Stephen Kinzer

A British soldier guards a BP pipeline in Iran, 1941 - oil produc-
tion and distribution played a major strategic role in the Second
World War. (Daily Telegraph)

How an Oil Company Helped Destroy Democracy in Iran

To frustrated Americans who have begun boycotting BP: Welcome to the club. It's great not to be the only member any more!

Does boycotting BP really make sense? Perhaps not. After all, many BP filling stations are actually owned by local people, not the corporation itself. Besides, when you're filling up at a Shell or ExxonMobil station, it's hard to feel much sense of moral triumph. Nonetheless, I reserve my right to drive by BP stations. I started doing it long before this year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

My decision not to give this company my business came after I learned about its role in another kind of "spill" entirely -- the destruction of Iran's democracy more than half a century ago.

The history of the company we now call BP has, over the last 100 years, traced the arc of transnational capitalism. Its roots lie in the early years of the twentieth century when a wealthy bon vivant named William Knox D'Arcy decided, with encouragement from the British government, to begin looking for oil in Iran. He struck a concession agreement with the dissolute Iranian monarchy, using the proven expedient of bribing the three Iranians negotiating with him.

Under this contract, which he designed, D'Arcy was to own whatever oil he found in Iran and pay the government just 16% of any profits he made -- never allowing any Iranian to review his accounting. After his first strike in 1908, he became sole owner of the entire ocean of oil that lies beneath Iran's soil. No one else was allowed to drill for, refine, extract, or sell "Iranian" oil.

"Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams," Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, wrote later. "Mastery itself was the prize of the venture."

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Stephen Lendman

On June 28, 2009, while he slept, dozens of Honduran soldiers stormed President Manuel Zelaya's residence, arrested him at gunpoint, and exiled him to Costa Rica, in violation of the 1982 Constitution, stating:

"No Honduran may be expatriated nor delivered by the authorities to a foreign state," nor may a democratically elected leader be deposed,"

evidence showing Washington's involvement and support, coordination handled by US Ambassador Hugo Llorens and Thomas Shannon, Jr., current US Ambassador to Brazil, then Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

In advance and thereafter, Washington choreographed the entire process, blamed Zelaya for his illegal removal, opposed his return, backed the coup d'etat regime and sham November 2009 election under martial law, elevating fascist Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo Sosa to the presidency on January 27, 2010, now the Obama administration's man in Honduras, succeeding interim leader, Roberto Micheletti.

Under him and Sosa, Hondurans have endured death squad terror at the hands of the military whose officers from captain on up have been trained for decades at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA), renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISEC), where they're taught the latest ways to kill, main, torture, oppress, exterminate poor and indigenous people, overthrow democratically elected governments, assassinate targeted leaders, suppress popular resistance, and work cooperatively with Washington to solidify fascist rule, intolerant of democratic freedoms or leaders not backing ruling class interests, using deep repression to enforce them.

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Andy Worthington

Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.

No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.

Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.

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Denis Rancourt

Palestine became "the occupied territory" from which Palestinians were
driven out and settlements built for Jewish squatters. Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon are full of refugee camps. Palestinians were driven off their
lands by means of numerous Zionist massacres. [Editor] Photo: A
Palestinian man at a refugee camp in 1949.

Surely the Israeli government would agree that the right of a nation state to exist is a question of international law.

Under international law, no other country has ever demanded or been granted that another nation state be forced to officially recognize the claimant nation’s “right to exist”, under the threat of military reprisal no less.

But since this is an original and unresolved question of international law and since Israel has forcefully put it on the table, it is relevant to examine whether Israel is following established principles of international law, such as the Geneva Conventions for example, or foreign country assassinations and kidnappings, or international waters commando attacks of civilian ships, etc.

These specific questions of international law are not complicated. The laws and international treaties are written in clear language, and Israel’s actions are also clear. Global civil society (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Red Cross, etc.) and all independent international law experts that I have heard or read are unanimous in the answer. See HERE.

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Stephen Lendman

On August 10, 1997, in the New York Times Magazine, David K. Shipler headlined, "Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnam" saying:

Looking back, one of the key war architects admitted "how dangerous it is for political leaders to behave the way we did" about a war that shouldn't have been fought and couldn't be won.

In his 1995 book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," former Defense Secretary McNamara wrote:

"....we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

In 1965, he knew the war was lost and said so, telling Lyndon Johnson: "I don't believe they're ever going to quit. And I don't see....that we have any....plan for victory - militarily or diplomatically," spoken as he began escalating dramatically, knowing the futility and criminality.

