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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 |
More here.
TimesOnline: "Is the world drifting towards a new global war? From this week the dominant super-power, America, will for three months pass through the valley of the shadow of democracy, a presidential election. This is always a moment of self-absorption and paranoia. Barack Obama and John McCain will not act as statesmen but as politicians. They will grandstand and look over their shoulders. Their eye will stray from the ball.
The question is critical. Has the West misjudged the fault line of an impending conflict? Its global strategy under George Bush, Tony Blair and a ham-fisted Nato has declared the threat to world peace as coming from nonstate organisations, specifically Al-Qaeda, and the nations that give them either bases or tacit support. Western generals and securocrats have elevated these anarchist fanatics to the status of nuclear powers. Policing crime has become 'waging war', so as to justify soaring budgets and influence over policy, much as did America's military-industrial complex during the cold war.
Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely 'clashes of civilisation', but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.
Moscow initially spent the 17 years since the fall of the Soviet Union flirting with the West. It had been defeated and had good reason for disarming and putting out feelers to join Nato and the European Union. It took part in such proto-capitalist entities as the G8.
In the case of Nato and the EU it was arrogantly rebuffed, while its former Warsaw Pact allies were accepted. Moscow was told it would be foolish to worry about encirclement. A nation that had never enjoyed democracy should content itself with basking in its delights. Russians in the Baltic states and in Ukraine should make their peace with emerging governments. The political clutter of the cold war should be decontaminated.
There is no strategic justification for siting American missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is nothing but right-wing provocation. Nato's welcome to Georgia and Ukraine, for no good reason but at risk of having to come to their aid, has served only to incite Georgia to realise that risk while also infuriating Moscow.
Russia is well able to respond recklessly to a snub without such encouragement, so why encourage it? The more powerful state - America - surely has an obligation to show the greater caution. Any strategic decision, such as the goading of Moscow, must plan for its response. Nato's bureaucracy, lacking coherence and leadership, has been searching for a role since the end of the cold war. That role is apparently now to play with fire.
... 'going to war' is never an intention. It is rather the result of weak, shortsighted leaders entrapped by a series of mistakes. For the West's leaders at present, mistake has become second nature."
Let's be honest. The US and Britain are imperialist nations, you could even call them fascist in their wish to control the whole world. The West is using the 'War on terror' to terrorize the world. Our leaders are criminals.
10:49:13 AM 
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Links: "The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the 'War on Terror' and recent revelations in TIME - based on disclosures by a 'senior American official' (now retired), who was 'a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings' after the 9/11 attacks, and who reported that 'a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island' - will come as no surprise to those who have been studying the story closely.
The news will, however, be an embarrassment to the US government, which has persistently denied claims that it operated a secret 'War on Terror' prison on Diego Garcia, and will be a source of even more consternation to the British government, which is more closely bound than its law-shredding transatlantic neighbour to international laws and treaties preventing any kind of involvement whatsoever in kidnapping, 'extraordinary rendition' and the practice of torture."
10:35:31 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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