Fight The Obama War Machine Rally At Park Street, Boston Saturday September 13- I PM- The Anti-War Struggle Begins-Again 

 

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – Are You Feeling Safer Now?

Amid the obsessive mainstream media chatter about whether Obama’s war is legal without Congressional approval – probably not, though most members of Congress are not anxious for a vote anytime soon – there is almost no mention that bombing Syria without the agreement of its sovereign government is clearly a violation of international law.  This applies to unilateral actions by the US or NATO, or any “collation of the willing” Obama can cobble together in the Middle East.  The likely US “allies” in this enterprise are themselves dictatorships via fake elections (Egypt, Jordan) or absolute Gulf Monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, etc.).  Only the UN Security Council is legally empowered to apply military force across borders, except in the case of immediate defense against foreign attack.

 

Saturday, September 13

No U.S. War on Iraq and Syria!

1pm, Park St. MBTA Station

 

President Obama plans to launch a new war on Iraq and Syria, using US air strikes, arms, money, and training, and over 1,500 U.S. ground troops. The U.S. war on Iraq in 2003-2011 caused this crisis. We can't let this happen again. Join together to protest another US war in Iraq and Syria. It’s time once again to stand up for peace and justice and against this insanity. Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace, Massachusetts Peace Action and the Committtee for Peace & Human Rights (list in formation). Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/events/1500590576853570/

 

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Six Steps Short of War to Beat ISIS

The bottom line is there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear, even if U.S. airstrikes manage to get the right target somewhere and take out an APC or a truckload of guys with RPGs or whatever… As horrifying as the beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good basis for foreign policy. We should keep in mind that Matthew Olson, the outgoing head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said last week that “there is no credible information that [ISIS] is planning to attack the United States,” and there is “no indication at this point of a cell of foreign fighters operating in the United States—full stop.”  … We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible… weakening ISIS requires eroding the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.  More

 

MANIPLUATING PUBLIC OPINION. . . Again

 

After Media Assault Americans Believe ISIS Threat To US

After a continual barrage of media hype surrounding a group of Islamist fighters in Iraq and Syria the American people are scared that the homeland is in jeopardy. According to a CNN/ORC Poll, 45% of Americans see that ISIS is a “very serious threat to the US.” That number parallels what Americans thought of Al Qaeda in 2003. 90% of Americans, according to the poll, believe ISIS is some level of threat to the US. Despite ISIS being a regional group trying to establish an caliphate in the Middle East and zero evidence to back up the claim, 70% of Americans also think ISIS has agents in the US ready to strike. While media distortions are a large part of why the public has become hysterical on ISIS, part of the response is also due to a game ISIS itself has been playing… The US intervening may be exactly what ISIS wants at this point. That like the killings in Iraq by Al Qaeda that led to US blunders in Fallujah, ISIS is setting the US up for a similar overreaction.  More

 

Of course, the “threat” to the US is a lie. . .

Some News Organizations Finally Realize Obama’s War Message is Misleading

President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State counts on pretty much everything going right in a region of the world where pretty much anything the U.S. does always goes wrong. Our newspapers of record today finally remembered it’s their job to point stuff like that out. The New York Times… [points out] the essential but often overlooked fact that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that [the Islamic State] poses no immediate threat to the United States.” “Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.” “It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic…  More

 

Since 9/11, Fewer Americans Say Terrorism Top Problem

Thirteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., terrorism is far less top-of-mind for Americans than it was immediately after those attacks. Mentions of terrorism did increase slightly this month as terrorist groups such as ISIS took actions that directly affect the U.S., prompting calls for U.S. action from many politicians and some journalists. While terrorism may be less top-of-mind to Americans -- and less likely to register as the most important problem facing the nation -- many still see it as important when asked about it specifically. In January polling, 72% of Americans said they felt terrorism was an important issue for Congress and the president to deal with this year. In February, 77% said international terrorism was a critical threat to the U.S. The economy or dissatisfaction with government may trump terrorism as the most important problem at the moment, but many Americans still see terrorism as a threat that must be dealt with, even 13 years after 9/11.  More

 

FISK: The Latest Evil Force, Since the Last Evil Force

Resurrection, reinvention and linguistics. Barack Obama did the lot. And now he’s taking America to war in Syria as well as Iraq. Oh yes, and he’s going to defeat Isis, its “barbarism”, “genocide”, its “warped ideology” – until the bad guys are “vanquished from the earth”. What happened to George W Bush?  … One can see, of course, how difficult these lessons in Middle East history must be for the average American. All these forces of evil being vanquished over and over again, and then – bingo – there’s another force of evil to vanquish. So Obama produces words that are easy to swallow. “genocide”, “barbarism”, “cancer”.   More

 

BASEVICH: Obama’s Plans Ignore the Lessons of the ME Wars

For the 20 years between 1991 and 2011 — the interval between Operation Desert Storm and the final withdrawal of U.S. forces after a lengthy occupation of Iraq — Washington policymakers, Republican and Democratic, relied on various forms of coercion to align Iraq with American expectations of how a country ought to run. The effort failed abysmally… Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won’t create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won’t restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won’t dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won’t pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won’t end the Syrian civil war.  It won’t bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won’t persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won’t end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All the military power in the world won’t solve those problems.  More

 

WARNING TO WAR SUPPORTERS
If you want to bomb a country every time an evil group murders people in a gruesome manner, you’ll have to bomb a lot of countries including our own.  ISIS draws its strength in Iraq from resentment of the Iraqi government, which bombs its own cities using U.S. weapons, and which beheads people, albeit in grainier footage with lower production values.  Allies in the region, including allies that support ISIS, including allies armed by the United States(some of which arms end up in the hands of ISIS), themselves behead people regularly. But is that worse than other types of killing? When President Barack Obama blew up a 16 year old American boy whom nobody had ever accused of so much as jaywalking, and blew up six other kids who were too close to him at the time, do you imagine his head remained on his body? …The fact that it’s Obama doesn’t make it OK. A majority of you supported attacking Afghanistan and within a couple of years a majority of you said Afghanistan should not have been attacked. Why not? Not because there weren’t evil people in Afghanistan, but because bombing the country made everything worse, not better.  More

