Elsewhere Today 442

Aljazeera:
Gaza rockets wound Israeli soldiers

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2007
6:28 MECCA TIME, 3:28 GMT

At least 50 Israeli soldiers have been wounded by two rockets fired into Israel by Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip.

The rockets hit the Zikim base north of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning.

The soldiers, who were sleeping in tents at the time, were evacuated to hospitals by two helicopters and about 20 ambulances.

Al Jazeera's Nour Odeh the military wing of Islamic Jihad and the Public Resistance Committees claimed joint responsibility for the attack.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the group "blessed" the rocket attack "which brought pride to Palestine".

Odeh said 10 of the injuries were moderate to grave. Many of the soldiers were treated for panic.

"They say it is in response to the continued Israeli military attacks against their activists throughout the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," Odeh reported.

"There are daily incursions and detentions in the West Bank, so the groups consider it a legitimate response against a military target."

Rocket strikes

Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza are frequent, but rarely cause injuries.

The homemade rockets are inaccurate with many falling in open spaces or in the town of Sderot.

Most land harmlessly but since 2000, 12 people have been killed in the salvoes.

The number of wounded was the highest in a single rocket attack launched from the Gaza Strip.

Hamas took over the Gaza Strip during fighting against the Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, three months ago.

Israeli warning

The strike on the army base could boost calls in Israel for a large-scale ground operation in the Gaza Strip against fighters behind the rocket attacks.

Eli Yishai, the Israeli Industry and Trade minister, "I think that, long, long, long ago, years back, we should have responded with a mighty force," told Israel's Army Radio.

"There will be no choice but to take action, ultimately," he said.

"There will be discussions, the military will makes its proposals, and the government will decide."

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said last week that Israel would "without hesitation and without pity" launch counterstrikes against fighters who fired the homemade rockets.

After the rocket attacks, a missile fired by Israeli forces hit a home in Beit Lahiya, a Palestinian town in northern Gaza, locals said, wounding a woman and her daughter.

Two Palestinian children were also injured on Tuesday when Israeli forces raided the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, Israeli forces detained 16 Palestinians.

Military plans

Last week, Olmert ordered the army to draw up plans to curb the rocket fire, but did not endorse water and power cuts on Gaza's beleaguered population.

Pressure on Olmert to respond to the regular rocket fire has mounted recently after a projectile landed near a day-care centre in Sderot a day after the start of the school year. There were no casualties.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, was quoted as telling ministers that until Israel has completed development of a rocket interception system, "the only solution is deep ground operations in Gaza".

"The time may be approaching where it will necessary to launch a major ground operation to stop the rocket fire," he was quoted as saying in a speech to directors of Israel's main arms manufacturing firms.

Source: Agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/5B7F29C9-A66F-46B4-917D-27E6CA7356A9.htm

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AllAfrica:
Juvenile Justice System in Tatters

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
10 September 2007
Monrovia

A teenager accused of rape, Abraham peers through the rusty bars of his prison cell where he has languished for two months. His wide eyes and childlike manner belie his alleged crime.

"I don't like being the youngest," the 14-year-old told IRIN. "Sometimes other prisoners make me do things I don't want to."

He said that when he first came he could not sleep at night. "Sometimes because I was frightened and sometimes because there was no space to lie down." He shares a cramped, dirty cell with eight other minors accused of similar crimes. At night they fight over the cell's single foam mattress.

The children have no mosquito nets and lack proper sanitation.

Also lacking is due process. Abraham, like all but one of the prison's 28 juvenile inmates detained in Monrovia Central Prison, Liberia's most overcrowded jail, has not yet been tried.

Most of the children have never seen a judge specialising in crimes committed by minors.

A system in tatters

Four years after the end of Liberia's brutal 14-year war, the juvenile justice system is barely functional. Its problems mirror the breakdown of the judicial system as a whole, which the UN says is one of the major threats to the stability of the country.

"Until the army and police can stand on their own and the justice system is rehabilitated and accessible to all Liberians, the country will remain vulnerable to the risk of a return to lawlessness," the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in an 8 August report. The report called the state of the juvenile justice system "a source of deep concern."

The head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), Alan Doss, recently said that strengthening the judicial system will be one of the most important requirements for a sustainable peace in Liberia as the mission eventually draws down.

Legal experts say rebuilding the juvenile justice system will be a daunting challenge.

"Juvenile justice in Liberia is only just beginning to be addressed," said Kitty van Gagnide, child protection officer with UNMIL's human rights division.

Monrovia Central Prison houses 661 inmates, more than five times its intended capacity. While children have separate cells, they must interact with adult offenders during exercise and meal times and in bathrooms.

In rural areas the situation is worse, van Gagnide said. "Sometimes juveniles are separated from adults only by a bench or makeshift wall."

In February a 14-year-old boy held at Sanniquelle Prison in Nimba County told UN officials that he was given drugs and alcohol and made to work for adult detainees with whom he shared a cell.

Strong law, on paper

Liberian law includes a 'juvenile procedural code', which provides what legal experts say is a solid foundation for the development of a fully-functional juvenile judicial system. "[The code] is actually better than in many other West African countries," UNMIL's van Gagnide said.

"The problem is that it is rarely followed."

UNMIL's human rights division is training magistrates, court staff and police on juvenile law chapter by chapter.

"The majority of magistrates don't have much grasp of juvenile law," van Gagnide said. Under the code, juveniles awaiting trial should not be considered under arrest and incarceration should be considered a protective measure to prevent further delinquency until guardians can be contacted.

Magistrates are often unaware that many juvenile offenders should not be in prison, van Gagnide said, although one of the consequences of war is that a lot of youth do not have parents or legal guardians.

Another issue is that juvenile courts in Liberia ought to have exclusive jurisdiction for under-18-year-olds but with only one operational juvenile court in the country, county magistrate courts often take over.

"They too are under-resourced," Anthony Valcke, Country Director of American Bar Association (ABA) Africa, told IRIN. "And if children are tried in magistrates' courts a whole new set of problems [is] brought to the table."

The problems, he explained, range from lost documents to wrongful bail demands to sexual abuse by authorities.

Earlier this year, a magistrate in the rural town of Zorzor was investigated for extorting sexual favours from a teenage girl in his court on charges of stealing a mobile phone.

Competing judicial systems

Luther Sumo, a protection lawyer with the International Rescue Committee, said there is a rift between statutory law and customary law with regard to the treatment of juveniles. And many children whose cases are dealt with in magistrates' courts do not have birth certificates. As a result it is not uncommon for judges to treat children as adults.

ABA is now working with UNICEF to identify, track and monitor the progress of youth in prisons. Top on their agenda is the establishment of rehabilitation programmes in lieu of detention.

"Nobody knows how many of the children in Liberia's prisons are innocent. Detaining them because of a slow justice system is counter-productive and actually increases the likelihood of them offending upon release." UNMIL's van Gagnide said.

While there are no formal rehabilitation homes in Liberia, facilities such as Monrovia's Don Bosco Children's Centre serve as a stop-gap measure in cases of less serious juvenile crimes such as theft, although it does not cater for youths charged with rape or murder.

UNMIL and the US government are backing the construction of a new adult wing at Monrovia Central Prison, which will make room for more juvenile cells. Hopes are also resting on the new UN deputy envoy to Liberia, Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu, who has considerable experience with juvenile justice in Ghana.

