Truthout.org March 17, 2013: On this tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is important to remember the 4,500 Americans killed, the far larger number permanently wounded, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions maimed or displaced, the trillion dollars of US taxpayers’ money squandered (and the resulting cutbacks through sequestration), the continued costs of the war through veterans’ benefits and interest on the national debt, and the anti-American extremism in reaction to the invasion and occupation which has spread. All could have been avoided if the Democratic-controlled Senate hadn’t voted to authorize this illegal and unnecessary war and occupation.
Category: Truthout
Truthout
Hillary Clinton’s Legacy as Secretary of State
Truthout February 7, 2013
Hillary Clinton leaves her position as Secretary of State with a legacy of supporting autocratic regimes and occupation armies, opposing enforcement of international humanitarian law, undermining arms control and defending military solutions to complex political problems. During her eight years in the U.S .Senate she was an outspoken supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, lied about Iraq’s military capabilities to frighten the public into supporting the illegal war, unleashed repeated attacks against the UN, opposed restrictions on land mines and cluster bombs, defended war crimes by allied right-wing governments and largely embraced Bush’s unilateralist agenda.
Supporting Nonviolence in Syria
Foreign Policy December 20, 2012, by Stephen Zunes
[Also at Truthout.org and International Center for Nonviolent Conflict]
While a growing number of people are calling for increased military aid to armed insurgents or even direct military intervention, as the French government has said it will consider, to support the armed opposition would likely exacerbate the Syrian people’s suffering and appear to validate the tragic miscalculation by parts of the Syrian opposition to supplant their bold and impressive nonviolent civil insurrection with an armed insurgency…
Remembering George McGovern
Truthout October 22, 2012. Also see Zunes’ article in Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies and 1993 interview with McGovern in The Progressive.
Getting to know George McGovern – who died Sunday morning at age 90 – as a friend, collaborator, co-author and co-teacher has been among my proudest, and most fulfilling experiences. As a 15-year-old high school sophomore, I volunteered for his 1972 presidential campaign. McGovern won my county (one of the few in the South that went Democratic that year), but lost the state and the nation in a near-record landslide, thanks in large part to attacks by the right wing of the Democratic Party during the primaries and the dirty tricks by the campaign of incumbent President Richard Nixon during the fall campaign. These illegal acts, along with the resulting cover-ups, eventually led to impeachment procedures that forced Nixon’s resignation…
University of California Takes Aim at Human Rights Activists
Truthout, 4 May 2012, by Stephen Zunes.
Also in Rise Up Times and interviewed on The Scott Horton Show. From the Vietnam War to the Central American revolutions to apartheid South Africa to the East Timor occupation to the invasion of Iraq, university campuses have been an important venue for concerned scholars and activists to raise issues regarding human rights, international law and US foreign policy…
US Outrage Over Syria Veto at UN Rife With Hypocrisy
Truthout, February 8, 2012, also by The Israel Palestine Project
Official Washington has been rife with condemnation at the decision by the governments of Russia and China to veto an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing repression in Syria and calling for a halt to violence on all sides; unfettered access for Arab League monitors; and “a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system, in which citizens are equal regardless of their affiliations or ethnicities or beliefs.” Human rights activists were outraged…
Iraq: Remembering Those Responsible
Truthout Published 1 January 2012: Also at Common Dreams, Transnational.org, Peace and Justice Post and ZNetwork
The formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month has led to a whole series of retrospectives on the invasion and the eight and a half years of occupation that followed as well as a host of unanswered questions.. of critical importance at this juncture is that we not allow the narratives on the war to understate its tragic consequences or those responsible for the war — both Republicans and Democrats — to escape their responsibility…
The Legacy of 9/11 and the War on Intellectuals
Truthout & Huffington Post Sept. 10-11, 2011: Ten years after 9/11, for the first time, a plurality of Americans recognizes that US policy in the Middle East played a major role in the attacks. As a Middle East specialist, I engaged in scores of interviews and wrote a number of widely circulated articles in the days, weeks and months following the terrorist strikes arguing this very point…
Lessons and False Lessons From Libya
Truthout August 30, 2011. Also in Peace Review
A Journal of Social Justice Volume 25, 2013 – Issue 4
Congress and Its Colonialist Agenda
Truthout & Salem News (Oregon) July 15. 2011
Up until the mid-20th century, Western attitudes regarding national freedom essentially went like this: the independence of white Western nations (Great Britain, France, the United States etc.) was a given. Independence for nonwhite, non-Western nations (such as those in Africa, the Middle East and Asia), however, could only be under conditions granted by the occupying powers. The time at which these nations could be free, their specific boundaries and the conditions of their independence could only be reached through negotiations between the colonial occupiers and representatives
