Dress Rehearsal For A Mideast War?

By Patrick J. Buchanan,
June 15, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

"History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes," said Mark Twain.

Observing the uprising in Syria, the atrocities, the intervention by rival powers, it all calls to mind the Great Rehearsal for World War II, the Spanish Civil War.

The war began in 1936 with an uprising in Morocco of Spanish Nationalists against a Madrid regime seen as anti-Catholic, Marxist and Trotskyite. Vladimir Lenin had predicted that Spain would be the second Soviet republic in Europe.

The war would last three years, with Joseph Stalin providing aid to the regime, Benito Mussolini sending troops to fight on the side of Gen. Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler sending his Condor Legion. The bombing of Guernica by the Legion, commemorated in the famous Picasso painting of that name, would be regarded as the great war crime of the conflict.

Yet Guernica was child’s play compared with what was to come with the Blitz, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima. The Nuremberg Tribunal would wisely rule out terror bombing of cities as a war crime for which Nazis could be prosecuted and hanged.

As America has declined to intervene in Syria, FDR declared neutrality early in the Spanish Civil War, outlawing any sale of weapons to either side.

In 1936, as the Spanish war erupted, FDR spoke for his country:

"We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connections with the political activities of the League of Nations. … We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war."

America emphatically agreed.

Today, it is the bitter fruit of Iraq and Afghanistan that explains our reluctance. Then, it was 116,000 American dead in places like the Argonne and Belleau Wood — which had produced a Carthaginian peace at Versailles and set the table for Hitler — that had left us with ashes in our mouths. Two battalions of American volunteers did go to Spain to fight on the side of the regime. In 1947, veterans of that "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" would be put on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.

In Spain, the struggle was ideological and religious — Nationalists and Catholics against socialists, communists and anarchists.

In Syria, too, it is religious — the Alawite Shia regime of Bashar Assad battling an uprising centered in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

As Europe in 1936 contained democracies, dictatorships of the fascist and authoritarian right, and a Stalinist left, today’s Middle East contains democracies, monarchies and dictatorships.

As there were Catalans and Basques fighting for their own causes in Spain, in Syria today are Kurds, Druze and al-Qaeda with their own rival agendas.

As America and Britain stayed out of the Spanish Civil War, so today America and Britain have stayed aloof from Syria’s conflict.

As the Spanish Civil War exposed the impotence of the League of Nations, Syria’s conflict is exposing the paralysis of the United Nations, when permanent members of the Security Council like Russia refuse to authorize the kind of intervention they did in Libya.

As the Spanish republic received moral and material support from Moscow, today Moscow sends attack helicopters to Damascus, while Turkey provides sanctuary for the resistance, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar provide weapons.

Russia and Iran see Assad’s Syria as their last strong, reliable ally in the region. Syria’s ports on the Mediterranean are open to Vladimir Putin’s navy. And Putin’s military-industrial complex has long sold the Assad family the weapons to fight its wars and crush rebellions.

If Assad’s regime were to collapse and the Muslim Brotherhood come to power, Russia would be virtually out of the Middle East. Iran would be almost isolated. Had we not overthrown the Sunni regime of Saddam and brought the Shia majority to power in Baghdad, an Iran without Syria would be an Iran without a major ally across the region.

The first peril in the Syrian conflict is that it could become a civil war in which not just 10,000 die, but scores of thousands perish.

A second danger is that as Syria contains Sunni, Shia, Druze, Kurd, Arab, Christian — indeed, mirrors the Middle East — a Syrian civil war could become a proxy war for all in the region, beginning with Lebanon.

Third, as Syria is aligned with Iran in the conflict with Israel and with Russia on the world stage, greater powers may come to see themselves as having a vital stake in how this war ends, and intervene, each in its own way, to assure a favorable outcome.

The Spanish Civil War ended in Franco’s victory in 1939 and ended well for the Western democracies that had not intervened.

When Hitler, after occupying France in 1940, met with Franco to ask permission for the Wehrmacht to cross Spain to attack Gibraltar, Franco said no and put troops in the Pyrenees to enforce his decision.

Unlike Mussolini, Franco remained a nonbelligerent in the world war, returned U.S. pilots who came down in Spain and agreed to a postwar alliance with the United States.

Non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War worked out just fine.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Body Counts: The Human Cost Of The "War on Terror"

By M. Reza Pirbhai
June 09, 2012
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

In the early days of the ‘War on Terror,’ US General Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts.”  He was referring, of course, to the dead of Afghanistan. That the names of 9/11 victims have been appropriately written in stone, only makes it doubly striking that the war waged in their names generates little interest on non-US or NATO civilian deaths. 

In fact, a war now in its 11^th year, comprising the invasion and occupation of two countries, as well as the ongoing bombing of at least three more, has not produced any holistic studies on its direct and indirect casualties.

That a global war can rage so long with no official will to ascertain the number of ‘others’ killed is indicative of the manner in which the cost of war is calculated by those states prosecuting it. Non-US and NATO dead, maimed, disappeared or displaced can’t be part of the equation if official policy is not to count. That there appears to be little public will to change that policy speaks of a more broadly worrying attitude toward ‘others,’ particularly Muslims. The UN and some NGO’s are attempting to count, however, mostly in the variety of local contexts engulfed in the conflict. Despite the hurdles of official obfuscation and public indifference, a catalogue of deadly consequences has begun to emerge.

