Threat of Violence Looms Again Over Fallujah

by Dahr Jamail

FALLUJAH - The threat of violence hangs over Fallujah again as leaders of the Awakening Council fight for political power through the elections Jan. 31.

The Awakening Councils were set up and backed by the U.S. military to curb spiraling violence. According to the U.S. military, most of the members recruited were former resistance fighters. Over recent years, they grew to a strength of about 100,000 men, each paid 300 dollars a month.

U.S. aid to the Councils was cut off in October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

The Awakening Councils now control most of Anbar province. This is the largest province, covering about a third of Iraq. Political power here is critical because the province borders Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Anbar has a largely Sunni population of about two million, in an Iraqi population of about 25 million.

The province has seen some of the worst violence through the occupation. Two U.S. sieges in 2004 destroyed most of Fallujah. Violence continued to plague provincial capital Ramadi as well.

The Awakening Councils helped greatly to stabilize the security situation, but they could now become the problem as they take on political parties and also other Awakening Councils.

Many are holding out threats if they do not win. The president of the Fallujah Awakening Council, Sheikh Aifan Sadun, has like many other Awakening leaders, hundreds of security personnel under his control.

Sadun, contesting as a local representative in his city, is accusing rivals from the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) of preparing for fraud in the upcoming vote.

"The Islamic Party is placing their people as observers in the voting centers in Fallujah," Sadun told IPS. "They are also pressuring people who they think will be voting for Awakening members like me."

Sadun, speaking in his heavily armored BMW car as we drove in a convoy around Fallujah, told IPS he would use "any means necessary" to fight the IIP if they stole the elections.

The IIP have been in power here because most other Sunni political groups boycotted the 2005 elections.

At places rivalry has developed between competing leaders of Awakening Councils. In Ramadi, capital city of AnbAr, Sheikh Ahmad Abo Risha is president of the Awakening Council for the entire province.

Abo Risha's rival, Sheikh Hamid Al-Hayis, is also an Awakening Council leader in the city, and from the same tribe.

Abo Risha does not have kind words for Al-Hayis. "Al-Hayis has relations with government people and oil contracts, and he gets money from this by using his position which we helped him acquire," Abo Risha told IPS at the Awakening Council of Ramadi headquarters.

"I'm from a long line of sheikhs, but Al-Hayis has only been a sheikh since 2006 when we started the Awakening," Abo Risha said. If Al-Hayis were to win the elections, "there will be a revolution."

And, he told IPS, it will be a disaster if the IIP takes the election by fraud. "It will be like Darfur."

(Inter Press Service)

Monument to Bush shoe-throwing shines at Iraqi orphanage

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- For the war-beaten orphans of the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit, this big old shoe fits.

A huge sculpture of the footwear hurled at President Bush in December during a trip to Iraq has been unveiled in a ceremony at the Tikrit Orphanage complex.

Assisted by children at the home, sculptor Laith al-Amiri erected a brown replica of one of the shoes hurled at Bush and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki by journalist Muntadhir al-Zaidi during a press conference in Baghdad.

Al-Zaidi was jailed for his actions, and a trial is pending. But his angry gesture touched a defiant nerve throughout the Arab and Muslim world. He is regarded by many people as a hero. Demonstrators in December took to the streets in the Arab world and called for his release.

The shoe monument, made of fiberglass and coated with copper, consists of the shoe and a concrete base. The entire monument is 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) high. The shoe is 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) long and 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) wide.

The orphans helped al-Amiri build the $5,000 structure -- unveiled Tuesday -- in 15 days, said Faten Abdulqader al-Naseri, the orphanage director.

"Those orphans who helped the sculptor in building this monument were the victims of Bush's war," al-Naseri said. "The shoe monument is a gift to the next generation to remember the heroic action by the journalist."

"When the next generation sees the shoe monument, they will ask their parents about it," al-Naseri said.

"Then their parents will start talking about the hero Muntadhir al-Zaidi, who threw his shoe at George W. Bush during his unannounced farewell visit."

Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader toppled by the United States in 2003, was from the Tikrit region.

Al-Zaidi marked his 30th birthday in jail earlier this month. One of his brothers said he is "in good health and is being treated well."

Al-Zaidi's employer, TV network al-Baghdadia, keeps a picture of him at the top left side of the screen with a calendar showing the number of days he has spent in detention. The network has been calling for his release.

By tradition, throwing a shoe is the most insulting act in the Arab world.

A VERY REAL NEW WORLD ORDER

By Chuck Baldwin
January 27, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

It is hard to believe, but a majority of Americans (including Christians and conservatives) seem oblivious to the fact that there is a very real, very legitimate New World Order (NWO) unfolding. In the face of overwhelming evidence, most Americans not only seem totally unaware of this reality, they seem unwilling to even remotely entertain the notion.

On one hand, it is understandable that so many Americans would be ignorant of the emerging New World Order. After all, the mainstream media refuses to report, or even acknowledge, the NWO. Even "conservative" commentators and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, or Joe Scarborough refuse to discuss it. And when listeners call these respective programs, these "conservative" hosts usually resort to insulting the caller as being some kind of "conspiracy kook." One host even railed that if anyone questions the government line on 9/11, we should "lock them up and throw away the key." So much for freedom of speech!

This is an area--perhaps the central area--where liberals and conservatives agree: they both show no patience or tolerance for anyone who believes that global government (in any form) is evolving. One has to wonder how otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people can be so brain dead when it comes to this issue. It makes one wonder who is really pulling their strings, doesn't it?

The list of notable personalities who have openly referenced or called for some kind of global government or New World Order is extremely lengthy. Are all these people "kooks" or "conspiracy nuts"? Why would world leaders--including presidents, secretaries of state, and high government officials; including the media, financial, and political elite--constantly refer to something that doesn't exist? Why would they write about, talk about, or openly promote a New World Order, if there is no such thing?

Many of us recall President George Herbert Walker Bush talking much about an emerging New World Order. For example, in 1989, Bush told the students of Texas A&M University, "Perhaps the world order of the future will truly be a family of nations."

Later, Bush, Sr. said, "We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order . . .. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders."

Bush, Sr. also said, "What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea--a new world order."

Bush, Sr. further said, "The world can therefore seize the opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order . . ."

What was President G.H.W. Bush talking about, if there is no such thing as an emerging New World Order? Was he talking out of his mind? Was he hallucinating?

England's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said, "We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not." He continued saying, "On the eve of a new Millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organizing our international institutions." He also said, "Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community."

In 1999, Tony Blair said, "Globalization has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globalism is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon."

What is Tony Blair talking about, if there is no emerging New World Order? What does he mean by "a new doctrine of international community"? What does he mean by "new world"? How can one have globalism, which includes "a political and security phenomenon," without creating a New World Order? Is Tony Blair hallucinating?

Likewise, former President George W. Bush penned his signature to the Declaration of Quebec back on April 22, 2001, in which he gave a "commitment to hemispheric integration and national and collective responsibility for improving the economic well-being and security of our people."

By "our people," Bush meant the people of the Western Hemisphere, not the people of the United States. Phyllis Schlafly rightly reminded us that G.W. Bush "pledged that the United States will 'build a hemispheric family on the basis of a more just and democratic international order.'"

Remember, too, that it was G.W. Bush who, back in 2005, committed the United States to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which is nothing more than a precursor to the North American Community or Union, as outlined in CFR member Robert Pastor's manual, "Toward a North American Community."

If there is no such thing as an emerging New World Order, what was G.W. Bush talking about when he referred to "a hemispheric family" and an "international order"?

The public statements of notable world leaders regarding an emerging New World Order are copious. Consider the statements of former CBS newsman, Walter Cronkite.

