Dear Friend,
Masked goons entered New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University and went on a rampage, targeting students and teachers and vandalising property. Several students have been injured, including the head of its students’ union. The police, “who are in the campus and the security personnel did nothing,” said JNUSU vice-President Saket Moon. The JNUSU has alleged the complicity of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad or ABVP, the student body linked to the BJP, in the attack.
Kindly support honest journalism to survive. https://countercurrents.org/subscription/
If you think the contents of this news letter are critical for the dignified living and survival of humanity and other species on earth, please forward it to your friends and spread the word. It's time for humanity to come together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/news-letter/.
In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
ABVP Goons
Attack JNU
by Countercurrents Collective
Masked goons entered New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University and went on a rampage, targeting students and teachers and vandalising property. Several students have been injured, including the head of its students’ union. The police, “who are in the campus and the security personnel did nothing,” said JNUSU vice-President Saket Moon. The JNUSU has alleged the complicity of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad or ABVP, the student body linked to the BJP, in the attack.
Police failure to protect JNU from terror attack need to be investigated
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
It is not the JNU which is attacked. it is a message to all students and educational institutions to shut their mouth and toe the line of India’s ruling party. It is a message to all the
opponent to keep quiet or face the party militia and that left, Ambedkarite, freethinkers, humanists should not expect any police support if they are attacked by the right wing goons
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd Condemns Attack on JNU Teachers and Students
by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
The academic world must condemn this approach. We all must stand by the JNU teahers and students who are seriously injured.
NAPM stands in solidarity with the struggling students and faculty members of JNU
Press Release
NAPM strongly condemns the unprecedented violence unleashed by the masked goons on the JNU campus specifically targeting Student Union activists, students active in anti fee hike agitation and the faculty members supporting them and some Kashmiri and Dalit students.
The attack has left more than 20 students and faculty members with grievous injury, fracture and cuts including severe head injury to JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh, Prof Sucharita Sen and others
In a First, Gangs of Masked Goons Launch Barbarous Attacks on JNU
by Sukla Sen
https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/in-a-first-gangs-of-masked-goons-launch-barbarous-attacks-on-jnu
Injured students and faculty members must be provided proper medical services, free of cost.
The masked goons must be brought to book.
The Delhi Police and the university security must be held accountable.
There has got to be a credible and comprehensive inquiry, immediately.
In Spite Of Severe Repression People Are United In Protests
Co-Written by Sandeep Pandey and Anandi Pandey
All the 17 deaths that have taken place in Uttar Pradesh due to bullet injuries during the recent violence are Muslim youth in 20s
and 30s and mostly from poor families. Strangely, the police has not taken responsibility for any except one in Bijnor, when there is no question of groups of people having clashed with each other. It was a protest against the government. People were on one side and police on the other.
Killing Qassim Soleimani: rule of law or rule of the jungle?
by Dr James M Dorsey
International law may not be a major consideration in debates about the US killing of Iranian military commander Qassim Soleimani, yet the legality of the assassination could prove to have long-term consequences for whether the rule of law or the law of the jungle dominates a new world order.
International law may not be a major consideration in debates about the US killing of Iranian military commander Qassim Soleimani, yet the legality of the assassination could prove to have long-term consequences for whether the rule of law or the law of the jungle dominates a new world order.
The Trump administration has asserted that killing Mr. Soleimani was necessary to avert an imminent attack on US targets that allegedly was being planned by Mr. Soleimani and Abdul Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, who also died in the attack.
The assertion, yet to be backed up by evidence, served to justify the attack and fend off allegations that the targeted killing violated both US and international law.
The implication was that Mr. Soleimani’s death would thwart an unspecified imminent attack and stop the Iranians in their tracks, an assumption that has little foundation in reality given Iran’s track record, most recently its refusal to buckle under following the imposition in 2018 of harsh US economic sanctions, some of the harshest ever imposed.
The notion that the killing of Mr. Soleimani amounted to rule of the jungle rather than rule of law was reinforced by assertions by Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi that he had been asked by Mr. Trump to mediate with Iran and that the Iranian military leader had been carrying Iran’s response to a Saudi initiative to defuse tension when he was assassinated.
Mr Abdul Mahdi’s allegation that Mr. Soleimani was involved in efforts to dial down tensions came in a debate in parliament in which lawmakers called in a resolution for the removal from Iraq of foreign forces, the bulk of which are American.
