Study: Few Afghans know about 9/11, reason for war

92% of 1000 afghan men interviewed in Helmund and Kanhdahar provinces unaware of 9/11 according to UN study

KABUL – Afghans in two crucial southern provinces are almost completely unaware of the September 11 attacks on the United States and don’t know they precipitated the foreign intervention now in its 10th year, a new report showed on Friday.

NATO leaders gathered in Lisbon for a summit on Friday where the transition from foreign forces — now at about 150,000 — to Afghan security responsibility will be at the top of the agenda, with leaders to discuss a 2014 target date set by Kabul.

Few Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, Taliban strongholds where fighting remains fiercest, know why foreign troops are in Afghanistan, says the “Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables” report to be released later on Friday.

The report by The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) policy think-tank showed 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.

“The lack of awareness of why we are there contributes to the high levels of negativity toward the NATO military operations and made the job of the Taliban easier,” ICOS President Norine MacDonald told Reuters from Washington.

“We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both convince them and show them that their future is better with us than the Taliban,” MacDonald said.

The report said there was a continued “relationship gap” between Afghans and the international community, describing the lack of understanding as “dramatic.”

U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Islamist Taliban government in late 2001 for sheltering al-Qaida leaders who plotted the 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people.

The war has now dragged into its 10th year and violence is at its worst, despite a record number of foreign troops, with military and civilian casualties at their highest levels.

Exit timetable
Attention is now focused on an exit timetable. U.S. President Barack Obama, who will review his Afghanistan war strategy next month, wants to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from July 2011.

European NATO leaders, under pressure at home to justify their continued commitment to an increasingly unpopular war, are following a similar timetable. Some are withdrawing troops and others are looking to move from combat to training roles.

While Afghan President Hamid Karzai has set a target of 2014, NATO’s civilian representative in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, said this week “eye-watering levels of violence by Western standards” might mean the transition spills into 2015.

That throws the emphasis back on the Afghan government — widely seen as so corrupt and inept that it is unable to support itself — and the readiness of Afghan forces to take over.

\\REUTERS

Pakistani terrorist revealed in new photo

It was only a few months ago that Maulana Fazlullah, a 33-year-old firebrand Muslim cleric, was galloping through the villages and over the hills of Pakistan’s scenic Swat Valley in the Northwest Frontier Province.

Astride a white horse, sporting his trademark black turban and a black beard which engulfed the entire lower half of his face, he seemed to some at first, more of a modern day Zorro, than a deadly terrorist. But that was then. Today, the Pakistan army is at war with Fazlullah, and he is in hiding.

Maulana Fazlullah, seen in a photo exclusively obtained by NBC News.

NBC News has received this photo; the first picture of Fazlullah that revealed a clear image of the face of one of Pakistan’s most wanted terrorists.

‘Mullah Radio’
The young cleric, also known as “Mullah Radio” for his fiery anti-western, anti-Musharraf speeches broadcast from an illegal FM radio station, has developed a large following among the Pashtun tribes straddling the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Pashtuns are an ethnic group comprising 15 percent of Pakistan’s population, mostly in the Northwest Frontier Province and in Pakistan’s southwest Balouchistan Province. They have an ancient culture, speak their own language and abide by their own tribal codes of honor and hospitality called Pashtunwali.)  Most of the Pashtuns on both sides of the border would like to split from the Pakistan federation and from Afghanistan to form their own independent state.

A large majority of the Pashtuns are unhappy with what they consider U.S. influence on their tribal lands and are unhappy with the governments of  both President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan for their support of U.S. policies in the region.

Fazlullah has had an eager audience. America was bombing them, he screamed from astride his white horse and on the airwaves of portable FM radio transponders. America was killing innocent women and children. The locals listened.

His message grew worse.

The entire valley, he said, would now be governed by Islamic laws known as Shariah. And what’s more, taking his cue from Osama bin Laden, he wanted to restore the caliphate, the Muslim dynasties that ruled the known world for centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 AD.

Fazlullah’s interpretation of Shariah was rigid. Most of the locals had no choice but to go along. The Swat Valley, known as the Switzerland of Asia for its breathtaking mountains, forests and lakes, was a haven for tourists. Pakistanis referred to the Valley as “just one step short of Paradise.” But not any longer.