In his book, "A Reporter's Life," Walter Cronkite said, "A system of world order--preferably a system of world government--is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty . . ." Cronkite told BBC newsman Tim Sebastian, "I think we are realizing that we are going to have to have an international rule of law." He added, "We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law." Cronkite also said, "American people are going to begin to realize that perhaps they are going to have to yield some sovereignty to an international body to enforce world law."

If there is no emerging New World Order, what is Walter Cronkite talking about? Can there be any doubt that Cronkite is talking about global government? Absolutely not!

Now, when Bush, Sr. talks about fulfilling "the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders," he was talking about the same thing former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was talking about when he said, "The time for absolute and exclusive sovereignty . . . has passed."

The United Nations has been on the forefront of promoting the New World Order agenda since its very inception. In 1995, the UN released a manual entitled, "Our Global Neighborhood." It states, "Population, consumption, technology, development, and the environment are linked in complex relationships that bear closely on human welfare in the global neighborhood. Their effective and equitable management calls for a systematic, long-term, global approach guided by the principle of sustainable development, which has been the central lesson from the mounting ecological dangers of recent times. Its universal application is a priority among the tasks of global governance."

If there is no emerging New World Order, what is "global governance" all about?

"Who are the movers and shakers promoting global government?" you ask. Obviously, it is the international bankers who are the heavyweights behind the push for global government. Remember, one cannot create a "global economy" without a global government to manage, oversee, and control it.

In a letter written to Colonel E. Mandell House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."

"Old Hickory" did his best to rid the United States from the death grip that the international bankers were beginning to exert on this country. He may have been the last President to actually oppose the bankers. In discussing the Bank Renewal bill with a delegation of bankers in 1832, Jackson said, "Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out."

Unfortunately, the international bankers proved themselves to be too formidable for President Jackson. And in 1913, with the collaboration of President Woodrow Wilson, the bankers were given charge over America's financial system by the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Ever since the CFR and Trilateral Commission were created, they have filled the key leadership positions of government, big media, and of course, the Federal Reserve.

In his book, "With No Apologies," former Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater wrote, "The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power-- political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future." Was Goldwater a prophet or what?

And again, the goals of the global elite have been publicly stated. Back in 1991, the founder of the CFR, David Rockefeller praised the major media for their complicity in helping to facilitate the globalist agenda by saying, "We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. . . . It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

How could Rockefeller be any plainer? He acknowledged the willful assistance of the major media in helping to keep the elitists' agenda of global government from the American people. To this day, the major media has not deviated from that collaboration. And this includes the aforementioned "conservative" talking heads. They know if they want to keep their jobs, they dare not reveal the New World Order. The NWO, more than anything else, is the "Third Rail" to the national media.

Is it any wonder that President Barack Obama has stacked his government with numerous members of the CFR? Among these are Robert Gates, Janet Napolitano, Eric Shinseki, Timothy Geithner, and Tom Daschle. Other CFR members include CFR President Richard Haass, CFR Director Richard Holbrooke, and founding member of the Trilateral Commission and CFR member Paul Volcker. Obama even asked a CFR member, Rick Warren, to deliver the inaugural prayer.

Still not convinced? Just a few days ago, when asked by a reporter what he thought the most important thing was that Barack Obama could accomplish, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, "I think his task will be develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a New World Order can be created. It's a great opportunity; it isn't just a crisis."

This is the same Henry Kissinger, you will recall, who said back in 1991, "Today, America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow, they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were [sic] an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government."

Even Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, wrote an editorial expressing his support for world government. In his column he said, "I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. . . . But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.

"A 'world government' would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.

"So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might."

Rachman then goes on to explain the reasons why he believes world government is plausible.

Do you now see why it does not matter to a tinker's dam whether it is a Republican or Democrat who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? For the most part, both major parties in Washington, D.C., have been under the dominating influence of the international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, the CFR, and the Trilateral Commission. And this is also why it does not matter whether one calls himself conservative or liberal. For the most part, both conservatives and liberals in Washington, D.C., are facilitating the emerging New World Order. It is time we wake up to this reality.

Presidents Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton, and Bush, Jr. have thoroughly set the table for the implementation of the NWO, as surely as the sun rises in the east. All Obama has to do is put the food on the table--and you can count on this: Barack Obama will serve up a New World Order feast like you cannot believe!

That a New World Order is emerging is not in question. The only question is, What will freedom-loving Americans do about it? Of course, the first thing they have to do is admit that an emerging New World Order exists! Until conservatives, Christians, pastors, constitutionalists, and others who care about a sovereign, independent United States acknowledge the reality of an emerging New World Order, they will be incapable of opposing it. And right now, that is exactly what they are not doing.


© 2009 Chuck Baldwin - All Rights Reserved

Iraq won't allow Blackwater to operate in country

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN

BAGHDAD - Iraq will not allow Blackwater Worldwide to continue providing security protection for U.S. diplomats in the country, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Thursday.

Blackwater's image in Iraq was irrevocably tarnished by the September 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square. Five former Blackwater guards pleaded not guilty Jan. 6 in federal court in Washington to manslaughter and gun charges in that shooting.

The decision not to issue Blackwater an operating license was due to "improper conduct and excessive use of force," said Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf.

Neither Khalaf nor a U.S. Embassy official gave a date for Blackwater personnel to leave the country and neither said whether they would be allowed to continue guarding U.S. diplomats during the interim.

A U.S.-Iraqi security agreement approved in November gives the Iraqis the authority to determine which Western security companies operate in Iraq.

Blackwater employees who have not been implicated in the shooting have the right to work with a different employer.

"We sent our decision to the U.S. Embassy last Friday," Khalaf told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "They have to find a new security company."

The U.S. Embassy official confirmed it received the government's decision, saying that U.S. officials were working with the Iraqi government and its contractors to address the "implications of this decision."

The official made the statement on condition of anonymity under embassy regulations.

In the 2007 shooting, Blackwater maintains its guards opened fire after coming under attack after a car in a State Department convoy broke down.

The Iraqi government has labeled the guards "criminals" and is closely watching the case.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

The United Haters of America

By Guy Reel

Somewhere deep inside the authoritarian minds of the ultra right-wingers, the fear, helplessness and paranoia that have always been so evident have reached the boiling point. For them, Obama's election and, perhaps even more so, the sight of him standing on the Capitol steps and taking the oath of office, have brought home a grim truth. They have tried to deny it for many years now, but America is not what they think it is. And because of their own incompetence, blindness to reality and the changing demographics among voters - the growing minorities and young voters who have rejected the GOP - they have lost America, perhaps for good.

And so now we hear, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, their wish of failure (and perhaps worse) for America.

Karl Rove and Marc Thiessen, the former chief White House speechwriter, have been warning that Obama's new anti-terror policies (such as closing Guantanamo Bay, prohibiting torture and stopping rendition to CIA black sites) may put the nation at risk. In The Washington Post, Thiessen wrote, "If Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible - and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation."

One can read the anticipation between the lines - "When there's a terrorist attack, Republicans will rule again because that will prove Obama was wrong and Bush was right!"

Well, of course it would do nothing of the sort. First, there is no evidence that any of Bush's anti-American policies - illegal wiretapping, coercive interrogations, extraordinary renditions, or holding people without charges, lawyers or trials - have prevented any attacks. In fact, most military and intelligence personnel agree that these policies have increased terrorist recruiting and made American less safe. They have also resulted in far more terrorist attacks around the world.

Bush and Dick Cheney made similar claims during their beauty pageant goodbye strolls while completing their terms in office. The most important legacy for them is that there were no terrorist attacks on the U.S. after 9/11, and they argued that Obama's reversals of Bush's policies could invite future attacks. That argument is utter nonsense.

Leave aside the fact that more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died, many from terrorist attacks, and that more than 150,000 Iraqis have died, many from terrorist bombings, and that hundreds more died in terrorist assaults in London and Madrid and India and Indonesia and elsewhere. Even had none of these things happened, the cause-and-effect argument simply isn't logical. It's just after-the-fact rationalization.

