Henry Makow
Henry Makow's Blog

Mr. Walter Rothschild riding on one of his tortoises...

Jeff Rense's website and radio program represent an oasis of truth for countless people around the world who can still think for themselves. That's why it was both puzzling and painful to witness a vituperative attack on Jeff by his erstwhile friend and ally Mark Glenn. Both these men are courageous and outspoken opponents of Zionist World Government. What triggered Glenn's attack?

Among the thousands of articles Jeff has posted since last summer were two which Mark felt were anti Islam. Mark felt they played into the hands of Zionists who are trying to pit Christians against Muslims and asked Jeff to remove them. Jeff refused. He will not permit anyone to censor his news content or tell him how to run his site. Mark retaliated by launching a vitriolic attack on Jeff.

Ironically, both imitated the hated Zionists by playing the "hate card." Mark accused Jeff of inciting hatred against Muslims. Jeff accused Mark of inciting Muslim terror against him personally. Jeff threatened to call the FBI and Homeland Security on Mark. Mark said Jeff was threatening Mark's wife and nine children.

When I suggested to Jeff that Homeland Security is the antithesis of everything he represents, he agreed. He was just trying to get Mark to understand how seriously he took Mark's readers' vitriol.

Jeff argued that these two articles were exceptions among thousands that are pro-Muslim or expose the Zionist NWO threat.

One was a ridiculous Zionist propaganda piece that he had meant to label as such. He expected his readers to recognize it.

Mark Glenn certainly didn't nor did he accept Jeff's explanation. It was called "Demoting Islam's Religious Status," by Martel Sobiesky and argued that Islam isn't a religion.

The other article by Devvy Kidd had the inflammatory title, "Islam a Cancer Oozing Across America" and described the excesses of radical Islam. Jeff felt Devvy was a respected contributor and had a right to examine these excesses. Jeff points to his Disclaimer at the bottom of every article. Posting does not necessarily mean his endorsement.

Mark basically felt that Jeff should present a consistent party line. Jeff felt that good journalism means presenting a range of views. He consistently posted links to Mark's own articles. By Mark's own estimation, Jeff was responsible for 10-15,000 readers each time. In any case, we had two people who should have been cooperating, draining each others' batteries.

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Stephen Lendman

Besides mass slaughter and destruction, wars create refugees, millions at times, uprooted, displaced and homeless, on their own somehow to survive. Israel's "War of Independence" was no different, dispossessing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, a story Western media reports don't explain or even mention.

In his book, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story," Ramzy Baroud recounted his father Mohammed's story. Born in 1938 in Beit Daras village, he saw it conquered, leveled and erased, except from the memory he took to his grave. A captive in his own land, he lived years as a Gaza Nuseirat camp refugee, raising his family including son Ramzy, dreaming always of going home, struggling as a freedom fighter to end decades of conflict, violence, occupation, and oppression, what Edward Said called "a slow death," shattered hopes, and inexorable toll of its incalculable horror to so many.

Spanning over seven decades of history and survivor recollections, it tells a powerful firsthand story of those who lived it, not the airbrushed Western version of the new Israeli state, born in blood, mass slaughter, destruction, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of survivors, to this day oppressed, harassed, intimidated, humiliated, attacked and arrested for being Muslims, not Jews on their own land, in their own country, illegally occupied for decades.

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Flora Nicoletta
uruknet.info

Emad Marzuq, 2006 - Photo by Caritas-Gaza

"One night Emad was walking in the neighborhood of Shejayia in Gaza City. While he was speaking on his cell phone a missile was fired at him. His brothers explained me that inside such kind of missile there are some sort of turning knives which cut everything."

"In our Qur'an it is written that everyone of us has two angels on his shoulders. On the right, angel Atid registers all our good actions. On the left, angel Raqib registers all our sins and bad actions. On Judgment Day, angel Esrafil will ask us to stand up in front of God and the books will be read.

We the Palestinian people keep a book like the two angels for all the countries and all the men. We will never close the books till the day will come for their Judgment. They will have to respond to all the crimes and atrocities committed against our nation, since more than a century." ~ Mohammad, Gaza.