Local population terrorized
Fazlullah banned TV and music in the Swat Valley. He threatened barbers who shaved their customers’ beards and ruled that girls could not go to school. Women stayed home, too afraid to walk the streets.  He then ordered his men to destroy the ancient images of Buddah, carved into the mountains of the Swat Valley — reminiscent of when the Taliban destroyed the Buddah statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. The historic images were un-Islamic, Fazlullah said.

The local population was terrorized. The Taliban from the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan joined forces with Fazlullah and all sorts of foreign and unsavoury characters moved into the Swat Valley.

The Swatis, as they are known, are not particularly politically motivated; they are more business-minded, interested in commerce and trade, and of course tourism. But still they are religious, and they were afraid. They listened intently to what Fazlullah had to say. Whoever would not go along with Fazlullah’s conditions was killed. What’s more, their entire family would be killed too. Fazlullah had enlisted hundreds of young militants to fight with him. The Swatis complied; they had no choice.

The government of President Pervez Musharraf did nothing for months. The situation in Swat deteriorated by the day.

Fazlullah became emboldened. The local and foreign media screamed that the Taliban had left the border areas and moved into Swat and now held sway in the so-called “settled areas” of Pakistan. The Taliban had indeed moved into Swat, and al-Qaeda came with them.

The pressure mounted on President Musharraf and finally last November he ordered two infantry brigades of the Pakistan Army to retake the Swat Valley from Fazlullah. As of this writing, the Pakistan army now controls about 90 percent of the Swat Valley.

Rumors of demise premature
But the army still has not been able to capture or kill Fazlullah. Rumors surfaced Wednesday that he had been killed. Fazlullah, upon hearing the reports, called some local media in Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier Province, saying he was alive and leading his men in the battle for the Swat Valley. 

“We will continue our fight until our goals are achieved,” Fazlullah said from an undisclosed location, somewhere in Paradise.

via//MSNBC

In defence of Pakistan’s military dictator

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf gets a bad press; Benazir Bhutto a too kind one. Which of them is the real rogue?

When Musharraf, as Pakistan’s top army commander, tried to engineer war with India over Kashmir in 1999, he demonstrated his roguish side. Yet even many of his opponents in Pakistan will concede that since he deposed Nawaz Sharif and assumed power he has been largely a benevolent dictator.

Compared with the last days of the Shah – and many in the American foreign policy establishment are falsely comparing what happened then with what is happening today in Pakistan – the country remained until Bhutto’s assassination rather stable, except in its lawless frontier provinces that border Afghanistan, a problem area even in British colonial days.

Until now, Musharraf has rarely cracked the whip. His riot police act with relative moderation. His jails are not full. Executions are rare and never for political offences. Pakistan today is not Iran of yesterday, neither in the type of leadership nor in its degree of religious fervour: the Islamist parties have never gained more than 11 per cent of the vote in a free election.

Bhutto and her husband seem manifestly corrupt. The one chance of nailing her lay in Switzerland where she had stashed cash in quantities she could never have earned honestly. At the time of her death she was appealing a Swiss conviction for money laundering. Many believe she was implicated in her brother’s death. Certainly she quarrelled with both her brothers and her mother, all of whom competed to have the lead billing in the family’s political drama. She also was estranged from her husband.

Yet now, according to her will, her husband was her chosen successor. For Bhutto, keeping the family – to wit her 19-year-old son – in the line of power was more important than developing a democratic, openly competitive, party.

In comparison, Musharraf has done no great favours for his family, nor earned excessive wealth. He is a down-to-earth army man, who when younger loved to test his macho side.

It was under Musharraf that Pakistan extended the olive branch to India over Kashmir. Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, praised Bhutto as someone who had wanted to break the “sterile patterns of the past” that had brought them to war three times over disputed Kashmir.

But this was a gratuitous backhanded slap at Musharraf. Singh knows as well as anyone that the Kashmir dispute is grounded for lack of Indian resolve to go the last mile. He also knows that the militancy that plagues the region, spreading its infection into Afghanistan and to the frontier provinces of northwestern Pakistan originates in large part among the fighters who first engaged in violence in Kashmir in an attempt to oust the Indian presence.

There is no doubt that the Pakistani military was in large measure responsible for developing this infection when it built up the strength of the mujahidin in Kashmir. It provided training. It helped with logistics and provided military materials over a long period of time.