Johnson was also uneasy, telling his close friend, Senator Richard Russell, that he faced a Hobson's choice saying: "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," the former being impeachment if he quit, the latter certain defeat that destroyed him. After three heart attacks, he died a sick, broken man, four years after he left office, two days before Richard's Nixon's second inauguration, a man soon to face his own moment of truth, omitting what should have brought him down and his successors.

America's Longest War - As Unwinnable as Vietnam, Reshuffling the Deck Chairs to Delay It

McChrystal's out, Petraeus is in, New York Times writers Alissa Rubin and Dexter Filkins announced the switch June 23, headlining, "Petraeus Is Now Taking Control of a 'Tougher Fight," saying:

He's taking over to execut(e) the strategy (he engineered) with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal....directly responsible for its success or failure, risking the reputation he built in Iraq," not a winning surge, but by buying off Sunni tribal chiefs and key Baathists not to fight, a much tougher strategy in Afghanistan, the traditional graveyard of empires, defeating Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, the Brits and Soviets among others, America likely next, but will Petraeus be around when it happens.

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Sheldon Richman
Freedom Daily

So Gen. Stanley McChrystal is out and Gen. David Petraeus is back at the helm in Afghanistan. I don’t like hackneyed phrases, but if this isn’t rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, what is it?

America’s occupation of Afghanistan has no end in sight. The July 2011 date for the beginning of withdrawal is something that even President Obama doesn’t want to talk about. It is clearer than ever that the date was a crumb thrown to the American people so they wouldn’t grumble when Obama announced the troop buildup last year. As Petraeus told members of Congress this month, “It’s important that July 2011 be seen for what it is, the date when a process begins based on conditions, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits.”

Obama presumably would like to get out — he can’t be thrilled about presiding over America’s longest war — but the cross-currents may leave him no choice but to tread water. The military wants to “win,” whatever that means, while the Right is ready to pounce on Obama as an appeaser of terrorists if he acknowledges the reality of this inglorious war. (Al-Qaeda has moved on.)

We call the operation in Afghanistan a “war,” but in fact U.S. forces are occupying the country in order to suppress any opposition to the corrupt and inept Karzai government that the United States helped put in power and has protected ever since. In the parlance of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, any enemy of President Hamid Karzai is an enemy of the United States, which is ridiculous. Afghans don’t like invaders, be they Britons or Russians or Americans. That they attack occupying forces and the governments those forces support means nothing more than that they want to rid their land of foreign troops. That doesn’t make them anti-American terrorists. It makes them Afghans. Let’s leave their country to them.

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James Petras

WAR CRIMES IN GAZA and the ZIONIST FIFTH COLUMN IN AMERICA
FROM THE PREFACE

"The US Congress and White House are zionized occupied territory."

The Report published by the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, better known by the name of its head, as the “Goldstone Report” was a major breakthrough in three senses. In the first place the Report was the most systematic, detailed study of Israeli violations of international law in its wars against the Palestinian people. Secondly it caught the attention of the broadest sections of world opinion and ignited a firestorm of disapproval of Israel from almost all of the worlds’ leaders.

On the negative side the publication of the Report and the vehement rejection by all of the mainstream American Jewish Organizations, revealed their utterly craven disregard for human rights on the one hand and their absolute power and control over Washington’s policy toward the Middle East on the other. The US Congress voted by a margin of over ten to one to denounce the Report and instead support Israeli war crimes, as did the White House.

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Jonathan Azaziah

A refutation of Shelby Steele’s propaganda piece masquerading as a legitimate editorial.

1. World opinion is to be divided into two categories. The first category is the category of governments, and the second category is the category of citizens. In the framework of the first category, the overwhelming majority of governments have supported the Israeli massacre of the Freedom Flotilla, because the majority of governments are under the influence and/or subversion and/or control of the Zionist lobby. In that same framework, whatever government officials have offered a condemnation of the ‘attack,’ have not specified who exactly they’re condemning, and this, as aforementioned, is the result of the Zionist lobby. Again, in the same framework, the minute amount of government officials that have actually condemned Israel itself, their condemnations ring hollow, for they will not be backed up with action. In the framework of the second category, it is becoming increasingly evident, that populations of the world, Muslim and Jewish, Christian and Hindu, Black and White, Latino and Asian, lower-class and middle class, have lost their patience with the constant tyrannical, genocidal, and quite frankly, insane behavior of the illegal occupational entity known as Israel. The people are tired of forking over their tax dollars to a state that murders, steals, occupies, rapes, tortures, imprisons for no reason, and now, pirates, when their money could go to their failing social and economic crises. The people are tired of another people, just like them, being unjustly treated in a fashion worse than animals, for 62 years. The people are weary of their governments who continue to lend their irrational, unwavering support to this criminal fraud of a nation. The people, finally, seem to understand the severity of the crimes against the Palestinians, and it seems, they finally want an end to it. When world opinion isn’t divided into these two diametrically opposed categories, then that phrase, is simply a generality being used to mislead on behalf of Israel and its cohorts in America and Britain.

