Wars 4 Status Quo

Para já...

2008-02-28T10:48:00.002Z

... tenho estado a escrever no Vento Sueste.

Provávelmente de vez em quando, para registo, colocarei aqui os respectivos posts relevantes.

Kosovo

2008-02-18T21:42:00.001Z

Agora para ajudar só falta aderir à NATO. As bases já estão lá.

"Was the Civil War a Terrible Mistake?"

2008-02-07T08:46:00.000Z

No History News Network.

By Jim Powell , Mr. Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of The Triumph of Liberty (2000), FDR’S Folly (2003), Wilson's War (2005) and Bully Boy (2006). His latest book, Greatest Emancipations: How Slavery Ws Abolished in the West, will be published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan.

"During Dr. Ron Paul’s recent appearance on FACE THE NATION, he suggested that the Civil War was a mistake, and he has been criticized for saying that. The topic was a minor part of the interview, and he didn’t have time to present much of a case, but fascinating questions were raised. How else would American slaves have gained their freedom if the Civil War hadn’t forced the issue? How could important social reforms of any kind be achieved against stubborn opposition? (...)"

"Colin Powell made his Iraq presentation at the UN five years ago, on February 5, 2003."

2008-02-06T09:28:00.000Z

Sobre o tema acima, vou lembrar-me da dificuldade que tive no dia seguinte ao discurso de Colin Powell em discutir o assunto com muitos "colegas", apesar das evidências/suspeitas a priori sobre quase todo o material exposto por Collin Powell em directo na TV para todo o mundo. Lembro-me bem do ar triunfante de Vasco Rato (o proto-neo-cons de serviço em Portugal) no Público, a expôr a sua tese de "certinho"e "virtuoso" ganhador dado as provas apresentadas por Powell.

"Somehow" os enganos dos pro-war nunca resultam em descrédito, nem quando se enganam redondamente nem mesmo quando a sua base é em parte mentiras. É sempre os que se opõem que são os utópicos e maluquinhos.

Podemos considerar o assunto como conspiração para justificar uma guerra? Creio que sim. Nuremberga até o considera formalmente um crime punivel internacionalmente. Não sei se na era pós-Bush, passado algum tempo a coisa não será mesmo investigada e mais tarde quem sabe punida.

Any thoughts? Gostava de ouvir alguns comentários.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002063.html

"Colin Powell made his Iraq presentation at the UN five years ago, on February 5, 2003.
As much criticism as Powell has received for this—he calls it "painful" and something that will "always be a part of my record"—it hasn't been close to what's justified. Powell was far more than just horribly mistaken: the evidence is conclusive that he fabricated evidence and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false.

Unfortunately, Congress has never investigated Powell's use of the intelligence he was given. Even so, what's already in the public record is extremely damning. So while the corporate media has never taken a close look at this record, we can go through Powell's presentation line by line to demonstrate the chasm between what he knew, and what he told the world. As you'll see, there's quite a lot to say about it.

Powell's speech can be found on the State Department website here. All other sources are linked below."

Ler o artigo.

Intervencionistas militaristas

2007-12-27T17:09:00.001Z

Nunca aprendem. Qualquer coisa que acontece (e com toda a probabilidade já no seguimento de intervencionismo anterior) e a solução é .... intervir mais e com mais militares. A isto chama-se hoje "pessoas moderadas" e "liberais".

É só ver na Atlântico: Buttho, NATO e o ano de 2008.

"A morte de Benazir Buttho significa a radicalização interna do Paquistão levada ao extremo. O caos no Paquistão interessa sobretudo à al-Qaeda, que joga nas fronteiras incipientes com o Afeganistão o seu renascimento pós-invasão. Ora este caos regional obrigará a duas situações de emergência. A primeira é um reforço substancial dos contingentes militares da NATO no Afeganistão "

E claro, ao reforço no próprio Paquistão.

"Invade the world" e acabem com todo o mal na Terra. Please.

Rothbard e a National Review

2007-12-03T20:45:00.000Z

"For the first five years of its existence I moved in National Review circles. I had known Frank Meyer as a fellow analyst for the William Volker Fund, and through Meyer had met Buckley and the rest of the editorial staff. I attended National Review luncheons, rallies, and cocktail parties, and wrote a fair number of articles and book reviews for the magazine. But the more I circulated among these people, the greater my horror because I realized with growing certainty that what they wanted above all was total war against the Soviet Union; their fanatical warmongering would settle for no less.

Of course the New Rightists of National Review would never quite dare to admit this crazed goal in public, but the objective would always be slyly implied. At right-wing rallies no one cheered a single iota for the free market, if this minor item were ever so much as mentioned; what really stirred up the animals were demagogic appeals by National Review leaders for total victory, total destruction of the Communist world. It was that which brought the right-wing masses out of their seats.

It was National Review editor Brent Bozell who trumpeted, at a right-wing rally: "I would favor destroying not only the whole world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star, rather than suffer Communism to live."

It was National Review editor Frank Meyer who once told me: "I have a vision, a great vision of the future: a totally devastated Soviet Union." I knew that this was the vision that really animated the New Conservatism. Frank Meyer, for example, had the following argument with his wife, Elsie, over foreign-policy strategy: Should we drop the H-Bomb on Moscow and destroy the Soviet Union immediately and without warning (Frank), or should we give the Soviet regime 24 hours with which to comply with an ultimatum to resign (Elsie)"

Escolhas

2007-10-22T13:22:00.000+01:00

Ponham-se (escolha à preferência do freguês, existem bons argumentos para ambos) a escolher lados morais/pragmáticos/etc (não no sentido individual, mas como quem tenta que os "Estados" o façam) entre e Turquia e os Curdos e depois tentem manter um edifício de política internacional consistente e coerente e que resulta. Sou todo ouvidos.

Has Putin Saved the Peace?

2007-10-19T13:34:00.000+01:00

Eurasia Strikes Back: No War With Iran Likely
by Srdja Trifkovic

War Fever

2007-10-18T11:57:00.000+01:00

É mais ou menos nestes pontos que a História costuma descontrolar-se....é só acontecer (ou fabricar) um incidente menor e...

* Bush. “We got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel,”

"President Bush issued a stark warning on Iran on Wednesday, suggesting that if the country obtained nuclear arms, it could lead to “World War III.”.

* Mr. Putin told a summit of five Caspian Sea nations, "We should not even think of using force in this region" – a veiled warning to the US not to strike Iran.

PS; Nem nuna foi dito que o Irão queria destruir Israel como sempre foi negado que pretendem uma bomba nuclear. Bush não se refere a desconfianças (tanto legitimas como sujeitas a discussão), pretende lançar a ideia que essas ideias são defendidas formalmente pelo Estado do Irão (isto é, que querem destruir Israel e que pretendem armas nucleares).

E isso é "War Propaganda".

PS2: Pergunta. Tal como Saddam na vertigem do início do Golfo II, terá o Irão "Guerra Justa" contra um ataque eminente? Falo do estrito ponto de vista daquele conceito conservador meio ultrapssado da soberania de um Estado-Nação.

PS3. Neste momento, se quisermos jogar aos soldadinhos de chumbo e contar espingardas, poderemos contar com Rùssia, China, Turquia e todo o o Médio Oriente como not-friendly numa guerra alargada. Suponho que isto deve dar um cenáro interessante para fins de tarde a ver a CNN acompanhado de pipocas.

Revisionismo

2007-10-17T12:26:00.000+01:00

Britain to claim more than 1m sq km of Antarctica

"The United Kingdom is planning to claim sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica, the Guardian has learned. The submission to the United Nations covers more than 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) of seabed, and is likely to signal a quickening of the race for territory around the south pole in the world's least explored continent.

The claim would be in defiance of the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic treaty, to which the UK is a signatory. It specifically states that no new claims shall be asserted on the continent. The treaty was drawn up to prevent territorial disputes."

Bill Buckley

2007-10-03T15:33:00.000+01:00

"Is the Liberty episode being erased from history. So it would seem...What has happened to our prying journalistic corps and our editors, normally so indignant of attempted suppression of the news?...We believe that a joint select committee of Congress should investigate the strange case of the USS Liberty..."--William F. Buckley, journalist and publisher, National Review, June 27, 1967

Bons tempos de quando a NR era de direita.

Notícias recentes: New revelations in attack on American spy ship

Bin Laden declara guerra a um islamo-fascista

2007-09-20T11:40:00.001+01:00

AP: Bin Laden to Declare War on Musharraf in New Video

Direito

2007-09-19T13:18:00.000+01:00

"Irão: Sócrates admite recurso «a todas as formas de sanções»O primeiro-ministro, José Sócrates, admitiu hoje o recurso por parte da União Europeia (UE) «a todas as formas de sanções» ao Irão, no caso de o país desrespeitar as leis internacionais sobre energia nuclear. "

O problema é mesmo esse. É que não existe própriamente direito internacional que possa ser usado contra o Irão. E existe direito internacional sobre os motivos para iniciar uma guerra.

"There's menace in Osama's message"

2007-09-13T10:12:00.000+01:00

Um aviso de Michael Scheuer [served as the chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is now a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation.]

(E apoiante de Ron Paul)

Bomba amiga do ambiente

2007-09-12T13:02:00.001+01:00

Russia Tests 'World's Most Powerful Non-Nuclear Bomb'

Nuremberga =

2007-09-07T15:28:00.000+01:00

= julgamento por conspiração para provocar uma guerra.

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Um pouco patético, não?

2007-09-04T09:06:00.001+01:00

Bush: I Can't Recall Why Iraqi Army Disbanded
Bremer: Bush Did Want Army Disbanded

Teorias (?) da Conspiração

2007-08-24T10:19:00.000+01:00

Via LvMI. "Organizers of the protests at the North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Québec, say they have video that shows police disguised as masked demonstrators tried to incite violence on Monday.

The video in question.

Québec provincial police admitted Thursday that three of their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Québec.

La Sûreté du Québec press release."

Victor Davis Hanson, Fabulist

2007-08-22T19:48:00.000+01:00

Andrew Sullivan sobre as opiniões de Hanson:

"In his NRO splutter this morning, military expert Victor Davis Hanson hyperbolized the following:

No one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic.
Let me suggest two articles in The New Republic that no one should have believed at the time, two articles that have been debunked by subsequent events, two articles that reveal spectacular misjudgment about the war in Iraq, two articles that should consign the author to irrelevance, unless he has explicitly explained why he was wrong and apologized. The two articles, of course, are by Victor Davis Hanson"

Re: Camodia genocide

2007-08-01T17:07:00.000+01:00

Submitted by anti_republocrat on August 1, 2007 - 2:06am.

"Darkhaha, the US caused the Cambodian genocide. US bombing and incursions into Cambodia weakened Sihanouk [O Príncipe] and made his regime vulnerable to the Khmer Rouge. After the US withdrew from Indochina, it was the Vietnamese who finally put an end to the killing fields by invading Cambodia, getting rid of the Khmer Rouge, then promptly withdrawing before they had to start fighting insurgents.

In any case, we never had any intention of trying to stop the Khmer Rouge from slaughtering their own people, so it can't possibly used as a justification for our occupation of Vietnam."

Disputas por Status Quo

2007-08-01T16:50:00.000+01:00

"Russia claims North Pole with Arctic flag stunt"

"(...) An audacious Russian mission to claim the North Pole for Moscow is due to reach its climax in the next 24 hours, after a week-long journey through thick ice-sheets.

The two Russian submarines are lowered into the Arctic Ocean
Two Russian vessels - including an atomic icebreaker - are expected to reach the Pole this afternoon.

There they will release two mini-submarines which will drop a metal tube containing a Russian flag onto the seabed. The release is likely to take place tonight or tomorrow morning, according to organisers.

The gesture, while symbolic, marks an escalation of the growing international dispute over who owns the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240 mile underwater mountain range that crosses the polar region. It is thought to contain rich oil and gas deposits.

Moscow believes the research mission will prove that the ridge is a geological extension of Russia, and can therefore can be claimed by Russia under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Denmark believes that the ridge is in fact an extension of the Danish territory of Greenland.

The US and Canada are also anxious to defend their Arctic territory, with both planning billion-pound investments in new patrol ships.(...)"

It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War

2007-08-01T09:41:00.001+01:00

Russia’s belligerence is hardly surprising

Revolução democrática

2007-07-22T22:12:00.000+01:00

Público: "Vitória esmagadora do partido de base islamista no poder na Turquia"

PS: Agora só falta o Paquistão (e o Egipto)

Coisas que fazem sentido (?)

2007-07-16T12:51:00.001+01:00

Most Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Saudi
Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran
Drug Czar Says US Pot Growers Are 'Dangerous Terrorists'
British Afghan Casualty Rate at Level of WWII
William Kristol : "Why Bush Will Be A Winner - If Gen. Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president. I like the odds."

Blind

2007-07-11T14:52:00.001+01:00

The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth, writes robert fox

Even the Bush administration will now admit, under its collective breath of course, that Iraq is in the throes of a full-blown civil war between armed groups of its Sunni and Shia Arab communities, triggered a year ago by the destruction of the al-Laskar mosque in Samara, a revered Shia shrine. (...) What the American authorities are reluctant to admit, however, is that there are signs that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and their allies - including Jordan - have been equipping and training Sunni extremists in Iraq for some time now. Critically, not all the weaponry and munitions have been used against the militants' Shia and Kurdish Iraqi enemies. Some of them - including lethal roadside bombs - have been aimed at US forces. "The growth of the official and unofficial Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments," a senior British officer has told me privately after a visit to Iraq."

Coisas de Neo-Cons

2007-07-10T11:38:00.000+01:00

"This weekend the Washington Post ran a story about Richard Barlow, a Pentagon whistle-blower in the late 1980s who tracked Pakistan and A.Q. Khan's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S. government wanted to sell F-16s to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress had prevented the sale of any equipment that could deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow pointed out that selling the jets to Pakistan would violate non-proliferation laws and complained that the Pentagon was misleading Congress on the issue.

From the Post:

"Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan's ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons 'far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan' -- something Barlow knew to be untrue."

