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Syria: Destruction Is Their Aim
Some truth on who is destroying Syrian towns and cities:
School buildings lie flattened and the town’s mosque is crushed under the debris of its own demolished twin minarets.
When the rebel Free Syrian Army routed government troops in mid-July, they dynamited the defensive positions that had been used against them — from the makeshift barracks in schoolyards to the sniper positions atop the towers once used for the Muslim call to prayer.
“Our strategy has been to completely destroy the buildings we had to force regime forces out to stop them ever coming back,” said an opposition leader, who identified himself only as Najmeddin.
It was also the foreign supported insurgents that burned down one of Aleppo's old souks.
Destruction of the infrastructure, economy and social fabric of Syria is their and their supporters aim.
Three Weeks Old News – A New Low For The Washington Post
news/n(y)o͞oz/
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- Newly received or noteworthy information, esp. about recent or important events.
- A broadcast or published report of news.
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Today the Washington Post publishes the following report by its reporters Kevin Sieff and Richard Leiby as news on its homepage and on the front page of its print edition: Afghan troops get a lesson in American cultural ignorance.
The core of the piece is this:
[T]he Afghan army is trying something new: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge.
The pamphlet is intended to “strengthen our understanding of our [NATO] counterpart,” according to an English translation of the pamphlet that was provided to The Washington Post. But in doing so, it also reveals seemingly minor — and rarely acknowledged — cultural faux pas that have created palpable tension between the two forces.
“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.
So the Afghan government is teaching its soldiers that they should ignore the acculturate behavior of the foreign barbarians. That is obviously necessary as, even after 11 years, the invading savages are still cultural ignorant and unable to learn how to behave themselves. It is interesting to know that. But how come I remember reading that story already and quite a while ago?
Cont. reading: Three Weeks Old News – A New Low For The Washington Post
Obama Administration Finally Acknowledges Benghazi Attack
On September 12, a few hours after I happened, I determined that the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi was an AlQaeda related operation in revenge for the earlier killing of the Al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in a U.S. drone strike in Waziristan:
Yesterday's confirmation of Abu Yahya al-Libi's death seems to be a much better explanation for yesterday's raising of al-Qaeda's flag in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the deadly attack on the consulate in Bengahzi. The AQ people in the area certainly had an urge and a plan to avenge al-Libi (the Libyan). That this happened on the anniversary of 9/11 is, as the Zahwahiri tape demonstrates, NOT a coincidence! These people used the movie story only to raise additional rabble to cover for them.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, thought differently:
“Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told me this morning on “This Week.”
…
“We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to – or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo,” Rice said. “And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there.”
Susan Rice was one of the three furies in the State Department that had urged for the destruction of the Libyan state. They misread of, or pretended to misread, the tribal insurgency against Gaddhafi as some kind of liberation movement.
Susan Rice wants to become Secretary of State when, in January, Hillary Clinton will leave the job. She therefore could not admit that her signature project in foreign policy, the war on Libya, turned out to be a disaster.
But after more than two weeks of dancing around the subject the Obama administration finally had to acknowledge what was obvious from the very beginning:
The top U.S. intelligence authority issued an unusual public statement on Friday declaring it now believed the September 11 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, was a "deliberate and organized terrorist attack."
Still missing is the recognition that the rising of the Al Qaeda flag at the U.S. embassy in Cairo by some Salafists was part of the plot.
The false pretension about the attack brings the Obama administration into well deserved political trouble:
The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.
As Mitt Romney has no viable foreign policy program the issue is unlikely to endanger Obama's reelection but it may cost the democrats some points in the House and the Senate races. Acknowledging the true nature of attack from the very beginning would have done less political harm.
Susan Rice should be fired. True to the Peter principal she has reached a position where her incompetence is at full display. Senator Kerry, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has a more realist than interventionist agenda, should become the next Secretary of State.
But in Washington being wrong only reenforces ones standing and no bad deed is left unrewarded. It is therefore likely that Obama will stick with Susan Rice as his next Secretary of State.
FARS The Farce (Updated)
UPDATE Sep 30, 8:00am
FARS now apologizes: FNA Apologizes for Recent Mistake
TEHRAN (FNA)- We would like to apologize to all our dear viewers for the mistaken release of a fake opinion poll on our website on Friday.
