It appears that most liberal opponents of the wars in the Middle East/ Central Asia have ceased their opposition with the Obama presidency. The liberal Democrats who abhorred Bush’s war policy (and most grass roots liberal Democrats did vehemently oppose the Bush war policy although this was not always the case with liberal politicians and media figures) apparently were simply opposed to wars led by Republicans.  As Byron York, a conservative,  writes in the first article below: “For many liberal activists, opposing the war was really about opposing George W. Bush. When Bush disappeared, so did their anti-war passion.” Anti-war protest leader, Cindy Sheehan, agrees completely, stating: “The ‘anti-war’ ‘left’ was used by the Democratic Party. I like to call it the ‘anti-Republican War’ movement.”

Obama is perceived as a liberal, a man of peace, and a charismatic figure, which enables him to get away with things that had been impossible for Bush the Younger.

Thus Obama can say such things as the war in Afghanistan is “fundamental to the defense of our people” and not be savaged by the former critics of the war.  This is not to say that the former anti-war people have become cheerleaders for war.  Rather, they have become largely indifferent to it.  Their attention has been largely diverted to the health care issue, the economy, the environment, or some other liberal cause. This political indifference has given Obama a virtual freehand in military policy.   The most dangerous possible development is war with Iran, which is sought by Israel and its Lobby.   Escalating American involvement in Afghanistan along with the continued American occupation of  Iraq allows for incidents with Iran (or incidents blamed on Iran) that could lead to war.  If Obama keeps sagging in the polls–due to the health care reform issue, a continuing problematic economy, and other domestic difficulties– an aggressive foreign policy might likely be seen as a necessary political ploy.   Even if war is not the deliberate goal, an aggressive policy, such as a naval blockade of Iran to enforce an embargo of various supplies (proposed in Congress in 2008), certainly brings a high risk of all-out war.

The liberal Obama would seem to better able to expand the wars than the conservative Bush. As Justin Raimondo has written: “it occurs to me that only Barack Obama, who won the White House in large part due to his opposition to the Iraq war, could take us to war with Iran, and rally liberals and much of the left behind it.” http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/07/16/obamas-war-signals/

This represents the  Nixon-goes-to-China analogy.  Just as Nixon with his anti-Communist bona fides had more political leeway to negotiate with Communist China than a liberal Democrat, the liberal man of peace Obama is better positioned politically to expand the wars in the Middle East/Central Asia than Bush the Younger, who was perceived as a warmonger.  (To counter this argument, it might be pointed out that liberal Democrats did attack Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.  However, despite Johnson’s success in pushing through liberal domestic legislation, he was never the darling of American liberals and certainly did not have the charismatic appeal of Obama.)

This scenario will not fully come to pass until Obama actually involves the US in war with Iran.  But while a war with Iran is certainly politically feasible, the question is whether Obama would actually take such an option since the national security and foreign policy elites outside the orbit of the Israel Lobby are against such a risky venture.

As
the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain’s choice of running mate,
President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential
power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.

“But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some
of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the
wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress,”
he adds.

RUSSIAN TANKS ROLL IN

Invasion (Update3)

By Torrey Clark and Greg Walters

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said “war has started” over the breakaway region of South Ossetia as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili accused its neighbor of a “well-planned invasion.”

Saakashvili said in a Bloomberg Television interview that his nation of 4.6 million people is “fighting to secure its borders” amid a “full-blown military aggression” involving thousands of Russian troops. Aerial bombings and wide-spread fighting in and around the region killed an unknown number of civilians and wounded “scores” more, Saakashvili said.

Putin earlier today told U.S. President George W. Bush in Beijing that “volunteers” were pouring over the border to help defend South Ossetia from Georgian forces, according to Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “War started today in South Ossetia” when Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers in the disputed region, Putin said. The Defense Ministry later said it deployed “reinforcements” in the region.

The ruble dropped the most against the dollar in 8 1/2 years and Russian stocks tumbled today on concern the conflict will worsen. The U.K., European Union and NATO, which Georgia is seeking to join, all called on both sides to end hostilities. The U.S. called for an immediate cease-fire.

`NATO Hopes’

“Georgia’s immediate NATO hopes have all but evaporated,” Dominic Fean, a researcher at IFRI, the French Institute of International Affairs, said by telephone. “Countries like Germany and France were already resistant to the idea of giving a NATO security guarantee to a country with an open dispute with Russia. I can’t see how they can get the consensus of 26 states anytime soon.”