When, in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the then Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan declared it would be an enlighted occupation. And, indeed, since 33 years now the occupied experience day in, day out the enlighted occupation.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Many, many years ago, I noted in the Moscow Times that shortly after the 2003 invasion, the United States had begun hiring some of Saddam's old torturers as the invaders sought to quell the then-nascent "insurgency" -- i.e., the opposition to foreign occupation that when carried out by white men, such as the French during World War II, goes by the more ringing name of "resistance." Here's part of that report, from August 29, 2003:

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" – aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

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Stephen Lendman

An earlier article, titled "UN Peacekeeping Paramilitarism" explained that although Blue Helmets are supposed to restore order, maintain peace and security, and help people transition to stability, they usually create more conflict than resolution as imperial enforcers, committing human rights abuses against vulnerable people, nearly always unpunished.

The article can be accessed through THIS link.

Wherever they're deployed, it's the same. In Haiti, for example, where for the first time ever, an illegal MINUSTAH mission enforced coup d'état authority against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, instead of staying out or backing his right to return.

It's no better elsewhere. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, where MONUC (renamed MONUSCO in July 2010) never brought peace and stability, and may be involved in reports of mass rapes and other atrocities. It wouldn't be the first time there or elsewhere.

In December 2004, the London Times reported the following about DR Congo:

● UN staffers committed 150 or more sex crimes, including pornographic videos and photos, "now on sale in Congo;"
● two Russian pilots enlisted girls for sex in exchange for jars of mayonnaise;
● UN peacekeepers in Kisangani, on the Congo River, impregnated 141 Congolese women and girls; others were accused of rape;
● Congo's Minister of Defense, Major General Jean Pierre Ondekane, told a top UN official that all peacekeepers in Kisangani would be remembered "for running after little girls," not doing their job;
● at least two UN officials, a Ukrainian and Canadian, were forced out of DR Congo for impregnating local women;
● many other abuses involved sexual abuse and exploitation, involving sex trafficking and rape; and
● then UN Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told the Times: "The fact that these things happen is a blot on us. It's awful. What is important is to get to the bottom of it and fight it and make sure that people who do that pay for what they have done."

Unfortunately sexual abuse, rape, and sex trafficking are more commonplace than occasional, wherever Blue Helmets are deployed.

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Sampath Perera
WSWS

"With much fanfare, the Obama administration has pledged several hundreds of millions of dollars in flood aid to Pakistan."

Seven of the 21 million Pakistanis affected by this summer’s floods are still without shelter, the United Nation’s Pakistan Office reported this week. And an estimated 14 million continue to need urgent humanitarian assistance.

These figures are an indictment of the Pakistan ruling elite’s incompetently organized and poorly funded flood relief effort.

They also are an indictment of the imperialist powers. Under conditions where Pakistan has faced what the UN has repeatedly described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in decades, the agency has repeatedly had to plead for the “international community” to come to assist Pakistan.

The western-dominated IMF and World Bank have tied flood aid to their demand for Pakistan to implement market reforms. Washington, meanwhile, has intensified its pressure on Pakistan to expand its counter-insurgency war against Taliban-aligned groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistan’s floods began with heavy rains in the country’s north-east in late July and continued as the water travelled the length of the Indus Valley over the next two months. More people were displaced in Sindh, the country’s southern-most province, than anywhere else, although authorities had weeks of warning about the impending floods. The vast majority of those now lacking shelter are from Sindh.

According to the Government of Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority the floods killed 1,961 people. But these figures could still rise sharply due to the spread of disease in relief camps, inadequate food aid, and the disruption of the country’s food supply.

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Stephen Lendman

Wallerstein is a Yale University Senior Research Scholar, former President of the International Sociological Associatiion (1994 - 1998), and chair of the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the the Social Sciences (1993 - 1995). His writing focuses on three domains of world systems analysis, the historical development of the modern world system, the structures of knowledge, and the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world economy.