"Unfortunately an incorrect item was released on our website on Friday which included a fake opinion poll on popularity rate of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US President Barack Obama. The news item was extracted from the Satirical Magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down from our outlook in less two hours," Editor-in-chief of FNA's English Service said.
"We offer our formal apologies for that mistake," he added.
…
FARS points out that others have also fallen for Onion spoofs. That is right. But listing the errors of others does not excuse yours. It only reenforces the point made below. The Onion is well known because others have fallen for it. And that is why journalists and editors aware of the anglophile culture no longer fall for it. Also FARS simply copied the onion piece without giving a source. That was simply plagiarism and whoever is the person responsible for that should have no role in the news business.
My original post is below:
It seems that either the Iranian English language FARSnews site was hacked, one of their interns decided to sabotage the sites reputation or its staff is really incompetent enough to plagiarize from the satire magazine The Onion:
FARS (16:47 | 2012-09-28):
Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama
TEHRAN (FNA)- According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than US President Barack Obama.
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The Onion (September 24, 2012 | ISSUE 48•39):
Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama
CHARLESTON, WV—According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. president Barack Obama.
…
(As that page on the FARS site will likely get removed I preserved two screenshot of the FARS piece.)
A general note to FARS: If you want to communicate in English get yourself some people who are not only well versed in the English language but who also have some cultural competence and know the U.S. and UK from their own experience.
Showing such incompetence makes everyone suspect of the other news you are distributing and only plays into the hands of your country's enemies.
Netanyahoo
This guy seems to be a bit crazy.
And look, he has a big ACME bomb.
Cont. reading: Netanyahoo
War Scenes – R.I.P. Maya Nasser
Two screenshot from the Russian documentation Battle for Syria (with English subtitles) on the war on Syria that I linked yesterday.The appear at 0:45 and 0:46 into the film.
It shows the back of a journalist reporting from the government side. He had been lucky. A shot had hit the center of the backside of his body armor but did not penetrate it. It seems pretty obvious that this had been a targeted shot, likely by a sniper.
Today more journalists were shot in Syria:
A corespondent for Iran's Press TV was shot dead on Wednesday while reporting from the scene of devastating twin explosions in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Maya Nasser, a 33-year-old Syrian national, was killed after being hit by "insurgent" sniper fire, Press TV said.
The channel's Damascus bureau chief, Hussein Murtada, who also worked for the Arabic-language Al-Alam TV network, was injured after coming under attack, the channel said. […] Murtada was reportedly shot in the back.
Shooting journalist in the back seems to be a modus operandi of these insurgents.
Cont. reading: War Scenes – R.I.P. Maya Nasser
A Few Links
A few links to issues I would like to write about but currently lack the time to tackle seriously:
"In sum, Morsi's friendly remarks about Iran point toward a regional strategic realignment on an epic scale subsuming the contrived air of sectarian schisms, which practically no Western (or Turkish) experts could have foreseen. It is a matter of time now before Egypt-Iran relations are fully restored, putting an end to the three-decade-old rupture.
The biggest beneficiary of this paradigm shift in Middle Eastern politics is going to be Iran. Arguably, we are probably already past the point of an Israeli attack on Iran, no matter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tilting at the windmill. In the prevailing surcharged atmosphere, the Muslim Middle East would explode into uncontrollable violence in the event of an Israeli (or US) attack on Iran."
WaPo Adds “Pro-American” To The “Unarmed” Illusions
The neoconned editors of the Washington Post show their stupidity and illusions: In the Middle East, a pro-American turn
IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt, plenty of commentators lamented what they saw as intractible anti-Americanism in the Middle East — even in Libya, where the United States had helped to overthrow a hated dictator. As it turns out, the reactions were hasty. In the days since the riots, there has been a broad backlash against the violence in both countries — culminating Friday in Benghazi, where tens of thousands of people marched on the base of an Islamist militia suspected of involvement in the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate.
People carrying pro-American signs pushed their way into the encampment of Ansar al-Sharia, which in spite of its denials is suspected of complicity in the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The militants were forced out of the base, and the demonstrators burned part of it before turning it over to the Libyan army.
They write this as at the same time as the newspages of the Post report this:
The commander of a powerful Libyan militia said Monday that looters had stolen “a large number” of shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles from the militia’s base when protesters who called for dismantling the country’s militias overran the compound.