Twisting the truth to support policy in the Middle East? Never! When Barlow complained, he was instantly fired and stripped of his security clearance. His intelligence career was ruined. He now lives in a trailer in Montana and, even though Congress' investigative arm backed up his position, is still fighting for a government pension that he feels is due. And what happened to Dick Cheney and Barlow's other higher-ups -- Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, among others? We don't think they're worrying about pensions.

Full story here."

Comentários: Good post, Luke. I'm a real conservative (unlike Bush & his cronies) and am really disgusted by these so-called neo-cons. Neo-con is just another term for opportunist. It seems they'll do just about anything in the name of political expediency."

Revisionism for Our Time,

2007-07-03T14:41:00.000+01:00

Murray N. Rothbard "For the same myth is now based on the same old fallacies. And this is seen by the increasing use that the Cold Warriors have been making of the "Munich myth": the continually repeated charge that it was the "appeasement" of the "aggressor" at Munich that "fed" his "aggression" (again, the Fu Manchu, or Wild Beast, comparison), and that caused the "aggressor," drunk with his conquests, to launch World War II. This Munich myth has been used as one of the leading arguments against any sort of rational negotiations with the Communist nations, and the stigmatizing of even the most harmless search for agreement as "appeasement."

It is for this reason that A.J.P. Taylor's magnificent Origins of the Second World War received probably its most distorted and frenetic review in the pages of National Review.
It is about time that Americans learn: that Bad Guys (Nazis or Communists) may not necessarily want or desire war, or be out to "conquer" the world (their hope for "conquest" may be strictly ideological and not military at all); that Bad Guys may also fear the possibility of our use of our enormous military might and aggressive posture to attack them; that both the Bad Guys and Good Guys may have common interests which make negotiation possible (e.g., that neither wants to be annihilated by nuclear weapons); that no organization is a "monolith," and that "agents" are often simply ideological allies who can and do split with their supposed "masters"; and that, finally, we may learn the most profound lesson of all: that the domestic policy of a government is often no index whatever to its foreign policy.

We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson: that "democracies" ipso facto will never embark on war, and that "dictatorships" are always prone to engage in war. Much as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may, once and for all, be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth.

There is only one real difference between the capacity of a democracy and a dictatorship to wage war: democracies invariably engage much more widely in deceptive war propaganda, to whip up and persuade the public. Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens, and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical moral cant to fool the voters. The lack of need for this on the part of dictatorships often makes their policies seem superficially to be more warlike, and this is one of the reasons why they have had a "bad press" in this century."

Notícias anónimas

2007-07-03T08:40:00.000+01:00

A de um cientista israelita (judeu convertido ao cristianismo) na prisão há 18 anos.

"Vanunu gets 6-month jail term for foreign contacts

OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: An Israeli court on Monday sentenced Mordechai Vanunu, who in 2004 completed an 18-year prison term for spilling nuclear secrets, to six more months behind bars after he violated a ban on speaking to foreigners. Israel has barred Vanunu from travelling abroad and monitored his movements since he left jail, alleging that he has more details on the Dimona atomic reactor to divulge. Vanunu denies that but says he will pursue anti-nuclear activities. “I don’t want to live here. I have the right to be free,’’ Vanunu, 52, said after the sentencing at Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. “I want to be free and I want to leave.” The court, which also handed Vanunu a six-month suspended sentence, held off on jailing him to allow for appeals. Vanunu’s lawyer, Michael Sfard, said he had until September 9 to decide on a course of action but hinted he might not fight the prison time. “This is a cruel sentence in a case that has nothing to do with national security or social values. It’s a measure of the vindictiveness of the state of Israel,’’ Sfard told Reuters. “While Vanunu has perfect grounds for an appeal, we will have to give thought to whether that is what is wanted.’’

Vanunu was jailed on treason charges in 1986 after giving an unauthorised interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level Dimona technician. The disclosures all but blew away the secrecy around an assumed Israeli atomic arsenal. Since his release Vanunu has campaigned for the Jewish state to be disarmed. "

Hamas e Fatah

2007-06-26T15:16:00.000+01:00

The Coup Against Hamas
Eric Margolis on yet another US intervention in the Middle East.

State vs. Non-State
William Lind on the Palestinians.

"Democratic peoples are not immune to blood lust"

2007-06-21T09:58:00.000+01:00

"Governments accountable to their people do not attack each other," said Bush.This may come as a surprise to descendants of those who fought for Southern independence from 1861 to 1865. Does Bush think Mr. Lincoln's government or those of the CSA, the Confederate States of America, were not "accountable" to their people? Yet 600,000 Americans died in that war between two democratic republics. (...)In 1914, the most democratic nations in Europe plunged into the bloodiest war in history. Free people in European capitals cheered lustily as their sons marched off to die.Democratic peoples are not immune to blood lust." The Democracy Worshipper by Patrick J. Buchanan

Adenda: Recomendável para quem gosta de dar lições de política externa-defesa citando "Muniche" -"President Bush began by paying tribute to the founding father of Czech democracy. "Nine decades ago, Tomas Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia's independence based on the 'ideals of democracy.'"Well, that may be what the Masaryk said, but it is not exactly what he did. In 1918, he did indeed proclaim the independence of Czechoslovakia, confirmed by the Allies at Paris. But inside the new Czechoslovakia, built on the "ideals of democracy," were 3 million dissident Germans who wished to remain with Austria and half a million Hungarians who wished to remain with Hungary. Many Catholic Slovaks had wanted to remain with Catholic Hungary. Against their will, all had been consigned to Masaryk's Czech-dominated nation.Query for Bush? If 3 million Germans were put under alien rule without their consent and against their will, and they wished to exercise their right of self-determination, as preached by Woodrow Wilson, did they not have a right to secede peacefully and join their German kinsmen?Because that is what Munich was all about.Between 1938 and 1939, dissident Germans, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians and Ruthenes – abetted by Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest – broke free of Masaryk's multinational democracy. Rather than let them secede from Prague, Churchill thought Britain should go to war.Was Winston right, or were the Sudeten Germans right? In 1945, liberated Czechoslovakia solved its dissident German problem by wholesale ethnic cleansing."

Nota: E foi assim que o problema ficou resolvido no pós-WWII. Os "alemães" Sudetas queriam ficar com os Habsburgos, mas estes (tal como com Kaiser) foram intencionalmente conduzidos para a porta de saída da história.Não era preciso ser especialmente dotado para perceber que sem os Habsburgs e o Império Austro-Húngaro, o destino de todos os alemães (incluindo os alemães austriacos) seria a ... Alemanha - a grande questão de séculos sobre a Grande Alemanha (se sob o domínio dos Habsburgs ou sob o domínio da Prússia) tinha ficado resolvida (e diga-se que quer Bismarck quer os sucessivos Reis da Prússia nunca pretenderam unificar uma Grande Alemanha... as repúblicas é que costumam ter sonhos construtivistas e a falta de pudor para os realizar...sem ser pelo meio bem mais pacífico e tradicional do casamento de monarcas). Um mimo de Woodrow Wilson a que se juntou a justiça dos Impérios vencedores. Depois foi o que se viu, as repúblicas caiem no fascismo dado a retórica de combater as injustiças da WWI (incluindo a Itália a quem foi recusado os espólios prometidos pela sua entrada em favor dos "Aliados"). E assim chega Hitler a Muniche onde 3 milhões de Sudetas querem ser alemães, e onde curiosamente também a Polónia e a Hungria reivindicam e conseguem território onde estavam as suas minorias. Fazer a guerra pelos Sudetas que queriam ser Alemães? Pois a guerra acabou a fazer-se mais tarde e o problema Sudeta foi resolvido...sem dúvida. Por ethnic cleasing. Assim um pouco como começar a fazer guerra por causa da Polónia e ver onde a Polónia acabou.

If only

2007-06-19T08:25:00.000+01:00

"UK MPs: Iraq 'Has Ruined Case for Liberal Interventionism'"

Sounds Familiar

2007-06-18T13:06:00.000+01:00

" The Turks charge that the Kurds are trying to influence the outcome of the plebiscite by driving 200,000 Turkmens and Arabs out of the city, and moving in 600,000 Kurds. " Kurdish Powder KegPrimed to Explode

Como enfurecer um Urso

2007-06-12T16:37:00.000+01:00

1. Ir à Albânia prometer a independência do Kosovo (e assim estabelecer o princípio da Grande Albânia como se Europa - não os EUA - já tivesse poucos problemas com a influência muçulmana).

2. Ir à Sérvia tentar comprá-la com a adesão à NATO (à Sérvia por quem a Rússia de Czar apostou tudo e tudo perdeu na Primeira Guerra Mundial por ser um seu aliado eslavo natural)

3. Colocar sistemas "inocentes" no seu quintal

Só posso concluir que a Rússia se vai virar ainda mais para a China e começar o seu próprio processo de cativação de países para um novo Bloco.

My God, Gingrich pensa que é um rebelde!

2007-06-01T09:17:00.000+01:00

LRCBlog: Writes Bryan Stewart:

"Watching the awful 'History Channel' last night...they did a piece on Star Wars, and had all sorts of empty-headed intellectuals discussing Lucas' portrayal of the old republic transforming itself into the empire...they showed how Chancellor Palpatine, democratically elected, morphed into the Emperor basically through emergency war powers granted to him...of course the comparison was made to Hitler....the not-so-subtle History Channel then began talking about and showing images of not only the murderous Nazis, but of (surprise, surprise!) Saddam Hussein as well...in discussing brutal dictatorships, these were the only two chosen, no Stalin, no Mao....dovetailing nicely to the next segment, which they interviewed (gasp!) Newt Gingrich, with the implication that the present-day USA was analogous to the rebels in Star Wars (freedom fighters), and the empire in Star Wars analogous to Iraq, Iran, 'terrorists', "

Coisas interessantes

2007-06-01T09:08:00.000+01:00

Israeli agents 'helped Entebbe hijackers'

''My contact said that the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis,'' Mr Colvin added. The message was received without comment by the Foreign Office but later officials recorded that a journalist from the Liverpool Post, Leo Murray, had also told them that a splinter group of PFLP was planning a series of spectacular incidents to disrupt contacts between the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the US.

Iran Says Dead Rebels Had US-Made Arms

Ex-KGB spy: UK tried to recruit me

2007-05-31T13:58:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Andrei Lugovoi -- the man British authorities accuse of poisoning a former Russian spy in London last year -- told reporters Thursday he wasn't behind the ex-KGB agent's murder, but speculated the British government may have been.

"I don't know who killed him," Lugovoi, a former security service agent turned businessman, said at a Moscow press conference, according to a translation from Russia Today television.
He did, however, speculate on who was behind the poisoning of former spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died in November, several weeks after being exposed to toxic levels of polonium-210.

"It is difficult to abandon the idea that Litvinenko had become an agent of the British special services who got out of hand and was then eliminated -- if not by the special services themselves, then under their control or their connivance," he said.

As part of a "grim political story" the British special services recruited political refugee and Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky, who lives in London, to kill Litvinenko, Lugovoi said, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

"You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that there must be a motive behind such a crime," he said. "Alexander was not my enemy."

Lugovoi said Berezovsky's motive was Litvinenko's possession of "great material" that could expose the underhanded way Berezovsky acquired political refugee status in Britain.
Detailing the scheme, Lugovoi explained "those wishing to get political asylum should publish in Russia certain articles of a political content, an anti-Russian content, criticizing the course of the Russian government."

In addition, Lugovoi also claimed he was approached by the British special forces and asked to gain compromising information on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Attempts were made to openly recruit me as a British intelligence service agent," Lugovoi said. "The Britons in fact suggested that I collect any information that could compromise President Putin and members of his family."

Putin says test missile is signal to U.S.

2007-05-31T13:56:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Russia's test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile this week was in response to U.S. steps that have sparked an arms race and undermined world security, Russian President Vladimir Putin says.

"Our American partners have left the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty. We have warned them then that we will come out with a response to maintain the strategic balance in the world," Putin told a news conference Thursday.

"We conducted a test of a new strategic ballistic missile with multiple warheads, and of a new cruise missile, and will continue to improve our resources."

"We are not the initiators of this new round of the arms race," said Putin. "(Our partners) are stuffing eastern Europe with new weapons. A new base in Bulgaria, another in Romania, a site in Poland, radar in the Czech Republic . . . what are we supposed to do? We cannot just observe all this."

Russia test-fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday featuring multiple warheads that senior officials said could pierce any missile defense system, including the planned U.S. shield in Europe.

Russia says the U.S. missile defence shield is a threat to its security and will change the strategic balance in Europe, but Washington dismisses such fears, saying the shield is intended to counter "rogue states."

Blasfémias

2007-05-31T10:04:00.000+01:00

Bomb Iran: "Podhorez writes in conclusion. "As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will."

Podhoretz believes that "the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938." Podhoretz has a book set for release on September 11 entitled World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

Como se o Paquistão, que se abandonar o seu "fascismo" adoptando a democracia, corre o risco de entregar todo o seu arsenal actual (comparando com o hipotético ainda muito a prazo iraniano) a islamistas, não fosse o risco maior.

E assim temos "Muniche" até à eternidade. Hitler foi derrotado em pouco mais de 3 anos mas Estaline conquista metade da Europa Cristã e do mundo. E consideram isso um exemplo para a eternidade.

Mas quanto a tal bombardeamento (a actividade preferida dos especialistas em relações internacionais) desencadear caminhos gravosos que não os do idealismo moralista e militarista cego destes tipos (como Woodrow Wilson), nada.

Just wisfull thinking.

Vietnam?

2007-05-23T08:15:00.000+01:00

SFGate: "(05-22) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.
The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.

Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 -- a record-high number -- by the end of the year. "

The path of self-destruction

2007-05-04T11:34:00.000+01:00

"(...) We say the missile defense system is directed at Iran. Russians see it as of a piece with the move eastward of NATO and targeted at them. Can we blame them for so thinking, when we responded to their pullout of troops from Central and Eastern Europe by bringing Central and Eastern Europe into a U.S.-led alliance?

