Stephen Lendman

[Part II] Wikipedia says US presidential doctrines state "key goals, attitudes, or stances for United States foreign affairs." Except for James Monroe in 1823 asserting a declaration of regional dominance, later ones reflected Cold War and imperial politics since Harry Truman.

On March 29, eight New York Times contributors asked "Is There an Obama Doctrine," preceded by an introduction saying his previous day America's role in Libya speech asserted unilateral authority to intervene abroad "when our interests and values are at stake," an illegal position under international and constitutional law, unmentioned in the debate.

On April 13, Times writer Peter Baker headlined, "Obama Puts His Own Mark on Foreign Policy Issues," saying:

"If there is an Obama doctrine emerging, it is one much more realpolitik than his predecessor's, focused on relations with traditional great powers and relegating issues like human rights and democracy to second-tier concerns."

In fact, no US president in recent memory gave a damn about either or anything humanitarian.

Unmentioned was Obama's belligerent lawlessness, waging four imperial wars and numerous proxy ones, spending record amounts on militarism while homeland needs go begging. In fact, former White House chief of staff (now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel calls it being "cold-blooded about the self-interests of your nation," no matter the death, destruction, and misery toll taken to achieve them.

They, not major media boilerplate, define his doctrine, an out-of-control agenda for American dominance, using missiles, bombs, ground troops, and assassination squads to indiscriminately slaughter civilians, including women, children, and elderly, virtually anyone in raging wars he opposed as a candidate.

In addition, he endorses torture and extraordinary renditions as official US policies, as well as backing the world's worst despots, ones not fit to be in polite or any other company.

Notably they include the odious Saudi monarchy and Bahrain's Al Khalifa one, committing daily atrocities against nonviolent protesters, doctors and nurses treating them when injured, and anyone potentially threatening their despotic chokehold on people wanting to be free.

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Anonymous

Se lo advertimos, ¿creían que engañarían a todo el mundo, todo el tiempo? Parece que no han entendido nada. Sus continuos esfuerzos por acallar la libertad de expresión y la creciente ola de indignación contra su sistema corrupto resultan completamente inútiles.

Cuanto más complacientes se vuelven hacia la plutocracia y sus absurdas exigencias, más expuestos quedan ante la opinión pública. Cuanto más pague el pueblo por la avaricia criminal de una pequeña elite intocable, más obvia se revelará su incapacidad para liderar el cambio que se les exige. Cuanta más fuerzas usen contra personas pacíficas y desarmadas, más deslegitiman su propia autoridad. Por cada desinformación corporativa que ustedes o sus socios capitalistas emiten o publican, crecen cientos de canales ciudadanos para asegurar que la verdad sea escuchada.

El pueblo ha evolucionado. Ahora somos una red distribuida que combina sus conexiones sociales con la tecnología, compartiendo información como una conciencia global. Sus intentos por dividirnos y alienarnos ya no serán efectivos nunca más. Al contrario, comienzan a revelar su estrategia de desgaste a la vista de todos.

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Stephen Lendman

For months, courageous Bahrainis protested peacefully against the Al Khalifa monarchy's repressive brutality, corruption, and discrimination, as well as unemployment, poverty, and other unaddressed social justice issues.

The response has been ruthless state terrorism against anyone challenging regime control, no matter how lawless, barbaric, and unresponsive to basic human rights and needs.

Since the mid-February uprising began, America's media largely ignored it, especially extreme repression Washington supports. Complicit in helping a key ally, Bahrain is home to the Navy's Fifth Fleet, strategically located in the heart of the Persian Gulf.

On June 6, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) highlighted the mistreatment of doctors and nurses, explaining their arrests, detentions, torture and upcoming military trials for doing their job.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) President Stephen Soldz spoke publicly saying:

"We cannot be silent. Many of our members are health providers. The government of Bahrain arrested nearly 50 doctors and other health providers, many of whom have been tortured. Their 'crime' is refusing to let injured protesters die and informing the world press about the abuses they witnessed."

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Tariq Ali
London Review of Books

● Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite
Profile, 417 pp, £25.00, March 2011, ISBN 978 1 84668 054 0

#9679; A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy Kalinovsky
Harvard, 304 pp, £20.95, May 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 05866 8

Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow between 1988 and 1992, was in Russia when Soviet troops crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in 1979. His fascinating account of the Soviet intervention is based almost entirely on Russian sources: interviews with participants, information from veterans’ websites and from archives, although those of the GRU and the KGB remain mostly sealed. Each page reads like a warning to Afghanistan’s current occupiers. Braithwaite wrote two devastating articles in the Financial Times opposing the Iraq War and the atmosphere of fear created by New Labour propaganda but Afgantsy is written in a very different register. The Soviet intervention is seen as a tragedy for both the Russians and the Afghans.

The principal aim of Soviet foreign policy in the region had always been to preserve Afghanistan as a neutral state. Lenin was too orthodox a Marxist to believe that tribesmen and shepherds could make the leap forward to socialism: ‘Herdsmen can’t be transformed into a proletarian mass.’ His successors were not at all pleased when, in 1973, Muhammad Daud toppled his cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup and proclaimed a republic. Moscow had enjoyed warm relations with the king, a genial old buffer who presided over the tribal confederation that constituted the Afghan state. The Soviet leaders were even less pleased when in April 1978 a group of communist army officers staged a coup and called it a revolution. A few months earlier, two rival communist factions, Parcham (Flag) and Khalq (People), whose members were mostly university graduates and urban intellectuals, along with a few dozen officers and their clansmen in the armed services, had with great reluctance reunited as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Parcham followed an orthodox pro-Soviet line; Khalq was more independent of the Soviet Union and less in thrall to classic Marxist notions about the prerequisites for a transition to communism. Noor Mohammed Taraki, a Khalqi, was appointed general secretary, with Babrak Karmal of Parcham as his deputy. Hafizullah Amin, another leading Khalqi, was elected to the Politburo, but only after a struggle. Parcham claimed he was a CIA agent, recruited during his time as a student at Columbia.

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