South Ossetia, which has a population of about 70,000 and is less than half the size of Kosovo, broke away from U.S.- backed Georgia in the early 1990s and now is a de facto independent state with Russian peacekeepers and economic support. The peacekeepers are deployed under a Commonwealth of Independent States mandate.

“We will not allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 42, said on state television after the Interfax news service said Russian troops were killed in Georgian shelling of a barracks and checkpoint. “The guilty will get the punishment they deserve.”

Iraq Pullout

Georgia called today for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on South Ossetia.

“We’ve been encouraging everyone involved and every international party to engage in talks for years, months, days, hours,” Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze said by telephone. “What we get is another column of Russian tanks.”

Georgia, the third-largest member of the allied coalition in Iraq after the U.S. and U.K., will bring home half of its 2,000 soldiers from the Middle East country in the next few days, Kakha Lomaia, head of Georgia’s Security Council, said by telephone. The Georgian contingent is stationed in Al-Khut, 185 kilometers (114 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Fighting escalated throughout the day, with Russian planes dropping four bombs on the Vaziani military base, which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization uses for training, Lomaia said. The base is about 15 kilometers from the Georgian capital.

Russian Tanks

Georgian forces have shot down three Russian planes since the fighting began, Lomaia said. Russia earlier bombed two Georgian towns, Gori and Kareli, he said. Russia’s Foreign Ministry denied the bombing claim. The Defense Ministry denied losing aircraft.

Russian troops occupied parts of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said by telephone. Russian television showed tanks heading over the border to South Ossetia from the Russian region of North Ossetia at about 3:30 p.m. Moscow time.

“We find ourselves in a situation similar to where the Czechs were in 1968, to where the Hungarians found themselves in 1956,” Lomaia said. “All we can do is defend our freedom.”

Georgia last month increased the size of its military to 37,000 soldiers and today Saakashvili called up reservists and urged the nation to defend “every meter” of land. Russia has a standing army of about 1.1 million.

`Energy Corridor’

“Fighting continues,” Russian Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, commander of Russia’s peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia, said by mobile phone. The peacekeepers have suffered casualties, although it’s too early to say how many, he said.

Georgia is a key link in a U.S.-backed “southern energy corridor” that links the Caspian Sea region with world markets, bypassing Russia, the world’s biggest energy producer. Two pipelines pass through the country linking Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The BP Plc-led Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which has been closed since Aug. 5 due to an explosion in Turkey, runs about 100 kilometers south of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

The most recent violence in the region erupted on Aug. 1, when South Ossetia said Georgian shelling of the regional capital Tskhinvali claimed six lives. Georgia said South Ossetian forces sparked the fighting.

“The conflict might be short and hot, but my sense is that neither party wants a prolonged conflict,” said Michael Denison, associate fellow at London-based research group Chatham House and a professor of international security at the University of Leeds.

To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Walters in Moscow gwalters1@bloomberg.net; Torrey Clark in Moscow at tclark8@bloomberg.net

Writer who shone light on gulag dies
Associated Press
August 4, 2008

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died at 89.

	Solzhenitsyn as gulag prisoner.

Son Stepan said his father died of heart failure.

Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labour camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed.

It earned him 20 years of bitter exile but international renown, and inspired millions.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a carpenter struggling to survive a Soviet labour camp, Solzhenitsyn described the human “meat grinder” that had caught him and millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and absurd reasons, followed by slave labour camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

Read article

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.

In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Literary giant’s monumental legacy

Michael Ulman
The Australian
August 4, 2008

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn believed he was a prophet. He had no doubt that every word he wrote had enormous significance.

When he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was certain that the Swedish Academy would choose him above the other nominees.

His death serves to remind us that Solzhenitsyn is unique, a giant of Russian and, indeed, world literature.

I first heard of him in 1961, nearly one year before his first publication. Viktor Nekrasov, one of the Russian liberal intelligentsia’s favourite authors, told me that someone in the office of the Soviet literary journal New World had showed him, in great secrecy, a manuscript written by a former political prisoner. It was a story about a day in the life of a prisoner in one of Joseph Stalin’s labour camps. Nekrasov kept repeating that it was a masterpiece of such quality that it made it hard to see the point of writing anything else.

Read article

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe

Marcus Warren
Telegraph
August 4, 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not.

Of course, the tyrants and grey bureaucrats who actually tried to turn Marxism into a working polity contributed as much if not even more to the destruction of the system they ruled over.

But those figures who are usually proclaimed winners of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and Baroness Thatcher among them, built their victory on the foundations of his life story and testimony from the Gulag.