Mr. Abdul Mahdi’s assertion that Iran was responding to a Saudi initiative was all the more noteworthy given that the kingdom had reportedly recently put its indirect outreach to Iran on hold as anti-government protesters in Iraq and Lebanon targeted Iranian influence in their countries.
“Americans, once the most prominent proponents of international law as the regulator of relations between nations, have now fully validated the law of the jungle. We are now likely to experience it,” said Chas W. Freeman Jr, a former career US State Department official in an email to a private mailing list.
Conservative commentator Robert Kagan warned in a book published last year, bemoaning America’s withdrawal as an enforcer of international law, a notion challenged by an array of critics, that chaos was the world’s historical norm. “The jungle will grow back, if we let it,” Mr. Kagan argued.
The sense that Mr. Trump, like many of the world’s civilizational leaders, has no regard for international law was evident, particularly to Iranians, in his threat to attack Iranian cultural sites if Iran retaliates for the killing of Mr. Soleimani.
Mr. Trump did not specify what he meant by cultural. Some analysts suggested the president may have been referring to symbols like the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic republic.
Legal experts nonetheless warned that attacks on cultural sites amount to a war crime.
With millions in the streets to welcome the return of Mr. Soleimani’s body, Iranians used the hashtag #IranianCulturalSites to respond to the threat by posting online pictures of mosques, museums, monuments, archaeological sites, and other Iranian architectural marvels.
Similarly, with Iraq perceiving the US strikes as a violation of the country’s sovereignty, Iraqis may, alongside Iranians, be one of the few who, perhaps self-servingly, factor adherence to international law in their debates.
In line with the comments of Messrs. Freeman and Kagan, the legal aspects of Mr. Soleimani’s killing take on a significance that goes far beyond the Middle East in an environment in which civilizational leaders like India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jingping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Myanmar’s Win Myint flout international law with impunity.
Violations of international law grounded in propagation of concepts of a civilizational rather than a nation state that defines its borders not in terms of internationally recognized frontiers, but blurry lines of civilizational reach, have occurred in recent years fast and furious.
Iraqi assertions of a US violation of sovereignty echo Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. Mr. Trump has ignored United Nations Security Council resolutions by unilaterally recognizing Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Mr. Mynt stands accused of ethnic cleansing by the United Nations that has prompted hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Massive evidence documents Mr. Jinping’s authorization of the brutal repression of Turkic Muslims in the troubled north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang while Mr. Modi appears to be progressively disenfranchising his country’s Muslim minority.
For his part, Mr. Soleimani is believed to have been responsible for numerous incidents of political violence, including a 2012 attack on tourists in Bulgaria executed by a Lebanese suicide bomber. Five of the six casualties were Israelis.
Adopting the principle of might is right, civilizational leaders’ abandonment of international law, including guarantees of basic and minority rights, risks creating a global jungle in which wars, political violence, marginalization of ethnic and religious groups, and destabilizing mass migration contribute to rule of the jungle rather than rule of law.
So do Western approaches adopted almost two decades ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Said at the time Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, former advisor to prime minister Tony Blair, current advisor to the European Commission on Myanmar, and a proponent of the doctrine of a new liberal imperialism who in 2011 defended Bahrain’s brutal repression of a popular uprising:
If the world has a civilized core that deserves lawful conduct, there also is a barbarous periphery that warrants “rougher methods of an earlier era… Postmodern states operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security” but “in the jungle, one must use the laws of the jungle.”
Some two decades after Mr. Cooper wrote those words, the jungle rather than the rule of law threatens to become the norm, putting the global community on a dangerous and slippery slope.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.
Disruptive Assassinations: Killing Qassem Soleimani
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
On the surface, it made not one iota of sense. The murder of a
foreign military leader on his way from Baghdad airport, his diplomatic status assured by the local authorities, evidently deemed a target of irresistible richness. “General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” The words from the Pentagon seemed to resemble the resentment shown by the Romans to barbarian chiefs who dared resist them
On the surface, it made not one iota of sense. The murder of a foreign military leader on his way from Baghdad airport, his diplomatic status assured by the local authorities, evidently deemed a target of irresistible richness. “General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” The words from the Pentagon seemed to resemble the resentment shown by the Romans to barbarian chiefs who dared resist them. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”
The killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force in a drone strike on January 3, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, or Hash a-Shaabi and PMF Kata’ib Hezbollah, was packaged and ribboned as a matter of military necessity. Soleimani had been, according to the Pentagon, “responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.” He was behind a series of attacks on coalition forces in Iraq over the last several months including attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad on December 31, 2019.
