Eric S. Margolis Column

[Xerxes]

Foreign Correspondent
INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS
by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis


AFGHANISTAN: TIME FOR TRUTH
September 18, 2006


Do not believe what OUR media and politicians are telling us about Afghanistan. Nearly all the information we get about the five-year old war in Afghanistan comes from US and NATO public relations officers or `embedded’ journalists who merely parrot military handouts. Ask yourself, when did you last read a report from a journalist covering Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces?

Now, the official rosy view is being flatly contradicted by impartial observers.

The respected European think-tank, Senlis Council, which focuses on Afghanistan, just reported the Taliban movement is `taking back Afghanistan’ and now controls that nation’s southern half.

This is an amazing departure from claims by the US and its NATO allies that they are steadily winning the war in Afghanistan. Or, more precisely, winning it again, since the Bush Administration claimed to have won total victory in Afghanistan in 2001. At the time, this column predicted that victory was an illusion and the war would resume in force in 4-5 years.

According to the Senlis Council, southern Afghanistan is suffering `a humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty…caused by `US-British military policies.’

Deflating optimistic western reports, Senlis investigators found, `US policies in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy.’ This is a bombshell.

The US and NATO have been insisting any withdrawal of their forces from Afghanistan - or from Iraq - will leave a void certain to be filled by extremists. These claims are nonsense, given that half of Afghanistan and a third of Iraq are already largely controlled by anti-western resistance forces.

Were it not for omnipotent US airpower, American and NATO forces would be quickly driven from Afghanistan and Iraq. If Afghan and Iraqi resistance forces ever manage to obtain effective man-portable anti-aircraft weapons, such as the US Stinger or Russian SA-18, the US-led occupation of those nations may become untenable. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980’s was doomed once mujahidin forces obtained American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

Last week, Canadian and British commanders boasted they were about to annihilate Taliban forces `surrounded’ around Panjwai and Zahri. They crowed an `estimated 500 Taliban,’ had already been killed.

A storm of bombing and shelling did kill many Afghans, but most of the dead `suspected Taliban militants’ turned out, as usual, to be civilians. NATO failed to show bodies of dead enemy fighters to back up its absurd claims.

When NATO forces entered Panjwai after weeks of air strikes and shelling, the supposedly `surrounded’ Taliban had vanished. Embarrassed British and Canadian commanders admitted `we were surprised the enemy had fled.’ Surprised?

Doesn’t anyone remember the Vietnam War’s fruitless search and destroy missions and inflated body counts? Don’t NATO commanders know their every move is telegraphed in advance to Taliban forces? Don’t they see what’s going on now in Iraq?

Did Canadian officers making such fanciful claims really believe Taliban’s veteran guerillas would be stupid enough to sit still and be destroyed by US air power?

Now, Canadian-led NATO forces are crowing about having finally occupied Panjewi. `Taliban has fled!’ they proudly announced. Don’t they understand that guerilla forces don’t hang on to fixed positions? Occupying ground is meaningless in guerilla warfare.

Seemingly immune to history or common sense, Canada is sending a few hundred more troops and a handful of obsolete tanks to Afghanistan. Poland, which will send troops anywhere for the right price, is adding 1,000 more soldiers next year.

US, British and Canadian politicians say they are surprised by intensifying Taliban resistance. They have only their own ignorance to blame.

Attacking Pashtuns, renowned for xenophobia, warlike spirits, and love of independence is a fool’s mission. Pashtuns are Afghanistan’s ethnic majority. Taliban is an offshoot of the Pushtun people. Long-term national stability is impossible without their representation and cooperation.

What the west calls `Taliban’ is actually a growing coalition of veteran Taliban fighters led by Mullah Dadullah, other clans of Pashtun tribal warriors, and nationalist resistance forces led by Jalalladin Hakkani and former prime minister, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, whom the CIA has repeatedly tried to assassinate.

Many are former mujahidin once hailed `freedom fighters’ by the west, and branded `terrorists’ by the Soviets. They represent national resistance to foreign occupation. In fact, what the US and its NATO allies are doing in Afghanistan today uncannily mirrors the brutal Soviet occupation during the 1980’s.

The UN’s anti-narcotic agency reports Afghanistan now supplies 92% of the world’s heroin. Production has surged 40% last year alone. Who is responsible? The US and NATO. They now own narco-state Afghanistan.

