The figure presented by the US-based Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center is about 650,000.


The Big Black Hole in the Dollar’s Future

F. William Engdahl

For months the US Government has insisted that the worst of the “recession” is nearing an end and that “green shoots” of recovery are at hand. The reality is opposite. The financial crisis that began in August 2007 in the small “sub-prime” or high-risk segment of the $20 trillion mortgage debt market is now spreading, lawfully, to the “prime” or high-quality segment. The economy of the world’s sole Superpower is coming to resemble more than of the Roman Empire in the fourth Century as it collapsed into anarchy, debt and chaos.

Nations of the world are taking steps to move away from dollar dependency. China, Russia, Brazil, Kazakhstan are calling for a new reserve currency. China is quietly making bilateral currency swap agreements with Asian trade partners as well as Latin American and former Soviet Union countries. The major trade currency of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area will not likely be the dollar. In Latin America the ALBA countries are switching to sucre as a trade currency instead of dollar starting from January 2010. MERCOSUR is going to refuse dollar in foreign trade in 2011. The worst is yet to come for the world reserve currency.


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