If the Russia-baiters in this capital have their way, Ukraine and Georgia will also be brought into NATO. That would commit us to go to war with Russia over control of the Crimean peninsula and the Russian-speaking Donbass of eastern Ukraine, and over the birthplace of Stalin and who should control South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

"Moscow would not dare intervene in the Baltic republics!" comes the retort. Perhaps not. But the Russians are now fiercely nationalistic and anti-American. And it is always a mistake for a great power to cede to a minor power the ability to draw it into a great war. Just as it is always a mistake to hand out war guarantees one cannot honor.

In March 1939, Britain gave a war guarantee to Polish colonels who had not requested it, a guarantee Britain had no way of fulfilling. The war that followed cost Britain her empire and Poland 50 years of freedom.

In August 1914, King Albert of Belgium informed King George V that the Kaiser's troops had crossed his border. He invoked a treaty assuring Belgian neutrality that the British had signed -- in 1839!

So, Britain declared war, and 700,000 Brits perished in the Great War that hurled the West onto its present path of self-destruction.

And the march of folly continues on. " Dying for...Estonia? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Edmund Burke, anti-war conservative

2007-04-24T19:18:00.001+01:00

“But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven ... that is truly more odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself to be himself mean and miserable....”

Jessica Lynch, American Hero.

2007-04-24T19:04:00.000+01:00

"Lured out of rural West Virginia to join the aggression against Iraq, Jessica Lynch was badly wounded. According to the Pentagon, she was a GI Jane who fought to the last bullet, and then was rescued from Iraqi rapists by brave Special Forces (in an incident taped for broadcast).

In fact, she had not fired her rifle and was being treated well by Iraqi doctors, who were trying to send her back to the Americans. Thank goodness for the Congressional hearings to expose all this again.

This teenager from a poor family, who will apparently never recover from her injuries in Bush's vicious war, had a well-remunerated future ahead of her--speeches, a book, a tv special, maybe even a movie. She was an Official Hero as well as a millionaire, sure to be seated next to Laura at the next State of the Union, and heralded by all the hate media and think tanks.

Instead, as she said on Good Morning America, she refused to go along with the federal script. "I didn't want to be portrayed as this Rambo fighting machine when I knew it wasn't the truth and it was important to me to always come out and tell the truth.!" Lew Rockwell

Os profissionais do cinismo

2007-04-20T08:57:00.000+01:00

Rove: ‘I Wish The Iraq War Never Existed,’ It Was ‘Osama Bin Laden’s Idea’

On a visit to Ohio yesterday, White House senior political adviser Karl Rove claimed he never wanted the war in Iraq:

“I wish the war were over,” Rove said. “I wish the war never existed... History has given us a challenge.”

History shows Rove was exceptionally eager in 2002 for the upcoming Iraq war, anxious to reap what he viewed would be the political gains for conservatives leading another military conflict:
In January 2002, Rove told conservatives, “Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe…We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.

In June 2002, Rove was giving PowerPoint presentations candidates advising them to “focus on the war” in their fall campaigns.

In August 2002, Rove was chairing the White House Iraq Group, whose mission was to “develop a strategy for publicizing the White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.”

In September 2002, Time reported that when friends asked whether Bush planned to invade Iraq, Rove was been known to reply, “Let me put it this way: If you want to see Baghdad, you’d better visit soon.”

Former White House counterterrorism director Richard Clarke later wrote that the Iraq “crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to ‘run on the war.’”

Keynes sobre Versailles

2007-04-20T08:24:00.001+01:00

"The death toll from WWI mounted toward ten million, Keynes became angrier and angrier at this civilization-breaking catastrophe, and angrier and angrier at the politicians who could see no way forward other than mixing more blood with the mud of Paaschendale.

At the Versailles peace conference the new democratic German government was treated as a foe rather than a potential ally, and the object became to extract as much in plunder and reparations from Germany as possible. (...) So Keynes exploded with a book called "The Economic Consequences of the Peace". It condemned Versailles. It prophesied doom if the treaty were carried out:

"If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy... the civilization and progress of our generation..." (HB, page 391). " J. Bradford DeLong

Outra coisa certa de Keynes mencionada neste texto (outras erradas porque dão a solução keynesiana como válida):

"He tried to prevent Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at an overvalued exchange rate, for by overvaluing the exchange rate Britain's Treasury Minister, Winston Churchill, was willing "... the deliberate intensification of unemployment.""

Este ponto foi comentado por Murray N Rothbard mais tarde (no seu livro "American Great Depression"). Foi Churchill que pretendeu deflacionar a "libra" evocando (nos seus habituais excessos pela honra do Império) ser seu dever fazer recuperar o valor da Libra (versus Ouro) aos tempos pré-WWI.

[Winston's most famous act was to return Britain to the gold standard at the unrealistic pre-war parity, thus severely damaging the export trade and ruining the good name of gold, as was pointed out by Murray N. Rothbard. Hardly anyone today would disagree with the judgment of A.J.P. Taylor: Churchill "did not grasp the economic arguments one way or the other. What determined him was again a devotion to British greatness. The pound would once more 'look the dollar in the face'; the days of Queen Victoria would be restored." Rethinking Churchill, Part 2 by Ralph Raico]

Mas tal como é errado inflaccionar é errado deflaccionar. A cada momento, a quantidade de notas versus ouro (não esquecer que se estava ainda nos bons velhos tempos de padrão ouro - algo deturpado já, mas ainda) num dado momento deve ser dado como adquirido, um novo valor ou rácio de equilibrio atingido ,o importante é não inflaccionar mais.

Entre outras coisas (como a criação do FED em 1913), este foi um dos passos para a Grande Depressão [Ou seja, Churchill está directamente- "intended" umas "unintended" outras - conectado aos piores acontecimentos da história da civilização].

300 (II)

2007-04-20T08:23:00.000+01:00

Ainda assim, é sempre belo quando alguém defende o seu território no seu território. Mas essa é a condição necessária: combater pelo nosso território no nosso território.

Mas como dizia alguém, ainda bem que as guerras provocam tanta destruição, porque senão corriamos o risco de gostar definitivamente de viver em guerra. E mesmo assim...

Scheuer Corrects National Review, Weekly Standard

2007-04-19T09:08:00.000+01:00

Via AnWarBlog

Below is the text of a response Michael Scheuer recently sent to National Review regarding their (and others’) misuse of his first book to “prove” a Saddam-al-Qaeda connection. (See here, here, and here.)

Sir,
Mr. A. McCarthy’s blog article referring to the Mr. Joscelyn’s recent reiteration in The Weekly Standard of his apparently controlling fixation on the non-existent, pre-Iraq war, Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection is, I regret to say, ill-informed and perhaps even intellectually mediocre.

Messrs. McCarthy, Joscelyn, Hayes, Feith, Vice President Cheney, and their acolytes either suffer from a misunderstanding or intend to continue deceiving the American people. I did argue that there was Iraq-AQ connection in my first book. I was mistaken and said so in my second book, while leaving my original research in place to warn off future writers from pursuing the incorrect path I had pursued. I admitted my mistake after leading a complete review of CIA’s classified holdings on Iraq and al-Qaeda in early 2003, a review which was ordered after Mr. Feith’s staff published an engrossing but entirely false description of close Iraq-AQ working relationship. At DCI Tenet’s request, we reviewed more than 20,000 documents and 75,000 pages of material — none of which suggested anything that might remotely be called a “relationship” between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Whether Mr. Tenet delivered this message to the president and his cabinet, only he knows. Perhaps Mr. Tenet will clarify this point in his forthcoming book.

In any event, I corrected my mistake in Imperial Hubris based on the far better research material available to me when preparing that book. The fact is today, as it was before March, 2003, that the United States Government held no information prior to the invasion of Iraq that showed a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda of the type Secretary Powell described at the UN or Vice President Cheney has continued to monger about since. Again, there was no data about Iraq-AQ cooperation before the war that could reasonably be seen as contributing to a casus belli vis-a-vis Iraq. I assume that bottom line remains true because the U.S. government has not produced any data that it captured after the invasion of Iraq to definitively document such a relationship.

The question, of course, is why such learned gentlemen as those mentioned above continue to adhere to a demonstrably false claim, or, indeed, why they needed to raise it at all. Saddam had a long and definitively proven record of training and otherwise supporting Palestinian terrorists. If the administration needed a terrorism peg on which to hang the rest of its case for war, it had it in spades without the slightest need to even fabricate a tale about Saddam and Osama. Of course, Saddam’s Palestinian proteges only attacked Israelis, and it would hardly have been practical to leverage the Saddam-Palestinian relationship as a means of persuading American parents to spend the lives of their soldier-children to protect foreigners.

Respectfully,Michael F. Scheuer

"1,000 Killed, 125K Flee New Somali Civil War"

2007-04-11T12:22:00.001+01:00

Com ajuda de quem? de quem?

The Fog of War

2007-04-11T11:17:00.000+01:00

"(..) You remember the EFPs right? The IEDs that are so powerful they got a brand new acronym a couple months back? The ones that, as the Monitor notes above, the U.S. government has accused Iran of supplying to the Iraqi Shi’ite militias that America and Iran are both currently backing? (Gareth Porter explains the truth about them here.)

Well, here was also this Reuters piece from Saturday which included the same information. The Post ran the story, but apparently one of their editors (liars) realized this might reveal the holes in War Party claims that these new “EFPs” must be coming from Iran. After all, here, supposedly, is a whole EFP factory just a few miles south of Baghdad.(...)" Washington Post Liars Caught!

Nota: um exemplo típico de "Fog of War" que muitos liberais ignoram, atribuindo sempre comportamentos súbitamente bons, transparentes e eficientes em caso de conflitos quando em tudo o resto lhes chamam incompetentes e mal intencionados.

Washington Post Liars Caught!

2007-04-11T11:16:00.000+01:00

Via anwarblog

Washington Post Liars Caught!

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 in News, War party, Iran, Propaganda, Iraq by Scott Horton
Atrios (Via Lew Rockwell) has caught the Washington Post attempting to lie you into another war.
I had noticed a funny thing to make it into print in today’s Antiwar.com top story from the Christian Science Monitor while reading it on my radio show this morning. Dig this:

The US military also issued a statement on Sunday calling the operation in Diwaniyah, dubbed Black Eagle, a “great success” so far. It said it detained 39 militiamen and killed an unspecified number. It also has uncovered “many large caches of weapons,” including factories that make explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), devices that Washington accuses Tehran of supplying to Sadr’s militia.
You remember the EFPs right? The IEDs that are so powerful they got a brand new acronym a couple months back? The ones that, as the Monitor notes above, the U.S. government has accused Iran of supplying to the Iraqi Shi’ite militias that America and Iran are both currently backing? (Gareth Porter explains the truth about them here.)

Well, here was also this Reuters piece from Saturday which included the same information. The Post ran the story, but apparently one of their editors (liars) realized this might reveal the holes in War Party claims that these new “EFPs” must be coming from Iran. After all, here, supposedly, is a whole EFP factory just a few miles south of Baghdad.

The paragraphs revealing Iraqi EFP-self-reliance were then excised from Post version of the story.
“Red alert! Quick! Get out your Pravda pen™ brand exacto-knives and get to work before some damn blogger catches us admitting the truth in contradiction to one more of our half-baked excuses for war against Iran!”
Too Late. You’re caught, discredited Washington Post liars. From Eschaton:

Brutus e Julio Cesar

2007-04-03T19:31:00.000+01:00

"...como é que podemos saber se devemos agir de certa maneira, quando o risco da acção é grande, quando as consequências da acção podem não ser as que esperamos, quando nem sequer podemos ter a certeza de que aquilo que estamos a considerar fazer é realmente o que devemos fazer? Trata-se de questões morais e de questões políticas."

Frase no artigo do Expresso, "O ovo da serpente - Um clássico de Shakespeare que leva 23 actores a palco sob a direcção de Luís Miguel Cintra".

Ou diria eu, Brutus mata César para preservar a República e acaba a acelerar o Império?

O certo é que o autor do texto podia estar a falar de qualquer tipo de intervencionismo, social ou internacional.

"Black Hawk Down" - part II

2007-03-30T12:50:00.000+01:00

Helicopter shot down as Mogadishu battle rages - 36 minutes ago. MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Insurgents shot down an Ethiopian helicopter gunship in Mogadishu on Friday during a second day of fighting

Enough already

2007-03-30T10:43:00.000+01:00

Diz o neo-conservador Michael Leeden.

Tendo o Irão sido atacado por Saddam apoiado pelos EUA, estar sob ameaça - proferidas abertamente pelo sistema político americano - constante nos últimos anos sobre a possibilidade de um ataque, e têm a lata de ficarem um pouco aborrecidos por encontrarem tropas no seu território.

Não sabem eles que se tropas iranianas fossem encontradas em espaço americano iria Michael Leeden de imediato propôr a sua libertação imediata?

The War on Muslims

2007-03-28T09:37:00.000+01:00

"I get combative email informing me that Moslems are savage, barbaric, crafty, and patient, biding their time through the centuries to spit in apple pie, put Mom in a seraglio, and sodomize Boy Scouts – that they have spread by the sword, live by the sword, and lust to convert us all to Islam and sell us prayer rugs. The Gates of Vienna, 1453, all that.

Perhaps. There follows a list of Christian countries I can think of that have been conquered by Moslems since the Industrial Revolution:

On the other hand, to the best of my admittedly weak historical understanding, the following Islamic countries have been conquered by Christians: Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Chad, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Libya, Indonesia, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Kyrgyz, Kazakhstan, Somalia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan, to name a few. On various occasions Christians have tried to conquer Afghanistan, but with no better luck than they deserved. " Fred Reed

América e Europa

2007-03-23T13:26:00.000Z

A América só será diferente da Europa enquanto ainda existirem conservadores que defendem aquilo que na Europa é a esquerda que faz.

Ou seja, o excepcionalismo americano é terem sido os conservadores americanos a tentar "conservar" o carácter libertarian do seu regime (que vamos lembrar, não usa uma única vez a palavra "democracia" nos seus documentos fundadores). Aliás, a extrema-direita americana são aquelas milícias armadas organizadas com uma grande repulsa inata contra o governo federal, os seus impostos e ordens do poder executivo.

