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Tag: Iraq

Iran and the Axis of Hypocrisy

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a new coalition of national unity, elections in the country have been pushed back by months, and suddenly the danger of an armed strike against Iran, by Israel, has become more acute. It is now ten years since the January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech – the first since the 9/11 attacks on New York City – where then U.S. President George W. Bush announced to the world that the U.S. was up against an “Axis of Evil”, a label derived from the “Axis of Hatred”, coined by Canadian conservative journalist, David…

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The Gutter Press and the ‘War on Terror’

Letter to the Editor submitted to The Globe and Mail June 26, 2008 • George Bush is white. Stephen Harper is white. Tony Blair is white. So, I will now write about white terrorism as a plague covering the planet, given that several hundred thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a result of the military actions of these white men, are dead, maimed and/or traumatized. I will use the term “honky.” Were I to do this, of course, and submitted it as an article to the very respected The Globe and Mail, it would be rejected as being inflammatory, crude…

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The man who excommunicated Bush and Blair

The war in Iraq “indicates that leaders of the invading states did not listen to the church, and hence, we deem them excommunicates and perverted.”[1] These were the words of Father Attallah Hanna in April 2003. He was expressing the outrage of Palestinian Christians over the invasion of Iraq. As a result of this excommunication, George Bush, then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, and Blair’s then foreign minister Jack Straw, were banned from visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, one of the Christianity’s holiest sites. March 29, Attallah Hanna took his anti-war message to more than 600…

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Ten years of PNAC barbarism

It is now a decade since the establishment of the Project for A New American Century (PNAC) – the neo-conservative think tank whose ideas formed the backbone for the two administrations of George W. Bush. The central legacy of PNAC will undoubtedly be the war on Iraq. It is, put simply, a legacy of barbarism. Some of the signatories on the original PNAC “Statement of Principles” were hard to take seriously (remember Dan Quayle, the vice-president who couldn’t spell “potato” – or Francis Fukuyama who thought that history had ended?). But others – Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld…

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Was ‘troop surge’ Bush’s Cambodia?

By 1970, it was clear to most that the United States could not win the war in Vietnam. But a defeated imperialist power is not a power without teeth. Before it finally left in 1975, the U.S. twice escalated the war massively. The first was April 30, 1970, when then president Richard Nixon announced a joint, U.S./South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The second was in late 1972, when Nixon ordered a horrendous bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and its principal harbour, Haiphong. The anti-war movement today has been bracing for our own “Cambodia”. We, like the…

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End game in ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’

The British are withdrawing from the province of Basra in the south of Iraq, and the occupation of that country is now clearly exposed as an almost completely U.S. affair.[1] When the Iraq war began in 2003, it was already considerably different than the earlier war in 1991. The “Coalition of the Willing” put together by George W. Bush was just a shadow of the massive force, which backed his father’s war. France, Germany and Canada were among the major powers that refused to participate in 2003. Now, this already weak coalition is starting to completely unravel – it is…

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