Dominating the main oil export route from Central Asia was a primary objective of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Ironically, instead of an anticipated oil bonanza, the US now finds itself mired deep in the Afghan drug trade.

Washington and NATO can’t keep pretending this is someone else’s problem. Drug money fuels the Afghan economy and keeps local warlords loyal to the US-installed Kabul regime.

Afghanistan’s north has become a sphere of influence of Russia and its local allies, the Uzbek-Tajik Northern Alliance led by notorious war criminals and leaders of the old Afghan Communist Party.

The US and its allies are not going to win the Afghan war. They will be lucky the way things are going not to lose it in the same humiliating manner the Soviets did in 1989.

In recent week, near panicky calls by British PM Tony Blair for more NATO troops to be sent to Afghanistan show that western occupation forces are on the defensive, fighting to hold their bases, and facing the specter of eventual defeat. Just, in fact, like every other invader that has ever occupied Afghanistan.

A final point. US and NATO forces are not fighting `terrorists,’ as their governments claim. They are fighting the Afghan people. In the 1980’s, I saw mujahidin too poor to afford shoes strap 110lbs of mortar shells on their backs, and climb 6-8 hours over mountains through snow to bombard a Communist base, then trudge home. These are the people we are fighting. Anyone who knows Afghans know they will not be defeated, even if they must resist for an entire generation.

http://www.bigeye.com/fcorrlst.htm

[SS_Charlemagne]

Good article. Interesting, indeed.

[Indonesiana]

Salaam,

Good to see every progress in battlefield of Afghanistan. BTW, is there any chance to see Talibans use captured sophisticated warbooty as they previously did with Russian weaponry?

[Xerxes]

The "new" Taliban do need a source where to draw their support
hmmm... i think they are on their own this time. But i do wish them luck trying to combat NATO military military warmachine

[Xerxes]

Foreign Correspondent
INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS
by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis


SPITTING ON INTERNATIONAL LAW
September 25, 2006


TORONTO - Towards the end of the Soviet Union, I was the first western journalist (to the best of my knowledge) allowed into the world’s most dreaded prison, Moscow’s sinister Lubyanka. Muscovites dared not even utter the name of KGB’s headquarters, calling it instead after a nearby toy store, `Detsky Mir.’

I still shudder recalling Lubyanka’s underground cells, grim interrogation rooms, and even deeper underground execution cellars where tens of thousands were tortured and shot. I sat at the very desk from which monsters who ran Cheka (Soviet secret police) – Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria - ordered 30 million victims to their deaths. This industrial murder, we should recall, occurred at least five years before Hitler’s death camps went into production, and was well known to Churchill and Roosevelt when they allied themselves to mass murderer Josef Stalin.

Prisoners taken in the dead of night to Lubyanka were systematically beaten for days with rubber hoses and clubs. There were special cold rooms were prisoners could be frozen to near death. Sleep deprivation was a favorite and most effective Cheka technique. So was near-drowning in water fouled with urine and feces.

I recall these past horrors because of what this column has long called the gradual `Sovietization’ of the United States. This shameful week, it became clear Canada is also afflicted.

We have seen America’s president and vice president, sworn to uphold the Constitution, advocating exactly the same tortures techniques KGB used at the Lubyanka. They claimed beating, freezing, sleep deprivation and drowning were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, calling them by the euphemism, `tough interrogation’. Stalin made the same arguments, but did not stoop to euphemisms. .

The White House insisted that anyone charged with vague `terrorism offenses’ – including Americans - could be kidnapped, tortured, and tried in camera using `evidence’ obtained by torturing other suspects. Bush & Co reject the basic law of habeaus corpus and US laws against torture. The UN says Bush’s torture plans violate international law and the Geneva Conventions. These conventions were enacted to provide basic protection to combatants and civilians in wartime, and regulate the behavior of occupying powers.

The White House claimed the Geneva Conventions, the core of international law, are `outdated ‘ and did not apply to so-called `terrorism suspects.’ The Bush Administration was particularly unhappy over the Geneva Convention’s law that it is illegal for an occupying power invading another nation to set up a government there under military occupation, such as the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On a side note, Switzerland, guardian of the Conventions, broke its usual discreet silence recently to accuse Israel of grossly violating the Geneva Conventions by brutally mistreating the Palestinian people.

Bush’s attempts to re-write the Geneva Conventions, which were signed by 162 nations, met serious protests from many other nations and four senior Republican Senators.