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Stephen Lendman

Established in 1999, G20 finance ministers, central bank governors, and, at times, heads of state meet semi-annually to "discuss key issues in the global economy," the initial 1999 meeting in Berlin, hosted by German and Canadian finance ministers.

G20.org calls its itself "the premier forum for our international economic development that promotes open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability," saying it "support(s) growth and development across the globe," or does it?

The reality suggests otherwise about a political power elite gathering to review past achievements, challenges, and prospects for greater exploitation of world markets, resources, and people everywhere. In other words, to support power and privilege over beneficial social change, a consideration not addressed, discussed, or thought about, except with regard to instituting policies leading to the disintegration and elimination of social democracies, replacing them with the worst elements of developing world harshness, tolerating no opposition.

What economist Michael Hudson suggested in his recent article titled, "Europe's Fiscal Dystopia: The 'New Austerity' Road to Financial Serfdom," saying:

Europe is committing fiscal suicide - and will have little trouble finding allies at this weekend's G-20 meetings," attendees "calling for cutbacks in public spending" when economic recovery requires stimulus, job creation, and public investment, not global wars, banker bailouts, or other counterproductive measures.

Hudson called the meeting "a carefully orchestrated financial war against the 'real' economy," initiated in America, Obama having "stacked his White House Deficit Commission....with the same brand of neoliberal ideologues who comprised the notorious 1982 Greenspan Commission on Social Security 'reform,' " a topic this writer addressed earlier in a "maestro of misery" article about a man who wrecked the lives of millions for the rich, now cashing in big late in life, claiming no responsibility for decades of harm, a legacy others won't let him forget.

Now it's going global, why Hudson sees Europe "dying....succumb(ing) to a financial coup d'etat rolling back the past three centuries of Enlightenment social philosophy." In lock step, America is erasing its New Deal and Great Society gains, planning mass impoverishment, human misery, and fascist harshness, the hidden G20 agenda not reported in the mainstream, sticking to its party line propaganda, the usual rubbish top officials preach to conceal their real plans from hell.

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Khalid Amayreh reporting from occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinian children play in the ruins of a house demolished by Israeli
bulldozers in Silwan in east Jerusalem. (UPI)

The recent decision by the Israeli government to banish four Palestinian lawmakers from Jerusalem to areas in the West Bank run by the Palestinian Authority (PA) is another repugnant expression of the Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing in the city, holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

This undeclared but clear policy aims to minimize as much as possible the city's non-Jewish population so that Israel can realize its routinely-invoked mantra of Jerusalem being "Israel's eternal and undivided capital."

The four Arab lawmakers, Muhammad Abu Tir, Ahmed Atwan, Mohammed Totah and Khalid Abu Arafeh, didn't violate any laws, committed no crimes and certainly did nothing to warrant extirpation from their natural homeland, the city of their birth.

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Gilad Atzmon

Discussion with Gilad Atzmon by Miriam Cotton

Introduction by Miriam Cotton

Gilad Atzmon is a world renowned saxophonist and musician with a deep political passion for humanist issues and concern for the fate of the Palestinian people. He has written extensively about the issue and been published widely. As a self-exiled, former Jewish Israeli and IDF soldier, Atzmon’s perspective within the raging public discourse on Palestine is relatively unique. His views are bitterly opposed by some among anti-Zionist Jewish groups, who accuse him of anti-Semitism and of being a ‘self-hater’.

Atzmon fiercely resists the charge of anti-Semitism and insists that he is concerned with a proper and thorough examination of the ideology of what it is to be Jewish – in particular about how the notion of the Jews as ‘a chosen people’ has led, as he sees it, inexorably to the rise of Zionism and its present disproportionate influence on world affairs.