But, apart from clandestine illegal work by some local Pakistani military and intelligence officials, this support network has been closed down by Musharraf. This doesn’t stop the militants from drawing their military requirements elsewhere or stop them organizing a big bombing from time to time in India. Nor does it stop them working with the Taliban and the other militants of northwest Pakistan. In their eyes, India has designs on Afghanistan and is the enemy of all Islamic militant movements.

A peace agreement on the lines proposed by Musharraf – which most Western diplomats will tell you is as handsome an offer as they ever imagined – would shut down Kashmir-grown militancy once and for all. The militants are no longer as popular as they were inside Kashmir and the proposed peace deal would finally pull the carpet from beneath them. Moreover, it would be a singular contribution to the lessening of all Pakistan-based terrorism.

Why doesn’t Singh do it? Because of pressures from his own military. Because of the aspiring great power role of the foreign policy establishment that can’t bear to treat Pakistan as an equal. Because of the ultra chauvinism of Singh’s coalition partners, the Communists. Because the priority with the Communists on policy is to persuade them to agree to the pending nuclear deal with the U.S.

But now that Musharraf is losing political strength all bets are off. Pakistan itself may be consumed by this infection of militancy.

---

Jonathan Power is the author of Conundrums of Humanity: The Quest for Global Justice.via//Star, The

Benazir Bhutto: An Age of Hope Is Over

Nineteen years ago at the end of December, Benazir Bhutto, fresh from her first, exhilarating election victory and newly sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, met Rajiv Gandhi, the youthful prime minister of India, for talks in Islamabad. She was 35, he was 44. There was obvious good will, almost intimacy, between them. The air was full of promise and hope that these two modernizing scions of dominant political families would turn decades of war and hostility between their nations into a new era of peace.

Three and a half years later, Gandhi was assassinated. There had been no breakthrough with Pakistan to bolster his legacy. Now Bhutto is dead, at another moment of renewed anticipation. An age of hope is over.

There is a terrible symmetry in the lives and deaths of these two political leaders. Both were the children of powerful people: Indira Gandhi as India’s prime minister and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto her counterpart in Pakistan. Together, in 1972, they had negotiated an agreement over Kashmir, but their heirs were never able to build on it. Their respective children, Rajiv and Benazir, had seen those parents suffer politically motivated deaths: Indira murdered in 1984 by bodyguards revenging her attacks on Sikhs, and Zulfikar hanged under the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in what many Pakistanis consider a thinly disguised judicial execution.

Young Gandhi and Bhutto, both killed in suicide attacks, ultimately became the victims of inherited policies. Rajiv Gandhi had tried to put an end to Indian meddling in Sri Lanka and its support for a vicious Tamil Tiger rebellion. He was killed by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber, a woman who moved toward him to touch his feet in an age-old gesture, then triggered an explosion that blew them both apart. While it is too early to know who killed Benazir, Pakistan’s policies on Afghanistan are the backdrop to this tense and dangerous moment. Her father and his successors had supported Afghan rebels in order to become a player in Afghanistan and counter Indian influence in Kabul lately aligning riskily with American policies. Rajiv’s mother, whose intelligence agencies roamed the region causing havoc, had set out to weaken Sri Lanka, South Asia’s most developed nation.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi were both campaigning to return to power when they died. Both had been elected, then vilified. She lost support among middle-class Pakistanis for her feudal ways and unwillingness to take on social issues–child labor or the mistreatment of women–or chip away at the power of the military, and was driven from office twice on charges of corruption, much of it attributed to her husband. In India, Rajiv was the perennial butt of attacks from unreconstructed leftists and traditionalists who scoffed at his Westernized style, Italian wife and fresh ideas that rattled the khadi crowd. On the night he died, a policeman told me they had identified his remains by his expensive imported running shoes. Suspicions linger that Gandhi or those close to him may have been involved in illegal payments for arms contracts.

Tragically, political violence has been the bane of modern South Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan east to Bangladesh. Militants and fanatics of all stripes and dogmas and grievances have assassinated leaders since much of the region gained independence from Britain in the mid 1940s. It has been a formidable hindrance to development of political institutions.

In New Delhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed in 1948 by an outraged Hindu. Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951–in the same Rawalpindi park where Benazir Bhutto was attacked–and General Zia ul-Haq perished in a still mysterious plane crash in 1988. In Sri Lanka in 1959, Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike fell victim to a fanatic Buddhist monk, the first of two generations of more than a half-dozen leading politicians to die in shootings and bombings. (Tamil Tiger rebels would later try but fail to kill Bandaranaike’s daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, when she was president.) Sheikh Mujibir Rahman, founder and first Prime Minister of independent Bangladesh, was murdered in 1975; in 1981 Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, was shot in an army coup. Nepal’s entire royal family was wiped out in one evening in Kathmandu in 2001, apparently by a disaffected crown prince.