This week’s tentative and still cloudy agreement between Bush and Congress to may somewhat limit torture, but appears to exempts US officials from having to observe the Geneva Convention and be given immunity to any criminal acts they commit that violate the conventions.

Canadians had a shocking view of similar creeping totalitarianism as the full horror of Maher Arar’s persecution was revealed. Thanks to false information from RCMP, the US arrested a perfectly innocent Canadian citizen transiting through a New York airport, sent him to Syria to be tortured, and subsequently denied this crime until it was exposed. Arab states and Pakistan are routinely used by the Bush Administration for outsourced torture. Syria denies the charges.

Suspects were routinely kidnapped by the US, often on the basis of faulty information or lies elicited under torture, then sent to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan to be tortured until they confessed. The objective of this `rendition’ program: torture as many suspects as possible in hopes of finding a few kernels of useful information. The Cheka and East Germany’s Stasi used the same practice.

I never thought to see the United States - champion of human rights and rule of law - legislating torture and Soviet-style kangaroo tribunals. I never thought I’d see Congress and a majority of Americans supporting such police state measures. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln must be turning in their graves.

The Bush Administration insists that its `tough interrogation techniques’ are really torture, and must be used on dangerous terrorist suspects. They cite the old Israeli argument for torture, `what if you had a suspect who knew where there was a huge, ticking bomb?’ That argument is specious. History shows torture is never confined to a few cases.

Once released from Pandora’ Box, torture becomes routine and ubiquitous among security agencies. Not only are single high-interest suspects tortured, their relatives, friends and associates are also tortured in case they know something, or to corroborate interrogation information. Anyone these people know or talked to also fall under suspicion and into the torturer’s ever-widening ambit.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Canada has always seemed to me been a haven of moderation, decency, and rule of law that managed to stay aloof from the world’s travails. That is, until the Maher Arar affair shockingly showed it could also quickly fall into police state behavior.

Arar’s despicable treatment by Canada and the US was the result of a US witch hunt, plus anti-Muslim racism, stupidity, bureaucratic cowardice and incompetence. Disturbingly, before becoming prime minister, conservative leader Stephen Harper actually branded Arar a terrorist, and backed his arrest and imprisonment.

We saw Ottawa aiding the outrageous persecution of its citizens, and the US shamefully refusing to aid the Canadian government’s official Arar inquiry, which was followed with intense interest and concern by most Canadians.

Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who authorized Arar’s arrest, should face justice for this and many other malfeasances. He was the chief witch hunter who had over 3,000 innocent Muslims arrested, threatened and interrogated. None were found guilty of any terrorism charges. The current US Attorney General , who actually denied the Bush Administration was responsible for Arar’s abduction and torture, should be ashamed of himself. He also happens to be the author of many of the government’s legal briefs justifying torture.

Canada must demand a thorough US investigation, apology, and guarantee Canadians will never again become victims of the state-run criminal activity that afflicted Maher Arar. Canada’s PM Harper should advise his new best friends in Washington that Canada is not a banana republic.

Officials directly involved in the most sordid, disgraceful case in Canada’s modern history, must face justice. They are as much guilty as the torturers who beat Maher Arar mercilessly for ten months. The same applies to American officials who sent an innocent man to be nearly beaten to death and virtually buried alive in a `grave’ cell measuring six feet by three.

[Xerxes]

Foreign Correspondent
INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS
by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis


BOMBING PAKISTAN BACK TO THE STONE AGE
October 2, 2006


While interviewing Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf after the 1999 military coup that brought him to power, I was struck both by his plain-spoken honesty, and doubts this rather eccentric general turned politician would survive. Running turbulent, unstable Pakistan, is one of the world’s toughest, most dangerous jobs.

I felt at the time Musharraf was not in the same league as his predecessors, Zia ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto, both of whom I knew well and respected.

But seven years and two assassination attempts later, Musharraf still runs Pakistan, and still talks like a soldier.

During last week’s US media blitz to promote his new book, Musharraf claimed soon after 9/11, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the US would `bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if it did not immediately turn against its Afghan ally, Taliban, and allow the US to use military bases in Pakistan to invade Afghanistan.

Musharraf’s claim provoked an uproar in the US and Pakistan, making one wonder if his goal was getting on the Oprah Show or explaining Pakistani policy to confused Americans.

