Few share our privilege, power and freedom – hence responsibility
Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy. In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.
-Ann Jones, writing from Afghanistan.
So given this extreme human suffering and repression imposed by the Saudi monarchy in multiple countries, what should the US – the Leader of the Free World and the self-proclaimed Deliverer of Freedom and Democracy – do? To Riedel, the answer is obvious: work even harder, do even more, to strengthen the Saudi regime as well as the neighboring tyrannies in order to crush the “Arab Awakenings” and ensure that democratic revolution cannot succeed in those nations.
-Greenwald skewers another
“It is our plea that the drone attacks upon us be stopped. Because the American government is oppressing us without reason.”
-Resident of Waziristan, in this film.
“There’s just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror – highly effective terror – regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it.”
–Glenn Greenwald on Obama’s drone program. A new report highlights the ways it terrorizes the people of Pakistan.
You don’t end war by encouraging a parliament to pass a resolution, or by swapping politicians and governing forms, but by creating a culture that finds blowing innocent men, women and children to bits as abhorrent as pushing an old lady into oncoming traffic. Those in power can’t start wars if they don’t find anybody willing to fight them.
-Charles Davis on social revolution
“That’s a legal issue. In U.S. law, it’s a covert action when the president says it’s a covert action. I think if you’re on the receiving end of the covert action, it’s an act of war.”
-Richard Clarke on US actions against Iran.
So Iran is supporting rebels fighting a dictatorship in one country (Yemen) and supporting the dictatorship in another (Syria). In those two countries, the U.S. is doing exactly the reverse: propping up the Yemeni dictatorship while arming the Syrian rebels. Why is one better than the other or a greater sign of aggression and threats?
–Greenwald on the NYT and its propagandizing on the Iranian “menace”.
“If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law [aka the Homeland Battlefield Bill] we cease to be a constitutional democracy.”
-Chris Hedges lays it out.
“Little of that [bad news] is expected to be mentioned publicly at the Chicago meeting [of NATO]. Mr. Obama and the NATO allies, European and American officials said, must instead present a picture of success that includes the possibility of reconciliation talks with the Taliban and a NATO withdrawal that is coming only after a job well done.”
-The New York Times explains how the Afghan disaster will be “presented” at the upcoming NATO summit. A European official added, “The most important thing now is the messaging.”
“There is no moral distinction between a drone strike and the explosion of the improvised explosive device, between a suicide bombing and a targeted assassination.”
-Chris Hedges in another lucid explanation of how war works.