US President Donald J. Trump had thrown caution to the wind, suggesting in a briefing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that an option on the table would be the killing of Soleimani. The Iran hawks seemed to have his ear; others were caught off guard, preferring to keep matters more general.
A common thread running through the narrative was the certainty – unshakable, it would seem – that Soleimani was on the warpath against US interests. The increased danger posed by the Quds Force commander were merely presumed, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was happy to do so despite not being able to “talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives.” (Pompeo goes on to insist that there was “active plotting” to “take big action” that would have endangered “hundreds of lives”.) How broadly one defines the battlefield becomes relevant; the US imperium has decided that diplomatic niceties and sovereign protections for officials do not count. The battlefield is everywhere.
Trump was far from convincing in reiterating the arguments, insisting that the general had been responsible for killing or badly wounding “thousands of Americans over an extended period of time, and was plotting to kill may more… but got caught!” From his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, he claimed that the attack was executed “to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.”
Whatever the views of US officialdom, seismic shifts in the Middle East were being promised. Iraq’s prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi demanded an emergency parliamentary session with the aim of taking “legislative steps and necessary provisions to safeguard Iraq’s dignity, security and sovereignty.” On Sunday, the parliament did something which, ironically enough, has been a cornerstone of Iran’s policy in Iraq: the removal of US troops from Iraq. While being a non-binding resolution, the parliament urged the prime minister to rescind the invitation extended to US forces when it was attacked by Islamic State forces in 2014.
Iranian Armed Forces’ spokesman Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi promised setting “up a plan, patiently, to respond to this terrorist act in a crushing and powerful manner”. He also reiterated that it was the US, not Iran, who had “occupied Iraq in violation of all international rules and regulations without any coordination with the Iraqi government and without the Iraqi people’s demands.”
While the appeals to international law can seem feeble, the observation from the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnès Callamard was hard to impeach. “The targeted killings of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Humandis are most [likely] unlawful and violate international human rights law: Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.” To be deemed lawful, such targeting with lethal effect “can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat to life.”
The balance sheet for this action, then, is not a good one. As US presidential candidate Marianne Williamson observed with crisp accuracy, the attack on Soleimani and his companions had little to do with “whether [he] was a ‘good man’ any more than it was about whether Saddam was a good man. It’s about smart versus stupid use of military power.”
An intelligent use of military power is not in the offing, with Trump promising the targeting of 52 Iranian sites, each one representing an American hostage held in Iran at the US embassy in Tehran during November 1979. But Twitter sprays and promises of this sort tend to lack substance and Trump is again proving to be the master of disruptive distraction rather than tangible action.
Even Israeli outlets such as Haaretz, while doffing the cap off to the idea of Soleimani as a shadowy, dangerous figure behind the slayings of Israelis “in terrorist attacks, and untold thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese and others dispatched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force,” showed concern. Daniel B. Shapiro even went so far as to express admiration for the operation, an “impressive” feat of logistics but found nothing of an evident strategy. Trump’s own security advisers were caught off guard. A certain bloodlust had taken hold.
Within Congress, the scent of a strategy did not seem to come through, despite some ghoulish cheers from the GOP. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and chairman of the House Intelligence panel, failed to notice “some broad strategy at work”. Michigan Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin, previously acting assistant secretary of defence and CIA analyst, explained why neither Democratic or Republic presidents had ventured onto the treacherous terrain of targeting Soleimani. “Was the strike worth the likely retaliation, and the potential to pull us into protracted conflict?” The answer was always a resounding no.