He transformed a then obscure acronym (standing for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies”) into a one-word symbol of Soviet brutality which resonated across the world, not least in his own country.

Read article

The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:43:56

US Vice President Dick Cheney

Prominent journalist Seymour Hersh exposes details of a plan considered by US Vice President Dick Cheney on how to provoke war with Iran.

"There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war [with Iran]," Hersh said recently in reference to the subject of discussion at a meeting held at Cheney’s office.

In a July article published in the New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist revealed information about covert US operations carried out in Iran. He did not disclose the content of the talks with Cheney in his article.

In a recent interview with Think Progress, however, Hersh exposed that the meeting witnessed Cheney mulling over a proposal to dress up Navy SEALs as Iranians and shoot them in order to trigger a war with Iran.

"The one (plan) that interested me the most was why don’t we build – we in our shipyard – build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up," he revealed in his recent interview.

"Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of – that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation."

The well-known journalist added that the proposal was ultimately rejected.

"Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran," he continued.

Hersh argues that should Washington engineer ‘the right incident’, Americans will ‘support’ going to war with Iran.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Myron Hersh first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.

MD/HGH/AA

Bill Anderson
LRC Blog
July 24, 2008

It seems that every once in a while, our political classes and their media partners place the mantle of “Keeper of the Secret” upon a political figure. After he was assassinated (but not before) John F. Kennedy was given that title.

Alas, the title then fell to Jimmy Carter, but he apparently could not keep the secret, so we waited for Teddy Kennedy, but he had this little problem of not winning the nomination for president. Then it was John Jr., who had to take the New York Bar Exam at least three times before passing it but he, too, died before he could lead us to the Promised Land.

Today, Barack Obama is the official “Keeper of the Secret.” Yes, Obama KNOWS how to make socialism work; he can remake the Law of Scarcity, and he can bring peace and prosperity to everyone simply by manipulating the tax code and subsidizing fascist entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Today’s “The Messiah Has Arrived” speech in Berlin was just another example of this worshipful nonsense that the political classes foist upon people. I recently read a bumper sticker with Obama’s picture on it and “Hope” written under the picture.

I’m sorry, but the idea of a politician being the source of hope is too much. And Obama as the Messiah is just plain laughable, yet we can expect to see this kind of coverage for the next year or more, since I am sure he easily will win the presidential election. The last time we saw this kind of political adulation was when the Roman emperors claimed to be gods. That will be the next step for Obama. Stay tuned.

The Week that America Woke Up to the Economic Crisis

Last week, for the first time, the average American woke up to the fact that our economy is in trouble.

Despite Bernanke and Paulson’s pep talks, despite the happy talk by the talking heads, despite the cooked earnings reports desperately being put out by the banks and others, last week people still got – on a gut level – that the economy is in mortal danger.

The failure of IndyMac and the fact that Freddie and Fannie are on the ropes are what finally woke people up. The cracks in our financial system have become so big that the crew trying to maintain the facade simply can’t paint over them any more.

Everyone I talk with – from the construction manager, to the baker, to the lawyer, to the doctor – are now all are in a holding pattern . . . They’re all just waiting to see what happens with the economy.

None of them are making big purchases, or starting new ventures, or jumping into new investments. All of them know that there are big problems with the U.S. economy, but are hoping that it turns around.

So what? Who cares what the people I’m talking to are doing?

Because the same thing is happening all over the U.S. That means that the economy is quickly freezing up. And that means a depress . . . er, a very severe recession.

And everyone you’re talking with is saying the same thing, right? (That’s probably why you’re reading this . . . you already know its true from your own experience).

As Reuters puts it:

"The nightmare scenario for U.S. economic authorities is here: confidence in their ability to rescue the country from a housing-led financial panic is now at its lowest level since the crisis began.

This means losses for investors, already totaling nearly half a trillion dollars, could mount even further over the next few months, with implications for business investment and the overall health of the economy.

***

Saturated with bad news, investors appear to have thrown in the towel. As they do this, the risks that both consumers and businesses will face further retrenchment at the same time is growing."

Last week was a huge turning point, when the average American could no longer be tricked by the fast-talking ponzi scheme salesmen. Last week was the week that America woke up to the economic crisis we’ve been facing for a long time.

On a positive note, everyone I speak with now finally understands that the war in Iraq is a large part of why our economy is sinking like a stone. And see this

.

Once they get that, the pressure to get us out of Iraq will become very strong. Hopefully, the economic crash will help wake people up in other areas as well.