Armitage denies threatening war on Pakistan. But a reader, Prof. John Yardley, reminded me that in my 2002 book, `War at the Top of the World,’ I had indeed revealed the US threat to bomb Pakistan.

I met with Gen. Mahmud, before 9/11. He and Lt. Gen. Mohammed Aziz were Pakistan’s top military officers who put Musharraf into power. After 9/11, they were ousted under US pressure for being `too Islamist.’

After 9/11, I learned indirectly from Mahmud that Armitage indeed delivered an ultimatum to him threatening war if Pakistan did not swiftly bow to US demands.

Pakistan’s efforts to make the Bush Administration understand it was supporting Taliban to maintain order in Afghanistan, keep the Russian-backed Afghan Communist Party in check, and to block Indian and Iranian influence there, fell on deaf ears.

So was ISI’s insistence that Taliban had no knowledge or part in the 9/11 attacks, and bore no ill will towards the United States. Quite the contrary, many Taliban commanders were originally armed, financed and trained by CIA in the 1980’s. But enraged Americans were demanding revenge for 9/11. They wanted targets, not explanations.

I’ve heard various versions of Armitage’s exact words. But I know whatever he said put the fear of god into Pakistan’s military leadership.

ISI sources say the Bush Administration threatened to bomb faithful old ally Pakistan, cut off its oil, collapse its banking system and call in its loans. More frightening, Washington also threatened to `unleash’ India against Pakistan, either allowing India to conquer the Pakistani-held portion of disputed Kashmir, or give Delhi a green light to invade all of Pakistan, possibly with American assistance.

Leaked cabinet documents from 10 Downing Street show three months before invading Iraq in 2003, President Bush told British PM Tony Blair that once he finished off Iraq, he planned to `go after’ Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan was in America’s cross hairs.

Gen. Musharraf thus faced a horrible choice: abandon Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan for which it had faced down the mighty Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Allow a hostile regime to be established there dominated by Pakistan’s blood enemies, the Afghan Communists, Iran and India. And abandon Pakistan’s most cherished national cause, the 50-year struggle to free Kashmir of Indian rule.

Or else stab anti-Communist ally Taliban in the back, give military bases to the US, abandon the struggle in Kashmir, bow to Washington’s commands, and face the wrath of Pakistanis crying out that Musharraf had sold out to the Americans. This is, of course, what has happened, leaving Musharraf increasingly isolated and unpopular.

Pakistan’s media bitterly noted that Taliban’s tribal warriors resisted US B-52 carpet bombing for two weeks. Pakistan caved in after a single threatening phone call.

Musharraf claimed he `war gamed’ a US attack and concluded his nation would lose. Pakistan might have resisted a US attack, but certainly not a joint US-Indian offensive. So he had little choice.

But many Pakistanis believe Musharraf was far too eager to comply with Washington’s diktat and to turn against Pakistan’s old friends and allies. But $4 billion of US aid and secret CIA stipends distributed to Pakistan’s ruling elite rented cooperation.

Every time Pakistan got into trouble with Washington, it would suddenly discover `one of al-Qaida’s top commanders’ and deliver him to the Americans. So far, almost 700 have been sent, in each case for rewards of millions of dollars, as Musharraf unwisely boasted.

The biggest trouble Musharraf has gotten into is the still murky Dr. Abdul Kadeer Khan affair. Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, the father of its nuclear arsenal, was caught red handed selling centrifuges and other nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

Even though US satellites saw Pakistani Air Force C-130’s delivering equipment to North Korea, Musharraf denies he or anyone else in government knew about this extensive black market operation. Such claims sound totally implausible, given all nuclear operations and material are under tight military control. Musharraf has rejected US demands Khan be turned over. The scientist is a national hero in Pakistan.

Last Wednesday, President George Bush hosted a tense dinner for Karzai and Musharraf, who detest one another. As the Afghan War goes increasingly badly for the western powers, Karzai keeps blaming Musharraf for allowing Taliban to operate inside Pakistan and launch cross-border attacks on Afghanistan. Musharraf fired back that Karzai was a figurehead who had no control of his country. Both accusations are true.

Tribal politics lie at the heart of their dispute. The 30 million Pashtuns (or Pathans), the world’s largest tribal society, are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan by an artificial border, the Durand Line, drawn by divide and conquer British imperialists.