Ismail Salabi, the commander of Rafallah al-Sahati, a powerful Islamist militia in Benghazi, said in an interview that the missiles, used by fighters to “hit airplanes” and known to the U.S. intelligence community as MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems), were stolen along with 2,000 semiautomatic rifles and ammunition, as the militia withdrew from its base amid a firefight early Saturday.
According to the report of "unarmed people" dissected here earlier those "pro-American" "demonstrators" were heavily armed and also attacked the military base the Rafallah al-Sahati, which was under government control, and some soldiers guarded.
The WaPo editorial does not mention that all. One wonders what those editors will write when those "pro-American" looters use their newly acquired weapons to take down American airplanes.
A Middle East that is ruled by somewhat elected governments more inclined to listen to their voters than the respective U.S. ambassadors will not be pro-American as long as the U.S. is supportive of the apartheid regime in Israel. That is, as the loss of Egypt as an U.S. ally shows, simply a fact.
How long will it take the neocons and their neo-Wilsonian brethren on the other side of the isle to understand that? Are they even capable of understanding?
How Do “Unarmed People” “Return fire”?
A few days after the recent attacks on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi someone whipped up a crowd and had it attack the bases of some militia group. The usual western media who had cheered for the overthrowing and killing of Gaddhafi are trying to tell us that this was some peaceful protest, pro-American and only to drive out some jihadist militia. But that does not seem to be the full story.
The Guardian headlines:
Unarmed people power drums Libya’s jihadists out of Benghazi
The sub headline says:
These were the incredible scenes in Benghazi as tens of thousands of ordinary citizens marched on the Islamic extremists in their compounds and drove them out with shouts, placards and sheer courage
The piece is by one Chris Stephen who writes as if he was there. According to him those who attacked those Salafi/Jihadists groups were unarmed people with only shouts, placards and sheer courage.
But down in Mr Stephen’s article we find this:
Then the cry went up to march on Hwari, the sprawling base of another militia, Raffala al-Sahati, to which Ansar al-Sharia men were believed to have fled. El Farsi found his car, a BMW, and roared off south.
Protesters crammed into cars, hooting horns and waving Libyan tricolours as an impromptu convoy surged south. But this time the response was different. The first protesters who marched on the gates were met by machine gun fire, triggering pandemonium.
…
As protester numbers grew and fire was returned, the base garrison fled, abandoning vehicles, guns and huge quantities of ammunition which the crowd looted.
Mr Stephen’s does not say with what those “unarmed people” returned fire. Did they fire shouts? Placards? Sheer courage?
Mr. Stephens also doesn’t explain why the “unarmed” mob would attack the Raffala al-Sahati group at all. It was mentioned in no report about the attack on the U.S. embassy and had likely nothing to do with it.
From another news source we find that the group is aligned with and under command of the central government and that it was based in regular military barracks.
Protesters also attacked the headquarters of the Raf Allah al-Sahati brigade, an Islamist group which is under the authority of the defence ministry, on Benghazi’s outskirts.
An AFP correspondent said the assailants walked away with weapons, ammunition and computers. After two hours of fierce fighting during which rockets were used, they managed to drive out members of the brigade.
So according to the AFP Stephen’s “unarmed people” won a two hour battle in which machineguns and rockets (I assume this means Rocket Propelled Grenades) were used. All this with “shouts, placards and sheer courage”?
And what about those 6 dead soldiers which, after the mob had left, were found in those barracks with their hands tied and bullets in their heads? Did the “unarmed” protesters use “shouts, placards and sheer courage” to accomplish that?
Somehow Mr Stephen’s story of peaceful protesters driving out jihadists does not add up. That might be because he doesn’t bother to write about the real question.
Why did the Benghazi mob attack and executed forces of the newly elected central government? Could that be because 39% of them prefer a strong man rule while only 29% prefer democracy? And who were the real “extremists” here?
The Retreat From Afghanistan
The green on blue attacks in Afghanistan led to the collapse of the exit strategy in Afghanistan. Joint operations with Afghan forces on the most important lower level are halted. This and the recent audacious Taliban attack on the joined British U.S. Camp Bastion have changed the mind of even the most hawkish U.S. politicians
“I think all options ought to be considered, including whether we have to just withdraw early, rather than have a continued bloodletting that won’t succeed,” [Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)] said Wednesday.
