Is It A War On Islam?

I think anti-war people are wetting their pants for all the wrong reasons. there isn`t going to be a war . However, Us is using it as a front to station its military throughout Muslim world. In other words the military occupation of Muslim lands, including Paksitan is complete. In about couple of months Iraq will be declared in ``compliance`` and war will be averted declaring US as the savior of humanity since it didn`t kill anybody. The staus quo will persist with the only change that there will be about 250K US army stationed at all strategic locations to control the natural resources and governments of the Muslim world. The menace is bgger than war.

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Here`s John LeCarre: Famous MI-spy and great novelist. One of my favourites. An Insider!

Check out complete talk at www.sundayherald.com/30700


One of Britain`s leading writers sparked controversy last week when he accused President Bush of being driven to war by the thirst for oil and power. Here, for the first time, is John le Carré`s full and specially updated essay



AMERICA has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the domestic rights and freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.

The hounding of non-national US residents continues apace. `Non-permanent` males of North Korean and Middle Eastern descent are disappearing into secret imprisonment on secret charges on the secret word of judges. US-resident Palestinians who were formerly ruled stateless, and therefore not deportable, are being handed over to Israel for `resettlement` in Gaza and the West Bank, places where they may never have set foot before.

Are we playing the same game here in Britain? I expect so. Another 30 years and we`ll be allowed to know.

The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press: see page A27 if you can find and understand it.

No American administration has ever held its cards so close to its chest. If the intelligence services know nothing, that will be the best-kept secret of all. Remember that these are the same organisations who brought us the biggest failure in intelligence history: 9/11.

The imminent war was planned years before Osama bin Laden struck, but it was Osama who made it possible. Without Osama, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world`s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But Osama conveniently swept all that under the carpet. Eighty-eight per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of US nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, tailored to respond equally to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the hands of `rogue states`. So we can all breathe easy.

And America is not only deciding unilaterally who may or may not possess these weapons. It also reserves to itself the unilateral right to deploy its own nuclear weapons without compunction whenever and wherever it considers its interests, friends and allies threatened. Precisely who these friends and allies are going to be over the next years will, as ever in politics, be a bit of a conundrum. You make nice friends and allies, so you arm them to the teeth. Then one day they`re not your friends and allies any more, so you nuke them.

It is worth remembering here for just how many long hours, and how deeply, the US cabinet weighed the option of nuking Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. Happily for all of us, but for the Afghans in particular whose complicity in 9/11 was much less than Pakistan`s, they decided to make do with 25,000 ton `conventional` daisy-cutters, which by all accounts deliver as much clout as a small nuke anyway. But next time it`ll be for real.


Quite what war 88% of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer`s pocket? At what cost -- because most of those 88% are thoroughly decent and humane people -- in Iraqi lives? It is probably by now a state secret, but Desert Storm cost Iraq at least twice as many lives as America lost in the entire Vietnam war.

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America`s anger from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent opinion poll tells us that one in two Americans now believes Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being threatened, bullied, browbeaten and kept in a permanent state of ignorance and fear, with a consequent dependence upon its leadership. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should, with any luck, carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse -- see his speech of January 3 -- they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I`m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam`s downfall -- just not on Bush`s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

Old-style American colonialism is about to spread its iron wings over all of us. More Quiet Americans are slipping into unsuspecting townships than at the height of the Cold War.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God.

And God has very particular political opinions.

God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America.

God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America`s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is: a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another`s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the governor of Florida and the ex-governor of Texas. Bush Senior has some good wars to his credit, and a well-earned reputation for visiting America`s wrath on disobedient client states. One little war he hand-launched was against his own former CIA pal, Manuel Noriega of Panama, who served him well in the Cold War but got too big for his boots when it was over. Power doesn`t come much more naked than that, and Americans know it.

Care for a few pointers?

George W Bush. 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company. 1986-1990: senior executive of the Harken oil company.

Dick Cheney. 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company.

Condoleezza Rice. 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her.

And so on.

But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God`s work. We`re talking honest values here. And we know where your children go to school.


In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was paying a social visit to the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive their thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that `somebody` was Saddam Hussein. Hence Bush Junior`s cry: `That man tried to kill my Daddy.` But it`s still not personal, this war. It`s still necessary. It`s still God`s work. It`s still about bringing freedom and democracy to the poor, oppressed Iraqi people.

To be an acceptable member of the Bush team it seems you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. I think I may be Evil for writing this, but I`ll have to check.

What Bush won`t tell us is the truth about why we`re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil -- but oil, money and people`s lives. Saddam`s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Iran`s, next door, is to possess the world`s largest repositories of natural gas. Bush wants both, and who helps him get them will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn`t, won`t.

If Saddam didn`t have the oil, he could torture and murder his citizens to his heart`s content. Other leaders do it every day -- think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt -- but these are our friends and allies.

In reality, I suspect, Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to America or Britain. Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction, if he`s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes` notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of American growth.

What is at stake is not -- as presently offered -- a handful of empty rocket-heads, but America`s need to demonstrate its over-arching military power to all of us -- to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair`s part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can`t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can`t get out. Ironically, George W himself may be feeling a little bit the same way.

Rest at www.sundayherald.com/30700

A solid attempt to paint the current international scenario by the author.

Day by day, it appears that the environment gets more complicated

for Pakistan. Waht next?