By killing such a high ranking official of a sovereign power, the US has signalled a redrawing of accepted, and acceptable lines of engagement. The justification was spurious, suggesting that assassination and killing in combat are not distinctions with any difference. But perhaps most significantly of all, the killing of Soleimani will usher in the very same attacks that this decision was meant to avert even as it assists Iranian policy in expelling any vestige of US influence in Iraq and the broader Middle East. It also signalled to Iran that abiding by agreements of any sort, including the international nuclear deal of 2015 which the US has repudiated, will be paper tigers worth shredding without sorrow.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
The ‘Great Game’ is Afoot: Killing Soleimani Reflects US Desperation in the Middle East
Co-Written by Ramzy Baroud & Romana Rubeo
By killing top Iranian military commander, Qasem Soleimani, American and Israeli leaders demonstrated the idiom ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
Co-Written by Ramzy Baroud & Romana Rubeo
By killing top Iranian military commander, Qasem Soleimani, American and Israeli leaders demonstrated the idiom ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both politically and legally embattled – the former has just been impeached and the latter is dogged by an Attorney General indictment and investigation into major corruption cases.
Despairing, out of options and united by a common cause, both leaders were on the lookout for a major disruption – that would situate them in a positive light within their countries’ respective media – and they found it.
The assassination of the Iranian major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and commander of its Quds Force, Soleimani, on January 3, along with several Iranian military leaders by a US drone was a testament to the degree of that US and Israeli desperation.
Although there has been no official confirmation or denial of the Israeli role in the US operation, it is only logical to assume indirect or even direct Israeli involvement in the assassination.
Over the last few months, the possibility of a war against Iran has once more gained momentum, topping the agenda of Israel’s foreign policy makers. Politically beleaguered Netanyahu has repeatedly and tirelessly asked his friends in Washington to increase pressure on Teheran.
“Iran is increasing its aggression as we speak,” Netanyahu claimed on December 4, during a meeting with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. “We are actively engaging in countering that aggression.”
One can only assume what “active engagement” from the overtly militant Israeli point of view can possibly mean in this context.
Moreover, the fingerprints of the Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, are unmistakably present in the assassination. It is plausible that the attack at Soleimani’s convoy near the Baghdad International airport was a joint CIA-Mossad operation.
It is well-known that Israel has more experience in targeted assassinations in the region than all Middle Eastern countries combined. It has killed hundreds of Palestinian and Arab activists this way. The assassination of Hezbollah’s top military leader – the movement’s second in command – Imad Mughniyah in February 2008, in Syria, was only one of numerous such killings.
It is no secret that Israel is itching for a war against Iran. Yet all of Tel Aviv’s efforts have failed to bring about US-led war similar to the Iraq invasion in 2003. The most that Netanyahu could achieve in terms of US support in that regard was a decision by the Trump administration to renege on the US commitment to the international community by withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear Treaty in May 2018.
That coveted Israeli war seemed assured when Iran, after various provocations and the slapping by Washington of yet more sanctions, shot down a US unmanned aerial vehicle that, as Iran maintained, violated the country’s airspace, on June 20, 2019.
Even then, the US response fell short of achieving the all-out war that Netanyahu has been so frantically seeking.
But much has happened since then, including a repeat of Netanyahu’s failure to win a decisive election, thus securing another term in office, compounding the Israeli Prime Minister’s fully justified fear that he could eventually find himself behind bars for operating a massive racket of bribes and misuse of power.
Trump, too, has his own political woes, thus his own reasons to act erratically and irresponsibly. His official impeachment by the US House of Representatives on December 18 was the last of such bad news. He too needed to up the political ante.
If there is one thing that many Democratic and Republican lawmakers have in common is their desire for more Middle East military interventions and to maintain a stronger military presence in the oil and gas-rich region. This was reflected in the near-celebratory tone that US officials, generals, and media commentators have used following the assassination of the Iranian commander in Baghdad.
Israeli officials too were visibly excited. Immediately following the killing of General Soleimani, Israeli leaders and officials issued statements and tweets in support of the US action.
For his part, Netanyahu declared that “Israel has the right to defend itself. The US has the same right exactly.” “Soleimani,” he added, “is responsible for the deaths of innocent US citizens and many others. He was planning further attacks.”
The last statement in particular, “he was planning further attacks,” points to the obvious joint intelligence and information sharing between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Benny Gantz, mistakenly celebrated for being a “centrist”, was no less militant in his views. When it comes to matters of national security, “there is no coalition and opposition,” he stated.
“The killing of Soleimani is a message to all the head of global terror: on your own heads be it,” the Israeli general, responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, also added.
Iran will certainly respond, not only against American targets but Israeli targets as well, for Teheran is convinced that Israel has played a major role in the operation. The pressing questions are more about the nature and the timing of the Iranian response: How far will Iran go to send even a stronger message back to Washington and Tel Aviv? and could Teheran communicate a decisive message without granting Netanyahu his wish of an all-out war between Iran and the United States?
