By AlJazeeraEnglish, March 11, 2010

On this episode of the Riz Khan show we ask if US weapons are behind the sharp rise in birth defects in Falluja. Residents of the Iraqi city blame the surge in chronic deformities on controversial weapons used by US forces against Sunni fighters in 2004. But the US military has dismissed those allegations.

To sign a petition directing the United Nations to address the situation, go to Help Deformed Children in Fallujah.

Unnatural Acts

By Chris Floyd, Counterpunch, March 8, 2010

All who draw the sword will die by the sword.

– Yeshua Ha-Notsri, Palestinian dissident, c. 33 CE.

As we all know – or rather, as everyone but those who climb and claw their way to the top of power’s greasy pole knows – the effects of war are vast, unforeseeable, long-lasting — and uncontrollable. The far-reaching ripples of the turbulence will churn against distant shores and hidden corners, then roil back upon you in ways you could never imagine, for generations, even centuries.

Nor is “victory” in war proof against these deleterious effects. For the brutalization, moral coarsening, corruption and concentration of elite power that attend every war do not simply disappear from a society when the fighting stops. They persist, like microbes, in myriad forms, working with slow, corrosive force to degrade and deform the victors. Indeed, victory in battle often leads a society to enshrine war’s most pernicious attributes: violence is ennobled, and becomes entrenched as an ever-ready instrument of national policy. Militarism is exalted, the way of peace dishonored: cries of “Appeasers! Cowards! Traitors!” greet every approach that fails to brandish the threat of extreme violence, that fails to “keep all options on the table.”

The apparent “lesson” of victory – that there can be no right without armed might to win and safeguard it – quickly degenerates into the belief that armed might is right. Military power becomes equated with moral worth, and the ability to wreak savage, unimaginable destruction through armed violence — via thoughtless obedience to the orders of “superiors” – becomes a cherished attribute of society.

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By the Canadian Peace Alliance, March 5, 2010

The Conservative’s 2010 Budget still represents an unprecedented increase in defence spending, says the Canadian Peace Alliance, Canada’s largest peace network. While there is a small decrease in the amount previously allocated to the military under the Canada First Defence Strategy, overall defence spending continues to go up.

“This is still a war budget,” said Christine Jones, co-chair of the Canadian Peace Alliance. “While the Harper government wants Canadians to tighten their belts, the military gets billions more each year.”

The Budget reduces annual defence spending by $525 million in 2012 and $1 billion annually after 2012, but this is an insignificant change to the Canada First Defence Strategy, which allocates $490 billion in military spending by 2025.

“The Conservatives are giving 20 billion annually to the arms dealers rather than to Canadians who are reeling from the economic crisis”, said Derrick O’Keefe, co-chair of the CPA. “Worse still, the Budget figures don’t include the costs of ‘incremental funding’ such as the war in Afghanistan, which has already cost Canadians more than $20 billion.”

The Canadian Peace Alliance calls on the Government of Canada to redirect money earmarked for the military to be used for much needed social and environmental programs.

By Bill Robinson, Rideau Institute, March 5, 2010

(Ottawa) The new federal budget commits the Harper government to going ahead with its planned increases in military spending in both the coming year (fiscal year 2010-11) and the next, after which, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says, the size of planned increases in military spending will be reduced for two years. The military budget is then projected to resume the upward track promised in the Harper government’s so-called Canada First Defence Strategy.

As Flaherty explains it, “Budget 2010 reduces growth in National Defence’s budget by $525 million in 2012–13 and $1 billion annually beginning in 2013–14. Defence spending will continue to grow but more slowly than previously planned.” The Finance Minister’s chart, above, illustrates his explanation.

But for the time being at least, the government’s spending plans are about as clear as mud. For starters, Flaherty’s chart excludes incremental spending on Afghanistan and other operations, such as Olympics security. The actual level of military spending is thus higher than shown in the chart, although that extra amount is likely to decline as the Afghanistan mission winds down (assuming nothing comparable takes its place).

