Peace Messenger

Afghanistan: A Winning Strategy

David Cortright of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies proposes a more powerful strategy for Afghanistan than sending more troops, as part of an overall set of recommendations for the new administration, posted at AlterNet, (18 December 2008): "In This Era of Hope, Obama Must Emprace a Genuine Agenda of Peace":

The deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan is unlikely to bring lasting security to the region or stem the flow of recruits and support to  al-Qaida. The presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan is the problem, not the solution. Political opposition to foreign military operations has grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the deployment of additional troops will only make matters worse, fueling further resistance and terrorist attacks.

War and military occupation are not an effective strategy against al-Qaida. The concept of a "war on terror" is misguided and counterproductive. Utilizing the rhetoric and policy of war turns the criminals who commit mass murder into warriors and presumed heroes within their communities....

Christian College Professor Fired for Affront to Free Enterprise System

At the "God's Politics" blog, Randall Balmer comments on the dismissal of Andrew Paquin, a professor of global studies, from the faculty of Colorado Christian College:

...According to the Rocky Mountain News, the school’s president, Bill Armstrong, former U.S. senator from Colorado, fired Paquin “amid concerns that his lessons were too radical and undermined the school’s commitment to the free enterprise system.” Specifically, Paquin had the temerity to ask his students to read books by Peter Singer, the animal-rights ethicist at Princeton University, and by our friend Jim Wallis....

I guess I wasn’t aware that capitalism was under siege – what with the collapse of the Soviet empire and China’s headlong rush into a market-based economy. But the president of Colorado Christian University apparently feels otherwise. Capitalism, in fact, appears to be Jesus’ preferred economic system.

“I don’t think there is another system that is more consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ,” Armstrong told the Rocky Mountain News. “What the university stands for, among other things, is free markets.”

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Circle of Madness

Robert Scheer, editor of truthdig, comments on the U.S. administration's $20 billion high-tech weaponry package for Saudi Arabia:

The justification can’t be that this is yet another boondoggle for the military-industrial complex—the big winner in the war on terror—so we are told instead that the Sunni-dominated Saudi kingdom needs this weaponry to withstand a future challenge from those dastardly Shiite fellows in Iran.

Yes, the very same extremists whose surrogates are now, as a consequence of the U.S. invasion, pretending to be the indigenous government of Iraq.  Recall that the Shiite militants who rule Tehran, along with the Sunni nuts around Osama bin Laden, were both the sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein.  Now both of those forces are the main players, according to the Bush administration, vying for power in “liberated” Iraq, and our president is in the inane position of playing one group of fanatics against the other in the name of securing Iraq as a democratic haven....

To complete the circle of madness, White House officials tell reporters that the hope of the latest arms sale program is that the Saudis will be so thrilled with their new weapons that they will stop funding the Sunni insurgents who are currently killing Americans....  more

Photo: President Bush with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2005/AP

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United For Israel Tour

Ten-minute video by Max Blumenthal who writes, "I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington."

Among the highlights(?): Tom "the Hammer" DeLay lets us know that, "Obviously, we can't enjoy the second coming without being connected with Israel" and Joe Lierbermann declares the multitude John Hagee leads to be greater than the one Moses led.

See related story and alternate link to the video posted on AlterNet.

Mugged by Reality

"A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality."
--Irving Kristrol, a "founding father" of neoconservatism.

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
--unnamed "senior Bush advisor" to journalist Ron Suskind in 2004.

In her Los Angeles Times column for July 20 entitled "A really bad case of 'reality'", Rosa Brooks juxtaposes these two quotations, and comments:

In a very real sense, Suskind's "senior Bush advisor" has been proved more right than wrong. The administration did create realities to match its darkest visions, reshaping the world with remarkable speed and thoroughness.

In 2001, administration stalwarts suggested that Osama bin Laden rivaled Hitler in the danger he posed to U.S. security and insisted that Al Qaeda's power was so great that nothing short of a "global war on terror" was required.

At that time, most experts say, this description of Al Qaeda simply wasn't true. It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky - but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation.

Today, things are different. Thanks to U.S. policies, Al Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001. Our ham-handed detention and interrogation tactics and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq have alienated vast swathes of the Islamic world, fueling extremism and anti-Americanism. Today, Al Qaeda is no longer a single organization. Now it's a franchise, with new gangs of terrorists around the world proudly seizing the "Al Qaeda" affiliation.

The full-text of the column (highly recommended) is posted at truthout.org.