His many books include "The Capitalist World Economy," "After Liberalism," "The End of the World As We Know It," and "The Decline of American Power," in which he wrote:

"America has been a fading global power since the 1970s, and the US response to the (9/11) terrorist attacks has accelerated this decline....the economic, political and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming US decline."

Chalmers Johnson shares that view, notably in his books, "Sorrows of Empire" and "Nemesis," saying America is plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy," combined with growing authoritarianism and loss of personal freedom.

Hence, the title "Nemesis," the goddess of vengeance and punisher of hubris and arrogance in Greek mythology. She's here among us, says Johnson, unseen and patiently stalking our way of life, awaiting her chosen moment to make her presence known. Johnson compares her to Wagner's Brunnhilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen, saying unlike Nemesis, she collects heroes, not fools and hypocrites.

They both, however, announce themselves the same way, saying "Only the doomed see me," even though Nemesis' presence will have a profound real world effect.

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Marc J. Sirois
lobelog

"Here, then, is the real reason why America and Israel fret over the likes of Ahmadinejad: their policy has always been to divide and control (Arab vs. Persian, Sunni vs. Shia, oil producer vs. consumer, monarchist vs. republican, etc.) and anyone who even speaks about uniting these elements – regardless of how unsuccessful he is likely to be – threatens to expose the glaring weakness at the heart of their position."

The run-up to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon called forth a barrage of comment from neoconservative circles. Unlike the savvy campaign for war in Iraq, however, they now tend to make straightforward claims that are self-evidently at odds with reality. In other words, they’re not even telling very good lies any more.

A case in point was Iraq War propagandist Judith Miller’s Fox News article, whose central complaint seems to be that Ahmadinejad’s trip came at the behest of a single party, the Shia party/militia Hezbollah, rather than in response to an official invitation from the Lebanese government; “Who Invited You?” her headline indignantly blared.

Two problems undermined this approach. The first was that then-Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh quite publicly relayed just such an invitation to Ahmadinejad from his Lebanese counterpart, Michel Sleiman, in July 2008. The other was that Sleiman travelled to the Islamic Republic in November of that same year, making a reciprocal visit by Ahmadinejad what should have been a foregone conclusion.

That likelihood was placed in considerable doubt by the U.S. government’s having presumed the right to draw up Lebanon’s diplomatic schedule. While Miller rightly reported that Washington viewed the visit as “provocative,” she neglected to mention that heavy American pressure was applied on Beirut to cancel the visit. The U.S. demand was made in the name of Lebanese sovereignty (yes, really), which is rather ironic coming from a country that has supplied the tools for Israel’s occupation and violation of Lebanese territory, airspace and maritime boundaries for decades.

Undaunted by the untruths at the core of her position, Miller proceeds to expand on it.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." ~ Gore Vidal [*]

President Barack Obama began his longest campaign swing of the 2010 elections Wednesday, a four-day tour of the West Coast and Nevada to urge a vote for beleaguered Democratic Party candidates. At each stop, he warned that the outcome of the November 2 congressional election would set the direction of the country “for the next 20 years,” making dire predictions of the right-wing policies that a Republican-controlled Congress would carry out.

While his pseudo-populist rhetoric against Wall Street won applause at large rallies in Oregon and Washington, packed with college students, there is little practical difference between the policies the Obama administration is already implementing and the measures the Republicans would carry out if they return to power.

Obama suggested that the Republicans would “cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires,” “cut rules for special interests, including polluters” and “cut middle-class families loose to fend for themselves.” These charges would be a fair summary of the domestic policies of his own administration.

Continuing the bailout of Wall Street that was begun under Bush, the Obama administration has carried the largest handout of public funds to the wealthy in American history. This was followed up by the enactment last summer of a financial system “reform” bill so toothless that it punishes no one for the greatest outbreak of swindling in history.

The White House assiduously protected oil giant BP from the repercussions of the greatest environmental disaster in US history and last week lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

As for leaving ordinary families “to fend for themselves,” the Obama administration has imposed the burden of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression on working class families, rejecting any serious action as mass unemployment, mass poverty and mass foreclosures have become permanent features of American life.