Claro que agora, estes já são poucos. A América, com os neo-conservadores, por ironia, ficaram mais Europeus. A direita passou a fazer o que é esperado que a direita europeia faça. A tentação do império, das zonas de influência externas, dos militares estacionados por todo o mundo, e o securitarismo centralizado no big state,

Conservatives Bruce Fein, Bob Barr, David Keene, and Richard Viguerie have started the American Freedom Agenda,

-- End the use of military commissions to prosecute crimes.-- Prohibit the use of secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture.-- Prohibit the detention of American citizens as enemy combatants without proof.-- Restore habeas corpus for alleged alien combatants.-- End National Security Agency warrentless wiretapping.-- Empower Congress to challenge presidential signing statements.-- Bar executive use of the state secret privilege to deny justice.-- Prohibit the President from collaborating with foreign governments to kidnap, detain of torture persons abroad.-- Amend the Espionage Act to permit journalists to report on classified national security matters without threat of persecution.-- Prohibit of the labeling of groups or individuals in the U.S. as global terrorists based on secret evidence.

Churchill e o Iraque

2007-03-22T18:33:00.000Z

CHURCHILL'S FINAL FOLLY: OUR IRAQ QUAGMIRE!, (customer review)

"...The Great War. Britain and France took control of those former colonies via the spoils of victory and subsequently carved up that region for their own vested financial interests. And it was Winston Churchill who personally put forward the plans of dividing up those oil-rich lands for Britain's benefit. Churchill was a member of the British Parliament at the conclusion of that war and had been appointed by British Labor Party Prime Minister David Lloyd George to the position of Colonial Secretary, whose job was to restructure the newly inherited region. He forced together the Sunni Muslims Kurds, Sunni Muslim Arabs and Shiite Muslims under a single ruler in that land along the Tigris River to be called Iraq (Al-Jumhurria Al-Iraqia) which meant `the Republic of the River Shore.' His main goal: Establish a series of Arab states that were friendly to Great Britain and at as little cost as possible to the cash poor British Empire that was still suffering the financial effects of the just concluded four year worldwide war. The problem we face as we try to get these same tribes to work together in this democratic form of government they've just approved is that Churchill's guide for dividing up the conquered territories eighty years ago was not based on any ethnic tribal considerations into creating separate sovereign nations who would respect their Muslim neighbors. Instead, he devised a simplistic formula to ensure that the British Petroleum Oil Company made the maximum amount of profits on its wells in those lands with as little problem as possible from the locals and those he chose to become the rulers of those artificially created countries. Author Catherwood's main argument in his thesis is that Churchill made a crucial mistake when forming those three tribes into the nation of Iraq and it appears that we, as the backers of this new constitution are about to repeat, is assume that the people of those tribes believe that nationalism is more important to them than their religious beliefs. A previously disgraced Saudi Arab named Faisel Haishem who had been thrown out of those lands subsequently emigrated north and was personally selected by Churchill to rule the newly created country as a devoted ally to the west. He and his descendents of the self-proclaimed Haishemite Dynasty reigned over Iraq from 1921 to 1958 until they were deposed in a violent military coup with most of the royal family and their supporters being killed. Military dictators ruled the country from then on with an iron fist and that eventually gave us Saddam Hussein who took control in 1979 until his overthrow by the United States led multi-country military invasion in 2003. Could Winton Churchill's forced creation of Iraq back in 1922 eventually cause the downfall of the United States one century later?"

300

2007-03-15T17:02:00.000Z

Já era de esperar que Victor Davis Hanson tente transformar o relato de uma luta por afastar a ameaça de domínio por uma cultura estranha e estrangeira do seu território nativo, em qualquer tipo de confronto ideológico entre a "liberdade" e um "evil" (claro, o Irão que hoje estará prestes a dominar o mundo...começando por lançar mísseis para a Europa). Colocar Esparta (que submeteu Atenas) como símbolo de defesa dos bons princípios ocidentais ...

PS: Mudando de assunto ou talvez não, é bom que se teha presente que a Polónia invadida por Hitler (15 dias depois por Estaline, que diga-se já agora, para recuperar território ucrâniano perdido nos anos 20) no célebre e mítico Munique (onde toda a história neo-con parece começar), também foi um dos que reivindicou território à Checo-eslováquia, assim, não foi só Hitler que forçou que a parte habitada por alemães fosse entregue à Alemanha por um país desenhado em Versailles, foi também a Polónia a conseguir territórios (pequeno mas simbólico, não?) em Munique (e a Hungria também!). Foi a mesma Polónia que depois se recusou a negociar a questão dos territórios habitados por alemães (origem na antiga Prússia de Leste, etc). E foi pela Polónia que a França e Inglaterra declararam guerra, ficando provado que não foi o ultimatum de apoio à Polónia que demoveu Hitler. Se o ultimatum não tivesse sido feito, talvez Hitler tivesse apenas continuado para Leste em direcção a Estaline e tudo tivesse acabado com ambos os regimes mutuamente destruidos ou um deles fortemente debilitado (Hitler que não tinha feito a mesma purga de Estaline do seu exército - fazendo desaparecer uma classe militar com ligações ainda familiares e ainda que distantes na memória ao antigo regime - enfrentava ainda a presença da velha ordem, a prova é que quem tentou o assassinato a Hitler foi a antiga aristocracia prussiana, que o fez sem o apoio deliberado dos aliados - mais um erro - acabado todos mortos juntamente com as famílias).

Pulp Fictional History: "I don't know at what point I stopped seeing it as comic book fluff, like how the Spartans have the most conveniently placed bottomless pit ever (classic comic book gold), but I'm sure it was probably after the first time Leonidas (King of Sparta) bloviated about "logic" and "reason." While the graphics never went downhill, the script proceeded to practically nosedive into a redux of Bush's "freedom and liberty" Inauguration speech whenever Leonidas opened his mouth. Before the major battle even begins one is besieged by inconsistencies and blatant parallels. "Reluctant to battle" Sparta is forced into a war with Persia in order to "defend logic and reason" from the "tyranny and slavery of Asia" and are being hampered at home only by the Spartan council politicians who are being paid off by the enemy to not fund the Spartan army; it was like National Review commissioned its own version of reality."(...) Ultimately the smarter Arcadians realize this battle is lost and go back to their jobs in the free market, the Spartans fight until they all die, and I get to groan/roll my eyes at the end when the lone survivor (sent back before final assault to tell story) talks of how Sparta stood as the "lone light of reason & logic in the world and preserved liberty for later humankind to keep because"...wait for it... "freedom isn't free!" I leave the theater exhausted and hopeful that Americans have become so sheepled at this point that they don't even recognize the underlying message (or want one) and that they just came to watch moving pictures that also happened to have blood and female nudity in them. The next morning online I find my optimism bubble popped by the blood-thirsty artists at Cox and Forkum, the always "imaginative" Victor Davis Hanson, and reports that people are going to see 300 to "inform themselves on history." Like someone wanting to "eat healthy" by ordering a salad, and then having it only be full of iceberg lettuce and 5 lbs. of ranch dressing, Messrs. Miller and Snyder have made history appetizing to the American booboisee the only way they know how, by drenching it in misinformation and the myth of the "glorious war." To have such a movie be the Pied Piper to millions of Americans that the only way to fight a tyrannical superpower is to become ... a tyrannical superpower makes me question if William F. Buckley hasn't found a second calling in directing."

"EUA dizem que Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessou autoria do 11 de Setembro "

2007-03-15T13:04:00.000Z

"Este membro da al-Qaeda foi detido no Paquistão em Março de 2003 e transferido para Guantánamo no ano passado."

Falta saber o que é que os "Talibans" presos em Guatanamo tinham que ver com os 15 Sauditas e o seu chefe paquistanês.

Ainda histórias do Vietname

2007-03-08T14:52:00.000Z

"McCain’s father headed up the military’s Pacific command from 1968 to 1972, convincing President Nixon to illegally attack Cambodia and famously ordering the bombing of Hanoi even though he knew his son was still imprisoned there. " Num artigo sobre John McCain na Reason

Revealed: The true extent of Britain's failure in Basra

2007-02-23T13:29:00.000Z

By Patrick Cockburn

Why is the British Army still in south Iraq and what good does it do there?

The suspicion grows that Mr Blair did not withdraw them because to do so would be too gross an admission of failure and of soldiers' lives uselessly lost. It would also have left the US embarrassingly bereft of allies. Reidar Visser, an expert on Basra, says after all the publicity about the British "soft" approach in Basra in 2003, local people began to notice that the soldiers were less and less in the streets and the militias were taking over. "This, in turn, created a situation where critics claim the sole remaining objective of the British forces in Iraq is to hold out and maintain a physical presence somewhere within the borders of the governorates in the south formally left under their control, while at the same minimising their own casualties.' Mr Visser said.

In other words, British soldiers have stayed and died in southern Iraq, and will continue to do so, because Mr Blair finds it too embarrassing to end what has become a symbolic presence and withdraw them.

Other premiers' foreign policy misjudgements...

Lord Salisbury The Boer War 1899-1902

The discovery of gold in the two independent Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State led Britain to flex its military muscle in South Africa. There was enthusiastic support for the war back home in Britain, giving Salisbury a landslide in the 1900 general election. However, support began to wane as the war dragged on, and there was outrage at Britain's brutal tactics - although they led to the Boers' surrender in 1902. Despite the apparently successful outcome, it contributed in large part to the catastrophic defeat for the Conservatives in 1906, and signified the beginning of the end for the British Empire.

David Lloyd George The Easter Rising 1916

Prior to the 1916 Easter Rising, there had been little appetite among the Irish for armed struggle. But the execution of the leaders of the uprising, and subsequent atrocities, most notably the 1921 Croke Park massacre, only served to strengthen the resolve of those fighting for independence. What had begun as a small-scale armed rebellion escalated rapidly. Sinn Fein won 70 per cent of Irish seats in the 1918 general election, which was followed by an upsurge in violence, retaliations, a declaration of independence, a war of independence, and finally, in 1922, independence itself.

Anthony Eden The Suez Crisis, 1956

Covertly arranged in collusion with France and Israel, the mission was to regain control of the Suez canal (nationalised by Egypt), and to overthrow the nationalist Nasser regime. While the initial outcome was successful from a military point of view, and with minimal British casualties, the perception that Britain and France were seeking some kind of colonial resurgence did not sit well in Washington. Eisenhower made it clear to Eden that he did not want the operation to go ahead, and was willing to back it up with economic threats. Eden caved in, ending his career and Britain's status as world superpower.

Robert Peel The First Anglo-Afghan War 1839-42

The mission to curb Russian influence by deposing Dost Mohammed and restoring former ruler Shoja Shah, was launched to strengthen British interests. The British took Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul, captured Dost Mohammed and restored the Shoja to the throne. Their job seemingly done, they withdrew, leaving a garrison of troops and two envoys in Kabul. In 1841, however, there was an uprising, and the garrison was forced to surrender. The retreating British troops and civilians were massacred, bolstering Afghanistan's growing reputation as a graveyard for foreign armies.

Destaque

2007-02-22T11:16:00.000Z

Who Is IOZ? (blog) [Ora aqui estão comentários muito bem escritos sobre a Somália e Afeganistão]

Publicado na CL

Bush's Somalia Strategy Enables an Ethiopian Despot

2007-02-16T13:09:00.000Z

The invasion was a rout. But it also was very unpopular in Ethiopia. "Somalia is not a threat to Ethiopia," said Negasso Gidada, the former Ethiopian president who served alongside Meles but recently has emerged as one of the prime minister's most outspoken critics. "The Somalis didn't attack us, so why are we fighting them?"
Most felt that the attack was a diversion, both for Bush, from Iraq, and for Meles, from international scrutiny of his domestic affairs. Bush's gambit may not have worked: Already, as Ethiopian troops withdraw, the Islamic Courts are regrouping, and there is little hope that the US-backed transitional government, a fractious collection of warlords, can hold Somalia together." The Nation

Bush Orders More Troops to Afghanistan

2007-02-16T09:47:00.001Z

Eastwood says his WWII films expose futility of war

2007-02-13T09:48:00.000Z

E isto sobre a indisputável boa guerra. Aquela em que Estaline foi aliado e ficou com metade do mundo e foram lançadas 2 bombas atómicas. Uma vitória da "liberdade". A única coisa que foi mesmo "libertada" foi o mundo do Império Britânico, mas antes não o tivesse sido.

Mas fico com a impressão que conservadores-e-liberais-libertarians-pro-war-anti-pacifistas-intervencionistas-que-querem-que-todos-os-que-consideram-inimigos-se-convertam-ao-não-intervencionismo-e-pacifismo vão ser capazes de gostar do filme, das palavras de Clint e continuar a justificar com os raciocínos mais rebuscados qualquer coisa que envolva bombardeiros e porta-aviões e forças libertadoras de ocupação e reeducação das massas tribais para esmagar a mais leve e remota ameaça. É que estão a ver, com o Afeganistão e o Iraque não se deram mais atentados nos EUA. Só nos outros sítios todos.

Sobre a Rússia

2007-02-13T08:39:00.000Z

"How would we react if China today brought Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela into a military alliance, convinced Mexico to sell oil to Beijing and bypass the United States, and began meddling in the affairs of Central America and Caribbean countries to effect the electoral defeat of regimes friendly to the United States? How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland? " Does Putin Not Have a Point? by Patrick J. Buchanan

2007-02-13T08:36:00.000Z

Para quê o esforço continuado e repetido de Rui Ramos e Luciano Amaral em pretender provar que o Iraque é mau mas que podia ser pior?

Iran Supplying IEDs to Sunni Insurgency?

2007-02-12T11:30:00.000Z

Update: MSNBC reports:

“U.S. officials said there was no evidence of Iranian-made EFPs having fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents who operate mainly in Anbar province in the west of Iraq, Baghdad and regions surrounding the capital.”