Hindus and Muslims killed one another by the hundreds of thousands after the partition of British India in 1947 into Pakistan and modern India. And compared with Pakistan since then, India has experienced much more large-scale sectarian and political violence, with thousands of Sikhs butchered in the streets of Delhi and elsewhere in North India after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and up to 2,000 Muslims slaughtered by Hindu nationalists in Gujarat–Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace–in 2002. In both cases, political parties have been deeply implicated yet no political leader has been punished–in a democracy.

As the world mourns the loss of Benazir Bhutto, it would be myopic to focus only on Islamic-inspired violence and on Pakistan. This is a region with a turbulent post-independence political history. Our (Islamophobic?) preoccupation with Muslim terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan often blocks out a bigger picture. From end to end, South Asia is a region drenched in blood.

via//The Nation

75 killed, 59 schoolchildren, in Afghan blast

Dozens of schoolchildren and five teachers were among those killed in a suicide attack in northern Afghanistan earlier this week — the country’s deadliest since the fall of the Taliban — the government said Friday.

The 59 schoolchildren had lined up to greet a group of lawmakers visiting a sugar factory in the northern province of Baghlan on Tuesday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives.

“The education minister has ordered that no children should be ever again be used in these sort of events,” said Zahoor Afghan, an Education Ministry spokesman. He said the children ranged in age from 8 to 18.

In all, the explosion claimed the lives at least 75 people, including several parliamentarians, and wounded 96. It was the deadliest attack in the country since the toppling of Taliban regime from power in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared three days of mourning Wednesday and ordered an investigation. No group has claimed responsibility, and the Taliban denied any involvement.

Also Friday, NATO and Afghan troops battled Taliban fighters near Gulistan district in western Farah province. The soldiers seized the district center, killing up to 20 suspected militants who overran it last week, said Gen. Abdul Rahman Sarjang, the provincial police chief.

On Thursday, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops surrounded a compound where militants had gathered near Tirin Kot, in Uruzgan province, sparking a clash which left seven suspected Taliban fighters dead, said Juma Gul Hamat, the provincial police chief. Four militants were detained, he said.

There were no casualties among coalition and Afghan forces, Hamat said.

In southern Zabul province, Taliban militants on motorbikes ambushed and killed Shahjoy’s district chief and two bodyguards as they were shopping on Thursday, said Mohammad Rasool Khan, a district police chief.

Coalition and Afghan troops, meanwhile, came under fire from Taliban insurgents in southern Helmand province’s Nahr Surk district on Wednesday, a coalition statement said.

“The combined force immediately engaged the Taliban fighters with small-arms fire and close air support, killing many of the insurgents before they fled the area,” it said.

Violence in Afghanistan this year has been the deadliest since the Taliban’s ouster. More than 5,700 people, mostly militants, have died so far this year in insurgency-related violence, according to an Associated Press count based on figures from Afghan and Western officials.

Separately, a British soldier was killed Friday in a vehicle accident in Afghanistan, the British Ministry of Defense said.

Source: AP via Yahoo! News

The Pakistan problem

By H.D.S. Greenway | August 14, 2007

THE UNITED STATES has a real problem with Pakistan. But Pakistan has real problems of its own, and the solutions may not mesh with what Washington wants.

After having said he didn’t spend much time thinking about Osama bin Laden, the latest National Intelligence Estimate has forced President Bush to face up to the fact that a reconstituted Al Qaeda in Pakistan is a major threat — perhaps the major threat — to the United States.

Clearly, President Pervez Musharraf’s attempt to buy peace and loyalty on the northwest frontier has backfired. He had hoped to head off increasing support for Islamist extremists, but instead Al Qaeda has been the beneficiary. Frances Townsend, Bush’s Homeland Security adviser, spoke the truth when she said; “It hasn’t worked for Pakistan, and it hasn’t worked for the United States.”

The siege and storming of the Red Mosque has riled the faithful, and Musharraf’s unlawful and unsuccessful attempt to unseat Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry has made the president of Pakistan look foolish.

But what to do? There have been hints of military action against Al Qaeda in Pakistan, some of them clandestine to avoid embarrassing Musharraf who has forbidden American troops on Pakistani soil. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has advocated attacking Al Qaeda in Pakistan no matter what the Pakistanis think — a formula for disaster. The idea of Navy Seals, CIA, or Special Forces operating in some of the most remote and desolate territory on earth without benefit of local knowledge or Pakistani help would be counterproductive in the extreme.

Moreover, the American way of war depends on massive firepower from the air, not the determined, loss-inflicting, village-to-village way that is necessary in irregular warfare. The number of civilian deaths being inflicted in neighboring Afghanistan by American and NATO forces has caused President Hamid Karzai to protest time and time again — the reason being that these civilian deaths are turning the local population against the government. When the tipping point arrives, all our efforts in Afghanistan are doomed. To repeat this in Pakistan would be a strategic blunder on the scale of Iraq.

A result of American armed intervention in Pakistan could be the dissolution of Pakistan itself. The border lands with Afghanistan, Balochistan, and the Northwest Frontier Province — never mind the tribal territories — are a major problem for Pakistan. Costly and nation-threatening revolts have plagued the government since Pakistan was formed.

The British had constant problems in the border regions during their tenure, with armed rebellions in Waziristan as late as the 1930s. The strange arrangement of the tribal territories, which are not completely under the government’s control, are a legacy of those times when the British tried to buy peace on the frontier.

I can remember 20 years ago taking a steam train, the Landi Kotal local, up to the Khyber pass. I knew I was in the tribal territories when I saw tribesmen getting on board without paying for a ticket as I had done back in Peshawar. When I asked why, they slapped their rifles and said “this is our ticket.”

The frontier territories have always been deeply religious. When Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, went up to Peshawar in order to explain the partition of India just before independence, he faced 100,000 angry tribesmen and wasn’t able to address the crowd. Only his green army uniform saved the day. The tribesmen thought he was wearing the color of Islam to honor them.

I believe Musharraf is sincere when he says he wants to rid the country of Islamic extremists. But he has to tread carefully, as the tribal nationalism of the frontier is interwoven with Islamism, much of it extreme. His previous attempts at military intervention have been even less successful than his try for a truce. The political ramifications of a full scale revolt on the frontier would be, for Pakistan, far worse than Al Qaeda’s presence. Such an event would be worse for America too.

Unfortunately not everybody in Pakistan, including some in the intelligence services, think it a bad thing to have a Taliban card to play just in case Afghanistan turns against Pakistan at some future date. Pakistan has not forgotten that once the Soviets called it quits and withdrew beyond the river Oxus, America lost interest and just walked away, leaving the region in chaos.

The real tragedy is that the United States bungled the job when Osama and Al Qaeda were still in Afghanistan.

H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Source: The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/08/14/the_pakistan_problem/

Bush Warns Puppets Not to Praise Iran

“A Heart to Heart Talk”

Bush Warns Puppets Not to Praise Iran

By GARY LEUPP

Hamid Karzai, hand-picked by Washington to pose as president of the broken country of Afghanistan, says his government has “very, very good, very, very close relations [and] will continue to have good relations with Iran.” He declares on CNN, “So far, Iran has been a helper” in fighting terrorism.

Nuri al-Maliki, favored by Washington as the most viable prime minister to pretend to lead the bleeding country of Iraq, says Iran is doing “positive and constructive” work in “providing security and fighting terrorism” in his country.

Both of these puppet regimes in nations bordering Iran seek to maintain close relations with the Islamic Republic. But puppets aren’t supposed to compose their own lines, and the puppeteer George Bush seems somewhat irked at these words.

“I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force,” he tells visiting Karzai at Camp David. Bush’s remarks are often unclear and confused, allowing for various interpretations. But here he’s not expressing any openness to the possibility that what the Afghan said might be true. As the Nation reported, he’s telling “the visitor from abroad that he is wrong” and that Iran is most certainly not a positive force.

Of Maliki’s comments, Bush states with undiplomatic condescension, “I will have to have a heart to heart with my friend, the prime minister, because I don’t believe [the Iranians] are constructive. . . . My message to him is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay.” Here it’s not clear whether he’s warning Iran it will pay a price (which would not be news because it has been longstanding Bush policy to threaten Iran) or threatening his “friend” the embattled Iraqi prime minister.