But meanwhile children like Abraham just wait. "I already feel like I've been here a long, long time" he says, tugging impatiently at the bars.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]

Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200709101316.html

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AlterNet:
Six Years of 9/11 as a License to Kill

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on September 10, 2007

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited "9/11," a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight - giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you're more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you're more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.

"Sept. 11 changed everything" became a sudden cliche in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were - and are - preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it's called "patriotism."

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity. At the same time, it was a grisly addition to a history of human experience that has often included many thousands killed, en masse, by inhuman human choice.

It is simply and complexly a factual matter that the U.S. government has participated in outright mass murders directly - in, for example, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq - and less directly, through aid to armies terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua, Angola, East Timor and many other countries.

The news media claim to be providing context. But whose? Overall, the context of Uncle Sam in the more perverse and narcissistic aspects of his policy personality. The hypocrisies of claims about moral precepts and universal principles go beyond the mere insistence that some others "do as we say, not as we do." What gets said, repeated and forgotten sets up kaleidoscope patterns that can be adjusted to serve the self-centered mega-institutions reliably fixated on maintaining their own dominance.

Media manifestations of these patterns are frequently a mess of contradictions so extreme that they can only be held together with the power of ownership, advertising and underwriting structures - along with notable assists from government agencies that dispense regulatory favors and myriad pressure to serve what might today be called a military-industrial-media complex. Our contact with the world is filtered through the mesh of mass media to such a great extent that the mesh itself becomes the fabric of power.

The most repetitious lessons of 9/11 - received and propagated by the vast preponderance of U.S. news media - have to do with the terribly asymmetrical importance of grief and of moral responsibility. Our nation is so righteous that we are trained to ask for whom the bell tolls. Rendered as implicitly divisible, humanity is fractionated as seen through red-white-and-blue windows on the world.

Posing outside cycles of violence and victims who victimize, the dominant vision of Pax Americana has no more use now than it did six years ago for W.H. Auden's observation: "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

We ought to know. But we Americans are too smart for that.

The U.S. media tell us so.

Norman Solomon’s new book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State" has just come off the press. For more information, go to the the Web site.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62172/

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Asia Times:
Sheikh Osama and the iPod general

By Pepe Escobar
Sep 12, 2007

"And among the most important items contained in [President George W] Bush's speeches since the events of the 11th [September 11, 2001] is that the Americans have no option but to continue the war. This tone is in fact an echoing of the words of neo-conservatives like [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [former defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board] Richard Perle, the latter having said previously that the Americans have no choice in front of them other than to continue the war or face a holocaust.
- Osama bin Laden video, September 7.

PARIS - World public opinion has just been treated to the face-off of the year - as if orchestrated, with impeccable timing, in a John Woo movie.

On the Washington side is General David Petraeus, 54, the top US commander in Iraq, the Teflon general or, critics would argue, the iPod general, as he only plays the iTunes playlist selected by his owner, the White House.

On the Hindu Kush mountainside, possibly between Chitral in Pakistan and Kunar province in Afghanistan, arguably in a cave with broadband and video-production facilities, is Sheikh Osama bin Laden, 50, al-Qaeda leader and (still) the most wanted man in the world. (The United States' bounty on his head doubled to US$50 million in July.)

It's six years after September 11 and, once again, Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is the message. This war is being decided on the screen. The half-trillion-dollar question is inescapable: Who's to be trusted, the general spinning a successful "surge" for President George W Bush's troops in Iraq, or the sheikh posing as statesman and strategist? Who's not lying, the Pentagon or al-Qaeda?

Six years ago, it was not supposed to be this way. Al-Qaeda was turning Boeings into missiles and delivering to the US the "new Pearl Harbor" for which neo-cons so much yearned. Saddam Hussein, counting his dollars from the United Nations oil-for-food program, was building palaces and living in the lap of luxury in Baghdad. He regarded Islamist fanatics as the plague.

Then the plot got convoluted. The neo-cons pulled an Alfred Hitchcock and, just like the vanished Janet Leigh character in Psycho, introduced vanished weapons of mass destruction in Mesopotamia. Shock-and-awe was ruthlessly counter-acted with good old guerrilla warfare. Saddam was hanged after being judged by a kangaroo court. And bin Laden pulled a comeback a la John Travolta in Pulp Fiction: looking younger, sporting a dyed-black beard (a stick-on?), white robe and cap and cool beige cloak, he's now back in a starring role in garb tailored for global audiences. Meanwhile, incidentally, the US lost the war in Iraq.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr Bush
Both the sheikh and the general have been aiming to seduce multiple layers of constituencies, but above all US public opinion. Any number of troubling questions may be posed regarding the "message from Sheikh Osama bin Laden to the American people", acquired by Reuters "from a Web trawler in Europe" last Friday, but only, suspiciously, after the US government and the neo-con-drenched, Washington-based terrorism-monitoring SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities) Institute had already bagged it.

Anyway, the iconic jihadi might have boasted that a record 60% of Americans, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, agrees with him: they now believe the Iraq invasion was a mistake, the war will be lost, and the US should send the troops home according to a timetable, and "stick to that timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq".

Under these circumstances, who cares if Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, believes the sheikh is "virtually impotent"? When he seizes the moral high ground and analyzes - in intimate detail - the failure of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, he has his finger much closer to the pulse of the American street than either Republicans or Democrats, not to mention the Pentagon.

Enter bin Laden not only as film star but visionary film director. Had he been the screenwriter of all the plot twists since the fateful September 11, the sheikh would have written exactly the same parts played by key Bush administration characters.

As for Petraeus, he was the central character in a book about the invasion of Iraq. He played himself: commander of the famed 101st Airborne Division. He's a classic intellectual warrior (a PhD in the lessons of the Vietnam War from Princeton; the author of the current Pentagon counterinsurgency manual). He might have been Martin Sheen's Lieutenant Willard tracking Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He mixes war and politics with consummate ease and, like the sheikh, simply cannot resist self-promotion in front of the media glare. His Dutch ancestry betrays the ruthlessness behind his cool projected persona.

In an ideally sane scenario, he would have been in charge of a task force tracking the sheikh and engaged in dismantling al-Qaeda as part of carefully designed global police work. Right now, for instance, he would have to be focused on the Chitral-Kunar corridor in the Hindu Kush, the most probable location of that mythical bin Laden cave. Better yet, he would be focused on finding al-Qaeda's information-technology manager, the guy who makes the global distribution of all those videos possible.

Instead, the iPod general, after "shock and awe", was sent to supervise the occupation of Mosul and to train Iraqi forces. No spinning may disguise the stark reality; "pacified" Mosul today happens to be a major stronghold of Sunni Arab guerrillas, and only six battalions of Iraqi security forces behave with real independence.

As expected, after a tsunami of leaks and speculation, the messianic (for hardline Republicans) general's spin of a "successful" "surge" in Congress was not raw, blunt or realistic. He droned on about "ethno-sectarian" violence and was long on "achieving objectives over time" and "success" in al-Anbar province - as if wily, armed-to-the-teeth Sunni tribals would not turn against the Americans sooner rather than later.