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Sam Pizzigati
AlterNet

"1,000 billionaires worldwide, but average income is $10,000."

Who owns, right now, the wealth of the world? Until just over a week ago, we really didn’t have much in the way of specifics for an answer.

The United Nations University in Helsinki, in 2006, did try to tally household assets for the entire world. But that UN University World Institute for Development Economics Research report didn’t cover data from any year beyond 2000.

Now two of the scholars behind that 2006 report, Anthony Shorrocks and Jim Davies, have joined with the Credit Suisse Research Institute in Zurich to produce an even more ambitious global wealth tally, current all the way into 2010.

This new body of research, the first Global Wealth Report the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has published, crunches the data for over 200 countries worldwide. The data cover the wealth holdings of the world’s rich -- and everybody else.

That makes this effort something of a statistical landmark. Other global banks have, over recent years, tried to total the wealth of the world’s wealthy. The new Credit Suisse research has targeted “the entire wealth spectrum,” from the super rich “at the top of the wealth pyramid to individuals at the bottom.”

So what does all this targeting have to tell us? Those inclined to see the sunny side will certainly try to give the new Credit Suisse numbers a positive gloss. The Credit Suisse figures show that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000.

The world’s 4.4 billion adults, notes the new Credit Suisse research, now hold $194.5 trillion in wealth. That’s enough, if shared evenly across the globe, to guarantee every adult in the world a $43,800 net worth.

But the world’s wealth, of course, does not stand evenly divided, and the new Credit Suisse study, to its credit, neatly breaks down the arithmetic of our staggering global unevenness.

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Lawrence Davidson
Redress

Lawrence Davidson unpicks the subtext behind the current emphasis by Zionists on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which he says is aimed primarily “at undermining the growing boycott movement that seeks to isolate Israel and call into serious question the legitimacy of a state designed exclusively for one ethnic or religious group”.

“...it is the practice of Zionism, and not lack of recognition of its alleged Jewishness, that is causing Israel’s legitimacy crisis. Demanding that the Palestinians, or indeed the whole world, call Israel the Jewish state cannot mask its real nature.”

Michael Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This means he stands in a line of foreign diplomats who are often quite out of the ordinary. For one thing, they may well be ex-Americans.

Oren (né Bornstein) was born in upstate New York and grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. He switched countries in 1979. For another, Israeli ambassadors do not hesitate to engage in public debates aimed at swaying American public opinion. Actually, this is very un-diplomatic behavior and you don’t see the ambassadors from China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay or Liechtenstein, ad finem, doing that sort of thing. Yet, Oren has done this several times by sending op-eds to the New York Times. On 13 October he did so again with one entitled, "An end to Israel’s invisibility".

It is an odd title, for if there is one thing Israel is not, it is invisible. But the ambassador is arguing from a peculiar point of view. Essentially, he claims that the Palestinians have yet to officially acknowledge that Israel is a "Jewish state". For Oren, it is the Jewish aspect of Israel that remains "invisible". As odd as this sounds, the ambassador’s complaint echos a current theme across the political spectrum in Israel. At the same time that he put out his op-ed, Ari Shavit, the centre-right contributor to Ha’aretz, published a piece that made a similar argument but extended the failure of recognition accusation to Europe and beyond. It appeared on 14 October and is entitled “The core of the conflict". All of this might appear as something of a mystery.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Members of the National Trade Union Federation of Pakistan
demonstrate in Karachi against U.S. drones on Jan. 23, 2010

If ever I am tempted by the siren songs of my tribal past as a deep-fried, yellow-dawg Democrat, and begin to feel any faint, atavistic stirrings of sympathy for the old gang, I simply think of things like the scenario below, sketched last week by Johann Hari, and those wispy ghosts of partisanship past go howling back to the depths:

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named "Predators", or "Reapers" – after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

...[This] is in fact an accurate description of life in much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone – 14 times the number killed in the 7/7 attacks in London. The floods were seen as an opportunity to increase the attacks, and last month saw the largest number of robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 per cent.

