A Deadly Misunderstanding;

Peaceful Efforts in the Middle East

Ironically, as I attempted to spotlight centuries of misunderstandings between East and West, a few key Republican-based government officials (Pres. Bush and colleagues) misunderstood my promotion of peace with Muslims and my book offering solutions to bridge East-West tensions.

Rather than perceiving my work as a help to more intelligent diplomacy and responsible foreign policy, it was interpreted by some as an attempt to sabotage certain ideologically based policies.

On the contrary, all aspects of foreign engagement depend on and are strengthened by each other, when applied strategically. As a member of the Veteran's Affairs committee during my first term in Congress, I have always felt strongly for our veterans. The thousands who create a strong military defense as the backbone behind peaceful overtures are crucial in order for an intelligent diplomacy to work. Yet in past administrations, our defense agencies have been asked to take a surprisingly offensive stance, wielded aggressively in propagating ideologies that might have been more easily spread through peaceful measures.

Far from sabotage, my efforts are aimed at reducing bloodshed and creating space for trust to develop between nations. When a team of like-minded individuals visited Saddam's regime in 2002 as an attempt to gain cooperation; we hoped to divert from the impending onset of war. While Iraq's leaders were surprisingly open, top U.S. officials were not.....>>>Rest Here

Mark Siljander's Book: "A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide"

"Engaging the Muslim World"

Diane Rehm NPR show 3.23.09

Juan Cole: "Engaging the Muslim World" (Palgrave Macmillan)

In a video message to the Iranian people and government, President Obama said the U.S. seeks engagement based on mutual respect. Historian and blogger Juan Cole discusses what that might achieve and why he’s pushing for a broader campaign to engage the Muslim world.
Guests

Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan; his blog is "Informed Comment"

To Listen:
Real Media Player

Windows Media Player

Jimmy Carter: Peace in the Holy Land

"We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work"

In this urgent, balanced, and passionate book, Nobel Peace Laureate and former President Jimmy Carter argues that the present moment is a unique time for achieving peace in the Middle East -- and he offers a bold and comprehensive plan to do just that.

President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them.

Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration.

This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and doable path to peace.

Victims of bush's "War on Terror": Children

On January 12th 2009 President bush gave his final Press Conference to the Nation.

In it he made a number of statements that have been analyzed by many, my take on his answers and spin was his showing how little a man, who is in total denial and lacking any compassion or moral feelings, of how big a failure as a person, and especially as the President, he has been!

In one of his answers he said this:

"The most urgent threat that he'll have to deal with and other presidents after him will have to deal with is an attack on our homeland," Bush said. "You know, I wish I could report that's not the case, but there's still an enemy out there that would like to inflict damage on America."

And for once I agree with this incompetent,immoral, unrepentant little man?, he's created tens of thousands, that didn't exist before, who now wish this Country and It's Citizens Harm, "Mission Accomplished", for the coming decades!!

We can all see, daily, those who are retaliating for the policies he set forth, in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the death and destruction that is ongoing, with our soldiers still dying and being maimed as well as the innocent citizens of both countries, the word is "Blowback"! These policies have also brought about a rise of Criminal Terrorism, around the World, over these last 7 years.

What does the future hold and for how long?

I've done a few posts, this is but one, about that probable future and the possibility of reaching into the coming generations, how many, who knows right now. But it only takes a few who carry the hatreds that they have grown up with to create destructive blowback, and that builds towards more of the same.

Michael Haas has a recent write on just this probable future, more geared in the present of who should be brought to accountability, but there are certainly more who actually created the failed policies we've been party to. The name of Michael article is: Children As Unlamented Victims of Bush's 'War On Terror'.

He starts it out with:

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture.

Some will try and argue that certain forms of torture really aren't, or that it's needed to get information, it isn't for it only gives weak or false information, yet we as a Nation have not only participated but helped write the laws on torture and ratified these laws making them our own. The link only gives one of the World Wide conventions held for the purpose of writing these laws that aim to end the use of inhumane treatment of torture, and more, that doesn't return what is sought, reliable intelligence. We were also the major contributor to the Geneva Conventions and major condemner of countries who don't follow what was done in Geneva. We are now publicly one of the participants, we can condemn no more.

We've all watched, most in total disbelief and rage, what has happened under this president and his administrations policies along with his political parties affiliation rubber stamping their wants, and we've done virtually nothing but allow it to continue.

Haas goes further into what most haven't paid attention to:

The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

Think about the above, as parents what would You do if your country was and is being destroyed and the children of were being treated as enemies or used for other purposes and excused as being in War! But there's more:

While detained, several children have been brutalized and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took no action to stop the offenses. Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

Those that want to denie, for argumentative our some twisted form of political ideology, what torture or inhumane treatment of others actually is or isn't, look at your's or other little kids, young teens, and ask if you would want them treated like animals, and if so to what purpose!

Michael Haas has a book out George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration's Liability for 269 War Crimes I haven't read as yet, as I just ordered it, but it will be read and added to the others and all that is now being written and discussed as to what this Nation must do, not only for our own survival of what we are, but the World view of us as a Leader of Nations and an Example to Emulate and Strive towards.