For instance, according to two different assessments - by the Associated Press and by Iraq Body Count - Iraqi civilian deaths remain stable, or may be actually rising, contrary to the general's optimistic numbers. Iraq averages 62 violent deaths a day, compared with 37 last year. There were no fewer than 1,809 civilian deaths last month. The "surge" has led to the acceleration of ethnic cleansing, and with no fewer than 100,000 Iraqis fleeing the country every single month, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent, there are fewer and fewer people to kill on the ground. During the "surge", 20 times as many people are leaving the country as before it began at the start of the year.

In his long-awaited close-up for the cameras in Congress, Petraeus did not say a word about the appalling living conditions in Iraq, or about the more than 4 million killed, exiled or now living as refugees. He did not say that now, on the sixth anniversary of September 11, the US opens its spanking-new, 42-hectare, US$592 million embassy, fortress rather, in Baghdad, almost as big as the Vatican, built by 3,500 people (mostly imported from Kuwait) over three years, complete with 27 bomb-proof buildings, underground bunkers, leisure and entertainment centers, beauty parlors, a gym, a swimming pool and a club.

Symbols don't come more pregnant with meaning than this: and this one spells, "We rule, and we're not gonna leave, ever." As for a real drawdown of troops, not a word amid the current show to (not) amuse the galleries.

Make Islam, not war
As for bin Laden's progress report on the "war on terror", it reads like a wacky remixed version of Karl Marx' and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto - all the more striking as it cuts through the neo-con-promoted atmosphere of fear in the US prior to a possibly tactical nuclear, illegal, preemptive attack on Iran.

Bin Laden quotes everything from the Holy Koran to Noam Chomsky to illustrate his take on the irreversible decline of the American empire and to develop his critique of globalized capital, including the mention that "life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations".

This time he didn't need a Kalashnikov as a prop, or to dwell once again on "Christian and Jewish crusaders" or the occupation of the "land of the two holy mosques" (Mecca and Medina). After all, Islamist jihad of the al-Qaeda mold is slowly reaching one of its key objectives, which is the overthrow of infidel, secularist governments in Islamic lands.

A major goal of bin Laden has been to depose the House of Saud. He's getting there. He already has the Americans out of military bases in Saudi Arabia. The secularist Assad dynasty in Syria might also be replaced sooner rather than later by a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government. And best of all, the Americans got rid of secularist infidel Saddam for him.

The solution for the planet's ills, according to the theocratic sheikh, is to "embrace Islam". It's as if he had felt the urge to coin a new slogan: "Make Islam, not war." US public opinion, the anti-war movement included, obviously will not buy it. But his key target audience - the middle and lower middle classes and urban proletariat all over Muslim lands in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia - may, as they have already identified, and felt in their skin, all the sorrows provoked by corporate-driven globalization.

It's as if bin Laden - in tune with great swaths of world public opinion - already sees on the horizon the dust storms unleashed by the shattering US defeats in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is deeply engaged, according to his and Ayman al-Zawahiri's strategy, in transforming al-Qaeda from a sect into a global protest movement.

Those who will definitely pay a lot of attention to bin Laden's words are young, second-generation Muslims or migrant, refugee, converted Muslims born in western Europe, "socially mutating tribes" as French expert on Islam Olivier Roy would put it, all of them ultra-radicalized anti-globalizers for whom al-Qaeda is a true anti-globalization revolutionary movement.

They are definitely not Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghans and Iranians - all of these not giving a damn about pan-Islamism, as they are engaged in much more complex, localized national struggles.

Once again, it's important to stress the nonsense of the neo-con-coined "Islamo-fascist totalitarianism" label. In Black Mass, his latest book, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, John Gray, correctly describes radical Islam of the al-Qaeda mold as Islamo-Jacobinism: "Their closest affinity is with the illiberal theory of popular sovereignty expounded by [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and applied by [Maximilien] Robespierre in the French Terror." Bin Laden may be now expounding in full a modern revolutionary ideology, but he is still the leader, as Gray would define it, of "a millenarian movement with Islamic roots".

The whole question around the face-off of the year is not how Petraeus will "save" the US$3-billion-a-week Bush war on Iraq. The question is why bin Laden felt so relaxed as to stage a comeback as statesman/strategist to proclaim, among other things, the utter failure of the Bush-conducted imperial project.

The answer is because Bush and the neo-cons have been playing al-Qaeda's game all along. Had Petraeus been sent six years ago on a thorough counterinsurgency mission to smash al-Qaeda, Congress today would be grappling with really relevant issues, such as health, education, the erosion of American workers' salaries and yes, global warming. Forget Petraeus: someone in Hollywood better call Bruce Willis to fight and kill the sheikh in Die Hard 5.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II12Ak05.html

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Guardian:
Bin Laden releases video on 9/11 anniversary

James Sturcke
Tuesday September 11, 2007

A new video featuring an introduction by Osama bin Laden was released today, exactly six years after the September 11 attacks in the US.

During the 14-minute foreword to the film, the al-Qaida leader praised Waled al-Shehri, one of the hijackers on American Airlines flight 11 that hit the World Trade Centre in New York.

In the tape's introduction, a still image of Bin Laden - wearing the same white robe and cap, and beige cloak as he wore during a video posted online four days ago - was seen with his finger raised.

Bin Laden praised al-Shehri, saying he "recognised the truth" that Arab rulers were "vassals" of the west and had "abandoned the balance of [Islamic] revelation".

"It is true that this young man was little in years, but the faith in his heart was big," he said. "So there is a huge difference between the path of the kings, presidents and hypocritical Ulama [Islamic scholars] and the path of these noble young men ... It remains for us to do our part.

"So I tell every young man among the youth of Islam: it is your duty to join the caravan [of martyrs] until the sufficiency is complete and the march to aid the High and Omnipotent continues."

After Bin Laden spoke, the video of al-Shehri appeared, during which he read a will.

"We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left," al-Shehri said, asserting that America will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.

Al-Shehri is the seventh of the 19 hijackers to appear in such a will since they died in the terrorist attacks.

The 47-minute video has yet to be posted on extremist websites, but a copy was obtained by the monitoring group IntelCenter. The video emerged as the Afghan government insisted that Bin Laden was not in the country.

"I know that he is not in Afghanistan, but I don't have information where he is," the foreign minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, told Reuters.

"Our intelligence information and activities of al-Qaida ... and also the information of Afghans in the anti-terror war all give ... information that he is not in Afghanistan."

Mr Spanta said there was no popular support for Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

"[Given] the enmity between him and the Afghan population ... because he was the main creator of a terrorist and dictatorship regime against the population of Afghanistan, it is impossible that he can find support among the civilians of Afghanistan," he said.

The latest Bin Laden film comes four days after the release of the first video for three years featuring the al-Qaida leader.

In that film he appeared in good health despite earlier reports that he was gravely ill with kidney disease.

Last week's address appeared to be aimed at taunting the American public. He flaunted his knowledge of current world affairs and noted the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. He also referred to a film by the Guardian's Sean Smith, which was shot recently in Iraq.

Al-Qaida has marked past anniversaries of the September 11 attacks by putting out videos of the last will and testaments of some of the hijackers, usually accompanied by comments from top leaders and documentary-style footage.

Last year, for example, a 55-minute video with the last testimonies of two hijackers was released.

The video included old but previously unreleased footage of Bin Laden strolling through an Afghan training camp where the attacks were apparently planned, and chatting with senior al-Qaida lieutenants.