Atzmon also takes issue with the Western Left which he believes has failed either to recognize the true extent of Zionist influence (he singles Noam Chomsky out for criticism) and of not understanding how western Marxist/socialist ideologies are incompatible with Islamic societies and therefore can be of no use to them. These and other issues are discussed with him below. There are many things in what Atzmon says below that beg further question and comment but hopefully the exchange has served to illustrate his interpretation of the Palestinian situation and to provide an insight on a less frequently aired or understood perspective. Miriam Cotton: MediaBite (Ireland)

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Alisa Roth & Hugh Eakin
The New York Review of Books

An Iraqi agricultural engineer holding a photograph of his now blind sister,
Damascus, Syria, 2008. They fled Iraq after he was stopped at a roadblock in
Baghdad, tortured by a militia group, and left for dead while on his way to a
hospital to obtain medicine that might have helped save her eyesight. Both
unemployed, they live in poverty without hope of returning to Baghdad.
Gabriela Bulisova

Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East
by Deborah Amos
Public Affairs, 230 pp., $25.95

1
Among the many consequences of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the plight of millions of Iraqi refugees is seldom mentioned. The stories of such people as Burhan Abdulnour, whom we met in Sweden in 2008, have hardly been told. Abdulnour, a doctor, was director of a Baghdad hospital for chest diseases. His wife, Sahar, also a physician, was teaching physiology at Baghdad University’s medical school. They lived in al-Riyadh, a mixed neighborhood in central Baghdad, with their three children. “We had jobs, we had homes, we had cars, we had normal lives,” Abdulnour recalled. They were members of Iraq’s Christian minority. Although life under the Baathist dictatorship had been tolerable for them, they assumed that the arrival of the Americans would bring new freedoms and much-needed economic development. “We were expecting to have new devices, new equipment for the labs, X-rays, operations, everything,” Abdulnour said.

The new technology never arrived. Instead, Iraq descended into horrific violence; Christians were among those targeted by armed gangs and Islamic militias. By 2006, there were frequent attacks near their house. That spring, their twelve-year-old son was home alone when a car bomb exploded so close that it broke the windows. Then came the death threats. “My wife was threatened in her medical school—they were threatened, the dean of the college, the head of the department also. One of her colleagues was killed in his own clinic,” Abdulnour said. That August, he moved his wife and children to Jordan. He returned to his job in Baghdad, where he had only a few months left until he could claim his pension. But before he could finish, armed men came looking for him. He fled too. Today, Abdulnour and his family have settled in Sweden; their lives in Iraq are over.

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Stephen Lendman

Each year, PCHR publishes its annual report on Occupied Palestine, this year's a detailed 250 page review of the past year, including the first days of Israel's war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, "the major issue in the record of human rights and international humanitarian law violations in the Occupied Palestinian Terrority (OPT) in 2009," the bloodiest since the 1948 Nakba that stole a nation from its people.

Today, 1.5 million Gazans struggle to rebuild their lives, "in spite of sustaining permanent disabilities, losing loved ones or becoming homeless" after war under siege - collective punishment in violation of international law, and fundamental human rights, including free movement of persons and goods, proper shelter, adequate health care and education, and the right to rebuild homes and other structures destroyed by the war's onslaught.

Israel's settlement expansion, Separation Wall, and control matrix exacerbates West Bank conditions, "turning Palestinian communities into (isolated) Bantustans." In addition, efforts continue to consolidate and illegally annex East Jerusalem by dispossessing its residents, en route to making the entire city exclusively Jewish, unheard of in the modern era, especially by a so-called civilized state, in fact, barbarian and brutish while touting its democratic credentials and victimhood, more evidence of a scoundrel caught red-handed.

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Charles Glass

When you’re losing bad on Afghanistan’s plains
And the critics dare to question your gains
Just roll to your geology and use your brains
And go to your gold like I told yer
~ With apologies to Rudyard Kipling

Now that the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey have uncovered $1 trillion worth of stones in Afghanistan, the big question is: why didn’t the Afghan geologists burn the old Soviet maps the US used to go prospecting? If they had, Afghanistan could stay as it was. Now, it stands to be Afghanistan with Saudi Arabia thrown in. A gruesome thought. There is always the hope that the Pentagon’s experts are exaggerating. It wouldn’t be the first time the military (encouraged by eager politicians) played loose with facts to rekindle love in a war that the public no longer wanted to pay for.

Blame the Afghan geologists, who found mineral survey maps the Soviets left behind in 1989. (The Russians took the tanks, the missiles, the vodka and the troops. Why didn’t they take the maps?) Instead of destroying the diabolic documents, the geologists hid them from the warlords and Taliban throughout the 1990s. When the US invaded in 2001, they handed them over to the Americans. The rest, as they say, is mystery.

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Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook explains why Israel’s recent “easing” of the siege of Gaza – hailed by Israeli agent of influence and former British Prime Minister Anthony Blair as a sensible path to peace – is a ruse that will change virtually nothing for the ordinary people of Gaza.