Pashtuns account for 50-60% of Afghanistan’s 30 million people. Taliban is an organic part of the Pashtun people. The western powers and their figurehead ruler, President Karzai, are not just fighting `Taliban terrorists,’ but a coalition of Pushtun tribes and other allied nationalist movements. In effect, most of the Pashtun people.

The other half of the divided Pashtuns live just across the Durand Line in Pakistan, comprising 15-20% of its population. Pashtuns occupy many senior posts in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. Pashtuns, including anti-western resistance fighters, never accepted and simply ignore the artificial border bifurcating their tribal homeland.

Washington keeps demanding Musharraf crack down on Pakistan’s pro-Taliban Pashtuns. But Washington fails to understand that too much pressure on these fierce warriors could quickly ignite a major historic threat to Pakistan’s national integrity: a Pashtun independence movement seeking to join the Pashtun of Afghanistan and Pakistan in a new state, Pashtunistan.

Growing tribal unrest in Pakistan’s strategic province of Baluchistan, where support of Taliban runs high, further threatens to destabilize the fragile nation.

President Musharraf has bent over so far backwards to comply with Washington’s highly unpopular demands that he has deeply angered his people, who increasingly call him a tool of the west. Karzai is seen the same way by many Afghans. Yet US (and now Canadian) policy depends on the survival of these two colorful but increasingly isolated leaders.

thanks for the articles, these things are the sign of American justified policy against the so called mind created terrorists and games they are playing with innocent people for only money and power. that is remind of german SS.

[Xerxes]

^^
no problem, couple of things about Eric Margolias


Eric Margolis is an American journalist. He is a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East, South Asia, and Islam, and appears frequently on Canadian television broadcasts, as well as on CNN.

Margolis identifies his politics as "Eisenhower Republican". Though his domestic political persuasion is moderately conservative (he is a staunch anti-communist and a supporter of capitalism), Margolis' views on the Middle East are sharply at odds with the neoconservatives.

Margolis is best known from his coverage of Palestine and Kashmir. Margolis' mother, Nexhmie Zaimi, was also a journalist who spent a long time in the Middle East documenting the plight of the Palestinians during the 1950s[1]. Her influence, plus Margolis's role as a foreign correspondent in the Mideast and travelling with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, has given Margolis a strong interest in the Muslim World. He strongly supported NATO's intervention in the Kosovo war and also supports the rebels in Chechnya.

[Khaybar]

August 14, 2006

THE LEBANON CURSE STRIKES AGAIN


As a shaky cease-fire goes into effect in Lebanon, Israel’s generals and politicians are furiously blaming one another for what many Israelis are calling a major political and military defeat.

After 31 days of fighting, Israel has nothing to show but world-wide condemnation (the US excepted), scores of dead soldiers and civilians, burned forests, displaced civilians and the expenditure of billions of dollars.

A decade ago, Israelis used to speak of their `Lebanese curse.’ They were referring to their disastrous interventions there that brought them nothing but heavy casualties, billions in wasted dollars, ruined political and military careers and the historic shame of the massacres at Shatilla and Sabra, and the destruction of Beirut.

The old curse struck again. The fierce resistance of some 3,000 Hezbullah fighters to the world’s fourth most powerful military machine electrified the Muslim world, and horrified Israelis, who had foolishly dismissed Hezbullah as `a bunch of terrorists.’

According to Israeli media, Israel had apparently been planning the Lebanon invasion for the past three years and conducted a mock invasion of Lebanon only a month ago. President George Bush had strongly urged Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert to attack Hezbullah as the first stage in a US-British-Israeli campaign against Syria ad Iran.

The new invasion of southern Lebanon was expected to be swift and painless. A week’s bombing would erase Hezbullah, promised Israel’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, a sort of Israeli version of `bomb’em back to the Stone Age’ Gen. Curtiss LeMay. Instead, Hezbullah fought Israel’s armored juggernaut to a standstill. Israel’s huge bombing campaign killed over 1,000 civilians but very few Hezbullah fighters.

Why have Hezbullah’s mujahidin proven such fierce and skilled fighters? Many are well-educated university graduates, often around 30-40 years old. They are dedicated to driving Israeli troops from Lebanon and aiding the Palestinian cause.

Hezbullah’s Shia traditions of self-sacrifice, fearlessness, and heroism in battle play a key role. So, too, the concept of noble martyrdom in righteous battle.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has suffered grave casualties in southern Lebanon, notably near the strategic hilltop town of Marjayoun, losing score of casualties. Hezbullah claims to have knocked out nearly 20 of Israel’s superbly armored Merkava tanks. Nearby Bint Jebil, which changed hands numerous times, is being hailed as `Hezbullagrad,’ after the legendary World War II battle at Stalingrad.