The tape was accompanied by another featuring an address by Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,2166681,00.html

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Jeune Afrique: L'homme le plus proche
du roi ne sera pas premier ministre

MAROC - 11 septembre 2007 - par AFP

Fouad Ali El Himma, ex-vice-ministre marocain de l'Intérieur et personnalité la plus proche du roi Mohammed, VI a nié catégoriquement qu'il puisse être nommé premier ministre, dans un entretien à la télévision publique "2M" lundi.

M. El Himma a présenté sa démission à la veille des élections législatives du 7 septembre. Il a enlevé un siège de député dans la circonscription des Rehamna au nord de Marrakech sous l'étiquette "sans appartenance politique".

"Non c'est une erreur", a répondu M. El Himma à une question du journaliste de 2M. "Quand un communiqué du palais royal est diffusé, il ne peut pas comporter de conspiration", a-t-il dit.

Le palais royal avait auparavant annoncé lundi que des consultations avec les partis politiques allaient être lancées pour la désigfnation du premier ministre.

"A la lumière des résultats définitifs de l'élection (le 7 septembre) de la nouvelle Chambre des représentants, le roi Mohammed VI a décidé d'accorder dans les jours qui suivent des audiences aux dirigeants des partis politiques (...) dans la perspective de la désignation du Premier ministre", a indiqué le palais royal.

Avec 52 sièges, l'Istiqlal (nationaliste) a remporté les législatives du 7 septembre devant les islamistes du Parti Justice et Développement (PJD, 46) et le Mouvement populaire (MP, 41).

Le Rassemblement national des indépendants RNI, libéral) arrive quatrième (39 sièges) suivi de l'Union socialiste des forces populaires (USFP, 38 sièges).

La majorité sortante était composée de l'USFP, de l'Istiqlal, du RNI, du MP et du parti du progrès et du socialisme (PPS, 17 sièges).

M. El Himma a estimé que "les électeurs marocains ont donné leurs voix à des partis qui ont travaillé avec le roi Mohammed VI sur un projet clair", relevant que ces partis de la majorité sortante "ont recueilli 184 sièges". Soit plus que la majorité absolue des 325 sièges de la Chambre des représentants.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP72327lhommertsin0

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Mail & Guardian:
Victims of forgotten conflict

Stephanie Hancock | Paoua, Central African Republic
11 September 2007

Jacques Bissari is 70 and nearly crippled. Every day he lives in fear that attackers will come to kill him, but he cannot leave his home because he is too frail. "Most people are in the bush but I stayed," says Bissari. "When the military come they mock me and ask why I am still here."

Bissari's village of Bedaya is one of dozens that lie empty in this part of the Central African Republic (CAR).

A series of devastating attacks in which armed men loot homes, kill unarmed civilians and burn down villages has pushed an entire population into hiding in this remote north-western area of the CAR. Villagers have fled their homes and taken to the bush, living in the forests to avoid further attacks.

For the past two years a low-level war between rebels and CAR President Francois Bozize's army has created widespread instability and lawlessness.

The United Nations refugee agency says more than 265 000 people have fled their homes since 2005; most are now camped out in the bush, fearing for their lives.

Village after village lies empty and abandoned and roads are deserted; it is possible to drive for several days without seeing a single car.

Aid workers say most attacks have been carried out by government forces, often Bozize's own presidential guard.

The attacks are thought to be punishment meted out by the armed forces for civilians' perceived support of rebels in the area.

While rebels are present in some villages, the local population often has little choice.

"The rebels use civilians as human shields," an observer told the Mail & Guardian in Paoua. "Civilians don't really want the rebels in their villages, but they also don't want to tell the army where the rebels are hiding.

"Civilians trust neither the [national] army nor the rebels. They have to stay in the bush to avoid getting caught in the crossfire."

For their part, the rebels - who are no closer to forcing Bozize from power than when they started their battle two years ago - blame the government for attacking innocent civilians.

Observers say the rebels have °©little hope of taking power, especially with dwindling financial support, and aim simply to make the country ungovernable.

At this, they have largely succeeded. Vast areas of the northern CAR are now a virtual no-man's-land.

The government still controls key towns, but the bush has become a lawless security vacuum, with rebels and aid workers the only people still moving around.

The local population is faced with a grim set of choices. Civilians can either stay in their empty or partially destroyed villages, risking death if the army attacks, or they must live in the bush, miles from proper food and water supplies.

"I think what's hardest for these people is that they are still afraid," said Nicolas Rost, of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Bangui.

"Many people are terrified - they are worried every day that another attack might occur. They have been attacked several times and many have even been attacked in the bush where they are hiding."

Aid workers call the CAR Africa's "forgotten conflict", but it is also a hidden crisis: those in need of humanitarian assistance are hard to find and often frightened when strangers try to help.

"We are still scared maybe the rebels or the military might come to find us," says Andre Ndjikinde, who fled his home when troops attacked the town of Paoua early last year, killing more than 100 people.

"Since we've been here the children don't go to school and there is no doctor. If we fall ill we will stay like this and die."

Ndjikinde, who has been living in a makeshift bush settlement for the past 18 months, says he cannot go home even if he wanted to. "We are homeless. Most of our houses were burnt by rockets or destroyed by the fighting."

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318805&area=/insight/insight__africa/

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Mail & Guardian:
Ebola outbreak confirmed in DRC

Geneva, Switzerland
11 September 2007

An outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever, a deadly disease for which there is no treatment, has been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Samples from five people have tested positive for the Ebola virus in the southern province of Kasai Occidental, where authorities have reported about 120 deaths among 300 sick people in the past four months, WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl said.

Not all these deaths are necessarily due to Ebola, however. Other diseases are also suspected to be ravaging the remote region, as some patients have responded to treatment with antibiotics, indicating Shigella disease, which is borne by contaminated food or water, he said.

"We know there are five cases confirmed as Ebola. We still believe other things are going on," Hartl said. "We have to get more people on the ground in the area to investigate."

No cases have been reported in the east of the country where heavy fighting in recent weeks between government forces and rebels has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes.

Ebola, which causes death in 50% to 90% of cases, is transmitted by contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected persons. Symptoms begin with fever and muscle pain, followed by vomiting, diarrhoea and in some cases bleeding from orifices.

The virus's natural reservoir seems to reside in African rain forests and in areas of the Western Pacific, according to the United Nations health agency.

Kasai is east of Kikwit, the site of a major Ebola outbreak in the former Zaire in 1995, which killed 250 among 315 people.

The samples were tested at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in a laboratory in Gabon, according to Hartl.

The WHO on Tuesday activated its Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, known as Goarn, asking partner health organisations including the Atlanta-based CDC to send epidemiologists and other experts, he said.

"The WHO is in the process now of coordinating international teams to go into the area," Hartl said.

It is also important to warn communities that Ebola can be transmitted at burial ceremonies where mourners have direct contact with the body of the deceased, he said.

"We have to identify cases and isolate cases, separating Shigella patients from Ebola," Hartl added.

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/
breaking_news__africa/&articleid=318880#

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Mother Jones:
Bloody Wonderful: Goodbye, Anita Roddick

A friend and colleague remembers the hell-raising, dirty joke-cracking, fast-walking, top-selling firebrand who leveraged her Body Shop brand into an unstoppable force for social change.

