“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.” – Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies[Read More…]
During this past week on the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war one fundamental question on many people’s minds is how it all started. For those who were either too young to remember, or those who were not paying attention at the time or who were not yet born the answer is pivotal in[Read More…]
Invasion of Iraq and Crisis of American capitalism The War of Iraq by the United States is an event that will be inscribed in black letters forever. Hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world revolted to the bloodbath of a merciless military power shattering a small and defenceless country. The invasion of Iraq was an imperialist[Read More…]
Over 300 wars! As documented in the Wikipedia timeline of U.S. wars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations and in the Wikipedia list of wars involving the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States the United States of America has been more or less continuously at war ever since the American Revolutionary war of 1775-1783, which established the United States as a nation. Often several wars took place simultaneously.[Read More…]
The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the[Read More…]
WASHINGTON (03-20) – Anti-war protesters demonstrated across the country yesterday on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war. Across from the White House in Lafayette Square protesters heard speakers condemning America’s “eternal wars” and called for a reduction in the Pentagon budget, an end to the war in Ukraine through negotiations and cautioning against a[Read More…]
The 20th anniversary of the war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 will fall on about 20 March 2023. On this occasion mendacious and racist Western media will at best remember the Iraq War as a US policy mistake. However decent people will remember the carnage. From 1990 onwards Iraqi deaths from US-imposed violence and deprivation[Read More…]
The peace movement did a great many things right in the first decade of this millennium, some of which we’ve forgotten. It also fell short in many ways. I want to highlight the lessons I think we’ve most failed to learn and suggest how we might benefit from them today. We formed uncomfortably large coalitions. We brought together war abolitionists[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of[Read More…]
Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms,[Read More…]
It was the morning of March 19th, 2003 and this writer was up early. I was eating a bowl of Cheerios as I turned on the boob tube. I can remember vividly the evening before when I was able to watch a Canadian Cable News channel. The news anchor was explaining how all the many groups throughout the entire planet[Read More…]
On the weekend encompassing Friday 14 February to Sunday 16 February 2003 in Australia, coordinated mass protests against the impending Iraq War occurred around the world in over 600 cities. This global mass protest was described as the largest protest event in human history. According to the BBC 6-10 million people protested in a total of about 60 countries. In[Read More…]
Instability in Iraq has not ended in Iraq despite withdrawal of a fighting group. Iraqi supporters of powerful cleric Moqtada Sadr began withdrawing Tuesday from Baghdad’s Green Zone after he demanded fighting end between rival Shiite forces and the army that left 23 dead and hundreds wounded. The violence that erupted on Monday pitched Sadr loyalists against Shiite factions backed[Read More…]
Iraqi finance minister Ali Allawi resigned during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday to protest the political turmoil in the country. Iraq’s political impasse, now in its 10th month, is the longest in the country since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion reset the political order. Nearly 10 months on from the last elections, Iraq still has no government, new prime minister or[Read More…]
Numerologists tell you that 19 is 1 + 9 which equals the powerful # 1 , or new beginnings. Well, 19 years ago on March 19, coincidentally, my nation orchestrated the most horrific deed since God knows when. The illegal and immoral attack, invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq really upset the world’s applecart. The carpet bombing of Baghdad and[Read More…]
As a religious studies professor, I know a parable when I see one. Consider the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the final events in this country’s war in Afghanistan as just such a parable taken directly from the history of our moment. The heart-wrenching last days of that war amounted to a cautionary tale about the nature of[Read More…]
In one of his interviews before the Taliban retook Afghanistan, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, blamed the American failure in Afghanistan on a change in Washington’s mission from anti-terrorism to “nation building.” In his view, Washington should just have held strategic sites in the country to keep terrorists off balance and not engaged in an ambitious reconstruction of[Read More…]