There is also no reason to think that most people will blame Obama if terrorists strike again, even though that's what all this noise from the right wing is about - laying the groundwork to blame the new president. Despite the evidence that the Bush administration ignored blatant warnings about 9/11, went on vacation and did nothing to stop the attacks, Americans rallied around Bush. They would likely do the same with Obama.

Now there is fear-mongering about what would happen were we to grant some rights to offenders at Guantanamo - that some would go free and incite violence against us. Well, here's a news flash: That has already happened, under Bush. The U.S. has already released more than 400 prisoners from Guantanamo, many held for years without any legal rights whatsoever. Some have simply gone home. But some have taken up arms against us (perhaps some of them because they were held without cause). The New York Times reported that one became the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and is suspected of involvement in the bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen in September.

Where are the howls of protest about this outrage? If this happens under an Obama administration, the Limbaughs and the Hannitys will be calling for his head. But, in their blind devotion to Bush, they say nothing about policies that led to an arrest and incarceration of a terrorist but were so ill-conceived and poorly managed that they forced his release. Similarly, some charges against terrorists have been or will be thrown out because Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush allowed their torture. The very policy they so lovingly embraced has actually helped the enemy.

But that actually isn't that surprising. Right-wingers have always seemed to have a strange enthusiasm for the things terrorists do and say, then they react in a way that helps the terrorists. The administration based U.S. military and foreign policy on what the terrorists said they were going to do - imagine, running U.S. policy based on the lies and threats of a bunch of wanton murderers. Bush put the country trillions more into debt to fight wars and finance tax cuts for the rich so that he could say we were taking the fight to the terrorists but could still go shopping. He let terrorists' threats lead him to ignore the Constitution, erode our moral standing in the world and drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. And his policies have allowed murders to go free and kill again - exactly what the right-wing claims Obama is going to do.

So it's not much of a stretch to think that, somewhere deep down, some in the extreme right wing will gain a smug satisfaction if terrorists do strike again in America. They can't wait for the blame game to start. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rove and Sarah Palin seem to think that liberals hate America. But, who, really, are the haters?

Limbaugh and many of his listeners have said they hope Obama will fail. That means they want America to fail. Or, at least, they want the kind of America that Obama stands for to fail - you know, the one where civil liberties are respected, where the rule of law prevails, where a multi-lateral foreign policy is embraced to increase homeland security, and where an African-American Democrat can become president.

They hate the America that is a liberal democracy, which it has been through most of its history. They hate the idea of equal protection for gays, of rights for the accused. They hate the idea of any kind of social welfare. This is a group that would destroy an entire industry because they hate the union workers who are fighting for better health care and wages. Yet they barely bat an eye at millions stolen by CEOs and investment bankers who raped their companies and banks and gave away billions in bonuses while the economy collapsed all around.

During the run-up to Obama's inauguration, some newspapers ran series of interviews with people about their hopes and fears for the new presidency.

The hopes, mostly from Democrats: New and more accountable foreign policy, less cronyism, less corruption, more fiscal responsibility, and more moral accountability in government.

The fears, mostly from Republicans: The expansion of social welfare programs and allowance of gay marriage.

Really? That's what they're afraid of, after these last eight years? Well, in fairness, maybe they do have a deeper fear.

What they are really afraid of is that President Obama, and America, will succeed.

Guy Reel is an associate professor of mass communication at Winthrop University. He may be reached at reelg@winthrop.edu

Israeli Troops Killed Gaza Children Carrying White Flag, witnesses say

By Dion Nissenbaum

January 28, 2009 "McClatchy Newspapers" -- EZBT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — Nasser Abu Freeh was one of the first to see the Israeli soldiers as they entered this pastoral Gaza neighborhood overlooking the Israeli border on Jan. 3, hours after the Israeli government ordered the first ground forces into Gaza.

Abu Freeh's two-story hilltop home is a favorite spot for Israeli soldiers, who used it as a command post during three previous attempts to deter Gaza militants from firing crude rockets into Israel from the surrounding cattle farms, orange groves and dirt alleys.

Scouts from the militant Islamist group Hamas also favored the hilltop as a place to watch for approaching Israeli soldiers, and the fighters tried to lure the Israelis into a trap by planting land mines outside Abu Freeh's home.

As the Israelis moved in, neighbors said, the Hamas scouts put up little resistance and quickly fell back into the more densely populated part of the neighborhood.

Within hours, the Israeli soldiers took over Abu Freeh's house, moved the seven people living there into one room and began interrogating the adults. The questioners were angry because one of their soldiers had been killed nearby in the early hours of the ground offensive, and they wanted to know what traps Hamas had set for the Israeli forces.

"Where are the tunnels?" Abu Freeh said the soldiers asked in Arabic. "I will kill you if you don't tell me."

Israeli tanks and bulldozers soon took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh's home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo's five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire.

More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

"We were waiting for them to give us an order," Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. "Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot."

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip. It's part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza.

"The evidence we've gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong," said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip. "All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags."

Along with the white flag incidents, Human Rights Watch is calling for an international investigation into widespread charges that Israel prevented medical teams from helping wounded Palestinians trapped in their homes and needlessly demolished hundreds of houses, including dozens in Ezbt Abed Rabbo.

"This was not a rogue unit," said Abrahams. "The needless civilian deaths resulted from concrete decisions made by the military."

The Israeli military, which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called "the most moral army in the world," said it's investigating the increasing number of war crimes allegations, but it rejected any suggestion that its soldiers had targeted civilians.

"IDF forces have clear firing orders," the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement in response to questions from McClatchy. "But in the complex situation in which fighting takes place inside towns and cities, placing our forces also at great risk, civilian casualties are regrettably possible."

Throughout the war, Israeli officials said Hamas militants put Palestinian civilians in danger by booby-trapping homes and firing on soldiers from crowded buildings.

However, residents living near Khaled Abed Rabbo all said that Hamas forces quickly abandoned the outlying neighborhood once the Israeli forces took over.

With his daughters bleeding to death, Abed Rabbo said, the family screamed for help.

Samieh al Sheik, an ambulance driver who lived in an adjacent home, heard the shouting. Without thinking about what could be waiting outside, Sheik said he ran to his ambulance, turned on the emergency lights and drove toward the screams.

As he turned the corner and headed for Abed Rabbo's home, Sheik said he came face-to-face with the Israeli tank unit. The soldiers ordered him to get out of the ambulance and told him to walk straight out of the neighborhood.

"I didn't see what happened to the family that day because I couldn't reach them," said Sheik, who returned to find the ambulance crushed under a demolished building.

Faced with his dying children, Abed Rabbo gathered up the wounded and sought to escape, even if the Israelis opened fire.

With Israeli soldiers shooting at the ground near their feet, Abed Rabbo said, the family walked more than a mile to the main road, where they finally found help. His surviving 4-year-old daughter, Samer, was one of the few to be allowed out of Gaza to receive special medical care in Brussels.

Halima Badwan was less fortunate. As Abed Rabbo rushed his surviving daughter to the hospital, she lay dying in a house nearby.

Halima and her husband, Ahmed, a retired 63-year-old Palestinian Authority general, were among nine people who'd gathered in one room during the fighting. The previous day, Ahmed Badwan said, a tank round had smashed into the room, killing a neighbor and seriously injuring his wife.

Badwan didn't think he could carry his wife to safety. Red Cross officials in Gaza said that Israeli military officials repeatedly denied their requests to send medical teams to the neighborhood.

So, when the Israeli military began declaring a short "humanitarian pause" to the shooting each day, Badwan said he took his wife's gold necklace and left her lying nearly unconscious in the ruins of their home.