Mc Cain was joined by on of the leading warmongers in the House:
[Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., who chairs the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, ] is the longest-serving Republican member of Congress, and he has continuously voted against troop drawbacks from Afghanistan, or even for setting a timetable for troop withdrawal. But after Sitton’s death, Young noted a change of heart.
“I think we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as we can,” Young told the Tampa Bay Times this week. “I just think we’re killing kids that don’t need to die.”
With even the hawks calling for an early withdrawal I expect the Obama administration to reveal its plan for an accelerated retreat from Afghanistan immediately after the November election. The implementation of such a plan will face some difficulties.
The administration has burned the bridges to a negotiated solution in Afghanistan by listing the Haqqani network, part of the Taliban, as a foreign terrorist organization. A ceasefire to facilitate the western retreat from Afghanistan is therefore unlikely to happen. While most the soldiers can be flown out of the country huge mountain the materials will have to go over land.
Who will cover those routes while the western forces are reduced and the Afghan army, as is very likely to happen, breaks apart?
The last iconic pictures we will get from this war of Afghanistan will likely show huge columns of burning trucks.
It’s All For Sale
How much money was contributed to the Obama campaign to pay for removing the Marxist-Islamist terror cult MEK from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations?
On “Western Experts”
The Russian president Putin is modifying some of the policies his predecessor Medvedev implemented. The NYT is lamenting about that and includes this funny bit:
In a way, the biggest surprise is that Mr. Putin has found it necessary to roll back Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives in the first place.
For the four years of the “tandem” arrangement, the consensus among Western experts was that Mr. Medvedev did not do much without specific approval from Mr. Putin. On the day the two men announced they would switch places, a top Obama administration official shrugged off a query about whether this would herald a change of course in foreign policy: “Everyone knows that Putin runs Russia,” the official said.
That seems less obvious now. Mr. Putin set about reviewing or reversing a long list of policies after his inauguration: […]
All this suggests that many of Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives toward the end of his presidency, sporadic and incomplete as they were, were undertaken independently, and in some cases against Mr. Putin’s wishes.
I am no "western expert" on Russia. But compare the view of those "experts" after four years of Medvedev to my take at the beginning of Medvedev's presidency. In March 2008 I wrote:
Dmitry Medvedev ran Putin's election campaign in 1999 and was his chief of staff. He is the chair of Gazprom's board of directors since 2000 and First Deputy Prime Minister since 2005. He was "Person of the Year" of the Russian equivalent to Time in 2005. […]
Medvedev is a small man, 5'4'' or 162 cm – not the supersized format of a "western" manager. But he is young and a very fit sportsman. People who underestimate him and suspect that he is only a Putin puppet are in for some serious surprises.
Why are those experts called experts when it took them until after Medvedev's presidency to see what I could see at its very beginning? An independent man that was a partner but not puppet of Vladimir Putin.
The most serious surprise for the "western experts" was Medvedev's fast decision in August 2008 to react with force against the Georgian attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia. Something that did not surprise me at all. But even after that had happened those "experts" still thought of Medvedev as the Putin puppet he never was. Only now do they start to understand him.
Tell me, why are those experts still listened to?
A “False Wall In A Tehran Clock Factory” – Huh?
This blog has followed the allegations about Iran's nuclear program for years and even debunked some of them. I though I had heard of all the western talking points.
But there is now, apparently, something I did not know.
A report in today's New York Times about some interview an Iranian official gave includes these allegations:
Iran hid the construction of its Natanz nuclear enrichment plant — until it was revealed by a dissident group — as well as its construction of centrifuges to enrich uranium, until inspectors acting on a tip found them behind a false wall in a Tehran clock factory.
Iran revealed a deep underground site in 2009 only when it became clear that the West had discovered it and was about to announce its existence.
Iran did not have to announce the building of the enrichment plant in Natanz to the IAEA until six month before introducing nuclear material into it. It did not break its NTP obligation by building the plant. The 2009 construction of the plant near Qom was revealed by Iran in a letter to the IAEA. Only days after that letter was send did the U.S. government claim that it had known about this secret site. Again, Iran did not break any rules on this.