Beginning in Afghanistan, most commonly cited studies on the 2001 invasion find that approximately 4,000 to 8,000 Afghani civilians died as a direct result of military operations. There are no figures for 2003-05, but in 2006 Human Rights Watch recorded just under 1,000 civilians killed in fighting. From 2007 to July 2011, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) tallies at least 10,292 non-combatants killed. These figures, it should be emphasized, do include indirect deaths or injuries. Some thing of the scope of indirect deaths can be gleaned from a Guardian article – the most thorough journalistic report on the subject – which calculated that at least 20,000 more died as a result of displacement and famine due to the disruption in food supplies in the first year of the war alone. As well, according to Amnesty International, approximately 250,000 people fled to other countries in 2001 and at least 500,000 more have been internally displaced since.

Moving to Iraq, the Iraq Body Count project records approximately 115,000 civilians killed in the cross-fire from 2003 to August 2011. However, the World Health Organization’s Iraq Family Health Survey reports a figure of approximately 150,000 in just the first three years of the occupation. With indirect deaths added, The Lancet Study placed the estimate at approximately 600,000 in the same period. Moreover, an Opinion Research Business study estimated 1,000,000 violent deaths to have occurred by mid-2007. In addition, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported approximately 2,000,000 Iraqis displaced to other countries and 2,000,000 more internally displaced as of 2007. There is no solid information on indirect death or injury rates, but the documented collapse of the Iraqi healthcare system and infrastructure more generally (foremost in the region before 1991) does not suggest anything less than another atrocity.

Beyond the two states under occupation, the ‘War on Terror’ spills into a number of neighboring countries including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Prime weapons deployed in these theatres have been US ‘drones,’ special operations groups, intelligence agents and the governments/armed forces of the countries involved. Given the often extra-judicial and covert nature of this theatre, calculating casualties is hampered by the virtual absence of independent data. Indeed, this is also a problem in Afghanistan and Iraq, but even so, considering only ‘drones’ thought to have been used in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the numbers of strikes is agreed to be on the rise. To date, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that at least 357 strikes have occurred in Pakistan between 2004 and June 2012 (more than 300 under the Obama administration). At least 2,464 people have been killed, including a minimum of 484 civilians (168 children). The Washington Post adds 38 strikes resulting in 241 deaths (56 civilian) in Yemen. There are no figures for Somalia, but the New York Times confirms that operations have been ongoing since at least 2007.

Proponents of the war, official and public, will rush to retort that many of the citations in this article list most civilian deaths as the work of enemy combatants. But how can anyone confirm this when dependent on such a dearth of study? And as best highlighted by the ‘drone’ campaign, how can anyone transparently distinguish between civilians and combatants, when the latter’s assassins are also their judges?  Indeed, even if accepted at face value, these attacks make the US government one of the most prolific, self-professed ‘target killers’ in history. Moreover, as a representative from UMANA commented on his study, “if the non-combatant status of one or more victim(s) remains under significant doubt, such deaths are not included in the overall number of civilian casualties. Thus, there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties.” In fact, such problems are admitted by the authors of every study.

Pasting this patchy set of statistics together, the bottom end of the total non-US and NATO civilian deaths exceeds 140,000. The top end easily reaches 1,100,000. That’s 14,000 to 110,000 per year. To put these figures in some context, it is worth recalling that 40,000 civilians were killed by the Nazi ‘Blitz’ on Britain during WWII. As well, it should be recalled that in both low and high scenarios, figures for direct deaths in Afghanistan for 2003-5, and indirect deaths from 2003 to the present, are not available. Furthermore, civilian deaths caused by means other than drones, such as renditions and disappearances, are not counted from any arena, and casualties stemming from the military campaigns of proxies (e.g., the governments of Pakistan or Yemen) have not been tallied. The number alive, but injured, orphaned or otherwise disenfranchised, let alone those tortured in public and private prisons across the world, is also not tolled. And finally, the suffering of millions of displaced persons from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere remains incalculable.

What has been counted here, even though tragically incomplete, illumines the reason US and NATO officials are reticent to publically do the same. To consider the staggering human cost of the ‘War on Terror’ would mean admitting that ‘terrorism’ is a two-way street and states, not militias, drive the heaviest weapons. General Franks’ preference not to count bodies is egregious, but unsurprising. That his lack of interest is echoed in the public spheres of the US and NATO countries, exposes the more astonishing consent (manufactured or not) of general populations, at least in the case of these Muslim victims. 

Nothing less than this official and public indifference explains the absence of any holistic study on civilian casualties, particularly while mourning the nearly 3,000 civilians killed on 9/11 and in whose name the ‘War on Terror’ is still waged.

M. Reza Pirbhai is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Louisiana State University.

New Imperialistic Tool

UN Security Council Threatens Sanctions on Any Who ‘Disrupt’ Yemeni Govt.

Warns Against 'Spoilers' of Yemen's Single-Candidate Democracy

By Jason Ditz,
June 12, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

That’s just the way the US likes it in Yemen, and according to a new resolution by the UN Security Council that’s how the international community likes it too. Following up on recommendations from officials, the resolution endorses the single candidate election that installed the US-backed Major General Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Following in the footsteps of an executive decision by President Obama worded almost the exact same way, the Security Council resolution threatens sanctions against anyone who does anything to “undermine” the Yemeni democracy, candidate-free though it may be.

The resolution cites Article 41 of the UN charter, saying that empowers the council to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on anyone who ignores their decisions, in this case the decision being that the election was just fine.

Hadi was installed as part of a negotiated settlement on the ouster of Ali Abdullah Saleh, with Hadi taking his position and the political opposition being given a few cabinet posts on the condition that no