We must find the ways to bring Accountability for the Crimes against our Laws as well as the Laws we've helped form towards World stability and make our Constitution strong again, or we will collapse as a society and be scorned by the World!

And we must find a way, amongst All People, to stem the possibility of many of the children of today, growing up under occupation, death and destruction, don't become even more violent and destructive towards others than that we've already created through our failed policies of the past and the near past!

Guantanamo "Abandoned Our Values and Defiled Our Constitution!"


The video is a combination of three BBC News reports on Guantanamo from Dec. '08 to Jan '09, it's about 141/2 minutes long, the links to each individual video at their site found below.

Guantanamo 'a stain on US military' Dec 3rd '08

Guantanamo closure plan ordered Dec 19th '08

Former guard on Guantanamo 'torture' Jan 9th '09

The Special Prosecutor Petition

Hug Your Kid, if you've got one,

And think of the Children and what they are now, and have been, living in and with, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Westbank, Israel, way too many places in Africa the forgotten continent and peoples, and other area's around the world, would You Want Your Kid Growing Up As They Are!!

"Riveting" - U.S. Presidents and the Middle East

The present, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 265 Posted - January 5, 2009, looks mighty interesting, especially reading the few documents they have linked there.

Details inconsistent policies and influence of foreign leaders

New Patrick Tyler book narrates: "A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror"

American Presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush have sought to distinguish themselves from their predecessors with sudden shifts in Middle East policy and questionable strategies that have contributed to undermining American credibility in the region, according to a new book, A World of Trouble, by veteran correspondent Patrick Tyler, a fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Tyler's account begins with a raucous night of recriminations over George W. Bush's Middle East diplomacy by former CIA Director George Tenet, and then rewinds to the grand deception of Dwight Eisenhower by Britain, France and Israel, in the Suez Crisis. In bringing the narrative forward to the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of today, Tyler gives the reader an intimate portrait of presidential decisions and the out-sized influence of White House aides and foreign leaders and their emissaries.

These are but a few, of the documents, that they have listed at the archives site:

* The private pleadings of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who in June 1973 sought to convince President Nixon that war was coming in the Middle East and that the only way to avert it was by a robust diplomatic intervention by the superpowers. Nixon and Kissinger, fearing domestic blowback in the midst of the Watergate scandal, refused to be drawn in and war broke out four months later.

* The Reagan Diary entry that sheds light on how the White House and the Saudi royal family circumvented the law on presenting lavish gifts to the President, in this case, a pair of Arabian horses.

* The top-secret channel opened by the Nixon White House with the Shah of Iran to discuss "contingency" planning by the Iranian leader to seize Saudi Arabia and its oil resources in the event of a coup or an external assault on the Saudi kingdom. (two documents)

* The confidential debate within the Nixon National Security Council on how to invent a claim of "Russian treachery" in order to justify the U.S. tilt toward Israel, and a massive resupply of its forces, during the 1973 October War. (two documents)

* The CIA's confidential description of the internal pressures within the Israeli leadership that tipped the Jewish state toward a preemptive attack on the Egyptian army in Sinai after the closure of Israeli shipping lanes in the run-up to the the Six Day War. (two documents)

Haven't read the book yet, so can't add much more, except to raise the curiosity of those that might be interested

The Entry of the Sunni Mujahideen

Michael Scheuer has an interesting series of articles at the Asian Times from the The Jamestown Foundation. A window in the coming Blowback, that has already reared it's ugly head in many places and is stoked by throwing intense flames onto the already started fire?

The latest report is called MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH, Part 4 with a subtitle "Palestine and Israel: The ring of terror tightens"

Seems al Qaeda is not only growing but thriving and expanding rapidly with more fringe groups, which is what al Qaeda is, forming under that umbrella of Criminal Terrorism and according to Scheuer targeting Israel and U.S. Interests

As discussed earlier in this series of articles, the entry of Sunni mujahideen from Iraq into Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon has been a fairly visible process and tracking it - at least in outline form - is an achievable task.

This group falls under the name "Salafi" or "Salafism" which is the correct descriptive name of the often used term "Wahhabi", at least according to this site:

What is a Salafi and What is Salafism?

The reader will notice that the word "Wahhabi" is always indented with quotation marks here at TheWahhabiMyth.com. Those who are labeled with this word do not themselves use this term, as it is used as a means of belittlement. The reasons for the rejection of this term are clearly outlined throughout this book. The correct way of referring to them is by terming them Salafis, as they are those who adhere to the way of the Salaf - the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah raise his rank and grant him peace) and his companions.

Following the way of the Salaf is the way which has been legislated in the Quran and Sunnah, the very sources of Islam. The Prophet (may Allah raise his rank and grant him peace) said to his daughter Fatimah: "Indeed, I am for you a blessed Salaf."

When asked about which was the correct and acceptable way of understanding Islam, the Prophet (may Allah raise his rank and grant him peace) replied by saying: "That which I and my companions are upon."