Progressive Defense of Weiner Overlooks His Right-Wing Foreign Policy
Truthout June 20, 2011: A surprising number of progressives have been expressing regret at the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) … What is disturbing, however, is the way Weiner is being treated as if he was a leading progressive voice on Capitol Hill despite his decidedly right-wing political agenda, particularly on foreign policy…
Netanyahu’s Speech and Congressional Democrats’ Embrace of Extremism
Truthout June 3, 2011:
As Israeli opposition parties, peace and human rights activists, and editorialists denounced their prime minister’s intransigence in the face of President Barack Obama’s peace initiative, Congressional Democrats here in the United States have instead joined their Republican counterparts in lining up to support the right-wing Israeli leader’s defiance…
Mitchell’s Inevitable Resignation
Truthout May 16, 2011. Also in Huffington Post and ZNetwork
At age 77, George Mitchell’s resignation as President Barack Obama’s envoy on Arab-Israeli affairs may have indeed been for personal reasons, as he claimed. More likely, however, it came out of frustration at the Obama administration’s failure to pressure the right-wing Israeli government to make the necessary compromises for peace…
Credit the Egyptian People for the Egyptian Revolution
Truthout February 26, 2011
While there will undoubtedly have to be additional popular struggle in Egypt to ensure that the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak leads to real democracy, the ouster of the dictator is by any measure a major triumph for the Egyptian people and yet another example of the power of nonviolent action. Indeed, Egypt joins such diverse countries as the Philippines, Poland, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Nepal, Serbia, Bolivia, Indonesia, and others…
US Continues to Back Egyptian Dictatorship in the Face of Pro-Democracy Uprising
Truthout January 27, 2011. Also in Huffington Post
Washington’s continued support for the Egyptian dictatorship in the face of massive pro-democracy protests is yet another sign that both Congress and the Obama administration remain out of touch with the growing demands for freedom in the Arab world. Just last month, Obama and the then-Democratic-controlled Congress approved an additional $1.3 billion in security assistance to help prop up Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime.
Tunisia’s Democratic Revolution
Huffington Post Jan 20, 2011 |Updated May 25, 2011
Whether the overthrow of the corrupt and autocratic Ben Ali regime in Tunisia in a mass civil insurrection will lead to a stable, just and democratic order remains to be seen, but the dramatic events in that North African country underscore a critical point: Democracy in the Arab world will not come from foreign military intervention or sanctimonious lecturing from Western capitals, but from Arab peoples themselves.
New Arms Deal to Israel Stokes Militarism
Truthout November 10, 2010
The recently announced deal for the United States to provide Israel with 20 new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets marks yet another blow for arms control advocates and those who had hoped the Obama administration would resist continuing with the Bush administration’s policy of further militarizing the Middle East. Once again rejecting calls from the peace and human rights community to link arms transfers to adherence to human rights and international law, the $2.75 billion deal is one of the largest arms procurements by the state of Israel. This is the first part of a series of US taxpayer-funded arms transfers to Israel expected to total more than $30 billion over the next decade…
Congress Defends Murder of American Peace Activist and Other War Crimes
Truthout October 11, 2010; also in Znetwork
Despite revelations from a detailed investigation by a special commission of the UN Human Rights Council confirming that Israel committed war crimes, the overwhelming majority of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress remain on record defending the Israeli attack as legitimate self-defense. This is particularly striking given evidence presented in the report that five of the nine people killed, including a 19-year-old US citizen, were murdered – shot execution-style by Israeli commandos…
Iraq: The Democrats’ War
Truthout Sept. 10, 2010 & Common Dreams
The ongoing presence of over 50,000 US troops, many thousands of civilian employees and tens of thousands of US-backed mercenaries raises serious questions over the significance of the partial withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. The August 31 deadline marking the “end of US combat operations in Iraq” is not as real or significant a milestone as President Obama implied… with all the attention on the supposed withdrawal of US combat forces, it is important to acknowledge the forces that got us into this tragic conflict in the first place.
Harry Reid’s Anti-Islamic Agenda
Truthout September 1, 2010
The moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party could not be any more evident than in its continued support for Nevada Sen. Harry Reid as majority leader despite his decision to join the bigoted and Islamophobic campaign against the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center in New York, arguing that it “should be built somewhere else.”
This was also an apparent effort to embarrass President Barack Obama – who, in a rare example of showing some spine in the face of right-wing attacks – defended the First Amendment rights of the Muslim group…