BAGHDAD, Iraq – Watching the Saddam Hussein trial at home on television, Jinan Mushrif said she got chills of pride Monday when she saw the ousted leader and a co-defendant chant, “Long live Iraq, long live the Arab state.” “These are the real men of Iraq, not those who hide behind their bodyguards,” the 49-year-old Baghdad housewife said with a laugh.

Saddam’s repeated outbursts at the third session of his trial on charges of mass murder found a receptive audience among some Sunni Arabs, tapping into Sunni resentment of the new order in Iraq, in which their once-ruling minority community is now dominated by the Shiite Muslim majority and the Kurds.

Mushrif’s son, Ziyad Tariq, stayed home from work at his auto parts shop to watch the trial. He believes the trial is a sham intended to boost support among followers of the Shiite leadership.

The trial is just “a battle of talk, in which no one cares about Iraqis. They just want to fulfill their own objectives,” he said.

His suspicions only increased when the first prosecution witness described a wave of arrests and torture in the Shiite town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.

“Did you see this guy, with his Iranian accent?” the 27-year-old Tariq shouted to his mother. “He is wearing a suit without a tie, just like the Persians.”
breitbart.com

The people of Venezuela have gone to the polls 11 times in seven years. Almost a superfluity of democracy, some might think, and signs of electoral fatigue could be detected in Sunday’s elections for the National Assembly when only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote. The rest perceived the result as a foregone conclusion since in earlier elections President Hugo Chávez, or the candidates he backed, had stacked up substantial majorities. Sunday’s poll followed the trend, and the Chávez list wiped the board.

This time, however, the once vocal opposition was strangely absent. Four of the small opposition parties decided to withdraw at the last minute, in a cynical manoeuvre designed to upset the hard-won stability achieved since the recall referendum in August 2004 (engineered by the opposition to try to secure the president’s resignation). Handsomely won by Chávez with a margin of 59 to 41, the referendum was certified as free and fair by observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Carter Centre, but some of the opposition parties refused to accept the result. Their rejection did little to enhance their authority or popularity and when they withdrew from Sunday’s poll they knew that they faced defeat and humiliation.

Their action irritated the mission sent by the OAS which believed it had negotiated a settlement over opposition complaints about the new automated voting system. The opposition then turned turtle and announced its withdrawal. It was not acting alone. In the background, at private meetings on the island of Aruba in the Dutch Antilles and in public declarations by Thomas Shannon, the US secretary of state for Latin American affairs, the opposition had been elaborating a strategy to overthrow Chávez. Its plan was to make people believe that “democracy in Venezuela is in grave peril”, as Shannon put it to a Washington subcommittee two weeks ago.

It is indeed in peril, threatened by a tiny ragbag of opposition groups given disproportionate international influence through the support of the US. By their irresponsible electoral abstention, they hoped to undermine the credibility of the parliamentary system.

The US-backed strategy is to use apparently neutral non-governmental organisations to tell the world that the elections are not free and fair, that press freedom is under threat, and that human rights are not respected. These allegations are then exaggerated and amplified in Washington.

The complaints are nonsense. The opposition still owns most of the newspapers and television stations. The judiciary has been comprehensively reformed after the scandals of the previous decade when half the judges were found to be corrupt or incompetent. Elections have been endlessly vetted and human rights have been extended to the great mass of the people.
guardian.co.uk

…For “illegal” Mexicans or those who want a quick route to citizenship, the military holds a strong attraction. Since Mexico provides the closest and most logical recruiting arena, Mexican “illegals” numerically outstrip all other Latin Americans living in the United States and in Iraq itself. Some 8000 Mexicans have now volunteered for official military service (John Ross, Counterpunch February 21, 2005).

Mexicans and those of Mexican descent make up more than half of the approximately 110,000 Latinos mostly, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Central Americans currently serving in the U.S. military. In addition, almost 25,000 other Mexicans have enlisted as a means of obtaining US citizenship. Coyotes smuggled some of these Mexicans into the country as children who never had any “legal” documents.
counterpunch.org

The immense significance of Rep John Murtha’s November 17 speech calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it signals mutiny in the US senior officer corps, seeing the institution they lead as “broken, worn out” and “living hand to mouth”, to use the biting words of their spokesman, John Murtha, as he reiterated on December his denunciation of Bush’s destruction of the Army.

A CounterPuncher with nearly 40 years experience working in and around the Pentagon told me this week that “The Four Star Generals picked Murtha to make this speech because he has maximum credibility.” It’s true. Even in the US Senate there’s no one with quite Murtha’s standing to deliver the message, except maybe for Byrd, but the venerable senator from West Virginia was a vehement opponent of the war from the outset , whereas Murtha voted for it and only recently has turned around.

So the Four-Star Generals briefed Murtha and gave him the state-of-the-art data which made his speech so deadly, stinging the White House into panic-stricken and foolish denunciations of Murtha as a clone of Michael Moore.
counterpunch.org

The U.S. government is waging an air war in Iraq. “In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Seymour Hersh reported in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker. “Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border.”

