Recent Western Occupations

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored “blue line” on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah’s military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed has been the pattern….. Continue Reading →

Now that Zarqawi has been replaced by “sectarian violence” and “civil war,” the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the CNN “mainstream,” is that the “Salvador Option” has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the U.S., which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the breakup of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush’s administration….. Continue Reading →

This is not the first time in modern history that the results of a genuinely free and fair election set off a horrendous civil war. The same thing happened in Ireland in 1921-1922, resulting in a civil war in which Irishmen killed each other in greater numbers than had just died fighting the British Empire in their successful War of Independence.

But American policymakers had a much more dramatic and awful example far closer to home that should have warned them about the potential of popular democratic passion to set off catastrophic civil strife: The free and fair elections of 1860 divided the United States between North and South as never before and led directly and rapidly first to the secession of the 13 Southern States and then to the worst civil war the modern Western World has ever known, in which 650,000 people died….. Continue Reading →

Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are not usually the result of insults, sanctions, invasions, bombings, killings, puppet governments, censorship, economic controls, and occupations. If this generation learns anything from this period, that would be a good start….. Continue Reading →