Who would have thought when I wrote this that six years later a leading contender for nominee as Republican U.S. presidential candidate would be arguing the same thing in his campaign.
He sums up the problem with U.S. foreign policy nicely: “We don’t mind our own business!”
Fun fact: U.S. military veterans have given more money to Ron Paul’s campaign than all the other campaigns put together.
As part of negotiations with Iran over nuclear fuel Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently proposed that Iran transfer about 70 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment by the end of this year, then to France for conversion into fuel plates for medical use, effectively negating its use in alleged potential nuclear weapons.
Iran has apparently made the perfectly justifiable suggestion that rather than send their fuel off, and cross their fingers that it comes back, they instead do a direct swap of their low-enriched uranium for fuel plates. This makes even more sense when you realise that the U.S. and France have reneged on commercial deals in the past to supply Iran with nuclear fuel.
According to this Reuters report (typically vague on sources) this suggestion is “unacceptable” to “Western diplomats.”
If you wanted evidence that these negotiations are not being carried out in good faith then here you have it. What does it matter to the West if a direct swap is made? The only reason it could matter is that peace is not the West’s aim.
They invade and lay waste another country, destroy the lives of millions of Iraqis for generations to come, all on some trumped up drivel about “weapons of mass destruction.”
Now they’re arguing over the real reason. Oil. It’s not enough that control of Iraq’s crude is being divvied up amongst the capitalists of the world. Thomas Pickens — an oil tycoon and political activist who hasn’t served a day in the army himself — has been arguing a line, and according to Reuters, recently told U.S. congress that he thinks U.S. capitalists alone are “entitled” to Iraqi crude because “we” spent billions of U.S. taxes and the lives of 5000 U.S. army pawns invading and occupying the country.
Classy.
With current events this is a must read for any Westerner.
The Guardian: ‘Memoirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’
Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.
Ahh, yes, there’s nothing like a little American exceptionalism to get one going in the morning.
According to Reuters, Colonel Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, has been complaining that the Taliban is violating international law by parading a captured U.S. soldier on camera.
It seems Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo: the U.S. tore up international law a long time ago.
Not only did the U.S. commit the supreme war crime when it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq — supreme because of all that ensues from starting a war, including the crimes of your opponents — but this is the same country, of course, to have declared by presidential order that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to captured Taliban soldiers and has since been detaining Afghan prisoners without trial, sneaking them off to Guantanamo and its secret prisons and torturing them.
Check out this video of war criminal Condoleezza Rice passing the buck when questioned by some students about torture.
Student: Waterboarding. Is waterboarding torture?
War crim: Er, the President instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s … and by the way, I didn’t authorise anything. I conveyed the authorisation of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorisation, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.
So, first, denial but it gets better. I couldn’t quite get the next question but this is her answer:
War crim: … and, I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorised by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
That old chestnut. “Well he told me to do it, and furthermore, he’s above the law.” We’ll see Condi, we’ll see.
Jeremy Paxman: What is the difference between Zionism and racism?
Peter Gooderham: Well we see the two as being quite distinct, um, Zionism is clearly a …
Jeremy Paxman: Yeah what’s the difference?
Peter Gooderham: Well Zionism is a political movement, um, relating to the establishment …
Jeremy Paxman (queitly): So are some forms of racism.
Peter Gooderham: … of a homeland, a Jewish homeland, in the er…er, in in what is now Israel, um, and racism is something else. I mean racism is, I think we all know it when we see it and it’s not, it’s not that, and we have fought long and hard at the United Nations to keep that, to maintain that distinction.
In this unique four-part film, award-winning Guardian foreign correspondent, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journalist and photographer, takes us back to his home city of Baghdad. In the week of the sixth anniversary of the US-led invasion, this film, made by GuardianFilms for the Arab news network Al Jazeera, gives an insider’s view of the real impact of the invasion on Baghdad as it became ‘The City of Walls’.
It’s been a long time coming but two people, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have finally put the numbers together and conclusively shown that modern social problems are substantially worse in those societies with wider gaps between rich and poor.
Any cursory look at the world tells you this but these are the first people to show it scientifically. This, I would suggest, is going to be huge. The implications are profound.
Will Hutton, writing for The Guardian:
Income inequality, they show beyond any doubt, is not just bad for those at the bottom but for everyone. More unequal societies are socially dysfunctional across the board. There is more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, higher prison populations, more murders, higher obesity and less numeracy and literacy in more unequal societies. Even the rich report more mental ill health and have lower life expectancies than their peers in less unequal societies.
They have produced a book on their findings called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. And they’ve also created website, equalitytrust.org, to make the evidence they set out better known.
As John Carey points out in his review of their book in the Times: “It might be said that The Spirit Level merely formulates what everyone has always felt.”
Now maybe we can get on with changing a few things around here.
External links: