Posts Tagged ‘Cold War’
Written by Radical Daily on 09 June 2008
NEW DELHI, India – International forces in Afghanistan have mismanaged the fight against the Taliban, leading to a rise in violence, and now risk losing people’s goodwill, President Hamid Karzai told an Indian news channel.
Karzai has often criticised the Western conduct of the war in Afghanistan, saying civilian casualties must stop.
In turn, the president, who wants to stand for re-election next year, is often criticised at home for being overly influenced by the United States and Britain.
In an interview to be aired on Indian television on Monday, he said foreign troops had failed to go after “the sanctuaries of the terrorists” which Afghan officials say exist over the border in Pakistan.
Karzai did not directly mention Pakistan but the Afghan government has said that the West should have done more to crack down on Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan.
“It was a serious neglect of that, in spite of our warning,” he told CNBC TV 18, adding that other former members of the Taliban who had given up arms were unfairly hunted down within Afghan territory.
“Some of the Taliban who have laid down their arms, who are living in the Afghan villages peacefully, who have accepted Afghanistan’s new order, they were chased, they were hunted for no reason, and they were forced to flee the country.”
Ousted from power in 2001 by U.S.-led and Afghan forces, the Taliban has vowed to topple the Afghan government and drive out the foreign troops who back it.
Some 13,000 people, including more than 380 foreign troops and 81 Canadian soldiers, have been killed in violence since 2006.
“The international community came to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and that fight has to be real and effective,” Karzai said.
“There is no way we can win this war against terrorism unless and until Afghanistan is . . . detached from the other interests or views that some of our partners have in this region.”
On the one hand the Taliban have shown a desire for political dialogue but on the other stepped up attacks, including a high-profile strike at a state parade attended by Karzai and Western diplomats in April.
Karzai also said violence had risen because not enough attention was paid in time to the training of a new Afghan army and police force.
There are 2,500 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led international force.
The Afghan president said he did not accept charges in the Western media of corruption, ineptitude and paranoia in his government.
“I don’t even recognise it,” he said.
Reuters
Tags: Afghanistan, Cold War, War
Posted in Capitalism, History, News, Saswat, Terrorism | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 07 June 2008
By Peter Phillips
Carlos Bastidas was only 23 years of age when he was assassinated by Fulgencio Batista’s secret police after having visited Fidel Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos’ brother, told about how a river of changed flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother’s efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.
The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. World Press Freedom day was proclaimed by the UN in 1993 to honor journalists who have lost their lives reporting the news, and to defend media freedom worldwide.
During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba.
I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over 90 municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province.
During the course of several hours in each station I was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose. This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests.
Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 resulting in the deaths of seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people and several hotel bombings in the 1990s one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.
In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.
Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is bias and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one organic country in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctor from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43% increase in GDP over the past three years.
Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly, discussed bias in the US media, “how often do you see Gore Vidal interviewed on the US media?” he asked. Vidal has recently said that the US is in its ‘worst phase in history.’ “Perhaps Cuba uses corporate news to excess,” he said, “Cuban journalists need to link more to independent news sources in the US.” Alarcon went on to say that Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.
As the Cuban socialist system improves, the US does everything it can to artificially force cold-war conditions by funding terrorist attacks, maintaining an economic boycott, launching a new anti-terrorism Caribbean naval fleet, and increasingly limiting US citizen travel to Cuba. It is time to reverse this cold-war isolationist position, honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system and build a positive working relationship between journalists in support of media democracy in both our countries.
Media Channel, 2008
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology and Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research organization. He traveled to Cuba as an invited guest of the Journalist Union of Cuba May 10 to 15, 2008.
Tags: Cold War, Cuba, Journalism, Press Freedom
Posted in Communism, History, Media, Opinion, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 04 June 2008
By Robert Scheer
What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?
You wouldn’t know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget—or covert—operations.
And what are we spending all this money on? We are talking high-tech war toys designed to fight a Cold War enemy that no longer exists, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, with its estimated total price tag of $300 billion, and Virginia-class submarines at $2.5 billion each. Who cares that the terrorists lack submarines for the Navy to battle deep in the ocean, for which the Virginia-class submarine was designed?
Then there are the F-22 Raptor jet fighters that no longer fill a credible military purpose but will take $65 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets. The Raptor includes stealth technology and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability. In 2005, Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, wrote that the Raptor “is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon.”
Since President Bush’s first year in office, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department has doubled its future planned investment in those ultra-pricey weapons from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion.
When pressed on why the massive weapons arsenal we already possess, which was credited with intimidating the Soviet Union into surrender, isn’t sufficient to keep the peace in a suddenly unipolar world, defense hawks sometimes cite what they claim is an emerging threat from China. “The Chinese are designing new classes of submarines with increased capabilities,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind.”
That is nonsense. China is not even a serious regional power, as the Pentagon’s 2007 report to Congress makes clear: “The intelligence community estimates China will take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary.” The report noted that “China’s military is focused on assuring the capability to prevent Taiwan independence,” but this last week the military threat to Taiwan gave way to a historic peace opening, with the first visit by the head of Taiwan’s ruling party to the mainland since the 1949 revolution.
Oh, and here’s another thing. Those Virginia-class submarines that Lieberman says are so important to our national security and for which he lobbied so hard? General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Co. has received multibillion-dollar contracts to build them. The company is based in Connecticut, suggesting that the real goal here was to find an enemy—any enemy—that would justify spending U.S. tax dollars on weapons produced in his home state.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district.
As President George H.W. Bush noted in his 1992 State of the Union address, “communism died this year,” and, he promised, “we can stop making the sacrifices we had to make when we had an avowed enemy that was a superpower. Now we can look homeward even more and set right what needs to be set right.” Toward that end, he ordered his secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to initiate a 30% cut in defense spending. Gloom and doom in the military-industrial complex was palpable.
But then came what defense industry lobbyists and their many allies on both sides of the aisle in Congress came to treat as the gift of 9/11, offering dramatic imagery of a new global enemy. Fortunately for those who profit from a permanent war economy, few in government or the media were inclined to challenge the enemy bait-and-switch game that unfolded. The defense industry and the Pentagon bureaucracy that services it were all too happy to accept whatever war they could embrace, even if the new “global war on terrorism” that President George W. Bush launched was to be fought against an enemy armed primarily with weapons that could be purchased for a few dollars at Home Depot.
The Soviets had developed the most modern arsenals, and the 9/11 hijackers were armed with box cutters, so how could we justify spending more to defeat al-Qaida than we ever did to combat the communist enemy? That is the third-rail issue that politicians and the media dread touching because of the national security hysteria generated after the 9/11 attacks. Yet no presidential candidate can be serious about cutting the federal debt, improving education, holding down taxes or paying for any of the other things that the candidates of both parties promise without cutting military spending.
Without slashing the inflated military budget, the next president, who will inherit at least a $400-billion current-accounts deficit along with debt service on seven years of profligate military spending, will not be able to finance any of the domestic reforms that both the surviving Republican candidate and his two Democratic opponents advocate.
Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn’t it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history—35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined—is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?
That is because politicians from both parties are complicit in the waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons systems that deliver jobs to their home districts and profits to their defense industry campaign contributors. It is a disease of our political system predicted by two of our great wartime generals-turned-president. First was George Washington, warning in his farewell address that once a nation embarks on the path of imperial adventure, the irrationality of false patriotic appeals would trump reason. What better time to recall Washington’s historic caution to the nation “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
In Eisenhower’s farewell address, he warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
There is no better evidence of the prescience of Washington and Eisenhower than the fact that the most obscenely bloated military budget in U.S. history is not an issue in the current presidential campaign. Sadly, defense spending has become enshrined in our political system as a totem to be worshiped rather than a policy program to be critically examined.
Robert Scheer is the author, most recently, of ”The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” to be published this week by Twelve Books.
This Op-Ed was originally published in The Los Angeles Times.
Tags: Bush, Cold War, Economy, War
Posted in Capitalism, Opinion, Saswat, Terrorism | No Comments »
