The era of US unilateralism has ended. Apart from its European allies — and there too, only some of them — the rest of the world has dismissed Washington’s demands to impose oil and trade embargo on Iran.
After the latest American rampage through three Afghan villages in the Pajway district of Qandahar on March 11, US President Barack Obama issued the following statement: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
When it comes to the War on Terror, it appears there is always a possibility to find legal justification for just about anything. Despite there being an “absolute” prohibition on torture under international law, John Yoo, then a Deputy Assistant Attorney at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The enterprise of US perpetual war is confronted with a persistent problem. Spiraling rates of psychological and social problems in returning war veterans is placing enormous stress on the narratives that the US government has constructed around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
As human rights campaigners around the world commemorated the 10th anniversary of the opening of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, marking a decade of human rights abuses known as the “war on terror”, one would have expected that Western governments would be contemplating scaling back their aggressive rhetoric and draconian laws which have become a feature of the 21st century.
How long this standoff will continue is debatable but what we need to consider is how this situation has deteriorated to a point that the US feels it can attack and kill Pakistanis at will.
The world is babbling with news about Iran being on the threshold of going nuclear, in a military sense. Israeli words are coming out of American mouths. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS news that Iran could build a nuclear bomb in a year or less (music to Israeli ears).
Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”
In contemporary global politics, two ingredients are considered essential to project power: wealth and military might. The two are inter-related. Obviously, without wealth, military hardware cannot be acquired and without military might, wealth can neither be protected nor additional amounts accumulated. There is also a third factor: the power of iman (faith-commitment).
There are a host of organizations — the United Nations (UN) with its Security Council, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — that are touted as world bodies whose function is to maintain peace, security and stability — financial and nuclear — in the world. The UN and IMF were created around the time of World War II.
Is the US endgame in Afghanistan real? If so, it appears to have entered a crucial phase under the cover of a series of international conferences to facilitate US troop withdrawal from the war-torn country. Some observers, however, believe America is playing a double game trying to give the impression of preparing to leave while working behind the scenes to establish permanent military bases in the country.
In the face of its collapsing economy and spiraling domestic unrest, the US is blithely proceeding with its blueprint of remaking world cartography. After dispatching Muammar Qaddafi in a hail of gunmetal, US imperialists are confronting the Syrian stumbling block, item No. 2 on its regime change wish-list.
Only the demented minds of American officials could concoct a story of the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir. In making this scandalous allegation on October 11, US Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller looked shifty and visibly uncomfortable.
Early month, as much of the western world was either wallowing in sentimental commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, or reflecting on the far greater atrocities perpetrated by the US in its aggressive exploitation of 9/11 in pursuit of their imperialist interests worldwide, warnings of an emerging tragedy of potentially even greater proportions were largely ignored.
Two Americans accused of spying were released on September 21 as part of a humanitarian gesture by the Islamic Republic of Iran. A delegation of American Christian and Muslim leaders had traveled to Tehran to meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other officials to seek the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal.
Since April 1978, the Afghans have experienced nothing but war. An entire generation has grown up with violence, murder and mayhem. First it was the Russians, followed by various Afghan factions fighting it out among themselves, then came the Taliban and now the Americans and their NATO allies.
Disturbing evidence has emerged of continued abuse and torture of prisoners by sadistic American guards in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), the American gulag in the illegally occupied Cuban island. To protest mistreatment and continued illegal detention, many prisoners resort to hunger strikes.
Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is an easy figure to hate. Given his eccentric behaviour, he is the butt of many jokes that are easily conflated into hate against the man and his policies. Qaddafi need not be our favourite tyrant but the West’s attack on his regime as well as the country’s infrastructure is not motivated by the desire to rescue the Libyan people.
Since he entered the White House in January 2009, Barack Obama has made war on Pakistan the most important policy of his presidency even while he has maintained a broad grin on his face. the presidential campaign: speak softly but carry a big stick.
Pvt. Bradley Manning’s case is cutting through the calcified US domestic landscape with a sword of sympathy. After his incarceration, the public is associating the Guantanamo images associated of “those Muslim terrorists” — shackled bodies, sexualized humiliation, minds breaking under psychological torture — with the cheery and too relatable photograph of the young American soldier.