Recent events in Iraq – the mass protests and attempt by unarmed protesters to storm the US embassy in Baghdad on December 31 – were, to some extent, a game changer. Initially, they were understood as an angry response to US airstrikes on an Iranian-backed militia group on Sunday, but the protests had unintended consequences as well, particularly dangerous from a US military and strategic perspective. For the first time since the phony US ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq under the previous administration of Barack Obama in 2012, a new collective understanding began maturing among ordinary Iraqis and their representatives that the US must leave the country for good.
Acting quickly, the US, with palpable Israeli giddiness, assassinated Soleimani to send a clear message to Iraq and Iran that demanding or expecting an American withdrawal is a red line that cannot be crossed – and to the whole Middle East that the evident US retreat from the region will not be duplicated in Iraq.
Soleimani’s assassination was followed by yet more US airstrikes on Iran’s allies in Iraq, as to also emphasize the level of US seriousness and willingness to seek violent confrontation as a matter of course.
While Iran is now weighing in its responses, it must also be aware of the geostrategic consequences of its decisions. An Iranian move against US-Israeli interests would have to be convincing from the point of view of Iran and its allies, yet, again, without engaging in an all-out war.
Either way, Iran’s next move will define the Iranian-US-Israeli relations in the region for years to come and will further intensify the ongoing regional and international “Great Game”, on full display throughout the Middle East.
Soleimani’s assassination could also be understood as a clear message to both Russia and China as well, that the US is prepared to set the whole region on fire, if necessary, in order to maintain its strategic presence and to serve its economic interests – which mostly lie in Iraqi and Arab oil and gas.
This comes at the heel of a joint Russian, Chinese and Iranian naval drill in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman, starting on December 27. The news of the military exercises must have been particularly alarming to the Pentagon, as Iran, which was meant to be isolated and browbeaten, is increasingly becoming a regional access point to the emergent and resurfacing Chinese and Russian military powers respectively.
Soleimani was an Iranian commander, but his massive network and military alliances in the region and beyond made his assassination a powerful message sent by Washington and Tel Aviv that they are ready and unafraid to up their game.
The ball is now in the court of Iran and its allies.
Judging by past experiences, it is likely that Washington will regret assassinating the Iranian general for many years to come.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer, translator and an editor at The Palestine Chronicle. Rubeo holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in Audio-Visual and Journalism Translation.
On the U.S. Assassination of Soleimani and the Heightened Danger of War: Oppose U.S. Imperialist Aggression—Trump/Pence Out Now!
in World
by
Revolution Newspaper
The world has been rocked by the U.S. assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, an Iranian government force that commands militias in different countries of the region. The assassination of a high government official of one sovereign state on the soil of another sovereign state is objectively an act of war by the U.S. This assassination will set off a spiral of tit for tat which carries grave dangers for the people of that region, and the world as a whole.
The world has been rocked by the U.S. assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, an Iranian government force that commands militias in different countries of the region. The assassination of a high government official of one sovereign state on the soil of another sovereign state is objectively an act of war by the U.S. This assassination will set off a spiral of tit for tat which carries grave dangers for the people of that region, and the world as a whole.
To be clear: Soleimani was a longtime butcher for the reactionary Iranian regime, which itself has committed real crimes against the people. But the butchery carried out by America in that region alone is 1,000 times greater than anything the likes of Soleimani could dream of! It is critically important that people in this country oppose this American act of war with mass political action.
Why Is the U.S. Carrying Out Assassination and Mass Murder in the Middle East in the First Place?
Why Is the U.S. Carrying Out Assassination and Mass Murder in the Middle East in the First Place?
The purpose of all the U.S. soldiers and mercenaries in the Middle East is this: to dominate a strategically vital part of the world that has oil and energy resources. The U.S. aims not only to plunder these resources, but even more to gain leverage over other rival and allied powers like China, Japan, and Europe that need these resources (and to contend with local powers like Iran that also seek to project their influence in the region). To do this, the U.S. has directly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, sponsored wars and coups by puppets and proxies in many more countries, and carried out drone assassinations all over the region. In the past three decades alone, millions of ordinary people have died in that region over these conflicts, with the vast, vast majority of these murders “made in the USA.”