But what about that "false wall in a Tehran clock factory"? I have never ever heard about that and a quick search on the Internet does not find anything about that.
Is this a new David Sanger phantasy or is there something real behind that?
Could someone please enlighten me on this issue?
Is Iran Violating The NPT? CRS Doesn’t Know
Has Iran violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? From all the usual brouhaha in western media about Iran's nuclear program one might think that this is clearly the case.
But not so fast says (pdf) a new study by the Congressional Research Service of the U.S. Congress:
Whether Iran has violated the NPT is unclear. The treaty does not contain a mechanism for determining that a state-party has violated its obligations. Moreover, there does not appear to be a formal procedure for determining such violations. [..]
The U.N. Security Council has never declared Iran to be in violation of the NPT; neither the council nor the U.N. General Assembly has a responsibility to adjudicate treaty violations.
International law professor Dan Joyner, who has written THE book about the NNPT, even argues that "the IAEA applies incorrect standards, exceeds its legal mandate and is acting ultra vires (beyond its power) with regard to Iran."
The 120 member states of the Non-Alligned Movement, that is the real "international community", recently declared:
All states should be able to enjoy the basic and inalienable right to the
development, research, production and use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, without any discrimination and in conformity with their respective international legal obligations. Therefore, nothing should be interpreted in a way to inhibit or restrict the right of states to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. States’ choices and decisions, in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear technology and their fuel cycle policies, including those of the Islamic Republic of Iran, must be respected.
The NAM also condemned any threats against peaceful nuclear facilities as they are regularly issued by Israel and by U.S. officials "a grave violation of international law, of the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations, and of regulations of the IAEA."
The CRS does not find Iran in violation of the NPT. The most informed legal expert on the NPT says the IAEA, under the U.S. puppet Amano, is exceeding its mandate with regards to Iran. The majority of sovereign states are supporting Iran's nuclear program.
Those are just three out of many more reasons why all the talk about a U.S. and/or Israeli attacks on Iran is nonsense.
Reidar Visser Changes His Field
Many of you who have, like me, followed the U.S. occupation of Iraq will remember the invaluable insights of Reidar Visser. Reidar is the Norwegian political scientist and Middle East scholar who always had the most knowledgeable picture of Iraq's internal politics and policies.
Reidar Visser has now changed the subject of his research. Over the last year he was apparently stalked by the Norwegian police for some rather diffuse reason. This led him to his new research subject, the human rights violation by police, police criminality in general and police stalking in particular. The emphasis of his research will be on Northern Europe with special attention to the situation in Norway and the Netherlands.
You can follow Reidar Visser at his site Historiae.org and at his new blog Policestalking. His most recent post there is How the Norwegian Government Brought an End to My Iraq Research.
While Reidar Visser's invaluable insights into current Iraqi policy will probably no longer be updated, the archive of his six years of blogging about Iraq is still available at Iraq and Gulf Analysis.
The morass of European police corruption and brutally certainly deserves deeper scrutiny. Reidar Visser has shown that he is capable to drill down into the core of complex and seemingly nebulous issues, to unearth the facts and to communicate them in enlightening writings. I look forward to reading about and commenting on his new discoveries.
The Future of U.S.-Egypt Relations – **Cancelled**
The House Committee on Foreign Affairs under chairwomen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was set to hold a hearing on Eygpt.
But -apparently- The Future of U.S.-Egypt Relations was cancelled.
bigger
There are likely only very few Egyptians bothered by this.
Collapse Of The Exit-Strategy In Afghanistan
Yesterday U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta characterized insider attacks on US troops in Afghanistan as the ‘last gasp’ of a frustrated Taliban insurgency. But what we really see are the ‘last gasps’ of the western forces in Afghanistan.
The exit plan was to train Afghan forces by embedding western troops with their units and to bit by bit transfer security operations to them.
That plan met reality and it did not survive the impact:
KABUL: NATO-led forces are scaling back joint operations with Afghan forces after a spate of “insider attacks” in which Afghan recruits turned their weapons on Western allies, officers said on Tuesday.
…
Under the new order, most joint patrols and advisory work with Afghan troops will only be conducted at the battalion level and above.