As he walked out of his neighborhood, Badwan said, he stopped at a nearby ambulance station and asked for help. The International Committee for the Red Cross was powerless to do anything.

Iyad Nasr, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza, said Israeli soldiers had fired at ambulances that tried to reach some areas, even when medical officials had received approval from the Israeli military to enter certain neighborhoods.

"Our request for Ezbt Abed Rabbo was just pending and pending and pending and pending day after day," Nasr said.

Israel's widespread denial of access to medical crews in Gaza appears to be a breach of humanitarian law, said Yuval Shany, a legal scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"In international law, there is obligation to facilitate access to the wounded and even to treat the wounded," Shany said. "In this area, I think there was a deviation from the international standard and this should be investigated."

When Badwan, Abed Rabbo and scores of other residents of Ezbt Abed Rabbo finally returned to their neighborhood after Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire on Jan. 17, they were stunned to discover that their neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

Using bulldozers, tank shelling and explosives placed in the houses, the Israeli military had leveled entire blocks of homes.

Badwan found his wife's body buried under the rubble of their building.

The destruction didn't come as a complete surprise to Taysir Abed Rabbo, who lived in a two-story home near Badwan's that Israeli soldiers had used as a temporary post.

Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestinian Authority presidential guard, was among dozens of men who were rounded up nearly a year ago during an operation called Operation Warm Winter and taken to Israel for interrogation.

The interrogators gave Abed Rabbo a prophetic warning.

"They said if we did not stop the rocket fire, they planned to make this area 'a red area,'" said Abed Rabbo, who said he wasn't sure at the time what the Israelis meant.

Israeli leaders are moving swiftly to insulate their soldiers from any penalties for their actions during the offensive, which left more than 1,200 Palestinians dead, destroyed more than 4,000 buildings and caused $2 billion in damage.

The Israeli military has barred reporters from printing the names of military leaders who took part in the Gaza campaign, known as Operation Cast Lead, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has created a legal defense unit to protect any soldiers accused of war crimes.

In a defense of his military on Sunday, Olmert accused Israel's critics of using "moral acrobatics" to question Israel for using its military to try to halt the Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza that's killed 12 people since September 2005.

"The soldiers and commanders who were sent on missions in Gaza must know that they are safe from various tribunals, and that the State of Israel will assist them on this issue and defend them just as they bodily defended us during Operation Cast Lead," Olmert said.

While human rights groups are investigating the allegations, Shany said, Israeli leaders should take the lead and investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

"It makes sense to try to protect the soldiers, but it would also make sense to investigate where needed," Shany said. "They should investigate, and when actions were justifiable they should protect, and when not, they should prosecute."

Special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this article from Jerusalem.

Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER

As the economic news darkens in the United States, the ideas for stimulating new jobs get worse. A sure-fire way to advance deeper into recession is now being spread around: spend even more on the Department of Defense (DoD). Doing that will not generate new jobs effectively and it will perpetuate serious problems in the Pentagon. The newly inaugurated President Barack Obama would be well advised to go in precisely the opposite direction.

Harvard economist Professor Martin Feldstein has advocated in the Wall Street Journal (‘Defense Spending Would Be Great Stimulus’, 24 December 2008) the addition of USD30 billion or so to the Pentagon’s budget for the purpose of generating 300,000 new jobs. It is my assertion, however, that pushing the DoD as a jobs engine is a mistake.

With its huge overhead costs, glacial payout rates and ultra-high costs of materials, I believe the Pentagon can generate jobs by spending but neither as many nor as soon as is suggested.

A classic foible is Feldstein’s recommendation to surge the economy with “additional funding [that] would allow the [US] Air Force [USAF] to increase the production of fighter planes”. The USAF has two fighter aircraft in production: the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The F-22 has reached the end of approved production (with 183 units) but the air force would love at least 60 more. However, even if Congress appropriated today the USD11 billion needed for them, the work would not start until 2010: too late for the stimulus everyone agrees is needed now.

Feldstein thinks it can be otherwise. He is probably thinking of the Second World War model where production lines cranked out thousands of aircraft each month: as fast as the government could stuff money, materials and workers into the assembly line.

The problem is that there is no such assembly line for the F-22. Although they are fabricated in a large facility where aircraft production hummed in bygone eras, F-22s are today hand-built, pre-Henry Ford style. Go to Lockheed Martin’s plant; you will find no detectable movement of aircraft out the door. Instead you will see virtually stationary aircraft and workers applying parts in a manner more evocative of hand-crafting. This ‘production rate’ generates one F-22 every 18 days or so.

The current rate for the F-35, now at the start of production, is even slower, although the USAF would like to get its rate up to a whopping 10 to 15 aircraft per month.

Why do we not just speed things up?

We can’t. The specialised materials that the F-22 requires must be purchased a year or two ahead of time and, with advance contracting and all the other regulations that exist today, the Pentagon’s bureaucracy is functionally incapable of speeding production up anytime soon, if ever.

In fact, adding more F-22 production money will not increase the production rate or the total number of jobs involved. It will simply extend the current F-22 production rate of 20 aircraft per year into the future. Existing jobs will be saved but no new jobs will be created.

Note also that the USD11 billion that 60 more F-22s would gobble up is more than a third of the USD30 billion that Feldstein wants to give to the DoD. How he would create 300,000 new jobs with the rest of the money is a mystery. More F-22 spending would be a money surge for Lockheed Martin but not a jobs engine for the nation.

Even if one could speed up production of the other fighter, the JSF, it would be stupid to do so. The F-35 is just beginning the testing phase and it has been having some major problems, requiring design changes. That discovery process is far from over. The aircraft should be put into full production after, not before, all the needed modifications are identified.

Over-anxious to push things along much too quickly to permit a ‘fly before you buy’ strategy, the USAF has already scheduled the production of around 500 F-35s before testing is complete. Going even more quickly would make a bad acquisition plan even worse.

Even other economists are sceptical about Feldstein’s numbers. An October 2007 paper from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst found that each USD1 billion spent on defence would generate 8,555 jobs, not the 10,000 calculated by Feldstein. Given the problems with the F-22 just discussed and the lack of jobs I believe it will generate, even this lower estimate sounds extremely optimistic.

More importantly, the same amount of money spent elsewhere would generate more jobs, often better ones, and it would do it faster. For example, according to the above study, USD1 billion in spending for mass transit would generate 19,795 jobs (131 per cent more than for the DoD) and in education would generate 17,687 jobs (107 per cent more) – and the hiring could start in early 2009.

In fact, if employment is the aim, it makes more sense to cut defence spending and use the money in programmes that do it better. As for the defence budget, less money offers the opportunity for reform – just what the doctor ordered. Despite high levels of spending, the combat formations of the services are smaller than at any point since 1946. Major equipment is, on average, older, and, according to key measurables, our forces are less ready to fight.

The F-22 and F-35 programmes typify the broken system that fostered this decline. Real reform would do much more for national security than giving the Pentagon more money to spend poorly.

Winslow T. Wheeler spent 31 years working on Capitol Hill with senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office, specializing in national security affairs. Currently, he directs the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington. He is author of The Wastrels of Defense and the editor of a new anthology: ‘America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress’.

Card's Super Salute

Arizona pays tribute to Tillman even if NFL does not

By Gary Myers

TAMPA - There are only two players on the Cardinals' roster who remain from Pat Tillman's final season in 2001. Despite that and the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan nearly five years ago, his presence is still felt on this unlikeliest of Super Bowl teams.

"He's not a forgotten man," says safety Adrian Wilson, a rookie in Tillman's final season. "He's an inspiration for the whole organization."