Scheuer describes the movements of the Salafi and it's goals.

the goal of the mujahideen from Iraq has been clear: (a) to spread Salafi beliefs in the Levant countries and (b) to place fighters as close to Israel as possible. These Salafi Islamists are, in essence, trying to create a space where they can begin to operate inside Israel. Whether they succeed in that goal is an open question, but their intent is clear.

There have been a few, very few, reports about so called in-fighting in Gaza long before the recent Carnage going on today. Here it seems it's reported as fighting between factions within Hamas, apparently that may not be the case.

Al-Qaeda and its Salafi allies have long viewed Palestine as "an Islamic endowment", a place to which "every Muslim has the right to set out for jihad in its land". Osama bin Laden, moreover, has long railed against the governments of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon for preventing non-Palestinian mujahideen from basing themselves in their countries. Bin Laden's gripe has now been satisfied to an extent, not by his own hand, but by courtesy of the regional destabilization caused by the United States-led war in Iraq. Salafi fighters of various nationalities are now flowing into the Levant from Iraq.

In Palestine, there seems to be a minor Salafi presence in the West Bank but a steadily growing military and proselytizing presence in Gaza. The above noted "Army of Islam" and several other Salafi organizations have created training facilities in Gaza and have displayed them to the international media, defiantly proclaiming, "We are coming Jews!" They have, to date, conducted some attacks on the Israeli army when its units were engaged in raids in Gaza, and have attacked Christian and American targets in Gaza.

The bleed-through from Iraq also is having some impact in the Palestinian territories - especially Gaza - and in Israel.

The Salafi have apparently taken some actions against the Israeli's but on a minor scale so far.

and the Salafis appear to spend just as much time fighting with their erstwhile Islamist colleagues in Hamas.

As the Salafists in Gaza began to preach and attract followers there appears to have been an implicit understanding reached between the Salafist leaders and Hamas. The deal allowed the Salafists to train fighters, attack Israeli targets, and preach in Gaza as long as they did not engage in Gaza's internal political system and did not try to impose their ideology by force on Palestinians.

This has been an unstable deal at best; even as the Salafists acquiesced to Hamas' terms, they declared their belief that "Hamas does not implement the rule of God on earth, and does not enforce any ruling of the Islamic Sharia". There have been fire-fights between Salafists and Hamas security forces during the latter's raids of Salafi mosques and other sites. On one occasion this fall, Hamas policeman killed nine members of the Army of Islam, earning a promise of revenge from the group's leaders.

While the recent actions of the Israeli's, as many are now saying, have enhanced the Palestinian Elected Hamas, which had been losing stature, it may actually be emboldening, and making it easier, for the Salafi Mujahideen to recruit not only Hamas fighters but other Palestinians and not only in Gaza but on the West Bank as well.

As the cut above says "but by courtesy of the regional destabilization caused by the United States-led war in Iraq. Salafi fighters of various nationalities are now flowing into the Levant from Iraq", the legacy being left, and forcast by many, has been rapidly taking place. Not only as to the instability of the region because of Iraq but this administration's ignoring the Israeli and Palestinian issue for eight years, with their partners the Likud government in Israel, and our present Secretary of State Condi Rice total lack of concern and action as to the recent past leading to the Israeli Destruction now taking place in Gaza, while earlier her and bush pledging more involvement and a Peace Deal before they Slither Away!!

Once again the link to this recent write: MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH, Part 4

And the previous three:

PART 1: Syria: Terror's made-to-order milieu

PART 2: Lebanon: Last stop on a jihad highway

PART 3: Jordan: Al-Qaeda clouds a precarious future

Something you may also want to view:

The Power of Nightmares

A 3-Part BBC Video Series
This 3-part BBC video series documents the history of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-conservatism. Although it runs several hours long, it is well worth the time to view it.

The Power of Nightmares Part 1: “Baby it's Cold Outside“

The Power of Nightmares Part 2: The Phantom Victory - by Adam Curtis

The Power of Nightmares Part 3: The Shadows in the Cave

And what will happen within Iraq especially adding the actions taking place in Gaza?

‘Sons of Iraq’ role causes some worry

By Thursday, when the security agreement between Iraq and the United States takes effect, about 75 percent of the "Sons of Iraq" groups in the country will be under Iraqi responsibility, U.S. officials said this week.

The transition of the armed groups from U.S. control began last year and has been one of the key worries in cementing the security gains seen in the country in recent months. More than 100,000 "Sons of Iraq" members had been recruited in Iraq over the past two years — some of them former insurgents, most of them young men without jobs.

Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; his most recent book is Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Dr Scheuer is a Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation.

Eric Margolis-The consequences of a failed policy -The Real News

Eric Margolis on the power keg of the Middle East?

As contributing editor for The American Conservative and Sun Media, and Founding Committee member of The Real News Eric Margolis says: "The reason I was drawn to [The Real News] was the fact it seemed to me to be the voice that I and many others had been looking for."


New powder keg of the Middle East? (1 of 3)



The consequences of a failed policy in Iraq (2 of 3)



U.S. foreign policy and the race for President (3 of 3)


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