Many Hezbullah officers are highly skilled veterans of the 80’s war. By contrast, IDF ground forces seems to have forgotten almost all the bitter lessons previously learned in Lebanon. The 1980’s occupation cost Israel nearly 800 soldiers and billions of dollars.

Hezbullah fighters stand out among Arab military forces for proficiency in small unit combat tactics. Their squads are experts in moving and firing, setting up interlocking fields of fire, laying ambushes and anti-tank mines, and pre-registered mortar fire plans.

Hezbullah’s men wear modern body armor and helmets. They have supplies of munitions cached all over the area, and networks of bunkers, caves and trenches that partially neutralize Israel’s command of the air. Subjected to intensive, round-the-clock bombing by Israel’s Air Force and shelling by heavy 155mm guns and rockets, Hezbullah’s fighters have never wavered or retreated, and continued to resist with ferocity. No professional western troops could do better.

One of Hezbullah’s few advantages is intimate knowledge of southern Lebanon’s fractured terrain of steep hills, dry stream beds, twisting roads, and deep ravines. Israel’s vast number of tanks and armored vehicles cannot be employed to full force in such terrain as it was in the deserts of Sinai and barren Golan Heights.

Equally important, Hezbullah’s infantry has acquired sizeable amounts of anti-tank systems. These include the venerable but still destructive US TOW sourced from refurbished Iranian stocks, the Soviet Sagger, and the modern European Milan and some Russian systems, likely obtained on the arms market or from Syria. These weapons have caused the largest number of Israeli casualties and armor losses and are a fearsome threat for IDF infantry packed into vulnerable armored personnel carriers.

Had Hezbullah any effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, such as the US Stinger that neutralized Soviet aviation in Afghanistan, Israel’s enormous advantage from devastating close air support would be partially neutralized.

Far from being what Israel and the US call a `terrorist group,’ Hezbullah is an integrated political, social, cultural and military movement that represents the Lebanon’s Shia, who make up 40% of that nation’s people. Recent polls show 87% of Lebanese now support Hezbullah.

Even al-Qaida, which used to brand Shia’s traitors to the Arab cause, now hails Hezbullah as a vanguard of Arab liberation.

In spite of the cease-fire, which has already been twice violated, 40,000 Israeli troops remain poised to enter Lebanon, most of whose population has been driven out by Israeli bombing and shelling and their villages razed by Israeli bulldozers. The fate of the nearly one million refugees created by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign remains unresolved. Much of Lebanon lies in ruins.

The Bush Administration’s encouragement of Israel’s foolish invasion and laying waste of Lebanon marks its third military disaster after Afghanistan and Iraq. This from the man who styles himself `the war president.’

Hezbullah has emerged from the Lebanon War as the new champion of the Muslim World. Its fighters held out longer against Israel’s might than did the Arab armies in the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, and emerged undefeated. Israel’s carefully-cultivated myth of military invincibility was shattered by Hezbullah. As a result, Israel will now redouble its attempts to assassinate its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

The repulse of Israeli forces by a few thousand Hezbullah fighters ought to give pause for thought to the Pentagon and bloodthirsty neocons who have been clamoring for war with Iran. Hezbullah was trained and armed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. American forces might face the same tough fighting in any invasion of Iran that Israel just met in Lebanon.

As this column predicted when the fighting in Lebanon began, after all the barrages of self-righteous propaganda, massive bombing and heaps of dead civilians, in the end the two sides would negotiate through third parties -which they could have easily done after the minor border skirmish that triggered this totally unnecessary war. But PM Olmert, enraged by Nasrallah’s taunting that he was `small’ compared to Ariel Sharon, went to war, egged on by George Bush, who rushed Israel fuel and munitions.

The cease-fire and impending dispatch of Lebanese and UN forces to southern Lebanon will hopefully end this stupid, pointless war and afford Israel a face-saving way of withdrawing its head from a hornet’s nest. However, the war could easily re-ignite and Israel could end up bogged down in guerilla war in southern Lebanon, as it previously was for 18 years.

Israel’s politicians will now face the wrath of voters who are rightly outraged over the fiasco in Lebanon and Hezbullah’s crowing victory. Heads will surely roll.