Ras

Urstruly:

When are you going to beg for forgiveness from the Afghans? When are you going to apologize for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who launched rocket after rocket in to civillian areas of Kabul. When are you going to beg for forgivness from Afghan orohans who were victims of your drems of strategic depth? When are you going to ask for forgivness from Kashmiri girls defaced by acid throwing jehadis who hail from Muridke and have no business in Kashmir?

When are you going to realize that what the afghans did to the Punjabi Talibans was not a result of affection but pure hatred for the foeigners who came to colonize Afghanistan in the name of Islamic brotherhood?

Well Spoken, Hoodbhoy

I love the American people. There are no people on the earth like the simple, polite, helful and innocent country folks of America. (not the guys in big cities)

But something has really gone topsy-turvy with the Government and its policies. It simply fails to appreciate the difference between the Gulf War, the Afghan war and the approaching Iraq war.

If America attacks Iraq, this would be the beginning of the downfall of the great American Empire. History shows us that all great powers began to deay when they became unjust and unreasonable.

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sohail...thank you for putting it so succinctly...yes..if only we grasp `it is business nothing personal`...

...t

The real story is as old as history itself. The US is in dire economic straights and has to resort to theft or robbery to boost its sagging balance sheet.

Back in Ancient Greek times, Pericles established the Delian League to defend all of Greece against the Persians. The deal supposedly was that Athens would head the alliance and the other city states would place part of their own silver into a common storage at the island of Delos, to be used for common defense expenditure, if Persia were to attack again. Pericles basically stole that silver. He built the Parthenon and other great masterpieces of Classical Athens, but basically he was a thief. Eventually, on the verge of being found out, he began a war with Sparta. He did this as a distraction. But his war was a disaster. Athens never returned to its former glory. Fraud and theft by Pericles, destroyed Athens` real glory.

Baby Bush is NO Pericles. He is, however, facing a similar economic situation. A mountain of credit of $US 34 TRILLION and a NET US external debt of $US 9 TRILLION. The US requires an annual foreign funds inflow taking 71% of global financial savings. By any of these measurements, the US is near the end of the rope. Here and now, Baby Bush and the US establishment faces ``Pericles` choice``. They can admit to the credit expansion frauds since 1950 and turn around and face these US problems and fix them. They can do it knowing that the result would be the biggest, deepest, and longest depression in a century, but it would be worth it to keep the peace. Or they can do what Pericles did, they can go to war.

Baby Bush and his cronies first stole the White House, and are now bent upon robbing the world`s second largest oil reserve. At about 200 Billion barrels (say $30 per barrel) that gives them about a $6 Trillion boost. Not enough to solve the problem but a good first step.

That the thug of Bagdad, Saddam Hussein may well be the devil incarnate, does not take away from the simple reality that Baby Bush is just as much a common criminal as the druggie who holds up the ghetto convenience store at gun point and cleans up its cash register.

The paranoid may beleive that it is THEM that America is after, but they are just an easy target and thus have the privilege of being picked on. As they said in the movie Godfather, ``Its just business, nothing personal.``

...SR

mbenzenglish Yadihkumullah wa aslibalakum

Dr. Hoodbhoy -- u write:

`` Only a global peace movement that explicitly condemns terrorism against non-combatants can slow, and perhaps halt, George Bush`s madly speeding chariot of war. Massive anti-war demonstrations in Washington, New York, London, Florence, and other western cities have brought out hundreds of thousands at a time. ``

the answer is -- no `global peace movement` -- no `massive anti war` demonstrations` -- are ever going to deter -- this cold-hearted wretched cabal of criminal draftdodgers -- armchair Chicken Hawks -- and ex saddam lover rats --

who have no qualms about sacrificing the lives of someone elses sons ad daughters -- to make a few OIL bucks for themselves and their masters.

what they are saying to the WEAK -- BUILD YOUR OWN ATOM BOMB -- then and -- ONLY THEN -- we will sit down with you and negotiate --

It`s 30`s world coming to the 2002 all over again -- folks

the neo Hitlerians are coming out of their white house rat holes with --`PREMPTIVE PRETEXTS` -- of grabbing weaker countries` real estate and oil wealth -- all over again --

Countries of the Third world -- read the writing on the wall -- Beware of this Bumbling Buffoon -- the B52 Bomber Bush --

he WILL attack you -- if u DONT have the Bomb -- he will SLEEP with u -- if u HAVE the Bomb --

so hurry -- BUILD THE BOMB -- the `Premptive Invaders` are coming --

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my President -- the Cowardly Lion -- promises ``energy aid`` for Nuclear North Korea -- ``energy raid`` for Non-nuclear Iraq

the message to the third world:

-- GO NUCLEAR -- GO NCULEAR -- AVOID RAID -- GET ``ENERGY AID``
-- HURRY -- not many left

That pathetic Clown -- how did we ended up with -- this MORON Of The New MELLENIUM.

oh God of the seven heavens -- if u really R there -- and if u really R All that Merciful -- have mercy on us -- puleeeze deliver us from this Mongoloid Creep -- in 2004 -- will ya?

amen

my President -- the Cowardly Lion -- promises ``energy aid`` for Nuclear North Korea -- ``energy raid`` for Non-nuclear Iraq

the message to the third world:

-- GO NUCLEAR -- GO NCULEAR -- AVOID RAID -- GET ``ENERGY AID``
-- HURRY -- not many left

That pathetic Clown -- how did we end up with -- this MORON Of The New MELLENIUM.

oh God of the seven heavens -- if u really R there -- and if u really R All that Merciful -- have mercy on us -- puleeeze deliver us from this Mongoloid Creep -- in 2004 -- will ya?

amen