With the final U.S. soldiers leaving Afghanistan earlier this week after nearly 20 years of occupation and war, a new analysis released Wednesday shows the United States will ultimately spend upwards of $8 trillion and that nearly one million people have lost their lives so far in the so-called “global war on terror” that was launched after the attacks of September[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies At Bagram air-base, Afghan scrap merchants are already picking through the graveyard of U.S. military equipment that was until recently the headquarters of America’s 20-year occupation of their country. Afghan officials say the last U.S. forces slipped away from Bagram in the dead of night, without notice or coordination. The Taliban are[Read More…]
An estimated $150 billion of stolen money has been smuggled out of Iraq in corrupt deals since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi President Barham Salih said Sunday. CNN and The New Arab reports said: “Of the close to a thousand billion dollars made from oil since 2003, an estimated $150 billion of stolen money has been smuggled[Read More…]
Amid the ongoing horror, it’s important to find ways to atone for war crimes —including reparations. Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from fifteen different countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with[Read More…]
‘A colonizer never leaves the colony in the hands of honest people’ – Iraqi saying In her article “Iraq’s century of humiliation in the globalised age”, Aneela Shahzad writes: “In May 2020, the Special Representative of Secretary General for the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq announced that the poverty rate in Iraq would double to 40% from around 20%, where[Read More…]
The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones revealed in a column last week on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands. The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed[Read More…]
Co-Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies It’s a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemy—an Iraqi militia called Kata’ib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kata’ib Hezbollah? Why are U.S. forces attacking it? And where will this lead? Kata’ib Hezbollah is one of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) that[Read More…]
More facts on imperialist aggression on Iraq have come out. The imperialists knew that the aggression would destabilize the entire region. Citing classified memo, media reports said: As U.S. president George W. Bush pressed the case for war in Iraq in the summer of 2002, top State Department officials warned that an invasion to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could[Read More…]
It might have made a bit more than a whimper had the US political scene not found itself in yet another paroxysm of the drama known as the Trump White House. Fifteen years before, governments aligning with the dogs of war decided, in defiance of millions of protestors globally, to invade a sovereign state. Papers cheered with blood lust; propagandists[Read More…]
The Iraqi parliament on Saturday, April 1, 2017, voted against raising the flag of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on public buildings and institutions in the city of Kirkuk. In a session attended by 186 members of the 328-seat parliament, the MPs voted in favor of flying only the Iraqi flag on Kirkuk’s public buildings. Kurdish lawmakers have walked out[Read More…]
Fighting has intensified in Mosul over the past two weeks as Iraqi government forces, backed by US-led air strikes, have pushed forward to the Tigris River in their efforts to recapture the country’s second-largest city from Islamic State. The US-backed offensive is having a devastating impact on the civilian population, which numbered over 1 million when operations began in October.[Read More…]
January 2, 2017: Being stuck in traffic is daily fare in Baghdad. While checkpoints have been dramatically reduced in recent times, and the number of concrete walls appear markedly decreased, traffic jams still defy description. It doesn’t help in the least that everyone is leaning on their horns. A half-a-million taxis roam around Baghdad spewing pollution as they look for[Read More…]
Najaf, Iraq–A week has passed since my arrival in Iraq. Once again we come desiring to strengthen the bonds of human friendship, bonds which threaten to break as the opportunities to visit each other become less and less possible. A few days prior to my departure, I attended a Veterans for Peace holiday party in New York City where[Read More…]
Even as columns of green buses were ferrying the last of the Western-backed Islamist “rebels” out of eastern Aleppo Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry took the podium at a State Department press conference to describe the situation in the northern Syrian city as “unconscionable” and to denounce the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out “nothing short[Read More…]
Fake news propagated by the US government and collaborating organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post helped create an environment in which the US was able to illegally invade Iraq in 2003, killing at least one million and possibly upwards of two million people, including the deaths of some 4,500 US soldiers, according to a meta-study by[Read More…]
“The Iraq Inquiry Report (2009-2016) documents how Tony Blair committed Great Britain to war early in 2002, lying to the United Nations, to Parliament, and to the British people, in order to follow George Bush, who had planned an aggression on Iraq well before September 2001. Australian Prime Minister John Howard conspired with both reckless adventurers, purported ‘to advise’ both[Read More…]