As the Cardinals prepare for their first Super Bowl appearance, there are reminders of Tillman all around. His No. 40 has been retired. There are pictures of him in the lobby and hallways at the team's training facility in Tempe. An eight-foot bronze statue of him was unveiled on Nov. 12, 2006, outside the University of Phoenix Stadium. It captures the quintessential Tillman: emotional, long hair flying, helmet in his outstretched right hand, a determined look etched on his chiseled face. It is located in Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza that surrounds the stadium where the Giants won the Super Bowl last year.

"The Arizona Cardinals meant a great deal to Pat and I know he would be so proud to see them take the field on Super Bowl Sunday," his wife Marie tells the Daily News in an e-mail. "I am personally grateful for all the support the Cardinals have shown the Pat Tillman Foundation as we continue to carry forward Pat's legacy and civic action."

Tillman, the Cards' starting strong safety who abruptly quit football to join the elite Army Rangers in May of 2002, said at the time he made the decision in part because he was deeply affected by the Sept. 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Marie Tillman, the high school sweetheart who married him shortly before he made the decision to join the Army, was a guest, with her mother, of commissioner Roger Goodell in his suite at the Super Bowl in Arizona last year.

Marie Tillman is a private person and neither she nor the Cardinals would say whether the Bidwills, who own the team, extended an invitation for her to attend Super Bowl XLIII against the Steelers on Sunday. Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said late last week from her home in northern California that nobody from the Cardinals had contacted her about coming to Tampa.

The NFL does not have anything planned to honor Tillman this week or on Sunday. It contributed $250,000 for the construction of the Pat Tillman USO Center on the Bagram Air Base near Kabul in Afghanistan. The recreational facility, the first USO center in Afghanistan, opened in April of 2005. Inquiries were being made to see if it was feasible to have a live television shot of the center during the telecast of the Super Bowl.

On the NFL's annual USO tour last summer, Goodell, making the trip for the first time, visited the Tillman Center with Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora and Saints quarterback Drew Brees.

"Pat Tillman will be very much on our minds because of what he means to the Cardinals, the NFL and all Americans," Goodell tells The News. "He was an inspirational leader, not just as a football player but as an American citizen. He represents the highest level of service and sacrifice to his country. His legacy will be with us forever and I am grateful that I had the honor of visiting the Tillman Center in Afghanistan last July."

Tillman was 27 when he was killed. Had he chosen to continue in the NFL, he conceivably could have still been playing in what would have been his 11th season. He was drafted by the Cardinals in the seventh round out of Arizona State. He was a linebacker at ASU, but the Cardinals figured he would be able to make the transition to safety. They liked his toughness. They liked his attitude. They loved his intensity, despite his being a bit quirky. After he was drafted, he rode his bicycle to the Cardinals' facility.

He was an unrestricted free agent after the 2001 season and the Cardinals offered him a three-year, $3.6 million contract. He traded in his $1.2 million-a-year NFL job for $18,000 per year with the Army.

"There've been so many times that I've thought of Pat in the last month," Cardinals president Mike Bidwill says. "Believe me, no one would have enjoyed this moment or the run that the team is on more than Pat Tillman. When people called this ‘the worst team that's ever made the playoffs,' I can only wonder how Pat would have responded. When describing this team, people mention heart and passion and overcoming odds. Pat was the embodiment of all those things and much more."

**********
Dave McGinnis was the Cardinals' defensive coordinator when Tillman was drafted, and he was the coach when Tillman called him two weeks after skipping a mini-camp in the spring of 2002.

"Mac, I'd like to come and see you," Tillman told McGinnis.
He walked into McGinnis’ office, closed the door behind him, took a chair from the front of the desk and pulled it around to the side right next to his coach.

“Mac, we need to talk,” Tillman told his coach.
He told McGinnis that he and his brother Kevin were preparing to join the United States Army Rangers.
“As well as I knew Pat, I would say it was surprising, but it wasn’t shocking,” says McGinnis, now an assistant coach with the Titans. “This guy, his waters really ran deep. I know his decision had not come on a whim. It was well-thought out, well-planned. There was a deep conviction and meaning behind it. I respected him.”

As Tillman got ready to leave, he said he would be back playing football in three years.
“I want to play for you again,” Tillman said.
McGinnis promised him wherever he was coaching, he would find a spot for him.
Tillman and his brother qualified for the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment. He was deployed to Iraq and stayed for three months. He and his brother came back home for special training in preparation for being shipped to Afghanistan to hunt the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.

Late in the 2003 season, while he was stationed at Fort Lewis in Seattle, Tillman called his old team asking for four tickets to the Cardinals’ road game against the Seahawks. Bill Bidwill set him up in his private box and arranged for rooms at the team hotel. The night before the game, Tillman declined McGinnis’ offer to speak to the team, not wanting to be a distraction.

He came to McGinnis’ suite after the team’s Saturday night meeting and a group of them talked for three hours. The next morning, McGinnis met Tillman at a Starbucks across the street from the hotel at 6 a.m.

He invited him to the team breakfast at 8 a.m.
“Pat, there are men on this football team that would love to see you,” McGinnis said then.
Tillman relented and walked across the street with his old coach.
“I’m telling you, when we walked in with Pat, there was dead silence,” McGinnis says now. “You could feel the admiration and respect.”

One by one, the players came over and shook his hand.
“It was an awe-inspiring moment,” McGinnis says.
After the game, Tillman entered through a back door of the locker room to say goodbye to McGinnis. The Cardinals players came over and hugged him.

McGinnis’ voice cracks as he details his conversation with Tillman.
“I’m going to come back and play,” Tillman said.
“Wherever I am, I will always have a place for you,” McGinnis replied.
“I’m going to hold you to it, coach,” Tillman said.
They hugged. Tillman left the locker room.
“I’ll never forget it,” McGinnis says, his voice still cracking. “I never talked to him again.” Four months and a day later, Tillman was a casualty of war. He was shot in the forehead on April 22, 2004, in the hills of Sperah in Afghanistan, less than a month after being deployed.

Initially, the Army said he was killed by enemy fire. But later it admitted that he had been accidentally killed by one of his own men. A huge controversy ensued, with the Tillman family claiming a coverup by the government to hide the cause of death knowing “their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out,” Patrick Tillman Sr. said back then. “They blew up their poster boy.”

The Patrick Tillman Foundation, with McGinnis on the advisory board, was created to carry forward “Pat’s legacy of leadership and civic action by supporting future generations of leaders.”

It is done through “specific programs that educate and engage leaders of today and tomorrow: service members, their families and the youth of America.” he two Cardinals who remain from Tillman’s days are Wilson and long snapper Nathan Hodel, also a rookie that year. Wilson was going to compete with Tillman for the starting job if he had returned to the team in 2002.

“We always think about Pat,” Wilson says. “To play with him and to see what he went through, it’s an inspiration. For us to finally get here, it’s a long road, a lot of people were involved in it, and he was definitely one of those guys.”

Even for those Cardinals who didn’t play with Tillman, his presence is felt.
“I understand he’s a great human being, a great individual and he meant a lot to this organization,” KurtWarner says. “Not only with what he did on the field, but what he did off the field.”

Mike Bidwill adds, “In a very real way he will be with us on Super Bowl Sunday in Tampa. I said to Marie that he is looking down both excited for the team and at the same time ticked off that he cannot play in the game.”

Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Wake-Up Call to Obama

By DAVE LINDORFF

American foreign policy is moving from the absurd to the ludicrous.

Back in 2002, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney managed to snooker the people of the United States, or at least a large number of us, into believing that Iraq, a pathetic Third World country ruled by a corrupt tin-pot dictator, was a grave danger to America, akin to Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1940. We learned how absurd that claim was when two hundred thousand American troops backed by the mightiest air force the world has ever seen, slammed into the country in March, 2003, and the Iraqi military simply folded up, and the Saddam regime along with it.