Americans, by contrast, will not draw the same conclusions about their inept political leadership that better informed Israelis certainly will. George Bush, the war’s leading flag-waver, has received no rebuke from the US media or voters for his latest military debacle. Nor will the clapping seals in Congress and the Senate.

Lebanese and Israelis are paying the heavy price for Mr. Bush’s `reborn Middle East.’

30

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
تزول الجبال ولا تزل عض على ناجذك اعر الله جمجمتك تدفى في الارض قدمك ارم ببصرك اقصى القوم و غض بصرك و اعلم ان النصر من عند الله سبحانه
امير المؤمنين علي عليه السلام

[Xerxes]

Foreign Correspondent
INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS
by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis


POLITKOVSKAYA: RUSSIAN HERO
October 16, 2006


VANCOUVER – When I met Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2002 to discuss her new book about Chechnya, `Dirty War,’ I began by asking her about life in Moscow.

She brusquely interrupted me, `Please, I am here to speak only of Chechnya.’

The 48-year old Russian journalist told me her days were numbered. There had already been two attempts in Moscow on her life, and a third in Chechnya.

Last week, this crusading journalist was murdered in Moscow.

At a time when too many journalists have become clapping seals for governments or their corporate employer’s party line, Politkovskaya risked her life to report the truth.

She exposed massive human rights violations being committed by Russian forces against independence-seeking Chechen, as well as economic crimes and gangsterism.

She was among a handful of Russian journalists who dared cover the brutal war in the Caucasus, fearlessly reporting it in her crusading newspaper, `Novaya Gazeta,’ one of the last free voices in Russia’s mostly government-controlled media.

But because of mounting death threats against her and her two children, Politkovskaya told me she had regretfully decided to seek political asylum in Austria. Since 1996, 23 Russian journalists have been murdered for reporting on Chechnya and domestic crimes.

But this hero journalist could not stay silent about the slaughter in Chechnya. She challenged head-on the news blackout Moscow imposed on this forgotten and largely invisible conflict.

I had a taste of what she went through. While covering the 1980’s war in Afghanistan, the Soviets and Afghan Communists put a contract out to kill me as part of their effort to stop western journalists from reporting on the war.

My own mother, another crusading journalist who sought in the early 1950’s to tell Americans the truth about the plight of Palestinian refugees was finally silenced after numerous threats were made to throw acid in my face.

Politkovskaya returned to Russia, and continued to cover Chechnya in spite of more death threats and an attempt to poison her. She was about to come out with a critical new book about Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and the crimes being committed in Chechnya.

A contract killer murdered Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment. The consensus in Moscow was that the finger of suspicion pointed right at Chechnya’s Moscow-installed puppet ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, a brutal Chechen warlord who inherited the job of Moscow’s local thug from his father.

Politkovskaya’s murder was another sign that Russia, in spite of President Vladimir Putin’s claims it has become a nation under law, is still dominated by its shadowy security organs and ruthless gangsters.

By now, Moscow has mostly crushed the life out of Chechnya’s 1.5 million people. These tough Muslim mountaineers have battled Russian rule for 400 years. During World War II, Stalin attempted genocide by sending 60% of all Chechen to concentration camps, where the majority perished.

In 1999, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, Chechen, like Ukrainians and Baltics, declared independence. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin sent his army to crush Chechen independence. The elected Chechen president, Jhokar Dudayev, was assassinated, thanks to electronic locating gear supplied Moscow’s secret police by CIA.

Chechen fighters, in one of modern history’s most remarkable and valiant feats, defeated Russian invasion forces. In the process, the Russians killed 100,000 or more Chechen civilians by massive carpet bombing and shelling.

The world turned its back on this massacre. President Bill Clinton hailed its author, Boris Yeltsin, as `the Abraham Lincoln of Russia.’ The world bought Moscow’s claim that Chechen independence fighters were `Islamic terrorists.’

Russia invaded a second time and slowly crushed the Chechen by mass killings, savage reprisals, and torture. All the Chechen leaders were murdered. Journalists and aid workers who sought to report this second genocide were killed or kidnapped.

Some of the remaining few Chechen fighters were driven to desperate acts of terrorism, like the school hostage taking at Beslan. But Moscow relentlessly ground the life out of Chechen resistance.

The world turned its back on the slaughter of the Chechen people and their struggle for freedom. But Anna Politkovskaya did not. She spoke for those who had no voice.