And that’s not all. While the chart shows a 2009-10 spending level of slightly more than $18 billion, the budgetary Main Estimates give a figure of $19.2 billion for that fiscal year – still not including the costs of Afghanistan and other operations. You have to go to the 2009-10 Report on Plans and Priorities to find the actual level of 2009-10 spending, which, once Afghanistan, other missions, and sundry supplementary top-ups are added, is expected to total more than $21 billion.

The military spending figure for the coming fiscal year, according to the Flaherty chart, will be about $19 billion, or nearly one billion more than in 2009-10. Meanwhile, the Main Estimates put the 2010-11 figure at $21.1 billion, or nearly $2 billion more than reported in the 2009-10 Main Estimates.

So are we looking at a 5% increase in military spending this year or a 10% increase? It’s likely that the 2010-11 Main Estimates figure includes most or all of expected incremental operations spending, whereas the 2009-10 figure did not, so the increase is probably closer to 5%, but we don’t yet know that for sure. The 2010-11 Report on Plans and Priorities will give us the most complete and reliable figure, but that document hasn’t been released yet. It may be out later this month.

In the meantime, count on the usual suspects to call the government’s promise to reduce the rate of increase in the military budget a couple of years from now a cut in the budget. The rest of us can wonder how the 2.7% annual increases promised in the Canada First Defence Strategy turned into something that looks more like a 5% (or greater) increase in this year of supposed restraint.

Bill Robinson is a defence analyst and senior adviser of the Rideau Institute.

Fanning the Flames of Another War in the Caucasus?

By Eric Walberg, Counterpunch, March 5-6, 2010

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world expected a new era of peace and disarmament. But what happened? Instead of diminishing, US and NATO presence throughout Europe, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia rapidly increased, and the world experienced one war after another — in the Caucasus, Yugoslavia , Iraq and Afghanistan , each one hotter and more horrible than the last. And we are far from seeing the end to the savagery now unleashed by the anti-communist jinni.

Though a pokey backwater for the past millennium, the south Caucasus is now a key battleground, the “critical strategic crossroads in 21st century geopolitics”, writes analyst Rick Rozoff, the focus of ambitious energy transit projects and a military corridor reaching from Western Europe to East Asia, controlled (or not so “controlled”) from Washington and Brussel.

Surely peace in this vital region should be a paramount goal for both Russia and the West, for their own reasons — Russia because, well because it is there and its cultural and economic links are vital to Russia ’s well being. The US, if only to benefit economically, since peace everywhere is a boon to economic well being and logically should be blessed by the world’s superpower, whether or not it is a benevolent one.

But this logic has been betrayed — egregiously, in the case of US abetting Georgia in its disastrous war against Russia in 2008, less obviously in likely covert US and other involvement in Chechnya and its neighbours, as well as in the Armenia-Azerbaijan stand-off over Nagorno Karabakh.

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U.S. Tightens Missile Shield Encirclement Of China And Russia

by Rick Rozoff, Global Research, March 4, 2010

So far this year the United States has succeeded in inflaming tensions with China and indefinitely holding up a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia through its relentless pursuit of global interceptor missile deployments.

On January 29 the White House confirmed the completion of a nearly $6.5 billion weapons transfer to Taiwan which includes 200 advanced Patriot anti-ballistic missiles. Earlier in the same month it was reported that Washington is also to provide Taiwan with eight frigates which Taipei intends to equip with the Aegis Combat System that includes the capacity for ship-based Standard Missile-3 interceptors.

The Aegis sea-based component of the expanding U.S. interceptor missile system already includes Japan, South Korea and Australia, and with Taiwan added China would be justified in being apprehensive.

