[Peace] News notes for the AWARE meeting 2007-11-04

[C. G. Estabrook]

SUNDAY 4 NOVEMBER 2007
[THIS WEEK sees the anniversary of the October Revolution (a calendar 
change accounts for the date discrepancy) in 1917 -- the coup by the 
Bolshevik faction in the course of the eight-month old Russian 
Revolution, an uprising against serfdom and war (the February 
Revolution).  In the October Revolution, state power was seized by a 
small group led by Lenin and Trotsky, who immediately moved to put an 
end to the socialist and democratic movements that had appeared during 
the previous months.  The two great political systems of the 20th 
century agreed in the lie that the Bolshevik regime was socialist -- the 
USSR, because they wanted the great cachet of socialism; the USA, 
because they wanted to discredit socialism by the example of Bolshevik 
practice.]

[1] IRAN.  George Will argues in his Sunday column (published in the 
local paper and elsewhere) that Congress must exercise its 
responsibility to keep the president from initiating a war with Iran. 
This surprising assertion from a leading conservative pundit suggests 
that it's accepted that that's what the administration is going to do. 
"Congress's Unused War Powers" begins -- it seems to me accurately -- 
"Americans are wondering, with the lassitude of uninvolved spectators, 
whether the president will initiate a war with Iran."
	On Monday, fourteen White House reporters had an entirely 
off-the-record news conference with Bush.  Do you suppose Iran came up?
	Meanwhile, the public half of the administration, VP Cheney, said in a 
speech in Dallas on Friday, "Peaceful measures to prevent Iran from 
menacing the Middle East and developing a nuclear weapons program have 
not yet worked, leaving military action as a possible solution."  A new 
Zogby poll shows that a majority [52%] of likely voters would support a 
U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
	On Thursday the WP published a memo from then-Secretary of Defense 
Rumsfeld from a year and a half ago that issued explicit instructions to 
the military to "keep elevating the threat ... link Iraq to Iran ... 
talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people 
realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists.” 
Rumsfeld also instructed Pentagon officials to write letters responding 
to newspaper columnists who criticized the war.

[2] ISRAEL. The Bush administration announced tentative plans on 
Wednesday to sell Israel up to $1.32 billion worth of advanced guided 
TOW and Hellfire missiles, munitions and other weapons from American 
weapons' makers. Congress has the power to reject proposed arms sales, 
but rarely does so.

[3] SYRIA. In the most startling story of the week, the right-wing 
Jerusalem Post reported that "The September 6 raid over Syria was 
carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported 
Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two 
US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a 
suspected nuclear site under construction.  The sources were quoted as 
saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes. 
  The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear 
weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed..."
	What occurred -- and what the target was -- remains unclear, but 
whatever occurred was undoubtedly done with some degree of US/Israeli 
collusion.  Can this incident be connected with the movement of armed 
nuclear weapons across the US the week before, to a staging area for the 
Middle East?  That's officially dismissed by the USAF as a "mistake," 
but such a mistake had not happened, by official accounts, in the 
history of US nuclear weapons.  And we know that there is an embattled 
faction within the administration that desperately wants to attack Iran 
before the end of the Bush presidency.

[4] PAKISTAN. The Bush administration's announced policy of spreading 
democracy to the Middle East was at work in Pakistan this week, where 
the US client Pervez Musharraf suspended the constitution and declared 
martial law in order to retain power.  Hundreds of his opponents were 
arrested and the press and private communications were censored.  In a 
TV address, Mushie cited Abraham Lincoln as his role model, for doing 
extra-legal things in the US Civil War.
	Pakistan is the 6th most populous country in the world, with well over 
half the US population -- and nuclear weapons.
	Meanwhile, US favorite and former Iraqi PM Allawi says that a similar 
coup is just what's needed in Iraq.

[5] TORTURE. In spite of his taste for torture, the Senate looks like 
approving Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, as Democratic liberals in 
the Senate say they will vote for him.

[6] DEMOCRATS. The uselessness of the Democratic presidential candidates 
leads Frank Rich to speculate in today's NYT that the Democrats could 
lose the election in one year's time.  "...if President Bush does not 
bomb Iran ... [that's] potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If 
we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the 
results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates 
for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have 
to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once 
again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does 
not have one."
	That would leave President Giuliani to conduct the war against Iran, 
which he bodaciously wants to do. (Giuliani's Condoleezza Rice is a 
retired career foreign service officer from the Reagan administration 
who now unsurprisingly holds a sinecure at Yale, Charles Hill.)
	Meanwhile Sen. Barack Obama refused to sign a letter warning Bush that 
he has no authority from Congress for an attack on Iran; 30 senators 
(including Clinton) did sign. (Instead, Obama has a Resolution...) Like 
Clinton's tergiversations around Kyl-Lieberman, it's the shill's attempt 
to be on both sides of the issue -- but in effective support of the 
bipartisan war policy.

[7] ECONOMY. The U.S. dollar fell again on Friday against a basket of 
six major currencies, hitting levels not seen in that index's 
30-year-plus history. (The euro is $1.45, sterling $2.09.)  The news 
reports have been saying that oil prices are rising (to $95), but the 
real story is about the dollar's fall: in terms of gold, the price of 
oil has not risen much since Bush came to office.  Some economists and 
financiers contend the US is already in recession.

[8] AFRICA. Nearly 90,000 people have fled fighting in the Somali 
capital of Mogadishu in recent days. In an open letter to Somali 
government officials, the U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for 
Somalia said that it has become more difficult for aid organizations to 
reach the displaced.  This is a result of the US destruction of the 
popular government that arose in Somalia -- using Ethiopia as the 
instrument.  Like the US staging area on the stolen island of Diego 
Garcia, the Horn of Africa is important to the US in regard to its 
unwavering insistence on controlling ME energy resources.

--Carl Estabrook <www.newsfromneptune.com>

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