She refused to be intimidated and fought to her last breath against injustice.

[Xerxes]

Foreign Correspondent
INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS
by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis


ASIANS SAY: `BETTER THE KIM YOU KNOW……’
October 23, 2006


TOKYO - North Korea’s `Dear Leader’ must be sipping a glass of his favorite French wine and having a good laugh as he observes the worldwide hysteria he created by shooting off a tiny nuclear device.

For a dictator who loves international attention and movie-making with equal passion, what could be more satisfying than playing arch villains in his own James Bond production while savoring the storm of international hypocrisy and prefabricated outrage his less than one kiloton nuclear test unleashed.

But keep in mind, North Korea has done nothing illegal under international law. It has every right to conduct underground nuclear tests. India and Pakistan did so in 1998. Today, the US is supplying India with nuclear fuel and technology that allows Delhi to divert scarce nuclear fuel to its military reactors and upgrade its strategic weapons.

The United States, Britain, France, Russia and China have all violated the basic international law on nuclear power, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT). Article IV of the treaty mandates `complete nuclear disarmament under strict and effective international control.’

That was 38 years ago. Today, these nations have 30,000 nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia hold the lion’s share. None of the treaty signatories have abandoned nuclear weapons. The US is currently updating and refreshing its nuclear arsenal and developing deep penetrating weapons.

In 1953, America’s greatest modern president, Dwight Eisenhower, launched his Atoms for Peace initiative. He called for total international nuclear disarmament, including the entire US nuclear arsenal. Subsequent administrations ignored Eisenhower’s sensible proposal.

The only two nations to have actually scrapped their nuclear arsenals have been South Africa and Ukraine.

The US, France, Russia and China also violated Article I of the treaty, which bans transfer of nuclear technology. The US gave nuclear know-how to Britain. France supplied Israel with nuclear technology. Russia gave it to China, and China shared technology with Pakistan. Israel, which refused to sign the NNPT, supplied extensive nuclear technology to South Africa and, more recently, to India.

Those nations screaming the loudest about North Korea and Iran barging into the restricted nuclear club are also the nations with the biggest stocks of nuclear weapons themselves. Israel warns it is prepared to go to war to defend its Mideast nuclear monopoly.

The US has nuclear weapons based in South Korea, probably in Okinawa, at Guam, and with its 7th Fleet in the Pacific. South Korea has twice been caught with covert nuclear weapons programs. Japan can assemble nuclear weapons on 90 days notice. Taiwan has long run a covert nuclear program.

China, not wanting to be caught offside in the world uproar against the Dear Leader, began perfunctory inspections of trucks headed into North Korea. China is the sole source of North Korea’s oil and supplies most of its imported foodstuffs.

Beijing is clearly deeply confused by its eccentric Korean ally, and furious at him for provoking the current uproar and making China’s leadership lose face. But it does not want to see Kim’s Stalinist regime collapse, and has so far refused to join an international naval blockade. So for now, China is playing good cop/bad cop.

The US-led UN embargo against North Korea cuts off tanks, military equipment and aircraft. But North Korea has a lot of these, however outdated, and can’t afford any more. Following its official philosophy of `juche,’ North Korea has become nearly self-sufficient except for oil, and can survive for a long time under blockade. About 85% of its imports come by truck and train from China.

Provided China does not cut off oil to North Korea, the most painful part of the embargo may be the cruel denial of luxury goods to the Dear Leader – a ban on his favorite fine French wines, cigarettes, and chocolates. No doubt, Kim’s cellar was amply stocked in anticipation of such ruthless punishment.

None of North Korea’s other neighbors want Kim’s regime to collapse either. North Korea’s implosion would produce 20 million of starving refugees that would flood into South Korea, China and Japan, as well as possible civil war, and certainly anarchy.

So China, South Korea and Russia may be content to slap Kim’s hands for daring to detonate a nuclear device or two that everyone knew he had but preferred to pretend he did not.

Behind all this cynical farce lies a serious danger. Forced inspections of North Korean ships could spark a military clash between the US and North Korea or, worse, between the US and China.

Both besieged North Korea and the sinking Bush Administration are desperate and dangerously trigger happy these days.

Asians fear the US may do to North Korea what it did to Iraq - overthrow a nasty but effective government and replace it by anarchy. Better the Kim you know…..


Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006