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Stephen Lendman

A detention in occupied Palestine (Credit: AFP)

Defence for Children International (DCI) Palestine Section (DCI/Palestine) "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

Two earlier articles addressed their work, accessed though the following links, here and here.

Both covered Israel's systematic, institutionalized use of torture of Palestinian children as brutally as against adults. DCI/Palestine's latest September Bulletin adds more, saying:

"For the first time....three (documented) cases of children reporting being given electric shocks by Israeli interrogators (occurred) in Ari'el Settlement."

Each was accused of stone throwing. Electric shocking extracted confessions although the boys maintain their innocence.

DCI and PACTI (the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel) demanded Israel investigate reports that a Gush Etzion settlement interrogator

"attached car battery jump leads to the genitals of a 14-year old boy in order to obtain a confession to stone throwing."

The August 5 incident involved four boys walking near a road used by settlers when an Israeli jeep approached. "Just for fun," one boy waved. The jeep turned, was joined by others, and chased the boys. They were seized, blindfolded, painfully shackled, detained, and taken to the Zufin settlement, then to the Ari'el settlement where one boy, Raed, was interrogated.

Though innocent, "Threat of electrocution" made him confess to stone throwing, after which his head was slammed against a cupboard. He was also punched in the stomach, and a second interrogator shocked him with a handheld device, making him dizzy and shiver. He then signed a confession in Hebrew he couldn't understand, was transferred to Salem Interrogation and Detention Center, after which he was taken to Megiddo Prison, in violation of Fourth Geneva's Article 76, pertaining to the rights assured protected persons detained under occupation.

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Stephen Lendman

"[Tea-Party activists] believe America is going "socialist," when, in fact, it's swung sharpley to the right, Obama going Bush one better, yet disguising it as populism, or a variant thereof."

Tea Party.org calls itself "a grassroots movement (for making Americans aware of) any issue that challenges the security, sovereignty, or domestic tranquility of our beloved nation, the United States of America. From our founding, the Tea Party is the voice of the true owners of the United States, WE THE PEOPLE."

More below about these PEOPLE, and their deep-pocketed ability to manipulate minds effectively with considerable right wing media support.

Another web site headlines "Tea Party Patriots, Official Home of the American Tea Party Movement, A community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!"

Its mission statement aims at "excessive government spending and taxation," stressing "three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets," largely veiled terms to mean whatever its backers endorse, including incorrectly connecting tea to America's revolution.

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Peter Symonds
WSWS

In the lead-up to next month’s NATO summit in Lisbon, the Obama administration and its allies, confronting widespread anti-war sentiment at home, are attempting to dupe the public by claiming that the US/NATO combat role in Afghanistan will end by 2014, with troop withdrawals to begin next year. Behind closed doors, however, the talk is not of an end to the war, but rather of an open-ended, neo-colonial occupation.

In opening a debate on the Afghan war in the Australian parliament on Tuesday, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard spilled the beans. After noting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai expected to assume full responsibility for his country’s security by the end of 2014, Gillard bluntly spelt out that the “transition process” would not mean the end to the Australian military presence in Afghanistan.

“Let me be clear,” Gillard said, “this [transition process] refers to the Afghan government taking lead responsibility for security. The international community will remain engaged in Afghanistan beyond 2014. And Australia will remain engaged. There will still be a role for training and other defence cooperation. The civilian-led aid and development effort will continue... We expect this support, training and development task to continue in some form through this decade at least.”

While ministers and officials in the US and other countries have spoken vaguely about a continuing military role in Afghanistan after 2014, Gillard is the first leader to declare that the US-led military occupation will continue for another decade—at least. Her repeated references to the “new international strategy” highlight the fact that this is the Obama administration’s plan. And if Australia, with its current, modest troop numbers of 1,550, intends to remain for another 10 years, then the US and its closest allies are preparing for a large military presence in Afghanistan into the indefinite future.

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