Cooperation with smaller units will have to be “evaluated on a case-by-case basis and approved by RC (regional) commanders”, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
NATO restricts joint operations with Afghans
This is an official acknowledgement that the plan to train Afghan forces and to transfer security operation to them has now failed. There is no longer a viable exit strategy but to cut and run.
Tellingly neither the Afghans nor U.S. allies were consulted in this decision:
The decision, which was announced in Washington, appeared to take the UK government by surprise, coming just a day after the defence secretary Philip Hammond defended Nato’s continued work with Afghan troops in the Commons.
He said on Monday: “…it is essential that we complete the task of training the Afghan national security forces and increasing their capability so that they can take over the burden of combat as we withdraw. That is what we intend to do, and we will not be deterred from it by these attacks.”
The original plan could continue if the western forces were willing to take more casualties. But the electorates in the west have long given up on Afghanistan and no politician is willing to argue for plans that are sure to end in many more dead soldiers.
Over the last few days six western forces died in green-on-blue incidents. The Taliban raided a huge and well protected (in theory) base in Helmand, destroyed or disabled 80% of the fighter jets of a Marian Aviation Squadron and killed its commander. A U.S. air attack went wrong and killed or wounded nearly twenty Afghan girls and women who were collection fire wood. The Afghan president spoke out against the one sided U.S. interpretation of a prisoner transfer deal. Several demonstrations about a U.S. anti-Islam film led to violent clashes with police forces. Today 10 foreign contractors, most of them South Africans, were killed in a suicide attack in Kabul.
The plan to exit by 2014 will have to be revised. It is likely that the retreat will now be accelerated and that most of the 150,000 western troops and contractors will be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2013. The plans to keep special forces and their support elements in Afghanistan until at least 2024 will also need a revision. That plan depends on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) with the Afghan government which still needs to be signed. The Maliki government in Iraq got rid of the U.S. occupation forces by not signing a SOFA. The Karzai government or its follow on will likely use the same tactic to send the foreign troops away.
The U.S. alone still has some 50,000 vehicles and 100,000 containers in Afghanistan. It should leave them for the Afghans. They can take what they can use and sell the rest as scrap to China. It would be a small compensation for what they had and have to endure.
Jewish Rage
This week's edition of NEWSWEEK has a somewhat disagreeable cover story.
Why Do They Hate “Us”?
Reason MCCLXXI: 8 women killed in NATO airstrike, Afghan officials say
Afghan officials say a NATO airstrike killed eight women and girls who were out gathering firewood before dawn Sunday in a remote region on the east of the country. The coalition says it believes only insurgents were hit.
Villagers from Laghman province's Alingar district brought the bodies to the governor's office in the provincial capital, said Sarhadi Zewak, a spokesman for the provincial government.
"They were shouting 'Death to America!' They were condemning the attack," Zewak said.
Were These Protests Really About That Film?
Reuters: Anti-American fury sweeps Middle East over film
Fury about a film that insults the Prophet Mohammad tore across the Middle East on Friday with protesters attacking U.S. embassies and burning American flags as the Pentagon rushed to bolster security at its missions.
These protests were not about that film.
The action at the consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday/Wednesday was a deliberate, well planned attack by some AQ affiliated or Salafist group. It seems that the storming of the embassy in Egypt was launched as a coordinated diversion for that attack.
The attacks on the U.S., German and British embassies in Khartoum today were state sponsored for local political reasons. Omar Hassan al-Bashir needed to prove his Islamic credentials and even designated the targets:
State-backed Islamic scholars in Sudan have called for a mass protest after Friday prayers over a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammed that originated in the United States and an Islamist group threatened to attack the U.S. embassy.
…
Sudan's Foreign Ministry also criticized Germany for allowing a protest last month by right-wing activists carrying a caricatures of the Prophet and for Chancellor Angela Merkel giving an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet in 2005 triggering demonstrations across the Islamic world.
There was also a storm on the embassy in Tunis today. I do not know enough about that countries inner policy to guess who was behind that but it wasn't the government. Troops defended the embassy and even shot some protesters.
There were also rallies in Gaza, Malaysia, Jordan, Kenya, Bahrain, Qatar, Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and even in India.
But all of these rallies were rather small and mostly peaceful. In all a few thousand out of 1.3 billion Muslims protested. Were this then really protests about religion?
Or has the film simply given an occasion for various local interest to push their local agendas?
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