Now, President Obama appears ready to make an even more absurd claim, namely that the gravest threat facing this nation is posed by the country of Afghanistan. Now I’ll grant that Afghanistan, with a population of 33 million, is at third bigger than Iraq, which had a population of 24 million, at least until the US invasion and occupation led to the death of over a million of Iraqis. But aside from that, Afghanistan, a land-locked nation that lies between Iran and Pakistan, is far weaker and more primitive even than Iraq.

By any measure except population, Afghanistan suffers in comparison to Iraq. It has no air force at all. It barely has an army. Most of its people are illiterate and live in rural areas. Its people are extremely poor—among the poorest in the world. In many ways, Afghanistan is actually less a country than a region populated by a variety of feuding tribes—tribes that have different languages and cultures and even different racial backgrounds.

Do we really believe that this desperately poor and war-torn nation poses an existential threat—or any threat at all—to the US?

Oh please.

Okay, we know that there is a gang of mostly Arab terrorists going by the name of Al Qaeda that is hiding out in eastern Afghanistan, and that its leaders have allied this organization with the Taliban—the ousted rulers of Afghanistan who were pushed out of the capital of Kabul by US forces in 2001 following the 9-11 attacks. But since that relatively easy military incursion, all the US and its 34,000 troops in Afghanistan have managed to accomplish, besides installing a crooked puppet regime in the capital city, has been to create more and more hatred for the US as an occupying power, by killing large numbers of Afghan civilians through brutal raids on villages and by use of overwhelming and inherently indiscriminate airpower and remote-controlled missile-equipped drone aircraft.

Based upon the ludicrous premise that Afghanistan is the biggest military threat facing the US today, our new president, Barack Obama, is preparing to send another 30,000 US troops to that country, effectively doubling the number of American soldiers already there. Inevitably, this will mean more killing and more anger towards America among the local population.

Al Qaeda members, meanwhile, have largely moved away from the battle to Pakistan, a much larger nation to the east of Afghanistan, which raises the question: What the hell are we trying to do in Afghanistan?

Let’s get it straight. No Afghan has ever, to my knowledge, harmed the United States. I’m not sure most Afghanis, if they could scrape together the money to go to the US, would even know where this country is. (Okay, most Americans probably couldn’t tell you where Afghanistan is, either, but at least we have libraries, and computers, which the geographically challenged can turn to in order to locate the place. That’s not true for the people of Afghanistan, who have neither.)

For eight years, America has been attacking and destroying a country that is about as dangerous a threat to America as is Mali, or Haiti, or the Comoros Islands. If Obama follows through and doubles the number of troops fighting over there, it will just make this whole policy twice as stupid.

I’m sorry. I know Al Qaeda is a nasty gang, well funded by sources in Saudi Arabia, and well trained in the fine arts of terrorism by the CIA, which back in the day saw the group as a good proxy for harassing Soviet troops that were occupying Afghanistan. But if eight years of constant war by US troops in Afghanistan has been unable to stop or even seriously undermine Al Qaeda, I cannot understand the logic of doubling down on the bad bet.

If the US wants to defeat Al Qaeda, it needs to enlist the support of the governments of the countries where Al Qaeda is operating, and it needs to eliminate the outside financial support for Al Qaeda. The first prong of this strategy would require convincing the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to get serious about driving out Al Qaeda. That should not be difficult. If we stopped killing Afghanis, and if we stopped firing rockets into the sovereign nation of Pakistan, killing innocent Pakistanis in the process, and massively insulting the government of Pakistan, and if we instead offered aid to both countries, contingent upon their taking serious action to eliminate Al Qaeda, we would quickly see these foreign intruders in both countries driven out. As to the second prong, why is the US continuing to treat Saudi Arabia as a valued ally if it continues to allow wealthy Saudis to sent financial support to Al Qaeda? Yes Saudi Arabia is a major provider of oil to the US, but the US is the major supplier of arms to the government of Saudi Arabia. It’s easy to see where the US could tighten the screws to end the flow of money to terrorists.

And then there is this: The Vietnam War destroyed the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. The Iraq War destroyed the presidency of George Bush. Obama, if he orders an expansion of the war in Afghanistan, and thus takes ownership of that conflict, will be well on the way to destroying his own presidency.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Israel Finally Admits Using White Phosphorous in Attacks on Gaza

by James Hider in Jerusalem and Sheera Frenkel in Gaza City

After weeks of denying that it used white phosphorus in the heavily populated Gaza Strip, Israel finally admitted yesterday that the weapon was deployed in its offensive.

The army's use of white phosphorus - which makes a distinctive shellburst of dozens of smoke trails - was reported first by The Times on January 5, when it was strenuously denied by the army. Now, in the face of mounting evidence and international outcry, Israel has been forced to backtrack on that initial denial. "Yes, phosphorus was used but not in any illegal manner," Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, told The Times. "Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is holding an investigation concerning one specific incident."

The incident in question is thought to be the firing of phosphorus shells at a UN school in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on January 17. The weapon is legal if used as a smokescreen in battle but it is banned from deployment in civilian areas. Pictures of the attack show Palestinian medics fleeing as blobs of burning phosphorus rain down on the compound.

A senior army official also admitted that shells containing phosphorus had been used in Gaza but said that they were used to provide a smokescreen.

The Ministry of Defence gave lawyers the task before the attack of investigating the legal consequences of deploying white phosphorus - commonly stocked in Nato arsenals and used by US and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan - inside the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, and one of the most densely populated places in the world.

"From what I know, at least one month before it was used a legal team had been consulted on the implications," an Israeli defence official said. He added that Israel was surprised about the public outcry. "Everyone knew we were using it, and everyone else uses it. We didn't think it would get this much attention," he said.

Because Israel is not a signatory to the treaty that created the International Court of Justice in The Hague, it cannot be tried there. Any country that is a signatory to the Geneva Convention, however, can try to prosecute individuals who took part in the Gaza operation as culpable of war crimes.

Despite a denial when The Times first reported the use of white phosphorus, an army spokeswoman said yesterday that the military had never tried to cover up its deployment. "There was never any denial from the beginning," she said.

CHANGING TUNE

January 5 The Times reports that telltale smoke has appeared from areas of shelling. Israel denies using phosphorus

January 8 The Times reports photographic evidence showing stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells. Israel Defence Forces spokesman says: "This is what we call a quiet shell - it has no explosives and no white phosphorus"

January 12 The Times reports that more than 50 phosphorus burns victims are taken into Nasser Hospital. An Israeli military spokesman "categorically" denies the use of white phosphorus

January 15 Remnants of white phosphorus shells are found in western Gaza. The IDF refuses to comment on specific weaponry but insists ammunition is "within the scope of international law"

January 16 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters are hit with phosphorus munitions. The Israeli military continues to deny its use

January 21 Avital Leibovich, Israel's military spokeswoman, admits white phosphorus munitions were employed in a manner "according to international law"

January 23 Israel says it is launching an investigation into white phosphorus munitions, which hit a UN school on January 17. "Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF is holding an investigation concerning one specific unit and one incident"

Source: Times database

© 2009 The Sunday Times/UK

U.S. Moving Toward Czarism, Away From Democracy

By David Sirota

History's great American parables teach that if anything unified our founders, it was a deep antipathy to dictatorship. As bourgeois revolutionaries from Boston to Philadelphia courageously split with the British crown in 1776, they created three equal branches of government to prevent, in the words of James Madison, "a tyrannical concentration of all the powers" in a president's hands.

For two centuries since, civics books, Hollywood biopics and party convention speeches have constructed a mythology insisting that this democratic commitment to checks and balances makes our country a beacon of freedom - the "shining city on a hill" overlooking a despotic world below. We are told that democracy's tumult - its messy debates, legislative sausage-making and electoral friction - is the best way to guarantee that public policy represents public will, therefore making us a strong and durable nation.