Responding to images of Maliki appearing cordial with Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, Bush mockingly assumed a pugilistic stance at his White House press conference, fists raised, and said, “You don’t want the picture to show you duking it out,” implying that while making nice for the cameras, Maliki ought (in his heart) to be in an Iran-attack mode.

I can just imagine the sort of “heart to heart” talks Bush has with his puppets. Consider their positions. On the one hand they live comfortably, eat and dress well, enjoy some symbols of authority thanks to their Quisling status. They may retain some sense of self-respect to the extent that they can depart from the occupier’s script on occasion on the grounds of “national interest” and differ on a subject such as bilateral relations with neighboring friendly countries.

On the other hand, neither Karzai nor Maliki has any popular respect or following, because their countrymen see their collaboration as a pact with the devil. Karzai is merely the mayor of Kabul, in a chic karakul hat and green ribboned cloak, looking like a leader for the cameras while the Taliban recapture much of his country and the rest remains under the boot of warlords whose power increases with each bountiful opium harvest. Maliki is not even mayor of Baghdad, but a prisoner of the Green Zone, abandoned by the Sunni politicians, the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc, and the secularists.

So Bush assumes they’ll be inclined to kiss his cowboy boots as they have so far, perhaps trying to conceal some revulsion to what all adheres. But I wonder if they are starting to feel real doubts about the wisdom of their humiliating collaboration to date. Maliki in particular seems a dour, unhappy man. Perhaps they think the invasions of their countries have personally benefited them, but have been far more disastrous for their peoples than they expected when they agreed to take their jobs. Even morally compromised people can get smitten with moral qualms. How can these men regain some modicum of dignity?

I think it likely that they fear the consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran. I’ll bet the drumbeat of anti-Iran propaganda and plethora of anti-Iran disinformation in the U.S. fills them with anxiety. They have now become intimately aware of the Bush-Cheney mindset, the U.S. administration’s contempt for their peoples, the vast ignorance in Washington about Muslim cultures. They do not want missile attacks on Iran, or regime change there; rather, they want to sit their American sponsors down with their Iranian friends for talks, or at minimum resist recruitment into America’s anti-Iran campaign.

Their recalcitrance must be frustrating for Bush. Nothing is going well in his war on evil. His generals paint a Hello Kitty face on the interesting, temporary new alignments in Iraq’s Anbar province. But everywhere hatred for U.S. imperialism mounts. Democratic elections in the Muslim world, most recently in Lebanon, bring his foes into power. It is impossible—particularly for him, given his obvious handicaps—to logically explain or justify through any “heart to heart” conversation the Cheney-neocon plan for a New American Century of empire in Southwest Asia. Instead he needs to take off the gloves and bully.

So there’s a mean glint in his eye and hint of worry as he tells the boys he’s gonna take them out to the woodshed for that talk about Iran—before they pay the price. I’d hope both Karzai and Maliki would realize they have little to lose at this point by saying, “No sir. You gave me this job and thanks for that. But—and only your friends will tell you this—your dukes are up but the Iranians might engage you in a very different contest than you expect. They are wrestlers, not boxers—have been for many centuries—and may wind up pinning a lot of your people down to the mat if you proceed with your apparent plans. My own people, I’m afraid, will cheer the Iranians on, while world opinion might disqualify you for brutality. So please leave me out of your match. If I have to pay a price for my stance, sir, so be it; the price of working with you has become too heavy.”

I’m not suggesting either has the integrity to say something like that. The likelihood is slim, but if the puppets indeed started to talk back (like the pathological liar marionette Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi’s story who ultimately becomes a real person) they might acquire the status of actual human beings—and even help thwart the designs of monsters.

* * *I read last week that “Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force. . . .” The “suspected” camps are of course suspected by Cheney’s neocons who claimed to be SURE about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Saddam’s al-Qaeda ties. Cheney remains intent on inflicting damage to Iran, that “unconstructive” nation “interfering” in the Iraq (following the American mother of interferences in the next-door country)—and then watching from his undisclosed location all the exciting consequences.

Even puppets are becoming animate in response to the machinations of this sick man, determined to inflict another surge of pain expanding the empire before he checks out. That may be slight cause for optimism. But we the people of the U.S. need to push harder for impeachment. My preference is first Cheney, then Bush, but in rapid succession.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Source: CounterPunch
http://counterpunch.com/leupp08142007.html