Brooke Shelby Biggs
September 10 , 2007

Anita Roddick, Dame Commander of the British Empire, founder of The Body Shop Ltd., lifelong activist, and member of Mother Jones' board of directors, has died, but to consider her "gone" would be to invite a tongue-lashing from beyond the grave about lack of imagination. As she would put it, she is very bloody much still here, and we all better get used to it.

I met Anita when I was producer of Motherjones.com in 1999. She blew into a board meeting from a delayed flight and discovered us doing free-association exercises with big colored pens and enormous pages of newsprint. We had been asked to draw that which inspired us most. "Bollocks!" she shouted, and grabbed a pen. A crude drawing of bags of cash emerged on the left; a wobbly planet sat on the right. Interrupting, in her famously impatient manner, she narrated: "What I want to do is give all my dosh away to people who make a difference now, and not sit around drawing all afternoon." Later that night, she joined three of us in a hotel room, drank warm white wine out of a bottle, told outrageous stories, and played poker for M&M's.

Anita revolutionized business in a place no one was even sure existed—its soul. The Body Shop pioneered socially conscious business practices and became wildly successful by marketing ideas and opportunities for activism, and for never once running an ad. She took a great deal of heat for criticizing the beauty industry while selling beauty products. But it all made sense when you listened to her—she'd tell you that anti-wrinkle creams were "God's way of separating the stupid from their money," and that all you really needed to stay young-looking was to "quit smoking, stay out of the sun, and eat more tomatoes."

In her human-rights and environmental activism, she saw plenty of tragedy. Her friend, Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed by the Nigerian government after he led a long battle against Shell Oil in the Ogoni tribal lands in 1995. Instead of crying, Anita decided that Ken would want her to carry on the fight that much harder. So she did. When Shell offered to buy advertising on this site to "green" its image, I asked her what she would do. She said, "I'd take their money and make them squirm. Tell the truth."

She was irreverent and demanding, easily bored and completely frenetic. At barely 5 feet tall, she walked so fast, I had to break into a jog every few steps to keep up with her. Anita waited for no one and nothing. Time was precious and laziness an obscenity. Knowing there might, perhaps, be something to this whole "mortality" rumor, in the past two years she had been making big plans. The day before she died, she and her husband Gordon brainstormed their activism goals for the coming year. She was never done.

Anita became not only a mentor and later an employer to me, but also my best friend and conscience. When I met her, I was questioning my power as a journalist to create any meaningful change in the world. But to her, defeatism was self-indulgent clap-trap, and no excuse in any case. Her favorite saying was, "If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." Yet when I hit a low point and did give up, she showed me a quiet love, generosity, and loyalty I have never witnessed before or would expect again. This past New Year's Day, she and her family literally saved my life.

She may have given millions to charities and fought the first battles against global warming, unfair trade, domestic abuse, animal testing, prisons, torture, and indigenous rights, but in person she was anything but politically correct. She loved to ask blunt questions about strangers' sex lives. She told off-color jokes—never mind, downright filthy jokes. Two years ago we were sitting together in the visiting room at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola when the guards swarmed in and asked us to leave. We had been campaigning on behalf of the men we were visiting, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three. While the guards worked out the bureaucratic details of removing us, Anita calmly told a truly stomach-churning dirty joke involving penguins. Even the guard captain had to crack a smile, and the tension instantly lifted.

I imagine Anita right now drinking Italian wine and playing poker with God, and telling him that she has a few burning questions on the subjects of injustice, human suffering, the environment, organized religion, and, of course, sex. Next up: redecorating the place.

But enough of all that: Anita would tell us all to stop blubbering and get on with the work. And each of us owes her that much; her work was so global and wide-ranging that she might well have changed the way you live, whether you know it or not. The best tribute to her is to tell someone a dirty joke, and then go out and do something. Buy a newspaper from a homeless guy, hold a door for a stranger, call your congressperson, write a check, picket something, and scream at the top of your lungs. And then go eat a tomato.

Brooke Shelby Biggs collaborated with Anita Roddick on four books, including Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits: A Spiritual Activists Handbook. She was an editor and producer of Motherjones.com from 1999 to 2002.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/09/anita-roddick-obituary.html

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Página/12:
Una lección contra la cobardía

El aniversario del golpe de Pinochet sirve para remarcar las palabras del presidente socialista en un palacio sitiado: “Tengo la certeza de que mi sacrificio no será en vano”.

Lunes, 10 de Septiembre de 2007

“En estos momentos pasan los aviones. Es posible que nos acribillen. Pero que sepan que aquí estamos, por lo menos con nuestro ejemplo, que en este país hay hombres que saben cumplir con la obligación que tienen.” Con estas palabras desafiantes iniciaba Salvador Allende lo que más tarde pasaría a la historia como el “discurso final”, su testamento político. Con estas palabras también culminaba el sueño de un gobierno socialista que había llegado al poder sin revolución, elegido en democracia y que concitaba la expectativa mundial. Se trata de una pieza de oratoria que más allá del silencio al que fueron sometidos su cuerpo y su nombre, más allá de los 17 años de Pinochet en el poder, y más allá incluso del viraje que el mismo socialismo manifestó en estos últimos años, sigue sonando en los oídos de quienes lo escucharon alguna vez, y merece ser conocido también por los más jóvenes.

Es por esta razón que mañana, cuando se cumplen 34 años del golpe que encabezó Pinochet junto con el ejército, la marina, la aviación y el cuerpo de carabineros, Página/12 rinde homenaje a la figura del presidente chileno a través de un fascículo especial de 16 páginas, con el texto completo de este discurso que hizo historia.

Dicen que Allende solía decir: “Yo no seré jamás como esos presidentes que salen al exilio arrancando poco menos que en pijama”. En la hora trágica, demostró que era capaz de transitar la distancia que existe entre el dicho y el hecho. Y en parte, allí reside el valor de este discurso que al filo de la muerte demuestra el poder de la palabra aun en tiempos en que se festeja su devaluación.

Este fascículo, que se distribuirá gratuitamente mañana con el diario, incluye también otros dichos de familiares, escritores, amigos y testigos que dan cuenta de lo que ocurrió aquella mañana del 11 de septiembre en el Palacio de La Moneda. “El drama ocurrió en Chile, para mal de los chilenos, pero pasará a la historia como algo que nos sucedió sin remedio a todos los hombres y mujeres de este tiempo”: así definió Gabriel García Márquez el impacto histórico del golpe y la trágica escena final de un hombre solo con su fusil y unos pocos colaboradores resistiendo en el palacio de gobierno, mientras la aviación copiaba la técnica de los bombardeos nazis a grandes ciudades, para destruir un solo edificio. Para derribar la vida en democracia.

Este ejemplar, que contiene el discurso del Palacio de La Moneda, es también el primer número de una nueva colección, que lleva el nombre de Discursos que cambiaron la historia, y que Página/12 distribuirá gratuitamente todos los lunes a partir del 8 de octubre. Los textos y la investigación estuvieron a cargo de Liliana Viola, autora del libro Los discursos del poder (Editorial Norma), donde recupera y pone en contexto los discursos políticos que en distintos momentos de la historia lograron influir en el pensamiento y a veces en las acciones de las masas que los escucharon. La colección incluye las palabras de Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Boris Yeltsin, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Hernán Cortés, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Eva Perón, Juan Domingo Perón y Raúl Alfonsín, entre otros.