As Israel this week declared the “easing” of the four-year blockade of Gaza, an official explained the new guiding principle: “Civilian goods for civilian people.” The severe and apparently arbitrary restrictions on foodstuffs entering the enclave – coriander bad, cinnamon good – will finally end, we are told. Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants will have all the coriander they want.

This “adjustment”, as the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, termed it, is aimed solely at damage limitation. With Israel responsible for killing nine civilians aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla three weeks ago, the world has finally begun to wonder what purpose the siege serves. Did those nine really need to die to stop coriander, chocolate and children’s toys from reaching Gaza? And, as Israel awaits other flotillas, will more need to be executed to enforce the policy?

Faced with this unwelcome scrutiny, Israel – as well as the United States and the European states that have been complicit in the siege – desperately wants to deflect attention away from demands for the blockade to be lifted entirely. Instead it prefers to argue that the more liberal blockade for Gaza will distinguish effectively between a necessary “security” measures and an unfair “civilian” blockade. Israel has cast itself as the surgeon who, faced with Siamese twins, is mastering the miraculous operation needed to decouple them.

The result, Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, would be a “tightening of the security blockade because we have taken away Hamas’s ability to blame Israel for harming the civilian population”. Listen to Israeli officials and it sounds as if thousands of “civilian” items are ready to pour into Gaza. No Qassam rockets for Hamas but soon, if we are to believe them, Gaza’s shops will be as well-stocked as your average Wal-Mart. -Be sure, it won’t happen.

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Stephen Lendman

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

"Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence"

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article "The Assassinations of the 1960s as 'Deep Events,' " Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

"The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other."

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated - what Scott called "some continuing and hostile force within our society..."

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Matthew Nasuti

A wounded U.S. soldier receives first aid inside a bunker in Bargematal,
Afghanistan, on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. (Photo: Oleg Popov / Reuters)

[Part 1] "American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen face the worst of two worlds. First, they continue to be supplied with cheap and substandard equipment (which has become a Pentagon tradition), while military contractors and war profiteers linked to Administration officials become rich. Second, when they are injured, their courage and actions are not recognized. Their injuries are many times not treated or acknowledged, and they are abandoned by the country they risked everything to protect. It is a shameful spectacle."

In Afghanistan, the light at the end of the tunnel is an exploding Taliban IED. The Pentagon has been given nine years to win its war and it has failed to do so. Last week the American public was given a status report by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who told Time Magazine that he is “pretty confident” that in six months the U.S. military will have made “sufficient progress” in the war.

This vague and hardly inspiring characterization (in which the Secretary commits to nothing) sets the stage for December 2010, at which time the military will cherry-pick positive news, as it minimalizes the bad news. The resulting concoction will be trumpeted as “progress.”

In order to continue to prosecute its lackluster war efforts and to deflect criticism regarding the competence of the military’s general officer corps, the Pentagon long ago realized that casualty rates had to be kept low. As they did not remain low, the statistics were adjusted. The procedure is simple. The Pentagon does not count 95% of the injured soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen as casualties. “Fudging the numbers” was adopted as the solution. All that matters is that Congress continues to fund the Pentagon’s wars.

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William Dalrymple

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government.

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David Ray Griffin

I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodworth for considerable help with this essay.

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be "Obama's Vietnam."1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the "lessons of Vietnam"? The US government learned one: If you're going to fight unpopular wars, don't have a draft hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

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Anne McClintock

In the Gulf, the forever spill has become the forever war. A calamity of untold magnitude is unfolding and, alongside it, a strange militarization has emerged, as the language for managing the crisis becomes the language of war.

War-talk is firing from the mouths of local officials, TV pundits, the Coast Guard and journalists. Campaigning frantically to protect Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal urges the TV cameras:

“We need to see that this is a war….a war to save Louisiana…a war to protect our way of life.”

Billy Nungesser, indefatigable President of the Plaquemines Parish, implores anyone who will listen:

“We will fight this war….We will persevere to win this war.”

For Ragin Cajun, Democratic strategist, James Carville:

“This is literally a war... this is an invasion…We need to hear someone say ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches….”

Retired Gen. Russell Honore, who oversaw the Katrina debacle, insists:

“We need to act like this is World War 3. Treat this like it’s an invasion...equal to what we decided about terrorists. We’ve got to find the oil and kill it.”

Find the oil and kill it? This is truly strange talk, this talk of war and killing oil. Even President Obama tried to fire up the nation by invoking 9/11, couching the spill as an invasion, a siege, an attack by terrorists. The militarization of the disaster has become the invisible norm, so much so that it is hard to see how misplaced and dangerous the analogy to war actually is.

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