Trump is already telling you that the purpose of this was to “save American lives.” Leaving aside the real purpose of this assassination—again, to fight for U.S. domination of an entire region of people—and what these “American personnel” are doing over there in the first place (which was to act as willing tools to the murder and brutality involved in that “mission”), let us make this fundamental point from Bob Avakian: “American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives.”
These wars and war crimes stem from a system, U.S.-dominated capitalism-imperialism. This system grinds up the lives of billions of people a day all over the globe. The wars that the system wages, generation after generation, are one big reason it must be overthrown, through revolution. And in fact, humanity does not need this system—it could live a whole different way! There is a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, that sets out a blueprint for how a revolutionary society on the road to emancipation could relate to the rest of the world: doing away with relations of exploitation and plunder, and actively healing the wounds of the past and overcoming the inequalities of today. The fact that these crimes are unnecessary makes them all the more painful and intolerable.
Clashes at the Top, Openings for the People
In addition to whatever “blowback” of different kinds the U.S. may get abroad, there is also opposition within the U.S. Demonstrations are taking place all over the country this weekend, and more need to happen. Forces within the U.S. ruling class opposed to Trump (the top Democrats and liberal media like CNN, the New York Times, etc.) are raising questions. Some worry that this is an impulsive move, with no viable strategy behind it, one that could backfire in very serious ways against the U.S. Some point to the way that U.S. allies—and adversaries—around the world are opposing this. Others are openly questioning Trump’s motivations and point out his whole history as a habitual, self-serving liar.
This opposition generally proceeds from and often openly couches itself in terms of what will advance U.S.—that is, imperialist—interests in the region, and the spokespeople for it generally reinforce the idea that the U.S. are “the good guys” in the region. These ideas are false and damaging and have to be struggled against. But these conflicts also create more space for others to raise questions and opposition of different kinds.
All of this takes place in the context of Trump’s impeachment and his looming trial in the Senate. Trump will doubtless use this attack on Iran and whatever conflict ensues from it to demand “national unity” around him. But this may not be so easy to do, especially if the suspicion spreads that he may have ordered the attack in part to serve his struggle to stay in office.
To be clear: while the Democrats are themselves defenders of this criminal system and this system itself must ultimately be overthrown, the Trump/Pence fascist regime poses an urgent and immediate threat to humanity—a threat both highlighted and aggravated by this attack—and this regime must be driven out, now. In this context, and especially with forces at the top of society now divided, if people take up the kind of massive, sustained, nonviolent protest demanding the ouster of the whole regime that RefuseFascism.org and the #OUTNOW! Movement are fighting for, this could change the whole equation for the better.
Let us seize the time.
U.S. OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!
TRUMP/PENCE FASCIST REGIME OUT NOW!
REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
Stand in Solidarity with Revolutionary Comrades Inside Iran
While we, as revolutionaries within the U.S., welcome the defeat of our own rulers in any conflict, we also support the revolutionary movement inside Iran that aims to overthrow its rulers, as part of emancipating humanity. This movement—led by the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist Leninist Maoist), which takes up the new communism put forward by Bob Avakian—is fighting to overthrow its oppressors, as part of the fight for a whole new world. We stand with them in firmly opposing the U.S. attacks and potential invasion, and the struggle to make revolution, to overcome all the oppressive and unequal relations of this world, and to bring into being a new world of human emancipation.
Revolution newspaper/revcom.us, the voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, provides the foundation, guideline, and organizational scaffolding for the whole process of carrying out our strategy for revolution. Through publishing works of Bob Avakian, and through many different articles, interviews, letters, graphics, and other features, Revolution enables people to really understand, and act to radically change, the world.
War Will Destabilize At Home And In The Region
by S G Vombatkere
The Indian Parliament had condemned USA’s attack on Iraq, and sending troops would be an insult to Parliament and to the people of India,
and India’s policy of “Panchsheel” in international relations would be negated by sending troops, since the role of India’s Armed Forces is to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.
Trump Threatens Afghan Armageddon
by Nick Turse
U.S. “Plans” for the Afghan War Might Prove a Crime Against Humanity
U.S. “Plans” for the Afghan War Might Prove a Crime Against Humanity
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and passively: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” That air-to-ground, laser-guided missile — designed to obliterate tanks, bunkers, helicopters, and people — did exactly what it was meant to do.