Okay, Iran is supplying bombs to who then? Not, they admit, to America’s enemies in Iraq – the “Sunni Insurgency” – but, to what the military officials termed “rogue elements” of the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He is a key backer of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The U.S. officials glossed over armaments having reached the other major Shiite militia organization, the Badr Brigade. It is the military wing of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leaders also have close ties to the U.S.

So: Iran is arming the AMERICAN-BACKED SHI’ITE GOVERNMENT. (?)

"Who speaks for Jews in Britain?"

2007-02-06T10:13:00.000Z

We will not accept the vilification of those who protest at injustices carried out in the name of the Jewish people.

"...The slur of "traitor" or "self-hating Jew" is especially noxious. For, if we feel compelled to protest against injustice to Palestinians, this is partly because of the lessons of our own history: the Jewish experience of marginalisation and persecution. Furthermore, when the language of human rights is spoken, many of us (secular and religious) hear the voices of those Hebrew prophets, rabbis, writers, activists and other Jewish figures down the centuries for whom Judaism means nothing if it does not mean social justice.

So, when we speak out against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or the bombing of Lebanon, or discrimination against Palestinians within Israel itself, we are not turning against our Jewish identity; we are turning to it. Some of us, recalling that nearly 40 years have passed since Israel's occupation began, hear a resonance. This was the length of time the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, near the end of which Moses gave them a directive: "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20). It is a compass bearing for all humanity, especially when we are trying to find our way - or help others to find theirs - to a better future.

Coisas de Churchill

2007-02-03T19:22:00.000Z

Web of Deceit By Barry M. Lando By Derrick O'Keefe

"...tracing the tragic history of Iraq back to the creation of borders designed to suit the oil lust of the then-mighty British Empire. Over the decades, imperial arrogance and disregard for local input seem to have been constants. We learn, for instance, that when the power brokers met in 1921 in Cairo to redraw the Middle East’s map, Winston Churchill didn’t want any Arabs in the hotel or even in its gardens. Later that year, faced with a growing resistance to their occupation, Churchill urged the RAF to explore the use of chemical weapons to put down the unruly subjects."

Cristãos por Israel e pleo fim do mundo

2007-02-02T08:23:00.000Z

The Troubling Worldview of the 'Rapture-Ready' Christian.

"(...) The dispensationalist view of Daniel 9:27 provides some troubling implications as well. They don’t care that tearing down the al-Aqsa mosque would result in a regional war and cause all sorts of global distress. This would not be a bad thing in their minds. They believe that it was all foreordained and is a sign that the end of the world would be soon upon us.

Also, if you buy into these interpretations, talks of peace in the Middle East are futile. Jews and Muslims must continue killing each other at high rates. And who will be the one bringing peace to the Middle East in this popular end-time paradigm? Not Jesus, but the Antichrist. Therefore, talk of Middle East peace during this current "dispensation" is not from Jesus, but the Antichrist. When dispensationalists hear talk of peace summits or treaties in the Middle East, they assume it must have evil origins and be antichristic. If that’s the cause, why bother trying to make the world a better place? All we need to do is be good Christians and wait for our ticket out of this earth and make way for the Antichrist.

Dispensationalists are numerous and popular. Well-connected preachers like Hagee have political connections. Dispensational preachers and lobbyists have the ear of the White House and are directly trying to influence foreign policy based on their very questionable theological views, which, by the way, are less than 200 years old. This is more than just a quirky theology that doesn’t affect those who do not hold it. Dispensationalists want to bring about world events that would have catastrophic implications for other Christians and for non-Christians. (...)

The logic and implications are clear. Society is going to hades in a handbasket. There’s little we can do to stem the tide of evil. The Middle East must further deteriorate. Anyone who disagrees with Israel’s foreign policy is opposing God. The third most important site to Muslims must be crushed to make way for a new Jewish Temple. Good Christians should support the building of a new temple with new animal sacrifices taking place inside of it (compare Hebrews 10 to the theology of Darby and Hal Lindsey). And in a strange sense, war is kinda good and peace is kinda bad – since war is a sign that the end is near and peace on earth is a sign of the Antichrist. Any Christian who doesn’t agree with all this is deceived at best and a heretic at worst.

When you understand that millions of Christians believe this way, and that some of them are actually fairly influential on the political scene, you begin to see why this theology needs to be refuted. By refuting it, dispensationalists think you’re trying to refute God. I would argue that you’re being more faithful to God and the very Scriptures themselves. This is not just an in-house debate that only affects myself and other Christians. Dispensationalists have a vision for the world and it is bad news for everybody. Therefore, it would do you all good to spend some time in the Bible and see what exactly the Scriptures have to say on this subject."

US 'victory' against cult leader was 'massacre'

2007-01-31T10:59:00.001Z

US 'victory' against cult leader was 'massacre'

There are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre.

A picture is beginning to emerge of a clash between an Iraqi Shia tribe on a pilgrimage to Najaf and an Iraqi army checkpoint that led the US to intervene with devastating effect. The involvement of Ahmed al-Hassani (also known as Abu Kamar), who believed himself to be the coming Mahdi, or Messiah, appears to have been accidental.

The story emerging on independent Iraqi websites and in Arabic newspapers is entirely different from the government's account of the battle with the so-called "Soldiers of Heaven", planning a raid on Najaf to kill Shia religious leaders.

The cult denied it was involved in the fighting, saying it was a peaceful movement. The incident reportedly began when a procession of 200 pilgrims was on its way, on foot, to celebrate Ashura in Najaf. They came from the Hawatim tribe, which lives between Najaf and Diwaniyah to the south, and arrived in the Zarga area, one mile from Najaf at about 6am on Sunday. Heading the procession was the chief of the tribe, Hajj Sa'ad Sa'ad Nayif al-Hatemi, and his wife driving in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk. When they reached an Iraqi army checkpoint it opened fire, killing Mr Hatemi, his wife and his driver, Jabar Ridha al-Hatemi. The tribe, fully armed because they were travelling at night, then assaulted the checkpoint to avenge their fallen chief.

Members of another tribe called Khaza'il living in Zarga tried to stop the fighting but they themselves came under fire. Meanwhile, the soldiers and police at the checkpoint called up their commanders saying they were under attack from al-Qai'da with advanced weapons. Reinforcements poured into the area and surrounded the Hawatim tribe in the nearby orchards. The tribesmen tried - in vain - to get their attackers to cease fire.(...)"

US 'victory' against cult leader was 'massacre'

2007-01-31T10:59:00.000Z

O que vem aí na Somália

2007-01-30T16:47:00.000Z

"What about the Islamic Courts? What do they need to do to defeat the state?

They have already accomplished their first task: avoid the Ethiopian army and go to ground, preserving their forces and weapons for a guerrilla war. Had they stood and fought, not only would they have lost, they would have risked annihilation. Mao's rule, "When the enemy advances, we retreat," is of vital importance to most 4GW forces.

The next task is harder: they must now regroup, keep most of their forces loyal, supplied, paid and motivated, and begin a two-fold campaign, one against the Ethiopians or any other foreign forces and the second against the Transitional Federal Government. This will be a test of their organizational skills, and it is by no means clear they have those skills.

Time will tell, time probably measured in weeks or months, not years.Against occupying foreign forces, the Islamic Courts will need to wrap themselves in nationalism as well as religion, so that they rather than the TFG are seen as the legitimate Somali authorities. The fact that the TFG has to be propped up by foreign troops makes this task relatively easy."
Somalia: A State Restored? Not So Fast by William S. Lind

As causas do Imperialismo

2007-01-30T16:45:00.000Z

É preciso descobrir um texto de um historiador inglês (AJP Taylor sempre a demonstrar o seu carácter único) à esquerda para ver negada de forma notável o alegado carácter capitalista do Imperialismo. São os interesses económicos? Não. "Their measuring-stick was Power, not Profit.

A. J. P. Taylor, Economic Imperialism, (1952): "Ideas live longer than men, and the writer who can attach his name to an idea is safe for immortality. Darwin will live as long as Evolution, Marx be forgotten only when there are no class-struggles. In the same way, no survey of the international history of the twentieth century can be complete without the name of J A Hobson.

[a explicação que se tornou norma...]

He it was who found an economic motive for Imperialism. Lenin took over Hobson's explanation, which thus became the basis for Communist foreign policy to the present day. Non-Marxists were equally convinced, and contemporary history has been written largely in the light of Hobson's discovery. This discovery was an off-shoot from his general doctrine of under-consumption. The capitalists cannot spend their share of the national production. Saving makes their predicament worse. They demand openings for investment outside their saturated national market, and they find these openings in the undeveloped parts of the world. This is Imperialism. In Hobson's words, 'the modern foreign policy of Great Britain has been primarily a struggle for profitable markets of investment' - and what applied to Great Britain was equally true of France or Germany.(...)

This idea is now so embedded in our thought that we cannot imagine a time when it did not exist. Yet the earlier Radical opponents of Imperialism knew nothing of it. They supposed that Imperialism sprang from a primitive greed for territory or a lust for conquest.

[mas curioso é que...]

Previously Marxists had condemned capitalism as being pacific and particularly for preventing the great war of liberation against Russia. Now all wars became 'capitalistic', and war the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. It is not surprising that, when the first world war had broken out, Lenin seized on Hobson's 'bourgeois-pacifist' theory and made it the cornerstone of neo-Marxism. Like most prophets he boasted of his foresight only when his visions had become facts.(...)[mas na verdade ...]Their measuring-stick was Power, not Profit. When they disputed over tropical African territory or scrambled for railway concessions in China, their aim was to strengthen their respective empires, not to benefit the financiers of the City.(...)

[E quem é que devemos temer? O capitalista?]

He knew that men love Power above all else. This, not Imperialism, is the besetting sin. (...)It is the high-minded and inspired, the missionaries not the capitalists, who cause most of the trouble. Worst of all the men of Power who are missionaries as well."

E missionários com vontade de usar o Poder para cumprir a sua missão ...

Imagine that

2007-01-30T16:43:00.000Z

"Economist Lawrence Parks has explained how the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 made possible our involvement in World War I. Without the ability to create new money, the federal government never could have afforded the enormous mobilization of men and material. Prior to that, American wars were financed through taxes and borrowing, both of which have limits." Ron Paul

Que tal pensar na possibilidade de: ... a Grande Guerra acabava com uma espécie de empate e... ...o Kaiser não tinha sido deposto, o Czar teria tremido e sido obrigado a grandes reformas mas não caído, os Habsburgos mantinham-se como um equilíbrio à influência Prussa na grande alemanha, os ingleses e franceses não teriam repartido o Médio Oriente criando os países artificiais (Iraque, Koweit, Kurdos de fora...Palestina, Síria). A Itália não se sentiria traída por ter entrado na guerra com promessas que não foram cumpridas no fim ... daí Mussolini (que apesar de tudo não só evitou o comunismo na Itália como protegeu enquanto conseguiu a Aústria da Alemanha).

Nem Estaline teria subido ao poder. Nem Hitler. Os chineses não veriam o Japão ser reconhecido - formalmente - como uma potência na zona. Ho-Chi-Min não teria sido escolhido o comunismo como bandeira do seu nacionalismo vietnamita cujo direito à soberania estava expresso dos 14 pontos de Woodrow Wilson (sabiam que Ho-CHi-Min foi a Paris na sequência de Versailles sendo ignorado pelo cinismo dos Impérios vencedores? Eu não). O mundo não teria vivido nos custos do realismo anti-comunista da guerra fria.

Quase todos os males modernos nasceram com a Grande Guerra. Aquela onde todas as Alianças foram evocadas.

Um comentário acertado

2007-01-29T12:59:00.000Z

Mais um no Duas Cidades

Somália - Mais uma guerra gnóstica

"Durante uma década, a Somália foi um caso típico de Estado mais que falhado: desaparecido. Os Somális derrotaram mesmo os estados unidos, simolizado por Blackhawk down. De repente, a campanha Blitzkrieg pelo exército etíope pareceu mudar tudo. Os islamistas foram postos de lado por tanques e jactos. Veio o governo federal transitório, criado há anos mas quase invisível dentro da Somália. O Estado somali foi restaurado - ou assim parece. Este choque directo entre a ordem internacional dos estados e o anti-estado, será um exemplo instrutivo. Se o Estado somali falhar outra vez, o futuro pertence aos gnósticos da quarta geração.

A melhor suposição é que na Somália, a dependência do novo estado perante tropas estrangeiras será fatal. As guerras de estado contra o anti-estado são competições pela legitimidade e nenhum regime estabelecido por intervenção estrangeira pode ganhá-la. Contudo, se os islamistas não se organizarem eficazmente, o novo governo poderá ganhar por defeito. De qualquer modo, é seguro dizer que o resultado em Somália terá um impacto para além das fronteiras daquele pequeno país."

"Doutrina Militar Russa - Revisão de Janeiro de 2007 "

2007-01-29T12:44:00.000Z

Via Duas Cidades

Doutrina Militar Russa - Revisão de Janeiro de 2007
Do meu colega WAis Ilya Platov recebi o seguinte:The new Russian military doctrine presented on January 20th 2007 by General Gareev.

The purpose of the new doctrine, elaborated under the auspices of the Russian General Staff and under the supervision of the President's Security Council, is to supersede the already existing "new" doctrine presented in 2000. What justifies such a change seven years later? Two issues are of interest:

a) the definition of the most important threats to Russia from the outside, and
b) military reform. The latter issue will be of a particular concern for Russian society, where the current draft system inherited from the USSR is considered to be corrupt, ineffective, and threatening to the lives of new recruits.

General Gareev justified the necessity for a new doctrine by announcing significant shifts
in the "geopolitical and military-political sphere." He stated that some points of the previous doctrine are outdated and do not reflect Russia's new geopolitical situation. From an international relations standpoint, the fact of a new doctrine is part of a more general trend towards a "clarification" of Russia's positioning on the global arena. Priorities are much more clearly defined, as well as its main priorities and targets.