¿Pueden los discursos cambiar la historia? Es una pregunta que esta colección tratará de responder. Por lo pronto, las últimas palabras del discurso de Allende, pronunciadas hace 34 años, siguen sonando y, “más temprano que tarde”, salieron de su tumba a la hora de revolver conciencias en su país:

“Trabajadores de mi patria, tengo fe en Chile y su destino. Superarán otros hombres este momento gris y amargo en el que la traición pretende imponerse. Sigan ustedes sabiendo que, mucho más temprano que tarde, de nuevo se abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre libre, para construir una sociedad mejor. ¡Viva Chile! ¡Viva el pueblo! ¡Vivan los trabajadores! Estas son mis últimas palabras y tengo la certeza de que mi sacrificio no será en vano, tengo la certeza de que, por lo menos, será una lección moral que castigará la felonía, la cobardía y la traición.”

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/2-7578-2007-09-10.html

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Página/12:
El verdadero choque de civilizaciones

Por Leonardo Boff*
Martes, 11 de Septiembre de 2007

La frase “choque de civilizaciones” como formato para las futuras guerras fue acuñada por el fracasado estratega de la guerra de Vietnam Samuel P. Huntington. Pero para Mike Davis, uno de los más creativos investigadores norteamericanos en temas actuales como “los holocaustos coloniales” y la “amenaza global de la gripe aviaria”, la guerra de civilizaciones se daría entre la ciudad organizada y la multitud de villas miseria del mundo.

Su reciente libro Planeta Favela, de 2006, presenta una investigación minuciosa (aunque su bibliografía es casi toda en inglés) sobre la favelización que ocurre aceleradamente en todo el mundo. La humanidad siempre se organizó de modo que los grupos fuertes se quedasen con la tierra y sus recursos, dejando a la mayoría excluida. Con la irrupción del neoliberalismo, en los ochenta ese proceso tuvo vía libre: se privatizó casi todo, los bienes y servicios se concentraron en pocas manos a tal ritmo que los países periféricos quedaron desestabilizados socialmente, con millones y millones de personas lanzadas a la más pura informalidad. Para el sistema, ellos son “aceite quemado”, “ceros económicos”, “masa superflua” que ni siquiera merece entrar en el ejército de reserva del capital.

Esta exclusión se expresa en la favelización que abarca cada año a 25 millones de personas en el mundo entero. Según Davis, el 78,2 por ciento de las poblaciones de los países pobres es de “villeros”. Según la CIA, en 2002 nada menos que mil millones de personas estaban desempleadas o subempleadas y favelizadas.

Y junto con la villa miseria viene toda una corte de perversidades, como el ejército de niños explotados y esclavizados, como en las fábricas de alfombras de Varanasi (Benarés), en India, o en las “haciendas de riñones” y otros órganos comercializables en Madrás o El Cairo, o en formas de degradación casi inimaginables, donde las personas “viven literalmente en la mierda...”

El imperio norteamericano no dejó de notar las consecuencias geopolíticas de un mundo favelado. Temen la “urbanización de la revuelta” o la organización de los villeros para la lucha política. Y organizaron un sistema MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain, Operaciones Militares en Terreno Urbanizado) para entrenar soldados para la guerra en calles laberínticas, en zanjas, en las villas de cualquier parte del mundo donde los intereses imperiales sean amenazados.

Será la lucha entre la ciudad organizada y amedrentada y la villa furiosa. Uno de los estrategas dijo fríamente que “las ciudades fracasadas y feroces del tercer mundo, en especial sus periferias villeras, serán el campo de batalla del siglo 21: la doctrina del Pentágono está siendo reconfigurada en esa línea para enfrentar una guerra mundial de baja intensidad y duración ilimitada contra segmentos criminalizados de los pobres urbanos. Ese es el verdadero choque de civilizaciones”.

¿Los métodos usados hace poco en Río de Janeiro, con la militarización del combate a los traficantes en las favelas, no seguirán ya esa estrategia inspirada por el imperio? Estamos entre los países más favelizados del mundo, efecto perverso creado por los que siempre frenaron la reforma agraria y la inclusión social de las grandes mayorías porque les conviene que sigan empobrecidas, enfermas y analfabetas. Mientras no se hagan los cambios necesarios para lograr la inclusión, seguirán el miedo y el riesgo real de una guerra sin fin.

* Teólogo y escritor brasileño. De Carta maior. Especial para Página/12.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91173-2007-09-11.html

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The Independent: The view from Washington:
Petraeus offers hope of success to a war-weary America

By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 11 September 2007

The commander of US forces in Iraq delivered his long-awaited assessment of Iraq yesterday, telling a war-weary Congress that the "surge" of troops in the conflict was starting to pay off.

"The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met," General David Petraeus said, flatly contradicting recent US reports describing setbacks and failure and increased sectarian violence. The most important development of the past eight months, the general said, was the rejection of al-Qa'ida by Sunni tribes in Anbar province, and the effect spreading elsewhere.

The White House hopes that the general's appearance will prove to be a turning point for the United States as it tries to extricate itself from Iraq without causing the breakup of the country or the emergence of another hostile regime.

General Petraeus is an increasingly a controversial figure. His admirers describe him as a brilliant soldier as well as a counterterrorism expert. Opponents says he is an uncritical supporter of President Bush's failing policies who has bamboozled Congressional opponents of the war.

The general's much-anticipated testimony was initially delayed when his microphone did not work. Once he began, he forcefully promised Congress that: "We will be able to reduce our forces to the pre-surge level... by next summer without jeopardising the security gains we have fought so hard to achieve."

While offering to withdraw a token marine brigade next month and an army brigade shortly afterwards, he said a dramatic withdrawal at this stage would be devastating.

Despite his onslaught, there was plenty of scepticism in the committee room yesterday. Tom Lantos, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said: "The administration's myopic policies in Iraq have created a fiasco ... We cannot take any of this administration's assertions on Iraq at face value any more."

Mr Lantos insisted that the Bush administration has sent General Petraeus and the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, "to convince Congress that victory is at hand".

"With all due respect to you, I must say, I don't buy it," Mr Lantos said, adding that "strategically, the escalation has failed" .

General Petraeus responded by delivering a blizzard of statistics which demonstrated, he said that the insurgents and al-Qai'da supporters were being defeated. He said continued progress would allow him to reduce US troop numbers by 30,000 as early as next summer. The withdrawals would reduce US combat troop strength to 130,000, the level before the surge.

He also produced charts which purported to show that violence has fallen sharply in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. The number of attacks and deaths would be lower without the attacks of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, he said. And one of his charts showed that two Iraqi provinces have seen greater violence during the surge.

The general also claimed that Iran is using its irregular Al Quds force to help the Iraqi insurgency, a charge the US has been making for several months. Iran's aim, he said, was to create a proxy militia inside Iraq, just as it had in Lebanon with Hizbollah.

The testimony is also expected to affect the US presidential campaign, where Democratic candidates are exploiting the public's deep opposition to the war to try to win control of the White House.

The Democrats want a rapid withdrawal of forces and the prospect of 30,000 troops being brought home by next summer could be seen as an incentive for them. However, many feel it is still too little and too late.

The general was also at pains to rebut charges that he was doing the bidding of the White House, saying: "I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress."

Feelings ran high in the committee room, where anti-war hecklers chanted: " Generals lie, children die", and: "War criminal, war criminal", before the committee chairman, Ike Skelton, decreed: "Out they go!" He warned that others disrupting the hearing would be prosecuted.