As it happened, though (and not for the first time in its history either), the CIA got it wrong. It wasn’t Osama bin Laden on the receiving end of that strike, or a member of al-Qaeda, or even of the Taliban. The dead, local witnesses reported, were civilians out collecting scrap metal, ordinary people going about their daily work just as thousands of Americans had been doing at the World Trade Center only months earlier when terror struck from the skies.
In the years since, those Afghan scrap collectors have been joined by more than 157,000 war dead in that embattled land. That’s a heavy toll, but represents just a fraction of the body count from America’s post-9/11 wars. According to a study by the Costs of War Project of Brown University’s Watson Institute, as many as 801,000 people, combatants and noncombatants alike, have been killed in those conflicts. That’s a staggering number, the equivalent of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But if President Donald Trump is to be believed, the United States has “plans” that could bury that grim count in staggering numbers of dead. The “method of war” he suggested employing could produce more than 20 times that number in a single country — an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians.
It’s a strange fact of our moment that President Trump has claimed to have “plans” (or “a method”) for annihilating millions of innocent people, possibly most of the population of Afghanistan. Yet those comments of his barely made the news, disappearing within days. Even for a president who threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and usher in “the end” of Iran, hinting at the possibility of wiping out most of the civilian population of an ally represented something new.
After all, America’s commander-in-chief does have the authority, at his sole discretion, to order the launch of weapons from the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. So it was no small thing last year when President Trump suggested that he might unleash a “method of war” that would kill at least 54% of the roughly 37 million inhabitants of Afghanistan.
And yet almost no one — in Washington or Kabul — wanted to touch such presidential comments. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department all demurred. So did the chief spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. One high-ranking Afghan official apologized to me for being unable to respond honestly to President Trump’s comments. A current American official expressed worry that reacting to the president’s Afghan threats might provoke a presidential tweet storm against him and refused to comment on the record.
Experts, however, weren’t shy about weighing in on what such “plans,” if real and utilized, would actually mean. Employing such a method (to use the president’s term), they say, would constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, and possibly a genocide.
A Trumpian Crime Against Humanity
“Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned sovereign nation of Afghanistan,” President Jimmy Carter announced on January 4, 1980. “Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.” Nine years later, the Red Army would finally limp out of that land in the wake of a war that killed an estimated 90,000 Mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers. As has been the norm in conflicts since World War I, however, civilians suffered the heaviest toll. Around one million were estimated to have been killed.
In the 18-plus years since U.S. forces invaded that same country in October 2001, the death toll has been far lower. Around 7,300 U.S. military personnel, contractors, and allied foreign forces have died there, as have 64,000 American-allied Afghans, 42,000 opposition fighters, and 43,000 civilians, according to the Costs of War Project. If President Trump is to be believed, however, this body count is low only due to American restraint.
“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone,” the president remarked prior to a July 2019 meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.” In September, he ramped up the rhetoric — and the death toll — further. “We’ve been very effective in Afghanistan,” he said. “And if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly, but many, many, really, tens of millions of people would be killed.”
If America’s commander-in-chief is to be believed, plans and methods are already in place for a mass killing whose death toll could, at a minimum, exceed those of the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Hundred Years’ War, and the American Revolution combined — and all in a country where the Pentagon believes there are only 40,000 to 80,000 Taliban fighters and fewer than 2,000 Islamic State militants.
President Trump claims he’d prefer not to use such methods, but if he did, say experts, his Senate impeachment trial could theoretically be followed by a more consequential one in front of an international tribunal. “Of course, any ‘method of war’ that would kill ‘10 million people’ or ‘tens of millions’ of people in a country where the fighting force consists of 40,000 to 80,000 would be a blatant violation of the laws of war and would render President Trump a war criminal,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told TomDispatch.
Max Pensky, the co-director of the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at the State University of New York at Binghamton, agreed. “Carrying out such a plan would certainly be a war crime because of the context of the armed conflict in Afghanistan,” he said. “And it would absolutely be a crime against humanity.” He noted that it might also constitute a genocide depending on the intent behind it.
The United States has, of course, been a pioneer when it comes to both the conduct and the constraint of warfare. For example, “General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field,” issued by President Abraham Lincoln on April 24, 1863, represents the first modern codification of the laws of war. “The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit,” reads the 157-year-old code. “All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country, all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense.”