1) About the exact nature of "menaces," the doctrine is purposefully vague. Gen. Gareev made reference not only to direct military threats, but also to "covert" political, military and economic "threats," putting on the same level the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, and recent "revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, sponsored according to him by NATO and the US. Russia clearly wants to send an unambiguous message to the West to stay out of the "Near Abroad," considered as the main geopolitical priority, hence the necessity to keep a large army capable to protect an extended border.

2) At the same time, Gen. Gareev considers that the future war will be a "partisan" war, and not a "global conflict" with a great power. Internal security threats ("terrorism and separatism"), an avowed priority, are directly linked to the situation in the former Soviet republics. While their relative autonomy in the foreign policy domain is tolerated, any attempt to go to the "enemy side" provokes a very harsh reaction (i.e. deployment of NATO troops in Crimea, Georgia, etc.).

3) Concerning nuclear power, Russia needs to continue to develop its nuclear arsenal, as the possibility of global conflict is not excluded (NATO? China?). "Wars of the future will necessitate conventional, high-precision weapons, under a permanently maintained threat of using nuclear weapons."

The doctrine is pragmatic in inspiration: it discards "ideological issues" in favour of a 19th century-style realpolitik (this is my own impression). The NATO and US are not considered as ideological rivals, but competitors with whom it is possible to cooperate in selected fields (like anti-terrorism).

Perhaps the most interesting point is a renewed emphasis on energy issues, considered to be the main source of coming global conflicts in the next 10-15 years (very likely according to Gareev). Russia's main strength seems to be its energy resources. He pointed to the USA as the main source of such a threat, using Iraq as an example of a predatory quest for energy resources; he also mentioned the likelihood of "political and economic rivalries" arising from this competition.

The general restated Russia's commitment to multilateralism, and estimated that the "USA is no longer able to carry the burden of global leadership," and that Russia is called to play the role of "geopolitical referee".

Concerning the much-needed reform of the Russian military, the doctrine states the following:

1) An assessment of the "critical" situation of the current system of obligatory military service: "the army […] is incapable of supplying young military men".

2) The new doctrine does not intend to eliminate obligatory military service, but to create a mixed system with a professional core supplemented by a draft army. The obligatory military service will be reduced from 2 to 1 year, and eventually to 6-8 months. While this does not solve Russia's problems, it will certainly reduce casualties due to mistreatment (usually carried on by second-year servicemen on the new recruits). According to Gen. Gareev estimates, the new system will be put in place within 5-6 years.

It is difficult to appreciate at this moment the reaction of the Russian public to the new doctrine. Media close to Putin underplay the "hostile" element of the doctrine, stressing that US and Russia are "partners" in the war against terror. The main concern will however be the issues of the reform of the military. Some observers consider that the doctrine advanced by Gareev artificially boosts the importance of "global threats" in order to justify the maintenance of a large Soviet-style army.

Kosovo

2007-01-26T13:28:00.000Z

The Big Question: Is Kosovo just an accident of war, and can it thrive as an independent state?

Why are we asking the question now?

Because today the UN mediator and former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, will give Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Russia their first sight of his plans to resolve the status of Kosovo. The proposal is expected to involve a huge degree of autonomy for Kosovo - which is technically a province of Serbia, although under UN control - but not full and immediate independence.

Mr Ahtisaari is expected to suggest that Kosovo gains the trappings of a country, including a flag, along with the right to enter into international agreements and apply for membership of international organisations and institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Mr Ahtisaari will then travel to Belgrade and Pristina to deliver the news to politicians there on 2 February.

How did history shape Kosovo?

Though Slavs and Albanians have lived side by side in Kosovo since the eighth century, the province was the centre of the Serbian empire until the mid-14th century. Moreover, Serbs regard Kosovo as the birthplace of their state. One of the key moments in history was Serbia's defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which led to centuries of rule under the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Serbia regained control of Kosovo in 1913, and the province later became part of the Yugoslav federation.

Throughout the 20th century, the fortunes of the two main ethnic communities fluctuated. Suppression of the Albanians in the 1960s gave way to more tolerance from Belgrade, then more repression. Meanwhile, the demographic balance tipped strongly in favour of ethnic Albanians, who became the overwhelming majority.

What provoked the war with Nato?

Resentment of Kosovan influence within Yugoslavia provided a useful political tool for Serb nationalists, most notably the man who became Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic. When he won that job in 1989, he stripped Kosovo of its autonomy. In the same year, Milosevic made his famous speech to hundreds of thousands of supporters at a celebration marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. Milosevic told the crowd that, six centuries after the famous battle, "we are again engaged in battles and are facing battles". These were, he said, "not armed battles", though he added ominously that "such things cannot be excluded yet".

A resistance movement gathered pace among Albanians in the 1990s. Albanian leaders made a unilateral declaration of independence in 1991 and a guerrilla movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army, attacked Serb targets, prompting a crackdown. When Milosevic rejected an international deal to end the crisis, and refused to end his campaign against Kosovo Albanians, Nato began air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999.

The repression of the Kosovo Albanians was stepped up and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. Despite several public relations disasters (such as bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), Nato's concerted bombardment succeeded in forcing a Serb retreat from Kosovo. After he fell from power Mr Milosevic was put on trial in The Hague on charges including genocide, though he died before the tribunal finished hearing the case.

What is the situation in Kosovo now?

The province is administered by the UN and relations between the two main communities are tense and sometimes violent. Ethnic Albanians number about 2.1 million, while about 175,000 Serbs remain following a post-war exodus of non-Albanians. The Serbian minority lives in separate areas, in particular near Mitrovica, and enjoys the protection of peacekeepers from Nato - the organisation that bombed Milosevic out of Kosovo. The UN and Nato are trying to reduce their presence and hand over more responsibility to the EU.
Economically underdeveloped, Kosovo remains a creation of the international community. Though declining sharply, assistance from foreign donors still accounted for some 23 per cent of gross domestic product in 2004, while spending by expatriates working for international organisations accounted for another 5.7 per cent of GDP.

According to the EU, Kosovo's judicial system is weak and unable to deliver a proper service. Corruption is widespread at all levels of life and "organised crime is entrenched in Kosovo and its prevalence gives rise to serious concern". The EU identified worries about "trafficking of drugs, weapons and human beings, prostitution and large-scale organised crime activities involving the infringement of copyright laws".

Will the Ahtisaari plan be acceptable?

Certainly not in Belgrade. In elections on Sunday, the nationalist Radical party emerged with the biggest share of the vote, but even Boris Tadic, the more pro-western leader of the Democratic Party, is opposed to full autonomy for the Kosovars. No Serb politician wants to go down in history as the person who surrendered Kosovo.

On the ground in Kosovo the local Serbs fear that any increase in power for the Albanian majority could have implications for their security. To reassure them, Mr Ahtisaari will pledge a continuing international presence there. But the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Albanian population wants full independence and is becoming increasingly impatient. Extremists have attacked UN vehicles in protest at the lack of autonomy and may be disappointed with the Ahtisaari compromise.

Will the plan work?

Success or failure depends on whether Russia blocks the blueprint in the UN Security Council. As Serbia's closest ally among the big powers, Russia considers itself to be Belgrade's biggest defender. Moreover, it complains that giving Kosovo any sort of independence sets a dangerous precedent. It is thinking here of its own backyard, particularly Chechnya.

Could Kosovo be successful as an independent state?

The current situation is not sustainable. With unemployment at nearly 50 per cent and high levels of poverty, the province remains an economic basket case, heavily dependent on outside aid. Diplomats say the only hope of turning around this dire situation is to secure an agreement resolving Kosovo's status. This would give legal certainty to potential investors. The danger is that the situation could spiral out of control if there is a return to widespread ethnic violence. Already, the Nato protection force has stepped up patrols and checkpoints to try to head-off any upsurge in sectarian unrest.

Should Kosovo be granted full independence from Serbia?

Yes...

* The overwhelming majority of the population is ethnic Albanian, and they have a right to self-determination
* Lack of nationhood is holding Kosovo back from developing economically and socially
* The current Nato-protected, UN-administered status quo is not sustainable in the long term

No...

* Kosovo is the historic birthplace of the Serb nation and losing it would stir up Serb nationalism
* Independence would endanger the physical security of the Serb minority in Kosovo
* It would set an unfortunate precedent which would encourage a host of other regions to press for independence

"A angústia da Sérvia"

2007-01-25T16:30:00.000Z

Nota: A ansgústia, diga-se, é geral. Vai ser difícil ou impossível mesmo, impôr a não independência no Kosovo (afinal, eram os "freddom fighters"...). Se não for já, mais tarde. Mas recorde-se que um dos motivos do conflito nos Balcãs, foi que a seguir às várias independências, os enclaves sérvios nessas novas independências pretenderam também por sua vez serem reconhecidos. E assim a guerra pela secessão, que nunca é "limpa" ( americana terá sido a mais sangrenta da história).A excessiva penalização de uma das partes, uma mania "ocidental" que arranja logo classificações morais ("ultra-nacionalistas", "ethnic-cleasing") de marketing diplomático e áurea de legitimação (ultrapassando o "mero" direito internacional) intervindo a favor de um qualquer "bem" contra oum"mal", conduziu a que os Sérvios percepcionem a situação territorial com cinismo. (Curioso. Foi o que aconteceu com os alemães na sequência da imposição de Versailes, com os resultados conhecidos).Resultado, o precedente vai servir de jurisprudência. É verdade que o princípio da Secessão como vontade pacífica expressa num processo democrático não tem refutação fácil. Outra coisa, porém, é o intervencionismo externo "ajudar á confusão". Estes processos já são demasiados complexos e instáveis para termos a "comunidade internacional" a introduzir mais variáveis e novos teatros de decisão.

Negócios, João Carlos Barradas:

"Na próxima sexta-feira, serão conhecidos os termos do plano do enviado especial da ONU Martti Ahtisaari para o estatuto da província onde cerca de dois milhões de albaneses esperam pela independência a prazo para desespero dos 80 mil sérvios que ainda residem no chamado baluarte histórico da Sérvia onde, em 1389, o príncipe Lazar perdeu a vida frente às hostes otomanas de Murad I.A ter vingado o compromisso negociado pelo Grupo de Contacto – Grã-Bretanha, França, Alemanha, Itália, Rússia e Estados Unidos – a formalização das condições de independência do Kosovo partirá do pressuposto expresso publicamente de que os albaneses têm o direito de se separar de Belgrado.As negociações abertas em Fevereiro do ano passado entre Belgrado e Pristina, sob égide da ONU, partem do pressuposto de que a província, protectorado internacional desde 1999, seja obrigada a criar instituições de segurança e judiciais sob supervisão externa, tenha interdita a possibilidade de eventual confederação, federação ou integração com a Albânia e mantenha a integridade territorial de forma a obstar a um efeito dominó de partilha étnica na Macedónia e na Bósnia-Herzegovina.O exemplo da secessão do Montenegro veio, no entanto, evidenciar que a "soberania limitada" da província poderá vir a revelar-se uma mero compasso de espera para a independência a prazo, depois de obtidas garantias para as minorias não-albanesas, essencialmente os residentes sérvios, e definidos os termos de protecção e livre acesso aos santuários e templos da Igreja ortodoxa no Kosovo. (...)A emancipação do Kosovo é, contudo, um dado irreversível, mas a atitude de Moscovo é um dos elementos a obstar a um compromisso. Vladimir Putin reafirmou ainda no seu encontro domingo, em Sotchi, com Angela Merkel que um compromisso implica o acordo mútuo de Belgrado e Pristina, insinuando, deste modo, que a Rússia poderia vetar uma resolução do Conselho de Segurança não aceitável por Belgrado. Ainda assim, quanto à última variante nas declarações de Putin sobre o Kosovo como questão a implicar o respeito por "princípios únicos e universais" na resolução de conflitos étnico-nacionais os sérvios não podem, no entanto, albergar grandes esperanças. O Kremlin visa essencialmente cedências da União Europeia e dos Estados Unidos nos casos de apoio de Moscovo aos secessionistas da Transdnistria, na Moldova, da Abkázia e da Ossétia do Sul, na Geórgia, às reivindicações das minorias russas nos estados bálticos e aos arménios do Nagorno-Karabah. O precedente que a autonomia ou futura independência do Kosovo possa vir alegadamente a representar como pretexto para Moscovo reconhecer actos de secessão de minorias russas ou pró-russas no antigo espaço soviético não implica um apoio determinado do Kremlin às pretensões sérvias.Nesses Balcãs que extravasam História para tão diminuta Geografia, no dizer sem arrependimento de Winston Curchill, talvez a Europa não se venha a perder como em 1914, mas convém ter em conta que os riscos dos jogos diplomáticos já por demasiadas vezes se revelaram indesejáveis para todos os protagonistas."

Pérolas do "Union of the State" speech

2007-01-25T09:42:00.000Z

* "This war is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us."

PS: E que condições seram essas ... e os palestinianos estarão apostados numa cruzada "ideológica"?

* "Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies"

PS: Humm...Hitler e a sua subida constitucional ao poder. O apoio popular que o Comunismo e o Fascismo já chegaram a ter. Os resultados dos partidos islâmicos quando têm a possibilidade de concorrer. "Give me liberty or give me death" de um dos pais da revolução americana Patrick Henry...a conquista da independência da Irlanda.