On February 28 the U.S. House and Senate foreign affairs committees permitted the “sale to Taiwan of missiles, helicopters and ships valued at about $6.4 billion” despite weeks of protests from China. “The U.S. Defense Department wants to sell Taiwan the most advanced Patriot anti-missile system….The system, valued at $2.8 billion, would add to Taiwan’s network of 22 missile sites around the country….” [1]

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang recently stated “The responsibility for the current difficulties in China-U.S. relations [belongs] completely to the U.S. side” for failing to recognize and respect China’s “core interests.” [2]

If the proposed placement of U.S. missile shield components in Poland, the Czech Republic, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Alaska and elsewhere were explained by alleged missile threats emanating from Iran and North Korea, the transfer of U.S. Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles to Taiwan – and, as was revealed in January, 35 miles from Russian territory in Poland – represents the crossing of a new threshold. The Patriots in Taiwan and Poland and the land- and sea-based missiles that will follow them are intended not against putative “rogue states” but against two major nuclear powers, China and Russia.

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For this and other articles by Rick Rozoff, visit Stop NATO.

by talkingsticktv, February 26, 2010

Interview with Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of Obstacles to Peace: A Re-framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel.

Towards America’s Electronic, Troop-less Wars

Future U.S Wars will involve Massive Use of Drones

A RQ-1 Predator from the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron lands at Tallil Air Base, Iraq on Jan. 20, 2004. (UPI Photo/Suzanne M. Jenkins/AFIE)

by Prof. Marc W. Herold, Global Research, March 1, 2010

Future U.S wars in the Third World will involve massive use of drones to police the territory, employ local satrap forces (like those of Karzai’s Afghan Army) and once the territory has been pacified sufficiently, the deployment of “Government Ready-to-Rule (GRR)” kits.

The drones provide the critical and the weak link: critical insofar as they represent the ultimate American-style war where only the “Others” (opponents and civilians) die but weak insofar as this type of warfare only works against an opponent without any anti-drone/aircraft capability. In other words, this type of technological warfare can only be carried out upon weak opponents lacking independent industrial capacities (not against China, Russia, and India).

This approach represents the culmination of disconnecting the delivery of deadly force – the rain of Hellfire missiles – upon the Others and incurring no human (physical or psychological – PTSD) costs. Or put in other terms, it represents the quintessential American way of “solving” problems with technological short-cuts, a military effort begun in 1942 with the Allied fire-bombing of German cities.

The current American war in Afghanistan is a harbinger of what is to come, America’s electronic, troop-less war.

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By Ashley Smith, Counterpunch, Feb. 24, 2010

It’s now more than a month since the earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting millions of people into the most desperate conditions.

But according to the U.S. government, Haitians have a lot to be thankful for.

On February 12, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted, “In terms of humanitarian aid delivery…frankly, it’s working really well, and I believe that this will be something that people will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we’ve been able to sort ourselves out as donors on the ground and responding to an earthquake.”

Bill Quigley, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, had a simple response to Merten’s claim: “What? Haiti is a model of how the international government and donor community should respond to an earthquake? The ambassador must be overworked and need some R&R. Look at the facts.”

What are the facts? The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that “more than 3 million people–one in every three Haitians–were severely affected by the earthquake, of whom 2 million need regular food aid. Over 1.1 million people are homeless, many of them still living under sheets and cardboard in makeshift camps. The government of Haiti estimates that at least 300,000 people were injured during the quake.”

So far, the relief effort has only managed to provide 270,000 people with basic shelters like tents. More than 1 million people still have little access to food and water and have to scrape by to find sustenance. Even worse, because the relief operation is so inefficient, Haitians report that some of the food spends so long at the airport that it is rotten by the time it gets to the hungry.

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By Russia Today, Feb. 19, 2010

A UN nuclear watchdog report suggests Iran could be developing a nuclear bomb, apparently confirming long-held suspicions in the West. But Tehran denies the claims, again insisting that its atomic intentions are peaceful. Michel Chossudovsky, who’s from an independent Canadian policy research group, believes that what Iran says hardly matters, because the U.S. is planning for war…