Mr Crocker, who also gave testimony, said: "Our country has given a great deal of blood and treasure." He added that it will take patience to achieve success in Iraq and warned that withdrawing forces at this stage would only lead to failure.

Democrats and Republicans both admire General Petraeus and the White House has also turned to him to give a boost to its policies at a time when Mr Bush's popularity has collapsed, in large part because of the war.

Before his testimony General Petraeus was being praised by Democrats even as they criticised the war. Mr Skelton, a Democrat, described him as " almost certainly the right man for the job in Iraq", while adding that " he's the right person three years too late and 250,000 troops short."

The hearing yesterday will be followed today – the anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks – with more testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee. This is all part of emergency war-funding legislation which was passed by Congress last May.

Congress provided $95bn (£46.8bn) to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until the end of September and laid down 18 political, economic and security "benchmarks" for the Iraqi government to meet to nudge it on the road to national reconciliation.

Claims and counter-claims

* Impact of surge

General Petraeus said: "The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met." It is true that security incidents and the number of civilian deaths have declined. He also hailed the agreement of Sunni tribesmen in Anbar province to stop co-operating with al-Qa'ida. But the arrangement in Anbar cannot be attributed only to the effects of the " surge". Al-Qa'ida has not been defeated, highlighting the difficulty of eradicating such a loose terror network by simply eliminating its leaders. Meanwhile, the political effects of the surge have yet to be felt.

* Troop cuts

He says: "I believe we will be able to reduce our forces to pre-surge level by next summer without jeopardising our security gains."

He recommended a very gradual reduction to pre-surge levels by mid-July next year, meaning that about 130,000 would still be in Iraq at that time. But he refused to speculate beyond that date. He did announce the departure of a Marine unit this month and said a brigade of 3,500 to 4,000 troops should be withdrawn by the new year. Democrats have already rejected these numbers as insufficient. Senator Robert Casey deplored the "attempt to throw Congress a bone and begin to pull some troops out".

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Iraqi forces needed " more effort and time" before they could replace coalition troops.

* Credibility

General Petraeus said: "I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress."

He rejected claims that his report reflected the wishes of the White House and stressed his figures were reliable. But they were contradicted by the Iraqi government and the UN. The Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid, said: "He has made statements over the years that have not proven to be factual. It's Bush's report."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2950300.ece

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The Nation:
Changing History

One year after the attacks, Eric Foner assessed the impact of 9/11 on the way America tells the story of itself and readjusts its relationship with the world.

by ERIC FONER
[from the September 23, 2002 issue]

All history, the saying goes, is contemporary history. People instinctively turn to the past to help understand the present. Events draw our attention to previously neglected historical subjects. The second wave of feminism gave birth to a flourishing subfield of women's history. The Reagan Revolution spawned a cottage industry in the history of US conservatism.

Many years will pass before we can fully assess how our thinking about history has changed as a result of September 11. While historians ponder this question, conservative ideologues have produced a spate of polemical statements on how we should teach American history in light of recent events. In a speech less than a month after the tragedy, Lynne Cheney insisted that calls for more intensive study of the rest of the world amounted to blaming America's "failure to understand Islam" for the attack. A letter distributed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which she once chaired, chastised professors who fail to teach the "truth" that civilization itself "is best exemplified in the West and indeed in America."

In What's So Great About America, Dinesh D'Souza contends that freedom and religious toleration are uniquely "Western" beliefs. The publisher's ad for the book identifies those who hold alternative views as "people who provide a rationale for terrorism." With funding from conservative foundations and powerful political connections, such commentators hope to reshape the teaching of American history.

Historians cannot predict the future, but the past they portray must be one out of which the present can plausibly have grown. The self-absorbed, super-celebratory history now being promoted will not enable students to make sense of either their own society or our increasingly interconnected world.

Historians cannot choose the ways history becomes part of our own experience. September 11 has rudely placed certain issues at the forefront of our consciousness. Let me mention three and their implications for how we think about the American past: the upsurge of patriotism, significant infringements on civil liberties and a sudden awareness of considerable distrust abroad of American actions and motives.

The generation of historians that came of age during the Vietnam War witnessed firsthand how patriotic language and symbols, especially the American flag, can be invoked in the service of manifestly unjust causes. Partly as a result, they have tended to neglect the power of these symbols as genuine expressions of a sense of common national community. Patriotism, if studied at all, has been understood as an "invention," rather than a habit of the heart.

Historians have had greater success lately at dividing up the American past into discrete experiences delineated along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and class than at exploring the common threads of American nationality. But the immediate response to September 11 cut across these boundaries. No one knows if the renewed sense of common purpose and shared national identity that surfaced so vividly after September 11 will prove temporary. But they require historians to devote new attention to the roots of the symbols, values and experiences Americans share as well as those that divide them.

All patriotic upsurges run the risk of degenerating into a coercive drawing of boundaries between "loyal" Americans and those stigmatized as aliens and traitors. This magazine has chronicled the numerous and disturbing infringements on civil liberties that have followed September 11. Such legal protections as habeas corpus, trial by impartial jury, the right to legal representation and equality before the law regardless of race or national origin have been seriously curtailed.

Civil liberties have been severely abridged during previous moments of crisis, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to Japanese-American internment in World War II. Historians generally view these past episodes as shameful anomalies. But we are now living through another such episode, and there is a remarkable absence of public outcry.

We need an American history that sees protections for civil liberties not as a timeless feature of our "civilization" but as a recent and fragile achievement resulting from many decades of historical struggle. We should take a new look at obscure Supreme Court cases-Fong Yue Ting (1893), the Insular Cases of the early twentieth century, Korematsu during World War II-in which the Justices allowed the government virtual carte blanche in dealing with aliens and in suspending the rights of specific groups of citizens on grounds of military necessity. Dissenting in Fong Yue Ting, which authorized the deportation of Chinese immigrants without due process, Justice David Brewer observed that, like today, the power was directed against a people many Americans found "obnoxious." But, he warned, "who shall say it will not be exercised tomorrow against other classes and other people?"

September 11 will also undoubtedly lead historians to examine more closely the history of the country's relationship with the larger world. Public opinion polls revealed that few Americans have any knowledge of other peoples' grievances against the United States. A study of our history in its international context might help to explain why there is widespread fear outside our borders that the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.

Back in the 1930s, historian Herbert Bolton warned that by treating the American past in isolation, historians were helping to raise up a "nation of chauvinists"-a danger worth remembering when considering the drumbeat of calls for a celebratory and insular history divorced from its global context. Of course, international paradigms can be every bit as obfuscating as histories that are purely national. We must be careful not to reproduce traditional American exceptionalism on a global scale.

September 11, for example, has inspired a spate of commentary influenced by Samuel Huntington's mid-1990s book The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington's paradigm reduces politics and culture to a single characteristic-race, religion or geography-that remains forever static, divorced from historical development or change through interaction with other societies. It makes it impossible to discuss divisions within these purported civilizations. The idea that the West is the sole home of reason, liberty and tolerance ignores how recently such values triumphed in the United States and also ignores the debates over creationism, abortion rights and other issues that suggest that commitment to them is hardly unanimous. The definition of "Western civilization" is highly selective-it includes the Enlightenment but not the Inquisition, liberalism but not the Holocaust, Charles Darwin but not the Salem witch trials.

