Well, whaddaya know?!
After losing 11 primaries in a row, last night Hillary won in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island.
That means she still has a chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee. And it means the American people will have to suffer through what feels like another 200 debates between Hillary and Obama. Oh joy!
Following a recent CNBC debate among the Republican presidential candidates, the network polled the audience asking the obvious question, “Who won?” After 7000 televotes were counted, Paul had an overwhelming margin of 75%. Paul supporters were livid that the network not only took the poll down but also all evidence of it on CNBC’s web site. http://www.cnbc.com/id/21257762/site/14081545/?site=14081545
Perform a search for Paul on You Tube and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands of links to every possible Ron Paul bit of minutia. Browse through Digg, and what you’ll find is a loyal cadre of Paulies downplaying anything negative of the candidate, and promoting everything positive, no matter of how minor.
Recent polling gives Paul, at best, 5% of the Republican vote, with more realistic numbers in the 2% range. http://www.pollingreport.com/wh08rep.htm Paulies claim a conspiracy behind the low numbers, one driven by a media fearing a Paul nomination. Yet, when given the opportunity, Paul supporters flock to online polls as a virtual flash mob, mercilessly flooding these polls with multiple phony votes.
So, what could we expect from a Paul nomination? Is this a reflection of a true movement or is it simply a virtual attempt at controlling the election?
Today’s book recommendation comes from The Nation:
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush by Barry Lando.
Sanctions were the weapon of mass destruction used against the Iraqi people to starve and reduce them to a Third World level of poverty.
Lando’s work opens our eyes to one of the most tragic episodes in the lengthy, sorry history of “Western” dealings with Iraq. He offers a well-researched account of Iraq’s external (and, to a lesser extent, internal) history since the British carved that unlikely state out of the moribund Ottoman Empire in 1919.
History doesn’t change much as he invokes Col. T.E. Lawrence’s well-known injunction of that moment: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour…. We are today not far from disaster.”
The British preferred Winston Churchill’s imperial ambitions. We chose Bushes, a Clinton and their respective entourages. Either way, disaster was not far behind. Iraq floats on a sea of oil, reputedly with the world’s third-largest reserves. The Great Powers naturally have been drawn to it, but they have cared nothing for the country that might nominally exist.
While we’re on the subject of western colonialism, take a look at this article from The Guardian:
Delhi, 1857: a bloody warning to today’s imperial occupiers
A century and a half after the Indian mutiny, echoes of the arrogance and lies that sparked insurgency could not be clearer
Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the largest and bloodiest anticolonial revolt against any European empire in the 19th century. Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army, all but 7,796 turned against the British. In many places the sepoys were supported by a widespread civilian rebellion.
There is much about British imperial adventures in the east at this time, and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us today. The British had been trading in India since the early 17th century. But the commercial relationship changed towards the end of the 18th, as a new group of conservatives came to power in London, determined to make Britain the sole global power. Lord Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington and governor general in India from 1798 to 1805, called his new approach the Forward Policy. But it was in effect a project for a new British century. Wellesley made it clear he would not tolerate any European rivals, especially the French, and planned to remove any hostile Muslim regimes that might presume to resist the west’s growing might.The Forward Policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed. Local laws which offended Christian sensibilities were abrogated - the burning of widows, for instance, was banned. One of the East India Company directors, Charles Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how he believed providence had brought the British to India for a higher purpose: “Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we draw a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?”
The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. In February 1856 they marched into Avadh, also known by the British as Oudh. To support the annexation, a “dodgy dossier” was produced before parliament, so full of distortions and exaggerations that one British official who had been involved in the operation described the parliamentary blue book (or paper) on Oudh as “a fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance” that was refuted “by one simple and obstinate fact”, that the conquered people of Avadh clearly “preferred the slandered regime” of the Nawab “to the grasping but rose-coloured government of the company”.
The reaction to this came with the great mutiny, or as it is called in India, the first war of independence. Though it reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were alien, the uprising was consistently articulated as a defensive action against the inroads missionaries and their ideas were making in India, combined with a generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadis. There was even a regiment of “suicide ghazis” who vowed to fight until they met death.
Events reached a climax on September 14 1857, when British forces attacked the besieged city. They proceeded to massacre not only the rebel sepoys and jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down. Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin.
The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with being behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching from Mecca and Iran to Delhi’s Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the prosecutor argued that “to Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857″. Like some of the ideas propelling recent adventures in the east, this was a ridiculous and bigoted oversimplification of a more complex reality. For, as today, western politicians found it easier to blame “Muslim fanaticism” for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own foreign policies. Western politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of “incarnate fiends”, conflating armed resistance to invasion and occupation with “pure evil”.
Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering them, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what the US and Israel are learning now, that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the east. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.
Tags: 
oil 
iraq war 
web of deceit 
neo-colonialism 
pnac 
project for a new american century
Carl Bloice, writing for Fahamu in Oxford, UK, elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region:
The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007.
Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how ‘to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?’
Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: ‘Perhaps US-based organizations don’t have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with “fundamental Islamic” forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of “terrorists”.’
To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa.
‘The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade - but you’d hardly know it from your nightly news’, wrote Andrew Cawthorne for Reuters from Nairobi last week.
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now recently examined the coverage of ABC, NBC and CBS on Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion.
ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating three whole sentences to it. Despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon.
One War Criminal Down, A Fistful to Go
by Paul Craig Roberts
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, or more accurately, George W. Bush’s lap dog, has resigned to England’s relief.
Boris Johnson at the Daily Telegraph wrote that “Blair cannot escape the blame for a disaster in which at least 60,000 (and possibly 10 times as many) Iraqis have died, and which is causing 40,000 Iraqis to flee the country every month.”
The Daily Mail’s Piers Morgan wrote that Blair’s complicity in the invasion of Iraq transformed England “into a more dangerous, paranoid, despised and ridiculed country. Blair’s reign will be remembered for one disaster of epic proportions, one appalling legacy.”
Claire Short, a former Blair minister, said, “I think Tony’s place in history is Iraq and the deceit and the desperate mess and it’s sad. It’s going to be a very bad place in history.”
Many wonder why Blair destroyed his reputation and that of his country, put himself at risk of being hauled before the International Criminal Court, and squandered his time as prime minister providing cover for George Bush’s war of aggression. The answer must be money. We will see which US corporate boards take Blair as a director and which groups pay him six-figure honorariums for speeches.