Ler The Ideologue, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Moscow 1941 by Rodric Braithwaite

2007-01-23T18:39:00.000Z

Edward N. Luttwak : Russian Winter Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at Warby Rodric Braithwaite Knopf. 416 pp. $30.00

Why did the peoples of Stalin’s Soviet Union resist the German invasion in 1941? Nobody need ask why they resisted the 1942 offensive that almost reached the Caspian Sea. Or why they fought ferociously thereafter, from Stalingrad all the way to Berlin in the largest military campaign in human history. For by January, February, and March 1942, Soviet forces had reconquered hundreds of villages and several towns in a wide arc around Moscow that had been in German hands for a few weeks or months, and soldiers and survivors soon spread the word of what had been found.In place after place, there were Russian prisoners of war, dead by the thousands in open fields enclosed by coils of barbed wire; they had not been shot, but simply left to die of hunger. There were the frozen bodies of countless civilians, mostly old men, women, and children. German troops had seized their homes and forced them out after robbing them of furs, sheepskin jackets, or even humble rags; they died struggling through the waist-high snow in a vain attempt to find shelter in temperatures of minus 30 degrees centigrade. Then there were the horrific remains of hangings and mass shootings of “Bolshevik commissars”—a category that could embrace any state or party official—as well as of Jews and of resisters, including those who had failed to obey commands only because they did not understand German.By 1942, in short, the Germans had become monsters in human form, who had to be resisted at any cost. But that was not yet known in 1941. On the contrary, and especially in the Ukraine, the German army enjoyed an excellent reputation dating back to World War I, when invading German troops were known for their disciplined behavior. Besides, a great many of Stalin’s subjects had excellent reasons for refusing to defend the Soviet Union, whose economic strategy was based on the ruthless extraction of agricultural output to pay for industrial and military investment. In the 1930’s, in order to break actual or potential resistance to forced collectivization, millions of supposedly richer peasants (“Kulaks”) had been deported to Siberia under atrocious conditions, and many more millions died of hunger in local famines caused by the forcible requisition of crops at gunpoint, plain administrative incompetence, and an ideological contempt for the peasantry that blinded urban party officials to the imperatives of rural life.So it is not surprising that in 1941 many peasants ceremoniously received the first German invaders with bread and salt and high expectations of liberation. Nor is it surprising that, in towns and cities, the Nazis found natural collaborators among the surviving bourgeoisie or those, including the humblest shopkeepers, who had been persecuted as such by the regime. Even safely proletarian party members had grounds for refusing to defend Stalin’s regime, whose purges had first carried off the higher echelons of Old Bolsheviks and then continued down the line through every branch of the party apparatus and state bureaucracy.Finally, the disaster of the German invasion of June 22, 1941 was itself demoralizing, especially within the ranks of the Red Army. Although not many knew that Stalin had been personally responsible for the failure to heed the sixty-odd warnings of the impending invasion, some dating back more than six months, the consequences of that failure were obvious to all. Soviet air and ground forces, kept in front-line deployments and advanced airfields instead of being pulled back for a counterblow from safer positions in the rear, were quickly overrun by the first thrust of the German offensive. The result was the immediate loss of thousands of aircraft, tanks, and artillery pieces (more than the Germans had on all fronts), leaving the remaining Soviet forces desperately weak in both armor and airpower.That is why the Germans could advance in a series of great encirclements to reach the approaches to the Moscow region by October 1941, precipitating both the official evacuation of ministries and factories and the panicked flight of many officials. By then, it was by no means unreasonable for Hitler to consider his Russian campaign essentially won. British intelligence concurred, as did most other observers.What happened next to save the day was not, as legend has it, the onset of the Russian winter—the German Panzers could advance swiftly on frozen ground—but an astonishing recovery by the Soviet army in the field and the population behind it. This defied all logic, and cannot be explained by appeal to German atrocities as yet unknown. And this is the mystery that Rodric Braithwaite addresses in Moscow 1941, a triumph of historical explanation.In arriving at his answer, Braithwaite reviews and presents anew the controversies that have bedeviled conventional diplomatic and military histories of the Russian front. Why did Stalin ignore the excellent intelligence foretelling the invasion? (He expected an ultimatum with outrageous demands—which he meant to accept.) Would the Germans have done better by heading straight to Moscow instead of conquering the Ukraine first? (Probably not.) Had Stalin been planning a surprise attack of his own, which the German advance preempted? (A fashionable thesis for a while, but nonsense.) And so forth.But the question on which this book is focused remains that of motivation. Why, instead of surrendering in what were obviously hopeless circumstances—as even the best British troops had done, and would do—did Soviet troops fight to the death? And that made a huge difference: some 100,000 Germans were killed by December 1941, mostly by little groups of leaderless Red Army stragglers whose units had fallen apart and which the Germans listed as destroyed. And why did civilians volunteer in such huge numbers, forming militia units that were mostly cut down in their first encounters with the enemy?Braithwaite’s answer is that, after the colossal and humiliating defeats of the great battles of encirclement in which the Red Army had been easily outmaneuvered again and again, the war had become a fight for self-respect, and for national identity. For Russians, the national identity in question was Russian, an instinctive patriotic reflex. For those non-Russian nationalities that in one way or another had advanced under Soviet rule despite all its cruelties, that identity was Soviet.These non-Russians included central Asians who had been emancipated from Islamic medievalism and Jews liberated from czarist anti-Semitism and not yet subjected to its late-Stalinist variety. It is not by chance that one hero of the battle for Moscow was the Khazak lieutenant Baurjan Momysh-Uly, immortalized in Aleksandr Bek’s factual novel, The Volokolamsk Highway (1944). Another was Lev Mikhailovich Dovator, the Jewish general in command of the Cossack cavalry corps of the Red Army—a fitting reversal of the historic relationship between Cossack and Jew. Thus, in the course of answering his own question, Braithwaite illuminates both an essential quality of Russian culture and the superimposed workings of the Soviet regime and Soviet institutions, including the army.Braithwaite is obviously a talented historian, and one who knows how to write. He also knows Russian, not as a foreigner who has studied the language but as a highly cultured Russian might. He seems to have read everything of importance on his subject, including the latest crop of published diaries, sociological studies, and even popular histories like Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad (1998) and its Russian equivalents.

Hillary Clinton:

2007-01-23T14:56:00.000Z

Even Worse Than I Remembered

Bob has some thoughts on Hillary Clinton's announcement she's running for president:

In the wake of 9-11, it wasn't just George W. Bush telling the world "every nation has to be either with us or against us." It was Hillary, as you can hear for yourself.

In October 2002, during the debate about giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, it wasn't just Dick Cheney telling the world in that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It was Hillary, from the floor of Congress.

And in February 2005, it wasn't just John McCain claiming that democracy was taking root in Iraq, and that the insurgency was in its last throes. It was Hillary, standing right at John McCain's side.

Yeah. So President Hillary would be soooooo much better about Iraq. Clap louder, everybody. Make it come true.

I'd forgotten at least half of that. And then there are the other things Bob mentions. God, she's awful. Anyway, be sure to read it all.

Military intelligence

2007-01-23T14:53:00.000Z

Thank God Our Leaders Are Completely Different From Saddam Hussein
I really could spend the rest of my life doing this.

This is from a 2004 article in Rolling Stone:

Over at Defense, competent intelligence professionals were purged in order to ease the way to war. Douglas Feith, brought in under Rumsfeld to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, applied an ideological test to his staff: He didn’t want competence; he wanted fervor. Col. Pat Lang, a Middle East expert who served under five presidents, Republican and Democratic, in key posts in military intelligence, recalls being considered for a job at the Pentagon. During the job interview, Feith scanned Lang’s impressive resume. “I see you speak Arabic,” Feith said. When Lang nodded, Feith said, “Too bad,” and dismissed him.

Sérvia e Kosovo

2007-01-23T08:57:00.000Z

Com o resultado das eleições Sérvias o processo de secessão do Kosovo fica ainda mais complicado. Vai ser dificil aos intervencionistas arranjarem uma solução. Todas são más.E como sempre, as consequências que sairem dela não vão encontrar responsáveis.

A concorrência

2007-01-19T09:21:00.000Z

U.S. official: Chinese test missile obliterates satellite

Story Highlights• Chinese use a missile to ram and destroy an old, orbiting satellite
• Experts: China now may have ability to knock out U.S. GPS and spy satellites
• Washington issues formal diplomatic protest

Pérolas da cegueira moralista

2007-01-18T18:14:00.000Z

Iran offered to cut off Hezbollah in overture to US in 2003

Iran offered to cut off aid and support for the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas, and promised full transparency on its nuclear program in a secret letter to the United States soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraque.

According to the BBC, the letter, which it obtained, was unsigned, but the US State Department understood that it came with the approval of the highest Iranian authorities.
The Islamic republic also offered to use its influence to support stabilisation in Iraq, and in return asked for a halt in hostile American behaviour, an abolition of all sanctions, and the pursuit and repatriation of members of the Mujahedeen Khalq (People's Mujahedeen MKO).
The MKO is an exiled Iranian opposition group which fought alongside former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein' army in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and is currently based in Iraq.
Initially, the State Department was positive on the offer, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, former US secretary of state Colin Powell' chief of staff, who spoke to the BBC.
"As soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's (
Dick Cheney') office, the old mantra of 'we don't talk to evil' ... reasserted itself," Wilkerson told the broadcaster.

"To our embarrassment at State ... the cable that I saw go back to the Swiss actually upbraided the Swiss for being so bold and audacious as to present such a proposal to us on behalf of the Iranians."

According to Wilkerson, the State Department was also offered a deal by the Iranians after it led the invasion of Afghanistan' in 2001 which involved Iran giving up senior Al-Qaeda terror network figures in return for help pursuing the MKO.

Powell and Wilkerson were unsure how high in the Iranian government the approach came from, however, and did not pursue the offer, the BBC said.

Rússia

2007-01-18T11:09:00.000Z

A notícia que começou por ser dada com acusações veladas ao regime...

Suspect charged in Russian banker's murder

"MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Russian prosecutors on Wednesday charged a private banker with ordering the murder of first deputy chairman of the central bank Andrei Kozlov, his lawyer told Reuters.

Alexei Frenkel, former head of a private bank that Kozlov had closed down three months before he was shot dead, was detained on January 11. A court formally approved his arrest on Monday.
"My client was officially charged with organizing the murder of Kozlov," Frenkel's lawyer Igor Trunov said by telephone. Frenkel has said he is not guilty.

Kozlov, who led the fight against money laundering in Russia's secretive financial world, was shot in September after playing in a soccer game between central bank officials and bankers.
The killing, one of the highest profile assassinations of an official under President Vladimir Putin, raised concerns about stability and brought back memories of the murky contract killings of the 1990s.

Kozlov, a father of three, made his name by withdrawing the licenses of banks that broke central bank rules. Prosecutors says dozens of tiny banks are used to launder billions of dollars of criminal money each year.

Frenkel, who was born in 1971, is the former CEO of VIP Bank. The Russian central bank, where Kozlov headed banking supervision, withdrew VIP Bank's licence in June 2006 for breaking anti-money laundering regulations"

The first total war

2007-01-17T16:20:00.000Z

David A Bell "To understand the pattern, we need to return to the years in which it started, and recognize that it marked a decisive break from earlier attitudes. Before the late eighteenth century, most Europeans accepted war as an inevitable and ordinary facet of human existence. European rulers saw war as their principal purpose, and waged it constantly. Once the terrible religious conflicts of the Reformation had passed, moreover, warfare became, by historical standards, remarkably moderate and restrained. Armies were small, major battles infrequent (though devastating when they occurred), and civilians relatively well-treated. Most aristocratic military leaders viewed their adversaries as honorable equals.

In the eighteenth century, however, these attitudes were decisively challenged. During the great moment of intellectual ferment we now call the Enlightenment, many thinkers began to argue that human society was steadily evolving towards ever greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness, and commercial exchange. As an optimistic English clergyman wrote in 1784: "The time is approaching, when the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, will be heard no more throughout the earth." By 1789, these ideas had practically become European conventional wisdom.

Yet paradoxically, when war actually broke out in 1792, these same ideas led directly to the abandonment of the earlier restraints on those that waged it. If warfare was intrinsically barbaric, then one's enemies (on whom the conflict, naturally, was to be blamed) were barbarians, and deserved to be treated as such. Furthermore, if war really was disappearing, then perhaps this one would be, in the words of the commanding French general, "the last war" - the war to end all wars, so to speak. And if that were the case, what means were not justified in order to achieve victory?

Guided by these arguments, the leaders of revolutionary France willingly leapt into the abyss of total war. And ever since, western leaders from Bonaparte to Bush have found it all too easy to present wars of conquest as apocalyptic contests between civilization and darkness. Meanwhile, the earlier regime of restraints has proven difficult to resurrect. It is enough to make us ask if we are really quite as enlightened as we like to think, and if we might not have something to learn from the aristocratic warriors whom the philosophes derided as walking anachronisms."

Analistas e política externa

2007-01-17T15:12:00.000Z

Um interessante artigo sobre o destino de 4 analistas errados e 4 analistas certos sobre o Iraque. (existe uma regra simples muito liberal para se estar certo e pobre: prever que o pior aconteça quanto maior forem os meios humanos, financeiros e materiais, e do tempo da sua utilização, para qualquer tipo de intervencionismo. Por exemplo, se tivesse sido uma operação de decapitação apenas de Saddam e pouco mais, entrando e saindo em grande velocidade, essa "medida" de intervenção era muito menor, e a probabilidade do ipor acontecer muito menor...).

The Iraq Gamble... It raised interesting questions. Noticing our nation is stuck in an unwinnable war (or two), we wondered if America hasn't stumbled off the meritocratic path...:

1. GETTING RICH BY BEING WRONG :

Tom Friedman, que tem o hábito de anunciar mais de uma vintena de vezes desde a invasão, que os "próximos 6 meses serão cruciais..."

Peter Beinart: "...editor of the New Republic...The editorial effect of this brand enhancement campaign was an aggressive pro-war stance and sustained attacks by Beinart on war critics for being "blind," "intellectually incoherent," and purveyors of "abject pacifism"—essentially calling them pussies while advancing the manly position that we needed to go war "even without the U.N." One Democratic advisor complained to Beinart: "You're doing Rove's work for him."Analytically though, Beinart is even less astute than Friedman. He swallowed the WMD line and called any other rationale "disingenuous." "

Fareed Zakaria: In State of Denial, Bob Woodward delivers this sparkling scoop: Fareed Zakaria attended a secret gathering convened by Paul Wolfowitz in late 2001. The task at hand, according to a fellow participant, was to draft "a forceful summary of the best pro-war arguments" which became a blueprint for the Bush Administration's PR campaign... Then for 16 months leading up to the invasion, he wrote columns, edited news coverage, and appeared as an analyst on television putatively evaluating those same arguments for his vast audience. Needless to say, Zakaria found the case for war a strong one. His role as confidential advisor to the administration was never mentioned though. And his most priceless bit of public prediction? A scenario for democratic revolution in the Middle East based on the idea that "oil goes to $10 a barrel."