More recently, however, the United States has set the rules of the road when it comes to borderless assassination. In asserting the right of the military and the CIA to use armed drones to kill people from Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia to Libya, through quasi-secret and opaque processes, while ignoring previous American norms against “targeted killing,” questions about national sovereignty, and existing international law, the U.S. has created a ready framework for other nations to mimic. In October 2019, for example, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted that he would assassinate Mazloum Kobani, the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces and a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “Some countries eliminate terrorists whom they consider as a threat to their national security, wherever they are,” Erdogan said. “Therefore, this means those countries accept that Turkey has the same right.”
Historically, the United States has also pioneered the use of weapons of mass destruction. While a White House spokesperson would not address the question of whether President Trump was alluding to the use of nuclear weapons when he claimed that “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth,” it’s notable that the United States is the only country to have used such weaponry in an actual war.
The first nuclear attack, the U.S. strike on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, left that city “uniformly and extensively devastated,” according to a study carried out in the wake of the attacks by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. “The surprise, the collapse of many buildings, and the conflagration contributed to an unprecedented casualty rate.” Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly. The final death toll, including those who later perished from the long-term effects of radiation sickness, was estimated at 135,000 to 150,000. An atomic attack on Nagasaki, carried out three days later, was calculated to have killed another 50,000 to 75,000 people.
Theoretical War Crimes and Real Civilian Deaths
Just days before mentioning the possibility of annihilating tens of millions of Afghans, President Trump took the Taliban to task for killing 12 people, including 10 Afghan civilians and one American soldier, in a car bombing while peace talks with the militant group were underway. At the time, he tweeted: “What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?” Weeks later, he would clear three military service members of war crimes, one of them convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, another charged with the murder of an Afghan man.
Amnesty’s Daphne Eviatar believes that the president’s “disregard toward the lives of civilians” may have led to less precise American attacks in recent years. “We’ve seen a dramatic rise in civilian casualties from U.S. military operations since Trump took office, including in Afghanistan,” she told TomDispatch.
An October report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), analyzing the war from July to the end of September 2019, documented the highest number of civilian casualties it had recorded in a single quarter since it began systematically doing so in 2009. During the first nine months of last year, in fact, UNAMA tallied the deaths of 2,563 civilians and the wounding of 5,676 more — the majority by “anti-government” forces, including the Taliban and ISIS. UNAMA found, however, that “pro-government forces,” including the U.S. military, killed 1,149 people and injured 1,199 others in that period, a 26% increase from the corresponding timeframe in 2018.
Of course, such numbers would be dwarfed were Donald Trump to decide to “win” the Afghan War in the fashion he hinted at twice last year, even as peace talks with the Taliban were underway. Johnny Walsh, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace and a former lead adviser for the State Department on the Afghan peace process, chalked Trump’s purported plans up to a “rhetorical flourish” and doubts they actually exist. “I am not at all aware of any plan to escalate the conflict or use nuclear weapons,” he told TomDispatch.
Whether or not such plans are real, civilian casualties in Afghanistan continue to rise, prompting experts to call for additional scrutiny of U.S. military operations. “It’s tempting to dismiss some of the President’s more provocative statements,” said Amnesty’s Daphne Eviatar, “but we do need to take very seriously the exponential increase in civilian casualties from U.S. military operations since 2017 and ensure every one is thoroughly and independently investigated, and the results made public, so we can know if they’re the result of an unlawful Trump administration policy or practice.”
As 2020 begins, with America’s Afghan war in its 19th year and “progress” as nonexistent as ever, a beleaguered president continues to mull over just how to end America’s “endless wars” (while seemingly expanding them further). Under the circumstances, who knows what might happen in Afghanistan? Will 2020 be the year of peace or of Armageddon there — or will it simply bring more of the same? With a president for whom “plans” may be more figurative than literal, all of this and the fate of perhaps 20 million or more Afghans remain among the great “unknown unknowns” of our time.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published by TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 Nick Turse
Search That Song
by K P Sasi
Better to sing your last song while alive
Than to leave your music unsung forever.
Search that song you forgot to sing
And sing it in my ears before I die.
The Triumphing of Democracy
by Mitali Chakravarty
And yet, Faiz will sing,
Rise up and ring…
We will see,
Hum Dekhenge…
No comments:
Post a Comment