Nor can September 11 be explained by reference to timeless characteristics or innate pathologies of "Islamic civilization." From the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction to Oklahoma City in our own time, our society has produced its own home-grown terrorists. Terrorism springs from specific historical causes, not the innate qualities of one or another civilization.

The study of history should transcend boundaries rather than reinforce or reproduce them. In the wake of September 11, it is all the more imperative that the history we teach be a candid appraisal of our own society's strengths and weaknesses, not simply an exercise in self-celebration-a conversation with the entire world, not a complacent dialogue with ourselves.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020923/foner

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ZNet | Iraq:
'The US Will Lose War Regardless What it Does'

by Gabriel Kolko; Spiegel Online
September 11, 2007

SPIEGEL: The long awaited results of the "surge" are now in. Has the surge succeeded? Is there reason for optimism in Iraq?

KOLKO: Both United States General David H. Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will deliver "progress" reports to Congress on Monday, but the skeptics far outnumber those who believe Bush's strategy in Iraq is succeeding. They will say that Shiite attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad have fallen but they will not add that Baghdad has been largely purged in many areas of Sunni inhabitants and their flight much earlier - and not the increase in Americans - is the reason "success" can be reported to Congress. Indeed, most of the administration's statistics have been met with a wave of skepticism.

The Iraq military but especially the political 'benchmarks' that this administration thought so crucial - and used to justify its 'surge' of 28,500 additional troops - have, in the opinion of Congress' Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued at the end of August, not been attained (there are now 168,000 American troops in Iraq, plus roughly half as many civilians). In its unexpurgated, original form, the GAO claimed that only three of the 18 Congressionally mandated "benchmarks" had been reached: violence was as high as ever; reconstruction was plagued by corruption on both the Iraqi and American sides; the Shiites and Sunnis were as disunited as ever, murdering each other; crucial laws, especially on oil, have not been enacted yet; and probably many political changes will never occur, and the like. Of its nine security goals, only two had been met. White House and Pentagon efforts to soften GAO criticisms failed.

SPIEGEL: Who has benefited from the mess?

KOLKO: The situation is worse than ever and the artificial nation - created after World War I in a capricious manner - is breaking up. The surge, as one Iraqi is quoted, "is isolating areas from each other ... and putting up permanent checkpoints. That is what I call a failure." The civilian death toll last August was higher than in February. Geopolitically, as Bush senior feared after the first Gulf war in 1990-91, Iran is emerging more powerful than ever, increasingly dominant in the region. The many official Israeli warnings before the war that this would be the outcome of war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power have come true.

SPIEGEL: How would you describe the situation of the Bush White House today? What options does it have?

KOLKO: The Bush Administration suffers from a fatal dilemma. Its Iraq adventure is getting steadily worse, the American people very likely will vote the Republicans out of office because of it, and the war is extremely expensive at a time that the economy is beginning to present it with a major problem. The president's poll ratings are now the worst since 2001. Only 33 percent of the American public approve of his leadership and 58 percent want to decrease the number of American troops immediately or quickly. Fifty-five percent want legislation to set a withdrawal deadline. In Afghanistan, as well, the war against the Taliban is going badly, and the Bush Administration's dismal effort to use massive American military power to remake the world in a vague, inconsistent way is failing. The US has managed to increasingly alienate its former friends, who now fear its confusion and unpredictability. Above all, the American public is less ready than ever to tolerate Bush's idiosyncrasies.

SPIEGEL: What went wrong? Was the war doomed from the very beginning? How can the US military and the US government which is spending $3 billion per week in Iraq be losing the war?

KOLKO: The US is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage, as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium- and long-run. They were irrelevant in many contexts in which the US was not involved, and they explain the outcome of many armed struggles over the past century regardless of who was in them, for they are usually decided by the socio-economic and political strength of the various sides - China after 1947 and Vietnam after 1972 are two examples but scarcely the only ones. Wars are more determined by socio-economic and political factors than any other, and this was true long before the US attempted to regulate the world's affairs. Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology. Washington refuses to heed this lesson of modern history.

SPIEGEL: What is the position of the US military? Are its forces united behind the war?

KOLKO: Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the American military, especially after the Vietnam experience traumatized it. My history of the Vietnam War was purchased by many base libraries, and the military journals treated it in detail and very respectfully. The statement at the end of July by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael G. Mullen, that "no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" if Iraqi politics fails to change drastically reflects a current of realism that has existed among military thinkers for some decades (whether he acts on this assumption is another matter and depends greatly on considerations outside of his control). But the senior military remains extremely disunited on this war, and many officers regard Gen. Petraeus - the top military commander in Iraq - as a political opportunist who ultimately will do as Bush commands.

Admiral William J. Fallon, who commands American forces in the region and is Petraeus' superior, is publicly skeptical of his endorsement of the president's policies in Iraq. The Army, especially, does not have the manpower for a protracted war and if the US maintains its troop levels after spring 2008, it will face a crisis. It will have to break its pledge not to leave soldiers in Iraq longer than 15 months, accelerate the use of National Guard units, and the like - and it will lose the war regardless of what it does.

SPIEGEL: But if there are critical voices in the military, why are they ignored?

KOLKO: Like the CIA, the military has some acute strategic thinkers who have learned from bitter experiences. The analyses of the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute - to name one of many - are often very insightful and critical.

The problem, of course, is that few (if any) at the decisive levels pay any attention to the critical ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There is no shortage of insight among US official analysts - the problem that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity, say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict them. Former CIA head George Tenet is the supreme example of that, and what the CIA emphasized for the president or Donald Rumsfeld was essentially what they wanted to hear. While he admits the CIA knew far less regarding Iraq than it should have, Tenet's recent memoir is a good example of desire leading reporting objectively. The men and women who rise to the top are finely tuned to the relationship between ambition and readiness to contradict their superiors with facts. The entire mess in Iraq, to cite just one example, was predicted. If reason and clarity prevailed, America's role in the world would be utterly different.

SPIEGEL: But what about the Iraqi security forces? Are they able to take over from the Americans?

KOLKO: The Iraqi army and police that are to replace the Americans is heavily infiltrated by Shiites loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and others - estimates vary, but at least a quarter is wholly unreliable. When Paul Bremer was sent as proconsul to Iraq in May 2003, he decided unilaterally to purge the military completely of Saddam's officers and loyalists - Bush still wanted, vaguely, to keep the existing army intact - but the task of reconstructing it proved far too difficult for his successors. The American administration is now using the very Sunni tribes that Saddam had worked with, mainly by purchasing their loyalty. It is very significant that Bush during his visit to Iraq a few days ago went to Anbar province rather than Baghdad, reflecting the realization that Nouri al-Maliki's government is no longer the chosen vehicle for attaining America's goals.

SPIEGEL: How does Washington plan to go about the business of ending the war?

KOLKO: There is utter confusion in Washington about how to end this morass. Goals are similar but the means to attain them are increasingly changing, confused, and as victory becomes more elusive so too does this administration look pathetic. The 'surge' in the opinion of a majority of quite conservative Establishment foreign policy experts (80 percent of whom had once served in government) was failing; the administration's handling of the war, in their view, was dismal. In fact, it is disastrous.

Interview conducted by John Goetz.

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