Jeffrey Goldberg: As Judy Miller pursues freelance projects out in Sag Harbor, doggedly accompanied by the rotting corpse of her career, she likely has much time for rumination. And it's tough to imagine these sessions of thought don't sometimes include spleen toward Jeffrey Goldberg. How did she end up getting screwed by Ahmed Chalabi and the neocons— metaphorically, of course—while Goldberg, who also demonstrated a remarkable willingness to channel their war-enabling disinformation, managed to keep both his job and his reputation? It's a tough task to argue that his work was any less influential in the pre-war debate than hers, or that he was any less of a go-to guy for the Rumsfeld gang. For instance, when Doug Feith had a hard-on about launching military action against Arab terrorists in Paraguay, who stepped forward and wrote the scare piece? Now we have a big special-ops base! And when Chalabi wanted to disseminate a dodgy tidbit about Saddam having a secret evil plan to kill 100,000 Israelis in a single day with bioweapons, was it not Goldberg who duly pimped it to the New Yorker's million discerning readers? It was indeed. ...Goldberg floated sketchy theories that the dictator was working closely with Al Qaeda and was so irrationally villainous that he was developing a super-duper WMD from wheat mold that, in the author's words, had "no military value [except] to cause liver cancer, particularly in children."

2. RIGHT BUT POOR

Robert Scheer: As a liberal columnist for the LA Times, Scheer argued relentlessly against the war, focusing on the dishonesty of the administration's efforts to "frighten the American people into supporting" it and seeking to bypass rational discussion and analysis by making Saddam into a cartoonish "super-villain"—the kind of guy who sacrifices military strategy to give toddlers liver cancer. His work constituted perhaps the most full-throated anti-war voice on the editorial page of a major American newspaper.

Career status: In the toilet. Fired from the Times in 2005 after a 12-year tenure, his column was handed over to the well-fed and well-connected pro-war conservative, Jonah Goldberg.

William S. Lind: This arch-conservative commentator may have been the most prescient voice in the American media warning against the military dangers facing us in Iraq. His career began as a protégé of America's greatest military strategist, colonel John Boyd, and he has since achieved his own renown in that field. Prior to the war, Lind warned that invading Iraq would be of inherent benefit to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. He predicted, "When American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin ... as an array of non-state elements begin to fight America and each other." Bottom line: "It won't be pretty." He also pointed out that a basic tenet of military theory is that a democracy cannot win any prolonged war if the people are at all uncertain about the reasons for fighting. At that point, prior to the invasion, more than half of Americans thought Saddam had a hand in 9/11.

Career status: Still writing for a small audience. Lind is a contributor to the American Conservative and websites like military.com, counterpunch.com, and antiwar.com. [e ainda Lewrockwell.com].

Jonathan Schell: Covering the Vietnam War for the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for 20 years, Schell saw how armed conflicts can go awry. Writing for the Nation and Harper's in 2002 and 2003, he made the case—amply supported by history—that any attempt to "impose" democracy from the outside and with an armed occupation is a fundamental error in understanding. As he saw it, all the Friedmans of the world, in love with the audacious experiment of trying to turn Iraq into a beacon of Middle Eastern democracy, were off in the poppies. Democracy, by its nature, must originate with a popular movement, not a bunch of guys in wrap-around shades and Kevlar vests riding in on Abrams tanks. And, lo, the Bush Administration has now leaked the fact that it's considering non-democratic scenarios to try to stabilize Iraq.

Scott Ritter: When world leaders spoke confidently about Saddam's biological and chemical weapons, Ritter was a lonely voice, saying that the arsenals had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. Having spent several years in Iraq as a U.N. inspector, the former marine had experience to support his statements. As we now know, he was correct.

2007-01-17T01:08:00.000Z

CBC Interviews Jimmy Carter: Palestine, Peace Not Apa..Full

"It was our Jacobin hubris"

2007-01-16T10:39:00.000Z

Via AnWar: Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, and a former writer for National Review,:

"It’s frustrating to get e-mails from people on the Left who assume that because I’ve lost faith in the president and the war, I’ve become some sort of liberal, and from people on the Right who believe the same thing. It only shows how distorted the war has made American politics. I’m no more enamored of the Left’s social agenda than I ever was — and my conservatism is primarily social/cultural/religious. Besides, it was realizing how this war and my initial support of it violated conservative principles that I ought to have been defending at its outset that finally turned me.

Chiefly I should have been completely suspicious of the social engineering that the US government set out to do in Iraq. It didn’t work in the Great Society, and there was no reason to believe that it would work in Iraq. You don’t march in and turn a tribal society that follows a fierce religion into a nation of Western-style liberal democrats. A key conservative truth is that the material order rests on the spiritual order. Iraqi society did not have the spiritual or moral wherewithal to become the kind of nation we set out to make them. It was our Jacobin hubris, our prideful belief in our own power, that got us into this mess. There were conservatives warning against this in 2002, but most of us on the Right didn’t want to listen."

Crusade Number Four

2007-01-16T08:29:00.000Z

Eric Margolis "The US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was sparked by last fall’s defeat of corrupt Somali clan warlords. They had recently been armed and financed by the CIA to fight the growing popularity of local Islamists.

The warlords had kept Somalia in turmoil and near anarchy for 15 years. Last year, a group of Muslim jurists and notables, the Union of Islamic Courts, managed to defeat the warlords and impose a rough form of law and order on many parts of chaotic central and southern Somalia. Northern Somalia is ruled by a secessionist government based around the strategic port of Berbera.
The conservative Islamic Courts were sympathetic to pan-Muslim causes. But there is no evidence so far that they were involved in anti-American jihadist movements and had no identifiable links, as Washington claimed, to al-Qaida. Now, Somalis are seething with anger at America, providing yet more volunteers for jihadist operations. In fact, the Christmas US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia threatens to ignite violence across the Horn of Africa.
A handful of African Al-Qaida suspects in the 1998 bombing of US Embassies in East Africa may have been in Somalia, but going to war against a sovereign nation to try to assassinate or capture a handful of suspects is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat and is sure to generate more anti-US violence. Air strikes by carrier- based US F-18’s and AC-130 gunships killed between 50-100 Somali civilians but, apparently, no al-Qaida suspects. The real aim of the US air attacks was to destroy remaining fighting units of the Islamic Courts and clear the way for the US-imposed Somali figurehead government.

The invasion and occupation of defenseless Somalia is the latest – but probably not the last – example of the increasing militarization of US foreign policy. VP Dick Cheney’s new Pentagon golden-haired boys, Special Operations Command, elbowed aside the humiliated CIA and the feckless State Department and vowed to "drain the Islamic swamp" in Somalia.

Thus begins President George Bush’s fourth war against the Muslim World. Invading dirt-poor Somalia is Bush’s last stab at military glory and a final effort to convince disgruntled American voters the so-called "war on terror" is a success. So also continues Washington’s preference of only invading small nations that cannot offer much initial resistance by conventional forces: Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia. Afghanistan has only 29 million wretched people; Iraq about 26 million- two thirds of them in rebellion.

The administration is again recklessly charging into a thicket of tribal politics in a remote nation it knows nothing about. US policy in Somalia is being driven by neoconservatives seeking war against the entire Muslim World, and self-serving advice from ally Ethiopia. Israel, which has maintained close intelligence, military, and economic links to Ethiopia’s regime, is also discreetly involved: it has long conducted covert operations in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea’s western littoral.

Eritrea’s 1993 secession took away Ethiopia’s natural access to the sea, leaving it landlocked. Ethiopia’s strategic goals in Somalia may be to seize one or more deep-water ports, turn Somalia into a protectorate, and crush any Islamic movements that might enflame its own voiceless Muslims, who comprise half of Ethiopia’s 73 million people.

America’s attack on Somalia recalls Afghanistan. The US is again blundering into ancient clan and tribal conflicts, using foreign troops and local mercenaries to defend a puppet regime without any popular support. US-Ethiopian intervention in Somalia is certain to re-ignite the murderous clan rivalries that brought it to the current state of anarchy.

Like Afghanistan, Somalia was easy to invade, but may prove very difficult to rule, or eventually leave. Many Somalis saw the now scattered Islamic Courts militias as their best hope for stability and normalcy. Now they are back to zero – or worse.

Like Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001, Somalis have been slow to oppose invasion. But in time they could mount serious resistance to the new US-Ethiopian condominium over Somalia.

From 1899 to 1930, Somali mujahidin waged a fierce resistance struggle against the British, who killed a third of the native population. In 1954, Britain handed the Somali ethnic region of Ogaden to Ethiopia, thus assuring continued hostility between the two old foes.

Now we have a new war, in a faraway place, could become yet another annoying, intractable headache for the west and yet another incubator of revenge-minded jihadis."

History of War, Mark Twain

2007-01-15T13:47:00.000Z

"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war -- what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"

"In war? How?"

"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one -- on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances.

The loud little handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war. The pulpit will -- warily and cautiously -- object -- at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so.

And now the whole nation -- pulpit and all -- will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

These excerpts are from chapters eight and nine, which he wrote in London from June through August of 1900 while he was preoccupied with the Boer War in South Africa, the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Philippine-American War. Two months later, in mid-October, Mark Twain returned to the United States and announced himself an anti-imperialist in dockside interviews.

Obsceno

2007-01-12T22:12:00.000Z

* Ataques na Somália afinal não mataram líderes da Al-Qaeda
Número de vítimas civis poderá chegar a uma centena

* E quem é que se sente tranquilo com:

"NATO afirma que matou 130 taliban no Afeganistão
Exército paquistanês lança ofensiva contra os extremistas perto da fronteira "

Tinhamos o Iraque, o Afeganistão e agora a Somália, "what next"?

2007-01-10T09:30:00.000Z

Somali Officials Accuse US of Killing 31 Civilians in Air Attacks

Salvar os outros de serem comunistas...

2007-01-08T22:05:00.000Z

"Both sides in Vietnam talked about staying the course -- the issue is whether they were really ready to do it," Mueller said. As it turned out, the North Vietnamese were willing to accept casualties on a scale virtually unprecedented in the history of combat. Vietnam War-era Secretary of State Dean Rusk once calculated that North Vietnamese losses in the war, when measured as a proportion of population, were the equivalent of the United States losing about 10 million lives. American losses in Vietnam, by that same measure, were 175 times smaller -- but even that was too high.

"There was a breaking point," Mueller concluded. "It was the Americans who broke." Wars Ultimately Measure Tolerance of Pain

A concorrência

2007-01-05T11:24:00.000Z

China unveils new fighter jet

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China on Friday hailed the development of its Jian-10 fighter jet, aircraft engines and air-to-air missiles as a sign it had soared into the top levels of aerospace defense technology.

China "has become the world's fourth country that is capable of developing on its own advanced fighter planes, engines and missiles," Geng Ruguang, deputy general manager of China Aviation Industry Corp., was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Somália

2007-01-05T11:09:00.000Z

Um governo (um conjunto de pessoas, vá lá) que não era apoiado nem pelos warlords nem pelos islamitas, pede a um Estado vizinho rival para invar a Somália, depois chega lá e pede ajuda à "comunidade internacional".

Um novo Iraque...e mais um factor de união e desconfiança do islamismo...brilhante

Somali militia attack revives fears of chaos

A indagar

2007-01-04T09:29:00.000Z

Basque Denial Clouds Role of Militants in Bombing

Pernando Barrena, a leader of Batasuna, ETA’s outlawed political wing, said that there was no proof ETA was responsible and that the group had not issued a statement claiming responsibility, as it usually does. “The political process has not been broken,” he said. The last fatal attack by the separatist group was more than three years ago.

But a caller who had warned authorities before the explosion said he represented ETA.

Saddam

2007-01-04T08:45:00.000Z

Como palavra final, Saddam foi decididamente, um Ditador totalitário sim, mas um Ditador totalitário com honra. O pior da sua prisão, julgamento e execução foi ter revelado essa faceta ao seu povo. É assim que os mitos se formam e perduram. Os mitos que sustentam uma nação. Os Sunitas iraquianos ganharam o seu. Parece-me impossível que no longo prazo não formem o seu próprio país, mesmo depois do que é previsível um grande longo inverno de violência. A história é mesmo assim.

Somália

2007-01-03T09:37:00.000Z

Somali Govt to Last for Weeks

Well actually the headline is “Ethiopian army to stay in Somalia for weeks” — but those of us who have paid attention to Somalia over the past few years know what that really means in relation to what the UN has been insisting is Somalia’s government. This “government” consisted of a gaggle of warlords and former communist regime bureaucrats holed up in a Nairobi Hilton — and who were only finally forced to return to Somalia when the hotel finally evicted them out for nonpayment. Even then a few of them just holed themselves up in the southern town of Jowhar, where they were nothing more glamorous than internationally-recognized version of the same thugs that lord over nearly every city in Somalia.
Now that the Ethiopian Army has come to their rescue, the commies and warlords have seized control of the important parts of the country and are now attempting to assert their collective will — naturally the first thing they do is order a complete disarmament of the entire city without exception.

“Everybody will be disarmed. There will be no sacred cows,” Information Minister Ali Jama Jangali said.

But then tellingly, and not surprisingly, the reporter feels the need to mention:
However, at a collection point seen by Reuters, not one gun had been handed in by midday.
And this is with Ethiopian backup. There is no evidence that many Mogadishans are rooting for the so-called government, at least not one made up of these butchers and gangsters and thieves. The business community — allowed to flourish over the last 15 years in near-total freedom, at least compared to the rest of Africa — will have a lot of demands that will need to be met if the government is to have anything of value left off which to survive.
So time will prove me right or wrong but I’m willing to bet that within hours of the Ethiopians heading home the technicals will come a-raiding, and with the support of various Somali civilian factions will butcher and/or expel the self-proclaimed government from the country yet again, as they did in 1991.