Tag: Iraq

After Weeks of Telling Israel Not to Widen Gaza War, US Widens It to Iraq and Yemen

by Dave Lindorff, a 2019 “Izzy” winner who has written for Rolling Stone, NY Times, Nation, FAIR, Salon, London Review of Books.

Americans are finally getting sick of US warmongering. For weeks we’ve been reading articles and hearing broadcast reports about how the Biden administration, including President Biden himself and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as US Ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, have been warning Israel not to cause or allow the war on Gaza to spread across the borders of Israel and its occupied territories into other parts of the Middle East.

Suddenly, the US Navy ships based in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, along with some British ships and planes (added no doubt to be able to call it a “coalition” effort), have hit suspected Houthi militia targets in Yemen, making it the US itself, not Israel, that is “expanding the war.”

This act of war, ordered by President Biden without so much as a consultation with Congress, where progressive Democrats and Republicans are expressing outrage, is doubly dangerous because the Houthi militia being pummeled by the US and Britain are allies or/and are supplied by Iran.

The US also rolled out another provocation — a rocket attack that killed the leader of a Hezbollah militia unit right in central Baghdad. As the headline over that story in the Washington Post put it: “US Strike in Baghdad Raises Specter of a Wider War.”

“Raises the specter,” indeed, and not just outside Israel’s and Palestine’s borders but potentially all the way across Europe and the Atlantic to the US.

Now, admittedly, the US has long dismissed the laws of war, at least when it comes to applying them to its own actions. But however cavalier Washington is about those laws, they are universal and they do say that when a country does violate them, using certain banned weapons for example, or invading a country that doesn’t pose an immediate threat to the attacker, the country that is the target of such violation has the right to respond in kind. So Americans ought to know that attacking a Hezbollah target who is under the protection of the Iraqi government in central Baghdad is actually inviting Iraq, the host country, or Hezbollah, the victim, to attack leaders in the US, either where its troops are based abroad (for example in Iraq) or in DC. Same goes for the US attacks on Houthi militia sites in Yemen. After enduring attacks against their forces and the Yemeni people by Saudi Arabia for years (with US-supplied weapons and direct assistance), the Houthis, at this point, are warning that “US interests” will now be retaliated against.

It’s easy to see how this kind of tit-for-tat, started by a hubristic USA leadership, could quickly spiral out of control. Suppose the Houthis were to launch an anti-ship missile and sink or heavily damage a US Navy vessel in the Persian Gulf…

For the rest of this article, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com/p/after-weeks-of-telling-israel-not. For this and other articles: https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com.

End Support for Warmongers at Yale

by Daud Shad, 2021 Yale College graduate

Members of the Yale community and beyond are joining the call for Yale to End Support for Warmongers! The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has renewed public scrutiny of the global military-industrial complex and the War on Terror, which has directly killed more than 900,000 people and cost over $8 trillion while completely devastating countries.

The recent resignation of Yale Professor Beverly Gage from the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy brings that public scrutiny even closer to campus. Professor Gage re-signed due to donor pressure to teach the program “the way Henry Kissinger would” and include Kissinger as advisor.

Kissinger, though admired by many in the American political elite, exemplifies all that is fundamentally wrong with the prevailing conception of “grand strategy”: the agency and precious lives of millions of people in foreign countries are disregarded for a chance at long-term hegemony for the most powerful country in the world. The devastation in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are major examples of what practitioners celebrated by Yale, beyond Kissinger, have been instrumental in.

There’s a deep issue at the university where credentialism often trumps humanitarianism. In its foreign policy instruction, Yale seems to value the fame or title of an individual over a record that exemplifies care for human lives (e.g., no involvement in war crimes!). Tragically, many of the world’s poorest communities suffer from war and its immense consequences. Simultaneously, leading warmongers evade basic accountability and receive prestigious positions.

There are three policies we urge Yale to immediately implement in order to begin to disentangle the university from warmongering and imperialism: [1] Prevent donor conditions on academic freedom; [2] Adhere to a standard for Yale affiliation that would disqualify those involved in war crimes; [3] Refuse to invest in defense contractors.

Read the petition and sign it at tinyurl.com/YaleEndWar. Daud graduated from Yale College in 2021. As a student, he was co-coordinator for Dwight Hall at Yale. You can reach him at  [email protected].

Oct. 7, 2020, marks the 19th year since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East began

Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice will return to remembering the cost of the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East by placing the September stone on the Memorial Cairn at the intersection of Broadway, Elm and Park streets in New Haven on Wednesday evening, October 7, at 6 p.m. That date will mark the 19th year since these wars began. We will practice social distancing and expect all participants to wear masks.

21-year New Haven Sunday Vigil Paused Until Further Notice Due to Covid-19

Ponder this: in a crisis of this magnitude, there aren’t close to enough ventilators and
other medical supplies including personal protective equipment to go around. The federal
government and the hospitals are talking about rationing health care. As always, the
elderly, poor, disabled and otherwise vulnerable are the ones whose lives will be
sacrificed first.

Yet the military manufacturers remain open, grinding away at the production of weapons
of mass destruction.

If this disturbs you, do something about it. Among other things, let your senators and
representatives know that they will not be re-elected unless they act now to ensure
production and distribution of all necessary equipment to save everyone’s life that
can be saved.

The government must act immediately:

  1. USE THE DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT TO MOBILIZE AMERICAN
    MANUFACTURERS TO SWITCH TO MAKING MEDICAL EQUIPMENT.
    2. USE THE DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY TO HELP COORDINATE
    EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF THESE SUPPLIES AND A MASS ROLL-OUT
    OF COVID-19 TESTING.

PLEASE, SPEAK OUT NOW. Call: U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy: (860) 549-8463;
Sen. Richard Blumenthal: (800) 334-5341; U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro: (203) 562-3718
TWO WAYS TO CONTACT THE PRESIDENT Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
White House Switchboard: (202) 456-1414; For email: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
Always leave your name, address and phone number.
ALL OUR LIVES DEPEND ON THIS.
CONTINUE TO PRACTICE SOCIAL DISTANCING. THINK AND ACT FOR
THE COMMUNITY.
Stay strong. We hope to see you soon.
RESIST THIS ENDLESS WAR
The New Haven Sunday Vigilers
March 2020
https://newhavensundayvigil.wordpress.com

Tomas Young – 11 Sept 1979 – 10 Sept 2014

by Augusta Girard, Program Director, Promoting Enduring Peace

In November 2013, Promoting Enduring Peace presented TV personality and producer director Phil Donahue for its first Mark Shafer lecture. Mr Donahue presented his award-winning documentary about Tomas Young, “Body of War.” Young was the voice for all the thousands of injured and dead soldiers.

Young joined the army when he was 22, two days after the 9/11 attacks. He had been in Iraq less than a week when he and fellow soldiers came under sniper fire. He was paralyzed from the chest down after being hit by a bullet in his spine.

tomas-young“Body of War” follows Young as a 25-year-old as he deals with his disability and finds his voice speaking out against the Iraq war and became an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

On the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, Truthdig published “The Last Letter” by Tomas Young directed towards George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

“I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans-my fellow veterans-whose future you stole…

“I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

Promoting Enduring Peace joins the world in mourning a young man who should not have lost his life fighting in a war that should never have been fought.