Iraqi government troops entered the eastern outskirts of Mosul Monday, as the US-backed offensive launched October 17 to recapture the country’s second largest city from the Islamic State began its third week. But the advances of Iraqi government soldiers, Peshmerga fighters and Sunni and Shia militias could not conceal the fact that growing sectarian tensions are threatening to vastly intensify[Read More…]
With the US-led offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIS), there are increasing reports of death and suffering on the part of Iraqi civilians caught up in the fighting and facing retribution from both ISIS and troops and militias loyal to Baghdad. Abdul-Ghani Asadi, the commander of the Iraqi army’s anti-terrorism contingent, reported Monday that Iraqi artillery has[Read More…]
I’ve written often about our Iraqi refugee friend and his oldest son from Baghdad. I will call them Mohammed and Ahmed. They made the torturous flight last year from Baghdad to Kurdistan and then across Turkey. They were on three Greek islands before permission was granted them to continue their trip. They passed through several countries at the time the[Read More…]
Friday, October 7 went by quietly unnoticed by major US media. It was the 15th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan — a war with no foreseeable end in sight. The number of troops due to remain in Afghanistan has been raised 50 percent to 8400. Drones based in Pakistan continue to play their deadly role. On the anniversary date,[Read More…]
Let me take this opportunity to make it clear that I am in no way sympathetic towards the unrepresentative Middle Eastern dictators in general and Bashar al-Assad in particular, but in order to assign blame for the wrongdoing in Syria, we need to remind ourselves of the elementary distinction between the constant and variable factors. Bear in mind that Bashar[Read More…]
Even as tensions are rising with Russia in Eastern Europe and China in Asia, the United States has launched a new war in Libya and is preparing a major military escalation in the Middle East, nominally directed against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In an interview yesterday with USA Today, Air Force Lieutenant General Jeffrey Harrigan confirmed that[Read More…]
Here are before-and-after pictures, at https://twitter.com/MAL0mt/status/701077438525263873/photo/1, of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East: What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came[Read More…]
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, in August 2011, to April 2013, Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al Nusra.” Although, the current al-Nusra Front is led by Abu Mohammad al Jolani but he was appointed as the Emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader[Read More…]
Inspired by the Hollywood thriller movie plot ‘The Rock’ the intelligence agencies of the United States and the United Kingdom fabricated evidence leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which resulted in the sufferings of millions of people in the Middle East and deaths of many hundred soldiers of the United States, the United kingdom and of several other[Read More…]
I’ve been hibernating since I heard the news about the massacre in El Kharadah district in Baghdad. It is the district where my memories from childhood were, the district where I was raised and taught to be a good woman and be good to others. In Al Kharadah I had my first love, it’s there where my heart broke and I cherished[Read More…]
In another example of outrageous British Establishment mendacity, the inexpert, Zionist-subverted, UK Iraq Inquiry, aka the Chilcot Inquiry, criticized intelligence failures re non-existent Iraqi WMD but whitewashed the US-, UK- and Australia-complicit, 1990-2011 Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust in which 4.6 million Iraqis died from violence (1.7 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) by (a) suggesting that about 150,000[Read More…]
The recent report produced by John Chilcot to look into UK role in US led invasion exposes the hollowness of such actions by allied forces. Some of the key highlights of the report are that a) UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted; b) Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; c) There[Read More…]
The Chilcot report that enquired into Britain’s decision to join US coalition that attacked Iraq which was released today finds that Britain decided to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on “flawed intelligence”. John Chilcot, the chair of the Iraq Inquiry said that the invasion went “badly wrong”. The 2.6 million-word Iraq Inquiry – which took seven years to[Read More…]
Today, with these words, I light a candle to remember the children who died in Sunday’s firestorm in Baghdad, the families who were obliterated, the individuals burned beyond recognition, the surviving friends and relatives looking for answers in the still-smoldering ruins and weeping in wave upon wave of inconsolable grief. My heart is with you, dear sisters and brothers. My hope is that others will light candles too and be moved to stand beside you and call in one invincible voice for an end to war in all its forms.
The month of Ramadan witnessed unspeakable carnage in three Muslim cities in three different countries. On 28 June 2016, 41 people, both locals and foreigners were killed in shootings and suicide bombings at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. On 2nd July, 20 people taken hostage by militants in an upmarket restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh were shot andmurdered. On the 3rd of[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