Hersh added: “As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.”

Here’s a big reason why: Major U.S. news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon’s bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war.
counterpunch.org

The apology of John Edwards, former Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, for voting for the Iraq war in 2002, has been widely praised. But his apology is based on a lie, one that other Democrats are likely to embrace and one which will serve their ambitions but hide the truth. We should have no illusions about this, for to believe otherwise is to set ourselves up for the continuation of Bush’s war by a Democrat.

Edwards declared in an op-ed column in the Washington Post on November 13, 2005: “The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president — and that I was being given by our intelligence community — wasn’t the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.” Sounds simple enough. “Had I known then what I know now, etc.” Poor John Edwards was deceived. But was he? How was it that 21 other Democratic Senators and 2 Republicans were not deceived and voted against the war?
counterpunch.org

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Hamid Riza Asaffi, speaking with journalists in Teheran, said that recent Israeli statements on Iran’s nuclear project showed that the Israeli government is frustrated from a failure to bring pressure from the international community to on Iran.

He claimed that a “serious crisis” within the “Zionist authorities” was the main factor behind what he described as Israeli threats. His comments were reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency.

“The Zionist authorities are well aware that if they make a foolish mistake against Iran, Iran’s harsh response will be destructive and determined,” said the spokesman. “Their approach comes from their anger over the fact that they can’t realize their plans,” he added.

Earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu told the Voice of Israel national radio network that “Israel must take every necessary step to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran must be prevented from developing this threat to the State of Israel. If, by the elections, the current government works to achieve this, I will give it my full support – and if it does not, I intend on establishing the next government, and then we’ll act.”
ynetnews.com

Netanyahu Backs Pre-Emptive Strike on Iran
…Netanyahu left few doubts about his solution: a pre-emptive strike similar to the 1981 attack ordered by then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin that destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor.

“I will continue the tradition established by Menachem Begin, who did not allow Iraq to develop such a nuclear threat against Israel, and by a daring and courageous act gave us two decades of tranquility,” Netanyahu told the Maariv daily. “I believe that this is what Israel has to do.”

Netanyahu, a bitter political enemy of Sharon, said he would support the prime minister if he carried out a pre-emptive strike. “If it is not done by the present government, I intend to lead the next government and to stop this threat. I will take every step required to avoid a situation in which Iran can threaten us with nuclear weapons.”

The number in Germany is 69,395. The number in Japan is 35,307. The number in Korea is 32,744. The number in Italy is 12,258. The number in the United Kingdom is 11,093.

I am not speaking of the number of car accidents last year in Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, or the United Kingdom. And neither am I speaking of the number of poisonings, suicides, or armed robberies in any of these countries.

No, I am speaking of something far more lethal: the continued presence of U.S. troops.

According to the latest edition of the “Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country,” published by the Defense Department’s Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (DIOR), the U.S. has troops in 142 countries. This is up from the figure of 136 countries that the government was reporting the last time I addressed the subject of the number of countries under the shadow of the U.S. Global Empire. Additions to the list are Armenia, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Iran, Malawi, Moldova, Slovak Republic, and Sudan. Subtractions are Eritrea and North Korea. Only 49 countries to go and the United States will have hegemony over the whole world. But it is worse than it appears. Counting the U.S. troops in territories, the officially reported number of countries or territories that the United States has troops in is now 158. It is not without cause that the twentieth century’s greatest proponent of liberty, and the greatest opponent of the state, Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), said that “empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States.”
lewrockwell.com

How Bush’s imperial policies are being linked to economic woes and CEO angst in America.

We hear a lot about the government largesse flowing toward Halliburton, Bechtel and a handful of other favored firms chosen to rebuild Iraq. Less often do we consider the possibility that the administration’s bellicosity has been a major business blunder.

Breaking with the Clinton administration’s advocacy for a cooperative, rules-based international economy — a multilateral order known to critics as corporate globalization — the Bush administration has fashioned a new model of imperial globalization, aggressive and unilateralist. This agenda, at best, benefits a narrow slice of the American business community and leaves the rest exposed to a world of popular resentment and economic uncertainty.

If Bush is an oil president, he’s not a Disney president, nor a Coca-Cola one. If Vice President Dick Cheney is working diligently to help Halliburton rebound, the war he helped lead hasn’t worked out nearly so well for Starbucks.
sfgate.com

12/05/05 “The Guardian” — — Five trillion dollars has been corruptly removed from the world’s poorest countries and lodged permanently in the world’s richest countries. That is the “conservative estimate” not of a leftwing anti-globalisation activist but of a leading American businessman and enthusiast for capitalism who has just completed a major study of how multinational corporations, wealthy individuals and unscrupulous governments are using the world’s banking systems in ways that spread poverty.

When aid or debt relief are discussed, attention often focuses on corrupt leaders and governments in Africa and other parts of the developing world. But they are amateurs compared with the rich companies and individuals who use the world’s tax havens and banking systems to hide sums of money that could address almost all of the continent’s financial needs.
informationclearinghouse.info