If that is true, then every patriot should be concerned about the intensifying efforts to supplant democracy with something far more authoritarian. Call it American czarism.

That term should be as impossibly oxymoronic as crash landings and deafening silence, considering our Constitution's desire to create a "government of laws and not of men," as John Adams said. But politics is filled with paradoxes from Reagan Democrats to Obama Republicans, and czars - i.e., policymakers granted extralegal, cross-agency powers - have become increasingly prevalent in our government over the past century.

After the Great Flood of 1927, for instance, President Calvin Coolidge named Herbert Hoover the federal government czar overseeing relief efforts, and Hoover subsequently appointed "dictators" (he actually used that term) to help coordinate the response.

During the power consolidations of the New Deal in the 1930s, a Time magazine story headlined "Dictator or Democrat" reported on the "suspicions of those throughout the nation who have an uneasy feeling that [President Franklin] Roosevelt, under cover of the emergency, is trying 'to slip something over' on democracy." In the 1940s and 1950s, parks commissioner Robert Moses - famously known as "the power broker" - amassed so much personal authority that he was able to almost single-handedly redesign New York City. And lately, presidents have given us poverty, energy, drug, health and even Iraq war czars.

Until now, this slow lurch toward czarism has primarily reflected the ancient, almost innate human desire for power and paternalistic leadership. The current president reminded us that executives see all-powerful "deciders" when they look in the mirror. And Americans - sans kings to rally around - have been elevating commanders in chief to superhero status well before Barack Obama's Marvel comic-book debut and George Bush's flight-suited "Top Gun" impression in 2003.

In recent years, this culture of "presidentialism," as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the "unitary executive" that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government. But only in the past three months has American czarism metastasized from a troubling slow-growth tumor to a potentially deadly cancer.

In October, Congress relinquished its most basic oversight powers and gave Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sole authority to dole out billions of bailout dollars to Wall Street. At the same time, it did nothing when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke used fiats to commit "$5 trillion worth of new money, loan guarantees and loosened lending requirements," according to Politico - all while he refused to tell the public who is receiving the largesse.

And the Washington Post has reported that lawmakers may appoint a "car czar" who "would essentially control the purse strings" of an auto industry bailout and "could force Detroit's Big Three automakers into bankruptcy" if he or she didn't like their behavior.

Put bluntly, the unprecedented usurpation of spending power by the executive branch and the Federal Reserve is systematically undermining our democracy's most sacrosanct principle - the one that is supposed to ensure "the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people," as Madison said. And this new czarism is so strident because it reflects both executive power lust and the 21st century economy.

Today, keystrokes and mouse-clicks instantly whisk trillions of dollars across the planet, and many of those keystrokes and mouse-clicks are uninhibited by the grindingly slow processes of democracy.

Saudi princes don't have to publish announcements in a federal register before moving cash from sovereign wealth funds into foreign investments. China's rulers aren't obligated to obtain legislative approval when buying or dumping U.S. Treasury bills; and transnational corporations will not wait for public hearings before shuttering offices, eliminating jobs and cutting off credit.

Our nation is integrally connected to this fast-moving globalized economy, and American czarism effectively posits that in order to compete, we must anoint strongmen as saviors, prioritize speed instead of sobriety and emulate dictatorship instead of democracy.

Indeed, the Economist magazine's prediction that the "economic crisis may increase the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism" is coming true right here at home, as we seem ever more intent on replicating - rather than resisting - that model.

This, as much as personal hubris, explains why Paulson and Bernanke sought unprecedented latitude in spending trillions - they want to be able to move as fast as their autocratic counterparts in other countries, and believe congressional oversight will slow them down.

It explains why UC Berkeley economist Laura Tyson says we need an auto czar who will "take a number of approaches to this problem that are already known, that have been discussed endlessly, and force it through" - because to economists, a czar quickly "forcing it through" is more important than any consideration for democratic deliberation.

And it explains why when Obama aides this week demanded complete control over the second half of the Wall Street bailout funds, House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D- Mass., shirked his oversight duties and said he's "willing to accept their word" that they will spend the money responsibly. In czarism, that's what legislators do: "accept the word" of the czar.

In sum, it explains why the age-old struggle between capitalism and democracy is once again defining our politics - and why capitalism is now winning.

That triumph may be terrific for the czars and great for their industry suitors, but as the founders would likely agree, it is a pyrrhic victory for America.

David Sirota is an author and syndicated columnist.

The World Won't Buy Unlimited U.S. Debt

By PETER SCHIFF

January 24, 2009 "WSJ" -- -Barack Obama has spoken often of sacrifice. And as recently as a week ago, he said that to stave off the deepening recession Americans should be prepared to face "trillion dollar deficits for years to come."

But apart from a stirring call for volunteerism in his inaugural address, the only specific sacrifices the president has outlined thus far include lower taxes, millions of federally funded jobs, expanded corporate bailouts, and direct stimulus checks to consumers. Could this be described as sacrificial?

What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America's public debt -- most notably the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis -- need to be prepared to sacrifice. They have to fund America's annual trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. These creditor nations, who already own trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt, are the only entities capable of underwriting the spending that Mr. Obama envisions and that U.S. citizens demand.

These nations, in other words, must never use the money to buy other assets or fund domestic spending initiatives for their own people. When the old Treasury bills mature, they can do nothing with the money except buy new ones. To do otherwise would implode the market for U.S. Treasurys (sending U.S. interest rates much higher) and start a run on the dollar. (If foreign central banks become net sellers of Treasurys, the demand for dollars needed to buy them would plummet.)

In sum, our creditors must give up all hope of accessing the principal, and may be compensated only by the paltry 2%-3% yield our bonds currently deliver.

As absurd as this may appear on the surface, it seems inconceivable to President Obama, or any respected economist for that matter, that our creditors may decline to sign on. Their confidence is derived from the fact that the arrangement has gone on for some time, and that our creditors would be unwilling to face the economic turbulence that would result from an interruption of the status quo.

But just because the game has lasted thus far does not mean that they will continue playing it indefinitely. Thanks to projected huge deficits, the U.S. government is severely raising the stakes. At the same time, the global economic contraction will make larger Treasury purchases by foreign central banks both economically and politically more difficult.

The root problem is not that America may have difficulty borrowing enough from abroad to maintain our GDP, but that our economy was too large in the first place. America's GDP is composed of more than 70% consumer spending. For many years, much of that spending has been a function of voracious consumer borrowing through home equity extractions (averaging more than $850 billion annually in 2005 and 2006, according to the Federal Reserve) and rapid expansion of credit card and other consumer debt. Now that credit is scarce, it is inevitable that GDP will fall.

Neither the left nor the right of the American political spectrum has shown any willingness to tolerate such a contraction. Recently, for example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman estimated that a 6.8% contraction in GDP will result in $2.1 trillion in "lost output," which the government should redeem through fiscal stimulation. In his view, the $775 billion announced in Mr. Obama's plan is two-thirds too small.

Although Mr. Krugman may not get all that he wishes, it is clear that Mr. Obama's opening bid will likely move north considerably before any legislation is passed. It is also clear from the political chatter that the policies most favored will be those that encourage rapid consumer spending, not lasting or sustainable economic change. So when the effects of this stimulus dissipate, the same unbalanced economy will remain -- only now with a far higher debt load.

If any other country were to face these conditions, unpalatable measures such as severe government austerity or currency devaluation would be the only options. But with our currency's reserve status, we have much more attractive alternatives. We are planning to spend as much as we like, for as long as we like, and we will let the rest of the world pick up the tab.

Currently, U.S. citizens comprise less than 5% of world population, but account for more than 25% of global GDP. Given our debts and weakening economy, this disproportionate advantage should narrow. Yet the U.S. is asking much poorer foreign nations to maintain the status quo, and incredibly, they are complying. At least for now.

