Replies to post #1632 on Foreign Correspondence

[otraque]

Edit:One grim matter to consider; i doubt very much U.S. will surrender its world power numero #1.
But what can they do to stop it???? The inevitable, that is.
The answer is this dangerous country can do far far far more than any Empire that rose and fell before us to make sure another Empire does not replace it.
i feel the deep conceit/certainty of our specialness added to the underlying hard reality this country has for its entire history been a country that is POSITIVE Gawd IS On Its Side, thus i conclude it is highly likely this country will not hesitate to throw the entire world into chaos thru extreme use of the what is without question, the most militarily best weaponed country in world history.
Does this include nuclear, of course it does(we are working hard and harder to perfect strategic nuclear weapons not then to use them if matter don't go OUR way); so yes, we will go nuclear rather than ever surrender our being the world's #1.
The inner mindset of of this country if not us than No one.

I feel those that get any inner hysteria over such and say "O NO it will NEVER come to that!!"
Are victims in deep denial that the world is NOT rational and never will be.
Only difference this time from past history is we got a "Gawd is on Our side" country shifting ever more and more to the right with a MASSIVE group of Apocalyse NOW people firmly in place and growing every month(The Rapturist move is in area of 70,000,000 million and growing).
Our military power is our gurantee we remain #1 or we take the world down with us.
i would strike rational behavior out of all equations myself.

[Amaunet]

Iraq: Refocus on the the big picture

September 17, 2004
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Iraq's military occupation has ended, long live the occupation! "The end of occupation and the transfer of authority to an interim government on June 28 offered at least a chance for a new beginning," writes Larry Diamond in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. The residents of Najaf, Kufa and Sadr City, not to mention Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq, continuously bearing the United States' aerial bombardment of residential quarters, helicopter "hell fires" and (uranium-enriched) tank fire, may beg to offer a different perspective, but alas, history is often, though by no means always, written from the prism of the powerful and the dominant.

Diamond, who once served as senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, credits the CPA's chief administrator, L Paul Bremer, dubbed as "dictator of Iraq" by the former United Nations envoy on Iraq, for "working hard and creatively to craft a transition to a legitimate, viable, and democratic system of government while rebuilding the overall economy and society". Yet in the same breath, Diamond criticizes the CPA for "obsessive control" and numerous missteps, such as "thorough de-Ba'athification", "dismantling the Iraqi army", failing to destroy the Muqtada al-Sadr phenomenon early on, and insufficient funneling of reconstruction funds, this while reserving his harshest criticisms for the US Defense Department's failure to dispatch the necessary troop level to ensure the security of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

Yet such analytic niceties, in the perpetual quest to locate the root causes of the Iraq fiasco, pale in comparison with the rationalizations of both the illegitimate invasion and the make-believe "end of occupation" and "transfer of authority". What Diamond and other like-minded pundits consistently overlook, for obvious political reasons, is that what happened on June 28 was a transfer of administrative authority from one US hand, namely Bremer's, to another US hand, namely the new US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, put in charge of the largest US mission overseas, hardly a sign that "the political phase of the occupation has ended", as Diamond claims at the outset of his article, titled "What went wrong?" It is therefore hardly surprising that he fails even to mention the thick legacy of some 100 CPA directives, ensuring the United States' tight control of the interim government, such as by placing US advisers at every Iraqi bureaucracy, beyond the reach of this pseudo-government and its functionaries.

Consider the recent siege, carnage and destruction at Najaf against Muqtada and his Mehdi Army, blamed even by a New York Times editorial squarely on the US Marines' new expeditionary force, which moved on Muqtada's position and thus derailed the fragile truce. The interim government's blessing of the US military assault on Najaf has doubtless aggravated its legitimacy problems, further eroding its chances to appear as a viable representative of the national will. The stage is now set for another chapter in a showdown between the forces of occupation and their local props on the one hand, and the diverse forces of (religious) nationalism seeking to regain Iraq's independence on the other. This means that contrary to some recent analyses focusing on a Shi'ite-Sunni divide, the most important determining factor in the war-torn country is, and for the foreseeable future will be, nationalism versus imperialism.

Who will ultimately win this bout? Richard Holbrooke, the former US envoy to the UN, bluntly stated last week that Iraq is "worse than Vietnam", citing the debilitating consequences of the war in the oil region potentially destabilizing the world economy. And Secretary of State Collin Powell, who is on record for blaming the invasion on pro-Israel "crazies" in the Pentagon and the White House, told a Senate committee last week that bringing stability to Iraq "is not impossible". That is putting it very optimistically, given the grim reality of security evaporation throughout Iraq these days, indicating a reasserted "insurgency" once dismissed out of hand by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "desperate dead-enders" or "isolated terrorists".

There is, sadly, a huge prospect that no one will win in Iraq, that the quagmire will linger on, more people will die, and more "sitting duck" occupying soldiers, while Iraq's pipelines continuously get sabotaged and precious resources are laid to waste, emboldening those who dream of Iraq's partition. In this nightmare scenario, the only potential winner is Israel, which pushed hard for the invasion through its allies in Washington and the nation's think-thanks, and which seemingly thrives on the world's perpetual distraction with Iraq while its government continues with its iron-fist, expansionist unilateralism, both tacitly and openly backed by the White House and the US Congress. Yet the more Israel presses on this war-mongering course of action, trampling on the Palestinians' rights, the more entrenched, and deep-seated, the Arab and Muslim hatred of Israel, and by association the US government, and thus the deeper the wound of the Iraq crisis pegged on to the Arab-Israeli conflict directly and indirectly, notwithstanding the Israeli army's role in training prison interrogators in Iraq in "mild methods of torture", which is sanctioned in Israel's own laws.

All this points at what is desperately needed in Washington to turn the situation around in Iraq and the entire Middle East: a de-linking of its foreign policy from the policies and priorities of Israel enjoying the nuclear blackmail of the Middle East, and a re-linking of the United States' Iraq policy with the Arab-Israeli conflict, energetically putting forth a viable formula for peace that could, conceivably, contain the various initiatives of the Geneva Accords. Yet the sheer weight of pro-Israel lobbyists and media pundits makes it highly unlikely that such a prudent course of action will be on the horizon any time in the near future. And this is, without doubt, tantamount to an unfolding tragedy, not only for the suffering people of Iraq and the region, but also for the spirit of the American republic increasingly infected by the virus of neo-colonialist expansionism exuded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud branch of ideology. The de-Likudization of US politics today is a sine qua non of retrieving the great republic from the brink of self-metamorphosis into a world-despised empire.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003.

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