 

Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS

A month after September 11, Donald Rumsfeld stood at a podium in front of a $2 billion B-2 bomber at Whiteman AFB in Missouri and addressed the aircrews of the 509th Bomber Wing [4], before they took off across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld told them, "We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal."  Since then, the United States has launched more than 94,000 air strikes [5], mostly on Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Rumsfeld's plan has undoubtedly achieved his goal of changing the way people live in those countries, killing a million of them [6] and reducing tens of millions more to lives of disability, disfigurement, dislocation, grief and poverty. More

 

OUR SAUDI “ALLIES” AT WORK: The Missing Twenty-Eight Pages of the 9/11 Report

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. “Those twenty-eight pages tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report,” Lynch maintains. Another congressman who has read the document said that the evidence of Saudi government support for the 9/11 hijacking is “very disturbing,” and that “the real question is whether it was sanctioned at the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were followed through.” Now, in a rare example of bipartisanship, Jones and Lynch have co-sponsored a resolution requesting that the Obama Administration declassify the pages.  More

 

PATRICK COCKBURN: Isis 'cannot be beaten' as long as there is civil war in Syria

There is a bizarre section in Mr Obama’s speech in which he says “we must strengthen the [Syrian] opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like Isil [Isis]”. The only way that this could be done would be to raise a mercenary army and pretend it is the Free Syrian Army reborn or, something that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have done in the past, pretend that jihadi groups whose ideology is the same as that of Isis nevertheless belong to the moderate camp. The missing element in the Obama plan is the creation of the framework for new peace negotiations between Mr Assad’s government and the moderate opposition such as it is. The Geneva 11 talks got nowhere because Washington insisted that the only topic of negotiations should be the departure of Mr Assad. Since he controlled most of Syria this was not going to happen, so in practice US and British policy was a recipe for an endless war… In Iraq the political and military reach of Isis is limited by the fact that the Sunni Arabs are only a fifth of the population, but in Syria they are three-fifths. Their natural constituency is much greater than in Iraq.  More

 

U.S. Pins Hope on Syrian Rebels With Dubious Alliances

After more than three years of civil war, there are hundreds of militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad — and one another. Among them, even the more secular forces have turned to Islamists for support and weapons over the years, and the remaining moderate rebels often fight alongside extremists like the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. “You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because they don’t exist,” said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace... Analysts who track the rebel movement say that the concept of the Free Syrian Army as a unified force with an effective command structure is a myth… Even as they line up to support Mr. Obama’s strategy against ISIS, some European allies remain skeptical about the efficacy of arming the Syrian rebels. Germany, for instance, has been arming and training Kurdish pesh merga forces in Iraq, but has resisted doing the same for any groups in Syria — partly out of fear that the weapons could end up in the hands of ISIS or other radical groups.  More

 

 

Sotloff Family Spokesman: Syria’s ‘So-Called Moderate Rebels’ Sold Sotloff To ISIS

A spokesman for the family of murdered journalist Steven Sotloff claimed Monday night that Sotloff was sold to the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by Syria’s “so-called moderate rebels.” …“We believe that these so-called moderate rebels that people want our administration to support, one of them sold him probably for something between $25,000 and $50,000 to ISIS and that was the reason he was captured,” Barfi said.  More

 

Report: Islamic State got anti-tank weapons from “moderate” Syrian rebels

Anti-tank weapons that were likely once owned by moderate Syrian rebels have landed in the hands of Islamic State militants, according to a newly released field investigation conducted in both northern Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State has also captured “significant quantities” of U.S.-manufactured small arms and has employed them on the battlefield, researchers found… The most powerful weapons documented were the two 90mm Yugoslav anti-tank rocket launchers, known as “Osas,” which resembled rockets that were transferred to moderate Syrian rebels, reportedly by Saudi Arabia last year. It is purportedly shown in this video in the hands of a Free Syrian Army rebel last year: The 25-pound rocket launchers have appeared in numerous battlefield videos shot in Syria and Iraq and were believed to be in Islamic State hands. But the new research marks the first time they have been physically documented.  More

 

In Congress, Islamic State takes pressure off Iran

Remember Iran? The dominant foreign policy issue of the past year has fallen by the wayside as Congress focuses on the rise of the Islamic State (IS). Republicans who just months ago vowed to use every tool at their disposal to force a vote on new sanctions in the Senate have shelved those plans, and even the GOP-controlled House isn't scheduled to hold a single hearing before the midterm elections. The shift in focus has given President Barack Obama's negotiating team welcome breathing room as it pursues a nuclear deal in Vienna, even as congressional skeptics fret that Iran will take advantage of the lull in attention. "The negotiators need the room to work," said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel on the Near East. "And I think maybe a little bit less pushing and pulling from this angle may help that work be done."

Republicans aren't nearly as sanguine.  More

 

Israel concerned ISIS threat may distract Obama from Iran

A senior political source told Ynet on Thursday night there was concern over the possibility that the US will moderate its pressure on Iran in the talks. A senior minister familiar with the issue said that "we are actually concerned about that possibility."  Sources in Israel said that the US has attempted to alleviate Jerusalem's concerns in recent months, promising that their policy towards Iran will not change. But Jerusalem is not convinced, especially given that only this week Obama cited the Islamic State as the biggest threat to the Middle East – and not Iran. More