You can't blame the Obama administration for choosing to go down this path. If these other nations are giving, it becomes very easy to take. However, given his supposedly post-ideological pragmatic gifts, one would hope that Mr. Obama can see that, just like all other bubbles in world history, the U.S. debt bubble will end badly. Taking on more debt to maintain spending is neither sacrificial nor beneficial.

Mr. Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market is Down (Little Books. Big Profits)" (Wiley, 2008).

Another War, Another Defeat

The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.

By John J. Mearsheimer

Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza.

Israel rejected that offer and with American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the Palestinians living there.

Hamas responded by continuing to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more. This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement, which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present war, which began on Dec. 27.

The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

As the violence increased, Hamas made clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally ended.

If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.

This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians, and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

Israelis tend to be blunt, and they occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.

This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.

Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.

More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk. __________________________________________

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Reasons for War?

By SAUL LANDAU

On January 18, Israel and Hamas agreed to a weeklong cease-fire. Prime Minister Olmert declared Israel had achieved its objectives. “Hamas was hit hard, in its military arms and in its government institutions. Its leaders are in hiding and many of its men have been killed,” said Olmert.

More than 1,100 Palestinians lay dead, more than a third women and children, countless more wounded and Gaza’s physical infrastructure destroyed or badly damaged. 13 Israelis died. Hamas still rules Gaza – from within, but has no control of its borders – and presumably can still smuggle weapons in from Egypt.

The truce is beyond shaky as President Obama takes office with an unqualified “I support Israel” policy and a core of Israeli kiss asses for advisers (Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk as examples).

The world witnessed another stupid and lopsided war in which Israel delivered deadly round of rockets and bombs into civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. As people shook their heads in disgust and bewilderment, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained the two possibilities: “If Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to educate Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.”

A small price to pay -- 1,400 dead – to learn an important lesson! Obviously the newly educated but now less numerous Palestinians will shout “Never again” as their slogan opposing Hamas in the next elections in Gaza thus showing that they “understand the consequences of previously voting for Hamas.” (Jan. 14)

Friedman also labeled Bush’s invasion of Iraq “the most noble act of US foreign policy since the Marshall Plan.” (NY Times, Nov. 30, 2003)

In 2006, Friedman praised Israel for successfully teaching a lesson by bombing and killing 1,000 plus Lebanese. “Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

One problem emerged with Friedman’s logic: Hezbollah emerged far stronger from the 2006 Israeli invasion; Israel much weaker.

Luckily, fanatic Arab militants seem to reject Friedman’s pedagogical method. Imagine, if they began to teach Jews around the world a similar lesson about the violent consequences that would result from supporting Israel! Imagine Friedman’s equivalent writing for the Nazi propaganda machine explaining how killing civilians in London, Leningrad or Warsaw would educate those supporting resistance to the folly of their loyalties!

The Friedman clones on op-ed pages and print and TV newsrooms throughout the West allows Israeli propaganda to prevail. But not as much as previously!

In a McClatchy/Ipsos poll of 1000 Americans adults, 44% supported Israel’s use of force, and 44% blamed Hamas for the Israeli invasion. Only 14% thought Israel had started the conflict. 57% thought Hamas was using excessive force, while only 36%, Israel. (LA Daily News, 1/14/09)

The media mostly omitted coherent history of Israel occupying Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War and its subsequent illegal occupation of the territory; or that the UN has repeatedly demanded in resolutions that Israel withdraw. After Hamas won the 2006 Gaza elections, Israeli authorities stopped delivering tax revenues on imports that the Gaza government needed to pay bills and police.

Israeli blockaded the Gaza border – an act of war under international law. This provoked the rocket firings into Israel, most of them missing human targets. Simultaneously, Israelis fired missiles into Gaza killing and wounding far more people than the inaccurate Palestinian missiles. The Israeli blockade stopped medical supplies as well, leading to more death and disaster.

The US press didn’t print the most outrageous pro Israel statements.

At a rally in New York, reported Max Blumenthal, “a man held a banner reading, ‘Islam Is A Death Cult.’” Some rally-goers “called for Israel to “wipe them [people of Gaza] all out.” (Alternet, Jan 13)

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Israel Beiteinu, which polls say will soon be Israel’s fourth largest party, demanded in a university speech in Israel that bombing in Gaza continue until Hamas “loses the will to fight.” Lieberman continued: “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II.” (Jerusalem Post,January 13, 2009)

Instead of reading such statements, the US public got regurgitated reports about Israeli leaders courageously removing troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005. Surprise! On New Year’s Eve CNN asked: who broke the June 2008 ceasefire that led to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza? Mustafa Barghouti got air time. In 2005, this Palestinian physician got almost 20% of the vote for President of the Palestinian National Authority against Mahmoud Abbas. “The world press,” he declared, “is overwhelmed with the Israeli narrative, which is incorrect. The Israeli spokespersons have been spreading lies.”

Barghouti charged that “Israel started attacking Hamas, and never lifted the blockade on Gaza.” CNN’s Rick Sanchez then said he had confirmed Barghouti’s version of the facts. Israel, not Hamas had started the war.

A NY Times columnist (Nicholas Kristoff, January 8), a Wall St. Journal writer (George Bisharat, January 10) and Time (January 8) also questioned Israel’s behavior. (“Why Israel can’t win”)

Until Israel began its Gaza massacre, US and mainstream Israeli media have accepted as axiomatic that Hamas means “terrorists.” Reporters have repeated the line about Hamas using Gaza residents as “human shields” after launching missiles targeting innocent Israelis. Humane and very patient Israel had no choice but to bomb the bejeezus (or the bemohammed) out of the “military installations” -- homes, clinics, refugee camps and schools as examples. Israelis naturally feel terrible about the thousands of dead and wounded women and children.

Rashid Khalidi pointed out “as an occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.” It has failed miserably to meet this responsibility. (NY Times, January 8)

Pro-Israeli media denigrates cowardly Hamas for seeking shelter among civilians. Imagine, as Uri Avnery suggested, German propaganda during World War II. “The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins.” Hamas, Uri Avnery wrote, do not “hide behind the population.” Rather, the population views them as their only defenders. (The Progressive, Jan. 11)

In 2006, George Bush pushed free and fair elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas won. The residents had become fed up with corrupt and insensitive Fatah, the US backed party of the Palestinian National Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas.

Because Palestinians made “the wrong choice,” Israel shut off fuel and electricity and restricted needed imports and peoples’ movements. The result: high unemployment, extreme poverty and hunger. Israel had used economic means to punish Gaza’s population for its electoral choice. Then, it subjected them to collective military punishment. Israel’s kill and destroy method seems unlikely, however, to convince Palestinians to reject Hamas, just as other people suffering punishment from oppressive military goliaths did not yield to brute force – even those who read Thomas Friedman on pedagogy.

Israel presented its bombing as deterrence, teaching a lesson by killing. Much of the world saw the response as disproportionate and downright barbaric. The US equivalent of suffering in Gaza as of January 16 would have meant 226,000 dead Americans, one third women and children and 1 million plus wounded, a third of them women and children.

Israeli apologists refer to bombing the UN Fakhura school and the Jabaliya refugee camp as inevitable mistakes of a necessary war. Israel must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets and Hamas fighters had fired mortars from or near the school. Later, Israel showed an aerial photo portraying the school and mortar, but subsequently admitted the photo was a year old.

Although the US public tended to believe Israel’s version, not the retraction, the war has caused confusion. What was this war about? Could it be as banal as gaining seats in the coming elections? That Israeli Defense and Foreign Ministers Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni have shown their voting publics – elections next month – they have bigger cojones than the hawkish Bibi Netanyahu?

Saul Landau received the Bernardo O’Higgins award from the Republic of Chile for his work on human rights. His latest book is A Bush and Botox World (AK/CounterPunch Press).